The Hidden Steps Behind Breakthrough Success. George Newman.
Hey family. JP Morgan put this book on their list for students and interns. I am not going to turn this into a sermon. It is not a church book. But that list got my attention. If they want their young people reading it, I want us looking at it. Here is what I think they want you to walk away with. And here is what it hit in me.
Newman is a psychologist who taught at Yale and now teaches marketing-psych in Toronto. He says we treat creativity like a cabin in the woods. Sit alone. Wait for lightning. He says burn that cabin down. Great ideas are not conjured from thin air. They are already out there. You survey. You dig. You sift. More like archaeology than magic.
Jackson Pollock searched for a decade, then had a short hot streak of drip paintings. Researchers found that pattern in more than 90 percent of creatives. Explore first. Then exploit. The idea was already in the pattern of trees. Pollock found it. So did monks in a garden 500 years earlier.
In federal contracting I do not invent opportunities, I find them. The wins come from surveying what agencies already said they need, reading debriefs, listening at industry days, and sifting what is sitting in plain sight. When I stopped waiting for a brilliant idea and started digging like an archaeologist, our pipeline changed.
I taught through one book of the Bible for over 200 messages and never ran out of material. That is not because I am creative. It is because the ideas were already in the text, and my job every morning was to survey, dig, and sift until I found the one for that day.
Early in my Army career I thought the officers getting promoted were the creative ones. They were not. They were the ones who studied what worked in other units, collected it, and applied it first. Survey your field before you try to be a genius in it.
Isabella and I did not sit in a cabin waiting for a vision of what our family should be. We watched families we admired, asked them questions, and built from what we found. The blueprint for a strong family already exists. Go study one.
Newman names the Originality Ostrich. You stick your head in the sand about what already works. He ran studies with sandwich makers and with people on a cooking show. The more original they tried to be, the less people wanted it. Contestants who chased originality were more than twice as likely to go home.
He points to an analysis of 18 million papers. The most useful work was about 90 to 95 percent familiar, with only 5 to 10 percent new. That is the 5 percent novelty rule. Remix what is already there. Do not start from zero.
The government does not buy science projects. Agencies buy what looks 90 percent like what already works, with a 10 percent edge that makes it better. When I made our offers familiar first and new second, we started winning more.
Grace is 2,000 years old, and my job is not to say something no teacher has ever said. My job is to hand an old truth to this generation in a way they can carry. That small fresh angle is enough, and chasing more than that would cost me the audience.
I stopped trying to be the most original person in the room and started trying to be the most useful. Master the standard first. The 5 percent you add on top of mastery is worth more than the 100 percent you invent from scratch.
My kids do not need a novel parenting philosophy. They need dinner, honesty, and a father who shows up. Most of family life is beautifully unoriginal, and the small ways we tailor it to each child are where the special lives.
The mantra is think outside the box. Newman says constraints make you more creative. People asked to invent kids' toys came up with better ideas when they had to use five random shapes. A blank page makes you default to a truck or a teddy bear. A box forces new questions.
He also talks about transplanting. Take a structure from another field and drop it on your problem. Japan had a high-speed train that made a boom coming out of tunnels. An engineer who watched birds copied a kingfisher beak. Same proportions. Boom gone. Train faster.
Some of our best solutions showed up when the budget was small and the deadline was tight. A blank check produces obvious answers; a tight box forces better ones. I also transplant structures constantly, and moving military logistics discipline into IT delivery is my kingfisher beak on a train.
A daily devotional is a brutal constraint. One passage, one point, out the door by morning, every single day. That box made me a sharper teacher than unlimited time ever would have.
The Army taught me to plan with the resources on hand, not the ones I wished I had. I carried that into every job since. When you cannot add money, time, or people, you finally start thinking.
We borrowed a structure from another field and put it in our house. The military has a battle rhythm, so our family has one too, with set meetings, a shared calendar, and a review after every big trip. The structure was not invented for families, and it works better than anything invented for families.
Once you have surveyed and gridded, you dig. Newman says more is more. There is a study he loves called the creative cliff illusion. People think they will run out of ideas after 10 or 15. They do not. If you keep going, more ideas come, and often the later ones are better. The obvious ones come first. The gold is after that.
Explore, then exploit. Do not freeze after the first decent thought. Keep generating. Then pick.
My first answer to a hard problem is usually everyone else's first answer, which makes it worth nothing in a competitive bid. The differentiators show up around idea 15 or 20, after the obvious ones are used up. So we keep listing options long after it feels done.
When I outline a message, the first three points are the ones any teacher would find. If I keep sitting with the text, points seven and eight surface, and those are the ones people quote back to me years later. Depth lives past the point where I want to quit.
Your first career plan is a rough draft, and so is your tenth. Keep generating options past the comfortable ones. The move nobody else on the list can even see is usually buried deep in yours.
When one of my kids brings me a problem, my first response is the generic advice they already heard somewhere else. If I stay in the conversation past the easy answer, we get somewhere real. The good stuff comes after the obvious stuff runs out.
Part 4 of the book is sifting. Which ideas do you actually pursue. Newman says we have a habit of adding. We pile on. People asked to make an object better almost never take anything off. They add. Create by subtracting. Paul Simon made Graceland by sifting recorded material and taking away.
The spark is not the finish. You refine. Then you do the work. Explore found the vein. Exploit mines it.
My instinct on a weak proposal is to add pages, and the fix is almost always to cut them. Subtraction is a discipline, not a loss. And no idea has ever invoiced a dime; the money is in the months of execution after the whiteboard session ends.
The best editing I do on any message is deletion, because every point I remove makes the remaining ones louder. God gave me the assignment, but the assignment still requires the mining. One series idea took me 200-plus weeks of daily work to bring out of the ground.
Ideas made me interesting in meetings. Execution got me promoted. Find the vein, then swing the pick every day until you have mined it, because the spark gets the credit but the work gets the results.
We made our family stronger by subtracting commitments, not by adding systems. Fewer obligations gave us back our evenings. And love is not the spark of saying it once; it is showing up daily long after the feeling that started it.
This is book 2 of 9. These are books JP Morgan wants their new people and interns to read. What did you get out of going through this? Let's discuss this in the comments.
I love you.
This is the YEAR OF DISCOVERY.
Rick