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PART I
SHORTEN
You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself any direction you choose.
âDR. SEUSS
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Chapter 1
HACKING THE LADDER
âBored Mormonsâ
I.
A strange thing has been happening in the United States for nearly 300 years. For some reason, our presidents are younger than our senators.
The average president of the United States takes office at age 55. In contrast, US senators start their terms in Congressâthe most recent at the time of this writingâat an average of age 62. Members of the House of Representatives were 57.
This is not a recent anomaly. Presidents have tended to be younger than Congress since the Founding Fathers died. And though a handful began the job as senior citizens, the average starting age has never crossed 60.
These statistics are especially peculiar because of how much more difficult it is to become president than a senator. Terms in the Senate are commonly seen as a step on the path to president. But even brand-new senators, holding their first federal office ever, have been coming in at an average of 56 and 57 in recent years. Presidents get to the top before senators get in the door.
Why?
Armchair explanations like good looks donât make sense. Why would we be more likely to vote for a handsome young president but not a good-looking young congressperson? Data in presidential versus congressional elections indicates that youth voter turnout isnât the culprit.
Some sort of creeping mistrust of the elderly or the advent of televised elections arenât skewing the results, either. The oldest-elected president, Ronald Reagan, took office at age 69, with the fourth-oldest, George H. W. Bush, succeeding him at 64. They brought up the average. Gerrymandering and changing campaign finance laws donât seem to explain the data, and the losers in presidential elections actually tend to be the same average age as the winners.
Weâve had rich presidents, poor presidents, political-insider presidents, Washington-outsider presidents, pretty presidents, ugly presidents, eloquent presidents, stammering presidents, old presidents, and young presidents. But mostly young presidents.
Lyndon B. Johnson became president at exactly 55. Perhaps his story will give us a clue to the phenomenon.
Born on a farm in Texas, Johnson was always a talker. He first ran for president in 11th grade. He won. Described by peers as ambitious from the beginning, he got involved in adult politics shortly after high school. He first served as a legislative secretary to a Texas congressman, but had won his own seat in the US House by age 29. Several terms later, he moved up to the Senate. From junior senator he rose to the rank of majority whip, then minority leader, then majority leader. Having paid his dues in each branch of Congress, he was elected John F. Kennedyâs vice president in 1960.
Then, tragically, President Kennedy was killed, and LBJ assumed his office, having climbed the political ladder for 25 years.
From the beginning of his career, LBJ was extraordinarily focused. He worked hard, pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, and patiently worked the ladder. And, after all that work, the last stage of his ascent came down to luck. If Kennedy had lived, Vice President Johnson wouldnât have had the chance to run for president until he was in his 60s.
We all know this ladder-climbing story. Itâs gospel weâve preached in career- and business-building for centuries. Weâre told that the best way to succeed is to start young, work hard, and move up through the ranks. The two ingredients are hard workânot quitting when things get toughâand luckâspots opening up on the rungs above you. LBJâs is that quintessential American story.
The problem is, when we look at the data, LBJâs isnât the quintessential presidential story at all.
Only three other presidents out of the 43 people who have been president at the time of this writing climbed the rungs of all four elected federal offices: Richard Nixon, Andrew Johnson, and John Tyler. Just over half of the presidents were ever congressmen at all.
It gets even more interesting when we look at the amount of time these men spent climbing up the political ladder. The ten oldest presidentsâthe ones who bring our age average upâheld a federal office for nine years,* or less than two Senate terms. Lyndon B. Johnsonâs story would suggest that these older presidents fought their way up the congressional ladder over a quarter century, and just got started a little later. But no.
In fact, most presidents spent just over half as many years in state and federal politics as LBJ did. Ignoring state politics, the average president spent just seven years as an elected official before reaching the White House. Five were never elected to any office before becoming president.
Thereâs something wrong with the great American ladder-climbing advice: presidents of the United States, some of the worldâs most successful people, donât follow it.
Itâs like each invented his own ladder.
II.
There is a pattern to the unconventional career tracks of US presidents. We find it among other groups as well. Throughout history, fast-rising companies, rock-star executives, âovernightâ movie stars, and top-selling products have outrun their peers by acting more like ladder hackers than ladder climbers.
