“A lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance,” says Pamela Meyer. “Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie.”
We are not always willing participants. Master forger and con man Henry Oberlander who was active in the 1930s understood human psychology well. “Everyone is willing to give something for whatever it is they desire the most,” he said. This became famous as “Henry's Rule,” and gives us a view into why deception is so profitable.
Research reveals the complexity of lying. Meyer says:
On a given day, studies show that you may be lied to anywhere from 10 to 200 times. Now granted, many of those are white lies. But in another study, it showed that strangers lied three times within the first 10 minutes of meeting each other. (Laughter) Now when we first hear this data, we recoil. We can't believe how prevalent lying is. We're essentially against lying. But if you look more closely, the plot actually thickens.
We lie more to strangers than we lie to coworkers. Extroverts lie more than introverts. Men lie eight times more about themselves than they do other people. Women lie more to protect other people. If you're an average married couple, you're going to lie to your spouse in one out of every 10 interactions. Now, you may think that's bad. If you're unmarried, that number drops to three.
Lying is woven into the fabric of our daily and our business lives. We're deeply ambivalent about the truth. We parse it out on an as-needed basis, sometimes for very good reasons, other times just because we don't understand the gaps in our lives.
That's truth number two about lying. We're against lying, but we're covertly for it in ways that our society has sanctioned for centuries and centuries and centuries. It's as old as breathing. It's part of our culture, it's part of our history. Think Dante, Shakespeare, the Bible, News of the World.
There's is an evolutionary aspect of lying. For example, many parents learn that their babies sometimes fake crying to get attention, and two year old children bluff to keep testing those boundaries of what is possible and what is not allowed.
Those familiar with the principles of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology know that as David Livingstone Smith says in Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind, “the ever-present possibility of deceit is a crucial dimension of every human relationship, even the most central: our relationship with our very selves.”
Aldert Vrij, a Professor of Applied Social Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Portsmouth (UK) has been researching the nonverbal and verbal cues to deception and lie detection.
Science has surfaced many indicators, and Vrji's book Detecting Lies and Deceit: Pitfalls and Opportunities is a comprehensive resource for anyone who wants to understand the working and efficacy of the most commonly used lie detection tools covering all three aspects of deception —nonverbal cues, speech and written statement analysis and (neuro)physiological responses.
What can we do to learn the truth?
“Trained lie-spotters get to the truth 90 percent of the time,” says Pamela Meyer. For those who are curious about becoming better at spotting lies but don't have time for Detecting Lies and Deceit's deep dive, three former CIA officers share their techniques in Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception.
“The rest of us, we're only 54 percent accurate” in spotting lies says Meyer. However:
there are steps we can take to navigate our way through the morass.
[...] There are good liars and bad liars. There are no real original liars. We all make the same mistakes. We all use the same techniques.
[...] Studies show that people who are over determined in their denial will resort to formal rather than informal language.
[...] We know that liars will unconsciously distance themselves from their subject, using language as their tool.
Qualifying language also further discredits the source. We can learn to get better at identifying the signs someone is lying. Spam, phishing schemes, fake digital friends, and partisan media are teaching us how to spot similar patterns in writing, including the typos and misspellings.
Body language is where we need to be more careful and let the science guide us. Meyers says:
With body language, here's what you've got to do. You've really got to just throw your assumptions out the door. Let the science temper your knowledge a little bit. Because we think liars fidget all the time. Well guess what, they're known to freeze their upper bodies when they're lying. We think liars won't look you in the eyes. Well guess what, they look you in the eyes a little too much just to compensate for that myth. We think warmth and smiles convey honesty, sincerity. But a trained lie-spotter can spot a fake smile a mile away.
[...] when you're having a conversation with someone you suspect of deception, attitude is by far the most overlooked but telling of indicators.
What's the difference when talking with someone who is honest?
An honest person is going to be cooperative. They're going to show they're on your side. They're going to be enthusiastic. They're going to be willing and helpful to getting you to the truth. They're going to be willing to brainstorm, name suspects, provide details. They're going to say, “Hey, maybe it was those guys in payroll that forged those checks.” They're going to be infuriated if they sense they're wrongly accused throughout the entire course of the interview, not just in flashes; they'll be infuriated throughout the entire course of the interview.
And if you ask someone honest what should happen to whomever did forge those checks, an honest person is much more likely to recommend strict rather than lenient punishment.
We have “blind spots,” say Bazerman and Tenbrunsel to explain why people with good intentions may fail to act in accordance with their own ethical standards. In Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do about It, a book written for managers and leaders, they say that “without an awareness of blind sports, traditional approaches to ethics won't be particular useful in improving behavior.”
When looking at problems
Leaders should consider if:
it's an ethical or a non-ethical issue (for example, a business or an engineering decision)
prejudices that are outside of their conscious awareness may motivate their behaviors
informal or unwritten forces within the organization encourage employees to ignore or minimize the ethical implications of a decision, or
factors like isolation, uncertainty, and time pressure increase the likelihood of an unethical decision
“Character's who you are in the dark,” says Meyer.
And what's kind of interesting is that today, we have so little darkness. Our world is lit up 24 hours a day. It's transparent with blogs and social networks broadcasting the buzz of a whole new generation of people that have made a choice to live their lives in public. It's a much more noisy world.
One challenge we have is to remember, oversharing, that's not honesty. Our manic tweeting and texting can blind us to the fact that the subtleties of human decency —character integrity— that's still what matters, that's always what's going to matter.
In this much noisier world, it might make sense for us to be just a little bit more explicit about our moral code.
Ariely says “most of us need little reminders to keep ourselves on the right path.” Good leaders make use of behavioral prompts and cues to affect their environment.
Being willing to engage in an open conversation about ethics and human psychology can help us draw the line on “Henry's Rule” and work on the “fudge factor.”
Watch Pamela Meyer full talk for visual examples below.
If you're still curious about the science of lying, in addition to her own book, Meyer recommends:
The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life —a combination of Ralph Keyes's investigative journalism, which provides contemporary context, and solid science resulting in a spirited exploration of why we lie about practically everything and the consequences such casual dishonesty has on society.
The Truth About Trust: How It Determines Success in Life, Love, Learning, and More —psychologist David DeSteno talks about how trust is risky but necessary, useful, and even powerful and we need to develop, strengthen, and manage it and how it permeates almost every area of life. He says we should examine motives by using on behavior rather than reassurance, pay attention to our intuition, cultivate trust from the bottom up, and much more. Trust is something we feel.
Our minds are filled with ideas. Most of our ideas are linked together —they form our personal worldview, our brain's operating system (OS). It is the network of our ideas that helps us navigate the world. Talks have secret lives —they can travel from our own neural networks to those of our listeners via the connection we make through sharing an idea.
Journalist and publisher Chris Anderson has been curating the TED conferences since 2002. From his experience as host and curator he has distilled four guidelines in TED Talks to help build connections between the ideas in our minds and those in the minds of our audience:
(1.) Limit the talk to just one major idea
Ideas are complex things; you need to slash back your content so that you can focus on the single idea you're most passionate about, and give yourself a chance to explain that one thing properly.
You have to give context, share examples, make it vivid. So pick one idea, and make it the through-line running through your entire talk, so that everything you say links back to it in some way.
(2.) Give your listeners a reason to care
Before you can start building things inside the minds of your audience, you have to get their permission to welcome you in. And the main tool to achieve that? Curiosity. Stir your audience's curiosity.
