Chapter 1

HACKING THE LADDER

“Bored Mormons”

I.

A strange thing has been happening in the United States for nearly 300 years. For some reason, our presidents are younger than our senators.

The average president of the United States takes office at age 55. In contrast, US senators start their terms in Congress—the most recent at the time of this writing—at an average of age 62. Members of the House of Representatives were 57.

This is not a recent anomaly. Presidents have tended to be younger than Congress since the Founding Fathers died. And though a handful began the job as senior citizens, the average starting age has never crossed 60.

These statistics are especially peculiar because of how much more difficult it is to become president than a senator. Terms in the Senate are commonly seen as a step on the path to president. But even brand-new senators, holding their first federal office ever, have been coming in at an average of 56 and 57 in recent years. Presidents get to the top before senators get in the door.

Why?

Armchair explanations like good looks don’t make sense. Why would we be more likely to vote for a handsome young president but not a good-looking young congressperson? Data in presidential versus congressional elections indicates that youth voter turnout isn’t the culprit.

Some sort of creeping mistrust of the elderly or the advent of televised elections aren’t skewing the results, either. The oldest-elected president, Ronald Reagan, took office at age 69, with the fourth-oldest, George H. W. Bush, succeeding him at 64. They brought up the average. Gerrymandering and changing campaign finance laws don’t seem to explain the data, and the losers in presidential elections actually tend to be the same average age as the winners.

We’ve had rich presidents, poor presidents, political-insider presidents, Washington-outsider presidents, pretty presidents, ugly presidents, eloquent presidents, stammering presidents, old presidents, and young presidents. But mostly young presidents.

Lyndon B. Johnson became president at exactly 55. Perhaps his story will give us a clue to the phenomenon.

Born on a farm in Texas, Johnson was always a talker. He first ran for president in 11th grade. He won. Described by peers as ambitious from the beginning, he got involved in adult politics shortly after high school. He first served as a legislative secretary to a Texas congressman, but had won his own seat in the US House by age 29. Several terms later, he moved up to the Senate. From junior senator he rose to the rank of majority whip, then minority leader, then majority leader. Having paid his dues in each branch of Congress, he was elected John F. Kennedy’s vice president in 1960.

Then, tragically, President Kennedy was killed, and LBJ assumed his office, having climbed the political ladder for 25 years.

From the beginning of his career, LBJ was extraordinarily focused. He worked hard, pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, and patiently worked the ladder. And, after all that work, the last stage of his ascent came down to luck. If Kennedy had lived, Vice President Johnson wouldn’t have had the chance to run for president until he was in his 60s.

We all know this ladder-climbing story. It’s gospel we’ve preached in career- and business-building for centuries. We’re told that the best way to succeed is to start young, work hard, and move up through the ranks. The two ingredients are hard work—not quitting when things get tough—and luck—spots opening up on the rungs above you. LBJ’s is that quintessential American story.

The problem is, when we look at the data, LBJ’s isn’t the quintessential presidential story at all.

Only three other presidents out of the 43 people who have been president at the time of this writing climbed the rungs of all four elected federal offices: Richard Nixon, Andrew Johnson, and John Tyler. Just over half of the presidents were ever congressmen at all.

It gets even more interesting when we look at the amount of time these men spent climbing up the political ladder. The ten oldest presidents—the ones who bring our age average up—held a federal office for nine years,^* or less than two Senate terms. Lyndon B. Johnson’s story would suggest that these older presidents fought their way up the congressional ladder over a quarter century, and just got started a little later. But no.

In fact, most presidents spent just over half as many years in state and federal politics as LBJ did. Ignoring state politics, the average president spent just seven years as an elected official before reaching the White House. Five were never elected to any office before becoming president.

There’s something wrong with the great American ladder-climbing advice: presidents of the United States, some of the world’s most successful people, don’t follow it.

It’s like each invented his own ladder.

II.

There is a pattern to the unconventional career tracks of US presidents. We find it among other groups as well. Throughout history, fast-rising companies, rock-star executives, “overnight” movie stars, and top-selling products have outrun their peers by acting more like ladder hackers than ladder climbers.

