“A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.” – The Fellowship of the Ring
Next up, Schrödinger’s Hot Pocket®, which is both ice cold and lava hot at the same time.
In my life, I have been bad at a lot of things. I’m still bad at most of them, but there are a few things that I’m good at. The way I got good at them started with being willing to experiment. By experimenting, I learned a lot of different ways to fail, just like the programmer that got turned down by the waitress – he had an error in connecting to the server.
When I failed, I learned how I failed. I then stopped doing those things. But experimenting always has the possibility of failure.
I’ve taken my sons through the same process – I’ve told them many times, “You can figure it out.” Before he left for college, I taught The Boy how to cook steak. I thought about teaching him how to make meringue, but I know the Australians hate it – they usually boo meringue.
I hope this joke doesn’t come back at me.
It’s not a lot for a legacy, but he grills steak like a demigod now. He’s so popular that his college roommates pitched in and bought him a charcoal grill. The Boy told me he grilled a chicken the other night for two hours, but the chicken still wouldn’t tell The Boy why he crossed the road.
How do you learn to cook well?
The same way that you learn anything – by experimenting, failing, and eventually getting it right.
Once you get it right? Then you can exploit the knowledge.
A group of researchers looked at just this pattern. The title of their article says it all: Understanding the onset of hot streaks across artistic, cultural, and scientific careers. You can find it here (LINK).
Related: blind Martians are now known as “brailleins”.
What are hot streaks? In my experience, it is when a person has exactly the right skills and is in exactly the right place. The authors of the article indicate that those skills come from prior experimentation. That is what I’ve observed in my life, too.
One example the authors use is Peter Jackson, who is most known for The Lord of the Rings trilogy and also the billionaire that looks the most like an actual hobbit®. All of Jackson’s previous work had prepared him for his streak, which in this case was The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Originally the studio wanted a product tie-in: Frodo would have connected the keys to JCPenney®, Dillards©, Macy’s™, and all the restaurants in the food court and then tie them to the One Ring. Then they’d have one ring to rule the mall.
What’s the difference between a Halfling and a Hobbit? Copyright.
The work that Jackson had done prior to this was important – it taught him all of the things necessary to make a movie, and making The Lord of the Rings was no ordinary movie, since the movies were all filmed at one time. On top of that, the movie required special effects on a scale that was unprecedented – they had to make Elijah Wood look Frodo-genic.
It was all coupled with Jackson’s fierce devotion to the source material so that the movies would be faithful to Tolkien’s vision. He even explained why the Eagles couldn’t fly the hobbits into Mordor – it turns out they were on tour.
Making the three movies cost around $300,000,000, so there was quite a bit of trust involved. Without his prior experience, no one would have given Peter Jackson the job. Without his prior experiments and his prior failures, he wouldn’t have had the ability to make the film.
But he did have that ability.
Originally Jackson wanted to make a cartoon, but the studio thought that was sketchy.
The movies collectively made nearly $3,000,000,000 (which, for scale, is what we send to the Ukraine every 45 minutes) at the box office, so investing in these films made approximately 10 times the initial investment. The movies weren’t just popular with people, they were popular at the awards, winning 17 out of 30 Oscars® and getting positive reviews and not getting slapped by Will Smith.
By nearly any measure, these are three of the best films ever made, so I’d call that a pretty good streak.
Peter Jackson must be driven, because he made hundreds of millions of dollars and still goes to work, but I’m thinking he only works on stuff he wants to work on.
That’s the power of being on a streak. The components are simple: experimentation, finding a challenge worth taking on that the experiments have prepared you for, and then exploiting those skills to take on the challenge at full speed. That’s when the streak starts – the right person is at the right place at the right time.
I started teaching my sons karate when they were young. I don’t know karate – I just enjoy kicking children.
My comment would be to keep experimenting because the experiments will provide skills. And the combination of those skills will, perhaps, lead to opportunities and places that you’d never expect.
I have learned one secret that I’ll share with you about how to make a steak taste better: eat it around a bunch of vegans.
