Crichton's and Grisham's books are both forgettable but quite enjoyable reads. In both cases, their formula is easily learned, and the 2nd and nth books you read just seem to scream out "formula." That's why I've read one or two of their books and don't feel the need to read any more.
It's a good formula. It can make very good movies. Sir Walter Scott [1] was hugely popular in his day. Some people do still read him. In 200 years, some analogous paragraph to this will appear for Crichton & Grisham.
Following the Modernist movement in literature in the aftermath of the first World War, Scott’s rambling and verbose text (indeed he was alleged to omit punctuation in his writing, preferring to leave this to the printers to insert as required) was no longer in vogue.
Ironically Jurassic Park was an exception (made a great movie, but Spielberg must have been very happy to lose the book's preoccupation with details of chaos theory and computer systems in the screenplay)
Speaking of formula and the beauty in hack work, the craft in O. Henry stories really holds up. I’ve got a collection in paperback that is almost falling apart. Some better than others but talk about using a formula with brilliance on the regular - can’t wait to revisit some now that I think about it.
I had read a couple of Grisham's works some years ago and found them enjoyable.
I thought I had never read Crichton (just not into dinosaurs) until I realised that I have infact read his State of Fear many years ago. However, I have no recollection whatsoever of its story.
Another author who uses formula seems to be Dan Brown: everything happens within 24 hours, there's a hero with lots of travel (atleast an Atlantic crossing and back — which if you think about it screws up the 24 hour timeline IRL) a pursuing villain who's low-key psychopath, a parallel storyline...
It's quite enjoyable if you're reading him for the first time, but by the time you're into 3rd book you'll start to see the formula and then whatever you're reading instantly loses its appeal.
I have decided that, life's too short to be reading low-quality work, and now I try to read classics and other renowned works.
Of course, with this strategy you might end up missing good works by independent authors. So, keep an open mind.
That’s a poor analogy. He wasn’t married to multiple women at the same time. And one can have multiple relationships simultaneously without getting married five times.
Two of my favourite authors. I know that their books the equivalent to blockbuster movies in cinema but man, I loved their books during my teenage years.
I already loved dinosaurs as a kid (whick kid doesn’t love them, though) and Jurassic Park the novel and then the movie (I was 10 and 13 when they came out) blew me away. I just started reading Jurassic Park again, this time in English (I couldn’t as a kid) and damn, so many memories…
Never cared for The Lost World though, neither the book nor the film.
For me, Crichton went off the rails with Rising Sun and Disclosure, which are mainly driven by animus against Japanese business practices and women filing sexual harassment claims. Like, if you were a rich white guy in the early 90s, those were two things that right-leaning media outlets would have you worry about. Crichton by that point had lost the imaginative independent thinking that drove his early work, and basically ate up and regurgitated the media panic of the day into two novels that have aged incredibly poorly.
Counterpoint: Crichton's Airframe is a great book that illustrates how journalists reporting on complex subjects they don't understand can cause great harm regardless of their intent or convictions.
I didn't read Airframe. I did read Timeline (1999), in which a shady corporation invents time travel. It plans to use this awesome power to, um, create an ultra-realistic Medieval theme park.
His comment on Type 3 - "One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage."
I once had a manager and his manager who were both like this. I've never seen a dynamic duo with more skill in turning a group of good ICs in a bunch of dancing monkeys churning out pointless work. But hey, while problems solved was zero, number of PowerPoints in the shared drive was over 9000.
A classic example of Type 3 is Emperor Nicholas II of Russia. So determined to work hard and do his duty that he was completely unwilling to delegate, with no effort spared in coming up with the worst possible solution to every problem.
I wouldn’t go so far as to call them stupid but I once had a colleague—not my manager thankfully—whose approach to doing everything was essentially shotgun frantic activity.
When I think about the workplace, I've usually interpret this version of stupid as a way of saying that there is a type of personality where the compulsion to do something completely overrides asking themselves if that thing should be done in the first place. The end result is exactly what you said - shotgun frantic activity because everything needs to be done and everything is a top priority. They are not stupid per se, but they create an astonishing amount of stupid and wasteful activity.