Use intriguing, provocative questions to identify why something doesn't make sense and needs explaining. If you can reveal a disconnection in someone's worldview, they'll feel the need to bridge that knowledge gap.
Once you've sparked that desire, it will be so much easier to start building your idea.
(3.) Build the idea, piece by piece, out of concepts the audience already understands
Use the power of language to weave together concepts that already exist in your listeners' minds —but not your language, their language. Start where they are.
Speakers often forget that many of the terms and concepts they live with are completely unfamiliar to their audiences.
Metaphors can play a crucial role in showing how the pieces fit together, because they reveal the desired shape of the pattern, based on an idea that the listener already understands.
(4.) Make your idea worth sharing
“Who does this idea benefit?” We should be honest with the answer. If the idea only serves us or our organization it's probably not worth sharing. Says Andersen:
The audience will see right through you. But if you believe that the idea has the potential to brighten up someone else's day or change someone else's perspective for the better or inspire someone to do something differently, then you have the core ingredient to a truly great talk, one that can be a gift to them and to all of us.
Zak Ebrahim's talk has a strong start. He says, “I am the son of a terrorist. Here's how I chose peace.” A strong opening grabs attention and involves the audience. Says Ebrahim:
On November 5th, 1990,a man named El-Sayyid Nosair walkedinto a hotel in Manhattanand assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane,the leader of the Jewish Defense League.Nosair was initially found not guilty of the murder,but while serving time on lesser charges,he and other men began planning attackson a dozen New York City landmarks,including tunnels, synagoguesand the United Nations headquarters.Thankfully, those plans were foiledby an FBI informant.
Sadly, the 1993 bombingof the World Trade Center was not.Nosair would eventually be convictedfor his involvement in the plot.El-Sayyid Nosair is my father.
View Chris Anderson’s video about TED Talks below.
The speaker’s job is to give to the audience, not to take. Which means no sales pitch.
Sometimes it takes a little demolition before changing minds. For example, modern media plays up violence because it sells. We can and should demonstrate how we've changed. Then, after crushing their stereotypes, we can make our point.
We should take the audience to a path of self discovery. Asking people to join the process helps them get more involved.
Words and images should work in concert.
Each slide has its moment, once we make the point, we should move on to the next one. Better to have a blank screen if we don't have a slide for the next point than to create distraction.
Transitions between slides should be kept simple, indicate when we are shifting to a new idea and dissolve when they are related. Too much dazzle distracts.
When a talk looks easy it's because a lot of preparation and rehearsals when into making it happen. Most TED speakers memorize and practice so much to make it sounds spontaneous.
To signal we care, we should dress appropriately. For example, wrinkled clothing telegraph we're not trying.
There is still plenty of opportunity in the gaps between what we say and what we do, between what we want and what we actually need, and in good experiences.
In The Ten Faces of Innovation IDEO's Tom Kelley and Jonathan Littman say the people who are most valuable in organizations have a solid grounding in the social sciences. Subjects like linguistics, cognitive psychology, and/or anthropology.
For example, people who fill the role of Anthropologist—the person who goes into the field to see how customers use and respond to products, to come up with new innovations; the Cross-pollinator who mixes and matches ideas, people, and technology to create new ideas that can drive growth; and the Hurdler, who instantly looks for ways to overcome the limits and challenges to any situation.
By far, the role of the Anthropologist is the single biggest source of innovation because, “people filling the Anthropologist role can be extremely good at reframing a problem in a new way—informed by their insights from the field—so that the right solution can spark a breakthrough.”
When working with them, they say, it's not so much their knowledge that is impressive, but a sense of “informed intuition,” or to put it with Harvard Business School Dorothy Leonard, “Deep Smarts.” In practical terms this means they have a dozen characteristics that make them good at what they do. They are:
1. practice the Zen principle of “beginner's mind” —in other words, they are willing to set aside what they know in favor of approaching situations with an open mind
2. embrace human behavior with all its surprises—rather than judging they observe and being practiced in the art of observing, they develop a genuine love of talking with people and watching what they do
3. draw inferences by listening to their intuition—through deductive reasoning, they are able to develop testable hypotheses about the emotional underpinnings of human behavior
4. seek out epiphanies through a sense of “Vuja De” —this is the opposite of déjà vu, which means having a strong sense the experience is new, even though it may have occurred before once or more times, or to see something that nobody noticed before
5. keep “bug lists” or “idea wallets” —extracting potential from everyday experiences through surprises, and especially noting what seems to need fixing like bugs and problems that hide opportunities
6. are willing to search for clues in the trash bin —and in general in the most unusual moments or places, like before customers arrive, after they leave, looking beyond the obvious, and even considering ideas that were thrown away
IDEO has documented a set of action-oriented tools —the Method Deck— to help organizations “ask,” “watch,” “learn,” and “try” things. It's important to have tools that help people figure out how to deconstruct the version of reality they have accepted so they can create something new from its parts rather than just doing exercises or providing a prescribed way of going about opening up new opportunities.
The distinction between solving a problem and finding or opening a new opportunity is also worth pointing out. In some cases we find an opportunity when we solve a problem, but in many more, we open a new opportunity by looking at things differently. So the old saying, if it's not broken it doesn't need fixing may end up holding us back reinforced too many times.
When we search for an item, the list of entries our browser brings back to us is more or less a self-fulfilling prophecy —the list of items most linked to, searched by and clicked on as a result of our own search behavior and the average of the people around us. The business model of search engines is based on this data and at last look it's still quite vibrant.
A very similar thing happens when we go to social networks to discover new things —our experience is based on that of the things we have liked before and that of the people we are already linked with. This very issue has been making headlines recently with Facebook. Our social media behaviors are part of the business model of successful social networks.
We are the sum of our experiences.
At a time when we could wade into more diverse kinds of experiences —because of technology, tools, the ability to move around more, and border-less web and the limitless isle— those experiences end up being narrower that we would suspect. It turns out that having the options at our disposal does not equal taking the option.
But there is a deeper truth than just information overwhelm at the root of this particular puzzle.
Knowing the name of something is not the same as knowing it, says Richard Feynman:
“You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”
Inquiry and reflection are not prized activities. In a world that idolized “doing,” the value of thinking is overlooked. We think we know, or can find out or predict, thanks to data big and small, so we stop looking. Why work hard to try to understand something when we can rely on past behavior through data exhaust to tell us exactly what happened? At least we are sure we made the right rationalization, or are we?
We are limiting ourselves is so many more ways than that.
As individuals, we have so many more examples of model behavior to follow from digital data available for anyone to browse. What everyone is doing is creating the expectation of what we should be doing to be successful, popular, but also accepted, part of things —gossip being our very own social grooming. But it is also widening the gap between what we need and what we want, or we think we do.
For another example of having more options and fewer apparent choices we can look at what we read, what is on our bookshelves or on our night stands. Are we exploring less popular, yet not less deep, good or useful readings? Or do we fall into line and buy off the lists we find and see, populated as they are with the usual suspects? Even when it comes to reading and sharing articles, blog posts, and subscribing to newsletters, mainstream continues to reinforce itself.
There are so many overlooked authors even among the classics. For lack of patience, curiosity, and/or desire we say to ourselves we lack time. We may not know, but do we want to learn? Can reading make us happier? Can it heal us? The spirit of inquiry, even in disagreement, and especially in surprise, can make us wiser.
