Nick Fargione

In 2009, Lin-Manuel Miranda was invited to perform at the White House. His musical “In The Heights” had just won a Grammy & 4 Tony Awards. So the White House was expecting him to perform something from Heights. Instead, he debuted a song from a rap album he’d been working on: Miranda explained that he'd been working on this "concept album about the life of someone I think embodies hip-hop...Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton." The crowd laughed. "You laugh, but it's true!" Miranda replied. "He was born a penniless orphan in St. Croix of illegitimate birth, became George Washington's right-hand man, became Treasury Secretary, caught beef with every other Founding Father. And all on the strength of his writing. I think he embodies the word's ability to make a difference." Takeaway 1: Lin-Manuel Miranda said he initially picked up Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton, "thinking maybe I’ll get a funny song out of it—some jokey-rap thing about the Hamilton/Burr duel." Then, as he read it, "I thought I would write a bunch of songs that tell the greatest hits of Hamilton’s life." Then, as he wrote the songs, he realized it could be a musical. Most things of magnitude start small. Talking about working with Nobel Prize winners, interviewing the great minds of his time, and studying the greats of all time—Richard Hamming famously said, to do great work, you have to: "Plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow." Takeaway 2: When Lin-Manuel Miranda told people he was working on a hip-hop album about a founding father, people laughed. He worked on the concept for 8 years—so, Miranda said, “I had a lot of people look at me like I was crazy for a very long time.” Speaking to entrepreneurs at the startup incubator Y Combinator, the billionaire Peter Thiel drew a Venn diagram on a whiteboard. In one of the overlapping circles, he wrote, “seems like a bad idea,” and in the other, “is a good idea.” The intersection is the sweet spot for doing great work, Thiel said. Everyone knows that to do great work you need natural ability and you need to work hard. But there’s a third ingredient that doesn’t get talked about or written about as often: the ability to work on what "seems like a bad idea." - - - As he was working on what he thought was going to be a hip-hop album, Miranda met his hero, the composer Stephen Sondheim. Sondheim asked him what he was working on. "And I told him, 'I’m working on this hip-hop album, like a ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ concept album about Alexander Hamilton.' And he threw back his head and guffawed, and he said, 'No one will expect that from you. That’s amazing. Keep writing that…Keep surprising us.'" Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!