Anatomy of a breakthroug.., p.1
Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most, page 1
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For Sar, Sam, and Is, who inspire my greatest breakthroughs
INTRODUCTION THE FIRST RULE IS THAT YOU WILL GET STUCK
Brianne Desaulniers was born in Sacramento, California, in 1989. She was homeschooled by her French-Canadian father and American mother and was drawn to Egyptology and magic—but most of all to acting. At age six, she enrolled as the youngest student at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, and three years later appeared in a skit on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. That brief appearance inspired other TV roles, beginning with guest appearances, then minor recurring roles, and eventually starring roles on popular TV shows. Reviewers praised her TV acting, which paved the way for film acting, directing, and writing.
A couple of years later, Desaulniers—now known as Brie Larson—became the seventy-fourth woman to win the Academy Award for Best Actress, the highest award in acting, for her role in Room. In addition to her Oscar, Larson has won more than seventy other acting awards, and the blockbuster title role in Marvel’s Captain Marvel. Larson’s trajectory is the stuff of fairy tales: a precocious start followed by dozens of small steps that culminated in towering success.
The problem with this account of Larson’s career path is that it ignores decades of frustration. Like many actors, Larson was stuck for years before she broke through. She struggled with rejection and body-image concerns and admitted to “feeling ugly” for most of her life. On the home front, her parents divorced, and her mother moved with Larson and her sister, Milaine, to Los Angeles, to be closer to Hollywood. “We had a crappy one-room apartment,” Larson recalled. “The bed came out of the wall and we each had three articles of clothing.” She auditioned hundreds of times for dozens of roles that eluded her, from commercial work to TV gigs.
What makes Larson different from most A-list actors is that she’s transparent about her struggles. On August 13, 2020, she uploaded a fourteen-minute YouTube video titled “Audition Storytime! (pt. 1).” “I thought I’d talk a little bit about my process,” Larson says to the camera, “because I think a lot of the time there’s been a lot of focus on my successes, and not on how hard it was, how much I was rejected; and you never know all of the jobs I didn’t get. So I thought it might be interesting to talk about that.”
The video and its sequel cataloged twenty years of disappointment, beginning with Larson’s first audition for a commercial role at age seven. Jammed into a room with other young hopefuls, Larson was dismissed after spending just a few seconds with the casting director. She sobbed because he didn’t ask her to perform her rehearsed monologue. “Later,” Larson said, “one casting director told my agent I was so bad she’d never bring me in for anything ever again. And she didn’t.” From there, Larson lists the roles she didn’t get: Gossip Girl, The Hunger Games, Tomorrowland, the Star Wars movies, Smart House, Spy Kids, and The Big Bang Theory. Larson punctuates each title with a laugh, but if you pause at the right moments, you see micro-expressions of pain. These aren’t happy memories, and they remain despite her subsequent success.
In the second part of “Audition Storytime,” Larson hits her stride, rattling off dozens of failed auditions. “I got down to the final round,” she says, “on Juno, 13, Brink, Smart House, Tomorrowland, Pitch Perfect, Into the Woods, Youth in Revolt, Peter Pan, Halt and Catch Fire, The Big Bang Theory. Oh my gosh. That’s a lot of heartbreak, folks. Here I am still standing.” The numbers aren’t pretty, Larson admits, but she ends with a note of hope: “I got told no ninety-eight to ninety-nine percent of the time. I know that’s hard to fully wrap your brain around—to think I’ve been on thousands and thousands and thousands of auditions.”
Larson is the embodiment of acting success. She has the awards, the fame, the money, the critical acclaim, and the list of credits. But even she hit walls, by her account, 99 percent of the time. Larson’s YouTube videos attracted hundreds of thousands of views and inspired dozens of media pieces. It was notable because it was so unusual in revealing the wrinkles beneath a journey that from afar appeared unbroken. Getting stuck isn’t a topic that celebrated actors and successes in other fields routinely discuss in such agonizing detail, so we’re often left feeling lonely and isolated when our own paths seem so much bumpier.
* * *
People get stuck in every imaginable area of life. They get stuck in jobs they’d prefer to leave, and in relationships that leave them unfulfilled. They get stuck as writers, artists, composers, athletes, scientists, and entrepreneurs. Sometimes they’re stuck for days, and other times for decades. Sometimes they stumble on breakthroughs, and other times they remain mired for life. We hear relatively little about these stubborn cases of stuckness because we’re bombarded by popular success stories. These successes lead us to believe that other people face fewer barriers than we do. Every now and then a star like Brie Larson will dispel that myth, but most of the time the experience of being stuck seems like a glitch that plagues us more than it does other people. In truth, we all face roadblocks—and being stuck is a feature rather than a bug on the path to success. So why is it so much easier to recognize our own barriers than those that face other people?
