CHAPTER 8
The Knowledge Is Like a Toothache: The Value of Taking the Long Way
WHAT IF YOU needed to water some flowers on the far side of the yard? Would you grab the hose and go, or would you walk the whole distance first to clear a path so that the hose didn’t get snagged on the way?
Most of us grab and go. And we always get snagged. The first, fastest, and most direct response is not the best or easiest solution.
When we have a problem we want an answer. We want it right now. We want it on schedule. But the answer is not going to come to you sitting at your desk when you summon it. It’s not in the box marked “Answers.” Your answer is on your pillow, it’s in the park, it’ll come to you while you are whistling to kill time waiting in line for lunch. The best answers are found when you put the problem down, give yourself time and space, change your context, and give your brain the opportunity to make connections and see what’s possible.
Your best answer is not a pizza. It is not going to be delivered within thirty minutes. But it will come. And when it does, it will be more than you imagined you were capable of doing—and even better than pizza.
What should you do with the problem that’s staring you in the face right now? Get up, physically get up from where you are stumped. Now, put down the problem. Think about something else, anything else. And give yourself some time. If you can look away now, it will lead to a lifetime of answers.
* * *
FROM THE NAME, it sounds like the title of a new television quiz show. But more than any game show, it’s excruciating and dramatic and brings grown men to their knees.
It’s The Knowledge.
Pass the test and the prize is a coveted license to drive a taxi in London.
What is The Knowledge? It’s everything a taxi driver is required to know—and a driver is required to know everything.
It begins with knowing every street within six miles of the center of London. Every street. Every main road, every side street, every one-way segment of a street. Every street that intersects with every other street, and in what order. There are, in the center of London, a mere 26,000 streets to contend with.
One more thing about London streets. There’s no logic to them. There’s no symmetrical grid of streets of like lengths and predictable intersections. And there is no sequential set of street names. There’s no such thing as a self-evident relationship between streets, as there is in the case of Manhattan’s Forty-second Street, which is forty blocks south of Eighty-second Street, and Fifth Avenue, which is three blocks east of Eighth Avenue. Instead, the streets of London are haphazardly named and crisscross each other like the contents of a bowl full of spaghetti dropped on the floor.
And then there are the landmarks. A driver is expected to know Big Ben, and Buckingham Palace, and the London Bridge—but also every museum, restaurant, hotel, hospital. It adds up to more than 186,000 locations. A driver needs to know what street these landmarks are on, and which side of the street, and then calculate the best way to get there from any starting point in the city.
The Knowledge test itself takes place in a small office, with a single test taker appearing before the examiner. The applicant wears dress clothes, addresses the examiner as “Sir,” and must not be even a moment late.
The examiner enters, looking like a skeptical cop who doesn’t quite believe your story. “You can smell if people have what is needed,” said Alan Price, a veteran examiner.
The examiner proceeds to open his file and states a starting point and a destination. The prospective driver must then lay out the best route in perfect detail, narrating through each turn and every landmark on the way using only the map he’s created in his head.
While the applicant sweats and strains against a mistake, the examiner sits imperiously waiting for an error, with an actual map at his side.
It is all so nerve-racking, “When a guy leaves this office, he won’t even remember his own name,” Price said.
Even so, the process is not over. Far from it. After successfully creating routes to four destinations selected by the examiner, the applicant is sent away. Come back in three or five or eight weeks, and answer another set of questions, he is told.
The process continues with session after session after session spread out over well more than a year. “The Knowledge is like a toothache,” Price admitted. “It doesn’t go away.”
Why does it take so long to take the test?
Though it is a very strange system—and reportedly a 450-year-old relic from a time when even an English baron couldn’t find someone who knew the streets of London—it is also a remarkably effective one.
Imagine the fate of a prospective driver who tried to learn all of London in one sitting. The problem would be overwhelming. Anyone would give up against the enormity of the task.
But street by street, day by day, it can be done.
And now we can even watch as the brain does it.
Researchers at University College London’s Institute of Neurology were curious what driving a London taxi and preparing for The Knowledge does to a human brain. Cab drivers, many inclined to believe that they were a breed apart and richly deserving of a researcher’s attention, gladly lined up to have their brains scanned.
With MRI scans taken throughout the process, researchers could see the hippocampus in drivers’ brains grow as they studied to acquire The Knowledge and as they became more experienced drivers.
