On the 27th straight day of filming “Forrest Gump,” Tom Hanks was tired & worried. During a scene on the famous park bench, Hanks stopped & said to director Bob Zemeckis, “Hey, Bob…is anybody going to care about this movie? I don’t think anybody’s going to care.” Bob replied, “It’s a minefield, Tom. You never know what’s good…It’s a minefield! It’s a goddam minefield! We may be sowing the seeds of our own destruction.” Tom Hanks told this story after he was asked, “When I ask for a memory from your career, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?” He said that what Zemeckis said was true of every movie he’s worked on: “There’s never any guarantee...You do not know if it is going to work out.” Takeaway 1: Hanks is the 5th-most highest-grossing actor of all time. And yet, the stickiest memory of his career is the feeling of uncertainty. Rarer than talent or work ethic, the poet John Keats wrote, is the ability to step into and push through doubts and uncertainties. In 1817, Keats wrote a letter to his brothers to share this exciting realization. “At once it struck me,” Keats wrote, “what quality went to form a Man of Achievement … Negative Capability.” Keats explains that “Negative Capability” is “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Takeaway 2: Those who possess Negative Capability, who can sit with uncertainty, who can spend months or years in the minefield that is working on something while knowing that there is a real possibility no one will care about it—they often possess another quality. They do what they do, not as a means to some end (money, fame, awards, etc.), but for the sake of doing it. When asked about one of his movies that commercially failed, Hanks said, "I loved making that movie. I loved writing it, I loved being with it. I love all the people in it." As Ryan Holiday once told me, "The work has to be the win." You control the effort, he says, not the results. "So ultimately, you have to love doing it. You have to get to a place where doing the work is the win and everything else is extra.” - - - “Life is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're going to get.” — Forrest Gump Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!

Josh Waitzkin was a chess prodigy. He won the U.S. Junior Chess Championship at age 11. He became an International Master at age 16. And his life was made into a movie (“Searching for Bobby Fischer”) at 17. But then, around the age of 18, Waitzkin quit playing chess because… He got a new coach. “I was a naturally creative, aggressive chess player,” Waitzkin explained. But the new coach forced Waitzkin to play like the great chess players Anatoly Karpov and Tigran Petrosian—“the most positional, conservative chess players.” When he was forced to play in a way that didn’t align with his natural proclivities, Waitzkin said, “I lost my love for the game.” So he quit. He later took up martial arts, and after just 2 years of training, he won his first national championship in martial arts. Asked if he took anything from chess into the martial arts, Waitzkin said he leaned into his unique physical and mental traits: “And in my observation of competitors in any discipline, this a really fundamental idea. Those who succeed at the highest level, I think, basically manifest their unique character through their discipline.” Takeaway 1: Waitzkin said he was at his best (as a chess player then a martial artist) when his style aligned with his personality. This is known in economics as “match quality”—the degree of alignment between the traits of a profession and the traits of a person. The NBA executive turned venture capitalist, Sam Hinkie, was asked how he thought about shaping his career path. Essentially, Hinkie said he tried to optimize for match quality. “By nature,” Hinkie explained, “I think in decades, and I have a steady temperament.” So, Hinkie thought, “Can you get to a place where there is leverage on that kind of thinking, where that kind of steady temperament is rewarded?” Takeaway 2: Waitzkin writes in his book, “The Art of Learning,” that “one of the most critical factors in becoming a high performer is the degree to which your relationship to your pursuit stays in harmony with your unique disposition.” The music producer Rick Rubin is a good example of this. Rubin is a voracious consumer of art. He’s constantly listening to music, reading a book, watching a movie, at a museum, or driving around just to look at beautiful architecture. “It’s all I do,” Rubin told screenwriter Brian Koppelman. “But not because it’s my job. It’s like, my job is my job because the person that I am loves to do those things.” - - - “It seems to me that each of us expressing our own originality is the essence of our art and professionalism.” — Jim Henson Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!