There are at least two reasons. The first lies in the headwinds/tailwinds asymmetry, a psychological phenomenon named by researchers Shai Davidai and Tom Gilovich. The asymmetry suggests that we pay far more attention to our barriers (or headwinds) than our blessings (or tailwinds), which leads us to believe that we face more opposition than we actually do. Davidai and Gilovich illustrate the idea with the case of a Scrabble player who draws unfavorable letters. Imagine getting the tiles U, U, I, I, I, Q, and W. Unless you sacrifice a turn to draw fresh letters, you’ll be stuck with those tiles for many rounds. Each time you try to make a word, you’ll ruminate on your bad luck. In contrast, a good draw doesn’t last long. You play the tiles as soon as they hit your rack. The same is true in other contexts. If you’re driving in heavy traffic and pick the slower of two lanes, you’ll watch with frustration as dozens of cars zip by in the other lane, whereas if you were in one of the cars zipping by, you’d be focusing on the road. We also devote more time and energy to barriers because that’s the only way to overcome them. You can’t improve your Scrabble performance or make up for lost time in heavy traffic unless you consider and act on your options.
Davidai and Gilovich also found that while we’re focusing on our own barriers, we tend to overlook the hardships that plague other people. In one experiment, the researchers asked pairs of Cornell University students to play a trivia game. Some of the questions for each contestant were drawn from easy categories—like TV sitcoms and famous cartoons—whereas others were drawn from difficult categories, like Baroque music and Russian literature. After the game, the contestants did a much better job of remembering their opponents’ easy categories than they did their opponents’ difficult categories—a bias they tended not to show when recalling their own questions. This pattern holds in other domains, too. For example, in another study Gilovich showed that people tend to believe taxes and regulations hurt them more than they do other people—even when that isn’t objectively true.
The second reason we believe our barriers are unusual is that it’s difficult to see others’ struggles. People tend to wrestle their demons privately, either behind closed doors or within their own heads, and what we ultimately see is the polished outcome of that process. We see Brie Larson’s Oscar, but not the decades of struggle that preceded the award. Meanwhile, the media devotes far more time to titanic success stories—Roger Federer and Serena Williams; Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg; Meryl Streep and Daniel Day-Lewis—than to the billions of strugglers who are more typical and therefore less interesting. Our social media accounts are similarly cluttered with the most glossy and popular accounts, and even the micro-influencers we follow share refined versions of their lives that skim the best moments and leave the wrinkles behind. Struggle is harder to see in other people’s lives, so we mistakenly believe it troubles us more than it does them.
* * *
In early 2021, Airbnb’s market capitalization topped $100 billion, making it one of the hundred largest publicly traded companies in the world. Its three cofounders, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk, were worth more than $13 billion each. Of those three, Chesky is the face of the company, and its CEO. Like Brie Larson, Chesky has been transparent about Airbnb’s challenges, and his own sticking points as the company grew.
Airbnb was born of necessity. Chesky and Gebbia met in college, and after graduation Chesky moved to Los Angeles, and Gebbia moved to San Francisco. Their postcollege jobs were uninspiring, so Chesky moved into Gebbia’s apartment in San Francisco so they could try their luck as tech entrepreneurs. “At the time, I had one thousand dollars in my bank account and I drove to SF,” Chesky recalled during an interview at Stanford University in 2015.
This was in 2007. Upon arriving
We had this idea that the designers coming to attend the conference needed a place to stay. We had no money, so what if we created a bed-and-breakfast for the design conference? The problem with this idea was we didn’t have any beds—however, we did have three inflatable air beds. This is where we came up with the name Air Bed and Breakfast, and our first site was airbedandbreakfast.com. We ended up hosting three people in our home during the conference, and at the time we thought this was a cool and funny way to make some money.
After this experience, Joe brought in Nathan Blecharczyk—one of his old roommates—and we decided to do this as a company. The core idea was, What if you could book someone’s home just like you could book a hotel room, anywhere in the world?
Put this way, the idea seems like the sort of dinky “business” a few postcollege guys might throw together on a whim. Even Chesky laughed when he began the interview by admitting that a number of people had told him, “Airbnb is the worst idea that has ever worked.”
At first, the company faltered. “We launched three separate times in 2008,” Chesky remembered. After the third launch, the team was introduced to fifteen angel investors. “Seven didn’t respond, four said it ‘didn’t fit with their thesis,’ one said they didn’t like the market, and three just passed.” Chesky and Gebbia funded the company with a string of credit cards that they stored in a baseball-card sleeve and were soon bogged down with more than $30,000 in debt.
Like Brie Larson, Chesky was open about his barriers. In the summer of 2015 he shared screenshots of those original rejection emails in a Medium blog post. They’re peppered with such phrases as “not something we would do here,” “not our area of focus,” “the potential market opportunity did not seem large enough,” and “we’ve always struggled with travel as a category.” Obviously Airbnb weathered these early storms and emerged intact. The team met with dozens of its early hosts to learn what did and didn’t work about the product. That year, the founders lived in Airbnb-hosted apartments to experience the service firsthand. What made the difference between a three-star experience, a five-star experience, and—as Chesky likes to call a sublime review—“a seven-star experience”? Airbnb eventually grew, first in New York, and then in other US cities, and investors began to take the company seriously. The company raised $620,000 in 2009, $7 million in 2010, and $112 million in 2011. Despite its many hiccups, most people most of the time focus on the company’s successful destination rather than the barriers that hampered its journey.
