Resulting
In her book Thinking In Bets, the poker champion turned author Annie Duke warns against “the hazards of resulting.” “Resulting” is her term for our tendency to let the quality of an outcome determine the quality of what precedes the outcome. It’s a poker player letting an unlucky break invalidate a statistically correct choice. It’s a movie director letting the box office results dictate their level of satisfaction with the work they did. It’s people letting an outcome—a tiny percentage of a total experience—determine if the experience was good or worthwhile or fun or et cetera.
Resulting—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
An Inconsequential Ripoff Can Become A Cult Classic
When That Thing You Do! released in 1996, it was a critical and commercial failure. It got terrible reviews, written off as “inconsequential,” “odd,” “simpleminded,” “a ripoff.” How did Tom Hanks, writer and director of the movie, internalize the failure? He didn’t. “I loved making that movie,” he said. “I loved writing it. I loved being with it. I love all the people in it.” In judging the success of his movies, Hanks separates the work itself from how it’s received—not just because results make up only a tiny piece of the total experience, but also because they can be upended. “Now,” Hanks said, “the same exact publications that dismissed it in their initial review call it, ‘Tom Hanks’s cult classic, That Thing You Do!’ So now it’s a cult classic. What was the difference between those two things? The answer is time.”
If You Define Yourself By That .01%, That’s Really Unfortunate
In the 200-meter backstroke at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece, American swimmer Aaron Peirsol touched the wall first with a time of 1:54.95, a new Olympic Record (“OR”). But when Peirsol looked up at the scoreboard, instead of “OR,” “DSQ” flashed beside his name. Peirsol had been disqualified for an alleged illegal turn during the race. The U.S. team filed a protest against the decision, arguing that Peirsol didn’t make an illegal turn. Over the next several hours, officials from the sport’s governing body, FINA, reviewed video footage of the race, consulted the judge in Peirsol’s lane, and debated whether or not to reinstate Peirsol’s gold medal and Olympic record. Asked what he was thinking and feeling during the hours of FINA’s deliberation, Peirsol said, “I remember thinking, ‘I’d be here anyway.’ You know? ‘Medal or no medal, I’d be here anyway. I’d be satisfied with all I did to get here anyway.’ The Olympics are an amazing pinnacle of what sport is, and it’s fun to be on that stage, but the other 99.9% of the time, you’re not on that stage. And so it has to be about something more than that—if all you really cared about was that .01% of what your career entailed, you’d be missing out on your entire life. If you define yourself or your career by that .01%, that’s really unfortunate.” Peirsol decided he wasn’t going to let the result—positive or negative, “OR” or “DSQ”—determine the worth of the other 99.9% of his life. Not long after, the FINA jury announced its verdict: Peirsol had made a legal turn. The disqualification was overturned, and Peirsol’s gold medal and Olympic record were reinstated.
It’s Not The Bullseye
At a meditation retreat on the Big Sur Coast, Zen Master Kobun Chino Roshi put on an archery demonstration. He set up a target at one end of a lawn along the Pacific Ocean. As the many retreatants watched, “slowly and with exquisite care,” Jack Kornfield writes in No Time Like the Present, “Roshi raised and unsheathed his bow from its leather case and carefully strung it. Then he uncased the arrows, sat meditating with them in his lap, then spun them and looked down the length from feathers to tip, finally selecting one. He stood and mindfully paced fifty feet from the target.” There he stopped and turned to face the target. He stood tall, and as he drew the arrow back, the spectators watched with great anticipation for the master archer to hit the center of the target. He aimed at the target for one, two, three, four, five seconds, then suddenly, Roshi raised the bow forty-five degrees and let the arrow fly. “It flew,” Kornfield writes, “over the target, over the cliff, and into the ocean. ‘Success,’ he smiled broadly.” Then, slowly and with exquisite care, he took another fifteen minutes to unstring the bow and pack the arrows. He turned to those watching and bowed. “It was completely unexpected,” Kornfield said. “It was a beautiful teaching: it’s not the bullseye…It’s the preparation, the care, the dance of doing it.”
There Is No Duration Or Stability To Its Unmaking
When she was fourteen, the pioneering performance artist Marina Abramovic received painting lessons from an abstract landscape artist named Filo Filipović. In their first lesson, Filipović guided Abramovic through a long and meticulous process. He carefully prepared the canvas, placing it on the floor, methodically pouring glue, and slowly layering sand, yellow pigment, red pigment, and black. After devoting so much time and care, Filipović doused the canvas with half a liter of gasoline, struck a match, and dropped it on the canvas, causing the entire creation to explode in an instant. “And then he left,” Abramovic writes in Walk Through Walls. “This made a big impression on me. I waited until the charred mess had dried, and then very carefully pinned it to the wall.” She and her family went on vacation shortly after, and by the time she returned, the sun had dried everything up, leaving nothing but a pile of ashes. “Later on, I understood why this experience was so important,” Abramovic writes. “It taught me that the process was more important than the result…I saw the process of making it and then the process of its unmaking. There was no duration or stability to it.”
The Ashes of Life
Yves Klein—the French painter best known for his signature patented color International Klein Blue (IKB)—liked to say, “my paintings are only the ashes of my art.” They were the remnants of something far richer, more time-consuming, more stable: every moment, every experience, and every thought that preceded them. “The paintings,” he wrote, “are a function of my LIFE.” Just as Klein’s canvases were merely a fragment of everything that led up to them, results are the .01% ashes of the 99.9% of life that leads to them.