Chapter 42 - Working
Today’s Chapter is based on the book “Working” by Robert Caro, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author who is best known for writing biographies. He is well-known for his biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson.
Buy it on Amazon here:
https://www.amazon.com/Working-Robert-Caro/dp/0525656340
Turn Every Pages
“The person that turns over the most rocks wins the game.”
— Peter Lynch
Robert Caro is well-known for his investigative work and his intensive researches for each books he released. This came from his nature of always wanting to figure things out and to try to explain them. As a matter of fact, he first started writing at Princeton where he was the paper’s sportswriter, but Caro found himself “writing more about the coach and about how he coached than about how the team was actually doing”
One of Caro’s motto in investigation work comes from one of his old employers Alan Hathway who once said to him: “Just remember, turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamned page.” This reminds him of the fact that whenever you need any information from someone, you may have to think outside the box to get it. As Elon Musk once said, “If conventional thinking makes your mission impossible, then unconventional thinking is necessary.”
“One of the reasons I believed I had become a reporter in the first place was to find out how things really worked and to explain those workings, and, as my focus had narrowed to politics, that reason had become to explain how political power really worked.”
— Robert Caro
For example, when Caro was preparing to write his biography on Lyndon Johnson, he decided to move to Hill Country and live there in order to better understand the people he was interviewing. Once he rented a house and lived in Hill Country for the next three years, everything changed. The people there started to open up and to talk to him in a different light: they were now including details that were not mentioned previously in their anecdotes about Lyndon Johnson.
Furthermore, when writing a biography, Caro was aware that it was primordial to obtain as much facts as possible when researching. This is because he was aware of the fact that “there is no Truth, no objective truth, no single truth, no truth simple or unsimple, either; no verity, eternal or otherwise; no Truth about anything, there are Facts, objective facts, discernible and verifiable. And the more facts you accumulate, the closer you come to whatever truth there is.”
By consequence, Caro took a long time to write his books because accumulating facts can take a long process as it can only be done through reading documents and through interviewing and re-interviewing individuals. This process cannot be rushed. Here’s how Caro explains the research process he took to write his book on Lyndon Johnson, in his own words:
“First you read the books on the subject, then you go to the big newspapers, and all the magazines—Newsweek, Life, Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Star, then you go to the newspapers from the little towns. If Johnson made a campaign stop there, you want to see how it’s covered in the weekly newspaper. Then the next thing you do is the documents. There’s the Lyndon Johnson papers, but also the papers of everyone else—Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower—whom he dealt with. Or for The Power Broker, Al Smith’s papers, the Herbert Lehman papers, the Harriman papers, the La Guardia papers….
(…)
Then come the interviews. You try and find everybody who is alive who dealt with Johnson in any way in this period. Some people you interview over and over. There was this Johnson speechwriter, Horace Busby. I interviewed him twenty-two times. These were the formal interviews. We also had a lot of informal telephone chats. I came to love Buzz. But none of this is enough. You have to ask yourself, Are you making the reader see the scene? And that means, Can you see the scene? You look at so many books, and it seems like all the writer cares about is getting the facts in. But the facts alone aren’t enough.”
— Robert Caro
This reminds me of the concept of separating opinions from facts that we have learned from J. Paul Getty. Getty mentions that the most common mistake that seems to be recurring among executives is the ineptitude to separate opinions from facts while making decisions. In fact, he explains that a businessman must assemble all the available pertinent facts and study them himself before making any deals.
While it is okay to take the opinions of others into consideration, it is primordial to understand that these opinions, while based on facts, are not flawless. As he once said, “The mistake lies in accepting and following other people's advice blindly, in accepting their opinions without first determining if they are backed up by facts.“
The morale of the story? Turn every pages yourself and never assume anything.
“The first of these is the failure-or the inability to distinguish between what is fact and what is opinion. Though it may be carefully considered and based on fact, opinion nonetheless remains opinion-and it is very seldom infallible. Opinion is never better than the information on which it is based, the qualifications of the person voicing it and his ability to correctly interpret the information at his disposal.” — J. Paul Getty
Friends With The Eminent Dead
“One who can so revere another, will soon himself be worthy of reverence.”
— Seneca
One of Charlie Munger’s operating system in life is to learn from the eminent dead. As a matter of fact, to be successful, one needs to seek good role models to emulate. As the famous saying goes, “show me your role models and I’ll show you your future.” And as Peter Kaufman once said, “No technique has been more responsible for my success in life than studying and adopting the good models of others.”
