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How to avoid watercoolers—Select your brother-in-law—Yevgenia's favorite book—What deserts can and cannot deliver—On the avoidance of hope— El desierto de los tártaros— The virtues of slow motion
Assume that, like Yevgenia, your activities depend on a Black Swan surprise—i.e., you are a reverse turkey. Intellectual, scientific, and artistic activities belong to the province of Extremistan, where there is a severe concentration of success, with a very small number of winners claiming a large share of the pot. This seems to apply to all professional activities I find nondull and “interesting” （I am still looking for a single counterexample, a nondull activity that belongs to Mediocristan）.
Acknowledging the role of this concentration of success, and acting accordingly, causes us to be punished twice: we live in a society where the reward mechanism is based on the illusion of the regular; our hormonal reward system also needs tangible and steady results. It too thinks that the world is steady and well behaved—it falls for the confirmation error. The world has changed too fast for our genetic makeup. We are alienated from our environment.
Every morning you leave your cramped apartment in Manhattan's East Village to go to your laboratory at the Rockefeller University in the East Sixties. You return in the late evening, and people in your social network ask you if you had a good day, just to be polite. At the laboratory, people are more tactful. Of course you did not have a good day; you found nothing. You are not a watch repairman. Your finding nothing is very valuable, since it is part of the process of discovery—hey, you know where not to look. Other researchers, knowing your results, would avoid trying your special experiment, provided a journal is thoughtful enough to consider your “found nothing” as information and publish it.
Meanwhile your brother-in-law is a salesman for a Wall Street firm, and keeps getting large commissions—large and steady commissions. “He is doing very well,” you hear, particularly from your father-in-law, with a small pensive nanosecond of silence after the utterance—which makes you realize that he just made a comparison. It was involuntary, but he made one.
Holidays can be terrible. You run into your brother-in-law at family reunions and, invariably, detect unmistakable signs of frustration on the part of your wife, who, briefly, fears that she married a loser, before remembering the logic of your profession. But she has to fight her first impulse. Her sister will not stop talking about their renovations, their new wallpaper. Your wife will be a little more silent than usual on the drive home. This sulking will be made slightly worse because the car you are driving is rented, since you cannot afford to garage a car in Manhattan. What should you do? Move to Australia and thereby make family reunions less frequent, or switch brothers-in-law by marrying someone with a less “successful” brother?
Or should you dress like a hippie and become defiant? That may work for an artist, but not so easily for a scientist or a businessman. You are trapped.
You work on a project that does not deliver immediate or steady results; all the while, people around you work on projects that do. You are in trouble. Such is the lot of scientists, artists, and researchers lost in society rather than living in an insulated community or an artist colony.
Positive lumpy outcomes, for which we either collect big or get nothing, prevail in numerous occupations, those invested with a sense of mission, such as doggedly pursuing （in a smelly laboratory） the elusive cure for cancer, writing a book that will change the way people view the world （while living hand to mouth）, making music, or painting miniature icons on subway trains and considering it a higher form of art despite the diatribes of the antiquated “scholar” Harold Bloom.
If you are a researcher, you will have to publish inconsequential articles in “prestigious” publications so that others say hello to you once in a while when you run into them at conferences.
If you run a public corporation, things were great for you before you had shareholders, when you and your partners were the sole owners, along with savvy venture capitalists who understood uneven results and the lumpy nature of economic life. But now you have a slow-thinking thirty-year-old security analyst at a downtown Manhattan firm who “judges” your results and reads too much into them. He likes routine rewards, and the last thing you can deliver are routine rewards.
Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. They need a capacity for continuously adjourned gratification to survive a steady diet of peer cruelty without becoming demoralized. They look like idiots to their cousins, they look like idiots to their peers, they need courage to continue. No confirmation comes to them, no validation, no fawning students, no Nobel, no Shnobel. “How was your year?” brings them a small but containable spasm of pain deep inside, since almost all of their years will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the outside. Then bang, the lumpy event comes that brings the grand vindication. Or it may never come.
Believe me, it is tough to deal with the social consequences of the appearance of continuous failure. We are social animals; hell is other people.
Our intuitions are not cut out for nonlinearities. Consider our life in a primitive environment where process and result are closely connected. You are thirsty; drinking brings you adequate satisfaction. Or even in a not-so-primitive environment, when you engage in building, say, a bridge or a stone house, more work will lead to more apparent results, so your mood is propped up by visible continuous feedback.