The hippocampus is the part of the brain that guides navigation. It is larger in birds and animals that depend upon keen navigation skills for survival. As these cab drivers built their mental map of the city, their brains grew to preserve those maps.
Interestingly, this doesn’t happen for bus drivers, who drive through the same streets over and over again so have no need for a comprehensive map of the city in their heads. It doesn’t happen for average residents of the city, who must nevertheless try to find their way across the city. It happens only for taxi drivers, who have both an urgency to learn and a built-in pacing mechanism.
London could not be learned overnight. Any driver who tried would immediately give up. But the time between test appearances makes it possible. The time between tests puts the brain to work on the task instead of allowing the brain to become overwhelmed.
As examiner Price explained, “The Knowledge is like a big jug of water and your brain is like a cup. You pour it in slowly so you don’t lose it. The Knowledge never stops.”
On the surface, The Knowledge is just a really, really hard geography test. But drivers tend to see it as something much grander, because you learn more than that. You learn what you are capable of if you don’t stare straight at the problem.
* * *
IT WASN’T JUST that Linus Pauling made contributions to organic chemistry and inorganic chemistry and quantum mechanics and molecular biology and medicine. It was the way he saw intersections between these fields no one else saw and in the process forever redefined what we know.
His insights into the chemical bond that links atoms into molecules—molecules that are the basis of all physical matter—was a foundational finding that won him a 1954 Nobel Prize, and which has shaped our understanding of chemistry, biology, and physics for generations.
Applying his own findings, Pauling discovered the molecular basis of disease and ushered in a breakthrough in treatment of sickle-cell anemia and other conditions.
Meanwhile, eight years after he won the Nobel for chemistry, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. Pauling remains the only person to win two, unshared Nobel Prizes, and the only person to win the Peace Prize and a Nobel in a scientific field.
How, exactly, does one become a latter-day Renaissance man like Pauling?
Happily, Pauling loved to write and speak about the process of thinking big thoughts and finding big answers. First, he said, breakthroughs are not simply a matter of collecting the best minds and assuming that they will produce the best answers. In fact, in total seriousness he told audiences that there were at least two hundred thousand Americans smarter than him. Nevertheless, it was unlikely those two hundred thousand were going to change the face of chemistry, or biology, or would need to clear space on their mantel for the Nobels they would win.
Second, Pauling said, great scientific advances aren’t like building the Great Wall of China, each day adding a tiny bit to what was there the day before. Instead, scientific advances come in big, swirling new directions that leave us seemingly going in circles before we burst forward with a new discovery.
Third, and most importantly, Pauling believed that working nonstop on any project limited the kind of insights he could arrive at. From one hour to the next, from one day to the next, he was likely to keep doing similar work and keep finding similar results. Doing this was like standing as a nightwatchman, guarding your ideas lest any new ones emerge. Which is why Pauling’s advice to anyone trying to do something big amounted to three words: Put it down.
Pauling said he didn’t do his best thinking in a laboratory, a classroom, the library, or during any great scientific meeting. It was in bed. It was away from the work and the details and the complications. In bed, as he drifted off to sleep, he set his mind free to try out new ideas and to seek new answers.
Working at the intersection of several fields, Pauling believed that he could combine ideas and principles in an infinite number of ways to seek a discovery. Most of those combinations—nearly all of them—were utterly useless. But Pauling believed that his mind, if unconstrained and unpressured, could sift and sort through those combinations without his active direction. And if something proved interesting, that idea would bubble up to conscious attention.
As Pauling extolled the virtue of letting the mind do its work, he hastened to tell students or anyone in his audience that the process of setting the mind free, of letting the imagination stretch to its capacity, was important for the scientist but just as vital “for the worker in any other field.” For the poet, for the salesperson, for the car mechanic, a mind free to puzzle something over was sure to see past the limits placed on it when facing a problem directly.
For Pauling, it was this freedom to step away that continually took him past the problem he was working on and to the answer. Like the cab drivers who needed to give their minds time to grow, Pauling needed to give his mind the free time to grasp his next great idea.
* * *
YOU STEP INTO a small, plain room.
You see a chair, a table, and a bell.
You were told that this was the “surprise room,” but so far it’s not really living up to its name.
You are shown a box of toys and told you can play with those later. But first, would you like a treat?
You answer yes. Of course you would, because this study takes place when you’re four years old.
The nice man you met in your preschool class explains that he’s going to leave you alone for a few minutes. But if you want him to come back, all you have to do is ring the bell, and he will. You practice a couple of times. He goes out the door. You ring the bell. He comes right back. You do all that a second and then a third time.
