CHAPTER 9
Dark, Soft, Smooth, and Slow: The Power of Opposites
WHAT IF YOU wanted to build the best team in baseball? You would start with the best players, right?
If you assembled the highest-paid players in baseball for your team—those judged by general managers and owners to be the best in the game—you might be in for a surprise.
In 2013, three of the four highest-paid players in Major League Baseball were—to be blunt—worthless.
The three performed so modestly that the average minor leaguer could have done just as well—though those minor leaguers would cost only 1/63rd as much in salary.
Counterintuitively, if you wanted to be the best team, you would be far better off avoiding those commonly thought to be the best players.
When you are stumped by a problem—when the only thought you can abide is that this is a problem that cannot be solved—you have to open your mind to opposites. Flip the situation on its head. Consider the possibility that the obvious negative is really a positive. Within opposites we find our most creative selves.
* * *
IT WAS A hot day. A very hot day. At that time, air-conditioning was not yet a common feature in houses—and this particular California July day was scorching.
When his colleague arrived, the first thing Bob Wells told him was, “I am so hot today. I jumped in the pool, took a cold shower. I tried everything I could think of, and nothing worked.”
Mel Tormé just nodded and sweated. The two men worked well at Wells’s house in Toluca Lake, but Tormé thought that houses in the valley were 10 degrees warmer than everywhere else in southern California.
Wells handed Tormé a piece of paper and told him he had tried one more thing to cool off. “I sat down and wrote these few lines as an experiment,” Wells said, “to see if thinking about winter scenes would do the job.”
A Southern California winter being insufficiently cold, Wells imagined he was back in the East, living through a real New York City winter again.
Tormé looked at the sheet. On it he read, “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose, Yuletide carols being sung by a choir, and folks dressed up like Eskimos.”
Wells apologetically said that the only winter thoughts he could keep in his head were of Christmas. The lines, he said, were just a throwaway, scribbled down for his own amusement in his failed attempt to beat the heat.
Tormé disagreed. He saw the makings of a song here. And since Tormé and Wells were under contract to produce new songs each month, they wasted no time following through.
Tormé sat down at the piano and began tinkering with some ideas. He tried out possible melody lines and chords. Meanwhile, Wells started building on the first verse.
As they sat there sweating in Wells’s house, thinking about winter in July, within forty minutes they had “The Christmas Song.”
They took it first to Nat King Cole. Tormé played the entire song for him, and Cole was ecstatic. He insisted that he be the first singer to record it. “That’s my song,” he told them. “Do you hear me? That is my song.”
While their record company boss had initially dismissed it as a “one-day song,” noting “No one is going to buy a song that’s only good one day a year,” Cole’s enthusiasm won out.
Cole recorded it in 1946 and again in 1953 with the full orchestral backing that became the standard version we still know today. The song was a great hit for Cole, and for the songwriting team of Tormé and Wells. More than that, it has endured to become a holiday institution as the most recorded and most frequently played Christmas song ever.
How did they evoke the simple joy of the holiday? How did they create something that envelops you in such a specific feeling and transports you? Wells credits the lure of the song, and its resulting staying power, to the upside-down fact that they wrote it in July.
“If we wrote a Christmas song in December, there would be nothing memorable at all about it,” he said. “We would have been surrounded by Christmas, by Christmas songs, by Christmas lines and Christmas hassles, and there would be nothing particularly magic in it. The moment would feel mundane to us and the song would be mundane.”
Wells said that there is a difference between seeing something up close and seeing it straight on. “You don’t write about a mountain from inside the mountain,” he said. “If you did, you’d never get what people feel about it right.”
Wells said that “the song is a true celebration of the Christmas season because that’s what we felt when we wrote it” on that sweltering July day in Toluca Lake, when Christmas was just a dream to them.
* * *
DRUG USE IS a plague that can destroy people, families, communities, and even entire countries. What do you do about it?
You attack it with everything you have. It’s a crime, so you bring in the police, make arrests, take the problem off the streets, and put those people in jail.
But the drug problem doesn’t go away. It gets worse. What do you do?
Attack the problem harder. More police. More arrests. Longer prison sentences. All this is enormously expensive. It costs money and takes human effort. Today, every American state spends more on its jails than on its universities. When you have a clear enemy, you fight it with everything you have.
