Originals

Vuja de. Not to be confused with déjà vu!

Déjà vu = You experience something new but it feels like you’ve experienced it before.
Vuja de = You look at something familiar with a fresh perspective—gaining “new insights into old problems.”

Originality starts with curiosity—with a willingness to challenge the norms and find a better way to go about doing things. Adam brings this point home with a fascinating study on the web browsers people use at work and how that correlates to their level of engagement and effectiveness in their jobs.

Here’s the short story. Economist Michael Housman studied thirty thousand customer service agents across a range of fields. Originally he was interested in understanding why some stayed at their jobs longer than others.

As he dug in, he noticed correlations between the web browser they used and their overall performance. For some odd reason, Chrome and Firefox users outperformed Safari and Internet Explorer users in nearly every regard (stayed on the job longer, missed less work, had happier customers, higher sales, etc.).

After digging in to the data further, he concluded that the individuals who chose not to stick with the default browser (Internet Explorer on a PC and Safari on a Mac) took more initiative in their jobs as well—looking for ways to optimize as they engaged in every facet of their jobs.

Unfortunately, as Adam tells us, we live in an Internet Explorer world—just as nearly two-thirds of the customer service reps used their default browser, most of us seem to simply accept the “default browser” of life and fail to take the initiative to craft our ideals.

How about you? What browser are you using? (hah!) (Me? I’m a Chrome guy.)

Here’s to challenging the defaults as we get our vuja de on!

That’s so good. Want to maximize your odds of coming up with an original work? Create a TON of stuff. :)

In addition to Beethoven and Mozart and their super-high level of output, Adam shares data on Shakespeare and Picasso. Both of those guys produced a CRAZY ton of goodness—only a tiny fraction of which was recognized as “great” but all of which was required to get to that greatness.

Reminds me of the 50 lbs = A wisdom from Art & Fear (see Notes). It’s worth reviewing (especially for the perfectionists in the house): “The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on the quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the ‘quantity’ group: fifty pounds of pots rated an ‘A,’ forty pounds a ‘B,’ and so on. Those being graded on ‘quality,’ however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get an ‘A.’ Well, came grading and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the ‘quantity’ group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the ‘quality’ group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”

Where do you fall on that spectrum? Trying to create *the* perfect piece or deliberately cranking out a high volume? (Or a nice hybrid of going for your best and holding high standards AND cranking out a ton—knowing that your best will come as a function of getting 4% better with more and more output?)

Here’s another section that got some heavy underlining and asterisks (you should see this chapter—it’s ALL marked up, and, for me, worth the price of the book by itself): “If you want to be an original, ‘the most important possible thing you could do,’ says Ira Glass, the producer ofThis American Life and the podcast Serial, ‘is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.’”

The most important thing if we want to be an original?

DO a HUGE volume of work. 50 lbs = A. (← That has a permanent home on my whiteboard.)

btw: We’re not talking about SHALLOW work here. We’re talking about DEEP WORK. Check out our Notes on Cal Newport’s Deep Work for more on that and remember the distinction:

“Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity. We now know from decades of research in both psychology and neuroscience that the state of mental strain that accompanies deep work is also necessary to improve your abilities.”

vs.

“Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tends to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

In an age of network tools, in other words, knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative—constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction.”

Let’s not be human network routers flitting from shallow thing to shallow thing.

Remember: Beethoven, Shakespeare, Picasso, et al. DID NOT produce their masterpieces with their attention splintered as their iPhones blew up with every push notification. GO DEEP!

One more gem from Adam worth noting here: “It’s widely assumed that there’s a tradeoff between quantity and quality—if you want to do better work, you have to do less of it—but this turns out to be false. In fact, when it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality. ‘Original thinkers,’ Stanford professor Robert Sutton notes, ‘will come up with many ideas that are strange mutations, dead ends, and utter failures. The cost is worthwhile because they also generate a larger pool of ideas—especially novel ideas.’”

Love this Idea. Seriously. One of my absolute favorites ever.

We touched on the same research by Alison Wood Brooks in our Notes on Kelly McGonigal’s The Upside of Stress and Amy Cuddy’s Presence.

Quick recap: Students are asked to give an impromptu speech before a panel of judges.

(Recall that people are more afraid of public speaking than death (!) making it a wonderful way to test responses to stress and leading Seinfeld to quip that “If you have to go a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.” ← hah. Sidenote: Public Speaking 101 soon.)

