Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

by Charles Duhigg

  For many people, in fact, figuring out how to accelerate innovation is among their most important jobs. “We’re obsessed with the productivity of the creative process,” said Ed Catmull, president of Walt Disney Animation Studios and cofounder of Pixar. “We think it’s something that can be managed poorly or well, and if we get the creative process right, we find innovations faster. But if we don’t manage it right, good ideas are suffocated.”

  Inside the story trust, the conversation about Frozen was winding down. “It seems to me like there’s a few different ideas competing inside this movie,” Lasseter told Buck, the director. “We’ve got Elsa’s story, we’ve got Anna’s story, and we’ve got Prince Hans and Olaf the snowman. Each of those stories has great elements. There’s a lot of really good material here, but you need to make it into one narrative that connects with the audience. You need to find the movie’s core.”

  Lasseter rose from his seat. “You should take as long as you need to find the answers,” he said. “But it would be great if it happened soon.”

  II.

  In 1949, a choreographer named Jerome Robbins contacted his friends Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents with an audacious idea. They should collaborate on a new kind of musical, he told them, modeled on Romeo and Juliet but set in modern-day New York City. They could integrate classical ballet with opera and experimental theater, and maybe bring in contemporary jazz and modernist drama, as well. Their goal, Robbins said, should be to establish the avant-garde on Broadway.

  Robbins was already famous for creating theater—as well as a life—that pushed boundaries. He was bisexual at a time when homosexuality was illegal. He had changed his name from Jerome Rabinowitz to Jerome Robbins to dodge the anti-Semitism he worried would doom his career. He had named friends as Communists before the House Un-American Activities Committee, terrified that if he didn’t cooperate, his sexuality would be publicly revealed and he would be shunned. He was a bully and a perfectionist and so despised by dancers that they sometimes refused to speak to him off the stage. But few refused his invitations to perform. He was widely acknowledged—revered, actually—as one of the most creative artists of his time.

  Robbins’s Romeo and Juliet idea was particularly bold because big Broadway musicals, in those days, tended to adhere to fairly predictable blueprints. Stories were built around a male and a female lead who pushed the plot along with dialogue that was spoken, not sung. There were choruses and dancers, as well as elaborate sets and a few duets about midway through each show. The elements of plot, song, and dance, however, weren’t intertwined as they were in, say, ballet, where the story and dancing are one, or opera, where dialogue is sung and music shapes the drama as much as any actor on the stage.

  For this new show, Robbins wanted to try something different. “Why couldn’t we, in aspiration, try to bring our deepest talents together?” Robbins later said. “Why did Lenny have to write an opera, Arthur a play, me a ballet?” The three men wanted to create something that felt modern yet timeless. When Bernstein and Laurents saw a newspaper article about race riots, they proposed making their musical about two lovers—one Puerto Rican, the other white—whose families were affiliated with warring gangs. The name of the show, they decided, would be West Side Story.

  Over the next few years the men traded scripts, scores, and choreography ideas. They mailed one another drafts during their long months apart. After half a decade of work, though, Robbins was impatient. This musical was important, he wrote to Bernstein and Laurents. It would break new ground. They needed to finish the script. To speed things up, he suggested, they should stop trying to do something new at every turn. Instead, they should stick with conventions they knew, from trial and error, had worked in other shows. But they should combine those conventions in novel ways.

  For instance, they had been wrestling with the first meeting between Tony and Maria, the musical’s main characters. They should take a page from Shakespeare, Robbins suggested, and have the lovers see each other across a dance floor. But it should be made contemporary, a place where “a wild mambo is in progress with the kids doing all the violent improvisation of jitterbugging.”

  For the battle in which Tony kills his enemy, Robbins said that the choreography ought to imitate the way battles are staged in motion pictures. “The fight scene must be provoked immediately,” Robbins wrote, “or else we’re boring the audience.” During a dramatic encounter between Tony and Maria, they needed something that echoed the classical marriage scene of Romeo and Juliet, but also incorporated the theatricality of opera and a bit of the sentimental romanticism that Broadway audiences loved.

  The biggest challenge, however, was figuring out which theatrical conventions were truly powerful and which had become clichés. Laurents, for example, had written a script that was divided into the traditional three acts, but it’s “a serious mistake to let the audience out of our grip for two intermissions,” Robbins wrote. Motion pictures had proven that you can keep audiences in their seats if the action is always progressing. What’s more, Robbins wrote to Laurents, “I like best the sections in which you have gone on your own path, writing in your own style with your own characters and imagination. Least successful are those in which I sense the intimidation of Shakespeare standing behind you.” Similarly, roles that were too predictable had to be avoided at all costs. “You are way off the track with the whole character of Anita,” Robbins wrote to his colleagues. “She is the typical downbeat blues torch-bearing 2nd character,” he remarked. “Forget Anita.”