But what if the problem still doesn’t go away? It only gets worse. Now what do you do? In most countries, the answer is obvious. Fight harder.
Not everybody saw things that way. “If what you are doing doesn’t work, why keep doing it?” asks Dr. João Goulão, the head of antidrug efforts for the Portuguese government. Indeed, he noted that one highly cited definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Dr. Goulão and other government leaders opposed making an ever-increasing commitment to the tactics that were losing the battle. In fact, like Bob Wells and Mel Tormé seeing Christmas from a different light in July, Dr. Goulão and his colleagues wanted to wage their drug fight from the opposite direction.
Instead of more police and longer prison sentences, they proposed decriminalization of drug possession. “It’s like we were banging our heads with a hammer to get rid of a headache,” he said. “If that doesn’t work, the answer isn’t a bigger hammer.”
Decriminalization! Critics howled. Drugs, already a scourge, would take over the country and make it uninhabitable. You don’t take something wrong and essentially give it a government endorsement.
Dr. Goulão had an answer. Police and punishment—condemnation—these were never the goal. The goal—from the start—had always been reducing the use of drugs. If drug possession is decriminalized, he said, the country could put its resources into treatment. What’s more, those in need of help would have no reason to hide in the shadows in fear of punishment if they sought a way out of drugs.
Ten years later, the drug numbers in Portugal are astonishing. Deaths from drug overdoses have fallen by 27 percent. New cases of HIV from drug use have fallen 71 percent. Overall drug use has fallen by 50 percent. Portugal now has the lowest rate of drug use in Europe. Portuguese people today are only one-fourth as likely to use drugs as Americans. “There is no doubt the phenomenon of addiction is in decline in Portugal,” Dr. Goulão said, as every single researcher came to the same conclusion.
Dr. Goulão takes all this not as a personal triumph but as a triumph for the families affected. “It is impossible to overstate what this means for families in Portugal,” he said. “Think of the mothers and fathers who are providing for their children today because they are not using, because they are not in jail. Our society is stronger today because of this.”
Today, more than twenty nations have some form of drug decriminalization, though generally it is far more limited than Portugal’s approach. Still, none of those countries has seen drug use go up in response to decriminalization.
Just as he once ignored his critics, today Dr. Goulão shrugs off those who praise him for having the courage and vision to turn drug policy on its head. “I am a doctor. Success to me is not how hard I work, or how many treatments I try on a patient, success to me is a healthy patient,” he said. “If you look at drug use that way, the important thing isn’t what you do, it’s what happens. And what’s happened is we have a healthier country now.”
* * *
YOU’RE GOING TO be read a list of words. After each word, please respond with the next word that comes to mind.
It is important that you understand that there are no right or wrong answers. It is, however, essential that you respond each time with the very first word that comes to mind. Just say the word the moment it comes into your head. Again, there’s no way to fail the test and no way to win on it, either. Just let your mind work without inhibition. Don’t try to edit yourself.
And then the words start coming at you. What do you say?
“Dark.”
“Soft.”
“Smooth.”
“Slow.”
“Beautiful.”
“High.”
“Trouble.”
“Hard.”
“Justice.”
“Light.”
“Free.”
“Bitter.”
“Long.”
“Joy.”
“Quiet.”
And on the list went for eighty-five more words.
Psychologists had been sorting through word association responses for generations, searching for insights into our personalities and proclivities. It wasn’t until Albert Rothenberg developed his approach that anyone came up with a reliable way to use the test to gauge a person’s capacity for creativity and finding answers.
Before Rothenberg, researchers counted up the number of unusual responses and theorized that odd word choices told us something about creativity. But unusual responses, it turned out, told us more about the size of a person’s vocabulary than about the capacity to produce inventive answers.
Rothenberg developed a theory that creative responses are fed by the ability to conceive of contradictory concepts, ideas, and images. Holding opposing views at the same time gives a person the ability to see a situation from multiple angles. Those varied perspectives, then, dramatically increase the odds of identifying a unique or surprising solution.
In the case of word association, Rothenberg believed that the more often a respondent said a word directly opposite in meaning to the word read by the tester, the more likely it was that he or she was capable of creativity.
