A Curious Mind

by Brian Grazer

  Imagine childhood, and reading, without Dr. Seuss.8

  I feel like we enter the world, newborn, and at that moment, the answer is “yes.” And it’s “yes” for a little while after that. The world is openhearted to us. But at some point, the world starts saying “no,” and the sooner you start practicing ways of getting around “no,” the better. I now think of myself as impervious to rejection.

  We’ve been talking about using curiosity when the world says “no.” But just as often, the “no” can come from inside your head, and curiosity can be the cure to that kind of “no” too.

  As I mentioned earlier, when I have a fear of something, I try to get curious about it—I try to set the fear aside long enough to start asking questions. The questions do two things: they distract me from the queasy feeling, and I learn something about what I’m worried about. Instinctively, I think, we all know that. But sometimes you need to remind yourself that the best way to dispel the fear is to face it, to be curious.

  I am a nervous public speaker. I give a good speech, but I don’t enjoy getting ready to give a speech, I don’t even necessarily enjoy giving the speech—what I enjoy is having given it. The fun part is talking to people about the speech after it’s done.

  For me, every time I do it is a test. Here’s how I keep the nervousness at bay:

  First, I don’t start preparing too far in advance, because for me, that just opens up the box of worry. If I start writing the speech two weeks in advance, then I just worry every day for two weeks.

  So I make sure I have enough time to prepare, and I start working on the talk a few days before I have to give it.

  I do the same thing I did with Grinch. I ask questions:

  What’s the talk supposed to be about?

  What’s the best possible version of the talk?

  What do the people coming to this event expect to hear?

  What do they want to hear, in general?

  What do they want to hear from me, specifically?

  And who is the audience?

  The answer to each of those questions helps me create a framework for what I’m supposed to talk about. And the answers immediately spark ideas, anecdotes, and points I want to make—which I keep track of.

  I’m always looking for stories to tell—stories that make the points I want to make. In terms of giving a speech, I’m looking for stories for two reasons. People like stories—they don’t want to be lectured, they want to be entertained. And I know the stories I’m telling—so even if I stumble or lose my way, well, it’s my story. I can’t actually forget what I’m trying to say. I won’t be thrown off stride.

  In the end, I write out the whole speech a day or two in advance. And I practice several times.

  Writing the speech gets it into my brain.

  Practicing also gets it into my brain—and practicing shows me the rough spots, or the spots where the point and the story don’t fit perfectly, or where I’m not sure I’m telling the joke exactly right. Practicing gives me a chance to edit—just like you edit a movie, or a magazine story, or a business presentation, or a book.

  I bring the full text of the speech with me, I set it on the podium, and then I stand next to the podium and talk. I don’t read the speech from the pages. I have the text in case I need it. But I don’t usually need it.

  Does curiosity require work?

  Of course it does.

  Even if you’re “naturally curious”—whatever that phrase means to you—asking questions, absorbing the answers, figuring out in what direction the answers point you, figuring out what other questions you need to ask, that’s all work.

  I do think of myself as naturally curious, but I’ve also exercised my curiosity in all kinds of situations, all day long, for almost sixty years. Sometimes you have to remember to use curiosity—you have to remind yourself to use it. If someone’s telling you “no,” that can easily throw you off stride. You can get so caught up in being rejected, in not getting something you’re working toward, that you forget to ask questions about what’s happening. Why am I being told no?

  If you have a fear of giving a speech, you can become so distracted or put off that you avoid it instead of plunging in. That prolongs the anxiety, and it doesn’t help the speech, it hurts it. The speech doesn’t write itself, and the way to manage being nervous about the speech is to work on it.

  I have found that using curiosity to get around the “no,” whether “no” is coming from someone else or from my own brain, has taught me some other valuable ways of confronting resistance, of getting things done.

  A great piece of advice came to me from my longtime friend Herbert A. Allen, the investment banker and creator of the remarkable media and technology conference he hosts every year in Sun Valley, Idaho (called simply the Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference).

  Many years ago, he told me: make the hardest call of the day first.

  The hardest call of the day might be someone you fear is going to give you bad news. The hardest call might be someone to whom you have to deliver bad news. The hardest call might be someone you want to see in person who might be avoiding you.

  And Allen was being metaphoric. The “hardest call” might be an email you have to send, it might be a conversation you need to have in person with someone in your own office.

  Whatever it is, the reason you think of it as the “hardest call of the day” is because there’s something scary about it. It’s going to be uncomfortable in some way—either in the encounter itself, or in the outcome of the encounter. But Allen’s point is that a task like that isn’t going to be less scary at noon or at 4:30 in the afternoon. Just the opposite, the low-grade anxiety from “the hardest call” is going to cast a shadow over the whole day. It’s going to distract you, maybe even make you less effective. It will certainly make you less openhearted.

