How to Fly a Horse

by Kevin Ashton

  Harvard psychologist Teresa Amabile studies the connection between motivation and creation. Early in her research, she had a suspicion that internal motivation improves creation but external motivation makes it worse.

  The external motivator Woody Allen avoids is the evaluation of others. Poet Sylvia Plath admitted to craving what she called “the world’s praise,” even though she found it made creating harder: “I want to feel my work good and well taken, which ironically freezes me at my work, corrupts my nunnish labor of work-for-itself-as-its-own-reward.”

  In one of her studies, Amabile asked ninety-five people to make collages. In order to test the role of outside evaluation on the process of creation, some participants were told, “We have five graduate artists from the Stanford Art Department working with us. They will make a detailed evaluation of your design, noting the good points and criticizing the weaknesses. We will send you a copy of each judge’s evaluation of your design.” Others were given no information about being evaluated.

  In fact, all the collages were evaluated on many dimensions by a panel of experts. Work by people expecting evaluation was significantly less creative than work done by people making collages for their own sake. The people expecting evaluation also reported less interest in doing the work—the internal creative drive Plath called “nunnish labor” had been diminished.

  Amabile replicated these results in a second experiment with a new variable—an audience. She divided forty people into four groups. She told the first group it was being evaluated by four art students watching from behind a one-way mirror, the second group that it would be evaluated by art students waiting elsewhere, and the third group that behind the mirror people were waiting to begin a different experiment. She did not mention audiences or evaluations to the fourth group. This was the one that did the work that was the most creative. The next most creative group was the other group that had not been told it would be evaluated, while knowing there were people watching. The group that expected to be evaluated but had no audience came in third. The least creative group by a considerable amount was the group that was being both evaluated and judged. The evaluated groups reported more anxiety than the nonevaluated groups. The more anxious they were, the less creative they were.

  In her next test, Amabile examined written rather than visual creations. She told people they were participating in a handwriting study. As before, there were four groups, some evaluated and some not, some watched and some not. Amabile gave them twenty minutes to write a poem about joy. Once again a panel of experts judged the poems and ranked them from most to least creative. The results were the same. What’s more, nonevaluated subjects reported that they were more satisfied with their poems. Evaluated subjects said that writing them felt like work.

  Amabile’s research validates Woody Allen’s reasons for avoiding the Oscars. Allen also skipped high school classes and dropped out of college. Missing award ceremonies is, in his case, part of a pattern of avoiding the potential destruction of external influence.

  Allen works at a small desk in the corner of his New York apartment, writing movie scripts on yellow legal paper using a burgundy red Olympia SM2 portable typewriter that he bought when he was sixteen. He says, “It still works like a tank. Cost me forty dollars, I think. I’ve written every script, every New Yorker piece, everything I’ve ever done on this typewriter.”

  He keeps a miniature Swingline stapler, two plum-colored staple removers, and scissors alongside the typewriter, and he literally cuts and pastes—or, rather, staples—his writing from one draft to the next: “I have a lot of scissors here, and these little stapling machines. When I come to a nice part, I cut that part off and staple it on.”

  The result is a mess: a patchwork of paper, each piece either held together with staples or pocked with the acne of staples removed. And covering the mess, in an eleven-point typeface called Continental Elite, colored in a spectrum of grays and blacks that can only come from metal on ribbon, is the screenplay for a movie that will almost certainly be a hit and may, incidentally, win some of the awards Woody Allen avoids.

  In 1977, one of these ragged yellow quilts became the movie Annie Hall. Allen thought it was terrible: “When I was finished with it, I didn’t like the film at all, and I spoke to United Artists at the time and offered to make a film for them for nothing if they would not put it out. I just thought to myself, ‘At this point in my life, if this is the best I can do, they shouldn’t give me money to make movies.’ ”

  United Artists released the film anyway. Allen was wrong to doubt it: Annie Hall was a great success. Marjorie Baumgarten of the Austin Chronicle wrote, “Its comedy, performances, and insights are all deadon perfect.” Vincent Canby of the New York Times: “It puts Woody in the league with the best directors we have.” Larry David, cocreator of the TV show Seinfeld: “It changed the way comedies were going to be made forever.”