  By 1957—eight years after they had first embarked on the project—the men were finally done. They had combined different kinds of theater to create something new: a musical where dance, song, and dialogue were integrated into a story of racism and injustice that was as contemporary as the newspapers sold outside the theater doors. All that was left was to find financial backers. Nearly every producer they approached turned them down. The show was too different from what audiences expected, the moneymen said. Finally, Robbins found financiers willing to support a staging in Washington, D.C.—far enough from Broadway, everyone hoped, that if the show bombed, the news might not spread to New York.

  The method Robbins suggested for jump-starting the creative process—taking proven, conventional ideas from other settings and combining them in new ways—is remarkably effective, it turns out. It’s a tactic all kinds of people have used to spark creative successes. In 2011, two Northwestern University business school professors began examining how such combinations occur in scientific research. “Combinations of existing material are centerpieces in theories of creativity, whether in the arts, the sciences, or commercial innovation,” they wrote in the journal Science in 2013. And yet most original ideas grow out of old concepts, and “the building blocks of new ideas are often embodied in existing knowledge.” Why are some people so much better at taking those old blocks and stacking them in new ways, the researchers wondered?

  The researchers—Brian Uzzi and Ben Jones—decided to focus on an activity they were deeply familiar with: writing and publishing academic papers. They had access to a database of 17.9 million scientific manuscripts published in more than twelve thousand journals. The researchers knew there was no objective way to measure each paper’s creativity, but they could estimate a paper’s originality by analyzing the sources authors had cited in their endnotes. “A paper that combines work by Newton and Einstein is conventional. The combination has happened thousands of times,” Uzzi told me. “But a paper that combines Einstein and Wang Chong, the Chinese philosopher, that’s much more likely to be creative, because it’s such an unusual pairing.” Moreover, by focusing primarily on the most popular manuscripts in the database—those studies that had been cited by other researchers thousands of times—they could estimate each manuscript’s creative input. “To get into the top 5 percent of the most frequently cited studies, you have to say something pretty new,” Uzzi said.

  Uzzi and Jones—along with their coll
eagues Satyam Mukherjee and Mike Stringer—wrote an algorithm to evaluate the 17.9 million papers. By examining how many different ideas each study contained, whether those ideas had been mentioned together previously, and if the papers were popular or ignored, their program could rate each paper’s novelty. Then they could look to see if the most creative papers shared any traits.

  The analysis told them that some creative papers were short; others were long. Some were written by individuals; the majority were composed by teams. Some studies were authored by researchers at the beginning of their careers; others came from more senior faculty.

  In other words, there were lots of different ways to write a creative study.

  But almost all of the creative papers had at least one thing in common: They were usually combinations of previously known ideas mixed together in new ways. In fact, on average, 90 percent of what was in the most “creative” manuscripts had already been published elsewhere—and had already been picked over by thousands of other scientists. However, in the creative papers, those conventional concepts were applied to questions in manners no one had considered before. “Our analysis of 17.9 million papers spanning all scientific fields suggests that science follows a nearly universal pattern,” Uzzi and Jones wrote. “The highest-impact science is primarily grounded in exceptionally conventional combinations of prior work yet simultaneously features an intrusion of unusual combinations.” It was this combination of ideas, rather than the ideas themselves, that typically made a paper so creative and important.

  If you consider some of the biggest intellectual innovations of the past half century, you can see this dynamic at work. The field of behavioral economics, which has remade how companies and governments operate, emerged in the mid-1970s and ’80s when economists began applying long-held principles from psychology to economics, and asking questions like why perfectly sensible people bought lottery tickets. Or, to cite other juxtapositions of familiar ideas in novel ways, today’s Internet social networking companies grew when software programmers borrowed public health models that were originally developed to explain how viruses spread and applying them to how friends share updates. Physicians can now map complicated genetic sequences rapidly because researchers have transported the math of Bayes’ rule into laboratories examining how genes evolve.

  Fostering creativity by juxtaposing old ideas in original ways isn’t new. Historians have noted that most of Thomas Edison’s inventions were the result of importing ideas from one area of science into another. Edison and his colleagues “used their knowledge of electromagnetic power from the telegraph industry, where they first worked, to transfer old ideas [to the industries of] lighting, telephone, phonograph, railway and mining,” two Stanford professors wrote in 1997. Researchers have consistently found that labs and companies encourage such combinations to spark creativity. A 1997 study of the consumer product design firm IDEO found that most of the company’s biggest successes originated as “combinations of existing knowledge from disparate industries.” IDEO’s designers created a top-selling water bottle, for example, by mixing a standard water carafe with the leak-proof nozzle of a shampoo container.

  The power of combining old ideas in new ways also extends to finance, where the prices of stock derivatives are calculated by mixing formulas originally developed to describe the motion of dust particles with gambling techniques. Modern bike helmets exist because a designer wondered if he could take a boat’s hull, which can withstand nearly any collision, and design it in the shape of a hat. It even reaches to parenting, where one of the most popular baby books—Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946—combined Freudian psychotherapy with traditional child-rearing techniques.

