The second major challenge came from my book The Rise of Superman, which examined the unprecedented progress made by action and adventure sports athletes over the past three decades. During this period, these athletes accomplished more impossible feats than almost any other group of people in history. Now the puzzling part: the athletes achieved these death-defying results by not following the ten-thousand-hour rule—or, for that matter, any of the rules normally associated with peak performance.6
Over the past fifty years, when scientists turn their attention to excellence and achievement, three factors have played an outsized role: mothers, musicians, and marshmallows. Essentially, these are the three traditional paths to mastery. Mothers reflects the nature and nurture side of this equation, the indisputable fact that both genetics and early childhood environment are crucial for learning and success.7 Musicians is a call back to the violinists Anders Ericsson studied in order to come up with his idea of “deliberate practice.” Finally, marshmallows is a reference to Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel’s fabled experiment in delayed gratification.8 Mischel found that children who could resist temptation in the present moment—that is, eating a marshmallow now—for the promise of a bigger reward—getting two marshmallows later—were far more successful in life. And this is true on a half-dozen different measures. More than grades, IQ scores, SAT scores, or just about anything else, the ability to delay gratification seems to be a consistent indicator of future achievement.
Yet, despite these findings, very few of the athletes in Rise had any of these advantages. Broken homes and bad childhoods were more the rule than the exception, meaning that neither nature nor nurture was on the job.
As far as ten thousand hours of deliberate practice goes, there wasn’t a whole lot of that, either. Sure, these athletes spent a considerable amount of time working on their craft, but almost none of that was spent on rote repetition. Most of the time, these athletes performed in living environments—the mountains, the oceans—where the terrain changes on a moment-by-moment basis, making, in many cases, the necessary repetition of deliberate practice not even possible. Plus, many of the athletes involved had abandoned professional sports careers because they hated doing the repetitive drills that underpin deliberate practice. In fact, the very terms they coined to describe themselves—free-skiers, free-surfers, free-riders—were an expression of this rejection.
Finally, the question of delayed gratification was almost ridiculous. Action sports are all about instant gratification. These athletes are hedonistic devotees of “chasing the stoke” and an entire dictionary of similar terms. They are folks who absolutely would have eaten Mischel’s marshmallow. Yet, somehow, despite not following any of the traditional rules for excellence, they still managed to rewrite the rulebook on human possibility.
The third and final challenge to the ten-thousand-hour rule was mounted by author David Epstein in his fantastic book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Essentially, Range is a well-constructed argument against the cult of specialization.
In Epstein’s research, when he studied peak performers, rather than a decade of deliberate practice in a single domain, he found the opposite. Instead of picking one subject and sticking to it, the data shows that most top performers start their careers with a wide “sampling period.” This is a time of discovery, where they’re testing out all kinds of new activities, bouncing from this to that and back again, and often without much rhyme or reason. So forget about early specialization and ten thousand hours to mastery; what Epstein’s research showed was that the fastest way to the top was to zigzag.
So what’s going on? Is ten thousand hours the rule or the exception? Do we actually need these decades of deliberate practice? Or might there be an easier way? Or a shorter path?
The answer is yes and no and a whole lot more.
MATCH QUALITY
It helps to start with Epstein’s discovery: the zigzag path to peak performance. Why is the fastest route the most circuitous? It comes down to “match quality,” which is the term economists use to describe a very tight fit among skills, interests, and the work that you do. When Shane McConkey says, “I love what I do,” that’s an expression of match quality.
Peak performers, the research shows, tend to start out their careers with a wide sampling period because they’re hunting for that perfect match fit. From the outside, this period looks like the exact opposite of early specialization. Mostly, it appears to be dillydallying. Wow, dinosaurs are the coolest thing in the universe. Wow, comic books are better than dinosaurs. Double wow, tennis is even better than comic books. But once peak performers get that fit right—that is, learn to love what they do—the result is a serious turbo-boost.
In dozens of studies, match quality is directly correlated with higher learning rates, which makes it one of the better predictors of sustained peak performance. Or, as Epstein says: “When you get fit, it looks like grit.”9 And the combination of accelerated learning and enhanced grit works like compound interest, which is also why—as a predictor of long-term success—match fit turns out to be a far better indicator than early specialization.
In education, for example, early specialization programs such as Head Start produce a significant “fadeout effect,” where the kids grow bored and end up quitting the activity altogether, giving them a head start to exactly nowhere.10 In business, we see something similar and then some. Income-wise, while early specializers get out to an early lead, it doesn’t last. After about six years in the workforce, those who began their careers with wider sampling periods tend to catch those early specializers, then leave them in the dust. And because they lack match quality, early career specializers tend to burn out and change fields. In fact, if your interest is the executive branch, rather than specialized training in a single job, the number of different jobs done in a given field remains one of best predictors of CEO success.11
And it’s for all these reasons that “match quality” has been baked into this book. The passion exercise is simply a long sampling period that emphasizes learning through doing. And, if your interest is match quality, the “doing” is key. Trial and error are the fast track to self-knowledge. We learn what we like and what we’re good at through hands-on experimentation. The research consistently shows that we cannot predict our likes or our strengths in advance. “Act first, think second,” is what the science says. This is also why, in the last section, to identify our strengths, we trusted our history rather than leaning on any of the leading diagnostics. Life, it seems, is best revealed in the living.
