The Social Animal

by David Brooks

  For example, some students walk into a classroom with no innate respect for whatever teacher they may find there. When they get angry or frustrated, they’ll curse at the teacher, ignore him, humiliate him, or even punch or throw a chair at him. Other students, on the other hand, do walk into the room with an innate respect for the teacher. They know, without thinking about it, that they are supposed to defer to him—that there are certain ways you act in front of a teacher and certain ways you don’t. They may get angry or annoyed, but they will express those feelings out of class. It would never occur to them to scream, curse, or throw a chair at a teacher. If someone were to do it in their presence, they’d gasp with shock and horror.

  Where did that innate respect come from? How did it come to be that the mere act of seeing the teacher triggered certain parameters in their minds? The answers are lost in Gloomy Prospect. The answers are lost in the midnight river of the unconscious. But somehow, over the course of their lives, they have had certain experiences. Maybe they came to respect the authority of their parents and now extend that mental frame to authority figures in general. Maybe they have absorbed certain stories in which they observed people treating teachers in a certain way. Maybe they have absorbed certain small habits and norms about classroom behavior that put a leash on the sort of behavior they consider unacceptable there. Out of these myriad influences, a certain pattern of perception has emerged, a certain way of seeing. Having learned to see a teacher in a certain way, they would never even consider punching one in the face, except in the realm of faraway fantasy, which they know they will never enact.

  Similarly, upright people learn to see other people’s property in a way that reduces the temptation to steal. They learn to see a gun in a way that reduces their temptation to misuse it. They learn to see young girls in a way that reduces the temptation to abuse them. They learn to see the truth in a way that reduces the temptation to lie.

  This learning-to-see model emphasizes that it is not one crucial moment that shapes a character. Character emerges gradually out of the mysterious interplay of a million little good influences. This model emphasizes the power of community to shape character. It’s very hard to build self-control alone (and if you’re in a community of obese people, it’s very hard to stay thin alone). It also emphasizes the power of small and repetitive action to rewire the fundamental mechanisms of the brain. Small habits and proper etiquette reinforce certain positive ways of seeing the world. Good behavior strengthens certain networks. Aristotle was right when he observed, “We acquire virtues by first having put them into action.” The folks at Alcoholics Anonymous put the sentiment more practically, with their slogan “Fake it until you make it.” Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia puts it more scientifically: “One of the most enduring lessons of social psychology is that behavior change often precedes changes in attitude and feelings.”

  Rematch

  People looked at Erica strangely in the days and weeks after the explosion. Erica looked at herself strangely. But months passed. Life at the Academy meant following a thousand small rules. Don’t start eating until everybody at the cafeteria table is seated. Always put your paper napkin on your lap first. Always stand up when a teacher enters the room. Never chew gum when you are in uniform, even if you’re just walking home. It’s not how Academy students conduct themselves.

  These thousand little rules became second nature to Erica, as to almost all the students. She found her diction changing, especially when she addressed strangers. She found her posture evolving, so that she adopted an almost military bearing.

  These little routines were almost always about self-discipline in one way or another. They were about delaying gratification or exercising some small act of self-control. She didn’t really think about them this way. The rules were just the normal structure of life for a student such as herself. But they had a pervasive effect on how she lived at school, eventually at home, and even on the tennis court.

  By junior year, Erica wasn’t quite so obsessed with tennis, but she had developed a way of mentally preparing for each match. She was using what you might call the Doctrine of Indirect Self-Control. She was manipulating small things in order to trigger the right responses about the big things.

  She’d sit on the bench before a match and play in her head the voices of airplane pilots she had heard, mostly in the movies. They always had such a deliberately calm manner as they came over the intercom. It put her in the right frame of mind. Then she would go through certain tricks and habits, match after match: Always lay your water bottles in the same spot near the net. Always put your racket cover under your chair with the same side facing up. Always wear the same mismatched sweatbands on your wrist. Always step over the lines on the way onto the court. Always draw a line with the right sneaker at the spot from which you will do your serving. Always think about serving five aces in a row. If you don’t actually feel you’re going to serve aces, just pretend. If your body impersonates an attitude long enough, then the mind begins to adopt it.

  Once on the court, Erica had strict rules for herself. There were two locales in her universe: on the court and off the court. Off the court is for thinking about the past and future; on the court is for thinking about the present. When Erica was about to serve, she thought about three things: spin, location, and velocity. If she found herself thinking about something else, she would step back, bounce the ball a few times, and then resume.

  Erica would not allow herself to have a conception of her opponent. She would not allow herself to think about line calls. Her performance would be judged by how the ball left her racquet, and nothing else was within her control. Her own personality was not at the center. Her talent wasn’t at the center. Her ego and self-worth were not at the center. The task was at the center.