  “A lot of the people we think of as exceptionally creative are essentially intellectual middlemen,” said Uzzi. “They’ve learned how to transfer knowledge between different industries or groups. They’ve seen a lot of different people attack the same problems in different settings, and so they know which kinds of ideas are more likely to work.”

  Within sociology, these middlemen are often referred to as idea or innovation brokers. In one study published in 2004, a sociologist named Ronald Burt studied 673 managers at a large electronics company and found that ideas that were most consistently ranked as “creative” came from people who were particularly talented at taking concepts from one division of the company and explaining them to employees in other departments. “People connected across groups are more familiar with alternative ways of thinking and behaving,” Burt wrote. “The between-group brokers are more likely to express ideas, less likely to have ideas dismissed, and more likely to have ideas evaluated as valuable.” They were more credible when they made suggestions, Burt said, because they could say which ideas had already succeeded somewhere else.

  “This is not creativity born of genius,” Burt wrote. “It is creativity as an import-export business.”

  What’s particularly interesting, however, is that there isn’t a specific personality associated with being an innovation broker. Studies indicate that almost anyone can become a broker—as long as they’re pushed the right way.

  Before rehearsals began for West Side Story, Robbins went to his colleagues and said he was dissatisfied with the musical’s first scene. As initially envisioned, the show opened in a traditional manner with the play’s characters introducing themselves via dialogue that illustrated the plot’s central tensions:

  ACT 1

  SCENE 1

  A-rab, a teenager dressed in the uniform of his gang (THE JETS) comes across the stage. Suddenly, two DARK-SKINNED BOYS plummet down from a wall, crashing A-rab to the ground and attacking him. The attackers run off and then several boys—dressed like A-rab—run on from the opposite side.

  DIESEL

  It’s A-rab!

  BABY JOHN

  He was hit hard.

  ACTION

  An’ right on our own turf!

  Riff, the leader of THE JETS, enters

  RIFF

  Straight factualities, A-rab. Who did it?

  ACTION

  Those buggin’ Puerto Ricans!

  DIESEL

  We’re supposed to be the champeens in this area—

  MOUTHPIECE

  The PR’s ’re crowdin’ us like their lousy families ’re crowdin’ ours!

  A-RAB

  Let’s have some action, Riff.

  ACTION

  Let’s put it on the PRs!

  BABY JOHN

  A rumble!

  RIFF

  Whoa, buddy boys! Whadda you diapers know from rumbles? The state of your ignorance is appalling. How do you think the top brass go about a war?

  BABY JOHN

  Crack-O Jack-O!

  RIFF

  First—you dispatch scouts to the enemy leader to arrange a war council. Then—

  ACTION

  Then you go!

  RIFF

  We oughta get Tony so we can take a vote.

  ACTION

  He always does what you say anyway. C’mon!

  In this version of the opening scene, the audience has learned the basics of the plot within moments of the curtain’s rise. They know there are two gangs divided along ethnic lines. They know these gangs are engaged in an ongoing battle. They know there is a hierarchy within each gang—Riff is clearly the leader of the Jets—as well as a certain formality: A rumble can’t occur without a meeting of the war council. The audience feels the energy and tension (Crack-O Jack-O!) and they learn about another character, Tony, who seems important. All in all, an effective opening.

  Robbins discarded it. Too predictable, he said. Lazy and clichéd. Gangs don’t just fight, they own territory, the same way a dancer owns a stage. The opening number of a musical about immigrants and the energy of New York ought to feel ambitious and dangerous—it needed to make the audience feel the same way Robbins, Bernstein, and Laurents had felt when they had come up with this idea. They,
the playwrights themselves, were strivers, Robbins told them. They were Jews and outcasts, and this musical was an opportunity to draw on their own experiences of exclusion and ambition and put their own emotions on the stage.

  “Robbins could be brutal,” said Amanda Vaill, Robbins’s biographer. “He could sniff out creative complacency and force people to come up with something newer and better than what everyone else settled for.” Robbins was an innovation broker, and he forced everyone around him to become brokers, as well.

  This is what appeared onstage—and, later, on movie screens—in what eventually became known as “The West Side Story Prologue.” It is one of the most influential pieces of theater in the last sixty years:

  The opening is musical: half-danced, half-mimed. It is primarily a condensation of the growing rivalry between two teen-age gangs, THE JETS and THE SHARKS, each of which has its own prideful uniform. THE JETS—sideburned, long-haired—are vital, restless, sardonic; The SHARKS are Puerto Ricans.

  The stage opens with THE JETS on an asphalt court, snapping their fingers as the orchestra plays. A handball strikes the fence and the music stops. One of the boys, RIFF, indicates with a nod to return the handball to its frightened owner. RIFF’s subordinate complies and the music restarts.