Action Method

This is something Paul Graham also recommends New ideas are found at the frontiers of knowledge Immerse yourself in a subject until you reach the boundaries of what is understood

Don't be scared to change your mind Admitting we're wrong improves our reputation Scientists who admitted they were wrong about a previous finding had better reputations than those who doubled down Refusing to change course damages reputation far more than changing our minds

What does a crazy mountaineering accident teach us about deep motivation and grit? In 1985, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates became the first people to climb the west face of the Siula Grande mountain. But on their way back down, Joe fell over 70 feet into an icy crevasse. Alone, freezing, and wracked with pain from his shattered leg, he knew he was going to die. But, “if I was going to die,” Joe determined, “I wanted to do it in sunlight.”  So Joe crawled up a steep, snow-laden, slope all through the night. “I stuck my head out of the crevasse at about one o’clock in the afternoon and sat there giggling manically.” Now that Joe had escaped the crevasse, he began to consider what it would take to get back to basecamp. Given the eight mile journey, the state of his body, and the level of food he had left, “my conclusion was, ‘you won’t make it.’”  But then Joe decided to play a mind game. Rather than focusing on the impossible big picture, he shrank his focus to an immediately tangible milestone. “I went, ‘Right, I’m going to get to that crevasse in 20 minutes. Then I’m going to get to that red rock in 20 minutes.’ It created structure and discipline. Sometimes I’d beat the target and I was made up; other times I’d lose and I was pissed off. But it kept me from the big picture of ‘you’re completely f’d.” These little wins generated a sense of progress and propelled Joe further than he imagined possible. But after three and a half days of crawling, he finally collapsed from total exhaustion. In a last ditch effort, Joe began calling out for help. It turns out that Joe’s mind game had brought him within a 10 minute walking distance from the camp. His partner, Simon, heard his cries for help and Joe miraculously went on to make it back home safe.  When we focus on tiny yet tangible milestones, one after another after another after another, the momentum of progress can carry us extraordinary distances.

You rise to the quality of your tools. Famed creator of Lost among other Hollywood blockbusters explains, “It’s like putting on a tie. It’s like ‘OK I’m going to work now.”   J. J. has observed over the course of his career that the tools he uses to create have a meaningful effect on what he creates. “It’s almost like when you buy a pen that you love, and when you have the right pen, it actually helps you, because it’s a weirdly inspirational thing and you feel like… you rise to it, somehow.”

Chanel ™ is the 89th largest private company in the world. Yet Coco Chanel was an orphan from the age of 11. She had no formal education in fashion and no inheritance. So how did she build one of the greatest fashion empires of all time? The secret is that Chanel developed a playbook that’s been used throughout time by the likes of Steve Jobs, Stephen King, and Southwest Airlines. It started when the son of a French socialite fell in love with Chanel in 1905. He allowed Chanel to reside at his family’s chateau. But Chanel always felt like an outsider. This feeling was exacerbated by her refusal to dress like the other women at the chateau. She viewed their fashion style with disdain, describing it as… “The last reflections of a baroque style in which the ornate had killed off the figure, in which over-embellishment had stifled the body’s architecture, just as parasites smother trees in tropical forests.” To Chanel, luxury fashion had become too extravagant. Too excessive. So in 1910, she set out on a mission to defy and redefine these outdated fashion trends. She convinced her new lover to provide enough capital to open a clothing store in Paris, and convinced her ex-lover to provide the premises. Chanel began making and selling hats that bucked the extravagant female fashion trends of the time—simple straw boater hats, trimmed with ribbon. Chanel’s hats “were stripped of embellishments, of the frills and furbelows that she dismissed as weighing a woman down, and being too cumbersome to let her think straight,” as her biographer, Justine Picardie, writes. The hats were an instant hit. It wasn’t long before her business became so successful that she had to move to a bigger store. From there, Chanel continued her war against excess. After being appalled by “those reds, those greens, and those electric blues” that she witnessed during a trip to the opera, Chanel observed that, “women think of every colour, except the *absence* of colours.” “These colours are impossible,” she continues, “these women, I’m bloody well going to dress them in black.” “For black wipes out everything else around.” When Chanel designed a dress that was shorter, sleeker, and stripped of color (see above), it was picked up by American Vogue and gave rise to a look that remains iconic to this day. Chanel applied her playbook of subtraction upon every trend of the age. She cut her hair short. She wore little-to-no makeup. She even applied her stripped back taste to interior design once she was able to build her own villa in the French Riviera. After a writer for Vogue visited Chanel’s villa, absence was praised over excess... “The motif seems to be an entire absence of knick knacks or unnecessary items. Everything one needs is there—and the most perfect of its kind—but there is nothing superfluous.” At the time of her death in 1971, Chanel had a net worth of (at a minimum) tens of millions of dollars in today's currency. Chanel eventually compressed her principle into a single maxim: “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror, and take one thing off.” THE TAKEAWAY We have an unfortunate bias toward ADDITION. Whenever we try to improve something, we default to adding more stuff. More features. More habits. More words. But Chanel’s playbook was one of subtraction. Her genius lay in her ability to delete, to strip-back, and to subvert. Steve Jobs was the same. He often asked designers to refine products by simplifying them—by deleting unnecessary buttons, screens, and processes. Stephen King managed to find time to read 70-80 books a year by refusing to switch on the radio and TV in favor of reading. Southwest Airlines succeeded by running less flights, less stops, less options, and even less food. Sometimes what we choose to remove is far more powerful than what we choose to include.