  Allen’s views about awards first became clear when Annie Hall was nominated for five Academy Awards and he refused to attend the ceremony. He did not even watch it on television. He recalled, “The next morning I got up, and I get the New York Times delivered to my apartment, and I noticed on the front page, on the bottom, it said, ‘Annie Hall wins 4 Academy Awards,’ so I thought ‘Oh, that’s great.’ ”

  Two of the awards, for Best Director and Best Screenplay, went to Allen himself. Unimpressed, he insisted that the phrase “Academy Award Winner” could not appear on advertising for the film anywhere within a hundred miles of New York.

  Allen’s next film was Stardust Memories. It underlined his indifference to praise: “It was my least popular film but it was certainly my own personal favorite.”

  Woody Allen is not alone in wanting to avoid being distracted by the judgment of others. When T. S. Eliot ascended to the highest peak of praise, the Nobel Prize in Literature, he did not want it. Poet John Berryman congratulated him, saying it was “high time.” Eliot replied that it was “rather too soon. The Nobel is a ticket to one’s own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.” His acceptance speech was modest to the point of evasion:

  When I began to think of what I should say, I wished only to express very simply my appreciation, but to do this adequately proved no simple task. Merely to indicate that I was aware of having received the highest international honor that can be bestowed upon a man of letters would be only to say what everyone knows already. To profess my own unworthiness would be to cast doubt upon the wisdom of the Academy; to praise the Academy might suggest that I approved the recognition. May I therefore ask that it be taken for granted, that I experienced, on learning of this award to myself, all the normal emotions of exaltation and vanity that any human being might be expected to feel at such a moment, with enjoyment of the flattery, and exasperation at the inconvenience, of being turned overnight into a public figure? I must therefore try to express myself in an indirect way. I take the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature, when it is given to a poet, to be primarily an assertion of the value of poetry. I stand before you, not on my own merits, but as a symbol, for a time, of the significance of poetry.

  Einstein actually did evade receiving his Nobel Prize. The award came long after his genius was generally acknowledged and was given not for his work on relativity but a more obscure finding—his proposal that light was sometimes a particle as well as a wave, known as the photoelectric effect. He claimed a prior engagement in Japan on the night of the Nobel ceremony, sent apologies to the Awards Committee, and gave an “acceptance speech” the following year in an address to the Nordic Assembly of Naturalists in Gothenburg.

  He mentioned neither the photoelectric effect nor the Nobel Prize.

  2 | CHOICE OR REWARD

  It is February 1976 in the harbor town of Sausalito, California. The days are cold and dry. A strange redwood hut overlooks the still, gray bay. Crudely carved animals decorate its door. A beaver squeezes an accordion. An owl blows a saxophone. A dog picks at the strings of a guitar. Ther
e are no windows. Inside the hut, rock band Fleetwood Mac is recording an album called Yesterday’s Gone. Their mood is as bleak as the weather, the atmosphere as odd as the door. The musicians hate this weird, dark studio with its strange animals. They have fired their producer. Singer Christine McVie and bass player John McVie, the Mac in the band’s name, are heading for divorce. Guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and singer Stevie Nicks are riding a bronco of an affair: on again, off again, argumentative. Drummer Mick Fleetwood finds his wife in bed with his best friend. Each day at dusk they haul their emotions past the trippy critters, feast on palliative cocaine, and work past midnight. Christine McVie calls it “a cocktail party.”

  Fleetwood Mac survives Sausalito for a few months, then decamps to Los Angeles. Singers McVie and Nicks stay away. The Sausalito tapes are a mess. The band cancels its sold-out U.S. tour, and its record label, Warner Bros., postpones the release of Yesterday’s Gone.

