Solidify Mortgage

With 1.9 seconds left in overtime of Game 5 of the 2006 NBA Finals, Dwyane Wade went to the free throw line. Wade & the Heat were down by 1. The series was tied 2-2. He told Tiger Woods how he prepared to make those high-pressure free throws: “The night before,” Wade said, “I was in the gym at midnight. And I was like, ‘I know games come down to free throws. No matter what happens, it's going to come down to free throws.’ So I was in the gym and I had my cousin standing next to me, I had him right in my ear talking shit to me. And so the next night, I get in that same situation where I got to make these free throws. And I just went back to last night in the gym. I just went right back to that. I was like, ‘I just hit 200 of these last night. I got this.’" "That's so good," Tiger says. "It's like," Wade says, "your confidence comes from your work." "Correct," Tiger replies. Wade: "You've done it over and over. You've seen yourself do it." Tiger: "Correct, thousands of times." Wade hit the two free throws, and the Heat won 101-100 to take a 3-2 series lead. Then in Game 6, he had 36 points to help the Heat win the game and their first championship in franchise history. Wade was named NBA Finals MVP. Takeaway 1: Ryan Holiday likes to say, "Belief in yourself is overrated. Generate evidence." Wade simulated the situation so that when he was in that situation for real, he had the evidence. “You've done it over and over,” he told himself. “You've seen yourself do it.” Your confidence comes from your work, from your evidence. Takeaway 2: What Dwayne Wade figured out intuitively—that confidence is a function of the previous work put in—is scientifically accurate. For nearly three decades, the neuroscientist Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett has been studying where emotions—calmness, panic, nervousness, and so on—come from. Her bestselling book, "How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain," gets its title from the discovery that emotions are constructed by the brain. "In every waking moment," she writes, "your brain uses past experience to guide your present sensations." In every waking moment, your brain sifts through its library of past experiences, looking for something similar to what is currently happening. If your brain can’t find anything in your past that is similar to your present, you are in a state of what brain scientists call “experiential blindness.” If you are at the free-throw line with the game on the line, for instance, and you start to panic—you’re in a state of experiential blindness. Your brain, Dr. Barrett would say, is calling you out. You didn't put in the work. You didn't form the past experience needed for your brain to be able to say, as Wade was able to say, "I just hit 200 of these last night. I got this." - - - “You are continually cultivating your past…the experiences you have today become the past that your brain uses to make predictions for tomorrow.” — Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!

On the 27th straight day of filming “Forrest Gump,” Tom Hanks was tired & worried. During a scene on the famous park bench, Hanks stopped & said to director Bob Zemeckis, “Hey, Bob…is anybody going to care about this movie? I don’t think anybody’s going to care.” Bob replied, “It’s a minefield, Tom. You never know what’s good…It’s a minefield! It’s a goddam minefield! We may be sowing the seeds of our own destruction.” Tom Hanks told this story after he was asked, “When I ask for a memory from your career, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?” He said that what Zemeckis said was true of every movie he’s worked on: “There’s never any guarantee...You do not know if it is going to work out.” Takeaway 1: Hanks is the 5th-most highest-grossing actor of all time. And yet, the stickiest memory of his career is the feeling of uncertainty. Rarer than talent or work ethic, the poet John Keats wrote, is the ability to step into and push through doubts and uncertainties. In 1817, Keats wrote a letter to his brothers to share this exciting realization. “At once it struck me,” Keats wrote, “what quality went to form a Man of Achievement … Negative Capability.” Keats explains that “Negative Capability” is “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Takeaway 2: Those who possess Negative Capability, who can sit with uncertainty, who can spend months or years in the minefield that is working on something while knowing that there is a real possibility no one will care about it—they often possess another quality. They do what they do, not as a means to some end (money, fame, awards, etc.), but for the sake of doing it. When asked about one of his movies that commercially failed, Hanks said, "I loved making that movie. I loved writing it, I loved being with it. I love all the people in it." As Ryan Holiday once told me, "The work has to be the win." You control the effort, he says, not the results. "So ultimately, you have to love doing it. You have to get to a place where doing the work is the win and everything else is extra.” - - - “Life is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're going to get.” — Forrest Gump Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!

In 1985, Nike held a 24-hour shoe design contest. Nike was struggling. Their stock dropped 50%. They had to lay off people. Adidas, Converse, & Reebok were all selling more shoes. So in a panicked attempt to find creative talent, Nike held a shoe design contest. The winner was A corporate architect named Tinker Hatfield. "Two days after the competition," he said, "I wasn't even asked—I was told that I was now a footwear designer for Nike." As he got to work on his first official shoe design, he thought about a building he had studied in architecture school: The Centre Pompidou in Paris. The Centre Pompidou is an inside-out building, meaning that the structural, mechanical, and circulation systems are all exposed. “That building,” Tinker said, “was describing what it was to the people of Paris. And I thought, ‘Well why not do that with a shoe? Let’s cut a hole in the side and show what’s in the shoe.’” So Tinker designed an inside-out shoe: The Air Max 1. The Air Max 1 was a massive success, and it steered Nike's design direction from then on. "To this day," Tinker says, "Phil Knight says I saved Nike." Takeaway 1: Had he not studied that building in Paris, Tinker says, he couldn’t have created the Air Max. Creativity, he says, is a function of the “library in your head." “When you sit down to create something...what you create is a culmination of everything you’ve seen and done previous to that point.” Takeaway 2: Tinker Hatfield went to architecture school and then he was a corporate architect for 4.5 years. Then, literally overnight, he became one of the best shoe designers in the world. This makes me think of a counter-intuitive discovery made by psychologist Charles Spearman in 1904. Before Spearman, the natural assumption was that the more you specialize in one thing, the worse you’ll be at other things. Instead, Spearman discovered "the positive manifold" phenomenon. He found that different abilities tend to be positively correlated. That the expertise gained through specialization is transferrable. That the cognitive and creative abilities cultivated as an architect could positively correlate with being a shoe designer. - - - "Creativity is a function of the previous work you put in."  — Robert Greene Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!