The best way to explain how that ladder hacking works comes from the Mormons.
RELATIVELY FEW PEOPLE LIVE in the environs of Brigham Young University, out in the American West. Some who do are occasionally surprised by a late-night knock on the front door and a strange request. Not from preachers or salesmen, but from bored Mormon college students.
Mormonsâand Mormon schools like BYUâhave a health code that discourages alcohol. When you put tens of thousands of young abstainers together in a small college town, an obnoxious proliferation of creative group activities results. One of them is the reason for that late-night knock. Itâs a game called Bigger or Better.
Bigger or Better is a scavenger hunt, a sort of trick-or-treating for (young) adults. Players divide into teams and begin with a small object, like a toothpick, then disperse and knock on neighborhood doors, one house after another.
At each answered door, the players introduce themselves with something on the order of, âWeâre playing a game called Bigger or Better. Do you have something in your house thatâs slightly bigger or better than this . . .â (display object) â. . . that you would trade with us?â
The first few houses are the toughest. People relaxing at night in their homes arenât often searching for toothpicks. Even in the friendly Rocky Mountains a homeowner can be put off by such a request. But before long, a stranger will good-naturedly offer a piece of gum for that toothpick, and the game is on.
At the next house, the gum becomes a ballpoint pen. At the next: a pack of Post-it notes. Then: a copy of last monthâs Nylon magazine. The magazine becomes a bouquet of flowers left by an unwanted admirer. The flowers get swapped for an old hat, and the hat is exchanged for a novelty T-shirt. In this phase of the game, the players benefit from a bit of curiosity, a little charity, and the fact that people were planning on getting rid of most of these objects anyway.
But after enough trades, the players hold objects of significant value in their hands. Now the boy who opens the door sincerely wants the T-shirt. He trades his lava lamp for it. The girls next door like the lava lamp and decide to part with a vintage mirror. The old woman down the street collects antiques; she accepts the mirror in exchange for an old BMX bike in the garage.
When time is up, the players return home to compare results. After a dozen or so trades, teams have turned toothpicks into a stereo system, a set of golf clubs, and a television set. One group even drags in a full-size canoe.*
Not bad, for a sober night out.
Bigger or Better illustrates an interesting fact: people are generally willing to take a chance on something if it only feels like a small stretch. Thatâs how a group of bored students transformed a toothpick into a TV, and remarkably quicker than if theyâd worked their seven-dollar-per-hour college-town jobs and saved up for one. With each trade, the players exchanged or provided valueâincluding entertainment value.
Now, if the BYU kids had gone door-to-door asking for free televisions, they wouldnât have succeeded so quickly. Few people are willing to make that kind of stretch. This is like an intern applying for a CEO job, or a brand-new startup bidding on a NASA contract. The players eliminated resistance by breaking the big challenge (acquire something valuable like a TV) into a series of easier, repeatable challenges (make a tiny trade).
Researchers call this the psychology of âsmall wins.â Gamblers, on the other hand, would call it a âparlay,â which the dictionary defines as âa cumulative series of bets in which winnings accruing from each transaction are used as a stake for a further bet.â
In Bigger or Better, the parlay never stops. Players donât wait an arbitrary period of time before moving on to the next trade, and they donât mind if the result of a trade was only a slightly more desirable object, so long as the game keeps moving.
âBy itself, one small win may seem unimportant,â writes Dr. Karl Weick in a seminal paper for American Psychologist in 1984. âA series of wins at small but significant tasks, however, reveals a pattern that may attract allies, deter opponents, and lower resistance to subsequent proposals.â
âOnce a small win has been accomplished,â Weick continues, âforces are set in motion that favor another small win.â
From the outside, this simply seems like a prudent way to climb the ladder: as fast as possible,* and in small bites.
While thatâs good advice, the key to the bored Mormon studentsâ success was not just their rapid cycle time. It was the direction they traded: sideways.
The players didnât simply parlay toothpicks for pieces of wood of increasing size; they traded toothpicks for pens and mirrors for old bikes. They didnât wait around for the owners of a vacant house to show up, so they could ask for a trade, and they didnât knock on the same door over and over until a ânoâ became a âyes.â When a door was shut to them, they immediately p...
