“He’s a savant. That’s the only way I can say it.” That’s how Tee Martin, quarterbacks coach for the Baltimore Ravens, described Ravens’ quarterback Lamar Jackson in a Washington Post interview from earlier this year.
Well, of course Jackson is a savant. Even on the high school level, the quarterback position is incredibly cerebral, and requires the individual to make all manner of split second reads while on the run, with frequently bigger opponents trying to hurt him. Imagine the immense, multiple-phone book (look it up…), split-second knowledge required to quarterback a team in the NFL.
What’s important, and it was written about in greater detail in my 2018 book, The End of Work, is that savants like Jackson are set to multiply. Such is the genius of automation matched with an increasingly globalized workforce: more and more of us will get to specialize, and in specializing we will get to do the work we can’t not do. The work that shines a bright light on our unique brilliance.
Jackson came to mind while reading Axios and Politico co-creator and co-founder Jim VandeHei’s excellent new book, Just the Good Stuff: No-BS Secrets to Success. VandeHei is clear that to have known him in high school, but even in college, it’s unlikely that you would have looked at him and seen an impressive future borne of unique smarts and abilities. In VandeHei’s words, “I was among the most unremarkable, unimpressive nineteen-year-olds you could have stumbled across in 1990.”
More realistically, VandeHei just hadn’t found his calling, yet. It’s kind of like if Warren Buffett had been born into a sports economy, as he once imagined in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece. If so, the highly capable investor and sage would have similarly been unremarkable, simply because no amount of instruction from the greatest sports minds could have turned Buffett into an athletic star. But in investing…
With VandeHei, he writes on his book’s very first page that he had a 1.4 GPA at University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, “then I yanked my head from my ass, thanks to stumbling into two new passions: journalism and politics.” Having found his passions, VandeHei was transformed.
One case about life that he makes is that anything is possible, and the truth of the latter can be found in VandeHei’s story: if “a middling dipshit like me could rise to the pinnacle of American journalism, then become CEO of two highly successful media startups – and then persuade you to read this – shows that truly anything is possible.” Ironically enough, it was in a big story on VandeHei in the Washington Post, the employer that VandeHei left (he covered the presidency for the Post) to co-found Politico, that I read about him and his new book. So compelling was the story that the book became a must-read, and also a very rewarding read.
If there’s a major pushback, it’s rooted in my belief that VandeHei was never a dipshit any more than Buffett would have been one if sports had been his only path to success, or if the seemingly non-political Jackson had been presented with reporting on politics as his only career path. The view here is that VandeHei, like Buffett and Jackson, has always had savant qualities that just needed discovery, or a market application. Everyone’s got remarkable skills and intelligence, but is the economy advanced enough to realize those talents and brains?
What read as most important to me, and useful to readers regardless of future life paths, is that VandeHei’s Just the Good Stuff didn’t get stuck in trite advice about getting a good education, or using education to find one’s passion. Seriously, how could something that realistically hasn’t changed in decades (some would say centuries) unearth in us what our passions are, or where our potential lies or does not? Think about this in particular when considering where VandeHei went to college. University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh isn’t University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the former most certainly isn’t known as a feeder to the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, two print publications where VandeHei reported in high-profile fashion.
Except that schooling is irrelevant to genius, or more specifically, schooling is a total non sequitur when it comes to genius. VandeHei has lived the previous truth, and continues to live it. He writes of how “it is nonsense that to shine, you need to go to a fancy school, boot lick bosses, or pay your dues in crappy jobs.” And the reason why the previous assertion is not the platitude that some might say it is has to do with another crucial truth conveyed by VandeHei, that “the second you hit the real world and workplace, no one gives a hoot about your college, GPA, or past mistakes and triumphs.” Amen.
Think Jackson in trying to better understand what VandeHei is saying. He played college football at Louisville, not USC, Alabama or Ohio State. Where he played indicates that he wasn’t a top prospect coming out of high school, and then the fact that Jackson was picked at the bottom of the first round of the 2018 NFL draft indicates that despite playing the most important position in football, the position that is nearly always picked at the top of the first round, more than a few teams thought him lacking the skills to perform the most important position in sports at the NFL level. Except that the past, and in particular the learning from the past, is irrelevant to success.