He tested this assumption by comparing the responses of people who regularly engaged in creative projects to those who did not. Rothenberg’s assumptions were correct. The creative group replied with opposites 25 percent more often than the noncreative group—and gave the answers 12 percent faster.1
Rothenberg ran the test again and again, pairing off not just people who engaged in the creative arts but those who held creative leadership positions in business settings. Each time, the more creative group replied with a greater number of opposites.2 He even collected responses from a dozen Nobel laureates—who turned out to give the greatest number of opposites in the shortest time of any group he ever tested.
In all these creative individuals, Rothenberg found that the speed of their responses when they replied with opposites was so great that these responses had to be summoned spontaneously. In other words, these subjects naturally classified a word with its opposites—holding two opposing notions right next to each other in their minds.
In interviews he conducted with novelists, poets, and other writers, Rothenberg was struck by the degree to which they held conflicting premises in the center of their thoughts. They worked with abstract and concrete ideas at the same time. They conceived of both the good and the bad within a person. They tolerated conflict, and it allowed them to find something new, something more. Indeed, Rothenberg found that it was by giving equal value to opposing beliefs that the writers were able to produce surprising and unique writing.
One of the fascinating elements of Rothenberg’s results is that neither the use of opposites nor the degree of creativity a person demonstrates is related to intelligence. Rothenberg separately gave IQ tests to subjects who took the word association test—and IQ proved to have nothing to do with the use of opposites or the capacity to be creative. Similarly, when working with students, Rothenberg collected their SAT scores. Again, higher scores had no effect on creative capacity.
We often think creative solutions are the province of certain kinds of people. They are not. We can be creative, we can come up with the answer to anything, if we let ourselves. How many opposites did you use? If you had more than seven, you would have been in Rothenberg’s creative group. Regardless of your number, you must keep your mind open to opposites. Open your mind to seeing past what is right in front of you, and answers will come.
When you have a problem, it plops down right in front of you. It’s so easy to see that it almost demands we look at it. But if your mind is open to opposites, that means you can be simultaneously flummoxed by a problem and yet maintain the belief that the problem can be solved. You can see the problem right in front of you but also see around it to what’s next. In fact, Rothenberg found that the bigger the opposite concept you can accept, the bigger the creative, inventive thoughts you will produce. Or, put another way, the larger the problem you can ignore and the bigger the answer you can find.
* * *
WHEN PAUL WELLSTONE asked Bill Hillsman to make commercials for his U.S. Senate campaign, Wellstone had no money and no name recognition, and he was down more than 30 points in the polls. He was, in a word, hopeless.
But Hillsman, who loves a good challenge, jumped at the opportunity.
While other professionals in the campaign worked feverishly to overcome the money problem and make Wellstone appear more mainstream and senatorial, Hillsman saw things very differently.
Hillsman believed that political handlers were trapped in the same tired set of assumptions. They ran these paint-by-numbers campaigns in which they did the same things over and over again and failed miserably at identifying what was uniquely compelling about their candidate. As a result, the voters saw campaign ads on television and leapt for the mute button.
Hillsman saw something uniquely compelling in Wellstone—and it happened to be everything his handlers were trying to overcome. Like writing a Christmas song in July or fighting drugs by decriminalizing them, Hillsman saw the conventional approach to campaigns as flat, flawed, and boring. While the handlers tried to mold a generic Senate candidate out of a short, puffy-haired, emotional college professor, Hillsman thought that those weren’t Wellstone’s problems—they were his assets.
Hillsman didn’t even worry about the dire money problem the campaign suffered. Instead of fruitlessly trying to close a 20-to-1 money gap with the opponent, Hillsman thought that the candidate should just make ads that were twenty times better than the opponents’ ads. Instead of worrying that Wellstone didn’t look like the candidate from central casting with perfect senatorial hair, Hillsman thought that they could present Wellstone as a real person, someone the voters could believe and like and trust.
With that frame of mind, and a willingness to ignore the rest of the campaign leadership, Hillsman started producing ads like no one had ever made before. He began with “Fast Paul,” in which Wellstone talked fast and ran in and out of the frame as the background scene shifted from a hospital to a school to a riverbank. Wellstone started by saying he had to talk fast because he didn’t have the millions of dollars his opponent had. In thirty seconds, he introduced his family, his background, and his top-issue priorities, and he defined the race as being run by a real person versus the big moneyed interest.
