Psyched Up

by Daniel McGinn

  “Actors are like athletes, and they need the same rigor and care that Usain Bolt might take before running one hundred meters. They need their own runway into a performance,” he says. “In my experience the really committed and interesting actors are really quite thorough about what their warm-up is before a performance.” And while many actors are inclined to engage in individual pre-performance routines, Rickson often encourages them to create new rituals that take place in groups. “Different plays demand different runways, and I like to customize it to the show and the particular actors,” he says.

  Like Donnelly, some actors are resistant at first. Lately yoga and customized music playlists on iPhones have become the prevailing backstage norm. “The etiquette is that the hour before the performance is the actor’s time. An actor is allowed to say ‘I want to do my own thing,’” Rickson says. “But I quite like to be involved, and I’m keen on creating some sort of ritual that is connective, that creates trust among people.”

  While Rickson is known for investing unusual energy and creativity to create group-oriented preshow routines, backstage rituals are a part of life on Broadway. Some of them are purely superstitious and focused on creating or preserving good luck. Cast and crew know never to whistle anywhere near the stage or to mention the play Macbeth (always refer to it vaguely as “the Scottish play”); both actions are thought to bring bad luck.

  The most elaborate preshow ritual, dating from the 1950s, involves a garment called the Gypsy Robe. On the opening night of a new Broadway musical, the entire cast and crew assemble onstage, and a veteran dancer from the most recent musical to open arrives with a pieced together, quiltlike robe, to which every Broadway musical has sewn its own small piece of fabric. After recounting the history of the robe, the representative from the prior Broadway play places it on the shoulders of the most senior chorus member of tonight’s show. While wearing the robe, the new gypsy circles the cast counterclockwise three times, touching each person on each pass. Then, after the assemblage breaks up, the gypsy takes the robe to each performer’s dressing room for a brief visit.

  Other rituals are a function of the grueling and sometimes monotonous grind of the eight-times-a-week performing schedule. “Certainly on long-running Broadway shows, the rituals are a curb-to-curb experience,” says Michael Passaro, who’s worked as a stage manager for more than thirty years. “Walking through the stage door, picking up their dressing room key, signing in at the call board, and getting into the routine, anything they can do to help focus them prior to the show, the better they’re going to be,” he says.

  During the 2013 production of Nora Ephron’s Lucky Guy, starring Tom Hanks in his Broadway debut, Hanks led the cast in what the New York Times described as a “small riot” a half hour before each show. The cast played kazoos, harmonicas, and duck whistles as a helium balloon was released; when it hit the skylight, the noise instantly stopped. As curtain time approached, the cast acted out silly walks and recited vulgar chants together. At the same time each night, Hanks would blast the Linda Ronstadt song “You’re No Good.” Hanks told the newspaper, “It’s the next one of the 57 things that have to happen before every show.”

  Reflecting back on the warm-up routine he created for The River, Rickson asks the key question when it comes to pre-performance rituals: “Do these things make a difference?” He answers: “From a director’s point of view, they do. Like great sports players or great public speakers, when you engage the footballer or the poet or the musician, or in this case the actors, in a dynamic way of absolutely being in the present and connected to their fellow players, something really special happens.”

  Critics agreed. Reviewing The River, the New York Times’s Ben Brantley said Jackman “ascends with assurance to a new level as a stage actor,” that Rickson directs “with care and polish,” and that the play “is guaranteed to hold your attention.”

  7.

  One of my favorite research studies about superstition was done by a team led by Sally Linkenauger. The researchers assembled forty-one right-handed golfers of equal ability who were asked to attempt ten putts from a distance of two meters on an artificial green. As in most of the experiments described in this chapter, the golfers were divided into two groups. As the researcher handed over the expensive putter each would use to attempt the shots, half the subjects were told that the club had previously been owned by Ben Curtis, a well-known PGA player, while the others weren’t told anything about the club’s provenance. (The researchers were lying—Curtis never owned the club.) Before putting, each golfer was asked to estimate the size of the golf hole by drawing it, and then attempt the ten putts.