Cambridge graduate and novelist Susan Elderkin says:
“We feel that though more books are being published than ever before, people are in fact selecting from a smaller and smaller pool. Look at the reading lists of most book clubs, and you’ll see all the same books, the ones that have been shouted about in the press. If you actually calculate how many books you read in a year—and how many that means you’re likely to read before you die—you’ll start to realize that you need to be highly selective in order to make the most of your reading time.”
Elderkin works with pragmatic philosopher Alain the Botton at The School of life. They offer a form of book discovery, reading “prescriptions” to help people “deal with the daily emotional challenges of existence.”# It's something very similar to what we experienced in school and luckily our home was filled with a few thousand books to choose from, in addition to our local library.
Reading on purpose to explore and think is a habit we formed when we were forming. There many many character-building lessons in it. We were very lucky. It's an acquired taste, but the good news is our minds are configured for storytelling. It takes no time at all to get used to it again, or for the first time.
Love of reading and love of learning go hand in hand. Love matters.
“The best scientists and engineers are just as creative as the best storytellers.”
[Steve Jobs]
If we were to say Pixar in 1996, not too many in the business world would have paid attention. But Steve Jobs did. He understood this was no technology company, that they were in the business of entertainment, and worked hard at helping the company bankroll itself while hatching its first success.
Since Snow White was released in 1928, says Jobs, every single major studio has tried to break into the business. Disney had been the only studio that had made a major blockbuster —at the time, we were talking more than 190 million USD in domestic sales at the box office. Until Pixar became the second studio to do so.
It's quite interesting to hear Jobs talk about the three-movie deal with Disney and how much the company enjoyed its partnership right after talking up Pixar's ability to deliver. Looking back, we can see how he was starting to lay the foundations for selling to Disney. Twelve years later, Disney bought Pixar for $7.4 billion after co-financing and distributing its animated films and splitting the profits. It was Chief Executive Robert A. Iger to seal the deal with Jobs.
Still about story and character development —When we talk computers as part of a process, we think it's going to take less time and cost less, or it's going to replace something. When photography was invented, people thought painting was going to be replaced, that it was going to go away. John Lasseter talks about computer animation as part of the creative process. The keyword is “animation.” At the time, Lasseter had worked on Toy Story for four years with a production of two and a half years. It took fewer people to do, yes, and it looks different. Pixar is about putting story into the culture.
A team sport —Whether we talk about technology or creative work, it's still about collaboration. Steve Jobs first heard about Pixar when George Lucas wanted to sell the animation studio that was part of Lucasfilm. That's when Jobs met Dr. Ed Catmull who said the idea, the dream, was to make the first computer animated film. This was beyond anything Jobs had seen on the Macintosh. He bought the company, and it took the team ten years to bring that vision and dream to life. Creatives want to work at Pixar because they can work on a project they can be proud of, have creative ownership, and a lot of fun, says Lasseter.
In animation every frame has to count —Which highlights the importance of story boarding. Once the story is down, once the frames are drawn on pieces of paper and ordered in the sequence that makes the story work, then technology is useful to put it together in story reels to see from the sketches if it works or not. In other words, they beta test the story before they commit to creating it frame by frame. This is totally different from live action film.
Technology lasts longer when in service to story —Something we may not think about much, but the story part of the creative process outlives the technology part. While a piece of technology may live for ten or fifteen years, a good story may live for sixty or even a hundred, like Snow White, for example. Jobs says another benefit in this business is that Pixar is not competing with Microsoft, the competition is against making a great film that people love. For example, political satire doesn't last as long as good story with universal characters.
Toward the end of the interview, Rose asks Steve Jobs about Apple. “It's hard to predict these things,” says Jobs talking about how the events unfolded. When looking at the computer business, he says he looks at it from his current vantage point at Pixar.
As Charlie Rose says, Jobs understood marketing very, very well. That was his genius at Apple and in the beginning. But while Rose talked about the promotional aspects of marketing, as in getting the word out, Jobs moved the conversation to the product —people will see Pixar's product and get it, it's a movie studio, and not a technology company.
Jobs' point of view was longer term. Films may take four years to make, but the story lasts for sixty years. He did take notice of the technology when he first went to Lucas, but he was listening when Lasseter talked about the storytelling. At the time of the taping, it had been ten years since Jobs had been with Pixar, putting $50 million of his own money in the company now worth a lot more. “I tend to stay with a business until someone kicks me out,” says Jobs.
Jobs did not see himself as “a guy who founds high-tech companies and tries to make another billion.”
Watch the 1996 interview with Charlie Rose below.
Ten years to get to the success of Toy Story. Connecting the dots by looking back, by the time Jobs helped seal the Pixar deal with Disney, another ten years after the interview with Rose, he was back at Apple. The iPod, iPhone, and iPad conceived as ways to enjoy entertainment.
Why do some people succeed, having remarkable and productive productive lives, while so many more never reach their potential?
Culture, especially American culture, would have us believe success is the product of individual effort. We would like to believe hard work pays off. But the truth is as usual a little more complex.
In a recent interview, Malcolm Gladwell talks about his 2009 book, Outliers: The Story of Success. He wrote the book to figure out what crates success and why. He says:
The point of Outliers is, I mean, there’s a number of points. But one is that I wanted people to move away from the notion of success as something individual. And I wanted to get people to understand that a lot of success has to do with chance, with the contribution of your culture, your generation, your family. There’s this kind of heroic notion of the lone genius — it’s very popular in the United States — and I wanted to say to people that notion has no — very little — basis in reality.
Yet, people mostly walked away with “the 10,000-hour rule.” That if we commit to doing the work for at least that long, we would make it. The number comes from the work of Anders Ericsson along with that of other researchers.
It prompts us to focus on quantitative information. But nobody likes “it depends” as an answer.
Says Gladwell:
no one is more surprised than me that that was the average takeaway. The 10,000-hour stuff that I put in Outliers was really only intended to perform a very specific narrative function — or, not narrative function, but kind of argumentative function — which was, to me the point of 10,000 hours is: if it takes that long to be good, you can’t do it by yourself.
If you have to play chess for 10 years in order to be a great chess player, then that means that you can’t have a job, or maybe if you have a job it can’t be a job that takes up most of your time. It means you can’t come home, do the dishes, mow the lawn, take care of your kids. Someone has to do that stuff for you, right?
That was my argument, that if there’s an incredibly prolonged period that is necessary for the incubation of genius, high-performance, elite status of one sort or another, then that means there always has to be a group of people behind the elite performer making that kind of practice possible. And that’s what I wanted to say.
But that is not what the great majority of people heard or read into it. The problem is a statement included in the book that makes the number official, “10,000 hours is the magic number of greatness.” Because it is easier to focus on as a target to reach, it stuck.
There's a cognitive bias called anchoring. Marketers and business people use it all the time to put a stake in the ground when it comes to pricing.
For an everyday example of this principle, we can look at solicitations for donations. The note comes with pre-printed amounts —$25, $50, $100. Providing suggestions takes care of what in organizations we often refer to as “blank paper syndrome.” It focuses on picking one, typically the middle one says research, due to its multiple choice format. Something very familiar in the American education system.
In The Undercover Economist Tim Harford highlights price anchoring by explaining coffee pricing and customer purchasing choices. Another example is in supermarkets — they rearrange the information they provide putting some goods next to non competitive others to sell more of certain items.
