27 Notes In 5 Minutes
My father has a line he's used for as long as anyone in our family can remember. It usually came blurting out after a meeting with a potential partner or agency where someone's bravado had been on full display and well past its limits. Once that person was out of earshot, half to himself, and maybe half for my benefit, he would shake his head and say, "I've forgotten more than they know."
For years it landed as a reminder of the distance between him and everyone else. Lately it has started to sound like a description of what happens to a person's knowledge over a long enough career, and it turns out to be more generous than it sounds.
The place that line landed hardest for me was the rehearsal arena. Building a show meant living in that hall twelve hours a day for weeks, watching the same numbers get staged and run until the choreography was memorized, cues recorded, every performer's habits were familiar, and the crew and tech teams were in sync. If anyone should have been able to see what still needed refining, it was the person who never left, meticulously watching every detail get worked over.
My father would come back into the rehearsal hall after being away for three or four days. He'd sit down, watch a run-through, and notice twenty-seven things in five minutes. All of it got scribbled into my notebook, became the subject of the end-of-day meeting, and was implemented the next day before the next full run-through. What frustrated me was that every note was obviously right the moment he said it and somehow invisible until he pointed it out, while I frantically wrote and nodded through one aha moment after another.
"How am I ever going to see all of that? Why wasn't it obvious to me? I've been sitting in this room twelve hours a day." He got those questions more than once. His answer was that one day the vantage point of perspective would arrive, and all the years would come through on their own.
He was completely right. There was no single rehearsal where it clicked. Maybe it dribbled in one note at a time, over days that turned into weeks that turned into years, with more shows to produce each season, sometimes simultaneously, run-through times staggered so I could sprint between multiple rehearsal halls and take it all in. Somewhere around year fifteen, the twenty-seven things were simply there without anyone looking for them. The individual notes from all those years were gone, nobody could have listed them. They had dissolved into the way the room looked.
My father wasn't the only one. When we produced High School Musical: The Ice Tour with acclaimed choreographer and director, Kenny Ortega, I watched him do the same thing. He'd walk into the ice rink not having seen anything take in the opening number, and rattle off his own twenty-seven things almost faster than anyone could write them down, then fix every one in rapid succession. Two people I admire with completely different backgrounds, had arrived at the same way of seeing. That's when it stopped looking like a personality and started looking like a skill.
Arthur Brooks has a name for this in his book From Strength to Strength, borrowed from the psychologist Raymond Cattell. Fluid intelligence is the raw horsepower, the ability to reason fast and solve problems you've never seen, and it peaks somewhere in your late thirties. Crystallized intelligence is what you can do with everything you've accumulated, and it keeps climbing through your forties and fifties. Brooks puts it plainly: "When you are young, you have raw smarts; when you are old, you have wisdom." My father was describing the second curve decades before anyone in our family had read about it. The forgetting he kept mentioning was the sound of one curve handing off to the other.
Organizations know this even when they don't say it. Spencer Stuart released its annual U.S. Board Index this week, and the headline is that S&P 500 boards are refreshing at the lowest rate in a decade because they're leaning harder on experienced seasoned directors. Boardrooms are paying for exactly the thing my father was describing. Not the resume, which lists what a person did, the five minutes, which shows what a person sees.
This matters most for people in the middle of a shift. The pattern is consistent across the leaders who come through Pivot With Purpose between eras. They can list their titles, but ask what they're actually good at, the thing they do when they walk into a meeting and know within a minute who is going to be the problem, or read a deck and know which slide is hiding the bad news, and they go quiet. Then something like, "I don't know how I know. I just see it." Nobody says that about something they picked up last year. It's crystallized intelligence coming out of the mouth of someone who assumes it isn't worth mentioning because it no longer feels like effort. The market values it at a premium, and the person holding it is discounting it to zero.
There's a second piece to my father's critical eye that took me longer to appreciate, he went away. Sitting in the room twelve hours a day built the eye, and leaving the room was what let it work. Proximity is how you earn the perspective, and distance is how you use it. Most of us get the first part right and skip the second, then wonder why we can't see what someone walking in cold captures immediately.
This is the case for the break you keep postponing, the long weekend, the real vacation, the week where you don't open the deck. Time away doesn't erase the hours you've put in, it's what lets them add up to something. You come back and the twenty-seven things are sitting there waiting, and they were invisible only because you never stepped far enough back to see them.
So a few things, offered rather than prescribed.
If you're between chapters and can't put words to what you know, pay attention to the next room you walk into after a stretch away. What you notice in the first five minutes, without trying, is a truer inventory of your value than anything you've written down about yourself. That's the list, told as a story, worth bringing into the interview, the board conversation, the negotiation.
If you're the one inside an organization with the decades behind you, notice what the distance is doing for you because the days you step away from the work aren't a break from your judgment, they're where it comes from. The colleague putting in the twelve-hour days can't see that yet, the same way I couldn't, and telling them to work harder won't close the gap. Walking back in after three days and saying out loud what you see, then explaining why it was invisible from inside, is the mentoring. You're not showing them how far ahead you are, you're showing them the vantage point exists, and that the hours they're logging are the only road to it.
My father has forgotten more than most people will ever know, and he'd be the first to say so! It took me most of a career to hear the line the way he meant it. He was never measuring the gap between us, he was telling me it would close.
From Your Biggest Champion,
Nicole
