by Adam Grant
The neurologist on call, Robert Burton, had his doubts. The patient’s prognosis was grim, and the spinal tap would be extremely painful. But the oncologist was not ready to throw in the towel. When Burton entered the room with the spinal tap tray, the patient’s family protested. “Please, no more,” they said together. The patient—too frail to speak from a terminal illness—nodded, declining the spinal tap. Burton paged the oncologist and explained the family’s wishes to avoid the spinal tap, but the oncologist was not ready to give up. Finally, the patient’s wife grabbed Burton’s arm, begging him for support in refusing the oncologist’s plan to do the spinal tap. “It’s not what we want,” the wife pleaded. The oncologist was still determined to save the patient. He explained why the spinal tap was essential, and eventually, the family and patient gave in.
Burton performed the spinal tap, which was challenging to carry out and quite painful for the patient. The patient developed a pounding headache, fell into a coma and died three days later due to the cancer. Although the oncologist was a prominent expert in his field, Burton remembers him “mainly for what he taught me about uncritical acceptance of believing that you ‘are doing good.’ The only way you can really know is if you ask the patient and you have a dialogue.”
In collaborations, takers rarely cross this perspective gap. They’re so focused on their own viewpoints that they never end up seeing how others are reacting to their ideas and feedback. On the other hand, researcher Jim Berry and I discovered that in creative work, givers are motivated to benefit others, so they find ways to put themselves in other people’s shoes. When George Meyer was editing the work of Simpsons animators and writers, he was facing a perspective gap. He was cutting their favorite scenes and jokes, not his own. Recognizing that he couldn’t literally feel what they were feeling, he found a close substitute: he reflected on what it felt like to receive feedback and have his work revised when he was in their positions.
When he joined The Simpsons in 1989, Meyer had written a Thanksgiving episode that included a dream sequence. He thought the sequence was hilarious, but Sam Simon, the show runner at the time, didn’t agree. When Simon cut the dream from the script, Meyer was furious. “I flipped out. I was so enraged that Sam had to send me to do another task, just to get me out of the room.” When criticizing and changing the work of animators and writers, Meyer would look back on this experience. “I could relate to that sense of being eviscerated when other people were rewriting their stuff,” he told me. This made him more empathetic and considerate, helping other people to simmer down from intense states and accept his revisions.
Like Meyer, successful givers shift their frames of reference to the recipient’s perspective. For most people, this isn’t the natural starting point. Consider the common dilemma of giving a gift for a wedding or a new baby’s arrival. When the recipient has created a registry, do you pick something from the registry or send a unique gift?
One evening, my wife was searching for a wedding gift for some friends. She decided it was more thoughtful and considerate to find something that wasn’t on their registry, and chose to send candlesticks, assuming that our friends would appreciate the unique gift. Personally, I was perplexed. Several years earlier, when we received wedding gifts, my wife was often disappointed when people sent unique gifts, rather than choosing items from our registry. She knew she wanted particular items, and it was quite rare for anyone to send a gift that she preferred over the ones she had actually selected. Knowing that she preferred the registry gift when she was the recipient, why did she opt for a unique gift when she was in the giving role?
To get to the bottom of this puzzle, researchers Francesca Gino of Harvard and Frank Flynn of Stanford examined how senders and receivers react to registry gifts and unique gifts. They found that senders consistently underestimated how much recipients appreciated registry gifts. In one experiment, they recruited ninety people to either give or receive a gift from Amazon.com. The receivers had twenty-four hours to create a wish list of ten products in the price range of twenty to thirty dollars. The senders accessed the wish lists and were randomly assigned to either choose a registry gift (from the list) or a unique gift (an idea of their own).
The senders expected that the recipients would appreciate the unique gift as somewhat more thoughtful and personal. In fact, the opposite was true. The recipients reported significantly greater appreciation of the registry gifts than the unique gifts. The same patterns emerged with friends giving and receiving wedding gifts and birthday gifts. The senders preferred to give unique gifts, but the recipients actually preferred the gifts they solicited on their registries and wish lists.
Why? Research shows that when we take others’ perspectives, we tend to stay within our own frames of reference, asking “How would I feel in this situation?” When we’re giving a gift, we imagine the joy that we would experience in receiving the gifts that we’re selecting. But this isn’t the same joy that the recipient will experience, because the recipient has a different set of preferences. In the giver’s role, my wife loved the candlesticks she picked out. But if our friends were enamored with those candlesticks, they would have put them on their gift registry.*
To effectively help colleagues, people need to step outside their own frames of reference. As George Meyer did, they need to ask, “How will the recipient feel in this situation?” This capacity to see the world from another person’s perspective develops very early in life. In one experiment, Berkeley psychologists Betty Repacholi and Alison Gopnik studied fourteen-month-old and eighteen-month-old toddlers. The toddlers had two bowls of food in front of them: one with goldfish crackers and one with broccoli. The toddlers tasted food from both bowls, showing a strong preference for goldfish crackers over broccoli. Then, they watched a researcher express disgust while tasting the crackers and delight while tasting the broccoli. When the researcher held out her hand and asked for some food, the toddlers had a chance to offer either the crackers or the broccoli to the researcher. Would they travel outside their own perspectives and give her the broccoli, even though they themselves hated it?
The fourteen-month-olds didn’t, but the eighteen-month-olds did. At fourteen months, 87 percent shared the goldfish crackers instead of the broccoli. By eighteen months, only 31 percent made this mistake while 69 percent had learned to share what others liked, even if it differed from what they liked. This ability to imagine other people’s perspectives, rather than getting stuck in our own perspectives, is a signature skill of successful givers in collaborations.* Interestingly, when George Meyer first started his career as a comedy writer, he didn’t use his perspective-taking skills in the service of helping his colleagues. He saw his fellow writers as rivals:
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 wa
sn’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.”
4
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.”