Introduction
On a crisp Saturday morning one spring, in a borough of Berlin called Mitte, I sat alone at a bistro munching away on a carrot-beet scone in between sips of a cappuccino. Or at least I thought. I could read the German menu only slightly better than I could name the street on which I was renting an apartment for the month. Despite brunching solo—an endeavor considered so gauche back home that The New York Times had once decreed it shouldn’t be done—I was having a marvelous time.
I was flipping through a copy of New York magazine and came upon an article about paint. While that might sound as enticing as watching it dry, the article was fascinating. You see, the author of the article focused his reporting on black. New Yorkers love it, I’ve learned, having lived in the city for about ten years, not only because of its ability to contrast starkly against any exposed sun-deprived skin but also because of its ability to mask the grime that the streets kick up onto you as you walk to work. However, the author was interested by a particular variant of black paint because it wasn’t quite paint at all.
In the “Antenna” wing of the Science Museum in London, the author explained, there sat a bronze bust of the BBC personality Marty Jopson. It was about six inches tall and an accurate enough likeness, especially in how light bounced off the dimples, the bushy eyebrows, and the handlebar mustache. Jopson was a props designer, inventor, and math hobbyist. He presented his scientific work on television for a while. On his show he asked, from behind safety goggles, whether an opera singer was capable of shattering a crystal wineglass with one powerful note. (She was.) With the help of the townspeople of Ashford, England, who lived on Butterside Road, he tested whether falling toast always landed buttered side down. (It mostly did.) Though the Marty Jopson bust was an unusual choice of subject matter, all in all there was nothing particularly remarkable about it.
Except for the nearly identical bust that sat beside it. When the two sculptures were viewed side by side, the second bust seemed to be only a silhouette, as if someone had taken a scalpel and cut a hole in space the exact shape and size of Jopson’s head. You couldn’t see the dimples or the mustache. There were no shadows. There were no contours. Had you been allowed to touch this bust, you would have felt all the texture of the face, the wrinkles on the forehead, and the hair on the chin. But to the viewer, all such detail seemed to have disappeared into a void. Or a black hole.
This second bust, like the first, was made of bronze, but it was cloaked with something special: Vantablack—the blackest black ever created.
Vantablack isn’t actually a pigment. It is a substance that is grown by scientists directly on the metal surfaces it is intended to cover, and it has virtually no mass at all. Vantablack is a densely packed collection of ultra-thin carbon nanotubes, like the material that makes up the bodies of Formula One racing cars and the Enzo Ferrari. It is as dark as it is because it absorbs 99.965 percent of light that hits it straight-on. For comparison, the blackness of asphalt consumes only about 88 percent. For us to see something, we need light to hit an object and to bounce back. Otherwise, we’re not going to see much of anything at all.
Vantablack has been used to coat the outsides of stealth jets. It has lined the insides of telescopes. And, just a few months before I read that article, scientists from Berlin Space Technologies—which was just a few train stops away from where I was sitting—had applied it to a microsatellite bound for outer space.
Recently, the famous British artist Sir Anish Kapoor had been granted exclusive rights to use one version of the product in his work, which includes the bust in the Science Museum. Kapoor explained that Vantablack is “blacker than anything you can imagine. So black you almost can’t see it…Imagine a space that’s so dark that as you walk in you lose all sense of where you are, what you are, and especially all sense of time.”
He’s hardly exaggerating. When we look at the bust, we lose all sense of dimensionality. What we see is not what’s really there. It’s an illusion. A trick of the eye.
For Kapoor, the gap between reality and perception was the key to transforming an otherwise unremarkable sculpture into a groundbreaking work of great artistic intrigue. What we actually see makes all the difference. Even—or especially—when what we see diverges from what’s really there.
This book is about that “especially.”
We think we see the world the way it actually is. We think that when we look at ourselves in the mirror, we see our face the same way others do. We believe that when we peer down the street in front of us, we know what we’ll pass by on our journey. We are certain that when we scan the food on our plate, we see what it is we’ll be eating. But none of this is always true. Instead, our visual experiences are often misrepresentations. We form an imperfect impression and our eager mind fills in the gaps, putting in place the missing pieces. We do this with the things we see even when they aren’t shrouded in Vantablack. And, interestingly, this can happen without our awareness, both in everyday circumstances and when we’re making some of the most important decisions of our lives.
Based on the research I and my colleagues have conducted, I believe that we can take advantage of the fact that we do not see the world perfectly, accurately, or completely—as long as we know when and why it happens. By learning more about how our eyes work in conjunction with our brain, we can direct our perceptual experiences to help us see the world in ways that will help us overcome some of the biggest challenges we face when working toward our most important goals.
I’m a social psychologist and scientist at New York University, and I have been conducting research on perception and motivation for more than fifteen years. I’ve worked with some of the most accomplished scholars and amassed my own talented team. Together, we have conducted investigations, analyzed the data from experiments we’ve designed, and reviewed new reports emerging from labs all around the world on how people best pursue their goals, and what stands in their way.
Through this work, I have noted commonalities among the problems that people face when they set out on a personal quest to master some ambition. I have encountered these problems too. Just as having a medical degree doesn’t protect a doctor from getting the sniffles, having a PhD in motivation science doesn’t inoculate me from the challenges of meeting my own goals. But I happen to be uniquely positioned to know the scientific data on the problems that arise along the way, and what the solutions to these problems might be. As a result, I have discovered strategies that work to overcome the difficulties that challenge the likelihood of our own success. I’ve learned what works—and what doesn’t—for myself and thousands of others who have been involved in my research.
What’s interesting is that our discoveries align with the methods used by successful entrepreneurs, athletes, artists, and celebrities. Ample scientific data underscores the effectiveness of approaches that these incredible individuals take to surmounting some of their biggest obstacles. And their habits, routines, and practices, my research finds, can be distilled into four general strategies with far-reaching application.