Unfortunately there are people who really are just stupid as well. I'm sure in the Armed forces that can have deathly consequences.
The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties.
Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions.
Unfortunately this is what happens in real life. And those people have the ability to completely derail sales opportunities because they don't know when to stop selling because they a) can't recognize when they can't win the deal or b)don't realize they have won and make such a mess they end up wrecking it.
Crichton was not a great author but his books are perfectly crafted, entertaining all the way through, and low-key super creative. He loved the research and it shows. The result was potboilers that never condescended and read smooth as butter. Like Lee Child or Robert B. Parker he made it look easy.
because ultimately everything he's written is forgettable. He wrote the same techno-thriller over and over and because it's easy to digest it became a good template for movies but other than that there's nothing really about any of his books that'd make you read them more than once.
we mostly talk about Crichton as an author rather than about the actual contents of the books. He's "famous for being famous", sort of like Madonna. look at the article we're commenting on which like almost all Crichton pieces talks about his success and sales rather than talking about his work at all.
This is a really simplified take on what makes literature "great". This might be one person's preference for what they like in literature, but I'd question the credentials of any English teacher who thought they could assign or revoke the label "great" based on any single aspect of the writing. Every good book has many facets, and no book can flesh them all out fully.
Take Jurassic Park: it's a very well constructed book with a theme of man's hubris in trying to control nature. The book is an exploration of human weakness, not human growth, so any more focus on character development would have just been a distraction from the themes. The characters are raw archetypes on purpose, because that's the best way to emphasize the theme.
Jurassic Park (and The Andromeda Strain) are probably his two best. That one was made into a good movie and the other one a groundbreaking one probably colors our memories of them too.
> Take Jurassic Park: it's a very well constructed book with a theme of man's hubris in trying to control nature.
Hmm, that sounds more like the movie than the book. The book isn't really about "nature... finds a way". The book is more about the dangerous synthesis of startup capitalism and cutting edge scientific research. Almost everything that goes wrong on the island happens because Hammond cuts every corner he can, explicitly to save money. And this is allowed to happen because when a startup is developing cutting edge technology, government regulators are clueless about what's even going on. Scientists in the field can't self-regulate their own field because all of them have a stake in various commercial enterprises, making them behave more secretively and protective than scientists should be. The introduction at the beginning of the book lays this theme out clearly; it's basically an essay/rant against bioscience startups with the corrupting influence of capital as the central thesis.
Incidentally the book has some character development from the lawyer Gennaro, coming to recognize and take responsibility for his own role in the disaster. It's minor though, almost like Crichton was conscious of how little character development was in the story and felt he needed to add a little. The movie strips this out entirely, and has Gennaro get eaten by the T-Rex instead of Ed Regis (who was removed from the story.)
I'm listening to the book right now and only saw the movie once, over a decade ago. My synthesis was very much my own based on my current reading, not on the movie interpretation.
There's definitely a critique of science-for-profit, but I think that that is in the context of the wider critique of man's hubris in general.
I read Malcolm's comments throughout the book as embodying the primary theme. It's not just "life finds a way" (although that quote is in there), it's that we think we can control things but in the end our attempts fall apart because there will always be some variables that remain outside of our control. The chaotic and unpredictable nature of the world is why it all falls apart, starting with the misidentification of the dinosaur as a lizard because the guy who could have known better was on vacation.
This is best evidenced to me in Nedry's death: in the moments leading up to his death he's monologuing in his head about how he had everything planned out and everything was going perfectly except for this stupid storm! The storm itself is a reference to earlier in the book when Malcolm talks about how it's impossible to predict the weather over more than a few days. The point is that no matter how hard we work, we will never be able to understand nature well enough to control it completely. Not just life, but the whole universe.
Nedry was killed by a dinosaur, but only because he couldn't control the weather.
Individual storms are hard to predict, but the general possibility of a storm is easy to predict. In fact the possibility of a storm rendering the island's docks unusable was predicted, but Hammond didn't act on it because it would have cost money.