“The 10,000-hour rule”
Ericsson's “rule” repeated in Gladwell's book became the anchoring factor by virtue of being a quantifiable data point rather than an emotional one. We focus on one thing and are blind to additional information. In the same chapter where the number and magic were part of the same sentence, Gladwell included more information:
elsewhere in that same chapter, there is a very explicit moment where I say that you also have to have talent. That, what we’re talking about with 10,000 hours is: how long does it take to bring talent to fruition?
To take some baseline level of ability and allow it to properly express itself and flourish. Ten thousand hours is meaningless in the absence of that baseline level of ability. I could play music for 20,000 hours. I am not becoming Mozart — never, ever, ever. I can play chess for 50,000 hours, and I am not becoming a grandmaster — ever, ever, ever.
“What it means to be talented is to take joy in obsessive practice,” says Gladwell.
Deliberate practice
Mastering skills, even in the presence of some or a modest amount of talent, takes practice.
In Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, Geoff Colvin says Deliberate Practice is designed to improve performance, works through repetition, relies on constant feedback for improvement, it's hard and thus mentally demanding, requires a good understanding of goals to ladder steps to get there.
Not just any kind of practice. It should be deliberate practice. Anders Ericsson had this insight in his research. That it's not just any kind of practice, but deliberate practice —diligent effort combined with intelligent feedback.
Talking about his own experience of mastering writing skills, Gladwell says:
one of the reasons I was drawn to Anders Ericsson’s notion of deliberate practice is that I did recognize a little of that in my own approach to my particular profession, discipline.
So this notion of not just applying yourself in a very dedicated fashion to what you do, but also actively considering, reconsidering, identifying weaknesses, striving to correct those weaknesses — I mean this sort of ongoing, what in the world of automotive manufacturing they refer to as “continuous improvement” — that was something that always came naturally to me.
There was never a moment when I was precious about my writing. In fact, I always welcomed people telling me what was wrong with it, because I always wanted to do it just a little better the next time. And I mean, that in a very colloquial way is what I think he’s getting at is: are you someone for whom the wheel never stops turning? You’re always looking for some way to do it a little bit better next time around.
[...]
But the amount of time necessary to make that improvement might be two or three X what you think it is. To me, that is his [Ericsson's] core observation. And that, to me, is an incredibly valuable, insightful observation. And I’m happy just with that.
Now, it so happens that I think he wants to go a step further and say, “If you do that kind of very devoted, long-running diligent practice, you don’t need a lot of kind of” — call it what you will — “raw talent when you begin.” My position is: you don’t have to say that.
As is often the case, the context that surrounds the research matters. So when we look at data, it's useful to understand the goals and reference points that frame the reason for conducting such research. It matters to application.
So to us the Beatles, and I think a lot of people would agree, what made them outstanding was their composing of a new type of music. It wasn’t like they excelled at being exceptional instrumentalists.
So if we want to explain here their ability to compose this really important music, deliberate practice should now be linked to activities that allow them to basically improve their compositional skills and basically get new feedback on their composition. So counting up the number of hours they perform together wouldn’t really enhance the ability here to write really innovative music.
In Outliers, Gladwell says part of the reason for achieving the success was because they played for a prolonged period of time in the clubs in Hamburg. In other words, while Ericsson says being derivative (instrumentalists) did not play a role in improving their composition skills, Gladwell says it did too, “they had played together 1,200 times — played live, 1,200 times by the time they came to America in 1964.”
At the same time, we are talking about talented musicians —John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison— playing together for hours and hours. Something good was bound to happen out of that.
It turns out that the tide of advantage —the answer we all look for— is “it depends.” Heritage, environment, including family ties, talent, and deliberate practice. But we should not forget the role of luck in our lives.
There is a reason why we get some of our best ideas when we're in a dreamy state. Ideas bubble up from our consciousness as we are about to let go of the awake state with its often frenetic activities and busyness. He says:
I noticed years ago that when people (myself definitely included) are anxious they tend to busy themselves with irrelevant activities, because these distract from and therefore reduce their actual experience of anxiety.
To stay perfectly still is to feel the fear at its maximum intensity, so instead you scuttle around doing things as though you are, in some mysterious way, short of time.
John Cleese says creativity emerges when we make room for it. He says, “You've got to be quiet; you can't have a creative idea when you're rushing around, answering your cell phone, looking at your watch, sending off email. It's not going to happen.”
Thomas Edison had more patents than any other in American history. He used to work best in the space between wakefulness and dozing off. So he had a system whereby he would hold ball bearings in his hand as he was working and he would have a metal plate on the floor.
As he would fall asleep, he would drop the metal bearings into the plate and he would be startled awake. Then he would pick them up and start over again. Edison liked to stay in that dreamy state. That's when he got most of his ideas.
Growing up, John Cleese was quite good at mathematics and Latin. He got into Cambridge to study science and then switched to law. While he was studying to become a lawyer, he discovered could write sketches that made people laugh.
Cleese studied with psychology professor Brian Bates who said the best bit of research on creativity had been done in America at University of California at Berkeley by Dr. Donald W. MacKinnon in the late sixties.
MacKinnon was a psychology professor and he studied creativity in professions like journalism and engineering. He had a particular interest in architects because they must be good at being creative, but also be good at the technical stuff to keep the buildings up.
He found two huge differences between creative and non creative architects:
1./ creatives know how to play — their playing was almost child-like. When we observe children, they are completely absorbed into something, what they are doing, and there is no sense of time. Because they are interested in it for its own sake, not to solve something.
2./ creatives defer making decisions as long as they could — the whole idea of the efficient executive that makes decisions quickly is bullshit. When we have to make a decision the first thing we have to ask ourselves is when does this question need answering? Then we answer it at that time. We do this for two reasons, because we may get new information later, which is obvious, and also because the longer we leave it, the greater chance our unconscious may come up with better stuff.
Playfulness and putting-off decisions help us become more creative. The longer we can tolerate the sense of dissatisfaction with not ticking an item off a list, the higher our creative output. Of course, we live in the real world, so often we will need to provide an answer by a certain time. But for the things where we can wait, we are better off when we defer closing them down.
On using complementary skills, Cleese says, “There's no point having a team if its members are not different from each other.” In a team, people need to have different skills. For example, he says, if you put together a bunch of middle aged white men they will later tell you how great of a time they've had and then come up with nothing. Sounds like Congress, says the interviewer from Google.
In his book So, Anyway... John Cleese talks about his early life and education, and how they led him to choose a creative life. Among the many things he says about creativity is that constant change in scenery and habits from moving around help being about new views of the world:
Research has shown that constant relocation in childhood is often associated with creativity. It seems that the creative impulse is sparked by the need to reconcile contrasting views of the world. If you move home, you start living a slightly different life, so you compare it with your previous life, note the divergences and the similarities, see what you like better and what you miss, and as you do so, your mind becomes more flexible and capable of combining thoughts and ideas in new and fresh ways.
The book doesn't cover the popular Monty Python programs, which may make it a challenge for the many fans of the series looking for personal insights from Cleese.
Although the book is not meant to be funny, there are several sections in the book that are quite enjoyable and even hilarious. A good sense of humor is important to deal with whatever life trows our way. In the book, he says:
A good sense of humour is the sign of a healthy perspective, which is why people who are uncomfortable around humour are either pompous (inflated) or neurotic (oversensitive). Pompous people mistrust humour because at some level they know their self-importance cannot survive very long in such an atmosphere, so they criticise it as “negative” or “subversive.”