It wasn’t the same ad voters had seen a million times from every candidate. No politician runs off the screen. No politician makes an ad touting how little money he has. No politician intentionally talks too fast. This was different. No need to hit the mute button on this—it was kind of fun and catchy. And you couldn’t help absorb the message: This Wellstone guy is a real person.
Hillsman didn’t ask the campaign to run tracking polls to see whether the ad worked. They didn’t have money for that, and Hillsman thought that he could get better data himself. He just went out to diners and ballgames and street corners and listened. If his ad is good enough, people will talk about it. If they don’t talk about it, he’s not doing his job right.
Hillsman followed up with an ad called “Looking for Rudy.” It features Wellstone looking high and low in Minnesota for his opponent, the incumbent senator Rudy Boschwitz. Boschwitz had to that point refused to debate Wellstone and largely stayed in Washington, seeing Wellstone as no more than a minor nuisance who would be crushed on election day. Breaking all the rules of political advertising, Hillsman’s ad was two minutes long instead of thirty seconds and contained not a single boilerplate talking point. Instead, unforgettably, it contained scenes like Wellstone dropping by Boschwitz’s campaign headquarters and asking if the senator was there. He wasn’t. Even better, Wellstone asks one staffer whether he thinks there should be a debate. The staffer looks stricken by the question and refuses to answer.
Later, Wellstone borrows a pen from the campaign receptionist to jot down his phone number to leave for Boschwitz. Noting that his campaign can’t afford such nice pens, he asks if he can keep it.
Nobody was muting this. Nobody could even look away. Campaign ads were never this long, because who could possibly sit through two minutes of stock footage and overwritten tripe? But this—was compelling.
And on the ad goes, as Wellstone tries to track Rudy down at his business and tries in vain to get him on the phone.
The Wellstone campaign could afford to run the ad only one time. But it was so noteworthy that it was shown on local and national news programs, and it was so arresting that no one who saw it needed to see it again.
Paul Wellstone comes across as likable, affable, funny, and, most of all, a very real person. Boschwitz, in his absence, becomes this creature of Washington, too self-important to show up for the election.
“Looking for Rudy” was voted by one trade publication as the best political commercial ever made. In fact, the ad was so powerful that it embarrassed Boschwitz into agreeing to debate Wellstone. The debates amounted to more free advertising for a campaign without any money and helped Wellstone further the story line that he was a real person running against a Washington insider.
Hillsman is convinced that if the campaign had continued to treat the things that were different about Wellstone as problems, they would have lost by 40 points. Instead, the campaign was built around them, and when the votes were finally counted, Wellstone had risen from 40 points down to win the race by 47,000 votes.
Looking back on the race two decades later, Hillsman marvels at how little political advertising has advanced since then. “These ads are all research-driven, formulaic, and highly repetitive. There’s very little art to them,” he said. “All it does is telegraph that they’re political commercials so people know right away to ignore it and go do something more worthwhile with the next thirty seconds of their life.”
Hillsman thinks political ad makers behave as if they can somehow annoy people into voting for their candidate. If they tried to use these techniques in business, “they’d get thrown out the window.”
The message of a typical political ad might as well be, “I’m just like all the rest of them,” Hillsman said. If you want to stand out in the political ad business, on the other hand, “just do the opposite—highlight the things everyone else is afraid to show.”
* * *
THE UNITED STATES had dedicated every available resource to its armed services in that winter of 1944. The nation was already churning out as many tanks and planes and weapons as it could. Soldiers were being inducted, trained, and sent overseas at an unheard-of rate. And still military leaders needed more help.
They were fighting two wars five thousand miles apart. They needed more soldiers; they needed more weapons. They always needed more.
But more was impossible. Everything that could be produced was being produced.
The only way to expand the American military capacity was to wait. But waiting was also impossible. The enemy would only grow stronger. Its appetite for conquest would only grow.
Stare at the problem and it has no answer. You need more. You can’t have more. You will have to wait to get more. You can’t wait. It’s a loop from which there is no escape.
But flip the situation on its head—as the army did in 1944—and there is an answer. The point of an army isn’t to be big and strong; the point is to win. Appearing big and strong will no doubt help you win, because the appearance of strength will intimidate an opponent and influence its behavior. So, army brass reasoned, even if you can’t get more troops and tanks, it would be very useful to appear to have more troops and tanks.