> "I want that equipment," Hammond said. "That's equipment for the labs. We need it."
> "Yes," Arnold said. "But you didn't want to put money into a storm barrier to protect the pier. So we don't have a good harbor. If the storm gets worse, the ship will be pounded against the dock. I've seen ships lost that way. Then you've got all the other expenses, replacement of the vessel plus salvage to clear your dock ... and you can't use your dock until you do..."
A reoccurring theme is the whole island being designed as a fragile system which cannot tolerate more than one or two failures at once. Malcolm's chaos theory argument says they can't predict when and how multiple failures will stack up to create a disaster, but could have designed their systems to be more robust to failure. For instance, they could have built a sheltered harbor for the island so that the very predictable eventuality of a tropical storm wouldn't isolate the island. They didn't, specifically to save money.
Another example since you bring up Nedry: why was Nedry hired to automate everything on the island, and why was he essentially working alone on it? Because Hammond was obsessed with not just making money, but making lots of money:
> Gennaro had to smile. It was almost the same speech, word for word, that he had used on the investors, so many years ago. "And we can never forget the ultimate object of the project in Costa Rica-to make money," Hammond said, staring out the windows of the jet. "Lots and lots of money."
> "I remember," Gennaro said.
> "And the secret to making money in a park," Hammond said, "is to limit your Personnel costs. The food handlers, ticket takers, cleanup crews, repair teams. To make a park that runs with minimal staff. That was why we invested in all the computer technology-we automated wherever we could."
I agree with you that you've hit on a major theme! One of Hammond's major flaws is cutting corners and spending too little, and the corrupting effect of money is a big deal in the book. I just don't agree that it's the primary theme.
The problem is that much of the book doesn't revolve around Hammond's cost-saving measures.
The first big chunk of the book is a description of a series of random actions by many different people that combine to cause the dinosaur threat to go unidentified. Midwives across Costa Rica mark reptile deaths as SIDS to avoid getting in trouble. A key reptile researcher is on vacation. The infectious disease specialists use the tentative identification of the reptile as a lizard, which the Costa Rican officials mistakenly interpret as a positive identification. All of these random events combine to cause the threat to go overlooked, and none of them are directly related to money at all. If he were trying to make a point about money, this part of the book would make no sense. The point is to illustrate how unpredictable the real world is in comparison to the idealized version that exists on paper.
And again, the primary antagonist's downfall and death is not driven by cost-saving measures, it's driven by an unexpected weather event. You don't kill off your antagonist in such an arbitrary way unless that arbitrariness is the main point of the story.
The one Grisham book that I have read felt like the author had not done enough research. It was set mostly in Europe and contained a lot of minor details that were wrong.
With his Type 1 and Type 2 ambitions, the author has stumbled upon the established SCARF model, which involves five domains of human social experience: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness.
You can apply this to a lot of things: ambition, leadership, engagement at work, etc.
In this case, through their ambition, Grisham seeks autonomy (and to an extent certainty) and Crichton status.
This is wonderful advice. I wish I would have received it (and been receptive to it) 15 years ago.
Back then I was a Crichton, but have realized I’m just causing myself unhappiness and anxiety on that path. Now I want to try to be more of a Grisham.
One challenge though: How can you be a Grisham in the “deep tech” startup space? The whole culture is so geared towards Crichtons. Is there a beaten path, or will I have to create it?
I doubt it will be possible, as the concept of SV-type startups is to be as Crichtony as possible. In fact, when they start to become boring you can often see VCs pressure the management to take more risk as a mere 2-5x return on investment is not enough to make the VC model work.
I expect that being a Grisham in deep tech either involves finding work in the research department of a more stable big tech company, or else in a research institute/university. If that is not possible and you can find/want only startup work, you can always try to uncouple your financials from work via FIRE methods and try to find autonomy that way. Be aware that you will find a growing friction with management and even your coworkers if you try that though.
Crichton is the cultural norm, I realize that. But does it have to be?