  By putting the task at the center, Erica could quiet the conscious self. She could direct her attention away from her own qualities—her expectations, her nerve, her reputation—and she could lose herself in the game. She could prevent herself from thinking too much, which is death to peak performance. She could merge with the patterns of the craft. She could fall back on the many hours of practice when she had done the same thing over and over and laid down certain models in her mind. And when she did this, her self-control was just outstanding, and nothing could ruffle her.

  When playing a game like tennis or baseball or soccer, athletes’ brains are engaged in complicated cycles of perception, reperception, and correction. Research by Claudio Del Percio of Sapienza University in Rome has found that, while engaging in difficult tasks, star athletes’ brains are actually quieter than nonathletes’ brains. They have prepared their minds to perform these sorts of tasks so it takes much less mental labor to excel. They also see what is happening much more clearly. Salvatore Aglioti, also of Sapienza, assembled a group of basketball and nonbasketball players to watch movies of free throws. The movies stopped just after the ball was released from the hand, and the athletes had to guess if the ball went in the basket. The basketball players were much better at this. They did it by activating the parts of their brains that control hand and muscle motion. They reenacted the free throw and felt it as if they themselves were performing the task. In short, expert players experience sports differently than nonexperts.

  Ninety-five percent of the time Erica’s regimen worked. She worried less her junior year, and she played better. There were occasions, though, when her composure slipped. She felt the demon of her anger slipping the chain and about to go off on a romp.

  She had a ritual for this, too. She would think about her anger and she would say to herself, “That is not who I am. That is an experience that is happening within me.” She imagined a grassy field. On one side was the angry dog of her anger. But on the other was the tennis player who had won her last five matches. She would imagine herself wandering away from the dog and over to the tennis player.

  She was trying to establish the right distance between herself and the world. Sh
e was practicing the form of self-monitoring that Daniel J. Siegel calls “mindsight.” She was reminding herself that she had a say in triggering which inner self would dominate her behavior. All she had to do was focus her attention on one internal character rather than another. This wasn’t easy. Sometimes the act of focusing attention required an immense display of mental force. But it was doable. William James was among the first to understand the stakes involved in these sorts of decisions: “[T]he whole drama of voluntary life hinges on the amount of attention, slightly more or slightly less, which rival motor ideas might receive.… Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of the will.” Those who have habits and strategies to control their attention can control their lives.

  As Erica aged, she got better at shifting attention from one impulse to another, and triggering different models in her head. The orchid seemed more likely to bloom.

  Inspiration

  After a few years in the Academy, she was different. The downside was that she was now somewhat estranged from her old neighborhood friends and even from her parents. They thought she’d entered a cult. The good news was that she had discovered how to work.

  One day, a middle-aged Hispanic woman visited the Academy. This woman had started a restaurant company and now owned a chain of restaurants spread around the country. She was thin, well dressed in a conservative business suit, and extremely calm. Erica was transfixed. She could imagine a path between the current life she was leading now, and the sort of elevated life the woman was leading. After all, that woman had traveled that path.

  Erica was suddenly consumed by a burning desire to be a business leader. In a short time, she went from a normal hardworking Academy student to a member of the club of the extremely ambitious. She bought an organizer book and portioned her day into color-coded blocs. She gradually changed her wardrobe. Her clothing was so prim, precise, and neat, she began to look like a ghetto Doris Day. She somehow got hold of a used desk set, and divided her assignments into an inbox and an outbox. It was as though her entire being had been suddenly occupied by the ethos of Switzerland. She was meticulous, disciplined, and ready to rise. Something had lit the furnace of the little engine of ambition, which from this day forth would know no rest.

  CHAPTER 9

  CULTURE

  RESEARCHERS HAVE SPENT MANY YEARS EXPLORING THE jungles of the human mind in search of the source of ambition. They’ve found some traits that highly driven people tend to share, and Erica had many of them.

  Ultra-driven people are often plagued by a deep sense of existential danger. Historians have long noticed that an astonishing percentage of the greatest writers, musicians, artists, and leaders had a parent die or abandon them while they were between the ages of nine and fifteen: The list includes Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Lincoln, Hitler, Gandhi, and Stalin, just to name a few. Erica hadn’t lost a parent. But her mother disappeared psychologically from time to time, and her father did physically. Like so many other ambitious people, she was haunted by the knowledge that life is precarious. Unless she scrambled to secure some spot in the world, everything could be destroyed by a sudden blow.

  Highly ambitious people often have met someone like themselves who achieved great success. It could be a person from their town, from their ethnic background, or with some other connection, who showed the way and fired their sense of possibility.