From a big-picture perspective, match quality is a sign that our five foundational intrinsic motivators—curiosity, passion, purpose, mastery, autonomy—are properly stacked. Aligned motivators significantly heighten attention, which is always the foundation of learning.
It comes down to energy.
When we attend, we’re making a choice about how to spend our energy. We’re shifting limited neuronal resources toward a single source, filtering out the world in service of a question. Attention is an inquiry: Are you important? If that answer is yes, if the thing you’re paying attention to is worth the energy, the automatic result is learning. This is how the system works, and with match quality, we’re getting the system to work for us.
MORE FLOW
If you really want to understand how those early-action sports athletes achieved more impossible feats than almost any other group of people in history, while that answer might start with match quality, it most definitely ends with flow.
And the reason should already be familiar: neurochemistry.
If you want to accelerate progress down the path to mastery, you need to learn to amplify learning and memory. A quick shorthand for how these processes work in the brain: the more neurochemicals that show up during an experience, the better chance that experience moves from short-term holding into long-term storage. That’s another job performed by neurochemicals—they tag experiences as: “Important, save
for later.”
In flow, four or five or maybe six of the most potent neurochemicals the brain can produce flood into our system. That’s a lot of “Important, save for later.” The result is a significant spike in learning and memory. In experiments run by researchers at Advanced Brain Monitoring in conjunction with the US Department of Defense, novice marksmen and -women were shifted into flow, then trained up to the expert level. They did this with handgun shooters, rifle shooters, and archers. In each case, it took 50 percent less time than normal for students to become experts.12 So those fabled ten thousand hours to mastery? What the research shows is that flow can cut that in half.
This explains how the action and adventure sports athletes in Rise pushed the limits of human performance so fast and so far. They did what they loved to do—a perfect match fit—and they did it in a way that generated a ton of flow. The flow state and its impact on learning were what allowed these athletes to shortcut the path to mastery. It’s a virtuous cycle and yet another reason why the road to impossible is shorter than many believe.
When flow is the reward, learning shifts from something done consciously, with energy and effort, to something done automatically, out of habit and joy. It’s the habit of ferocity applied to learning. If we can automate this whole instinct, from the first spark of curiosity that ignites the adventure through the rush of mastery that is its never-ending conclusion, then we’re constantly feeding our passion and purpose. This is what allows us to play the infinite game. If you keep learning, you keep playing. And if you keep playing for years on end, one day you might notice that the stakes involved not only exceed your expectations, they exceed your imagination—which is, after all, one reason they call it the “infinite game.”
Part III
Creativity
I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.
—SALVADOR DALÍ1
15
The Creative Advantage
If your interest is high achievement, creativity matters—that’s the place to start.
Back in 2002, the Partnership for 21st Century Learning, a nonprofit educational coalition that included everyone from executives at Apple, Cisco, and Microsoft to experts from the National Education Association and the US Department of Education was charged with determining which skills our children need to thrive in the twenty-first century. The old answer, of course, was the three Rs—reading, writing, and arithmetic.1 The new answer? The four Cs: creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and cooperation.
We see similar results in business. Back in 2010, researchers at IBM decided they wanted a better understanding of the skills required to run a company. To get their answer, they asked over fifteen hundred corporate leaders in sixty different countries and thirty-three different industries about the quality most important in a CEO.2 Once again, creativity came in first.
Perhaps the best data comes from Adobe’s State of Create, a 2016 comprehensive survey of over five thousand adults in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, and France.3 Instead of focusing on a single industry, Adobe asked a more general question: How critical is creativity to society?
Pretty damn critical is what they discovered.
Across the boards, Adobe found that creatives are significantly more fulfilled, motivated, and successful than noncreatives. On average, they outearn noncreatives by 13 percent. Companies that invest in creativity, meanwhile, surpass their rivals in revenue growth, market share, competitive leadership, and customer satisfaction—that is, nearly every critical category. And when it comes to quality of life, creatives report being a staggering 34 percent happier than noncreatives. Among many other things, this should definitely make us rethink how we deal with depression.
Finally, when it comes to stalking the impossible, creativity plays an even more important role. When chasing down big dreams, there’s rarely a straight line between where we are now and where we want to go. The fact is, the bigger the dream, the less visible the path. Which is to say, in the infinite game of peak performance, motivation gets you into the game, learning allows you continue to play, but creativity is how you steer.