With the formation of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, the army assembled a battalion of warriors who fought with their imaginations. Recruited from art schools and ad agencies, architecture firms and movie studios, their job was to conjure a fictional army battalion wherever it might be needed.
Troops in the 23rd fought in the war by not fighting at all—and they are credited with saving tens of thousands of lives by distracting and delaying enemy troops and keeping them from responding to real American attacks.
Men like the future fashion designer Bill Blass and future abstract impressionist painter Ellsworth Kelly and hundreds of other creative visionaries worked on what they called “atmosphere,” creating a multifaceted impression of great military force that could be assembled as needed.
They designed inflatable versions of tanks, jeeps, and planes that could be deployed to trick German reconnaissance planes looking down from above.
They created the impression of a massive unit of advancing soldiers by appearing to send 100 transport trucks rumbling through the center of a French town—though actually it was two trucks driving through town, circling back around, and driving through again and again and again.
With sounds recorded at Fort Knox in Kentucky, they broadcast the roar of engines and the grinding of gears so that people for miles around would hear the approach of what seemed to be a massive force.
They acted out mini-plays in which troops from the 23rd would appear to drunkenly forget themselves for a moment and speak too loudly of the plans for the next attack while sitting in the corner of a French pub.
They created fake construction sites so that it appeared that they were just about to build a bridge, thus telegraphing a fictional battle route to the enemy.
In France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Holland, and Germany, the 23rd gave a constant series of false directions to the enemy.
Their last great mission helped the Americans cross the Rhine and begin the final phase of the defeat of Germany. With the real crossing planned for Remagen, the 23rd prepared to “attack” seventy-two miles downriver, in Viersen. The Viersen mission included thousands of inflatable tanks and jeeps, the full calliope of sound, fake bridge construction, and even a fake medical installation to prepare for the casualties of the fake attack.
One army general said that the Rhine diversion alone saved ten thousand lives.
The 23rd was a triumph of creativity—first in the creation of the team, and second in the freedom it allowed individual members to use the full force of their minds to fulfill the mission of looking strong.
Imagine responding to the fearsome German war machine with fake tanks and Bill Blass. It sounds like the opposite of the way to fight a war. It is—and that’s why it worked so well.
THE TAKEAWAY
Being able to see the opposite opens up a world of new possibilities and original ideas. Seeing the opposite helped elect a senator on what others thought were his weaknesses. It helped win a war by playing pretend. It reduced the use of drugs by reducing the penalties for having them. It produced an iconic Christmas song on a sweltering summer day.
The power of tolerating the opposite is seeing things no one else can see, doing things that have never been done, believing when everyone else has given up. The limits people place on themselves no longer apply. Problems cannot stop you in your tracks if you can see the opposite—if you can see that problems can be gifts, as they were for Mel Tormé and Bob Wells and for Bill Hillsman. Seeing that problems can be challenges spurs innovative solutions—as in the Portuguese drug war and the American effort in World War II.
The power of turning things upside down is that it provides us the freedom to consider a new answer. That’s why Arthur Rothenberg found that creative people are 25 percent more focused on opposites.
Turning a problem upside down is like opening the floodgates for your mind—you won’t believe how much you had been holding back until you see the ideas that come rushing in.
TWO FOR THE ROAD: GO THE OTHER WAY
Don’t follow the leader. We want to defer to the people in charge who have the knowledge and experience and judgment to arrive at the best answers. But the leader in many cases is just the person with bad ideas who has been around the longest. When an economist examined NFL coaches’ strategic decisions, he found that coaches failed to choose the more aggressive and beneficial option 89.8 percent of the time.3 In academic-speak, coaches demonstrate “systematic, clear-cut, and … significant departures from the decisions that would maximize teams’ chances of winning.” In plain English, if the 32 top leaders in professional football are wrong 89.8 percent of the time, you should think past the well-worn answers of the people in charge.
Digress. “Digression!” the boys in Holden Caulfield’s class mockingly shout, when one of their classmates wanders off the central topic of his presentation. In one word, the scene in Catcher in the Rye encapsulates Holden’s distress in a school that abhors unconventional thinking. Outside Holden’s classroom, however, digressions should be treasured. When you bring together seemingly unrelated concepts, when you call in fugitive material, you see things in original ways and create original solutions. The next time you are trying to think of a bold answer, take the first opportunity to digress from the topic.