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.