"Before starting this job, I put myself through a crash course, watching five or six movies every single day for six weeks, trying to see every successful picture of the last several years. Then I read as many of the scripts as l could get my hands on, to see what made these particular movies great I kind of invented my own university, so that l could get some sense of both the business and the art. I've always been in worlds where knowing the community has been important. In graduate school, when was studying literature, to know the writers and critics was to know a universe. In Washington, I had to learn the political players, and here I had to learn the players. It became clear to me that there were about one hundred core writers, and l systematically set out to read a screenplay or two by each of them. When I got here, l was told it would take me three years to get grounded, but after nine months, the head of the studio told me I'd graduated and promoted me. Within a year I found with some stumbles here and there that I could perform the way my peers, who had spent their entire careers here, did. I attribute that partly to discipline, partly to desire, and partly to the old transferability of skills. You use many of the same
muscles in molecular biology, politics, and the movi It's all about making connections.
"One thing I did when I flrst got here was to sit in the office of the studio head all day, day after day, and watch and listen to everything he said or did. So when writers would come, when producers would come, I would just be there. When he was making phone calls, l would sit and listen to him, and I would hear him contend with what a person in his position contends with. How does he say no to someone, how does he say yes, how does he duck, how does he wheedle and coax? I would have a yellow pad with me, and all through my first many months, any phrase didn't understand, any piece of industry jargon, any name, any maneuver I didn't follow, any of the deal making business financial stuff I didn't understand, I'd write it down, and periodically I would go trotting around to find anyone I could get to answer.
"There was no situation that I could fail to learn from because everything was new to me, and therefore no matter what it was, however obtuse the person I was meeting with, however stupid the idea, however low-powered the agent pitching me something, it was a useful encounter, because I would be for the first time in that position. Every single thing was new, and so I had a complete tolerance for every conceivable experience, and as I learned from what other people would regard as real tedium, and stupid and avoidable experiences, I would then begin to filter those out of my input until I was ultimately only doing what l thought was useful and important for me, or things from which could learn, or had to do"
Lesson Three: You can learn anything you want to learn.
If one of the basic ingredients of leadership is a passion for the promises of life, the key to realizing the promise is the full deployment of yourself, as Kaplan did when he arrived at Disney. Full deployment is simply another way of defining learning.
Learning, the kind Kaplan did, the kind I'm talking about here, is much more than the absorption of a body of knowledge or mastery of a discipline. It's seeing the world simultaneously as it is and as it can be, understanding what you see, and acting on your understanding. Kaplan didn't just study the movie business, he embraced it and absorbed i and thereby understood it.