Primitive

About a decade ago I received an offer I couldn't refuse.

I was running my own public relations firm, and even though I was fortunate enough to make a good living, I could already sense the economy taking a turn for the worse. I had been bracing for months by cutting costs, hustling for clients, and networking. Then, a former colleague called me up and asked if I'd like to rejoin the PR agency I'd worked for years before, Burson-Marsteller, one of the world's largest. They were looking for a managing director, he said, somebody who knew the company and its culture well, but who could also serve as a change agent and inject a healthy dose of creative thinking. And they thought I'd be a great fit.

I discussed the offer with my wife over dinner. "I know how much you love being your own boss," she said gently, "but is it really worth all the hassle?" Wisely, she argued that with three small children to care for, a high-level position with a large agency would be a blessing. I'd no longer be worrying about making payroll, paying the rent on my office, or any of the other challenges that small business owners face. Together, we imagined all the new job's perks, from traveling the world to working with executives of Fortune 500 companies. Plus, it felt good to know that, having started at the bottom of the company's ladder, I was now being asked to come back and occupy a spot near the top. Feeling hopeful, I accepted the offer.

However, as soon as I walked back into the firm's Park Avenue South office, I knew I had made a mistake.

The wall-to-wall carpeting smelled just as musty as I'd remembered. The halls were dark and eerily quiet, and they led to a maze of cubicles where stressed-out employees glared at their computer screens and clicked away at their keyboards. My inbox was already jammed with emails from human resources summoning me to mandatory orientations and automated reminders about filling out my time-tracking spreadsheet. I told myself that occasional busywork was simply the price I had to pay for working in corporate America; I'd soon be wheeling and dealing with high-powered clients. I set out to do the best job I could. But that proved difficult. Like any large organization, Burson-Marsteller was not above petty office politics; I learned that if I wanted to be assigned to the firm's high-profile accounts, I had to campaign for them. This meant everything from sucking up to the bosses to figuring out which of my colleagues I could trust and which ones were after my job.

I became depressed. I'm a competitive guy, and I loved the work itself, but life in the office felt less about applying my creativity to get and serve clients and more about billing as many hours as humanly possible to prevail in some c-suite version of the Hunger Games. Each week my department posted a running tally of our billable hours that read like a baseball scorecard. If your "bill-ability"—and thus your value to the company—began to shrink, everyone knew it. We were so obsessed with accumulating hours that we barely spoke to each other.

I was caught between the push of the controlling company culture and the pull of my more free-spirited temperament. I let my frustrations seep in and take over. To fight the blues, I took some Zoloft my doctor prescribed, which made me feel dry-mouthed and numb. To give myself a jolt of adrenaline, I woke up before dawn every morning, left the house while my family was still sleeping, and started my day with an intense CrossFit workout. But in the end, no amount of air squats and burpees could fix my sense of despair at work. I was hardly alone in feeling such deep frustration: In a 2018 poll of about thirty thousand American workers, Gallup found that despite an increase in the number of people who report themselves satisfied at work, most of the respondents were still not emotionally connected to their work and classified themselves as "not engaged." They generally showed up and did the minimum required of them, but they'd leave the job if they found a slightly better option. Of those, 13 percent described themselves as "actively disengaged" with "miserable work experiences." Meanwhile, 67 percent said they were sometimes, very often, or always burned out at work.

This certainly would have described a lot of people at Burson-Marsteller, but not everyone. There was one guy who seemed immune to the petty infighting and the ambient malaise that seemed to infect everyone else. His name was Michael Claes, but we called him "007" because he was the consummate mystery man. After the office adopted business casual attire, Michael stubbornly stuck to his pressed white shirts, suits, and solid red and blue ties. No one knew exactly what he was working on, but he counted big blue-chip companies, including Clorox, among his clients. Once, somehow, he brought in the government of Indonesia for an assignment that went on for years. He came and went as he pleased. His office looked like the aftermath of a tornado. He had no clear supervisor because most of the company was afraid of him. "I wasn't interested in people's time sheets," he reflected to me recently. "I didn't worry about concepts like bill-ability or how many hours people worked. Hence, I was considered to be a lousy manager, which didn't bother me at all."

We used to joke that if Michael stopped showing up for work, it would take someone six months to muster the courage to ask where he went. Once, when his office phone stopped working, Michael called IT to get a new one sent up. Like at any big corporation, an IT ticket had to be created, approved, and then wind its way through the queue, which could take days. But Michael had no patience for bureaucracy, so he smashed the phone and sent the head of the New York office shards of plastic and wire in interoffice envelopes with a note: Replace my phone.

Michael got away with all kinds of off-the-wall behavior because, at the end of the day, he was valuable to the agency and brought in millions of dollars per year. He was like a hunter who ventured into the jungle, shot a meaty animal, and dragged it back to feed the village. He was moved by the thrill of the chase, and he relied on gut instinct rather than on some elaborate playbook. The farmers—like many of my colleagues at Burson-Marsteller—were "civilized" folks. They respected precise divisions of labor, valued collaborative work, and kept exacting schedules. They made it possible for Michael to disappear for weeks at a time to haul in a whale of a client. Just like early human civilizations did, the modern workplace needs both hunters and farmers to thrive. The more I've experienced workplaces like Burson-Marsteller, the more I've discovered renegades like Michael Claes who seem to be operating by their own set of rules. In HR corporate speak, they are considered "nontraditional hires." They constantly butt heads with their more civilized colleagues, but are allowed to remain somewhat autonomous because of the immense value they bring to the organization.