  The results showed that the golfers who thought they were using a PGA player’s club estimated the hole was 9 percent larger (suggesting the shot looked easier), and they sank 32 percent more putts than the control group.

  After reading the study, I interviewed Linkenauger for a section of Harvard Business Review called “Defend Your Research,” in which we conduct slightly skeptical Q&As with academics whose research seems to defy common sense. The headline on the piece read: “YOU’LL GOLF BETTER IF YOU THINK TIGER HAS USED YOUR CLUBS.”

  In the interview, Linkenauger attributed the results to “positive contagion.” “This is part of the reason people value autographs. The fact that a famous person has touched and signed the paper makes it feel very intimate, as if the person has given you a piece of themselves,” she said. It’s old news that celebrity artifacts are valuable, but this was the first study to suggest that a celebrity’s essence on a tool might actually help enhance someone’s performance.

  I asked a simple follow-up question: “If I wrote an article using Malcolm Gladwell’s laptop, would it be perceptibly better?”

  Linkenauger says her team had debated similar questions, such as whether using a pen owned by Einstein might help someone score better on a math exam. Their research suggested that it might, perhaps because the famous person’s tool helps prime a person to emulate the celebrated person’s success. She concluded, “If it makes you more confident and motivated, it will help you perform better.”

  As I geared up to write this book, I kept returning to this question: Would it turn out better if I wrote it on Malcolm Gladwell’s laptop?

  Years ago, before he became a literary celebrity, Gladwell and I had worked as reporters at different publications located in the same Manhattan office tower. We’d met a few times: His office had a Bloomberg terminal and mine didn’t, so I used to drop by to use it.

  So I e-mailed Gladwell, reintroduced myself, and made an offer: If I sent him a brand-new keyboard, would he write on it for three months and then return to me? I explained that I hoped to write my book on a keyboard he’d used, to test if positive contagion really makes a difference.

  He replied a few hours later: “Ha. That’s hilarious.” He specified that he’d need a Mac keyboard, and gave me his address.

  The next day I shipped him a new white Apple keyboard, along with some Sharpies and a note encouraging him to sign, decorate, or otherwise mark the keyboard to indicate he’d used it. A couple of months later, I checked in. “Yes! I’ve been using it!” he replied. “Just give me a reminder when you need it back.” I told him to keep it another month or so. A month later, eager to start writing, I asked him to ship it back. No reply. I asked again. No reply. And again.

  Days passed. I began to worry that Gladwell had been scamming me. Maybe he just wanted a free keyboard, and had never really planned on returning it.

  A week later, I see his name in my in-box. “So sorry I haven’t been in touch! I’ve been traveling for three weeks and went on e-mail hiatus. I’m back on Tuesday and will send the keyboard asap. I have been using it—and hope I have transferred some magic powers!”

  The keyboard arrived a few days later. Gladwell hadn’t signed or marked it with the Sharpies, so aside from the e-mail trail, there’s no evidence he�
��d actually used it. One colleague who watched me open the package offered unhelpful commentary: “You think he was writing his next book on it, but what if he just used it for stupid things like Facebook?”

  Over the coming months, I carried the Apple keyboard around, using it only when working on this book. To be honest, it was a pain. At work I ordinarily use a special ergonomic keyboard to protect against repetitive stress injuries; by comparison, Gladwell’s standard keyboard felt unfamiliar and uncomfortable. All the transport took its toll: After just a few months, one of the keys fell off.

  Still, I did get a small thrill knowing my fingers were striking the same keys as the fingers that had written Outliers and The Tipping Point. Did it increase my confidence by some small percentage? Yes! The book certainly didn’t write itself, and to preempt the too-easy line before any critic uses it: Yes, I know, I’m definitely no Malcolm Gladwell.