Brooks wanted to know which approach led to better performance: Trying to calm down or channeling your energy into excitement.

One group was advised to say, “I am calm.” The other, “I am excited.”

The “I am excited” group significantly outperformed the trying-to-get-calm group.

Why?

Because it’s almost impossible to shift from a high-arousal state of fear/anxiety immediately into a calm state. It’s like cruising at 80 miles an hour and slamming on the brakes. Not a good idea.

Much wiser to take all that fear energy and simply reframe it as excitement—channeling it into a positive, constructive direction and, effectively, pressing go on the accelerator rather than stop.

And “I am excited!” is a shockingly simple way to make that happen.

So…

What do YOU do when you’re feeling your heart race before a big event?

Time to get excited?

P.S. Here’s how Amy Cuddy brilliantly captures it in Presence: “As most of us know, stage fright can feel like a paralyzing overdose of anxiety. And what do people tell us to do when we’re anxious? They tell us, with good intentions, to calm down. As it turns out, that might just be the very worst thing they can say. You see, anxiety is what psychologists describe as a high-arousal emotion. As I’ve explained, when we’re anxious, we occupy a heightened state of psychological vigilance. We’re hyperalert. Our hearts race, we break out into a sweat, our cortisol may spike—all of these reactions are controlled automatically by our nervous system. And it’s virtually impossible for most people to shut off that kind of automatic arousal, to abruptly de-escalate it. Not only can we not calm it down, but when someone tells us to calm down, it also reminds us of how calm we are not, which stokes our anxiety even more.

But there’s another high-arousal emotion that’s not so negative. In fact, it’s quite positive— excitement. Brooks predicted that we may not be able to extinguish arousal, but we should be able to change the way we interpret it. So rather than fruitlessly trying to change the arousal level of our emotional states from high to low, what if we try to change them from negative to positive? From anxiety to excitement?”

That’s from a chapter on “Rocking the Boat and Keeping It Steady” in which, among other things, Adam talks about anger.

Anger can be a powerful catalyst but it needs to be used wisely. And, research shows us that venting is most definitely *not* the wisest path.

(Re-cap: In a study, people received super negative feedback from a critic. Then they were split into three groups: One hit a punching bag imagining hitting the critic (venting group); the other just hit the bag; the third just sat quietly. The venting group became MORE aggressive.)

The better choice?

“To channel anger productively, instead of venting about the harm that a perpetrator has done, we need to reflect on the victims who have suffered from it. … Focusing on the victim activates what psychologists call empathetic anger—the desire to right wrongs done unto another. It turns on the go system, but it makes us thoughtful about how to best respect the victim’s dignity. Research demonstrates when we’re angry at others, we aim for retaliation or revenge. But when we’re angry for others, we seek out justice and a better system. We don’t just want to punish; we want to help.”

Feeling anger?

See if you can tap into the grounded, thoughtful power of empathetic anger by focusing on who you can be angry FOR rather than who you are angry at.

Reminds me of a couple things.

First, in our interview on The Upside of Stress, Kelly McGonigal made the important point that if you want to find out how much meaning someone has in their lives, one of the best ways is to find out how much STRESS they have. We have a naive idea that stress-free is good, but, of course, if we truly want a life of deep purpose and meaning, we need to embrace and lean into the challenges.

Second, Malcolm Gladwell shares brilliant wisdom on “desirable difficulties” in David and Goliath (see Notes). He tells us that, although not everyone will overcome tough beginnings, those who can are often WAY stronger as a direct result. We want to turn those challenges into fuel for growth. We always have the opportunity to do so.

Finally: As one of the world’s leaders of revolutionaries Srjda Popovic (who, we learn, was one of the masterminds behind the Otpor! youth nonviolence movement that overthrew Milosovic) tells us: “Proper revolutions are not cataclysmic explosions. They are long, controlled burns.”

PERFECT wisdom for our optimizing and actualizing.

Sure, the huge cataclysmic “awakenings” on the journey are nice. But that’s not the foundation of a proper personal revolution. We want to create a long, controlled burn in our lives as we overthrow our internal tyrant(s) and make a difference in the world.

On that note, how’s your controlled burn doing and how can you add a little fuel to the fire?

Specifically, what’s ONE thing you know you could be doing that you’re not currently doing? Now a good time to add that fuel to our fire?