Airbnb isn’t unusual in its bumpy path to prosperity. Take another behemoth, Amazon, and you’ll find the same hurdles. Dan Rose managed retail divisions at Amazon from 1999 to 2006 and helped launch the Kindle. In September 2020, Rose posted a thread of tweets recalling how the company teetered shortly after he joined, in November 1999:
Amazon launched in July 1995, and every Xmas was a near death experience for the first 7 years. I joined in ’99 and got to experience this first hand. Starting in late Nov, all corporate employees were shipped to fulfillment centers to pack boxes for 6 weeks. Here’s what I saw:
Despite efforts to plan ahead, the company literally couldn’t keep up with holiday demand. 40% of all annual orders would come through in 6 weeks from Thanksgiving through New Year’s…. Xmas ’95, every employee including [CEO Jeff] Bezos packs boxes for 6 straight weeks, then vows to never let that happen again…. By the time I joined in ’99 it was an annual tradition….
Picking items, packing boxes, wrapping gifts for 10 hours/day x 6 days/week is fucking hard work. I have immense appreciation for the people who do these jobs. Your legs ache, your eyes go blurry…. [It’s] exhausting.
Jeff Bezos ultimately brought in Jeff Wilke, who saved the growing company from itself. Wilke’s background in manufacturing gave him the tools to turn Amazon’s warehouses into finely tuned machines, ultimately allowing the company to promise the same-day and next-day delivery options that fueled its Prime membership service. Wilke’s role was so instrumental in Amazon’s success that he ultimately became the company’s CEO of worldwide consumer business—a position that placed him second in charge behind only Bezos himself. In an interview Wilke gave shortly before he retired in January 2021, he remembered those early days when Amazon’s fulfillment process was stuck:
So I took the playbook that I had, which came from manufacturing, and implemented it in retail. It was really the first time that some of these techniques had been applied in a retail environment. And fortunately, they worked, [producing] very short cycle times, lower waste, lower defects. And that’s what enabled us to launch Prime. Prime is basically a subscription to this.
What we focus on is Amazon’s immense success, rather than its struggles. But what might have happened in an alternate reality where the company failed to overcome these early hurdles? In this universe, like so many other fledgling companies, Amazon might have collapsed beneath the weight of its own success. By its third or fourth holiday period, in the late 1990s, this alt-Amazon was receiving hundreds of thousands of online book orders. Its ersatz fulfillment team was forced to work twenty-plus hours a day to keep up with demand. Many orders arrived late, and customers were furious. Kids were denied the latest Harry Potter book on Christmas morning, and their parents were left without Stephen King’s holiday bestseller. The company had gone public in May 1997, but by 1998 or 1999 its stock price tanked in the wake of terrible reviews. (Even in reality, many early reviews of the company were quite negative. Slate called the company “Amazon.con,” and the Wall Street Journal called it “Amazon.bomb.”) By the early 2000s, alt-Amazon imploded. And since it no longer captured the attention of major newspapers, websites, and reviewers, its struggles faded from view. The company was stuck, but, as with the thousands of other companies that close every day, nobody was there to document its decline.
The bottom line is that entrepreneurial struggles are hard to see regardless of whether a business succeeds or fails. Success eclipses the struggles that preceded it, while failure is so commonplace that it tends to escape our attention. Instead, we’re exposed to story after story about Apple, Google, Facebook, Netflix, and an elite group of similarly exceptional successes.
* * *
Brie Larson, Airbnb, and Amazon are just three examples, but you don’t need to cherry-pick. Just dig one or two layers deep into our culture’s most prominent success stories and you’ll find frustrated protagonists. A young Fred Astaire complained of being stuck after a Hollywood producer rejected him with the statement “Can’t act. Slightly bald. Dances a little.” When Walt Disney’s first studio, Laugh-O-Gram, went into bankruptcy, he endured five years of inertia before designing a cartoon mouse who would go on to become his new studio’s mascot. Photorealist painter Chuck Close suffered what he called “the event” in 1988—a seizure that partially paralyzed him from the waist down. For decades his hyperrealistic paintings had relied on fine motor movements that were now impossible. Close was initially despondent, but in time he learned to paint in a new, expressive style with a brush strapped to his wrist. As he emerged from the fog of grief, Close famously claimed, “Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work.”
Closer to home for me, stories of chronic writer’s block are legion. Ralph Ellison wrote the classic bestseller Invisible Man in 1952 and failed to write a follow-up before his death in 1994, more than half a lifetime later. During those four decades, he amassed two thousand pages of notes for his planned second novel and complained to his friend and fellow writer Saul Bellow that he “had a writer’s block as big as the Ritz.” Harper Lee flirted with a similar fate. She published To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960, at age thirty-four, and only published its sequel, Go Set a Watchman, in 2015, a year before her death at age eighty-nine. Though much of Watchman was written in the mid-1950s, before Mockingbird was published, Lee “polished” the manuscript for fifty-five years. “I’ve found I can’t write,” she told a friend. “I have about three hundred personal friends who keep dropping in for a cup of coffee. I’ve tried getting up at six, but then all the six o’clock risers congregate.”
