Rainn Wilson, from The Office Farewell:

Greg Daniels said in our first meeting, ‘You know, American comedy is like this big ship, this big cruise liner, and if you can just point it 1° in the right direction, you can make a big difference. You can’t turn comedy that sharply.’ And I feel like that is what The Office did, it took American comedy and it turned it 1° in the right direction.

I watched this video last week after the finale, but I can’t stop thinking about the above quote. I love this analogy; I feel like you can replace comedy here with so many things. Sometimes to make a difference, to be innovative, to change course, you don’t have to run the opposite way—sometimes you can’t run the opposite way—sometimes change is slower.

Sometimes all it takes is that 1° difference.

I loved every bit of this GQ profile on Robert Downey Jr. and his career turn-around following the success of Iron Man. His confidence and insistence on playing the role of Tony Stark is inspiring:

But Downey was obsessed with the notion that the part should be his. “I don’t know why,” he says. “I do like a bit of Jung, and it was just this kind of numinous thing.” Even after the film’s director, Jon Favreau, passed on the word from Marvel that it wasn’t going to happen, Downey refused to listen. (Favreau later explained that Marvel had actually been even more definite: “Under no circumstances are we prepared to hire him for any price.”) Downey persisted nonetheless, and eventually he was told he’d at least get a screen test.

He had three weeks to ready himself. The way Downey describes what happened in that period seems itself like an origin montage from a superhero story: a time of focused preparation and of “spiritual/ ritualistic processes” that he still considers private and prefers not to detail. He worked on the scenes over and over: “The missus says she could’ve woken me up in the middle of the night and I’d have recited the audition dialogue in double time.”

Robin Sloan points out that this kind of focused vision is a rare but valuable asset:

There’s something very powerful about (a) the confident identification of a thing you want to do — a thing you must do — paired with (b) the professional skill to pull it off. That second part is crucial; we aren’t Green Lanterns and willpower alone does not suffice. But put them together and the combo never fails to impress, to a degree that is often surprising to everyone involved.

Honestly I just think relatively few people, even very skilled and/or successful people, have that kind of specific plausible vision for themselves. If you can muster it — or if perhaps it grabs you by the throat — it becomes a significant competitive advantage.

Something I hear over and over about successful businessmen and artists—Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Stanley Kubrick—is that that have an impossibly clear vision for the work they want to do and the things they want to make. And then on top of that, the ability to execute on that vision. It’s a kind of focus I hope to have.

Kon Leong, of ZL Technologies, asks some interesting (and great) interview questions when looking for candidates who are creative, ambitious, and curious:

But then I’d ask, “Outside the headlines, what were some of the most interesting things you’ve noted in the last couple of weeks, and tell me why, and what did you do about it?” That would reflect what you think is interesting, and that tells me a fair bit. If you can cite many disparate topics, that’s a step in the right direction. The point is, we’re trying to find the right fit. In a fast-changing environment, you need to learn more and more and more. There’s so much to learn, and you can’t be taught all the permutations and combinations of the answers, so you have to learn on your own. And to learn on your own, you need curiosity.

And then:

I’ll ask: How willingly do you accept stuff, and how willing are you to question things? How creative are you in finding your own answers? For example, everyone knows in school that you cannot divide by zero. Why? I try to find if they’ve actually questioned things like that at any time. The point is, we’re usually handicapped by our own borders, and we will not think beyond them. I think there’s one rule of thumb in creativity: when you’re brainstorming, you have to suspend disbelief. That’s a key ingredient. There’s time enough to challenge it and poke holes, but not at the time of generation.

How much do you question? How wide is your curiosity? Creativity is subversive and finding the type of leaders who encourage this is hard to do. When you find them, don’t let them go.