Excerpt
Good Ideas and Power Moves
POWER MOVE ONE
Be a Unicorn
Being like Taylor Swift is not impossible. However, it turns out that it's not exactly easy.
"But what happens if you get sick?" I asked my friend, a chef of a two-Michelin-star restaurant, over dinner.
It's a fascinating question, because it really highlighted the difference between our lives. If I were to get sick, I would send a few emails to postpone meetings, and when I'm feeling a bit better, I might even attempt to do some work from bed. This is the ultimate luxury of being a white-collar, work-from-anywhere worker.
My sister, who works in a hospital where she must be physically present to do her job, can even phone in sick and have someone cover her shift. Is it ideal? No. But is it catastrophic? Also no.
A two-Michelin-star restaurant, however, is slightly different.
Six-month waiting lists, for both lunch and dinner, and a small, ninja-like team of the most skilled chefs in the world performing what is essentially microsurgery on food to produce an extremely complex menu at high speed.
When your customers are spending hundreds of dollars per meal, at a minimum, the lowest acceptable outcome is complete perfection.
"Sick? You don't get sick. I haven't had a sick day in years," the chef tells me, baffled by the question in the first place. "It's not an option."
Of the estimated 15 million restaurants in the world, only 0.018 percent of them hold one or more Michelin stars. Of that, only 650 two- or three-Michelin-star restaurants exist today, putting my friend in the top 0.004 percent of chefs in the world.
I thought about a trip I took last winter, a four-hour flight each way with a three-day vacation in between. And afterward, a five-week battle with a chest and sinus infection that I definitely caught at the airport. If I were a chef, would I have not traveled so that I didn't get sick? Or would I have ignored being sick?
Then I thought about Taylor Swift's eighteen-month long Eras Tour across five continents, consisting of 152 shows in some of the most extreme weather conditions on Earth. What the hell? Just how?
I'm pretty sure I read that somewhere in the middle of her Brazilian shows, she performed her three-and-a-half-hour, ten-thousand-calories-burning show, boarded her plane still in her show attire, flew for ten hours to New York, and was papped the next day up to her usual shenanigans of recording a new album, hanging out with celebrity friends, and being the ultimate woman-about-town.
I say this as someone who is exactly the same age as Taylor Swift and would love going to the pub in pajamas to be normalized: How does she do it?
How does she not get sick? How does she have the energy? Has anybody actually verified that she doesn't have a twin?
To put this into the context of where I, part of the Taylor-aged cohort, am, one of my friends texted me yesterday asking me to congratulate her for wearing a bra for the first time in a week.
"I know I'm going on that stage whether I'm sick, injured, heartbroken, uncomfortable, or stressed. That's part of my identity as a human being now. If someone buys a ticket to my show, I'm going to play it unless we have some sort of force majeure," Taylor said in a pre-Eras Tour interview.
I'm not entirely sure what the correct single metric for trying to measure Taylor's success as a singer-songwriter would be, and it's likely that the topic could be a long book on its own, but consider that in 2022, thirty-six million songs were released to the public. Figuring out which artist is best among those releasing these millions of songs is complex, but just bear with me when I make the assumption that across these releases, Taylor comes up top.
That means she is 1/36,000,000. Which means she is in the top 0.0000000027 percent of artists releasing music. And that is just wild.
So yeah, we live in a world where there are two types of people: the normal people who try their best to wear bras to work and the Taylor Swifts. The chefs of two-Michelin-star restaurants. The prima ballerinas. The Navy SEALs. The Nobel Prize winners. The statistical outliers.
The Unicorns.
But . . . Unicorns Are
Normal People Too
There is a huge paradox regarding people who do extraordinary things.
In one way, they are just ordinary people like you and me who just so happen to be doing extraordinary things. Sometimes I like to think that even someone as powerful as the president of the United States puts on his pajamas, gets into bed at night, and thinks, "Thank god. Another day at the office done," before watching cat videos on an anonymous account on Twitter.
I happen to be writing this book from a little village in Ireland that houses a beautiful castle, where celebrities sometimes visit. One day, I walked into the tiny corner pub only to be told that I had just missed a global music superstar. "I don't see the big deal," the bar lady retorted across the pub. "He's just another man who sits on the toilet every day, bored like the rest of us."
In fact, some people have not subscribed to the celebrity-culture obsession that has permeated our lives, including most of my friends and family, who are blissfully unaware of any "famous" people and are unable to see Unicorns as anything but ordinary people. The "extraordinary" things they do are seen as nothing more than part of their job, no different from being a builder or an accountant.
And this is, in fact, probably a good way to think about them.
I've had the benefit of meeting, working with, and even befriending many Unicorns, and they are indeed normal people in the ways that make people human. They are insecure. They are scared. They worry about people not liking them. They also find it hard to get dates (I know!). They, too, will stare at their phones wondering if the person they like will ever text them back. They have complex friends and families. They start their day by waking up, jumping in the shower, and wondering whether or not they can get away with using dry shampoo instead of the real stuff.
And this is largely who we think about when we think about Taylor Swift. Or at least this is the way most people have been thinking about her for the last twentyish years. Because she is the ultimate girl next door.
She is a beautiful, ultratalented, successful, fun, witty billionaire that everybody wants to date. But is there anything more relatable than the fact that she still happens to get ghosted by her dates like the rest of us?
The depths of her perceived-and, to a large degree her real-normalcy will be a central theme in later discussions in this book on her strategy, her engagement, and why we all still seem to love her so much despite her success (yes, we typically dislike successful people, and greatly despise successful women).
