Authors: Adam M. Grant Ph.D.
B00AFPTSI0 EBOK (15 page)
When you start out, you see other people as obstacles to your success. But that means your world will be full of obstacles, which is bad. In the early years, when some of my colleagues and friends—even close friends—would have a rip-roaring success of some kind, it was hard for me. I would feel jealousy, that their success somehow was a reproach to me. When you start your career, naturally you’re mainly interested in advancing yourself and promoting yourself.
But as Meyer worked on television shows, he began to run into the same people over and over. It was a small world, and a connected one. “I realized it’s a very small pond. There are only a few hundred people at any one time writing television comedy for a living,” Meyer says. “It’s a good idea not to alienate these guys, and most of the jobs you get are more or less through word of mouth, or a recommendation. It’s really important to have a good reputation. I quickly learned to see other comedy writers as allies.” Meyer began to root for other people to succeed. “It’s not a zero-sum game. So if you hear that somebody got a pilot picked up, or one of their shows went to series, in a way that’s really good, because comedy is doing better.”
This wasn’t the path that Frank Lloyd Wright followed. He was undoubtedly a genius, but he wasn’t a genius maker. When Wright succeeded, it didn’t multiply the success of other architects; it usually came at their expense. As Wright’s son John reflected, “You do a good job building your buildings in keeping with your ideal. But you have been weak in your support of others in their desire for this same attainment.” When it came to apprentices, his son charged, Wright never “stood behind one and helped him up.” In one case, Wright promised his apprentices a drafting room so they could work, but it wasn’t until seven years after starting the Taliesin fellowship that he made good on his promise. At one point, a client admitted that he preferred to hire Wright’s apprentices over Wright himself, as the apprentices matched his talent but exceeded his conscientiousness when it came to completing work on schedule and within budget. Wright was enraged, and he forbade his architects from accepting independent commissions, requiring them to put his name at the top of all their work. A number of his most talented and experienced apprentices quit, protesting that Wright exploited them for personal gain and stole credit for their work. “
It is amazing
,” de St. Aubin observes, “that few of the hundreds” of Wright’s “apprentices went on to achieve significant, independent careers as practicing architects.”
George Meyer’s success had the opposite effect on his collaborators: it rippled, cascaded, and spread to the people around him. Meyer’s colleagues call him a genius, but it’s striking that he has also been a genius maker. By helping his fellow writers on
The Simpsons
,
George Meyer made them more effective at their jobs, multiplying their collective effectiveness. “He made me a better writer, inspiring me to think outside the box,” Don Payne comments. Meyer’s willingness to volunteer for unpopular tasks, help other people improve their jokes, and work long hours to achieve high collective standards rubbed off on his colleagues. “He makes everyone try harder,” Jon Vitti told a
Harvard Crimson
reporter, who
exclaimed that “Meyer’s presence spurs other
Simpsons
writers to be funnier,” extolling Meyer’s gift for “inspiring greatness in those around him.”
Meyer left
The Simpsons
in 2004 and is currently working on his first novel—tentatively titled
Kick Me 1,000,000 Times or I’ll Die
—but his influence in the writers’ room persists. Today, “George’s voice is strongly in the DNA of the show,” says Payne, “and he showed me that you don’t have to be a jerk to get ahead.” Carolyn Omine adds that “We all picked up a lot of George’s comedic sense. Even though he’s not here at
The Simpsons
anymore, we sometimes think in his way.” Years later, Meyer is still working to lift his colleagues up. Despite winning five Emmy Awards, Tim Long hadn’t achieved his lifelong dream: he wanted to be published in
The New Yorker
. In 2010, Long sent Meyer a draft of a submission. Meyer responded swiftly with incisive feedback. “He just went through it line by line, and he was incredibly generous. His notes helped me fix things that were bugging me at the bottom of my soul, but I couldn’t articulate them.” Then, Meyer took his giving one step further: he reached out to an editor at
The New Yorker
to help Long get his foot in the door. By 2011, Long’s dream was fulfilled—twice.