In thinking about all this, it’s easy to imagine that when work colleagues in Washington asked VandeHei where he attended college, they likely squirmed uncomfortably when he told them. Except that the past, and degrees earned or not earned, are yet again inconsequential when placed next to actual smarts that can’t be measured, along with the lengths those in possession of them will go to in order to maximize them. Once again, VandeHei was never dumb, he just hadn’t found his calling.
At the same time, VandeHei finding what animated his unique skills and intelligence may make some uncomfortable as they read the book. That is so since he’s clear early on that that “too often people use circumstances as a crutch.” Implied here is that people use their past, their lack of a degree, their lack of the right major, or their attendance at the wrong school, as an excuse to not pursue, or even find their passion. It’s a reminder that happiness is hard, and that it almost certainly is only attainable via the hard work (about work, VandeHei writes that he “loves this shit”) that can only be consistently performed if the individual is doing something that animates him.
Which brings up another disagreement with the author. He writes that “grit is it.” I’ll bet he could be persuaded that grit decidedly is not it, and the reason it’s not it can be found in VandeHei’s call for readers to “do something [for a career] you would do for free.” When we’re lucky enough to be doing what we would do for free, grit is a given. Except that it can’t be grit precisely because what we would do for free is so joyous. Think Washington Post columnist George Will. He can’t wait to get back to writing when he’s not writing, and when he wrote about baseball in Men at Work, he was clear that something so joyous could not be work.
In truth, grit would be Buffett trying to make a career out of football and basketball despite lacking the skills to play either, Jackson not leaning into an incredibly rare ability that has him knowing his own position and that of every other teammate/opponent better than they do in favor of national political reporting, and VandeHei pursuing a career as a professor of Russian fiction over his real passion for politics and journalism.
At the same time, it should be said that Just the Good Stuff is so much more than a book about how an unknown from Wisconsin became a known at two of the most important print publications in the world, and then became co-founder and CEO of two wildly successful journalism start-ups at a time when the consensus was that journalism’s best, most dynamic days were behind it. Oh well, just as education and the past are irrelevant to genius, so is conventional wisdom. Which is another reason VandeHei’s book was and is such a must-read: if he can thrive in a media space thought to have seen its best days, then it’s necessary to know what he deems the “good stuff.” About the good stuff, let’s just say VandeHei’s advice to “talk, not text” was worth the price of the book alone, so loathsome and time wasting is texting.
Of course, the challenge in reading VandeHei, particularly for someone who wants to be a writer and loves writing, is that some (or a lot) of the Good Stuff rejects how this writer does things. When it comes to opinion pieces, VandeHei dislikes “throat-clearing prefaces, thunderous overtures, and wordy introductions.” Almost all my writing includes all three, which had me squirming while also enjoying, and internalizing what VandeHei was saying. Having read the book in the past week, some of my daily opinion pieces have already been informed by VandeHei’s call for writers to get to the point.
The squirming increased as VandeHei cited a University of Maryland study “of how people read on social media, in school, and in business – and found we spend 26 seconds, on average, on things we choose to read.” The sweating began, and it worsened farther down p. 132 as VandeHei observed that it “is selfish to force me to sort through hundreds of words to figure out what you are trying to tell me.” VandeHei tells writers to “use bullet points, they are like magic for skimmers (which – face it – is everyone).” Agony. VandeHei plainly knows of what he speaks. Axios is his market reaction (Cox bought a majority stake in it that valued the new media company at $525 million) to the changing ways and needs of readers. Desirous of knowledge, but not the time required to attain it, Axios meets the marketplace by getting right to the point.
In my self-defense, a little over a year or two ago I did stop the 1,000 word daily opinion pieces. Initially the goal was 800 words, but even those are long, and this became apparent to me in reading writer submissions to RealClearMarkets. Nowadays the aim is 600 words, though VandeHei would likely say even 600 words is WAY too long. The only time the 600-700 rule is broken, and it’s always broken, is with book reviews. The view here is that if writers are going to put in the effort to write and publish books, reviewers should return their efforts.