The best way to explain how that ladder hacking works comes from the Mormons.

RELATIVELY FEW PEOPLE LIVE in the environs of Brigham Young University, out in the American West. Some who do are occasionally surprised by a late-night knock on the front door and a strange request. Not from preachers or salesmen, but from bored Mormon college students.

Mormons—and Mormon schools like BYU—have a health code that discourages alcohol. When you put tens of thousands of young abstainers together in a small college town, an obnoxious proliferation of creative group activities results. One of them is the reason for that late-night knock. It’s a game called Bigger or Better.

Bigger or Better is a scavenger hunt, a sort of trick-or-treating for (young) adults. Players divide into teams and begin with a small object, like a toothpick, then disperse and knock on neighborhood doors, one house after another.

At each answered door, the players introduce themselves with something on the order of, “We’re playing a game called Bigger or Better. Do you have something in your house that’s slightly bigger or better than this . . .” (display object) “. . . that you would trade with us?”

The first few houses are the toughest. People relaxing at night in their homes aren’t often searching for toothpicks. Even in the friendly Rocky Mountains a homeowner can be put off by such a request. But before long, a stranger will good-naturedly offer a piece of gum for that toothpick, and the game is on.

At the next house, the gum becomes a ballpoint pen. At the next: a pack of Post-it notes. Then: a copy of last month’s Nylon magazine. The magazine becomes a bouquet of flowers left by an unwanted admirer. The flowers get swapped for an old hat, and the hat is exchanged for a novelty T-shirt. In this phase of the game, the players benefit from a bit of curiosity, a little charity, and the fact that people were planning on getting rid of most of these objects anyway.

But after enough trades, the players hold objects of significant value in their hands. Now the boy who opens the door sincerely wants the T-shirt. He trades his lava lamp for it. The girls next door like the lava lamp and decide to part with a vintage mirror. The old woman down the street collects antiques; she accepts the mirror in exchange for an old BMX bike in the garage.

When time is up, the players return home to compare results. After a dozen or so trades, teams have turned toothpicks into a stereo system, a set of golf clubs, and a television set. One group even drags in a full-size canoe.^*

Not bad, for a sober night out.

Bigger or Better illustrates an interesting fact: people are generally willing to take a chance on something if it only feels like a small stretch. That’s how a group of bored students transformed a toothpick into a TV, and remarkably quicker than if they’d worked their seven-dollar-per-hour college-town jobs and saved up for one. With each trade, the players exchanged or provided value—including entertainment value.

Now, if the BYU kids had gone door-to-door asking for free televisions, they wouldn’t have succeeded so quickly. Few people are willing to make that kind of stretch. This is like an intern applying for a CEO job, or a brand-new startup bidding on a NASA contract. The players eliminated resistance by breaking the big challenge (acquire something valuable like a TV) into a series of easier, repeatable challenges (make a tiny trade).

Researchers call this the psychology of “small wins.” Gamblers, on the other hand, would call it a “parlay,” which the dictionary defines as “a cumulative series of bets in which winnings accruing from each transaction are used as a stake for a further bet.”

In Bigger or Better, the parlay never stops. Players don’t wait an arbitrary period of time before moving on to the next trade, and they don’t mind if the result of a trade was only a slightly more desirable object, so long as the game keeps moving.

“By itself, one small win may seem unimportant,” writes Dr. Karl Weick in a seminal paper for American Psychologist in 1984. “A series of wins at small but significant tasks, however, reveals a pattern that may attract allies, deter opponents, and lower resistance to subsequent proposals.”

“Once a small win has been accomplished,” Weick continues, “forces are set in motion that favor another small win.”

From the outside, this simply seems like a prudent way to climb the ladder: as fast as possible,^* and in small bites.

While that’s good advice, the key to the bored Mormon students’ success was not just their rapid cycle time. It was the direction they traded: sideways.

The players didn’t simply parlay toothpicks for pieces of wood of increasing size; they traded toothpicks for pens and mirrors for old bikes. They didn’t wait around for the owners of a vacant house to show up, so they could ask for a trade, and they didn’t knock on the same door over and over until a “no” became a “yes.” When a door was shut to them, they immediately picked another one. When the ladder became inefficient, they hacked it. And that is what made them successful so quickly.