  But as I sat there typing away on Gladwell’s keyboard, I couldn’t help but think of the moments when he must have struggled to find the right words but persevered. Decades after I lost my lucky Cross exam pen, I’m happy to have a lucky keyboard to rely on for a little boost. It may be a little weird, but for me, it works.

  Chapter Three

  DON’T JUST WIN ONE FOR THE GIPPER

  IS AN EMOTIONAL PEP TALK ALWAYS MOST EFFECTIVE?

  In 2005, a friend invited Erica Galos Alioto to the launch party for an Internet start-up called Yelp. She needed a night out. A graduate of Berkeley Law, Alioto worked at a large corporate law firm, and it was mind-numbing. “You can make it through the day,” she’d tell herself every morning, psyching herself up for a job she couldn’t stand.

  Yelp had just launched a Web site where consumers could post reviews of businesses. Alioto loved the party, and afterward she began writing Yelp reviews herself. She wrote so many she soon began earning invites to parties for “elite” reviewers. The more she used Yelp, the more she liked it.

  In late 2005 she called Yelp and asked if they needed legal help. The company wasn’t yet big enough to need an in-house lawyer, but they did need a salesperson. Was she interested?

  Alioto became one of Yelp’s first fifteen employees.

  She learned to sell by trial and error, calling up local businesses and urging them to pay for an ad on the Web site. Closing sales was a challenge, since almost no one she called had ever heard of Yelp.

  But Alioto, who is talkative and energetic, was good at her new job. Soon she was promoted to sales manager. Then she was promoted again. And again.

  Nearly ten years later, on the last Friday of August, Alioto awoke in a Manhattan hotel room. She put on a pair of impossibly shiny, sequined, look-at-me gold pants: a lucky outfit she only wears on LDOM, Yelp’s term for “Last Day of the Month.” After breakfast, she donned headphones, cranked up the song “Chop Suey!” by the band System of a Down, and headed to Yelp’s New York office.

  Alioto, thirty-nine, is Yelp’s senior vice president for local sales. Just before 9 A.M., she stands at the front of the auditorium. Looking on are 650 sales reps, mostly in their twenties, dressed in summer casual. They are just a portion of the 1,750 reps who report to Alioto, whose unit is responsible for more than 80 percent of Yelp’s new revenue.

  Taking the microphone, her goal is simple: to get these salespeople fired up to sell as many ads as possible today, before the accountants close the books on this month.

  Giving an energizing, motivating, confidence-building pep talk is a basic duty of a sales executive, one dramatized in movies like Glengarry Glen Ross and The Wolf of Wall Street. It’s a task Alioto has worked hard to perfect.

  “Wow, let me just say I’m impressed. I’m impressed first of all how big this group has gotten,” she begins. “I was here just a few months ago and it seems like you guys are multiplying at a crazy pace.” In fact, this office is adding ninety new salespeople every month.

  She extols the group for being the top-producing sales office at Yelp so far in August. She namechecks the office’s big producers.

  She speaks for twenty minutes. The heart of the talk is about setting specific goals for the day, and her explication of the formula she lays out: “Success Equals Mentality plus Attitude plus Talent.” Everyone in the room has the talent to succeed, she says. They couldn’t have made it through Yelp’s hiring gauntlet if they didn’t. So she suggests ways for them to shift into the right mentality and attitude. She tells stories. She asks questions. She instructs the audience to write down their goals for the day on a Post-it, and stick it on their computer.

  Then her volume rises as she urges the group to get energized for LDOM, a day when Yelpers typically close two to four times as many sales as they do on ordinary days.

  “LDOM is not about the day of the month. It’s how we approach that day,” she says. “There’s something about that day that makes us come in with a ridiculous amount of grit and determination—the ability to make the unthinkable happen. . . . All those people who’ve been telling us no all month long, we’re going to turn them around and get a yes.”

  Loud clapping.

  “This office is currently $1.5 million away from target this month. . . . Everything you do today, every action you take to make that successful outcome, every time you pitch, every business owner you talk to, every time you encourage a teammate to be better, every time you win the heart and mind of a business owner, it’s helping not only you, but it’s helping your team, it’s helping your office, it’s helping the organization. It helps Yelp get to where it wants to be.