One way of doing so is through reading. In fact, your role models does not even need to be alive. Due to the amount of biography books out there and the amount of information available on the internet, it is totally possible for an individual to learn insights from wise people of the past.
What better way than to learn from the experts who can teach you tips, tricks and insights that would have taken you a lifetime to learn. As Charlie Munger once said, “I want to learn as much as I can vicariously. It's too painful to do it by personal hardship.”
“If your hero is Tobi Lütke, who started Shopify, one of the most successful companies in the history of the world, you can find countless interviews with him on the internet. You can sit at the feet of the master and learn as he shares how he thinks, how he makes decisions, how he runs his company. The same goes for Peter D. Kaufman, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Tom Brady, Simone Biles, Serena Williams, or Katie Ledecky.”
— Shane Parrish
In his book “Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results”, Shane Parrish goes over the concept that by reading what exemplary people have written about, one can build a database of situation and responses. Collecting this database is primordial as it can help you make better decision by thinking “Here’s what the outliers would do.”
“One way of creating space for reason in your thinking is to ask yourself what your exemplars would do if they were in your position. It’s the natural next step. Once you imagine them watching, you make decisions and put them into action.”
— Shane Parrish
This core concept of Charlie Munger is the reason why I have started this blog. Here’s how Charlie Munger explains the importance of learning through reading biographies in his own word: “I am a biography nut myself. And I think when you're trying to teach the great concepts that work, it helps to tie them into the lives and personalities of the people who developed them. I think you learn economics better if you make Adam Smith your friend.”
In the case of Robert Caro, he also noticed that it is a lot easier to understand concepts through learning the lives of individuals. In fact, when he wrote about Robert Moses’ career, he quickly realized that “his story and the story of New York City were, to a remarkable degree, one story.”
“And therefore I came to feel that if what I had for so long wanted to do was to discover and disclose the fundamentals of true political power—not theoretical political power but the raw, naked essence of such power—then perhaps the best way to do that was through portraying the life of Robert Moses.”
— Robert Caro
This is the main reason why Caro needs so much time to write his books. For him, biographies shouldn’t only be about stating facts but to provide further information on the context surrounding the person in question.
For example, in terms of explaining about political power, Caro explains that he “now came to believe that the focus should be widened, to show not just the life of the wielder of power but the lives on whom, and for whom, it was wielded; not to show those lives in the same detail, of course, but in sufficient detail to enable the reader to empathize with the consequences of power—the consequences of government, really—on the lives of its citizens, for good and for ill. To really show political power, you had to show the effect of power on the powerless, and show it fully enough so the reader could feel it.”
“You try to learn as much about the people as you can. I try never to give psychohistory…. It’s as hard to understand someone you’re writing about as it is to understand someone in real life, but there are a lot of objective facts about their lives and actions, and the more of them you learn, the closer you come to whatever understanding is possible.”
— Robert Caro
Find Your Peers
“Man is a sociable being, and it is, for aught I know, one of the worst of punishments to be excluded from society.”
— Benjamin Franklin
Robert Caro’s career as a writer did not start the way he would have wished. As a matter of fact, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author initially struggled to make a living with his writings in the early days. Part of his difficulties as a writer was because of the fact that he did not have any contact with any single other writer of serious books during the first five years he worked on The Power Broker. He mentioned that “There was no writer with whom I could discuss a writing problem.”
This situation improved when in 1971, he joined the Frederick Lewis Allen Room, where he would be surrounded by other resident writers who were also working on their own researches and on their books. Being surrounded by people similar to you can be a great boost in terms of learning from each others and leaning on each others for support.
In Caro’s case, while he initially questioned himself on his ability to write a book due to him not being able to complete it in five years, he was quickly reassured by his fellow writers in the Allen Room:
“Then one day, I looked up and James Flexner was standing over me. The expression on his face was friendly, but after he had asked what I was writing about, the next question was the question I had come to dread: “How long have you been working on it?” This time, however, when I replied, “Five years,” the response was not an incredulous stare. “Oh,” Jim Flexner said, “that’s not so long. I’ve been working on my Washington for nine years.” I could have jumped up and kissed him, whiskers and all—as, the next day, I could have jumped up and kissed Joe Lash, big beard and all, when he asked me the same question, and, after hearing my answer, said in his quiet way, “Eleanor and Franklin took me seven years.” In a couple of sentences, these two men—idols of mine—had wiped away five years of doubt.”
— Robert Caro
Being part of a community is tremendously important for any human being to succeed. The experience at the Allen Room allowed Caro to discuss with fellow writers about various problems in research and writing that he previously couldn’t share with anyone.
