Man In The Car Paradox
In The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel writes about what he calls the “Man in the Car Paradox.” A dominant reason for wanting expensive things is that they seem like a good way to attract the admiration of other people. But in reality, when we see someone in a nice car or a big house, we don’t tend to think, “Wow, I really admire that person driving that car or living in that house.” Instead, we think, “Wow, if I had that car or house, people would really admire me.” So the paradox is: Nobody’s admiring anyone. It’s this strange loop: everybody’s thinking, if anything, about themselves being admired by other people who are also thinking, if anything, about themselves being admired by other people who are also thinking, et cetera.
One implication of this is that nobody is thinking about anybody as much as everybody thinks—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
If It Doesn’t Work Out, People Don’t See It!
After trading stories about releasing songs that flopped, the musicians Lainey Wilson and John Mayer worked out a counterintuitive point about failure. “People don’t really see all the times you put out stuff that doesn’t work,” Wilson said. And so therefore, the familiar fear of failure is, essentially, irrational. Because the fear of failure is often tangled up with the fear of being judged for failing. But if something fails—if it flops, goes nowhere, never breaks through—then almost by definition, not many people saw or heard about it. And if not many people saw or heard about it, there aren’t many people judging it—or you. As the realization seemed to hit him in real time, Mayer said with excitement, “if you do a thing and it doesn’t work out, then people don’t see it!”
Expensive Purchase, No Response
In his iPhone notes, the comedian Kevin Hart records random thoughts and observations that later develop into the material for his comedy. “If I show you my notes on my iPhone,” he told Jerry Seinfeld, “you wouldn’t understand it. It’ll go, ‘Expensive purchase, no response.’ In my head, I know what that means. ‘Expensive purchase, no response’—that was when I was buying expensive shit because I thought that an immediate response from the world comes with expensive shit. Nobody noticed my expensive shit when I got it. Nobody said anything. That’s a true story. That was about a watch. I bought this fucking watch. I took it back.” Seinfeld replied, “that’s the shit I like: taking something small and making it big. That is a really small, little, funny human thing. You think when you buy something expensive, that everyone’s going to notice. Nobody notices.”
I Give You Permission
In his work with great artists, the music producer Rick Rubin once told me that he often sees a version of the same problem. After achieving some level of commercial success, they’re burdened with the mostly self-inflicted pressure not to disappoint the audience that helped create that success. Among others, he mentioned one artist who hasn’t recorded an album in ten years because they will only return to the studio when they feel certain the result is an album that will “make history.” Never mind that it’s impossible to say what “making history” even means, such concerns with what others will think holds back many of these artists. So Rick said he often finds himself telling them, “I give you permission.” I give you permission to make something terrible. I give you permission to create something your fans will hate. I give you permission to let go of what worked in the past. I give you permission to not worry about what other people will think. “Now, it’s ridiculous,” Rick said. “I have no authority over the person. And they know I have no authority over them. But I’ll still grant them permission and somehow it frees them.”
The Most Precious Thing We Have In Life
When he was 19, Andre Agassi started losing his hair. Deeply ashamed of his receding hairline, to hide it, he started wearing a hairpiece. Not long after, at the 1990 French Open, he made it to his first Grand Slam final. “The night before the final,” Agassi writes, “Catastrophe strikes.” In the shower, he felt the hairpiece disintegrate in his hands. He summoned his brother, who clipped it back together with 20 bobby pins. The next morning, Agassi writes, “warming up before the match, I pray. Not for a win, but for my hairpiece to stay on…With every lunge, every leap, I picture it landing on the clay. I can picture millions of people suddenly leaning closer to their TVs, turning to each other and in dozens of languages and dialects saying some version of: Did Andre Agassi’s hair just fall off?” So worried about his hairpiece, though he was the heavy favorite, Agassi lost three sets to one. After, his girlfriend, aware of the whole hairpiece catastrophe, says, “I think you should just get rid of that hairpiece.” “Impossible,” Agassi replies, “I’d feel naked.” “You’d feel liberated,” she says. He thought it over for a few days, and then he went back to his girlfriend: “Let’s do it…Let’s cut it all off.” His first tournament with a bald head was another Grand Slam, the Australian Open, and, “I come out like the Incredible Hulk. I don’t drop one set in a take-no-prisoners blitz to the final.” You were right, he told his girlfriend before the final, “my hairpiece was a shackle.” In the final, he won three sets to one. “Everyone says it’s my best performance yet, because it’s my first victory over Pete [Sampras]. But I think twenty years from now I’ll remember it as my first bald victory.”
Keeping in mind that Agassi was so worried about what others would think or say about his shaved head, I went searching for what others thought or said after he shaved his head. All I could find was a passing mention in a 1995 Washington Post piece (“The wild mane of hair he sported at the tournament last season has been replaced with his new no-nonsense buzz cut.”) It made me think of a line from the philosopher Seneca, who writes in a letter titled On Groundless Fears: “We suffer more in our imagination more often than in reality.” In his head, Agassi thought people would think or say nasty things about him. In reality, no one really cared. “The most precious thing we have in life is time,” Agassi says, “so any time you spend worrying about something, get rid of it.”
A Really Valuable Form of Freedom
The novelist Zadie Smith talks about how we often think of freedom as simply being able to do whatever we want, whenever we want. “But there’s many other forms of freedom that are actually quite valuable,” she says. “Much of life can feel like a performance, where you’re trying to fit in, impress, or meet expectations. Even close friendships sometimes have this performative aspect where you’re not fully yourself. So anywhere you can go where you’re not on stage, where you’re not having to keep up someone else’s idea of you, where you can just be yourself—that is freedom. For me, at least—that’s a form of being free that is really valuable to me.”