SECRET 2
Are You Having Fun Yet?
“Come, Watson, come!” he cried. “The game is afoot. Not a word! Into your clothes and come!”
—“THE ADVENTURE OF THE ABBEY GRANGE”
Imagine you’re sound asleep in your warm bed on a frigid winter’s night. Other than an emergency like a fire or an earthquake, what could possibly make you get up, throw on some clothes, and venture out into the dark, chilly air?
For Sherlock Holmes in “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,” it was a simple telegram asking for help on a case from a Scotland Yard detective whom he barely knew. Most ofof us would probably have mumbled a barely audible “No thanks” and returned to blissful slumber. But Holmes’s reaction was classic—and extremely telling: He burst into Watson’s bedroom with a candle and shook him awake. “Come, Watson, come!” he cried. “The game is afoot. Not a word! Into your clothes and come!” Minutes later they were rattling across London in a carriage, headed for Charing Cross Station to catch a train to Kent and meet the detective at the crime scene. They were in such a hurry, they didn’t even stop for breakfast.
Even though “The game is afoot” was actually a quote from Shakespeare’s Henry V—an allusion some of Conan Doyle’s more educated Victorian-era readers no doubt recognized—it quickly entered the pop-culture lexicon and became inextricably linked to Sherlock Holmes. And for good reason; even though Conan Doyle didn’t originate the phrase, those four words tell us more about Holmes—and the nature of genius—than almost any other line in the entire Holmes canon.
Look carefully at the quote again: “The game is afoot.”
Not “The job is afoot.”
Not “The chance to make money is afoot.”
Not “Another opportunity to impress Scotland Yard and enhance my reputation is afoot.”
Nope. “The game is afoot.”
The game.
What propelled Sherlock Holmes out of his comfortable bed and into the bitterly cold London night wasn’t a chance to pad his bank account, pay the bills, or grab some quick publicity from the London newspapers. Just the opposite! He was racing to meet the detective because it meant a chance to play a game—a game that just so happened to be his livelihood, too. Holmes was ready to have some fun.
If you aspire to be a genius, there’s no shortage of advice out there. But before you spend a few years reading self-help books, taking personality tests, and attending three-day seminars on goal setting, take a few minutes to analyze how geniuses act. That’s what Conan Doyle did. Having grown up in a family filled with accomplished artists, writers, and thinkers, he developed a unique perspective on how to be successful just by watching how his relatives went about their daily lives. His mother, for example, was a member of Edinburgh’s Philosophical Institution and became acquainted with some of the era’s most famous intellectuals, including the great physician and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., whose name the young Arthur would later use for his most famous fictional creation. It’s doubtful that he would have ever come up with the idea for Sherlock Holmes in the first place had he grown up in a normal, stable middle-class home. Holmes is a composite sketch of the many geniuses Conan Doyle observed throughout his life; he seems to have taken their best and most powerful qualities and squeezed them all into a single character. It’s one more reason why we should pay close attention to the Holmes stories. Conan Doyle is giving us clues to solve a very different type of mystery—how to become a success.
“The Adventure of the Abbey Grange” shows us how a real genius acts. He plays. He has fun. He jumps at the chance to do what he loves, regardless of the time of night (or the temperature). He’s an adrenaline junkie. In this respect, Holmes resembles another Brit, the billionaire Richard Branson, the mogul behind the worldwide Virgin brand. He’s famous for jumping feetfirst into his diverse business ventures—from magazines to airlines to healthcare clinics—with an infectious sense of enthusiasm. Branson’s insistence on having fun has paid off: As of this writing, he’s worth well over $4 billion. He’s had plenty of successes and many high-profile disasters, but he keeps plugging along with that crazy grin plastered on his face. Why? Because for him, taking huge risks is what it takes to get him out of bed on a cold winter’s night.
Geniuses crave these huge risks. In “Abbey Grange,” Holmes is disappointed when he and Watson arrive at the scene in Kent and find that the crime—the murder of a local landowner—appears to be rather cut-and-dried, even boring. It’s obvious from the testimony of the witnesses that a band of criminals known as the Randall gang broke in and killed Sir Eustace Brackenstall when he walked in on them stealing his valuables. They had also tied up his wife with a cord so they could make a clean getaway. “The keen interest had passed out of Holmes’s expressive face, and I knew that with the mystery all the charm of the case had departed,” Watson noted. “There still remained an arrest to be effected, but what were these commonplace rogues that he should soil his hands with them?”
For Holmes, being handed a simple mystery was worse than stepping in a pile of dog manure. He craved difficult problems because they forced him to “up his game”; the more difficult the problem, the larger the potential victory, and the greater the sense of satisfaction and accomplishment when he solved it. Luckily, Holmes didn’t give up easily. Searching for anything to make the case more interesting, he turned his attention to the crime scene. “Holmes was down on his knees, examining with great attention the knots upon the red cord with which the lady had been secured,” Watson tells us. “Then he carefully scrutinized the broken and frayed end where it had snapped off when the burglar had dragged it down.”
The frayed cord was the piece of evidence Holmes had been waiting for. By examining how and where the cord was cut, he realized that the story Brackenstall’s wife told about the Randall gang couldn’t possibly be true. Now he was having fun! The cord led to another piece of evidence, which led to another, until finally he pieced together the truth: Brackenstall had been murdered by a ship’s officer who was secretly in love with his wife! Mrs. Brackenstall had made up the whole story about the Randall gang in a futile effort to protect him. In the end, though, Holmes realized that the officer had shown up at the country manor while Brackenstall—a hot-tempered man who had once doused a dog in kerosene and set it afire—was assaulting his wife. The officer had accidentally killed him during the ensuing struggle to protect the woman he loved. In a rare move, Holmes decided not to report his conclusions to the police, and allowed the officer and Mrs. Brackenstall to live happily ever after. He didn’t care that the Scotland Yard detective might think less of him for apparently failing to solve the crime, nor was he all that worried about missing out on a nice payday. Like Branson, he wasn’t in it just for the money. He had cracked a complicated case; he had satisfied his urge for fun.
You don’t become a true genius until you find a way to marry your passion with your career. Real guys like Branson (and fictional ones like Holmes) learned to master the art of oblique goal-setting. Their primary focus was to feed the need inside them. For Branson, it was the rush of competition; for Holmes, intellectual stimulation. In attempting to satisfy that need at all costs—by chasing after their particular definition of excellence, regardless of how weird it seemed to everyone else—they indirectly started attracting other results. In Branson’s case, that happened to be billions of dollars. In Holmes’s case, it meant developing a reputation as the ultimate master detective. Those are fantastic rewards, but they are mere side effects of their own extremely personal quests for a feeling, a rush, a sense of excitement and accomplishment.
Imagine that it’s a cold winter’s night. You’re buried under a mountain of warm blankets. What could possibly make you race out into the darkness? What could possibly be worth chasing down at this late hour?
The answer will be different for everyone. But your answer could literally be worth a fortune.