Then the man reaches under the table and picks up a plate. He puts it on the table. There’s a marshmallow on it.
The man says that if you can sit in the chair, and not get up, and wait until he comes back, then you can have two marshmallows.
Or, you can ring the bell anytime you want and he’ll come right back. But if you ring the bell, you can only have one marshmallow.
The man explains the whole thing a second time.
Then he asks if you know what you will get if you wait. He asks how to get him to come back. He asks how many marshmallows you get if you ring the bell.
You answer his questions. He says that’s right. And then he leaves.
He leaves you alone with that marshmallow.
What do you do?
You want to wait. Two marshmallows are better than one. But waiting is so hard. You want that marshmallow now. Right now.
There’s the bell. Right in front of you. Ring it and the wait is over. Ring it and you can have a marshmallow.
Do you stare at the marshmallow? Does your mouth water? Are you thinking about how much fun it is to eat one? How tasty it will be?
Do you touch it? Poke it? Pick it up?
You can’t go anywhere. You can’t do anything. You can’t even get out of your chair.
You could try to pass the time. Tap your feet. Or tug on your hair a bit. There’s no one else to talk to, but you could talk to yourself. Maybe sing a little.
But the minutes tick by slowly. You’re still in there. All alone. With the marshmallow. With the bell. You want to ring it. Waiting is no fun.
The force of the marshmallow proved to be too powerful for most kids. In fact, 70 percent of the four-year-olds who went through one of Walter Mischel’s marshmallow experiments gave up waiting and gave up their chance for a second one.1
One of the many striking patterns Mischel uncovered in various versions of the marshmallow test is that the key to successfully waiting was being able to mentally put the marshmallow aside.
Staring at the marshmallow and longing to eat it was a disastrous strategy. Singing the ABC song to yourself or pretending to be a cowboy, on the other hand, reduced the seductive power of that little ball of gelatinous goop.
Mischel saw this in his observations. The ones who gave up the fastest never took their focus off the marshmallow. The ones who lasted the longest “reduced their frustration during the delay period by selectively directing their attention and thoughts away from the rewards.” In other words, they didn’t focus on the problem.
He tested this conclusion by having the researcher give a new set of children one additional instruction before he left the room. To one group he provided transformational ideas. Think of that marshmallow as a cloud, or the moon. Think about playing in the clouds.
To the other group, the last thing the researcher said before stepping out the door was: Think about how marshmallows taste, how soft and sticky they are, how much fun they are to eat.
The average child in the cloud group lasted 13.5 minutes without ringing the bell. The typical child in the sticky and sweet group lasted 5.6 minutes.2
The sticky and sweet group was focused on the problem, and the problem quickly consumed them. The cloud group was given a way around thinking about the problem. They were given a break from it, and in the process they were freed of it.
That’s the difference between paying close, relentless attention to a problem and casting your eyes away from the problem. An abstract focus leaves you patient and free, ready for a solution. An arousing, direct focus makes the problem overwhelming and unsolvable.
To function well, in the marshmallow test or in making any decision, we have to voluntarily postpone immediate gratification. It always feels better to pounce than to linger. But pouncing leaves us vulnerable. There’s no way around the temptation of the marshmallow or the trap of the problem when we pounce.
Mischel thought that he had gleaned all he could from kids and marshmallows. But then he stumbled on a pattern that stunned him. Asking after the high school friends of his daughters, he came to think that many of these teenagers—who a decade earlier had been in the local preschool where he conducted his experiment—could be readily sorted based on how they had done on the marshmallow test. That is, those who waited for the second marshmallow seemed to be doing much better in school.
A full follow-up study confirmed his observation. The children who waited were more resilient, better able to handle stress, more self-assured, better at making plans and following through. They were, in short, still getting the outcomes they wanted and still displaying the patience and perseverance that guided them as preschoolers.
While many of the measures Mischel used were rather subjective, when he looked into his subjects’ SAT scores he had the cold hard data that researchers crave. The difference between children who shortsightedly gave up and children who waited it out for the second marshmallow amounted to 210 points on the SAT. To put that into perspective, that is about the difference between being admitted to Yale University and being admitted to the State University of New York at Binghamton.
