Decoding Greatness

How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success

Ron Friedman

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781982135805
• eBook ISBN: 9781982135812
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

National Bestseller For readers of Outliers, Atomic Habits, and Deep Work, comes a game-changing approach to unlocking your greatness, using a secret strategy that's vaulted business titans and creative geniuses to the top of their profession. We've long been taught there are two ways to succeed—either talent or practice. In Decoding Greatness, award-winning social psychologist Ron Friedman illuminates a powerful third path—one that has launched icons in a wide range of fields, from artists, writers, and chefs, to athletes, inventors, and entrepreneurs: reverse engineering. To reverse engineer is to look beyond what is evident on the surface and find a hidden structure. It's the ability to taste an intoxicating dish and deduce its recipe, to listen to a beautiful song and discern its chord progression, to watch your favorite film and grasp its narrative arc."Clear, concise, and backed by science" (Daniel Pink, author of When ), Decoding Greatness marries "alluring stories and illuminating studies" (Adam Grant, author of Think Again ) of top performers—from Agatha Christie to Andy Warhol, Barack Obama, to Serena Williams—with groundbreaking research on pattern recognition and skill acquisition. You'll learn how to take apart acheivements you admire, pinpoint precisely what makes them work, and apply that knowledge to develop novel ideas and products that are uniquely your own.Bursting with unforgettable stories and actionable strategies, Decoding Greatness is an indispensable guide to learning from the best, upgrading your skills, and sparking breakthrough ideas.

Part I The Art of Unlocking Hidden Patterns

The Mastery Detectives

Throughout our lives, we’ve been told two major stories about extraordinary achievement and the human capacity for greatness.

The first story is that greatness comes from talent. According to this view, we are all born with certain innate strengths. Those at the top of their field succeed by discovering an inner talent and matching it to a profession that allows them to shine.

The second story is that greatness comes from practice. From this perspective, talent gets you only so far. What really matters is an effective practice regimen and a willingness to do lots of hard work.

There is a third story about greatness, one that’s not often shared. Yet it’s a path to skill acquisition and mastery that’s stunningly common among icons everywhere, from artists and writers to chefs and athletes to inventors and entrepreneurs.

It’s called reverse engineering.

To reverse engineer is to look beyond what is evident on the surface and find a hidden structure—one that reveals both how an object was designed and, more important, how it can be re-created. It’s the ability to taste an intoxicating dish and deduce its recipe, to listen to a beautiful song and discern its chord progression, to watch a horror film and grasp its narrative arc.

In industries ranging from literature and the arts to the world of business, examples abound of elite performers whose achievements would have been impossible had they not first deconstructed the work of others.

Consider filmmaker Judd Apatow. Apatow has written, directed, or produced some of the most successful comedies of his generation, including Anchorman, Bridesmaids, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin. How did he learn his craft? By systematically deconstructing the success of every comedian he admired.

Apatow’s secret weapon was a radio show with an audience of one.

Back in high school, Apatow was a comedy fanatic, obsessing over comedians the way others his age obsessed over rock stars. He collected albums, planned his week around television appearances, and worked summers washing dishes at the local comedy club. On a whim, he joined his high school’s radio station, where he noticed something peculiar: the station’s teenage DJ was landing interviews with a number of surprisingly impressive bands.

That’s when the idea hit him. He’d create a radio show of his own and use it to get career advice from every luminary in the field.

“I would call their agents or PR people and say I was Judd Apatow from WKWZ radio on Long Island and I was interested in interviewing their client,” he later wrote. “I would neglect to mention that I was fifteen years old. Since most of those representatives were based in Los Angeles, they didn’t realize that the signal to our station barely made it out of the parking lot. Then I would show up for the interview and they would realize that they had been had.”

The ruse paid off handsomely. Over the next two years, Apatow interviewed the who’s who of comedy—Jerry Seinfeld, Garry Shandling, John Candy, Sandra Bernhard, Howard Stern, Henny Youngman, Martin Short, “Weird Al” Yankovic, Jay Leno—on everything from how they developed their material, to how they landed an agent, to the best way to get noticed.