For example: I don’t mind the high risk / high reward thing, as long as it’s not me working 80 hour weeks under incredible stress to try to avoid bankruptcy. There are plenty of Crichton wannabes with all the necessary drive, energy and business acumen, but which lack the imagination and creativity to really succeed. Why can’t one of them do that job? I can be the creative guy behind the scenes.
Sure you can be an “expert” and live out your days in a corporate research lab or something. But that means you’ll have a 9-5 job with zero financial incentives until you retire. I think we’re heading into an economy where creativity, imagination and foresight really is the bottleneck. Is it sound that that work is then not incentivized at all?
If you can find someone willing to do all the hard work while you sit and ideate, sure that would be a lovely deal. There's somewhat of a stigma in the startup world against idea people though, precisely because they think that being creative "should be" enough to succeed. It usually isn't and to be "very" successful you need both the 80 hour weeks AND ample creativity. To be merely averagely successful you can get away with either hard work OR creativity, but TBH given your deprecatory remarks about 9-5 jobs it doesn't sound you are as Grishammy (yet) as your initial post suggests. :)
The cost is that there are a lot of people in the world who have the business skills to create a strong startup, but lack the technical background to create a compelling product. Meanwhile there are plenty of technical founders with great product ideas, but who must (best case) spend years of their lives building HR organizations and "selling" instead of innovating. In the worst case, they'll be bad at those specific tasks and will simply fail. Today's startup culture doesn't really have a good way for productive technical founders to get their ideas into the world without doing all the heavy lifting. Maybe our current system is the best possible system; it's possible there's also room for improvement.
Sorry wasn’t meant to be deprecatory remakes. I’ve had plenty of 9-5 jobs and I’m looking into getting another one now. Just wanted to be clear that they typically do not come with any incentives to excel, at least not here in Sweden.
Describing an idea in sufficient detail for someone else to program it is probably harder than actually programming it. Thus, the person who is just a hustler, or just an idea person, will get outcompeted by the person who is both.
I agree. I don’t want to be a 100% “idea person”. But I think I could be pretty good at the initial phase of “deep tech” startups: building a prototype, recruiting a team and raising pre-seed money. Perhaps there’s an established model where I could do that again and again? And if not, perhaps creating such a model is my calling. :)
That's pretty much the model. It just takes much more work than it sounds like. Building and pivoting the prototype to find product market fit, building a team that doesn't such and buys into your vision otherwise they don't work for peanuts, and selling that vision is even harder with investors for the capital.
If you can do all that with a Type 2 mindset, nobody is stopping you.
There are plenty of ML Engineers in big tech making $500K working 40 hours a week. Many have PhDs, which programs are also filled with smart people not working crazy hours.
I would argue that outside of the Elon Musk tier of the deep tech world (and there's really only one person like that) almost every other person I know making measurable progress in hard technology is extremely focused on one thing at a time. The Crichton style 100-things-at-once approach grabs more headlines, retweets, and attention - but most of the engineers I know working on fusion reactors, electric vehicles, carbon capture, artificial intelligence, space travel, and medical advances are not trying to be VCs, entertainers, authors, and philanthropists at the same time they move their field forward.
Focus on running towards what actually moves the world forward and you'll discover the other people who are keeping up with you quickly. Don't worry about all of the noise around busier people working on other things. None of that will last.
This article speaks to me that the author himself is struggling to unblock his creativity by looking to other processes.
Both these authors were ambitious and ruled the 2000s best sellers list. Sure they had different processes, but we’re comparing books on the range of science topics to that of legal thrillers.
There’s other very consistent authors out there. The Danielle Steel, Nicolas Sparks, etc types are overlooked because of their book topics but they have similar stories of ambition in their late 20s where they decided to pursue writing full time.
I don’t really get what the take away is here. Each of these people are ambitious and live different lives to realize it. So what? What’s the takeaway?
The takeaway is clearly stated at the end: two extremely successful authors took very different paths to success and currently live two very different lifestyles — all based on their personality types.