  In Hollywood, forensic engineers slowly apply technical salve to the tapes and rescue the project. The band reassembles to listen and is surprised. The album is good—very good. Memories of the bickering in Sausalito inspire John McVie to change its name. He calls it Rumours.

  Rumours is released to critical ecstasy in February 1977. It spends thirty-one weeks at the top of the Billboard chart, sells tens of millions of copies, wins the 1978 Grammy for album of the year, and becomes one of the bestselling records in American history, bigger than anything by the Beatles.

  How to follow Rumours? Fleetwood Mac rents a studio in West Los Angeles, spends a million dollars, and leaves with a double album called Tusk, the most expensive record ever made. It gets tepid reviews; stalls at No. 4 on the charts, sells a few million copies, and sinks. Warner Bros. compares it to the rocket that was Rumours and declares it a failure.

  A few years later, the pop band Dexys Midnight Runners met a similar fate. Dexys’ big success was Too-Rye-Ay, an album propelled by a song called “Come On Eileen,” which was the biggest-selling single of 1982 in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Like Fleetwood Mac, Dexys recorded Too-Rye-Ay during a storm of personal crisis: singer and bandleader Kevin Rowland and violinist Helen O’Hara were falling out of love. The album’s success led to an intense world promotional tour. The musicians washed up on England’s shores exhausted. Three members quit. The ones that remained went to the studio to record their next album, Don’t Stand Me Down. It cost more money and took more time than Too-Rye-Ay. The photograph on the sleeve showed what was left of the band, known for wearing denim overalls, scrubbed and suited as if for job interviews. Inside were only seven songs, one of which was twelve minutes long and began with two minutes of conversation about nothing. Don’t Stand Me Down confused reviewers, launched with no single, and did not sell. Dexys Midnight Runners would not record another album for twenty-seven years. Music business veterans call this second album syndrome—the one after the breakthrough that costs more, takes longer, tries harder, and fails.

  Neither Fleetwood Mac nor Dexys Midnight Runners were made less creative by the emotional pressures they suffered when they recorded Rumours and Too-Rye-Ay. Like many before them, they made art from angst. But the bloom of success hides thorns of expectation. Big profits have a big price: the implied promise of more, made to a waiting, watching, wanting world.

  All creators face this risk. Work we want to do is better than work we must do. Dostoyevsky bewailed the external pressure of a publisher’s expectations:

  This is my story: I worked and I was tortured. You know what it means to compose? No, thank God, you do not! I believe you have never written to order, by the yard, and have never experienced that hellish torture. Having received in advance from the Russky Viestnik so much money (Horror! 4,500 rubles). I fully hoped in the beginning of the year that poesy would not desert me, that the poetical idea would flash out and develop artistically towards the end of the year and that I should succeed in satisfying everyone. All through the summer and all through the autumn I selected various ideas (some of them most ingenious), but my experience enabled me always to feel beforehand the falsity, difficulty, or ephemerality of this or that idea. At last I fixed on one and began working, I wrote a great deal; but on the 4th of December I threw it all to the devil. I assure you that the novel might have been tolerable; but I got incredibly sick of it just because it was tolerable, and not positively good— I did not want that.

  Dostoyevsky’s experience was typical. Working “to order, by the yard,” is less creative than working by choice.

  Harry Harlow was a protégé of Lewis Terman, the father figure of the Termites we met in chapter 1. Terman’s influence on Harlow was so great that he persuaded him to change his last name from “Israel” because it sounded “too Jewish.” After getting a doctorate in psychology under Terman at Stanford, the newly named Harlow became a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he renovated a vacant building and created one of the world’s first primate laboratories. Some of his experiments tested the effect of reward on motivation. Harlow left puzzles consisting of a hinge held in place by bolts, pins, and bars in the monkeys’ cages. The monkeys could unlock the hinge by releasing the restraints in the right order. When the monkeys opened the puzzles, Harlow reset them. After a week the monkeys had learned to open the puzzles quickly, with few mistakes. During the last five days of the experiment, one monkey opened the puzzle in less than five minutes 157 times. There was no reward: the monkeys opened the puzzles for amusement.