  “We have an action plan here. All we need to do is go execute today.” She pauses. “Are you going to execute?” There’s moderate applause. She asks again, with a slightly annoyed edge: “Are we going to execute?” Big applause.

  The reps file back to their phones. Today each will call and ask seventy business owners to buy Yelp ads. Each time they succeed, they run to the front of the room and hit a big gong, as coworkers cheer.

  2.

  Most of the chapters in this book are about psyching yourself up. But there comes a moment in life when it’s not about us anymore: It’s about the people we’re leading. We can’t do it for them. We can teach, encourage, prod, and cajole, but the outcome is in their hands. In the final few moments, all we can offer is a pep talk.

  There is a lot of mythology around pep talks. They have been celebrated for decades in sports films and war movies. NFL and NBA coaches’ pregame speeches are now routinely broadcast live on TV. Executives must deliver rousing remarks at every product launch or at the end of a quarter.

  No one is really taught to give these talks. We learn them mostly by mimicry and intuition. Some people are naturally good at them, but many aren’t.

  That’s especially true in Silicon Valley, where many of the people leading companies are highly introverted young men who’ve spent most of their lives with their faces buried in computer screens.

  So for many years, uncharismatic tech executives have tried to solve that problem by placing a call to Coach Bill Campbell.

  Campbell was born and raised in Homestead, Pennsylvania, an old steel town. While playing high school football, Campbell remembers his coach diverting the team bus on their way to a game against their archrival, Mount Lebanon High School. Instead of going directly to the field, the bus toured the adjoining neighborhood of ritzy homes. “You see those Cadillacs?” the coach asked. “Your fathers make the steel that goes into those Cadillacs. Are you going to let those candy-asses beat you?” Campbell recalls walking off the bus so energized that he wanted to strangle somebody. “That was the kind of motivation they used—we were the poor kids from the steelworks, they were the rich kids on the hill, and I’ll be damned if we were going to get beat,” Campbell says. “Of all the pep talks I’ve had in my whole life, I’ll never forget him saying that.”

  After high school, Campbell attended Columbia, where he
captained the football team. After graduating, he became a football coach, eventually coaching Columbia’s team from 1974 to 1979. From there, Campbell moved into a job in advertising and eventually became vice president of sales at Apple, just as it was about to launch the Macintosh computer.

  Campbell had no technical or computer skills, but Apple already had plenty of people who did. Instead, he excelled at skills befitting a former football coach: He could identify and nurture talent, build teams, and get everyone to do their best work. Campbell went on to senior jobs at several companies, including Intuit, where he served as CEO. During more than thirty years in Silicon Valley, Campbell—whom everyone called Coach—became especially famous for mentoring young technology wunderkinds with limited people skills. A memorable Fortune profile called him “a profane cosmic mash-up of Oprah, Yoda, and Joe Paterno,” who has a “preternatural ability to fire people up about their work.” (Another nickname: “The Nerd Whisperer.”) Campbell became exceptionally close to Steve Jobs, whom he counseled during long walks around their Palo Alto neighborhood.

  During his career, Campbell rarely gave on-the-record interviews to reporters, and my conversation with him, not long before his death at age seventy-five in early 2016, was likely the final interview of his life. In our conversation, he described how he’d recently worked with a tech CEO who’s not a particularly motivational speaker. The company was going through a period of malaise and infighting. Campbell tried to coach him for a crucial companywide speech. At one point, the CEO gave up and asked Campbell to deliver the talk for him. “No—you’re the CEO, and they want to hear from you, from your f—— lips,” Campbell said.

  He told the young CEO to talk about why he started the company and to explain what he needs them to do, and why. “What they want is to hear your heartbeat—they want you to say what you believe in. They want to believe it’s you talking, that you didn’t read it from a f—— script. That it’s you. You don’t have to holler it—just say it.”