In a primitive environment, the relevant is the sensational. This applies to our knowledge. When we try to collect information about the world around us, we tend to be guided by our biology, and our attention flows effortlessly toward the sensational—not the relevant so much as the sensational. Somehow the guidance system has gone wrong in the process of our coevolution with our habitat—it was transplanted into a world in which the relevant is often boring, nonsensational.
Furthermore, we think that if, say, two variables are causally linked, then a steady input in one variable should always yield a result in the other one. Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality. For instance, if you study every day, you expect to learn something in proportion to your studies. If you feel that you are not going anywhere, your emotions will cause you to become demoralized. But modern reality rarely gives us the privilege of a satisfying, linear, positive progression: you may think about a problem for a year and learn nothing; then, unless you are disheartened by the emptiness of the results and give up, something will come to you in a flash.
Researchers spent some time dealing with this notion of gratification; neurology has been enlightening us about the tension between the notions of immediate rewards and delayed ones. Would you like a massage today, or two next week? Well, the news is that the logical part of our mind, that “higher” one, which distinguishes us from animals, can override our animal instinct, which asks for immediate rewards. So we are a little better than animals, after all—but perhaps not by much. And not all of the time.
The situation can get a little more tragic—the world is more nonlinear than we think, and than scientists would like to think.
With linearities, relationships between variables are clear, crisp, and constant, therefore Platonically easy to grasp in a single sentence, such as “A 10 percent increase in money in the bank corresponds to a 10 percent increase in interest income and a 5 percent increase in obsequiousness on the part of the personal banker.” If you have more money in the bank, you get more interest. Nonlinear relationships can vary; perhaps the best way to describe them is to say that they cannot be expressed verbally in a way that does justice to them. Take the relationship between pleasure and drinking water. If you are in a state of painful thirst, then a bottle of water increases your well-being significantly. More water means more pleasure. But what if I gave you a cistern of water? Clearly your well-being becomes rapidly insensitive to further quantities. As a matter of fact, if I gave you the choice between a bottle or a cistern you would prefer the bottle—so your enjoyment declines with additional quantities.
These nonlinear relationships are ubiquitous in life. Linear relationships are truly the exception; we only focus on them in classrooms and textbooks because they are easier to understand. Yesterday afternoon I tried to take a fresh look around me to catalog what I could see during my day that was linear. I could not find anything, no more than someone hunting for squares or triangles could find them in the rain forest—or, as we will see in Part Three, any more than someone looking for bell-shape randomness finding it in socioeconomic phenomena.
You play tennis every day with no improvement, then suddenly you start beating the pro.
Your child does not seem to have a learning impediment, but he does not seem to want to speak. The schoolmaster pressures you to start considering “other options,” namely therapy. You argue with her to no avail （she is supposed to be the “expert”）. Then, suddenly, the child starts composing elaborate sentences, perhaps a bit too elaborate for his age group. I will repeat that linear progression, a Platonic idea, is not the norm.
We favor the sensational and the extremely visible. This affects the way we judge heroes. There is little room in our consciousness for heroes who do not deliver visible results—or those heroes who focus on process rather than results.
However, those who claim that they value process over result are not telling the whole truth, assuming of course that they are members of the human species. We often hear the semi-lie that writers do not write for glory, that artists create for the sake of art, because the activity is “its own reward.” True, these activities can generate a steady flow of autosatisfaction. But this does not mean that artists do not crave some form of attention, or that they would not be better off if they got some publicity; it does not mean that writers do not wake up early Saturday morning to check if The New York Times Book Review has featured their work, even if it is a very long shot, or that they do not keep checking their mailbox for that long-awaited reply from The New Yorker . Even a philosopher the caliber of Hume spent a few weeks sick in bed after the trashing of his masterpiece （what later became known as his version of the Black Swan problem） by some dim-thinking reviewer—whom he knew to be wrong and to have missed his whole point.
Where it gets painful is when you see one of your peers, whom you despise, heading to Stockholm for his Nobel reception.
Most people engaged in the pursuits that I call “concentrated” spend most of their time waiting for the big day that （usually） never comes.