The great news for readers is that the Good Stuff lives up to its get-to-the-point message. Each chapter reads like an Axios article explaining why a subject matters, bullet-pointed commentary that underscores why something matters, followed by a bottom line.
Equally important, the book is not just how to, or “self-help.” In my case, some of its best lessons were of the business variety. Entrepreneurs in particular fascinate me, and they do precisely given my belief that entrepreneurialism is not a choice as much as it’s a state of mind. That’s why they’re so rare. Rare is the person so relentless in going against conventional wisdom. This is true in thought, and even truer in business. Applied to VandeHei, Donald Graham’s response to VandeHei’s expressed intention to leave the Washington Post in order to start Politico was rather blistering: “I have never said this to anyone. You are making a ca-ta-stro-phic mistake.”
In reality, VandeHei was looking into the future and seeing it more clearly than the leading lights of print were. A major driver of this vision was Google’s acquisition of the then-less-known YouTube for $1 billion. VandeHei asked himself “what would it cost someone with Google-like money to take on my own paper, the legendary Washington Post?” As readers can no doubt deduce, Politico emerged from this question, and while there’s surely a lot that went into VandeHei’s eventual departure from Politico, it’s no reach to speculate that Axios emerged from what VandeHei learned in turning Politico in short order from unknown to “arguably the most successful new media company of the internet era.”
About all this, and in particular the departure, there’s obviously lots of bad blood between VandeHei and Robert Allbritton (the major money behind Politico), and it rates a book itself. Unknown is what kind of book it would be. Without knowing the details of what happened at all, I found myself reading the bullet points and anecdotes while wanting to know so much more. Venture capital funding is mentioned ahead of VandeHei and John Harris teaming up with Allbritton, but I’d really like to know more of the details about how it all came to be. In which case, it would be interesting to ask VandeHei if he thinks he could tell his business story in Axios form, or if a better rendering of it would come in the form of a more traditional memoir.
VandeHei has a Nick Saban, Pete Carroll, and Will Guidara (Eleven Madison Park) approach to progress. It’s about winning the play. Getting the little things right on the path to winning the bigger things. In his words, “nothing is more satisfying than knowing you’re a little better today than you were yesterday.” Saban never started each season with national championship designs. The goal was instead just constant improvement. That’s why he could be seen so irritated even when big games were well won, and this included national championship games.
As for employees, VandeHei tells readers to “spoil your superstars, they’re worth 10-20 mediocrities.” It brings to mind one of my own mentors, Bob Reingold. He’s long said “never let an employee ask you for a raise, just give raises.”
On the matter of hierarchy, VandeHei is plainly not a fan. He writes that “power should rarely flow from title or tenure,” and the latter is arguably of a piece with his already discussed view that “too often people use circumstances as a crutch.” A la Carroll in his past pitches to USC recruits back when college football was great, there’s competition for every position every day. People who work for VandeHei are allowed to thrive, or not. Along these lines, he writes that “the highest praise I pay Kristin [Burkhalter, Axios SVP] is that I spend zero time thinking about events.” In a dynamic economy, you’re rewarded for what you’re doing.
What read as most important in the book? The conclusion arrived at by me involved VandeHei’s admission that he’s “susceptible to one of the biggest problems in the modern workplace: wasting time on things better handled by someone else.” Yes. As discussed earlier, VandeHei remembers being unremarkable and aimless until he happened on passions (journalism and politics) that he would do for free. He crucially applies this to his work overseeing hundreds of employees: “At work, are you allocating most of your energy to things you are authentically very good or great at?” The essential question, and one that will be wonderfully enhanced as automation and “AI” free us ever more from the aspects of work we despise.
Hopeful that he’ll oversee the development of many more employees with his kind of energy and passion, it’s evident that VandeHei is working diligently to help employees find out about themselves what he long ago found out about himself. Read Jim VandeHei’s excellent book to instigate your own thinking about where your individual genius lies, and what to do and not do once you’ve happened on the most important discovery of your lifetime.
Republished from RealClear Markets