  It’s amazing how little it takes to spark the imitation instinct. A few years ago, two researchers, Geoff Cohen and Greg Walton, gave Yale students a short biography of a man named Nathan Jackson, who had become a successful mathematician. But they altered one key detail in some of the biographies. In half the cases, the researchers made sure Jackson’s birthday matched that of the student who was reading the bio. Then Cohen and Walton gave all the students some math problems to solve. The students who had read the essays with the matching birthdays worked on the problems 65 percent longer than the students without the matching birthdays. These students felt a sudden sense of kinship with Jackson, and were motivated to imitate his success.

  Highly ambitious people often possess some early talent that gave them some sense of distinction. It didn’t have to be a huge talent. Maybe they were among the better speakers in their fifth-grade class. Maybe they were among the best mathematicians in their small town. But it was enough so that the achievement became a kernel of their identity.

  Ambitious people often have a vision of an elevated circle they might join. There’s a common prejudice that ambitious people are driven to surpass their fellows, to be better than everybody else. In fact, most ambitious people are driven to achieve membership in some exclusive group or club.

  Erica had met the Hispanic restaurant owner at the Academy, and that encounter opened up a conviction that anything was possible for her. She would go to the newsstand and buy copies of Fast Company, Wired, and Bloomberg Businessweek. She imagined herself working at a small new company, part of a band of brothers working together for a common cause. She’d clip ads from other magazines showing people at parties in Manhattan, or gathering at a home in Santa Monica or Saint-Tropez. She’d tape them to the walls around her room. They became the shimmering subjects of her longing, the places she would someday belong.

  Erica’s teachers praised her for being a hard worker, for being efficient and meticulous. She began to think of herself as a person who could get things done.

  In 1997 Gary McPherson studied 157 randomly selected children as they picked out and learned a musical instrument. Some went on to become fine musicians and some faltered. McPherson searched for the traits that separated those who progressed from those who did not. IQ was not a good predictor. Neither were aural sensitivity, math skills, income, or a sense of rhythm. The best single predictor was a question McPherson had asked the students before they had even selected their instruments: How long do you think you will play? The students who planned to play for a short time did not become very proficient. The children who planned to play for a few years had modest success. But there were some children who said, in effect: “I want to be a musician. I’m going to play my whole life.” Those children soared. The sense of identity that children brought to the first lesson was the spark that would set off all the improvement that would subsequently happen. It was a vision of their future self.

  Work

  Some people live in romantic ages. They tend to believe that genius is the product of a divine spark. They believe that there have been, throughout the ages, certain paragons of greatness—Dante, Mozart, Einstein—whose talents far exceeded normal comprehension, who had an otherworldly access to transcendent truth, and who are best approached with reverential awe.

  We, of course, live in a scientific age. Vast amounts of research have now been conducted on early achievement, and collected in volumes like the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. The prevailing view is that geniuses are largely built, not born. In the flinty and overly prosaic view that is now dominant, even Mozart’s early abilities were not the product of some supernatural gift. His early compositions were not acts of genius, researchers argue. Mozart was a very good musician at an early age, but he would not stand out among today’s top child performers.

  What Mozart had, it’s maintained, was the same thing many extraordinarily precocious performers have—a lot of innate ability, the ability to focus for long periods of time, and an adult intent on improving one’s skills. Mozart played a lot of piano at a very young age, so he got his ten thousand hours of practice in early, and then he built from there.

  The latest research suggests a prosaic, democratic, even puritanical view of how fantastic success is achieved. The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. Instead, what really matters is the ability to get better and better gradually over time. As K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University has demonstrated, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously honing their craft. As Ericsso
n has noted, top performers devote five times more hours to become great than the average performers devote to become competent.

  John Hayes of Carnegie Mellon studied five hundred masterworks of classical music. Only three of them were published within the first ten years of the composer’s career. For all the rest, it took a decade of solid, steady work before they could create something magnificent. The same general rule applies to Einstein, Picasso, T. S. Eliot, Freud, and Martha Graham.

  It’s not just the hours, it’s the kind of work done in those hours. Mediocre performers practice in the most pleasant way possible. Great achievers practice in the most deliberate and self-critical way. Often they break their craft down to its smallest constituent parts, and then they work on one tiny piece of the activity over and over again. At the Meadowmount music camp, students spend three hours covering one page of music. They play the music five times more slowly than normal. If somebody nearby can hear the music and recognize the tune, they are not playing slowly enough. At the Spartak Tennis Club, students have rallies without a ball. They simply work on pieces of their technique.

  Benjamin Franklin taught himself to write in the following manner: He would read an essay in The Spectator, the best-written magazine of his day. He would write notes on each sentence of the essay on a separate piece of paper. Then he would scramble the notes and return to them after a few weeks. Then he would try to organize the notes in the proper order and use them to recreate the original essay. This is how he taught himself structure. When he discovered that his vocabulary lagged behind the original Spectator authors, he switched to another technique. He would translate each essay, sentence by sentence, into poetry. Then a few weeks later he would try to reconvert the poetry back into prose.