Neurotics, sensing that humour is always ultimately critical, view it as therefore unkind and destructive, a reductio ad absurdum which leads to political correctness. Not that laughter can’t be unkind and destructive. Like most manifestations of human behaviour it ranges from the loving to the hateful. The latter produces nasty racial jokes and savage teasing; the former, warm and affectionate banter, and the kind of inclusive humour that says, “Isn’t the human condition absurd, but we’re all in the same boat.”
He's not terribly fond of British journalists:
British journalists tend to believe that people who become good at something do so because they seek fame and fortune. This is because these are the sole motives of people who become British journalists.
But some people, operating at higher levels of mental health, pursue activities because they actually love them.
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
[Marie Curie]
She was a physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity —her research papers are still radioactive more than 100 years later.
Marie Curie discovered two new chemical elements —polonium (named after her native country) and radium. She carried out the first research into the treatment of tumors with radiation, and she was the founder of the Curie Institutes in Paris and Warsaw, which are important medical research centers.
Curie was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in France, and the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize. She's the only person to ever win two Nobel Prizes in (both) physics (1903) and chemistry (1911).
The other really important fact about her life is that she published her research to establish priority over her discoveries. She did not patent the procedure for extraction and purification of radium, something which would have made her and her husband Pierre, also a scientist, very wealthy. They believed that, “It would be contrary to the scientific spirit.” So it remained open source.
In a 1974 biography, Robert William Reid says:
The [research] idea was her own; no one helped her formulate it, and although she took it to her husband for his opinion she clearly established her ownership of it. She later recorded the fact twice in her biography of her husband to ensure there was no chance whatever of any ambiguity.
It [is] likely that already at this early stage of her career [she] realized that... many scientists would find it difficult to believe that a woman could be capable of the original work in which she was involved.
In the paper where she detailed her findings, Curie described how much greater the activities of pitchblende and chalcolite were to that of uranium. She wrote, “The fact is very remarkable, and leads to the belief that these minerals may contain an element which is much more active than uranium.” Later she would recall how she felt “a passionate desire to verify this hypothesis as rapidly as possible.”
She and husband Pierre announced the existence of an element they named polonium in July 1898. Radium (Lat. for ray) came on December 26 of the same year. Alone and together, the Curies published 32 scientific papers, including one that announced that diseased and tumor-forming cells were destroyed faster than healthy cells when exposed to radium.
The Curie's research was crucial in the development of x-rays in surgery. During World War I Curie put aside her lab work to equip ambulances with portable x-ray machines, which she herself drove to the front lines. She outfitted 200 mobile radiological units, constructed some 20 hospitals, and of the former, drove one of the cars herself (or with a driver), serving in turn as driver, crank operator, mechanic, tire changer, nurse at the front lines and radiological technician. She even offered the gold of her Nobel medals to be melted down to aid the war effort.
In Madame Curie: A biography, published in 1937 now available in reprint, the scientists' daughter Eve provides an honest historical account of the scientist's life and work. The book was written from the review of letters to and from Madame Curie to many people, the memories of people that knew her, drawing from her lectures and speeches, and the memories of Eve and her other daughter Irene, herself a scientist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
Despite her success, Marie continued to face great opposition from male scientists in France, and she never received significant financial benefits from her work. In 1911, when Nobel Prize winner (chemistry) Curie was denied a seat in the French Academy of Sciences, Albert Einstein sent her a letter of support. In it he says:
Highly esteemed Mrs. Curie:
Do not laugh at me for writing you without having anything sensible to say. But I am so enraged by the base manner in which the public is presently daring to concern itself with you that I absolutely must give vent to this feeling. However, I am convinced that you consistently despise this rabble, whether it obsequiously lavishes respect on you or whether it attempts to satiate its lust for sensationalism! I am impelled to tell you how much I have come to admire your intellect, your drive, and your honesty, and that I consider myself lucky to have made your acquaintance in Brussels. Anyone who does not number among these reptiles is certainly happy, now as before, that we have such personages among us as you, and Langevin too, real people with whom one feels privileged to be in contact. If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don't read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptile for whom it has been fabricated.
With most amicable regards to you, Langevin, and Perrin, yours very truly,
A. Einstein
P.S. I have determined the statistical law of motion of the diatomic molecule in Planck's radiation field by means of a comical witticism, naturally under the constraint that the structure's motion follows the laws of standard mechanics. My hope that this law is valid in reality is very small, though.
Einstein's letter has aged well and could be used appropriately for still too frequent situations today.
In photographs of participants of the world-famous Solvay Conferences (funded by a Belgian industrialist of that name), she was in the place of honor next to Einstein, Lorentz and Poincare.
By the late 1920s Marie Curie's health was beginning to deteriorate. She died on 4 July 1934 from leukemia, caused by exposure to high-energy radiation from her research.
The best way to have less fear in our lives is to understand more. Marie Curie was a self-educated visionary. Her research was done without salary or funding, four years in the mud on the floor of a shack into which the rain poured through a leaking roof, separating milligrams of radium from tons of pitchblende, using an iron rod as pounding tool to crush the ore, as similar to the technology of Amazon Indians.
Curiosity can help us learn about the things we don't know, so we can demystify them rather than fear them. “Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas,” said Curie.
Much remains to be done, but it won't happen as quickly nor as easily as we would like to think.
“Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses—especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”
[Leonardo da Vinci]
In the early 1480s, Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci wrote a letter to Ludovico Sforza, then Duke of Milan including a list of his capabilities. Sforza was looking to employ military engineers, so da Vinci included minute details about his skills to that effect:
My Most Illustrious Lord,
Having now sufficiently seen and considered the achievements of all those who count themselves masters and artificers of instruments of war, and having noted that the invention and performance of the said instruments is in no way different from that in common usage, I shall endeavor, while intending no discredit to anyone else, to make myself understood to Your Excellency for the purpose of unfolding to you my secrets, and thereafter offering them at your complete disposal, and when the time is right bringing into effective operation all those things which are in part briefly listed below:
1. I have plans for very light, strong and easily portable bridges with which to pursue and, on some occasions, flee the enemy, and others, sturdy and indestructible either by fire or in battle, easy and convenient to lift and place in position. Also means of burning and destroying those of the enemy.
2. I know how, in the course of the siege of a terrain, to remove water from the moats and how to make an infinite number of bridges, mantlets and scaling ladders and other instruments necessary to such an enterprise.
3. Also, if one cannot, when besieging a terrain, proceed by bombardment either because of the height of the glacis or the strength of its situation and location, I have methods for destroying every fortress or other stranglehold unless it has been founded upon a rock or so forth.
4. I have also types of cannon, most convenient and easily portable, with which to hurl small stones almost like a hail-storm; and the smoke from the cannon will instill a great fear in the enemy on account of the grave damage and confusion.
5. Also, I have means of arriving at a designated spot through mines and secret winding passages constructed completely without noise, even if it should be necessary to pass underneath moats or any river.
6. Also, I will make covered vehicles, safe and unassailable, which will penetrate the enemy and their artillery, and there is no host of armed men so great that they would not break through it. And behind these the infantry will be able to follow, quite uninjured and unimpeded.
7. Also, should the need arise, I will make cannon, mortar and light ordnance of very beautiful and functional design that are quite out of the ordinary.
8. Where the use of cannon is impracticable, I will assemble catapults, mangonels, trebuckets and other instruments of wonderful efficiency not in general use. In short, as the variety of circumstances dictate, I will make an infinite number of items for attack and defense.