True, this takes your mind away from the pettiness of life—the cappuccino that is too warm or too cold, the waiter too slow or too intrusive, the food too spicy or not enough, the overpriced hotel room that does not quite resemble the advertised picture—all these considerations disappear because you have your mind on much bigger and better things. But this does not mean that the person insulated from materialistic pursuits becomes impervious to other pains, those issuing from disrespect. Often these Black Swan hunters feel shame, or are made to feel shame, at not contributing. “You betrayed those who had high hopes for you,” they are told, increasing their feeling of guilt. The problem of lumpy payoffs is not so much in the lack of income they entail, but the pecking order, the loss of dignity, the subtle humiliations near the watercooler.
It is my great hope someday to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known, namely that our highest currency is respect.
Even economically, the individual Black Swan hunters are not the ones who make the bucks. The researcher Thomas Astebro has shown that returns on independent inventions （you take the cemetery into account） are far lower than those on venture capital. Some blindness to the odds or an obsession with their own positive Black Swan is necessary for entrepreneurs to function. The venture capitalist is the one who gets the shekels. The economist William Baumol calls this “a touch of madness.” This may indeed apply to all concentrated businesses: when you look at the empirical record, you not only see that venture capitalists do better than entrepreneurs, but publishers do better than writers, dealers do better than artists, and science does better than scientists （about 50 percent of scientific and scholarly papers, costing months, sometimes years, of effort, are never truly read）. The person involved in such gambles is paid in a currency other than material success: hope.
Let me distill the main idea behind what researchers call hedonic happiness.
Making $1 million in one year, but nothing in the preceding nine, does not bring the same pleasure as having the total evenly distributed over the same period, that is, $100,000 every year for ten years in a row. The same applies to the inverse order—making a bundle the first year, then nothing for the remaining period. Somehow, your pleasure system will be saturated rather quickly, and it will not carry forward the hedonic balance like a sum on a tax return. As a matter of fact, your happiness depends far more on the number of instances of positive feelings, what psychologists call “positive affect,” than on their intensity when they hit. In other words, good news is good news first; how good matters rather little. So to have a pleasant life you should spread these small “affects” across time as evenly as possible. Plenty of mildly good news is preferable to one single lump of great news.
Sadly, it may be even worse for you to make $10 million, then lose back nine, than to making nothing at all! True, you may end up with a million （as compared to nothing）, but it may be better had you got zilch. （This assumes, of course, that you care about financial rewards.）
So from a narrowly defined accounting point of view, which I may call here “hedonic calculus,” it does not pay to shoot for one large win. Mother Nature destined us to derive enjoyment from a steady flow of pleasant small, but frequent, rewards. As I said, the rewards do not have to be large, just frequent—a little bit here, a little bit there. Consider that our major satisfaction for thousands of years came in the form of food and water （and something else more private）, and that while we need these steadily, we quickly reach saturation.
The problem, of course, is that we do not live in an environment where results are delivered in a steady manner—Black Swans dominate much of human history. It is unfortunate that the right strategy for our current environment may not offer internal rewards and positive feedback.
The same property in reverse applies to our unhappiness. It is better to lump all your pain into a brief period rather than have it spread out over a longer one.
But some people find it possible to transcend the asymmetry of pains and joys, escape the hedonic deficit, set themselves outside that game—and live with hope. There is some good news, as we see next.
For Yevgenia Krasnova, a person could love one book, at most a few—beyond this was a form of promiscuity. Those who talk about books as commodities are inauthentic, just as those who collect acquaintances can be superficial in their friendships. A novel you like resembles a friend. You read it and reread it, getting to know it better. Like a friend, you accept it the way it is; you do not judge it. Montaigne was asked “why” he and the writer Etienne de la Boétie were friends—the kind of question people ask you at a cocktail party as if you knew the answer, or as if there were an answer to know. It was typical of Montaigne to reply, “Parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi” （because it was him and because it was me）. Likewise, Yevgenia claims that she likes that one book “because it is it and because I am me.” Yevgenia once even walked out on a schoolteacher because he analyzed that book and thus violated her rule. One does not sit idle listening as people wax analytical about your friends. A very stubborn schoolchild she was.
This book she has as a friend is Il deserto dei tartari , by Dino Buzzati, a novel that was well known in Italy and France during her childhood, but that, strangely, nobody she knows in America had heard of. Its English title is mistranslated as The Tartar Steppe instead of The Desert of the Tartars .
