This Is A Kind Of Necessary Selfishness
To unblock himself while writing East of Eden, John Steinbeck began writing letters to his friend Pascal Covici. After the first one on January 29, 1951, there was a letter for every working day until Steinbeck finished the first draft. “This book will be the most difficult of all I have ever attempted,” Steinbeck wrote in that first letter. To increase his chances of being able to pull it off, he said, “I can do small things after 3:30 PM, but the first part of the day must now be for the book. This is a kind of necessary selfishness—otherwise books do not get written.”
A kind of necessary selfishness—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
To Give A Damn About Some Things, You Can’t Give A Damn About Everything
The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman said that scientists, writers, programmers, mathematicians, consultants, engineers, entrepreneurs—anyone doing cognitive work—need one thing above all else to be able to do great work: “absolutely solid lengths of time.” Learning hard things, solving problems, connecting disparate existing ideas, generating new ideas—these things are “very much like building a house of cards and each of the cards is shaky,” Feynman writes in *The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, “*and if you forget one of them the whole thing collapses again.” To keep the thing from collapsing, Feynman repeats, “you need a lot of concentration—that is, solid time to think.” And if you’re not a little selfish in protecting your time, “then you don’t have the solid time…to do high, real good work.” So that he had that solid time, Feynman said, “I invented [a] myth for myself—that I’m irresponsible. I tell everybody, I don’t do anything. If anybody asks me to be on a committee, to take care of admissions—‘no, I’m irresponsible, I don’t give a damn about the students’—of course I give a damn about the students…but I do that because I like to do physics and I want to see if I can still do it, and so I’m selfish, okay? I want to do my physics.”
Where You Get More Efficient, You Get More Busy
At one point, the writer Oliver Burkeman did not have the absolutely solid lengths of time needed to write because he was “drowning in email.” In an attempt to become a more productive emailer and reduce the mental load of his inbox, Burkeman writes in his book Four Thousand Weeks, “I successfully implemented the system known as Inbox Zero, but I soon discovered that when you get tremendously efficient at answering email, all that happens is that you get much more email.” Not only because “every time you reply to an email, there’s a good chance of provoking a reply to that email, which itself may require another reply, and so on and so on,” but also: he became “known as someone who responds promptly to email,” leading to more and more people contributing to the flood of more and more emails. So, for the sake of his work and sanity, out of a kind of necessary selfishness, he became a “negligent emailer.”
Be Tenacious At The Right Level of Your Goal Hierarchy
Early in her career, Angela Duckworth taught in public schools, working with students from disadvantaged backgrounds. She noticed that the students who excelled and rose above their circumstances weren’t necessarily the smartest or most talented. Intrigued, she left teaching to pursue a PhD in psychology, determined to uncover the true drivers of achievement. For more than a decade, she immersed herself in all kinds of challenging environments, including military academies, high-stakes business settings, and competitive sports teams. She published her findings in her book Grit, which became a mega-bestseller and sparked widespread interest in the trait Duckworth’s research found consistently linked to success: “grit,” the ability to stick to a long-term goal, despite setbacks, competing interests, the lack of visible progress, the lure of more lucrative or prestigious paths, and all the other reasons to give up. With its popularity, however, the book also sparked some misconceptions. Many readers interpreted “grit” as a fixed trait—something you either have or don’t, in every situation. But Duckworth’s work pointed to a more nuanced idea: “grit” isn’t a static character trait. Instead, it’s a dynamic interaction between a person and their “top-level goal,” Duckworth explains, “which is something that might span years or even a lifetime, but which one believes is worth pursuing at the cost of other paths or opportunities.” She contrasts these top-level goals with “low-level goals”—specific, tactical actions, like answering email or being on a committee, which may or may not support one’s broader, long-term aspirations. “The common mistake,” she said, “is to think that ‘grit’ is about being tenacious about the specific, tactical things…It’s really about being tenacious at the top level of your goal hierarchy. And then, being flexible and able to shift or give up easily on lower-level things…The secret of applying grit correctly is to be tenacious at the right level of your goal hierarchy.” Which may require a kind of necessary selfishness, a little negligence, towards low-level things.
Sometimes, You Have To Say No To Your Friends To Say Yes To Your Work
When asked, Lin-Manuel Miranda says Wait For It is the best song he’s ever written. “I was on my way to my friend’s birthday party,” Miranda explains, “when that idea showed up in my head.” He was riding the New York City A Train when “the whole chorus showed up in my head, all at once. I write it down, and suddenly, I see the shape of the whole song.” He got off the train, walked to his friend’s apartment, “and I go, ‘hey, happy birthday man, I gotta go.’ I got back on the train, and I wrote the rest of the song on the way back home—from the L train to A back up to 207 Street. You have to do that sometimes.” You have to be a little selfish sometimes. “Sometimes, you have to say no to your friends to say yes to your work.”
A Gigantic Aspect of Survival
Jerry Seinfeld identifies “taste and discernment” as the ultimate skill of the artist. “It’s one thing to create,” Seinfeld says. “The other is you have to choose. ‘What are we going to do, and what are we not going to do?’ This is a gigantic aspect of [artistic] survival,” Seinfeld continues. “It’s kind of unseen—what’s picked and what is discarded—but mastering that is how you stay alive.” What are we going to say yes to, and what are we going to say no to? What are we going to be tenacious about, and what are we going to be a little irresponsible, a little negligent about? How much of our time and energy are we going to give the small things, and how much are we going to give the big things? Mastering this kind of necessary selfishness is a gigantic aspect of survival.