9. And should a sea battle be occasioned, I have examples of many instruments which are highly suitable either in attack or defense, and craft which will resist the fire of all the heaviest cannon and powder and smoke.
10. In time of peace I believe I can give as complete satisfaction as any other in the field of architecture, and the construction of both public and private buildings, and in conducting water from one place to another.
Also I can execute sculpture in marble, bronze and clay. Likewise in painting, I can do everything possible as well as any other, whosoever he may be.
Moreover, work could be undertaken on the bronze horse which will be to the immortal glory and eternal honor of the auspicious memory of His Lordship your father, and of the illustrious house of Sforza.
And if any of the above-mentioned things seem impossible or impracticable to anyone, I am most readily disposed to demonstrate them in your park or in whatsoever place shall please Your Excellency, to whom I commend myself with all possible humility.
The letter worked. A decade later, Sfoza commissioned da Vinci to paint The Last Supper. The mural is in the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan where I saw it many years ago.
Skill creates the necessary means for us to execute, to close the gap between our taste, what we see in our mind, and what we can make. “The more skill you have, the more sophisticated and accomplished your ideas can be,” says choreographer Twyla Tharp.
Pope Leo X heard that Leonardo da Vinci was experimenting with the formulas for varnishes instead of executing a painting. He declared, “This man will never do anything, for he begins thinking about the end before the beginning of his work.”
However, Leonardo understood that the better you know the nuts and bolts of your craft, the more fully you can express your talents.
The great painters are incomparable draftsmen. They also know how to mix their own paint, grind it, put in the fixative; no task is too small to be worthy of their attention.
Before we can create, we need to build our craft. In other words, to create more, we need to get better at it. It starts with “Perfect practice,” says Twarp. We also need to broaden our arsenal of skills to avoid becoming stale. Discipline is a skill, and everyone needs to develop it, no matter the type of work.
Discussing the power of the crossbow Leonardo da Vinci references doubling the degrees of “fury” through applied technique and dexterity in his notebooks. “You double your intensity with skill,” says Twarp. Before taking on a subject, da Vinci considered it from a variety of angles. “Leonardo's breadth of interests was remarkable. So was his ability to bounce back from one area of study to another and find relationships between them.”
To perfect our craft, we all need breadth —which we could achieve through a multidisciplinary approach to learning— as well as depth —achievable by thinking about the problem in minute detail.
For example, in his notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci lists the various aspects of rivers and currents he intended to study:
Of the different rates of speed of currents from the surface of the water to the bottom.
Of the different cross slants between the surface and the bottom.
Of the different currents on the surface of the water.
Of the different currents on the bed of the rivers.
Of the different depths of the rivers.
Of the different shapes of the hills covered by the waters.
Where the water is swift at the bottom and not above.
Where the water is slow at the bottom and swift above.
Where it is slow below and above and swift in the middle.
Where the water in the rivers stretches itself out and where it contracts. Where it bends and where it straightens itself.
Where it penetrates evenly in the expanses of rivers and where unevenly. Where it is low in the middle and high at the sides.
Where it is high in the middle and low at the sides.
Where the current goes straight in the middle of the stream. Where the current winds, throwing itself on different sides.
Of the different slants in the descents of the water.
This level of detail comes from keen curiosity and observation. “By the time Leonardo had considered all these aspects, he understood rivers and was ready to make any creative use of their power and potential that might occur to him, whatever the context,” says Twarp.
“From 1733 to 1758, Ben Franklin dispensed useful and timeless advice through Poor Richard's Almanack. Among the virtues extolled were thrift, duty, hard work, and simplicity. Subsequently, two centuries went by during which Ben's thoughts on these subjects were regarded as the last word. Then Charlie Munger stepped forth.”
[Warren Buffett]
In a Commencement Speech at USC Law in May 2007, Charlie Munger set the tone by acknowledging the importance of wisdom acquisition, in his view a moral duty, Confucius' idea of filial piety, and the value of knowledge transfer from one generation to the next.
He says:
I'm going to try and just give an account of some ideas and attitudes that have worked well for me. I don't claim that they are perfect for everybody, although I think many of them are pretty close to universal values and many of them are can't fail ideas.
Charlie Munger's core ideas
Getting what you want
The first one he got at a very early age, he says, “the idea that the safest way to try and get what you want is to try and deserve what you want.”
It's such a simple idea. It's the golden rule, so to speak. You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.
There is no ethos, in my opinion, that is better for any lawyer or any other person to have. By and large, the people who have this ethos win in life. And they don't win just money, just honors and emoluments; they win the respect, the deserved trust of the people they deal with. And there is huge pleasure in life to be obtained from getting deserved trust.
And so the way to get it is to deliver what you'd want to buy if the circumstances were reversed.
We may be tempted by the observation that often clever people of dubious skill become quite popular. Munger says:
Now, occasionally you'll find a perfect rogue of a person, who dies rich and widely known. But mostly these people are fully understood by the surrounding civilization, and when the cathedral is full of people at the funeral ceremony, most of them are there to celebrate the fact that the person is dead.
And that reminds me of the story of the time when one of these people died and the minister said, “It's now time for someone to say something nice about the deceased.” And nobody came forward, and nobody came forward, and nobody came forward. And finally, one man came up and he said, “Well, his brother was worse.”
We all mostly learn by example, so we want to be a good example for those who come after us.
A second idea Munger got very early and that was very useful to him, “there is no love that's so right as admiration based love; and that love should include the instructive dead.”
Becoming hooked to lifetime learning
In talking about the moral duty of wisdom acquisition and the value of learning he says, “there's a corollary to that proposition, which is very important: it means that you're hooked for lifetime learning.”
And without lifetime learning you people are not going to do very well. You are not going to get very far in life based on what you already know. You're going to advance in life by what you're going to learn after you leave here.
If you take Berkshire Hathaway—which is certainly one of the best regarded corporations in the world, and may have the best long-term investment record in the entire history of civilization—the skill that got Berkshire through one decade would not have sufficed to get it through the next decade, with the achievements made. Without Warren Buffett being a learning machine, a continuous learning machine, the record would have been absolutely impossible.
The same is true at lower walks of life. I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines—they go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up. And boy does that habit help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.
Quoting Alfred North Whitehead on the rapid advance of civilization, Munger notes that it came about with the “invention of the method of invention.” Says Munger:
if civilization can progress only when it invents the method of invention, you can progress only when you learn the method of learning.
Continuous learning expands our horizons. When we make learning a habit, we uncover new opportunities. Children feel the excitement of learning more strongly than the fear of the unknown. For adults the balance is reversed —we stop learning when we’re afraid of leaving the safety of what we know.
There is a method to learning continuously.
if you take Warren Buffett, if you watched him with a time clock, I would say half of all the time that he spends is just sitting on his ass and reading. And a big chunk of the rest of the time is spent talking one-on-one, either on the telephone or personally, with highly gifted people whom he trusts and who trust him. In other words, it looks quite academic, all this worldly success.
This is why Berkshire is so successful. The key is going to bed a little wiser than when you woke up that day. But being a voracious reader is not enough. Munger also talks about the importance of transferring what we know to others.
As David Weinberger says in Too Big to Know, “the smartest person in the room is the room.”
Creating a mental latticework
Another idea hugely useful was something that pushed him into his multidisciplinary approach to learning:
learning all the big ideas in all the big disciplines, so I wouldn't be a perfect damn fool who was trying to think about one aspect of something that couldn't be removed from the totality of the situation in a constructive fashion.
