The Beginner Advantage

Too Jewish. Too New York. 

…said Brandon Tartikoff, president of NBC from 1981-1991. 

“It didn’t sound like anything else on television,” NBC senior VP Warren Littlefield chimed in, “it was totally unconventional.” 

Seinfeld almost didn’t make it past episode 1. 

Today, it’s considered one of the greatest TV shows of all time. 

A common theme with creative innovation: great ideas are squashed, bad ideas thrive. 

Xbox was almost canceled. 

The Last Airbender was released. 

Even the experts get it wrong sometimes. 

In some ways, they’re more likely to get it wrong.  

What You’ve Got 

You believe you have nothing to offer.

You believe you have to chew on rocks for years before you can get to the caviar.

A lot of this leads many to give up too early. Some don’t even start. 

From one beginner to another, let me tell you once again: 

You’re wrong.  

Last LeoLetter, we figured out that as a beginner, you have a wealth of experiences.

This time we’re going to take it even further: 

You have an advantage over experts:

The Beginner Advantage (roll credits). 

Through the Cracks

In 1998, a startup named Webvan flew out from the gates of heaven.

Being in the middle of the Dotcom boom, everyone thought so. 

Investors poured in their money, growing at a rate befitting a gift from God.

The idea was simple: deliver groceries to people’s houses. 

Who doesn’t want that? 

Within a few months they were worth $1 billion. 

They were rapidly expanding across the country. 

They had distribution centers sorting groceries at speed and scale, and a network of trucks and vans to match. Like modern day Amazon, before Amazon.

By November 1999, it IPO’d at $8 billion. Yet another tech giant in the making. 

You likely never heard about it.

Because 18 months later, it went bankrupt. 

Under the Radar

When vice president of NBC Rick Ludwin saw the Seinfeld pilot, he was impressed.

The only issue: he was the only one impressed.

The other executives wanted to can it. 

What could he possibly know anyway? 

He’d never run a sitcom, just some specials. 

He wasn’t even in the freakin’ comedy department. 

Oh and by the way, at this point Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David had never written a sitcom!

An outsider executive who never ran a sitcom. Writers who never wrote a sitcom.

…are making a sitcom. 

A disaster on paper. 

A miracle in practice. 

Knowledge is Weakness. Ignorance is Strength. 

So how does a company go from $8 billion to nothing, all within 18 months? 

There were no customers. 

Okay, maybe not complete 0. But very few. 

Sounds stupid simple, right? How could these investors and heads of business, who should probably know what they’re doing, get it so wrong? 

Nobody stopped to ask if it was a good idea or not. 

How can they be led through such a wave of irrationality? 

Knowledge.

In a world where we worship knowledge as king, we have forgotten one thing:

Knowledge is a tool. A wonderful tool. 

Like all tools, it depends on its user.  

In this case, the tools used them. The experts, the management, executives, the investors, everybody was chained by their knowledge. 

They believed they could make it work even if it was built on nothing. 

In times of irrational optimism, knowledge without humility breeds hubris.

Hubris leads to foolishness.

Foolishness compounds into disaster. 

While Webvan failed, Seinfeld & Co. succeeded for the opposite reason:

Ignorance.

“Working outside the sitcom department may have been Rick Ludwin’s greatest advantage.”

The main difference between Rick Ludwin and other executives was that they “knew” sitcom, while he didn’t. 

“Larry [David] and Jerry had never written a sitcom, and my department had never developed one.”

Like the people surrounding Webvan, they were chained by their knowledge. 

But because Rick Ludwin had virtually no experience with sitcoms, he wasn’t chained by preconceived notions. 

“We were a good match, because we didn’t know what rules we weren’t supposed to break.”

Drawing on our previous issue, it was also his experience in everything else outside of sitcoms that also gave him a boost. 

Instead of focusing on a sitcom, he instead focused on what made good comedy. 

While Seinfeld was radically different from everything else, it was fundamentally good comedy. 

This right blend of ignorance and experience allowed him to continue betting on overlooked talents and shows: from Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, The Office, and more. 

The Best Place to Be  

None of this is to knock experts down or arbitrarily put the ignorant up. 

The reason that an $8 billion dollar company can go to 0 in months is the same reason a show made by a team of misfits can go onto be one of the greatest of all time.

The people of Webvan failed to take on the beginner’s mindset. 

Rick Ludwin and Co. embodied it. 

As a beginner, you’re in the best place to be. 

In fact, it is the only place for creative longevity. 

Being an “expert” is not a destination. 

It’s an ongoing process of starting and restarting, over and over. Continually creating new and novel things that raise the collective good. 

That means having the beginner mindset, always. 

“Practicing a way of being that allows you to see the world through uncorrupted, innocent eyes can free you to act in concert with the universe’s timetable.”

Remember how this feels, and constantly seek to hold onto it. 

What makes an expert, an expert? Their expertise. 

And it can also be their downfall. 

“…we’ve seen that creators struggle as well, because they’re too positive about their own ideas.”

It’s why disasters like Webvan and miracles like Seinfeld barely happen. 

Many creatives and experts stagnate because of their failure to get back to where you are right now:

You don’t have the burden of knowledge.

You are free of all biases. 

Your ignorance is your advantage. 

The idea dismissed as foolish by experts could be the fresh new thing that passes the only test that matters: 

It resonates with people. 

The Ultimate Case for the Beginner 

What made Einstein so revolutionary? 

He was a revolutionary. 

He broke away from the current establishment of physics, while others clung to old knowledge.

It took balls. 

It took courage. 

Courage to start anew.

Courage to break from the notions of the past.

Courage to be wrong. 

Courage to face judgment from others. 

It was courage that ushered in the new age that he brought us to.

At its core, the beginner’s mindset is just that:

Courage. 

Epilogue on the Beginner Series

As I finished writing this, the climax of Widmung, Op. 25 No. 1 by Schumann was playing. It was beautiful. 

I’ve spent the past 6 weeks putting this all together. I wish I had started writing much earlier. 

It’s the first major work I’ve created in…probably ever. 

I know that this will most likely go unread, but that’s fine. 

This newsletter has been central to my growth these past 6 weeks. 

For anyone who has read this far, thank you. 

This is just the beginning of a wonderful, beautiful journey. 

I love the world. I love humanity. And I’m so excited to see how it goes.

We are in hard times right now. 

More than ever, we need people who can show us that despite what’s happening, we can create a brighter future. 

We need people who will step up and show us a better path. 

And if no one else is doing it, you are elected. As am I. 

As they say about hard times…

With gratitude, welcome to the newsletter.