Which bring us to our next question: What the hell is creativity?
CREATIVITY DECODED: PART ONE
Scientists have been trying to answer this question for quite some time, mainly because it took quite some time for scientists to realize it was even a question. Many ancient cultures, including the Greeks, Indians, and Chinese, lacked a word for this particular skill. They thought of creativity as “discovery,” because ideas came from the gods and were merely “discovered” by mortals.4
This shifted during the Renaissance, when insights bestowed by the divine became ideas kindled in the minds of great people. During the eighteenth century, we put a name around this “kindling of ideas,” developing the concept of imagination or “the process of bringing to mind things without any input from our senses.” Then, at the turn of the twentieth century, French polymath Henri Poincaré expanded that concept into a process.
Fascinated by how his mind solved difficult mathematical problems, Poincaré realized that insights didn’t arrive out of nowhere. Rather, they followed a reliable five-stage cycle.5 A few years later, Graham Wallas, a professor at the London School of Economics, took a harder look at Poincaré’s cycle. He decided that two of the stages could be condensed into one, and he published the results in his classic book The Art of Thought.6
The cycle, according to Wallas and Poincaré, begins with a period of preparation. Here, a problem is identified and the mind starts to explore its dimensions. This leads to the second stage, incubation, where the problem gets passed from the conscious mind to the unconscious mind, and the pattern recognition system begins to chew on the problem. The third step is illumination, where an idea bursts back into consciousness, often through the experience we call “insight.” The cycle closes with a period of verification, where this new idea is consciously reviewed, tested, and applied to real-world problems.
In 1927, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead gave this cycle a name—“Creativity”7—which became a household word in 1948 when advertising executive Alex Osborn published his national bestseller, Your Creative Power.8 The scientific sea change began two years later, when psychologist J. P. Guilford delivered his presidential address to the American Psychological Association and pointed out that researchers had completely ignored an idea—creativity—that was now, thanks to Osborn, widespread in culture.9
He then set out to change that fact.
Prior to this work, Guilford had helped pioneer the field of intelligence testing (IQ). Along the way, he’d noticed that certain people—creatives—often scored lower on IQ tests, not because they couldn’t solve the problems on his tests but rather because their approach to those problems generated multiple solutions.
Guilford coined a term for this process: “divergent thinking.” It’s an anti-systematic approach to problem-solving, open-ended, definitely not logical, and this was the issue. IQ tests had been designed to measure its opposite, convergent thinking, where we converge on an idea, proceeding by logical steps, narrowing our possibilities as we go. Yet Guilford also realized that divergent thinking wasn’t entirely freewheeling. It had four core characteristics:
Fluency: the ability to produce a great number of ideas in a short time frame.
Flexibility: the ability to approach a problem from multiple angles.
Originality: the ability to produce novel ideas.
Elaboration: the ability to organize those ideas and execute on them.10
These characteristics were a major breakthrough. They made creativity—an idea so weird that the ancient Greeks didn’t even have a word for it—into a quality that was measurable. You could put people into a lab and give them problems to solve and count how many ideas they produced. You could compare and contrast their answers, seeing which notions showed up all over the place and which were shockingly original. This work gave us both a measurement tool and th
e rudiments of what has since become the accepted definition of creativity: “the process of developing original ideas that have value.”
More progress on this process arose in the 1960s. Research into split-brain patients—people whose corpus callosum had been severed in an attempt to treat severe epilepsy—revealed functional differences in the hemispheres. Language and logic seemed to live on the left; the right was symbolic and spatial.11 It was the final piece in the puzzle. We had our answer: creativity is a process. Poincaré’s four-stage cycle, which relies on Guilford’s four characteristics of divergent thinking, are, in turn, capacities housed on the right side of the brain.
Creativity decoded, at least for a while.
Unfortunately, as we have since discovered, almost no part of this story is true. Or not exactly. And this leaves us in a peculiar place. The research tells us that creativity is foundational to high achievement and high performance, yet the research can’t tell us what creativity actually is.
Which is about the time the neuroscientists showed up at our party.
CREATIVITY DECODED: PART TWO
One thing neuroscientists have learned since: creativity isn’t one thing. This is why those old myths no longer hold.
Poincaré’s cycle of creativity, for instance, is often the way things work, but not always. Sometimes you skip steps; frequently you compress timescales. Meanwhile, Guilford’s four characteristics of divergent thinking have held up, but they’ve been endlessly subdivided, relabeled, and reorganized. And the idea that the right brain is creative and the left logical doesn’t come close. It takes the whole brain to be creative and there’s zero data showing that you can’t be creatively logical or logically creative.12
The Art of Impossible Page 14