The key to Bigger or Better, in other words, is the “or.”

THE FASTEST LAND ANIMAL in the world is the cheetah. It can reach speeds in excess of 70 miles per hour. But, according to behavioral biologists, speed is not the cheetah’s biggest predatory advantage. As science writer Katie Hiler puts it, “It is their agility—their skill at leaping sideways, changing directions abruptly and slowing down quickly—that gives those antelope such bad odds.”

When we look at fast success in business and other fields, we see this cheetah behavior everywhere: One of the fastest-selling and transformative cellular phones in the world—the iPhone—was introduced by a personal computer company, at a time when the phone market was dominated by telecommunications firms. Nintendo began its life printing Japanese playing cards; the company brokered in taxis, instant rice, and hotels before it saw opportunity in the emerging American arcade scene. The novelist James Patterson, whose books have sold 275 million copies at last count, was an ad executive before switching over to literature (and leveraging his marketing expertise to become a bestseller). Award-winning actress Zoe Saldana was a ballet dancer before becoming a movie star. (Her first role was a ballet dancer.) This is often how “overnight success” happens for entertainers and public figures; they work hard in their field, then switch ladders and level up, to observers’ surprise.

Business research shows that this kind of ladder switching generally tends to accelerate a company’s growth. Companies that pivot—that is, switch business models or products—while on the upswing tend to perform much better than those that stay on a single course. The 2011 Startup Genome Report of new technology companies states that, “Startups that pivot once or twice raise 2.5x more money, have 3.6x better user growth, and are 52% less likely to scale prematurely.”

LET’S TAKE A DEEPER look at the fastest-climbing US presidents. The ones who bring down the average time spent on the political ladder. Here they are:

Here we have one-third of our presidents, most of whom had less time in elected office than it takes to get a political science degree.

Now let’s look at what they did before president:

The first thing you’ll notice is that no two presidents in this group had the same climb up the ladder. You may have also noticed that there are a lot of military men in this list. And governors, too.

Then there are some weird ones. Philanthropist? University president? Actor?

Many of these men did have political savvy. William Howard Taft, for example, came from a well-connected family, and his eight-plus-rung ladder climb involved being collector of internal revenue in Cincinnati and governor of the US-occupied Philippines. But this is certainly not the expected path to president.

The common pattern among these fastest-rising US presidents’ journeys is that, like the BYU students, they didn’t parlay up a linear path. They climbed various ladders of success and then switched to the presidential ladder.

It’s clear that switching ladders can help bypass “dues” and accelerate the Bigger or Better cycle. But what makes someone willing to make that sideways trade with us in the first place?

What about a general or a philanthropist makes us willing to make him our president?

III.

If there was ever a US president who stayed the course, it was Andrew Johnson. For 13 years, he paid his dues in Tennessee as mayor, state representative, and state senator. He spent ten years in the US House, four years as governor of Tennessee, five years as US senator, three years as military governor of Tennessee during the Civil War, and finally, vice president under Abraham Lincoln, who needed a Southerner in the White House to help unify the crumbling nation.

When Lincoln was assassinated, Johnson, one of the presidents with the longest political careers in history, assumed the presidency at age 56.

And then he proceeded to screw up.

Johnson was handed the high office at a time when America was bruised and needed a good leader. But Johnson, despite his experience, was not a good leader. He was backward and racist, consistently undermined by his own inner circle, and he would have certainly botched America’s post–Civil War reconstruction if only Congress had let him. The first president to be impeached, Johnson was the antithesis of the cheetah.

Historian James Ford Rhodes writes that Johnson “worked in a groove. Obstinate rather than firm it undoubtedly seemed to him that following counsel and making concessions were a display of weakness.”

This was a man too stubborn to adapt. Though he spent more time in politics than nearly any other president, historians rank him as the second worst ever.

Clearly, paying his dues did not qualify him for the job.

