The Right Grip
In his essay The Playing Field, Graham Duncan reflects on interviewing and assessing some 5,000 investment managers to try to answer, what sets the great ones apart? One separator, Duncan writes, is that the greats know how to maintain the right “grip” on things. Throughout high school and college, Duncan was a rower. In rowing, if you grip the oar too tight, your forearms tighten up, your form suffers, and you risk getting thrown overboard if you “catch a crab,” rowing slang for when the blade bites the water wrong and the handle whips back. But if you grip the oar too loosely, you have no control. The grip of an elite rower is “paradoxical—it’s solid but also loose.” With great investors, Duncan often sees this solid yet loose grip “reflected in the way someone grips his or her investment ideas or strategies,” he writes. “Lower level investors are sometimes surprisingly definitive in the way they describe an investment opportunity; they have a too tight grip.”
Gripping things solidly but also loosely—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
This Is Absolutely An Inevitable Collision
James Baldwin once defined “identity” as “the way in which one puts oneself together, what one imagines oneself to be; for one example, the invented reality standing before you now, who is arbitrarily known as James Baldwin. This invented reality contains a great number of elements.” And with many of those elements, Baldwin said he learned over time: it’s best to hold them with solid but loose grip. “Because the terms that you have invented, which you think describe and define you, inevitably collide with the facts of life. When this collision occurs—and, make no mistake, this is an absolutely inevitable collision—when this collision occurs, life offers you the choice, and it’s a very narrow choice, of holding on to your definition of yourself or saying, as the old folks used to say, and as everybody who wants to live has to say: Yes, Lord. Which is to say yes to life.”
Things “Going My Way” Versus Things “Going Well”
The historian Ada Palmer points out that one of the most recurring patterns of change and progress is that things often don’t go the way people wanted or imagined. In the early days of the Renaissance, Palmer explains, the Italian poet Petrarch helped recover ancient texts, hoping they would vindicate one worldview: Christianity. Instead, they unleashed many worldviews—new philosophies, new sciences, new medicines. “So he did not create a world that went as he wanted,” Palmer said, “but he created a world that went well.” Or, another example: the way trains and bicycles led to changes their inventors never set out to create. By making it easier for people to move more freely and independently, we got the suffragettes. “Suddenly,” Palmer said, “women could organize and mobilize. Did the inventor of the train intend for there to be women’s liberation? No. Did it go the way he imagined? No. Did it go well? Yes.” And so, it’s one of the great things we can learn from history: “things ‘going my way’ versus ‘things going well’ is a really important distinction.” Maintain a solid but loose grip on how you want or imagine or expect things to go.
No Matter The Outcome…
On May 2, 1972, Bruce Springsteen auditioned for the record producer John Hammond. Hammond had signed icons like Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin—two of Springsteen’s heroes. “I would’ve been in a state of complete panic,” Springsteen writes in Born To Run, “except on the way up in the elevator, I performed a little mental jiu-jitsu on myself. I thought, ‘I’ve got nothing so I’ve got nothing to lose. I can only gain should this work out. If it don’t, I still got what I came in with. I make my way through the world as myself and I’ll still be that person when I leave no matter the outcome.’” By performing a little mental jiu-jitsu, by holding his dream of landing a record deal with a loose grip, Springsteen said that instead of panicking, he walked into the audition feeling confident. He performed his song, “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City.” “When I was done I looked up,” Springsteen writes, “and I heard him say, ‘You’ve got to be on Columbia Records…That was wonderful.’” Springsteen signed a ten-album deal and would go on to record with Hammond and Columbia Records for the next fifty years.
I’m Going To Try My Best, And, “Who Cares?”
After winning back-to-back gold medals at the 2006 and 2010 Winter Olympics, Shaun White was the favorite to win gold at the 2014 games in Sochi. Before he dropped into the halfpipe in Sochi, Shaun said, “I knew I was going to lose…It was totally mental.” He was feeling the weight of the pressure to three-peat and, he said, “my mind was just not in a good place.” White didn’t podium at those 2014 games. After Sochi, he shifted his mindset. At the 2018 games in PyeongChang, before he dropped in for his final fun, Shaun said, “I said, ‘Who cares?’ At the end of the day, ‘Who cares?’ What’s the big deal? I’m here, I’m going to try my best, and, ‘Who cares?’ I’m going to go on from this regardless of what happens. Even though my whole world is wrapped up in this…Who cares?” With this tight but loose grip—focusing on trying his best, letting go of the need to win another medal—he put down one of the best runs of his life, scoring a 97.75 to win gold.
The Philosophy of Engaged Detachment
Herbie Cohen was called “the world’s greatest negotiator.” He advised presidents through moments of international crisis. He helped resolve the NFL players’ strike in 1987. He was helicoptered in to settle police strikes, negotiate with terrorists, work out the terms and close the deal. Over time, Herbie took the tactics and tricks he used in these high-pressure situations and spun them into a general life philosophy—“a kind of Jewish Buddhism,” his son Rich writes in The Adventures of Herbie Cohen. “He preaches engaged detachment, characterized as ‘caring, but not that much.’” Maintaining a tight grip on things, but not that tight.