  “Make the hardest call first.” That’s not quite about curiosity, and it’s not quite about determination—it’s a little bit of both. It’s grit. It’s character. Grab hold of the one task that really must be done—however much you’re not looking forward to it—and tackle it.

  That clears the air. It brightens the rest of the day. It may, in fact, reset the agenda for part of the day. It gives you confidence to tackle whatever else is coming—because you’ve done the hardest thing first. And while the outcome of “the hardest call” usually goes just like you imagine, sometimes there’s a surprise there too.

  Asking questions always seems, superficially, like an admission of ignorance. How can admitting your ignorance be the path to confidence?

  That’s one of the many wonderful dualities of curiosity.

  Curiosity helps you dispel ignorance and confusion, curiosity evaporates fogginess and uncertainty, it clears up disagreement.

  Curiosity can give you confidence. And the confidence can give you determination. And the confidence and determination can give you ambition. That’s how you get beyond the “no,” whether it’s coming from other people, or from inside your own mind.

  If you harness curiosity to your dreams, it can help power them along to reality.

  • • •

  ABOUT A DECADE AGO, the New York style magazine W did a profile of me with the headline:

  THE MOGUL

  Brian Grazer, whose movies have grossed $10.5 billion, is arguably the most successful producer in town—and surely the most recognizable.

  Is it the hair?9

  People in Hollywood, of course, know the hair.

  People in the rest of the world—people who may not even know my name but know A Beautiful Mind or Arrested Development or The Da Vinci Code—some of them know the hair too. “That Hollywood guy with the hair that stands straight up”—that’s a common description of me.

  The hair is part of my image, part of my persona.

  And the hair is no accident. Of course it isn’t an accident—because I have to gel it vertical every single morning.

  But my hair isn’t just a fashion quirk
. It’s not even really a matter of personal taste.

  After Ron Howard and I had done a couple of movies, I was building a reasonable reputation in Hollywood. It was nothing like the visibility of Ron, of course—he was a star and a director and the icon of an era. I was a producer, and also a newcomer, especially compared to Ron.

  But I wanted to make an impression. Hollywood is a land of style, a world where how you present yourself matters. Many of the people working here are so dramatically good-looking, that is their style. That’s not me, and I know that.

  When Ron and I were getting Imagine up and running in the early nineties, it was during a period when male Hollywood producers were developing a kind of collective persona. There was a group of young, successful producers doing loud, aggressive movies. They were themselves loud and aggressive—they were “yellers,” people who sometimes managed their colleagues by throwing things and screaming. And many in this same group wore beards. Bearded, aggressive men, producing aggressive movies.

  That wasn’t me. I wasn’t doing loud movies, I don’t look great with facial hair. I worked for a couple of screamers in my early days in Hollywood. I don’t like being screamed at, and I am not a screamer myself.

  But I didn’t want to simply fade into the background. I felt I needed to define myself in a way that made me memorable.

  So this question of personal style—what to wear, how to look—was on my mind.

  It all fell into place one afternoon in 1993, when I was swimming with my daughter Sage, who was then about five. As I surfaced in the pool, I ran my fingers through my wet hair, standing it straight up.

  “That looks cool!” Sage said.

  I looked at myself in the mirror with my hair standing up, and I thought, “That’s really interesting.”

  So I gelled it straight up. I started that very day.

  The hair got noticed. It instantly produced an extreme reaction from people.

  I’d say 25 percent of people thought it was cool.

  Another 50 percent of people were curious about it. Why do you do your hair like that? How do you do your hair like that?

  Some people who already knew me were in this curious category. They said, Brian, what’s up with the hair? What are you thinking? What got you to do that?

  Then there was the other 25 percent—the people who hated the hair. The hair made them angry. They looked at my hair and immediately decided I was an asshole.

  I loved that. I really liked getting that extreme range of reactions from people. The hair inspired curiosity about me. Right after I started wearing my hair up, I would sometimes hear people talking about it when they thought I couldn’t hear them.

  “Hey, what’s with Grazer? What’s he doing with his hair?”

  Michael Ovitz, the famous superagent and Hollywood power broker, grew up in the business right alongside me. He lobbied me. “Don’t do the hair,” Michael said. “Business people won’t take you seriously.”

  Some people thought I was arrogant because of the hair.

  The truth is that it had occurred to me that the world of Hollywood is divided into two categories—business folks and artists. I thought this hairstyle tipped me over into the artist category, where I was more comfortable.

  After having my hair straight up for a few months, I did think about stopping. So many people seemed to be talking about it.