By the time Meyer released the second issue of
Army Man
, he had thirty contributors. They all wrote jokes for free, and their careers soared along with Meyer’s. At least seven of those contributors went on to write for
The Simpsons
. One contributor, Spike Feresten, wrote a single
Simpsons
episode in 1995, and became an Emmy-nominated writer and producer on
Seinfeld
, where he wrote the famous “Soup Nazi” episode. And the
Army Man
contributors who didn’t become
Simpsons
writers achieved success elsewhere. For example, Bob Odenkirk is a well-known writer and actor, Roz Chast is a staff cartoonist for
The New Yorker
, and Andy Borowitz became a bestselling author and creator of “The Borowitz Report,” a satire column and website with millions of fans. Before that, Borowitz coproduced the hit movie
Pleasantville
and created
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
, which in turn launched Will Smith’s career. By inviting them to write for
Army Man
, Meyer helped them soar. “I just asked the people who made me laugh to contribute,” Meyer told Mike Sacks. “I didn’t realize they would become illustrious.”
Finding the Diamond in the Rough
The Fact and Fiction of Recognizing Potential
When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is; when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be.
—attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer, physicist, biologist, and artist
When Barack Obama entered the White House, a reporter asked him if he had a favorite app. Without hesitating, Obama named the iReggie, which “has my books, my newspapers, my music all in one place.” The iReggie wasn’t a piece of software, though. It was a man named
Reggie Love
, and no one would have guessed that he would become an indispensable resource to President Obama.
Love was a star athlete at Duke, where he accomplished the rare feat of playing key roles on both the football and basketball teams. But after two years of failed NFL tryouts following graduation, he decided to shift gears. Having studied political science and public policy at Duke, Love pursued an internship on Capitol Hill. With a background as a jock and little work experience, he ended up with a position in the mailroom of Obama’s Senate office. Yet within a year, at the young age of twenty-six, Love was promoted up from the mailroom to become Obama’s body man, or personal assistant.
Love worked eighteen-hour days and flew more than 880,000 miles with Obama. “His ability to juggle so many responsibilities with so little sleep has been an inspiration to watch,” Obama said. “He is the master of what he does.” When Obama was elected president, an aide remarked that Love “took care of the president.” Love went out of his way to respond to every letter that came into his office. “I always wanted to acknowledge people, and let them know their voice was heard,” Love told me. According to a reporter, Love is “known for his exceptional and universal kindness.”
Decades earlier, in Love’s home state of North Carolina, a woman named Beth Traynham decided to go back to school to study accounting. Beth was in her early thirties, and numbers were not her strong suit. She didn’t learn to tell time on an analog clock until she was in third grade, and in high school, she leaned heavily on a boyfriend to get her through her math classes. Even in adulthood, she struggled with percentages.
When it came time to take the certified public accountant (CPA) exam, Beth was convinced that she would fail. Beyond the fact that she had trouble with math, she was facing serious time constraints. She was juggling a full-time job with taking care of three children at home—two of whom were toddlers, both of whom came down with chicken pox within two weeks of the exam. The lowest point came when she spent an entire weekend trying to understand pension accounting, and after three days, felt like she understood less than when she started. When Beth sat down to take the CPA exam, right off the bat, she had a panic attack when she looked at the multiple-choice questions. “I would rather go through natural childbirth (again) than ever have to sit for that exam again,” Beth said. She left dejected, certain that she had failed.
On a Monday morning in August 1992, Beth’s phone rang. The voice on the other end of the line said that she had earned the gold medal on the CPA exam in North Carolina. She thought it was a friend playing a joke on her, so she called the state board later that day to verify the news. It wasn’t a joke: Beth had the single highest score in the entire state. Later, she was dumbfounded when she received another award: the national Elijah Watt Sells Award for Distinctive Performance, granted to the top ten CPA exam scores in the whole country, beating out 136,525 other candidates. Today, Beth is a widely respected partner at the accounting firm Hughes, Pittman & Gupton, LLC. She has been named an Impact 25 financial leader and one of the top twenty-five women in business in the Research Triangle.