And what I noted, since the really big ideas carry ninety-five percent of the freight, that it wasn't at all hard for me to pick up all the big ideas in all the disciplines and make them a standard part of my mental routines.
Once you have the ideas, of course, they are no good if you don't practice. If you don't practice, you lose it. So I went through life constantly practicing this multidisciplinary approach. Well, I can't tell you what that's done for me; it's made life more fun, it's made me more constructive, it's made me more helpful to others, it's made me enormously rich—you name it. That attitude really helps.
Because it helps us widen our lens and think about different angles, this approach may help us see an issue or problem better than the experts in that particular field. In that case, Munger suggests we keep our cards close to the chest, lest we create difficulties for ourselves:
One of my colleagues—also a number one in his class in law school, a great success in life, clerked for the supreme court, etc.—but he knew a lot and he tended to show it as a very young lawyer.
And, one day, the senior partner called him in and said, “Listen Chuck, I want to explain something to you. Your duty under any circumstances is to behave in such a way that the client thinks he's the smartest person in the world. And if you've got any little energy or insight available after that, use it to make your senior partner look like the smartest person in the world. And only after you've satisfied those two obligations do you want your light to shine at all.”
Well, that may have been good advice for rising in a large firm. It wasn't what I did; I always obeyed the drift of my nature. And if other people didn't like it, well I didn't need to be adored by everybody.
On this front, things get a lot easier when we carve a path we can call our own. In that case, carving the path becomes the challenge. It helps to learn the big ideas of the people who came before us, says Munger.
According to Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist Marcus Tullius Cicero, “A man who doesn't know what happens before he is born goes through life living like a child.”
But the point is to learn for the purpose of using our knowledge:
there are all these other things that you should know in addition to history—and those other things are the big ideas in all the other disciplines. And it doesn't help you just to know them enough just so you can prattle them back on an exam and get an “A.”
You have to learn these things in such a way that they're in a mental latticework in your head and you automatically use them for the rest of your life. If you do that, I solemnly promise you that one day you'll be walking down the street, and you'll look to your right and left, and you'll think, “My heavenly days, I'm now one of the few most competent people of my whole age cohort.” If you don't do it, many of the brightest of you will live in the middle ranks or in the shallows.
We wallow in the shallows when we skim and skip, thinking we can always rely on search to find what we are looking for, failing to understand that the value is about making things rather than finding them—search engines do a fine job with the latter.
Understanding the power of inversion
If instead of trying too hard to answer the question of what will make us successful we looked at what will really fail, that is inversion. Says Munger:
The way complex adaptive systems work and the way mental constructs work, problems frequently get easier, and I'd even say usually are easier to solve if you turn them around in reverse. In other words, if you want to help India, the question you should ask is not, “How can I help India?” you think, “What's doing the worst damage in India? What would automatically do the worst damage and how do I avoid it?”
You'd think they are logically the same thing, they're not.
Those of you who have mastered algebra know that inversion frequently will solve problems which nothing else will solve. And in life, unless you're more gifted than Einstein, inversion will help you solve problems that you can't solve in other ways.
[...]
What will really fail in life? What do you want to avoid? Such an easy answer: sloth and unreliability. If you're unreliable it doesn't matter what your virtues are, you're going to crater immediately. So doing what you have faithfully engaged to do should be an automatic part of your conduct. You want to avoid sloth and unreliability.
Munger cautions graduates on holding onto extreme ideology, “because it cabbages up one's mind.” When something becomes the only lens through which we see the world, we are in danger of messing up with our own mind.
Stating the arguments against our own position
Can we make an argument against our position? If we can do that, we are on our way to owning an opinion. Says Munger:
I have what I call an iron prescription that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another. And that is, I say, “I'm not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people do who are supporting it.”
I think, only when I've reached that state am I qualified to speak. Now, you can say that's too much of an iron discipline. It's not too much of an iron discipline. It isn't even that hard to do. It sounds a lot like the iron prescription of Ferdinand the Great: “It's not necessary to hope in order to persevere.” That probably is too tough for most people. I don't think it's too tough for me, but it's too tough for most people.
But this business of not drifting into extreme ideology is a very, very important thing in life. If you want to have more correct knowledge and be wiser than other people, a heavy ideology is very likely to do you in.
It's important to know both sides of an argument to be wise.
Identifying our self-serving bias
Mozart was a genius, but he was also quite miserable. Why? He overspent his income. He couldn't get away with that, we shouldn't try.
Generally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge, and self-pity are disastrous modes of thought. Self-pity gets pretty close to paranoia, and paranoia is one of the very hardest things to reverse. You do not want to drift into self-pity.
I have a friend who carried a big stack of linen cards, about this thick, and when somebody would make a comment that reflected self-pity, he would take out one of the cards, take the top one off the stack, and hand it to the person. And the card said, “Your story has touched my heart. Never have I heard of anyone with as many misfortunes as you.”
[...]
I suggest that every time you find you're drifting into self-pity—and I don't care what's the cause, your child could be dying of cancer—self-pity is not going to improve the situation. Just give yourself one of those cards.
Since self-pity is a standard condition, when we avoid it, we are automatically at great advantage over everyone else. We can train ourselves to recognize our own self-serving bias:
thinking that what's good for you is good for the wider civilization and rationalizing all these ridiculous conclusions based on this subconscious tendency to serve one's self. It's a terribly inaccurate way to think. And, of course, you want to drive that out of yourself because you want to be wise, not foolish.
Munger adds an important corollary to this core idea, allowing for the human condition to exist, because that is something we cannot change:
You also have to allow for the self-serving bias of everybody else, because most people are not going to remove it all that successfully, the human condition being what it is. And if you don't allow for self-serving bias in your conduct, again, you're a fool—you just aren't competent.
A story to illustrate:
I watched the brilliant, Harvard Law Review-trained general counsel of Salomon lose his career. And what he did was: when the CEO was aware that some underling had done something wrong, the general counsel said, “Gee, we don't have any legal duty to report this, but I think it's what we should do, it's our moral duty.”
And the general counsel was totally correct. But, of course, it didn't work. It was a very unpleasant thing for the CEO to do and he put it off, and put it off, and put it off. In due course, why, the thing eroded into a major scandal and down went the CEO and the general counsel with him.
The correct answer in situations like that was given by Ben Franklin. He said, “If you want to persuade, appeal to interest not to reason.” The self-serving bias is so extreme.
If the general counsel had said, “Look, this is going to erupt in something that will destroy you, take away your money, take away your status—it's a perfect disaster,” it would have worked. You want to appeal to interest. You want to do it with lofty motives, but you should not avoid appealing to interest.
A self-serving bias occurs when people attribute their successes to internal or personal factors but attribute their failures to situational factors beyond their control.
Avoiding perverse incentives
Incentives are a powerful force and they could lead us astray. Munger talks about the dangers of billable quotas, for example. He also says don't work under someone you don't admire or don't want to emulate:
Perverse associations—also to be avoided. And you particularly want to avoid working directly under somebody you really don't admire and don't want to be like. It's very dangerous. We're all subject to control to some extent by authority figures—particularly authority figures that are rewarding us. And that requires some talent.
The way I solved that is I figured out the people I did admire and I maneuvered cleverly, without criticizing anybody, so I was working entirely under people I admired. And a lot of law firms will permit that if you're shrewd enough to work it out. And your outcome in life will be way more satisfactory and way better if you work under people you really admire. The alternative is not a good idea.