Cal Newport is sharing these examples to the reader to impart the idea that you should try to match your career _style_ to your personality. You can pursue the exact same career as someone else, but if the __way_ you pursue it doesn’t match your personality style, you probably won’t be happy.
Thanks for reiterating it. I’m saying “so what?” to the takeaway.
It is putting one ambition type above others because it is most relatable to the author. It doesn’t mean it is the right one as proof by other successful authors who are constantly juggling many projects at a time.
There are these types of ambition in all professions. You can’t just assume a type you disagree with is not happy. That’s what I’m saying “so what?” to.
I’m fine with being downvoted, but wanted to provide more context to what can be perceived as cynicism.
The author isn't saying one way is better than the other and he's not saying one type is happier than the other. He postulates people are wired one way and trying to work in a style incongruous with that type are causing themselves unnecessary grief, even if they end up ultimately successful.
The point is to be honest with yourself which type you are and develop your work style to play to your strengths. It might not be the most insightful article, but most self-help topics are built on repetition and reinforcement. If anything, the author is trying to refute the cultural notion that the Crichton types are better than the Grisham types or vice versa.
One of the takeaways is some people enjoy pressure and some people use work to avoid pressure. You can find billionaires who have enough money to retire many times and they are still working 80 hour weeks. Why is that? They clearly enjoy the grind.
My problem is that I'm definitely type 2, but my mind wishes to become type 1. It took me two days just to write a Python script for managing spam, but when I go on GitHub, I find people regularly contributing to 3-4 critical projects every week from months.
If you spend the time to contribute one patch, I don’t see why you couldn’t repeat this process to the point where you are highly productive. It’s just hard work getting to that point.
Was he a climate denier or a critic of the emerging scientism in the climate change debate? There are unintended consequences to arriving at the right conclusion(climate change is real) for the wrong reasons. It undermines societies ability to move forward viable solutions.
No, he was a full blown denier, fond of making outlandish claims like the Antarctic ice area actually increasing, misrepresenting what the scientists had actually predicted in order to claim their predictions had failed, as well as writing an entertaining-but-silly novel about eco-terrorists faking natural disasters full of nonsense gotchas like "look, the temperature record in this place is lower than it was x years ago"
He just was smart enough to caveat it with "maybe the world is getting a little bit warmer but we can't be sure why" and to focus on attacking the notion of scientific consensus and modelling rather than defending alternative hypotheses in any detail.
Suuuure, he was actually trying to ensure society moved forward viable solutions to anthropogenic climate change by repeatedly asserting there was actually no evidence of its existence, misrepresenting accurate past predictions of warming in order to discredit them, even writing a book in which the natural disasters attributed to climate change were actually part of a murderous conspiracy to fake it, with a great big long appendix about the dangers of scientists advising government on public policy when contrarians like him could be doing that instead...
The take down on his footnote riddled state of fear is good. Shame about the politics because is was a great airport thriller. Full of mcguffins left right and centre.
Seems unlikely, he was typical of a cluster of opinion that has become more widespread since. Climate denial wasn't his only thing, for example, he also was a "the real sexism is against men" guy.
See also: Scott Adams, who seems to be on a similar arc.
1990s Dilbert: Office workers express skepticism and frustration surrounding their boss's incompetence and how meaningful their work really is.
2020s Dilbert: A robot indignantly asks "did you just assume my gender?" after having a "wokeness chip" installed [1].
I expect that within another decade he'll go full Mallard Fillmore and just have Dilbert's head in the corner with the rest of the comic being a giant speech bubble filled with a barely-coherent rant against people who only exist in his imagination.
It's a good formula. It can make very good movies. Sir Walter Scott [1] was hugely popular in his day. Some people do still read him. In 200 years, some analogous paragraph to this will appear for Crichton & Grisham.
Following the Modernist movement in literature in the aftermath of the first World War, Scott’s rambling and verbose text (indeed he was alleged to omit punctuation in his writing, preferring to leave this to the printers to insert as required) was no longer in vogue.
[1] https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofScotland/Sir-...