SIX at 6: A Certain Personality, A Tragic Mistake, Taxi Drivers, Harvesting An Identity, The Rock Tumbler Metaphor, and The Stamp of Nature

A Certain Kind of Personality

At some point in grade school, Greta Gerwig began to think that she might want to be a movie director. But as she became aware of a certain mythology associated with directors—rebellious, forceful personalities, singularly obsessed with movies from an early age—Gerwig began to doubt whether she had the personality. When she was a kid in Sacramento, she barely watched movies. At school, she was “a real rule follower.” Throughout her teens, she was interested in so many things—trumpet, ballet, fencing, step aerobics, tap dancing, and on and on—that a ballet instructor told her, “You’ll never be a master of anything. You’ll be a dabbler.” “If you hear a certain criticism at a certain point in your life,” she said, “it sticks with you.” That criticism reinforced her own lingering doubts, and for nearly seventeen years, Gerwig held off on trying to become a director. “I thought that directors had a certain kind of personality and that’s what made them directors,” she said. Eventually, as I wrote about in more detail here, she went for it. She’s directed three movies so far: Lady Bird (for which she became the fifth woman ever to be nominated for Best Director), Little Women, and Barbie (the first solo female-directed film to gross over $1 billion). And in the process, she said, “I realized that it’s doing the work of making movies that gives you that personality.”

That it’s through doing the work of making movies, writing books, starting companies, being a poet, a radio personality, or a taxi driver that one develops the necessary traits for the profession (as opposed to possessing them innately)—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6...

And That’s Your Tragic Mistake

The radio personality Ira Glass was once talking to some college students, each grappling with what to do with their lives. After Glass told them briefly about how he got into his line of work, one of the students asked, “How did you know not just what you wanted to do, but that you’d be great at it?” “Honestly,” Glass said, “even the stuff you’re really good at, you’re not really good at right away.” He told them a story to illustrate how long it took him to get good at his job. A couple years into making his Pulitzer Prize-winning show “This American Life,” one of the show’s producers, Alix Spiegel, pitched a story similar to one Glass had made years earlier, at the beginning of his career. Glass suggested that they dig up the old episode to see if they could salvage anything from it. After they listened to it, Spiegel said, “Wow. There’s no sign that you have any talent for radio. Like there’s not even a hint that you’re ever going to be any good.” Not only was she right, Glass said, but he revisited other episodes from his archives and was struck by how, even 15 years into his career, he still wasn’t very good. “The key thing,” Glass told the students, “is to force yourself through the work it takes to force the skills to come. That’s the hardest phase.” Even after hearing how uncertain and slow the process had been for Glass, the students continued to press for certainty—wanting to know how to be sure, how to feel certain before choosing this or that path. “Your problem,” Glass told them, “is you’re trying to judge all these things in the abstract before you do them. And that’s your tragic mistake. I mean it’s not a satisfying answer to hear that you just have to get in there and do things, but in fact it’s the only really honest answer that anybody would give you who’s done it...You know, you just have to push very, very hard on things before they get to be good. And yourself as well.”

The Neuroscience Of Pushing Very, Very Hard On Things

After learning about research finding that birds and mammals that bury food and dig it up later have an enlarged hippocampus—a key memory region in the brain—the neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire wondered if something similar happens in humans. So she began studying London taxi drivers. To get licensed, taxi drivers in training spend three to four years memorizing 25,000 streets and countless landmarks—what’s known as “The Knowledge.” Unlike the grid patterns of many North American cities, London’s layout is chaotic and unpredictable. Maguire wanted to know if the taxi drivers’ brains changed in the process of memorizing a labyrinth of thousands of city streets. Using brain imaging tools, Maguire compared the brains of licensed taxi drivers to those of non-drivers with similar age, education, and intelligence. Like those animals that memorize the locations of all their hiding spots, the taxi drivers had larger hippocampi than their non-taxi-driving counterparts. And the longer they had been on the job, the larger that area seemed to be. But, Maguire thought, there’s a possibility that the taxi-driving profession simply draws in people whose brains were built for it in the first place. To test that, Maguire and her team recruited a large group of taxi trainees, along with a separate group of non-drivers matched for age, education, and intelligence. Before training began, they conducted MRI scans and memory tests on all participants. Four years later, they repeated the same tests—and the scans showed that the trainees’ hippocampi had grown over time. Separate from Maguire’s work, other studies have found similar evidence that doing something repeatedly over time can lead to lasting, structural changes in the brain. Imaging studies of symphony musicians, for instance, have shown an unusually large Broca’s area—a region linked to language—while ballet dancers have shown brain adaptations that help them resist dizziness, with those changes growing more pronounced the longer they’ve danced. “There is a capacity for local plastic change in the structure of the healthy adult human brain in response to environmental demands,” Maguire and her team write in one paper. “We conclude,” they write in another, “that specific, enduring, structural brain changes in adult humans can be induced by biologically relevant behaviors.” If you push very, very hard on things, they change. And yourself as well.

You Are Harvesting Yourself In The Hours Of The Day

One lesson from Maguire’s work and the growing body of similar research is that our work works on us as much as, or maybe more than, we work on it. “You are harvesting your identity in whatever it is you’re dedicating yourself to in the hours of the day,” as the poet David Whyte puts it. “It’s not a passive process to work. You’re shaping an identity. It’s like practicing.” If you practiced a musical instrument for 8, 9, 10, 11 hours a day—even if you had no musical proclivity, you would become incredibly good at the clarinet, at the piano, at the saxophone. “So you’re becoming incredibly good at whoever you’re practicing at being in the hours of the day,” Whyte continues. “[Ask yourself], by the way I am in my every day, who am I practicing at becoming? Do I actually want to become that person?”

Common Stones Go In, Beautiful Rocks Come Out

Growing up, Steve Jobs sometimes mowed the lawn for an elderly man who lived down the street. One day, Jobs said, “He said, ‘Come on into my garage, I want to show you something.’ And he pulled out this dusty, old rock tumbler.” It was a homemade contraption, built from a coffee can, a salvaged motor, and a thick rubber band. They tossed in some “old, ugly rocks,” a bit of grit powder, and some liquid, then sealed the can and started the motor. The can began to spin, “making a racket as the stones went around,” Jobs said, “and he said, ‘Come back tomorrow.’” The next day, “we opened the can, and we took these amazingly beautiful, polished rocks. The same common stones that had gone in—through rubbing against each other, creating a little bit of friction, creating a little bit of noise—had come out these beautiful, polished rocks,” Jobs said. “And that’s always been, in my mind, my metaphor for a team working really hard to make great products: it’s through a group of people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together—they polish each other, and they polish the ideas, and what comes out are these really beautiful rocks.” In my mind, it’s a good metaphor for individuals as well: it’s by getting in there and doing things, as Glass said, pushing on things very, very hard, bumping up against and pushing through the friction, the uncertainty, the doubts, and the noise, forcing the skills to come, and working really hard that a common stone turns into a beautiful, polished rock.

For Use Can Change The Stamp Of Nature

There’s a scene in Hamlet where he’s pleading with his mother to break some of the destructive patterns in her life. “Assume a virtue, if you have it not,” he tells her. “Refrain to-night, and that shall lend a kind of easiness to the next abstinence; the next more easy: For use can almost change the stamp of nature.”

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