  But then I realized something: yes, the hair was inspiring curiosity about me, but what was really interesting was that people’s reactions to the hair said more about what they thought of me than they revealed about me, or my hair.

  I came to see my hair as a test to the world. I felt like I was eliciting the truth about how people felt about me much more quickly than having to wait for it to come out. So I left it up.

  In a way, the hair does something else for me. It lets people know that this guy isn’t quite what he seems. He’s a little unpredictable. I’m not a prepackaged, shrink-wrapped guy. I’m a little different.

  Here’s why my hair is important.

  Hollywood and show business really are a small town, and as in any industry, there is a pretty defined system of rules and practices and traditions. To get things done, you have to follow the rules.

  Mind you, all I did was gel my hair straight up, just as a gambit, and some people went completely crazy about it. Not just some people—one out of four people.

  My hair doesn’t have the slightest impact on any script or director or talent, it doesn’t change the marketing of a movie or the opening weekend grosses. But it made a lot of people—some of them important people—really uncomfortable.

  Now imagine the reaction, the resistance, when you do something different in a category where it really matters.

  But I don’t want to do the same kind of work everyone’s doing. I don’t even want to do the same kind of work I was doing ten years ago or five years ago.

  I want variety. I want to tell new stories—or classic stories in new ways—both because that makes my life interesting, and because it makes going to the movie theater or turning on the TV interesting.

  I want the opportunity to be different.

  Where do I get the confidence to be different?

  A lot of it comes from curiosity. I spent years as a young man trying to understand the business I’m in. I have spent decades staying connected to how the rest of the world works.

  The curiosity conversations give me a reservoir of experience and insight that goes well beyond my own firsthand experience.

  But the conversations also give me a lot of firsthand experience in exposing my own lack of knowledge, my own naïveté. I actually practice being a little ignorant. I’m willing to admit what I don’t know, because I know that’s how I get smarter. Asking questions may seem to expose your ignorance, but what it really does is just the opposite. People who ask questions, in fact, are rarely thought of as stupid.

  The epigram that opens this chapter—“Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will”—comes from a book by the Irish poet James Stephens. The quote goes on a little longer and makes a central point:

  Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will; indeed, it has led many people into dangers which mere physical courage would shudder away from, for hunger and love and curiosity are the great impelling forces of life.

  That’s what curiosity has done for me, and what I think it can do for almost anyone. It can give you the courage to be adventurous and ambitious. It does that by getting you comfortable with being a little uncomfortable. The start of any journey is always a little nerve-racking.

  I have learned to surf as an adult. I have learned to paint as an adult. I learned to surf much better after producing Blue Crush, a female-empowerment movie that we shot on the north shore of Oahu. Some of the people working on the movie were surfing there—surfing some of the biggest waves in the world—and I became fascinated with how waves work and what it was like to ride them. I love surfing—it requires so much concentration, it wipes away completely the concerns of the moment. It’s also totally thrilling.

  I love painting in much the same way. I find it utterly relaxing. I’m not a great painter, I’m not even a particularly good painter in technical terms. But I figured out that a lot of what matters in painting is what you’re trying to say, not whether you say it perfectly. I don’t need to have great painting technique to find real originality in it, and to be energized by it. I learned to paint after meeting Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

  In both cases, my curiosity conquered my fear. I was inspired to do both those things by some of the people who did them best in the world. I wasn’t trying to be a world-class surfer or a world-class painter. I was just curious to taste the joy, the thrill, the satisfaction that those people got from mastering something that is both hard and rewarding.

  Curiosity gives you power. It’s not the kind of power that comes from yelling and being aggressive. It’s a quiet kind of power. It’s a cumulative power. Curiosity
is power for real people, it’s power for people who don’t have superpowers.

  So I protect that part of myself—the part that’s not afraid to seem briefly ignorant. Not knowing the answer opens up the world, as long as you don’t try to hide what you don’t know. I try never to be self-conscious about not knowing.

  As it turns out, the people who hated my hair back in the beginning were right. It is a little bit of a challenge. The hair looks like just a matter of personal style—but for me, it is a way of reminding myself every day that I am trying to be a little different, that it’s okay to be a little different, that being different requires courage, just like gelling your hair straight up requires courage, but you can be different in ways that make most people smile.

  I gel my hair every morning first thing when I wake up. It takes about ten seconds. I never skip the gel. And twenty years after I started doing it, it has become my signature—and my approach to work matches my hair. It’s also still a great way of starting a conversation and standing out.

  In February 2001, I got to spend four days in Cuba with a group of seven friends who are also media executives. The group included Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair; Tom Freston, then CEO of MTV; Bill Roedy, then president of MTV; producer Brad Grey; Jim Wiatt, then chief of the talent agency William Morris; and Les Moonves, who is president of CBS.10