The Willingness To Take A Step Down
Towards the end of a lunch with a group of people brought together by Michael Roderick, someone thanked everyone for taking time out of the workday to be there. Gareb Shamus, creator of Wizard Magazine and Comic-Con, mentioned some of the cherished relationships in his life that came out of other Michael-curated get-togethers, then said, “If Michael is bringing people he knows together and invites me, I go.” When I first met Michael, I asked if he’d noticed any patterns among people who are great at what they do. At the time, I only knew he’d had a varied career—from teaching high school to producing Broadway shows, working at a startup, running a theater company, starting businesses, and more—so I was curious whether any traits consistently showed up across those different domains. His answer was that those at the top of their profession, whatever it is, have almost always made one or more “step-down moves” along the way. “Most people only look to continue to step up,” he told me. “Because ego is at play, because we care how others perceive us, because our identity gets tied to a title or high-status position, because of all those sort of things—there’s only a certain number of people who are willing to make the choice to take a step down.”
Step-down moves—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
A Peak And The Peak
In mathematics, a “local maximum” is a point representing the highest value on a graph within a small surrounding interval or region. It appears as a peak within a limited range of x- and y-values, but expanding the scale of the graph can reveal higher points elsewhere.
I often think about it in terms of skiing. After college, I chased winter—traveling between the Northern and Southern hemispheres to ski year-round. At every ski resort, there are many ski lifts that carry you up to different high points on the mountain. At the top of most of those lifts, you are not at the summit of the mountain—instead, you’re at a local maximum. You are at a peak, but not the peak. At Beaver Creek, for example, the summit is accessed via a lift called Cinch Express. If you’re at the top of any other lift, to get to the summit, you first have to ski down, ride up another lift, then ski down again to get to Cinch and up to the top. On a graph, you might need to zoom out to discover that what looked like a high point is really a local maximum. On a mountain, you might need to go down before you can go up. And similarly, as the investor Graham Duncan put it, “at different stages of your life and career, you should zoom out and say to yourself, ‘Okay, I’m here in this corner of a mountain range—do I still want to climb this mountain?’ Just check in every once in a while—’Am I at a local maximum? Is it time to walk down and head in a completely different direction?’”
A Genre Which Is Trifling By Definition
If not for the encouragement of his friend C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien said he wouldn’t have finished writing The Lord of the Rings. Primarily because, Colin Duriez explains in Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship, “In the 1920s, there was no adult readership for fantasy, or literature in which the story element was predominant.” In the 1920s, Tolkien was a professor at the University of Oxford. And at the time, fantasy or literature in which the story element was predominant wasn’t considered “serious.” It wasn’t worthy of an Oxford professor. It wasn’t prestigious. It was a step down. In his 1956 New York Times review of The Return of the King, the poet W.H. Auden wrote, “I rarely remember a book about which I have had such violent arguments. Nobody seems to have a moderate opinion: either, like myself, people find it a masterpiece of its genre or they cannot abide it, and among the hostile there are some, I must confess, for whose literary judgment I have great respect.” Auden explains that most of the objection was due to the fact that, at the time, most “people object to Heroic Quests and Imaginary Worlds on principle; such, they feel, cannot be anything but light ‘escapist’ reading. That a man like Mr. Tolkien, the English philologist who teaches at Oxford, should lavish such incredible pains upon a genre which is, for them, trifling by definition, is, therefore, very shocking.” After his works of fantasy in which the story element is predominant went on to sell more than 600 million copies, Tolkien would eventually be widely called the “father of high fantasy.”
An Epic Losing Streak
Six years into his professional tennis career, Andre Agassi’s manager, Perry Rogers, arranged for them to have dinner with Brad Gilbert, a former pro who’d had a great career despite limited natural ability. Rogers had just read Gilbert’s book, Winning Ugly, and wanted to meet with Brad, he told him, “to get your take on Andre’s game…We’d like you to tell us what you think.” “You want me to be honest?” Gilbert asked. “Please,” Rogers said. “Brutally honest?” Gilbert asked. “Don’t hold back.” After taking a big swig of his beer, Agassi writes, Gilbert launched into “a careful, thorough, brutal-as-advertised summary of my flaws as a tennis player.” Brad tells him the problem—“the problem that threatens to end [Agassi’s] career prematurely”—is that he’s still playing the way he played when he was dominating tournaments as a teenager. What got him to the pros doesn’t work in the pros, Brad says. He’s been stuck at a local maximum his entire pro career. “Stop thinking about yourself, and your own game,” Gilbert told him, “and remember that the guy on the other side of the net has weaknesses. Attack his weaknesses.” After a dinner full of brutally honest thoughts about his weaknesses, Agassi hired Gilbert to be his coach. As Agassi worked to adapt to Gilbert’s coaching, he took a step down and went on an “epic losing streak,” sliding out of the world rankings. At the 1994 U.S. Open, for the first time in his pro career, Agassi was unseeded. He reached the final, where he faced Michael Stich, recent Wimbledon Champion and the fourth-ranked player in the world, who had a weakness: his forehand. Throughout the final, Agassi writes, “I hear Brad’s voice, as clearly as if he were standing behind me. Go for his forehand. When in doubt, forehand, forehand. So I hit to Stich’s forehand. Again and again he misses.” Agassi wins in straight sets. “I fall to my knees. My eyes fill with tears.” The first unseeded player in 28 years to win the U.S. Open, Agassi would go on to win the Australian Open, and after winning back-to-back Grand Slams, he claimed the No. 1 ranking in the world.
You Just Have To Find A Way To Stick It Out
Before he was Han Solo or Indiana Jones, Harrison Ford was a carpenter. In 1964, Ford moved to Hollywood to become an actor. “But I arrived on a metaphoric bus full of people who had the same ambition,” he said. So he came up with this plan to prevail over the competition. As Ford spent time around the other aspiring actors on that metaphoric bus, he became aware of something: Most of them were in a hurry. They were in a hurry to “make it” or to make lots of money or to prove something to someone. Whatever the reason, most were on a tight timeline. So Ford’s plan was to do the opposite: to lengthen his timeline. To do so, Ford said, “I had to have another source of income. So I became a carpenter.” It was a step down from his dream of being an actor, but: “By doing carpentry, I was able to wait it out. And as the years went by, the attrition rate eliminated many of those people from the competition pool until finally, there were only a few of us left on the bus from that entering class. I always saw life that way—you just have to find a way to stick it out, to prevail.”
It’s Not Turning Back. It’s Turning Around And Moving Forward.
The great chef René Redzepi said one of the best pieces of advice he ever got was from the founder of Patagonia Yvon Chouinard: “He said, ‘there’s simply nothing wrong with turning back. It’s not turning back. It’s just just turning around and moving forward in a different direction.” The choice to take an apparent step down—whether it’s going from a high-level position in one field to an intern in another, a prestigious professor to a trifling writer of escapist reading, an elite athlete who hires a coach and unlearns what once made him successful, or an aspiring actor who takes up carpentry to make ends meet—“it doesn’t mean ‘going backwards,’” Redzepi continues. “It’s going in a new direction.”