I mean, being "normal" is her thing. Normality is her multibillion-dollar business. There's nobody who does "normal" better than the most famous and influential billionaire alive, even with her private jets.
But before we get into the specifics of her normalcy, I want to take a chapter, just one, to talk about the ways in which the ordinary people who do extraordinary things are actually pretty damn extraordinary.
Because until you have a good sense of what makes a Unicorn extraordinary, and until you really understand their superpower, it's going to be hard to contextualize just how insanely talented and special they are, and how downright difficult everything they do is.
Or learn how to actually do extraordinary things yourself, as an ordinary person.
You see, all the things that Taylor manages to do, and all her power moves and good ideas and superstardom and cunning cleverness, come from the little bit of "extraordinary" that lives within her.
People simply don't know how to identify Unicorns or to understand what makes them special, and the reason that ordinary people find it so hard to become Unicorns is that they don't know how to. I mean, how is Taylor Swift able to do the frankly insane things she does? It feels like a question that is too large to answer, and throughout this book I'll try to explain.
But when you step back and really look at, spend time with, and study the very ordinary people who do extraordinary things, the statistical outliers, you realize that they all share common traits, characteristics, and beliefs that allow them to transcend ordinariness to achieve Unicornness.
I call them common traits for the simple reason that you or I could, if we really wanted, achieve them too.
One of the most dangerous beliefs in the world is one that I hear constantly from many people, including the undergrads and students I teach, and is something that I catch myself sometimes repeating inwardly and outwardly: I can't be a Unicorn.
You'd be amazed to learn that the only real difference between someone wondering whether they'll wear a bra this week and Taylor Swift performing sellout shows around the globe is that Taylor figured out how to be a Unicorn, whereas others didn't.
Now, I'm not saying that what Taylor is doing is easy-quite the opposite.
But to the extent that all of us have enormous potential to change the world in little or large ways, we're also all guilty of leaving immense amounts of that potential unfulfilled. Even Taylor Swift knows this: When she got the news that Reputation was not being nominated for any Grammys, she said, with tears in her eyes, "I just need to make a better record."
And even after more than thirty years as one of the best chefs in the world, my friend tells me that "every day it's about just trying to make one small thing better, because there's still a very long way to go."
But looking at what Unicorns do in order to reach the extraordinary outcomes they achieve is, if nothing else, helpful for guiding us closer to being extraordinary.
Achieving Unicorn Status
There is a myth that extraordinary people are born as extraordinary people. That there's no point in trying to be the next Clara Bow-the world's original and most famous "It Girl"-because, well, Clara Bow came out of the womb absolutely and divinely fabulous. That Taylor Swift has some freakish brain wiring that nobody else does. That Nobel Prize ideas are contained in a person's mind at birth.
Well, this is not exactly how it goes.
According to William Shakespeare (and popularly believed to be true) there are three ways to achieve Unicorn status: "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them."
Let's start with being born great. There is no doubt that some people are born with unnaturally huge advantages that enable them to do extraordinary things. The swimmer Michael Phelps, for example, a physiological Eighth Wonder of the World, won eighty-two medals in major international swimming competitions over his career, no doubt aided by his genetically predisposed body.
Then you have people who were born into Unicorn status simply because of who they are. Think of nepo children of family-run conglomerates, who will ultimately have power and prestige transferred to them upon succession, as their last name is a stronger indicator of likely future leadership than a proven track record. Here, Unicorn status is achieved merely because of someone you are, not something you've done.
And then you have the Unicorns who have had greatness thrust upon them. The one example that lives in my brain constantly is that of a former actor, voice of Paddington Bear, and comedian whose move into politics was largely predicated on his viral comedy platform. After using humor and social media sketches to win his way into the presidency, the invasion of his country became the most geopolitically, economically, and security-significant events of our century. I am, of course, talking about Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, who had greatness inadvertently thrust upon him, and who has risen to the occasion of being one of the most important political figures of this and the last decade.
No doubt you can also think of or have already come across many people who have had greatness given willingly and freely to them for, well, unknown reasons-the people who have seemed to "fail upward," of whom we all annoyingly know many. Yes, it is excruciatingly infuriating to see.
But I guess some people who have greatness bestowed upon them do deserve it. There's also a category of people who are extremely talented, yet because of the dynamics of the industry they're in, will still rely on the powers that be to "anoint" them. Just look at American Idol, the TV show in which thousands of similarly talented people hope to become "the chosen one." The world of celebrity endorsements and partnerships doesn't feel too far removed from this, as executives at huge brands decide which model to turn into the next "It Girl." The next Clara Bow.
So yeah, both the "born great" and "had greatness thrust upon them" are two very real ways in which people move from being ordinary to extraordinary and achieve Unicorn status. I mean, after all my years at Harvard University, it's hard to ignore the fact that an overwhelming percentage of the student population are there because of their triple-barreled last names. I've met enough athletes standing at over seven feet tall to know there was one reason they'd been handed scholarships. And I've certainly been in enough meetings to know that, behind closed doors, the "winners" aren't always chosen based on merit. I've just seen too much not to be cynical about how opportunities are distributed.
But here's the thing-only a very, very small number of people become Unicorns in these ways.
Meaning that the overwhelming majority of extraordinary people, of Unicorns, who achieve statistically nearly impossible outcomes, are much more like you and me than you may think. They are the people who have had to achieve greatness themselves, in their short lives. They are the most ordinary of the ordinary people who do extraordinary things.
Which, you know, is great news. Because it means that if most of the Unicorns in the world are actually normal people who were able to achieve greatness on their own terms and not because of some external, impossible-to-replicate situation-like who their parents are, or exceptional biological advantage-then we, too, can achieve greatness.