Yevgenia encountered Il deserto when she was thirteen, in her parents’ weekend country house in a small village two hundred kilometers outside Paris, where their Russian and French books multiplied without the constraints of the overfed Parisian apartment. She was so bored in the country that she could not even read. Then, one afternoon, she opened the book and was sucked into it.
Giovanni Drogo is a man of promise. He has just graduated from the military academy with the rank of junior officer, and active life is just starting. But things do not turn out as planned: his initial four-year assignment is a remote outpost, the Bastiani fortress, protecting the nation from the Tartars likely to invade from the border desert—not too desirable a position. The fortress is located a few days by horseback from the town; there is nothing but bareness around it—none of the social buzz that a man of his age could look forward to. Drogo thinks that his assignment in the outpost is temporary, a way for him to pay his dues before more appealing positions present themselves. Later, back in town, in his impeccably ironed uniform and with his athletic figure, few ladies will be able to resist him.
What is Drogo to do in this hole? He discovers a loophole, a way to be transferred after only four months. He decides to use the loophole.
At the very last minute, however, Drogo takes a glance at the desert from the window of the medical office and decides to extend his stay. Something in the walls of the fort and the silent landscape ensnares him. The appeal of the fort and waiting for the attackers, the big battle with the ferocious Tartars, gradually become his only reason to exist. The entire atmosphere of the fort is one of anticipation. The other men spend their time looking at the horizon and awaiting the big event of the enemy attack. They are so focused that, on rare occasions, they can detect the most insignificant stray animal that appears at the edge of the desert and mistake it for an enemy attack.
Sure enough, Drogo spends the rest of his life extending his stay, delaying the beginning of his life in the city—thirty-five years of pure hope, spent in the grip of the idea that one day, from the remote hills that no human has ever crossed, the attackers will eventually emerge and help him rise to the occasion.
At the end of the novel we see Drogo dying in a roadside inn as the event for which he has waited all his life takes place. He has missed it.
Yevgenia read Il deserto numerous times; she even learned Italian （and perhaps married an Italian） so she could read it in the original. Yet she never had the heart to reread the painful ending.
I presented the Black Swan as the outlier, the important event that is not expected to happen. But consider the opposite: the unexpected event that you very badly want to happen . Drogo is obsessed and blinded by the possibility of an unlikely event; that rare occurrence is his raison d’être. At thirteen, when she encountered the book, little did Yevgenia know that she would spend an entire life playing Giovanni Drogo in the antechamber of hope, waiting for the big event, sacrificing for it, and refusing intermediate steps, the consolation prizes.
She did not mind the sweet trap of anticipation: to her it was a life worth living; it was worth living in the cathartic simplicity of a single purpose. Indeed, “be careful what you wish for”: she may have been happier before the Black Swan of her success than after.
One of the attributes of a Black Swan is an asymmetry in consequences—either positive or negative. For Drogo the consequences were thirty-five years spent waiting in the antechamber of hope for just a few randomly distributed hours of glory—which he ended up missing.
Note that there was no brother-in-law around in Drogo's social network. He was lucky to have companions in his mission. He was a member of a community at the gate of the desert intently looking together at the horizon. Drogo had the advantage of an association with peers and the avoidance of social contact with others outside the community. We are local animals, interested in our immediate neighborhood—even if people far away consider us total idiots. Those homo sapiens are abstract and remote and we do not care about them because we do not run into them in elevators or make eye contact with them. Our shallowness can sometimes work for us.
It may be a banality that we need others for many things, but we need them far more than we realize, particularly for dignity and respect. Indeed, we have very few historical records of people who have achieved anything extraordinary without such peer validation—but we have the freedom to choose our peers. If we look at the history of ideas, we see schools of thought occasionally forming, producing unusual work unpopular outside the school. You hear about the Stoics, the Academic Skeptics, the Cynics, the Pyrrhonian Skeptics, the Essenes, the Surrealists, the Dadaists, the anarchists, the hippies, the fundamentalists. A school allows someone with unusual ideas with the remote possibility of a payoff to find company and create a microcosm insulated from others. The members of the group can be ostracized together—which is better than being ostracized alone.
If you engage in a Black Swan–dependent activity, it is better to be part of a group.
Yevgenia met Nero Tulip in the lobby of the Hotel Danieli in Venice. He was a trader who lived between London and New York. At the time, traders from London went to Venice on Friday noon during the low season, just to talk to other traders （from London）.
As Yevgenia and Nero stood engaged in an effortless conversation, she noticed that her husband was looking uncomfortably at them from the bar where he sat, trying to stay focused on the pontifications of one of his childhood friends. Yevgenia realized that she was going to see a bit more of Nero.
They met again in New York, first in a clandestine way. Her husband, being a philosophy professor, had too much time on his hands, so he started paying close attention to her schedule and became clingy. The clingier he got, the more stifled Yevgenia felt, which made him even clingier. She dumped him, called her lawyer who was by then expecting to hear from her, and saw more of Nero openly.
Nero had a stiff gait since he was recovering from a helicopter crash—he gets a little too arrogant after episodes of success and starts taking uncalculated physical risks, though he remains financially hyperconservative, even paranoid. He had spent months immobile in a London hospital, hardly able to read or write, trying to resist having to watch television, teasing the nurses, and waiting for his bones to heal. He can draw the ceiling with its fourteen cracks from memory, as well as the shabby white building across the street with its sixty-three windowpanes, all in need of professional cleaning.
Nero claimed that he was comfortable in Italian when he drank, so Yevgenia gave him a copy of Il deserto . Nero did not read novels—“Novels are fun to write, not read,” he claimed. So he left the book by his bedside for a while.
Nero and Yevgenia were, in a sense, like night and day. Yevgenia went to bed at dawn, working on her manuscripts at night. Nero rose at dawn, like most traders, even on weekends. He then worked for an hour on his opus, Treatise on Probability , and never touched it again after that. He had been writing it for a decade and felt rushed to finish it only when his life was threatened. Yevgenia smoked; Nero was mindful of his health, spending at least an hour a day at the gym or in the pool. Yevgenia hung around intellectuals and bohemians; Nero often felt comfortable with street-smart traders and businessmen who had never been to college and spoke with cripplingly severe Brooklyn accents. Yevgenia never understood how a classicist and a polyglot like Nero could socialize with people like that. What was worse, she had this French Fifth Republic overt disdain for money, unless disguised by an intellectual or cultural façade, and she could hardly bear these Brooklyn fellows with thick hairy fingers and gigantic bank accounts. Nero's post-Brooklyn friends, in turn, found her snotty. （One of the effects of prosperity has been a steady migration of streetwise people from Brooklyn to Staten Island and New Jersey.）
Nero was also elitist, unbearably so, but in a different way. He separated those who could connect the dots , Brooklyn-born or not, from those who could not, regardless of their levels of sophistication and learning.
A few months later, after he was done with Yevgenia （with inordinate relief） he opened Il deserto and was sucked into it. Yevgenia had the prescience that, like her, Nero would identify with Giovanni Drogo, the main character of Il deserto . He did.
Nero, in turn, bought cases of the English （bad） translation of the book and handed copies to anyone who said a polite hello to him, including his New York doorman who could hardly speak English, let alone read it. Nero was so enthusiastic while explaining the story that the doorman got interested and Nero had to order the Spanish translation for him, El desierto de los tártaros .
Let us separate the world into two categories. Some people are like the turkey, exposed to a major blowup without being aware of it, while others play reverse turkey, prepared for big events that might surprise others. In some strategies and life situations, you gamble dollars to win a succession of pennies while appearing to be winning all the time. In others, you risk a succession of pennies to win dollars. In other words, you bet either that the Black Swan will happen or that it will never happen, two strategies that require completely different mind-sets.
We have seen that we （humans） have a marked preference for making a little bit of income at a time. Recall from Chapter 4 that in the summer of 1982, large American banks lost close to everything they had ever earned, and more.
So some matters that belong to Extremistan are extremely dangerous but do not appear to be so beforehand, since they hide and delay their risks—so suckers think they are “safe.” It is indeed a property of Extremistan to look less risky, in the short run, than it really is.
Nero called the businesses exposed to such blowups dubious businesses, particularly since he distrusted whatever method was being used to compute the odds of a blowup. Recall from Chapter 4 that the accounting period upon which companies’ performances are evaluated is too short to reveal whether or not they are doing a great job. And, owing to the shallowness of our intuitions, we formulate our risk assessments too quickly.