Beth Traynham and Reggie Love have led dramatically different lives. Aside from their professional success and their North Carolina roots, there is one common thread that unites them. His name is
C. J. Skender
, and he is a living legend.
Skender teaches accounting, but to call him an accounting professor doesn’t do him justice. He’s a unique character, known for his trademark bow ties and his ability to recite the words to thousands of songs and movies on command. He may well be the only fifty-eight-year-old man with fair skin and white hair who displays a poster of the rapper 50 Cent in his office. And while he’s a genuine numbers whiz, his impact in the classroom is impossible to quantify. Skender is one of a few professors for whom Duke University and the University of North Carolina look past their rivalry to cooperate: he is in such high demand that he has permission to teach simultaneously at both schools. He has earned more than two dozen major teaching awards, including fourteen at UNC, six at Duke, and five at North Carolina State. Across his career, he has now taught close to six hundred classes and evaluated more than thirty-five thousand students. Because of the time that he invests in his students, he has developed what may be his single most impressive skill: a remarkable eye for talent.
In 2004, Reggie Love enrolled in C. J. Skender’s accounting class at Duke. It was a summer course that Love needed to graduate, and while many professors would have written him off as a jock, Skender recognized Love’s potential beyond athletics. “For some reason, Duke football players have never flocked to my class,” Skender explains, “but I knew Reggie had what it took to succeed.” Skender went out of his way to engage Love in class, and his intuition was right that it would pay dividends. “I knew nothing about accounting before I took C. J.’s class,” Love says, “and the fundamental base of knowledge from that course helped guide me down the road to the White House.” In Obama’s mailroom, Love used the knowledge of inventory that he learned in Skender’s class to develop a more efficient process for organizing and digitizing a huge backlog of mail. “It was the number-one thing I implemented,” Love says, and it impressed Obama’s chief of staff, putting Love on the radar. In 2011, Love left the White House to study at Wharton. He sent a note to Skender: “I’m on the train to Philly to start the executive MBA program and one of the first classes is financial accounting—and I just wanted to say thanks for sticking with me when I was in your class.”
A dozen years earlier, after Beth Traynham took the CPA exam, she approached Skender to warn him about her disappointing performance. She told him she was sure she flunked the entire exam, but Skender knew better. He promised: “If you didn’t pass, I’ll pay your mortgage.” Skender was right again—and he wasn’t just right about Beth. That spring, the silver and bronze medalists on the CPA exam in North Carolina were also his students. Skender’s students earned the top three scores of all 3,396 CPA candidates who took the exam. It was the first time in North Carolina that any school had swept the medals, and although accounting was a male-dominated field, all three of Skender’s medalists were women. In total, Skender has had more than forty different students win CPA medals by placing in the top three in the state. He has also demonstrated a knack for identifying future teachers: more than three dozen students have followed in his footsteps into university teaching. How does he know talent when he sees it?
It may sound like pure intuition, but C. J. Skender’s skill in recognizing potential has rigorous science behind it. Spotting and cultivating talent are essential skills in just about every industry; it’s difficult to overstate the value of surrounding ourselves with stars. As with networking and collaboration, when it comes to discovering the potential in others, reciprocity styles shape our approaches and effectiveness. In this chapter, I want to show you how givers succeed by recognizing potential in others. Along with tracing Skender’s techniques, we’ll take a look at how talent scouts identify world-class athletes, why people end up overinvesting in low-potential candidates, and what top musicians say about their first teachers. But the best place to start is the military, where psychologists have spent three decades investigating what it takes to identify the most talented cadets.
In the early 1980s, a psychologist named Dov Eden published the first in a series of extraordinary results. He could tell which soldiers in the
Israel Defense Forces
(IDF) would become top performers before they ever started training.