It seems fair for success to be determined not by the hardworking but broken model of paying dues, but by merit and smarts. And we’d rather have presidents like Abe Lincoln than Andrew Johnson. But how are we to determine who’s fit for the job, if not through past experience?

FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS, people from every corner of the planet have flocked to New York City for the reason Frank Sinatra immortalized: to prove they could “make it.” The allure, the prestige, the struggle to survive, breeds a brand, an image of the city that ripples out to the rest of the world. Sinatra sang about proving himself to himself. “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” New York was the yardstick.

New York has indeed become a global yardstick—for artists, businesspeople, and dreamers of all stripes. He was a lawyer in New York? He must be good. Doesn’t matter if he was the worst lawyer in the city. If you can make it in New York, people assume that you can make it anywhere.

The yardstick the public uses when judging a presidential candidate, it turns out, is not how much time the candidate has in politics. “It’s leadership qualities,” explains the presidential historian Doug Wead, a former adviser to George H. W. Bush and the author of 30 books on the presidents. Indeed, polls indicate that being “a strong and decisive leader” is the number one characteristic a presidential candidate can have.

The fastest-climbing presidents, it turns out, used the Sinatra Principle to convey their leadership cred. What shows leadership like commanding an army (Washington), running a university (Wilson), governing a state for a few years—even if you started out as an actor (Reagan)—or building a new political party and having the humility to put aside your own interests for the good of the whole (Lincoln)?

Dwight D. Eisenhower led the United States and its allies to victory against Hitler. He had never held an elected office. He won by a landslide with five times the electoral votes of his rival. “If he can make it there, he can make it anywhere,” US voters decided.

IV.

The presidents, for the most part, got to high office by not playing the game everyone else plays. They acquire leadership experience in disparate fields, then use Frank Sinatra–style credibility to switch ladders to politics.

There’s one remaining question, however. We’ve seen how dues and experience are bad proxies for ability or merit. But does bypassing dues and experience leave us without the necessary skill to do the job? The Sinatra Principle helps presidents get the job, but does it qualify them for it?

Why don’t we ask the ten top-rated presidents in history:^*

All ten of the top ten presidents in C-SPAN’s survey were hackers. Only one, JFK, climbed a semblance of a traditional ladder; he served in both houses of Congress, but was a war hero and author of a Pulitzer Prize–winning book—clearly not the average ladder climber. Each of the men on this list worked hard in his career, learned and proved leadership through diverse experiences, and switched ladders multiple times. They continuously parlayed their current success for something more, and they didn’t give up when they lost elections (which most of them did).

The ladder switching made them better at getting elected and better at the job. To be a good president, Wead says, “You’ve got to be able to think on your feet.” Stubbornness and tradition make for poor performance—as we see with Andrew Johnson and other presidents at the bottom of history’s rankings.

The fact that our best presidents—and history’s other greatest overachievers—circumvented the system to get to the top speaks to what’s wrong with our conventional wisdom of paying dues and climbing the ladder. Hard work and luck are certainly ingredients of success, but they’re not the entire recipe.

Senators and representatives, by contrast, generally play the dues-and-ladder game of hierarchy and formality. And they get stuck in the congressional spiderweb. “The people that go into Congress go step by step by step,” Wead explains.

But presidents don’t.

It begs the question: should we?

WE LIVE IN AN age of nontraditional ladder climbing. Not just in politics, but in business and personal development and education and entertainment and innovation. Traditional paths are not just slow; they’re no longer viable if we want to compete and innovate.

That’s great news, because throwing out the dues paradigm leads us toward meritocracy. But to be successful, we need to start thinking more like hackers, acting more like entrepreneurs. We have to work smarter, not just harder.

We’ll see throughout the following chapters how Sinatra-style credibility and ladder switching—always parlaying for something more—are the foundation for how the most interesting people and companies in the world succeed. It’s not just how presidents get to the top. It’s how CEOs and comedians and racecar drivers hone their skills and make it in the big leagues. It’s how new businesses grow fast, and old businesses grow faster. It’s how entrepreneurs create life-changing products in record time and inventors parlay dreams for bigger dreams.

Hacking the ladder is the mind-set they use to get places. The rest of this book is about becoming good enough to deserve it.