  When Harlow introduced a reward—food—into the process, the monkeys’ puzzle solving got worse. In his own words: it “tended to disrupt, not facilitate the performances of the experimental subjects.” This was a surprising finding. It was one of the first times anybody noticed that external rewards could demotivate rather than invigorate.

  But these were monkeys. What about people?

  Theresa Amabile asked professional artists to select twenty pieces of their work, ten of which had been commissioned and ten of which had been created without a commission. A panel of independent judges assessed the merits of each piece. They consistently rated the commissioned art less creative than the self-motivated work.

  In 1961, Princeton’s Sam Glucksberg investigated the question of motivation using the Candle Problem. He told some people that they would win between $5 and $20, depending on how quickly they got the candle on the wall—the equivalent of between $40 and $160 in 2014 dollars. He offered other people no reward. As with Harlow’s monkeys and Amabile’s artists, reward had a detrimental effect on performance. People offered no reward solved the Candle Problem faster than people with a chance to win $150. Follow-up experiments by Glucksberg and others replicated these results.

  The relationship between reward and motivation is not as simple as “rewards reduce performance.” There are more than a hundred studies besides Amabile’s and Glucksberg’s. They reach no consensus. Some find that rewards help, some find that they hurt; some find that they make no difference.

  Ken McGraw at the University of Mississippi offered one of the most promising hypotheses to sort out some of the mess: he wondered if tasks involving discovery were disrupted by rewards, but tasks that had one right answer, like math problems, were improved by them. In 1978, he gave students a test with ten questions. The first nine required mathematical thinking, and the tenth needed creative discovery. He offered half of the students $1.50 ($12 in 2014 dollars) if they got the problems right. He offered nothing to the other half. McGraw’s results partially confirmed his idea. Reward had no effect on the math questions: both groups performed equally well. But it made a big difference on the creative discovery question. The subjects working for rewards took much longer to find the answer. Rewards are only a problem when open-minded thinking is required. They have a positive or neutral effect on other kinds of problem solving, but whether explicit, like Dostoyevsky’s advance from the Russky Viestnik, or implicit, like the expectations Fleetwood Mac faced after Rumors, rewards clog the c
lockwork of creation.

  Amabile explored and extended this finding with two more experiments. In the first, she asked schoolchildren to tell a story based on pictures in a book. Half the children agreed to tell a story in return for a reward—the chance to play with a Polaroid camera—and half did not. She eliminated the possibility that anticipating the reward was interfering with the children’s thinking by letting them play with the camera before they told their story. Children in the “no reward” group got to play with the camera too, but no connection was made to the task. The children’s stories were tape-recorded and judged by an independent group of teachers. The results were clear and as expected: children who’d been expecting no reward told more creative stories.

  In the second experiment, Amabile introduced a new variable: choice. She told sixty undergraduates that they were participating in a personality test for course credit. In each case, the researcher pretended that her video recorder had broken and the experiment could not be completed. She then told members of one group, called no choice–no reward, that they had to make a collage instead. She told subjects in another group, called no choice–reward, that they had to make a collage but would be paid $2. She asked people in a third group, choice–no reward, if they would mind making a collage but did not offer payment. She asked members of the fourth group, choice–reward, if they would mind making a collage for $2. For added emphasis, the reward groups worked with two dollar bills in front of them. An independent panel of experts judged the collages. In this experiment, reward did lead to the most creative work—by the choice–reward group. But the least creative work was also caused by reward—it came from the no choice–reward group. Both no reward groups scored in the middle, regardless of whether or not they had been given a choice. In creative work, choice transforms the role of reward. The least creative group’s problem was easily diagnosed: members of the no choice–reward group reported feeling the most pressure.