Expose Yourself To The Best Things That Humans Have Done While it isn’t explicitly stated, there’s a chapter in Walter Issacson’s biography on Steve Jobs that makes the source of his mystical taste blindingly obvious.  “The Jobses’ house and the others in their neighborhood were built by real estate developer Joseph Eichler,” Isaacson writes, “Jobs said that his appreciation for Eichler homes instilled in him a passion for making nicely designed products for the mass market. ‘I love it when you can bring really great design and simple capability to something that doesn’t cost much,’ he said as he pointed out the clean elegance of the houses. ‘It was the original vision for Apple. That’s what we tried to do with the first Mac. That’s what we did with the iPod.’”  This anecdote makes it quite clear that Steve’s taste for beautiful, mass market products, originated with Eichler’s homes. But Steve didn’t just limit his inspiration to housing… In 1981, “he began attending the annual International Design Conference in Aspen,” Issacson recounts. “The meeting that year focused on Italian style, and it featured the architect-designer Mario Bellini, the filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, the car maker Sergio Pininfarina, and the Fiat heiress and politician Susanna Agnelli.” “‘I had come to revere the Italian designers, just like the kid in Breaking Away reveres the Italian bikers,’ recalled Jobs, ‘so it was an amazing inspiration.’”  Italian design combined with the Bauhaus movement gave way to Apple’s iconic minimal, white, styling… “Jobs publicly discussed his embrace of the Bauhaus style in a talk he gave at the 1983 design conference.” “He predicted the passing of the Sony style in favor of Bauhaus simplicity. ‘What we’re going to do is make the products high-tech, and we’re going to package them cleanly so that you know they’re high-tech. We will fit them in a small package, and then we can make them beautiful and white, just like Braun does with its electronics.’”  And when it came to the specific details of the Mac design, Steve called upon a wide range of influences for directing his taste. Cars… “We need it to have a classic look that won’t go out of style, like the Volkswagen Beetle,” Jobs said. From his father he had developed an appreciation for the contours of classic cars.” “He also admired the design of the Mercedes. ‘Over the years, they’ve made the lines softer but the details starker,’ [Jobs] said one day as he walked around the parking lot. ‘That’s what we have to do with the Macintosh.’”  Appliances… “One weekend Jobs went to Macy’s in Palo Alto and again spent time studying appliances, especially the Cuisinart. He came bounding into the Mac office that Monday, asked the design team to go buy one, and made a raft of new suggestions based on its lines, curves, and bevels.”  Japan… “‘I have always found Buddhism, Japanese Zen Buddhism in particular, to be aesthetically sublime,’ he said. ‘The most sublime thing I’ve ever seen are the gardens around Kyoto. I’m deeply moved by what that culture has produced, and it’s directly from Zen Buddhism.’”  Steve's incessant references to excellent work reveals that his taste was shaped by a lifelong dedication to studying the pinnacle of design across diverse fields, and nurturing a deep appreciation for excellence in all forms.  He said it most plainly himself in a 1995 interview: “Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and then try to bring those things into what you're doing. I mean, Picasso had a saying, he said, ‘Good artists copy, great artists steal.’ And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”