#144 - How did they achieve so much?
And why did they?
After Christopher Nolan had finished the script for Oppenheimer, he first took it to his longtime visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson. The fulcrum for the story, as Nolan calls it, was the Trinity Test. Trinity was the code name for the first detonation of a nuclear weapon that the United States Army conducted as part of the Manhattan Project.
Nolan, as always, didn’t want to use computer-generated imagery, and so his question to Jackson was whether the Trinity Test could be re-created within those constraints.
I mean we always knew that the Trinity test would have to be a showstopper. It's the fulcrum that the whole story turns on and when I finished the script, one of the first people I showed the script to was my visual effects supervisor because I wanted to take CG off the table and see if you know he could come up with real world methodologies for producing the effect of, you know, the first atomic blast.
Nolan handed over the next several months of his life to Jackson. What did Jackson do?
…and so he spent months and months and months doing all these experiments and figuring out all these methods, some very very small and microscopic, some of them absolutely colossal and then the process of going out to the desert, you know, with Ruth De Jong [the production designer], building the bunkers as they would have been so that we could shoot in the middle of the night in the desert in the real places and get these guys there to really experience some measure of what that tension would have been like that crazy night, just building up and the weeks before building up, worrying about the weather…
Nolan wanted to find out if the tension of the first atomic blast could be recreated in the middle of the New Mexico desert. It was only after he was convinced that it could be that he felt ready to undertake Oppenheimer.
He then shot the decades-spanning movie in 57 days flat.
How could someone who was so painstaking in the conceptualization of the visuals for the project be so swift, almost hasty, with the filming?
This kind of productivity, by the way, is not limited to Nolan’s most recent project. It’s a running theme. Nolan runs tight ships. He finishes under schedule, under project.
Nor is this kind of productivity limited to filmmaking. You see it across domains.
The secret behind such high yield is the answer to the paradox of productivity. Go slow, go far.
The inexplicable preoccupations of genius
Says Scott Young, author of the book Ultralearning and someone who shot to fame with his MIT Challenge (he learned the entire 4-year MIT curriculum for computer science, without taking any classes):
On the face of it, the idea that we should do fewer things and obsess over quality seems to contradict the idea that those who have the most hits are the ones who took a lot of shots.
For someone who has struggled to pull off a month of no-phone Sundays and breaks into a cold sweat any time his three year old mimics him on the phone, the paradox Young is pointing to is not lost on me. I have seen it earlier, though at the time I didn’t have the radar to catch it. The moment of reading Young’s quote takes me back to John McPhee’s Draft No. 4, to this passage under the chapter Structure.
Out the back door and under the big ash was a picnic table. At the end of summer, 1966, I lay down on it for nearly two weeks, staring up into branches and leaves, fighting fear and panic, because I had no idea where or how to begin a piece of writing for The New Yorker.
[...]
The subject was the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey. I had spent about eight months driving down from Princeton day after day, or taking a sleeping bag and a small tent. I had done all the research I was going to do—had interviewed woodlanders, fire watchers, forest rangers, botanists, cranberry growers, blueberry pickers, keepers of a general store.
[...]
The piece would ultimately consist of some five thousand sentences, but for those two weeks I couldn’t write even one.
I see shades of Nolan’s Trinity Test in McPhee’s account.
I suspect McPhee, prolific as any writer of non-fiction with twenty-nine books, one of which was about just one tennis match, didn’t think there was anything unusual about the kind of time he spent thinking, instead of writing, in the face of a looming crisis.
Go slow (eight months researching a piece), go far (twenty-nine books).
Focus and mindset
Nolan’s methods disregard this need for quick progress. What he turns his attention to is the hardest, the slowest, the most meaningful, part of the project: the Trinity Test.
McPhee labors over the structure of his pieces on picnic tables instead of putting pen to paper.
Neither does anything that is automatic. Both go for the effortful.
Longtime readers of this newsletter may know of monkeys and pedestals and opportunity-cost thinking as two systems of thought that prescribe tackling the hardest part of the problem first.
I want to pull the curtains on another core component needed to pull off hard things: the skill of subtraction. Directing your efforts at the absolutely essential, and leaving out everything else. Here’s Jony Ive, ex-chief design officer at Apple, from a 2014 interview:
One of the things Steve [Jobs] would say because, I think, he was concerned that I wasn’t [focused enough]... he would say, How many things have you said no to?
[...]
What focus means is saying no to something that you, with every bone in your body, you think is a phenomenal idea and you wake up thinking about it but you say no to it because you’re focusing on something else.
Apart from the fact that one needs focus to accomplish incredible feats of human art such as Oppenheimer or Levels of the Game or the iPhone when it first came out, one needs it for putting a full stop to whatever it is that’s consuming them today.
👉The truly ambitious are worried sick that they’ll run out of time. They focus so that they can finish.
The rest are left searching for excuses to hold on to a dear project as if it were the last one. If they give that up, they give up their best shot at greatness. If this one thing they know and somewhat understand comes to an end, who knows what else they may be pitted against? There’s a fear that runs cold in their veins. They fear they cannot rise to that unknown occasion, so they drag their feet. They distract themselves, they meander.
Even the genius doesn’t have access to a reservoir of confidence at all times. Says McPhee in Draft No. 4:
To lack confidence at the outset seems rational to me. It doesn’t matter that something you’ve done before has worked out well. Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you.
Yet, McPhee’s gotten over this problem of lack of confidence at least twenty-nine times in his career. Genius has a sense they can level up to whatever the situation demands. They may not know for sure, but they have a sense that their true potential is unknown. The rest say to themselves: This is the best I’ll ever be.
👋Hi, I’m Satyajit. Welcome to my newsletter that picks apart the messiness of decision-making about business, careers, and life.
🤿Further reading for today:
Christopher Nolan’s take on creating Trinity Test
Scott Young’s MIT Challenge and Ultralearning
John McPhee’s Draft No. 4 and that book on a tennis match
Jony Ive interview about what Steve Jobs taught him
This is a great piece of insight! The difference between a genius and an insane person is that the madness of a genius has a method, although it may not be obvious. Thank you for deciphering such a method.