In those interviews Apatow learned that seven years is the amount of time it takes to discover your voice and hit your stride, that going more than a few days without performing disrupts your delivery, and that the single most important thing a novice comedian can do to improve is to get up onstage as often as possible, if only to dull the stage fright.

Many of Apatow’s recordings never aired. The radio program, of course, was beside the point. By the time he graduated high school, Apatow had assembled what he’s termed a “blueprint” and “bible” for writing jokes, developing his craft, and building a career.

Interviewing your idols can be an effective strategy for uncovering their secrets (as long as you hit on the right questions—more on that in chapter 7). You don’t even need to pretend you work for a radio station. In today’s burgeoning world of blogs and podcasts, it’s never been easier to engage experts in a conversation. But what if they’re not willing to talk to you? Or worse, what if they’re dead?

Not too long ago, best-selling author Joe Hill faced this very conundrum while working on a new book. His writing had stalled, and he knew precisely the type of tune-up it needed. So he turned to the work of legendary crime novelist and master of suspense Elmore Leonard.

“I put my book aside, and for about two weeks I rewrote The Big Bounce,” Hill explained in an interview with 10-Minute Writer’s Workshop. “Every day I would open the book and write the first two pages, copying sentence by sentence, just to get the feel for his rhythms and the way he wrote dialogue and the way he suggested character in just a couple lines…. I only needed about two weeks with Elmore to find my way back to the kind of rhythm and the kind of jazzy, light feel you need to write a thriller. By studying his voice, I was able to find my way back to my own.”

Hill was applying an approach he’d picked up from his dad, who had stumbled upon the practice back when he was six years old and stuck at home with tonsillitis. To pass the time, Hill’s father took to copying comic books panel by panel, occasionally introducing his own material and riffing on the plotlines. The practice served him well. He doesn’t write many comics anymore, but he has sold more than 350 million books. His name is Stephen King.

Both King and Hill were utilizing forms of copywork, a technique popularized by Benjamin Franklin and practiced by literary greats F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack London, and Hunter Thompson. It involves studying an exceptional piece of writing, setting it aside, and then re-creating it word for word from memory, later comparing your version to the original.

Many of the painters we now celebrate as creative geniuses devoted a significant portion of their careers to copywork. Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Mary Cassatt, Paul Gauguin, and Paul Cézanne all developed their skills by copying the works of the French painter Eugène Delacroix. Delacroix himself spent years copying the Renaissance artists he grew up admiring. And even those Renaissance greats—Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo—honed their craft by reproducing the work of their fellow artists, including one another.

What makes copywork so effective is that it forces an artist or writer to do more than simply recall content. Reproducing a piece demands that he or she pay careful attention to the organizational decisions and stylistic tendencies reflected in an original work. It is an exercise that enables novices to relive the creative journey and invites them to compare their instinctive inclinations against the choices of a master.

Ultimately, what the process reveals is decision-making patterns. And once an artist or writer’s underlying code is broken, it can be defined, analyzed, and applied to producing original works.

A Primer to Reverse Engineering Books, Songs, and Photographs

Copywork is one method for revealing a hidden formula, but it’s far from the only approach. Another, popular among nonfiction writers, is to leaf through the endnotes section at the back of a book and examine the original sources an author used to construct their piece. It’s the writer’s equivalent of enjoying a delicious meal at a restaurant and then raiding the chef’s pantry to uncover the ingredients.

The index is equally prized because it helps writers unpack an author’s thinking, sometimes even their own. The author Chuck Klosterman, for example, relishes the moment he gets to read the index of his new book because of how much of himself it reveals. “Exploring the index from a book you created,” he wrote in the introduction to a recent essay collection, “is like having someone split your head open with an axe so that you can peruse the contents of your brain. It’s the alphabetizing of your consciousness.”

Within fiction, the search for successful patterns dates all the way back to ancient Greece. In Poetics, Aristotle offered his analysis of what makes the best stories different. Among his conclusions: a three-part structure (beginning, middle, end) and the skillful use of surprises, especially plot twists that involve a reversal of fortune.