These patterns continued on as the preschoolers became adolescents and then adults. Those who had waited for the second marshmallow lived healthier lives as adults, were less likely to have a criminal record, had higher incomes, had greater feelings of self-worth, and were generally better able to cope with the challenges of life.3
For the marshmallow kids no less than Linus Pauling or the cab drivers, a bit of patience and the ability to look away moved them past the problem they were facing and let their minds work for them instead of against them.
* * *
VANESSA SELBST IS the most successful female player in poker history and among the most prominent and highly regarded players of either sex. When tennis great and poker enthusiast Rafael Nadal wanted to take on a top-level poker player, he squared off against Selbst. And she beat him. Handily.
She rose to the top of the game with a head for numbers and a fearlessness that’s made her a master of sliding all her chips into the center of the table and betting her tournament life. It’s a bet she likes to make even when her hand is weak.
Selbst developed both her passion for the game and her approach while she was a college student. Suddenly there was a deluge of poker on ESPN and other channels. And she was hooked.
Selbst was captivated by the fact that players came out of nowhere to win major tournaments—and millions of dollars.
And she was fascinated by the perspective into the game she could gain by watching. Watching on television, Selbst could see everyone’s cards, while each player knew only his own. It gave her a window into the way players think individually and into the collective rhythm of it all. There was no other competition she had ever seen where the viewer could know so much more than the competitor about what’s going on—and where the viewer could effectively train to beat that player just by watching.
There were, of course, countless hands where not much happened. One player had good cards and placed a big bet. The others had weak cards and quickly folded. But what interested Selbst was what happened when a player with weak cards tried to change the script. She saw a player storm back from barely holding onto his seat to become the chip leader on the strength of betting all he had on terrible cards. She watched his opponents—sitting with better cards and more chips—cower against him. They ran for the hills, and he collected the pot. After pulling this trick off three times, he had the chips and the swagger—and, soon enough, the tournament.
Selbst loved that poker was played at the intersection of math and psychology. You needed to know the odds of each scenario. How likely are you to get an ace here, or a club, or a pair. But more than that, you needed to understand human behavior. If you can figure out how others will react to what you do, you can dominate a game in which you can pretend to have anything at all.
Because more than what you actually have, poker is contested over the cards others think you have. Which to Selbst meant that the only way to win in poker was to be aggressive. “The aggressive player defines the hand,” she said. “Everybody else is reacting and therefore vulnerable.”
Reacting makes you vulnerable—not only because it allows the hand to progress on the aggressive player’s terms but because it gives the aggressive player an easier read on what cards her opponent is most likely to have.
Even when Selbst finds an aggressive competitor in a game, she reasserts herself. When someone raises a bet against her—an aggressive move—she loves to reraise by several multiples more. “It makes people play a certain way against me. They don’t want to reraise against me because they have no idea what I really have,” she said. “That’s a terrifying position to be in, and that’s exactly what I want them to feel.”
While she honed her strategy, Selbst continued to make relentless study of the competition and even of herself. She realized that in the heat of the moment, players make a default assumption that others will tend to react just as they do. Selbst saw this in herself as well.
“One of my leaks is thinking other players are as crazy as I am,” she said. “Which means in a situation in which 95 percent of players would have a pair of aces but I would probably be bluffing, my first thought is the other guy is bluffing because that’s what I would be doing.”
Selbst has trained herself to overcome this reflexive reaction by taking just a slight pause when she’s trying to read another player. She imagines getting up from her position and seeing things from the other player’s seat. It’s the patience to take that pause and look away from her cards—to stifle her own impulse and see something more—that makes the difference between an ordinary poker player and an extraordinary one. “You can’t play like you are playing against yourself,” she said. “Try to see it as someone else sees it, not as you see it. Other people are terrible at this—which is a great advantage for me.”
* * *
“IT WASN’T EXACTLY anyone’s idea of a happy, healthy childhood,” Will readily admits.
Will and his sister Kim endured an angry, aggressive mother and a distant father who was out of the house most of the time and out of sight the rest.
“It just did not really matter what you did,” Will said. “Either way, she was going to be on the attack. If you brought home good marks from school she would start right in with, ‘So, you think you’re better than me, huh?’ But if you brought home bad marks, it would be, ‘I always said you were a lazy bastard, never going to amount to much.’”
When Will and Kim were very young, they were stung and confused by the withering criticism and the total lack of physical affection. As they grew older, they tried to avoid their mother’s attentions and just hoped to endure life at home until the day they could move out.
Embarrassment at how they lived led Will to try to keep his schoolmates at a distance. “I never wanted anyone to come over because I didn’t want her to lay into me in front of somebody,” he said. “I didn’t want anyone to see that.”
Through it all, at least, Will and Kim had each other. Each served as the other’s sympathetic ear, shoulder to cry on, advocate, and coconspirator. “We survived together,” he said. “I really thought we’d be close forever.”
After they made it out, however, a distance opened up between them. “I guess we looked at each other and saw the past, what we had been through and what we were trying to escape,” Will said.
They were polite, they were respectful, but Will and Kim treated each other more like work colleagues than treasured siblings.
It may have been uninspiring, but their adult relationship was functional for more than twenty years until they faced decisions about the long-term care of their father.
With their mother having passed away, their father rattled around for years in the family house. But he was losing his grip on independence. He needed help getting groceries and making meals and keeping the house up. He needed someone to keep his medications straight, and he needed prodding to remember to take them.
“We disagreed about what to do for him, and we disagreed about who would do what,” Will said. “It was a stressful situation, and it didn’t help that we were back in that house, feeling it all come back to us, caring for the man who had stood by and never done anything to make our lives tolerable for us. And now here we were turning our lives upside down to make life tolerable for him.”
They didn’t have the heart to take out a lifetime of resentment on him, though. And they couldn’t take it out on their mother. So they chose the only target they could, each other.
They sniped at each other over schedules, unfinished chores, and even over whether they were being cheerful enough around their father.
Will moved something. Kim spent the day looking for it and then chewed him out about his thoughtlessness.
“And the pettiness just grew into something worse,” he said, “until we were screaming at each other like two drunks in a bar.”
The irony of the situation was not lost on him. “We had to grow old before our time,” Will said. “But now that we’re adults, we’re acting like children.”
Things calmed to the point where they simply stopped speaking to each other. But the pain of the war against his sister wore on Will every day. “I thought back to all those times when we were little, huddled under the desk in her room while we waited out another one of Mom’s storms,” he said. “Kim was the one person in my life who would smile at me, hug me, encourage me. Now we couldn’t even talk about the weather.”
Will tried to find a way to make peace with Kim. Will’s wife and Kim’s husband were enlisted as go-betweens. But back and forth they went into their old house and their old pain, and out they came each time unable to see each other as they once did.
Nothing seemed to help, until an assignment at work forced Will to pull out of their shared caregiving schedule. He worried that his relationship with his sister would get even worse as he left her to deal with their father without his help.
Instead, the time apart initiated a healing process for the siblings.
Weeks later, Kim invited Will over to her house, where he had seldom been even before their fights began. She said to him, “If Mom could see us right now, she’d say, ‘I was right about those two.’” She added, “I’m not going to let that happen.” And with little more than a smile and a hug, there was an entirely different feeling between them.
As with the pause that helped Vanessa Selbst get a better read on her opponents, Will and Kim emerged from time apart better able to see past the problem right in front of them.
“In the middle of it, we just couldn’t stop being that way,” Will said. “You can make something better if you just stop everything.”
THE TAKEAWAY
Your brain—given time and space—can see past the problems that are right in front of you. It can heal wounded relationships, conquer opponents in poker, solve the mysteries of molecules. As any London cab driver can tell you, your brain—given time and space—can transform itself and let you conquer any test.
More than that, your brain can transform your life by letting you see past the marshmallow right in front of you to the things that lie beyond. Children who looked away from the problem right in front of them went on to score 210 points higher on the SAT, and, what’s more, they led better, easier lives as adults.
Taking a step back from your problem and looking away—instead of pouncing on it—is like baking a cake instead of just eating each ingredient separately. It will take you longer, but you’ll wind up with something much better in the end.
TWO FOR THE ROAD: SEEING FARTHER
“Learn to play the violin” was business guru Peter Drucker’s memorable and surprising advice on how to best prepare to run a company. What he meant was that we need to be able to think across different subjects and nurture a larger vision. We need to be able to access more than one way of looking at something and take the time to add the pieces together. We need, in short, to cultivate seemingly unrelated strengths. Start learning something today that is totally unrelated to your work and family life, and it will teach you something vital about the things that are most important to you.
Get out of your cubicle. Researchers put people in an actual box and asked them to perform some creative word tasks. Others did the exact same task outside the box.4 The outside-the-boxers did 20 percent better. Get out of your confined space, be it cubicle, kitchen table, car, or wherever you are staring down a problem. Go where it is open—outside, in a big room, next to a giant window. Confinement confines ideas.