This reminds me of a concept we’ve learned from Benjamin Franklin who believed that that human beings are social creatures and that socializing with others is an essential part of a fulfilling life. He believed that people should actively seek out social connections and build relationships with others, rather than isolating themselves.
As a matter of fact, Franklin believed that having all the knowledge in the world is useless if you cannot share it with anyone.
“One of the philosophers, I think it was Plato, used to say that he had rather be the veriest stupid block in nature than the possessor of all knowledge without some intelligent being to communicate it to.”
— Benjamin Franklin
As a matter of fact, Franklin was a strong believer that sharing knowledge and information with a group of individuals, usually smarter than you, is a great way of learning things faster. In fact, various studies show that peer groups are super influential in your learning. The reasoning behind it can be easily understood by this famous saying: “you are the sum of the five people that you hang around with the most.”
Writing
“The next thing most like living one’s life over again seems to be a recollection of that life, and to make that recollection as durable as possible by putting it down in writing.”
— Benjamin Franklin
As Paul Graham once said, “a good writer doesn’t just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing.”
Similarly, during his Princeton days, Caro, while talented in writing, did not put in any real thought into it as it was too easy for him. This was noticed by his Professor who told him wisely that he was not going to achieve anything “if you don’t stop thinking with your fingers.”
From then on, Caro started the habit of writing slowly in order to think things all the way through, especially when the subject at hand is complex. This is the reason why Caro prefers “to write my first drafts in longhand, slowest of the various means of committing thoughts to paper, before I started doing later drafts on the typewriter; that is why I still do my first few drafts in longhand today; that is why, even now that typewriters have been replaced by computers, I still stick to my Smith-Corona Electra 210.“
Not only that, Caro had the habit to triple-space the lines in order to allow plenty of room for him to rewrite in pencil in case he had new insights or thoughts on the matter at hand:
“I triple-space the lines the way I did as a newspaperman, so there will be plenty of room to rewrite in pencil. I rewrite a lot. Sometimes I look at a page I typed but have reworked in pencil, and there’s hardly a word in type left on it. Or no words in type left at all—every one has been crossed out. And often there’s been so much writing and rewriting and erasing that the page has to be tossed out completely. At the end of the day there will be a great many crumpled-up sheets of paper in the wastepaper basket or on the floor around it.”
— Robert Caro
This reminds me of the concept of how one can learn through writing. As we have learned with Benjamin Franklin, by writing about a topic at hand, you must be able to compress your ideas into words which requires both understanding and thinking. As such,writing is a great process to understand things better yourself and to identify the topics that you understand from those that you don’t.
“All should be taught to write a fair hand, and swift, as that is useful to all.”
— Benjamin Franklin
Furthermore, writing is a great tool for better decision making. In fact, by keeping a decision journal at hand, you will be able to collect feedbacks from your previous decisions in the hope of making better decisions in the future.
Writing it down on a journal is crucial as it allows you to review all the circumstances and accessible knowledge you had at the time of your decision and to truly evaluate it without being obstructed by hindsight bias.
“Go down to a local drugstore and buy a very cheap notebook and start keeping track of your decisions. And the specific idea is whenever you’re making a consequential decision, something going in or out of the portfolio, just take a moment to think, write down what you expect to happen, why you expect it to happen and then actually, and this is optional, but probably a great idea, is write down how you feel about the situation, both physically and even emotionally. Just, how do you feel? I feel tired. I feel good, or this stock is really draining me. Whatever you think.
The key to doing this is that it prevents something called hindsight bias, which is no matter what happens in the world, we tend to look back on our decision-making process, and we tilt it in a way that looks more favorable to us, right? So we have a bias to explain what has happened.”
— Daniel Kahneman
Beyond the Book
Read "Seneca on Letting the Eminent Dead Guide You" by Farnam Street
Read "Why Write?" by Farnam Street
Read "Creating a Decision Journal: Template And Example Included" by Farnam Street
Great article.
Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few engage in it - Henry Ford
or to translate this to social media
“Thinking is hard, that's why most people judge” - Carl Jung
Reading is hard because it requires you to think.
Writing is hard because it highlights areas you think you understand but realise you don't when you try to write about it.
I love the quote - Turn every page. In software development assumption cause problems because people are not verifying fact from opinion (usually their own).
Its good to check our opinions, to understand where did this come from and what facts is this opinion based on. Many of our opinions are built on other peoples opinions and we rarely stop to clarify them.
I'm always interested in Robert Caro and his process because his books are great but you wonder how he doesn't go mad writing a book for years..