More recently, literary giant Kurt Vonnegut introduced a fascinating tool for exposing a story’s architecture. If you read a lot of novels or watch a lot of movies, you’ve probably noticed that most narratives tend to follow a formula. The vast majority of stories are iterations on a small handful of plots. These include rags to riches (e.g., Rocky, Oliver Twist, Ready Player One), boy meets girl (e.g., Grease, Jane Eyre, most romantic comedies), and the hero’s journey (e.g., Star Wars, The Lion King, The Lord of the Rings).

What makes each of these plots so compelling is their distinct emotional arc. The typical rags-to-riches story, like The Karate Kid, takes audiences on an upward journey from negative to positive emotions, as an overlooked hero goes from being an object of scorn and ridicule at the beginning to one worthy of recognition, appreciation, and praise by the end.

Contrast that to a hero’s journey story like The Wizard of Oz, where the emotional terrain is quite different. Here, an ordinary character leads an average life when an unforeseen event thrusts her into danger. What follows is an emotional roller coaster, as the hero navigates obstacle after obstacle, overcoming impossible circumstances, mastering uncertainty, and acquiring skill and confidence along the way.

Vonnegut believed that the world’s most popular stories—including those featured in the Bible, literary classics, and blockbuster films—fit neatly into one of six trajectories:

1. Rags to Riches (a rising emotional arc)
2. Riches to Rags (a falling emotional arc)
3. Man in a Hole (a fall followed by a rise)
4. Icarus (a rise followed by a fall)
5. Cinderella (rise, fall, rise)
6. Oedipus (fall, rise, fall)

To unlock a particular story’s emotional arc, Vonnegut recommended a simple exercise: plot the protagonist’s fortune on a graph.

It’s an illuminating activity—and not just for analyzing successful novels and movies. It’s also one that writers can apply to their own work to access a 30,000-foot view of their story and pinpoint events that stall or detract from their emotional arc.

A few years ago, nearly seventy years after Vonnegut first posed his theory, data scientists crunched two enormous databases of nearly 2,000 novels and more than 6,000 movie scripts and found overwhelming support for the contention that most stories follow one of these six narrative arcs. Today, Vonnegut is best known for his provocative science fiction. But his more lasting contribution to literature may turn out to be the analytical tool he gave writers for dissecting content they admire and fine-tuning their original work.

While the hunt for winning patterns inside popular fiction has received renewed interest in recent years, it’s been foundational to the education of musicians for generations. Learning to play an instrument, after all, is achieved by actively reproducing songs note for note. A novice might start with “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” or “Happy Birthday” and later graduate to Louis Armstrong, Mozart, or Lizzo. It’s a process that compels budding musicians to scrutinize a song’s melody, chord progression, and arrangement.

This participatory tradition may explain why musicians are considerably more open about their efforts to reverse engineer songs than creatives in adjacent fields. To appreciate just how open, run a quick search on YouTube. If a song is even remotely popular, chances are you’re a click away from a video showing you precisely how it’s played on live instruments.

Not too long ago, if you wanted to learn a popular song, you had to befriend an experienced musician or visit a music store and purchase sheet music. Not anymore. Today, an app called Capo allows you to reference any song on your iPhone and instantly bring up its chords, tempo, and key.

Musicians take pride in uncovering one another’s tricks—and they’re not the only ones. The same can be said of enterprising photographers.

When most people look at a photo, they focus on objects. Professionals direct their attention to something entirely different: the shadows. Years of experience have taught them to scan images for clues revealing how they were constructed. The length and direction of shadows are telling: they suggest camera angle, time of day, and lens aperture. Then there’s the richness and intensity of the shadows. Sharp, defined edges suggest a hard light source, while...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction: A Secret History from the Land of Innovation
• Part I: The Art of Unlocking Hidden Patterns
• Part II: The Vision-Ability Gap
• Conclusion: Stumbling on Greatness
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright