🥁 Rhyme Time🥁

“Our emotions and cognitions are so vivid, so comfortable, so perfectly catered to us, it is no wonder…[that] with every step we take away from the real world into our imaginations, we create a reality that is more and more idiosyncratic, and, in so doing, we widen the communication gap between ourselves and others.”

-Elizabeth Newton

I’m terrible at Rhymation.

My friend, former colleague, and guiding light Joyce Juda created Rhymation, a game where people work in pairs to communicate rhyming words. For those who worked with Joyce or did USY over the past half-century, Rhymation has a cult following that is difficult to describe.

Every time I play Rhymation, I flop. Badly.

I suppose I’d be better if I practiced more, but I’ve never been particularly good at games where my success depends on giving someone else clues. I get the concept but fail at the execution.

Like charades, what’s amazing and frustrating about games like Rhymation is that they require one person to possess complete knowledge of a chosen word and help someone with incomplete knowledge figure it out themselves.

Communicating an argument is more like Rhymation than we want to admit. I might think my idea is clear, logical, and fact-driven, and anyone who reads this newsletter should use the information precisely how I want them to. However, the truth is that we all possess mental blindspots and often lack sufficient empathy and understanding for the possibility that someone could be thinking perfectly logically and yet come to a completely different perspective.

This brings us to this week’s heuristic.

Naive Realism

What’s your favorite song?

Go to the nearest hard surface and start tapping the melody to that song without singing the words out loud. I’ll wait…

(For the record, in honor of Phish’s epic MSG run that broke Phish.net and Phish Reddit, I tried to tap out a full rendition of Gamehendge. It’s not the same without beach balls.)

But back to you.

If someone walked by and heard you tapping, would they be able to correctly identify your chosen song?

Elizabeth Newton designed this experiment for her 1990 doctoral dissertation at Stanford University, and not surprisingly, most people think that the song they are tapping will be discernable to someone else, yet rarely, if ever, can someone else recognize the melody. She argues that while

“we can simultaneously enact our internal symphony and engage in behavior which is both guided and highlighted by this symphony, we will be unaware of the huge gap between what we and our audience are hearing.”

Something as simple as a favorite song can make perfect sense in our mind while appearing like nonsensical tapping to someone else.

Expanding upon Newton’s research, Andrew Ward and our friend Lee Ross argue that the tapping experiment is one of a number of examples underlying their theory of “naive realism,” a theory they developed to account for the “important limitations in [human] perspective taking.” Naive realism is the idea that we overrate how much we see the world objectively while making large assumptions about how much others see the world irrationally. Ward and Ross argue that this means that people are inclined to believe the following argument:

1. I see the objective reality and make decisions based on unbiased information. My emotions do not impact my opinions
2. If others think rationally about the same questions, they will agree with me (because then we are both being rational)
3. Therefore, unless someone has a fact that I do not possess, that person who does not share my views is irrational or biased

Returning to Newton’s experiment, when I am tapping a song, I have a “privileged subjective experience” because I am playing the song in my head while tapping on the table. The tapping experiment (or Rhymation) is one of a number of examples where a person can believe they see the objective reality and get frustrated when someone else cannot.

If you’ve ever used the term “talking past each other” while describing a frustrating conversation, you share a sentiment similar to naive realism, recognizing that two people talking about the same thing seem to be living in alternate realities. We’ve already discussed the detriments of these gaps when learning about third stories, confirmation bias, hot-cold empathy gap, fundamental attribution error, etc.

But,

there is also something beautiful about seeing the world differently if we harness its power, which brings us to this week’s book recommendation.

The Creative Act

Reading Rick Rubin reminds me of reading Heschel.

This is more of a comment about writing style than subject matter. Heschel’s writing inspires because Heschel remains incredibly quotable; there can be hundreds of nuggets of wisdom in a single book. And to paraphrase Heschel, I feel like I’m praying when I am reading him.

Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being is not a memoir from one of the most successful music producers of the past half century but a meditation on creativity, which he defines as bringing “something into existence that wasn’t there before.” If this seems like a surprising definition of creativity, that’s the point. Rubin sees creativity as an attunement where “your entire life is a form of self-expression. You exist as a creative being in a creative universe. A singular work of art.”

The first time I read Rubin’s book, my initial reaction was to think about all of the work that I do that feels like the exact opposite of a creative act: fundraising, performance reviews, paperwork for human resources, board meetings, business travel, and more meetings. While I imagine Rubin does not love any of these things, ultimately, The Creative Act provides an opportunity to think about how we can bring new energy to any element of our work if we are willing to stay attuned.

Creativity entails special sensitivity to the world around us, a sensitivity that might come off as a kind of negativity. Rubin asks us to pause and get curious before we make too many assumptions:

“We are all translators for messages the universe is broadcasting. The best artists tend to be the ones with the most sensitive antennae to draw in the energy resonating at a particular moment. Many great artists first develop sensitive antennae not to create art but to protect themselves. They have to protect themselves because everything hurts more. They feel everything more deeply.”

If you recall our discussion about Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey’s notions of the “language of complaint vs. the language of commitment,” this is where Rubin’s meditations on creativity and our work on organizational development start to intersect. Oftentimes, a person with an abundance of creativity in your organization might initially present themselves as bothered by everything. And while plenty of people can bring snark with no contributions, innovators tend to be bothered by things as they are and willing to put in the time and work to make them as they should be.

Unless we do not give them the opportunity.

This paradigm is how I found my passions as a rabbi. I wanted to “see tremendous beauty or tremendous pain where other people see little or nothing at all” and bring my energy to places where people do not expect it. And I suspect I’m not the only one. In this sense, The Creative Act is a reminder to pause and ask myself if someone who seems bothered sees something I don’t. Taking that extra step might lead to something they and I never expected.

However, Rubin’s definition also opens up the possibility that someone in our organization or community sees something the rest of us don’t and gets frustrated that others cannot know exactly what it’s their mind, like how a singer with perfect pitch can notice the slight differences of even an excellent singer.

Sometimes, this bothered person is just a pain.

But other times, they are sitting on a piece of gold, something that will benefit everyone if we take the time to look. Be sure to slow down enough in your thought process so you don’t miss it.

The Tao of Rick Rubin

16%

In a study of 550 companies over the past three years, Scoop and the Boston Consulting Group found that companies that allowed employees to decide whether or not to come into the office outperformed those with restrictive policies by 16%.

What I Read This Week

1. This Needs Hot Sauce: Reader and Rhymation enthusiast Charlene Thrope wrote me, saying, “Josh, you would love this newsletter.”14 She was right. Even better when I heard the term “Gentle January.”
2. When A Nose Is Not Just a Nose: Marjorie Ingall wrote a piece for Vox about the new movie Maestro and representations of Jewish bodies in popular culture — a must-read.
3. The Story Behind the Rise of Hamas: Following the Simhat Torah massacre, I find myself wanting to know more about how Hamas built up the capacity that allowed them to wage violence on an unprecedented scale. This piece in Der Spiegel was helpful in making me better informed.
4. How Nvidia is Powering the AI Revolution: While new companies always become household names in moments of technological change, there are companies behind the scenes few people know about, but everyone should. Nvidia is one of them.
5. Jim Harbaugh As Turnaround CEO: I have no particular need to love Jim Harbaugh, minus my affinity for his brother John (Go Ravens.) But I still enjoyed this profile.