Maintaining objectivity
To maintain objectivity, Munger says we should get into routines.
we all remember that Darwin paid special attention to disconfirming evidence, particularly when it disconfirmed something he believed and loved.
Well, objectivity maintenance routines are totally required in life if you're going to be a correct thinker. And there we're talking about Darwin's attitude—special attention to the disconfirming evidence—and also to checklist routines. Checklist routines avoid a lot of errors. You should have all this elementary wisdom and then you should go through a mental checklist in order to use it.
There is no other procedure that will work as well.
Having a mental checklist is very helpful to stay the course.
Learning to think for ourselves
To illustrate this concept, Munger uses a sports analogy:
John Wooden, when he was the number one basketball coach in the world. He just said to the bottom five players, “You don't get to play, you're sparring partners.”
The top seven did all the playing. Well the top seven learned more—remember the learning machine—because they were doing all the playing.
And when he got to that system, why, Wooden won more than he'd ever won before. I think the game of life, in many respects, is getting a lot of practice into the hands of the people that have the most aptitude to learn and the most tendency to be learning machines.
if you want the very highest reaches of human civilization that's where you have to go.
You do not want to choose a brain surgeon for your child among fifty applicants, all of them just take turns during the procedure; you don't want your airplanes designed that way, you don't want your Berkshire Hathaway's run that way.
You want to get the power into the right people.
It's not enough to talk a good game, we must learn to play one by learning through deliberate practice. Which doesn't mean practicing with the intent of learning, as it may seem.
In Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, Geoff Colvin says Deliberate Practice is designed to improve performance, works through repetition, relies on constant feedback for improvement, it's hard and thus mentally demanding, requires a good understanding of goals to ladder steps to get there.
Munger says:
I frequently tell the story of Max Planck, when he won the Nobel prize and went around Germany giving lectures on quantum mechanics. And the chauffeur gradually memorized the lecture and he said, “Would you mind, professor Planck, just because it's so boring staying in our routines, would you mind if I gave the lecture this time and you just sat in front with my chauffeur's hat?” And Planck said, “Sure.”
And the chauffeur got up and he gave this long lecture on quantum mechanics, after which a physics professor stood up in the rear and asked a perfectly ghastly question. And the chauffeur said, “Well, I'm surprised that in an advanced city like Munich I get such an elementary question. I'm going to ask my chauffeur to reply.”
The reason for telling the story is to make a stronger point on knowledge. Munger says in this world we have two kinds of knowledge:
One is Planck knowledge—the people who really know; they've paid the dues, they have the aptitude.
Then we've got chauffeur knowledge—they have learned to prattle the talk; and they have a big head of hair, they may have fine timbre in the voice, they really make a hell of an impression, but in the end they've got chauffeur knowledge. I think I've just described practically every politician in the United States.
And you are going to have the problem in your life of getting the responsibility into the people with the Planck knowledge and away for the people who have the chauffeur knowledge. And there are huge forces working against you.
Being able to rattle off the ideas of others is not sufficient, we need to internalize knowledge for ourselves so we can synthesize our own ideas.
Munger says it helps when we have a strong interest in a subject:
Another thing that I found is that an intense interest in the subject is indispensable if you are really going to excel in it. I could force myself to be fairly good in a lot of things, but I couldn't be really good in anything where I didn't have an intense interest.
[...]
Another thing you have to do, of course, is have a lot of assiduity. I like that word because it means sit down on your ass until you do it.
Partnering well
This is partly a product of being deserving, partly an outcome of good selection, but is also due to sheer luck:
two partners that I chose for one little phase of my life had the following rule when they created a little design-build construction team.
They sat down and said, “Two man partnership, divide everything equally, here's the rule: whenever we're behind in our commitments to other people we will both work fourteen hours a day until we're caught up.”
Well, needless to say, that firm didn't fail. The people died honored and rich. It's such a simple idea. It's just such a simple idea.
Understanding the role of luck
Sometimes things just don't go as we expect. We may not control what happens to us, but we can do something about how we respond.
Another thing, of course, is life will have terrible blows in it, horrible blows, unfair blows—doesn't matter. And some people recover and others don't.
And there, I think, the attitude of Epictetus is the best. He thought that every mischance in life was an opportunity to behave well, every mischance in life was an opportunity to learn something, and that your duty was not to be submerged in self-pity, but to utilize the terrible blow in a constructive fashion.
That is a very good idea. And you may remember the epitaph which Epictetus left for himself: “Here lies Epictetus, a slave, maimed in body, the ultimate in poverty, and favored of the gods.”
Well, that's the way Epictetus is now remembered. He's had big consequences. And he was favorite of the gods. He was favored because he became wise and he became manly. Very good idea.
Being opportunistic means being ready
Along with prudence, Munger believes in opportunism. He says:
My grandfather was the only federal judge in his city for nearly forty years. And I really admired him. I'm his namesake. And I'm Confucian enough that, even now, I sit here and I'm saying, “Well, Judge Munger would be pleased to see me here.”
So I'm Confucian enough, all these years after my grandfather is dead, to carry the torch for my grandfather's values. And, grandfather Munger was a federal judge at a time when there were no pensions for widows of federal judges. So if he didn't save from his income, why, my grandmother would have been in penury.
And being the kind of man he was, he under-spent his income all his life and left her in comfortable circumstances. Along the way, in the thirties, my uncle's bank failed and couldn't reopen. And my grandfather saved the bank by taking over a third of his assets—good assets—and putting them into the bank and taking the horrible assets in exchange. And, of course, it did save the bank.
While my grandfather took a loss, he got most of his money back eventually. But I've always remembered the example. And so when I got to college and I came across Houseman, I remember the little poem from Houseman, and that went something like this:
“The thoughts of others Were light and fleeting, Of lovers' meeting, Luck or fame. Mine were of trouble, And mine were steady; And I was ready When trouble came.”
Because being prudent to him equals earning the ability to be opportunistic.
You can say, who wants to go through life anticipating trouble? Well, I did—all my life I've gone through life anticipating trouble. And here I am, well along on my eighty-fourth year, and like Epictetus, I've had a favored life. It didn't make me unhappy to anticipate trouble all the time and be ready to perform adequately if trouble came. It didn't hurt me at all. In fact, it helped me.
Creating a seamless web of trust
When a handshake is as good as a contract, we know we are on solid ground to build upon. Says Munger:
The last idea that I want to give you, as you go out into a profession that frequently puts a lot of procedure, and a lot of precautions, and a lot of mumbo-jumbo into what it does, this is not the highest form which civilization can reach.
The highest form that civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust. Not much procedure, just totally reliable people correctly trusting one another.
That's the way an operating room works at the Mayo Clinic. If a bunch of lawyers were to introduce a lot of process, the patients would all die.
So never forget, when you're a lawyer, that you may be rewarded for selling this stuff, but you don't have to buy it. In your own life, what you want is a seamless web of deserved trust. And if your proposed marriage contract has forty-seven pages, my suggestion is you not enter.
He concludes his speech with a quote. He says, “I'm like old Valiant-For-Truth in Pilgrim's Progress”:
“My sword I leave to him who can wear it.”
Watch the full video of the talk below.
For learning more about how to look at problems using Munger's lens, including the psychology of human misjudgment, read Poor Charlie's Almanack.
If you'd like the net proceeds from sales of Poor Charlie's Almanack go to benefit The Munger Research Center of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, buy the book (new) here.
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