I will rapidly present Nero's idea. His premise was the following trivial point: some business bets in which one wins big but infrequently, yet loses small but frequently, are worth making if others are suckers for them and if you have the personal and intellectual stamina . But you need such stamina. You also need to deal with people in your entourage heaping all manner of insult on you, much of it blatant. People often accept that a financial strategy with a small chance of success is not necessarily a bad one as long as the success is large enough to justify it. For a spate of psychological reasons, however, people have difficulty carrying out such a strategy, simply because it requires a combination of belief, a capacity for delayed gratification, and the willingness to be spat upon by clients without blinking. And those who lose money for any reason start looking like guilty dogs, eliciting more scorn on the part of their entourage.
Against that background of potential blowup disguised as skills, Nero engaged in a strategy that he called “bleed.” You lose steadily, daily, for a long time, except when some event takes place for which you get paid disproportionately well. No single event can make you blow up, on the other hand—some changes in the world can produce extraordinarily large profits that pay back such bleed for years, sometimes decades, sometimes even centuries.
Of all the people he knew, Nero was the least genetically designed for such a strategy. His brain disagreed so heavily with his body that he found himself in a state of continuous warfare. It was his body that was his problem, which accumulated physical fatigue from the neurobiological effect of exposure to the small continuous losses, Chinese-water-torture-style, throughout the day. Nero discovered that the losses went to his emotional brain, bypassing his higher cortical structures and slowly affecting his hippocampus and weakening his memory. The hippocampus is the structure where memory is supposedly controlled. It is the most plastic part of the brain; it is also the part that is assumed to absorb all the damage from repeated insults like the chronic stress we experience daily from small doses of negative feelings—as opposed to the invigorating “good stress” of the tiger popping up occasionally in your living room. You can rationalize all you want; the hippocampus takes the insult of chronic stress seriously, incurring irreversible atrophy. Contrary to popular belief, these small, seemingly harmless stressors do not strengthen you; they can amputate part of your self.
It was the exposure to a high level of information that poisoned Nero's life. He could sustain the pain if he saw only weekly performance numbers, instead of updates every minute. He did better emotionally with his own portfolio than with those of clients, since he was not obligated to monitor it continuously.
If his neurobiological system was a victim of the confirmation bias, reacting to the short term and the visible, he could trick his brain to escape its vicious effect by focusing only on the longer haul. He refused to look at any printout of his track record that was shorter than ten years. Nero came of age, intellectually speaking, with the stock market crash of 1987, in which he derived monstrous returns on what small equity he controlled. This episode would forever make his track record valuable, taken as a whole. In close to twenty years of trading, Nero had only four good years. For him, one was more than enough. All he needed was one good year per century.
Investors were no problem for him—they needed his trading as insurance and paid him well. He just had to exhibit a mild degree of contempt toward those he wanted to shed, which did not take much effort on his part. This effort was not contrived: Nero did not think much of them and let his body language express it freely, all the while maintaining an unfashionably high level of courtesy. He made sure, after a long string of losses, that they did not think he was apologetic—indeed, paradoxically, they became more supportive that way. Humans will believe anything you say provided you do not exhibit the smallest shadow of diffidence; like animals, they can detect the smallest crack in your confidence before you express it. The trick is to be as smooth as possible in personal manners. It is much easier to signal self-confidence if you are exceedingly polite and friendly; you can control people without having to offend their sensitivity. The problem with business people, Nero realized, is that if you act like a loser they will treat you as a loser—you set the yardstick yourself. There is no absolute measure of good or bad. It is not what you are telling people, it is how you are saying it.
But you need to remain understated and maintain an Olympian calm in front of others.
When he worked as a trader for an investment bank, Nero had to face the typical employee-evaluation form. The form was supposed to keep track of “performance,” supposedly as a check against employees slacking off. Nero found the evaluation absurd because it did not so much judge the quality of a trader's performance as encourage him to game the system by working for short-term profits at the expense of possible blowups—like banks that give foolish loans that have a small probability of blowing up, because the loan officer is shooting for his next quarterly evaluation. So one day early in his career, Nero sat down and listened very calmly to the evaluation of his “supervisor.” When Nero was handed the evaluation form he tore it into small pieces in front of him. He did this very slowly, accentuating the contrast between the nature of the act and the tranquillity with which he tore the paper. The boss watched him blank with fear, eyes popping out of his head. Nero focused on his undramatic, slow-motion act, elated by both the feeling of standing up for his beliefs and the aesthetics of its execution. The combination of elegance and dignity was exhilarating. He knew that he would either be fired or left alone. He was left alone.