When I eventually quit my job and restarted my own communications boutique, I intentionally sought to work with people like Michael. One day I was speaking with my business partner, Liel, trying to understand what it was about these square pegs in round holes that was so refreshingly different. I thought about the most successful people I had worked with, from members of the Forbes billionaires list to government ministers to surgeons to startup founders. As I told the story of Michael Claes interofficing the mangled remains of his phone to the head of Burson-Marsteller's New York office, we brainstormed about what separated accomplished people like him from the rest of the pack.

Without thinking, I blurted out: "They're totally fucking crazy."

Liel pressed me for a real answer. "Why? Because they are original? Pure? Primal? Uncorrupted by civilization?" We kept naming adjectives until one made me pause: "…Are they kind of primitive?"

I looked at Liel and smiled. "That's it. They're primitive."

We throw around plenty of terms to define personality types. Left-brained people are analytical and methodical, while right-brained people are creative and artistic—or so the theory goes. The Myers–Briggs Type Indicator assigns individuals an alphabet soup of letters that align with one of sixteen personality types. There are famed psychiatrist Carl Jung's introverts and extroverts. Type As and Type Bs. Entrepreneurs and employees. Gryffindors and Slytherins. People who see the white-and-gold dress and people who see the blue-and-black dress. I won't pretend to have the expertise to establish yet another scientific framework for categorizing the human mind. Rather, I want to recapture a word and identify a mindset—being primitive—to describe some of the people around us who are quietly and not-so-quietly living life on their own terms. They are talented, creative people whose instincts and unconventional ideas can contribute to innovation if only they are not stymied.

While most of us have been trained in schools and offices to act civilized, we have done little to cultivate our primitive side. And we all have a primitive side: It's the drive that leads us to obsess over our mission. It's the thrust that propels us to fight until we win. It's the tick that lets us ignore conventions and think up new solutions to old problems. It's the urge to jaywalk instead of waiting for the light. Most important, it's taking a social or financial risk when convention says not to.

As Dr. Richard A. Friedman, a professor of psychiatry at Cornell University, explained, "Culture is essentially giving the message that people should be safe and that risk is always a bad thing. So people are supposed to minimize their exposure. We're supposed to be safer, even when taking some risk might be beneficial." The good news, he said, is that "people can be taught to be take more intelligent risk often by just giving them more information about it."

And that information can be found in our primitive brains.

I realize that primitive is a loaded term. It's not politically correct. It even sounds a little bit offensive. I don't mean that we should be rude or coarse or unthinking, and I'm not suggesting that we should just let frat boys be frat boys. I'm also not here to tout trends like paleo diets, "primitive technology," "digital nomads," or calling coworkers "beasts" when they nail assignments. While these trends all point to many people's genuine desire to live more simply and more instinctively, this idea is actually much deeper than that.

In fact, primitive is the perfect word to describe a certain sort of energy that, as old institutions are uprooted and new economic players rise, is becoming more and more essential. And not only in our era: for approximately 90 percent of our history as a species, we thrived in large part because we roamed the world in tight-knit groups searching for sustenance and opportunity rather than sitting still and waiting for good fortune to come to us.

By the 1920s, the majority of Americans had left their farming communities and relocated to urban environments. But modern city living brought with it not only a new set of conveniences, like indoor plumbing, electricity, and heating, but also a new way of life. In the country, people resided in small communities, where everyone lived together and worked together. In the city, life was far more fragmented: you had your modest apartment, your factory job, your small circle of friends, and you were often sealed off from the millions of people from all backgrounds living below and above and beside you. Instead of roaming to new places to hunt and gather for survival, our society evolved into compliant adults with very different values than their primitive ancestors.

This is not some evolutionary abstraction. It's a process we've each experienced ourselves. We were enrolled in elementary schools that taught us that the most important things were to be polite, to play well with others, to obey our teachers, and to follow the rules. Then we went to college, and there we were told that if we did well—if we studied hard, earned enough As, and chased down the right internships—we'd have good jobs waiting when we graduated. As we entered the workforce, we were reminded that if we wanted to get anywhere in our careers, the only way to do it was by understanding the intricate set of guidelines that governed our professional lives, things like not challenging our boss and knowing our place in the corporate pyramid. Or as "The Logical Song" by the English rock band Supertramp goes, They send me away to teach me how to be sensible, logical, oh responsible, practical.

Don't get me wrong: Being civilized has done a lot of us a lot of good. But it's time to consider the alternative.

Why? Because our economy and our society are both changing, rapidly and radically. Some of the changes are technological: according to a 2019 study conducted by the Brookings Institution, 25 percent of American jobs are at "high risk" of being lost due to automation, and another 36 percent are at "medium risk." As a coauthor of the study explained, "If your job is boring and repetitive, you're probably at great risk of automation." Other changes are economic: when my father joined the workforce in the early 1960s, 88 percent of Americans working in the private sector could count on having a pension; today, that percentage is closer to 30, which means that more of us are being left to fend for ourselves in retirement. And some changes are institutional: instead of the large corporations that moved slowly and took few risks, the advent of the internet and the availability of venture capital funding enabled the rise of companies committed to moving fast and breaking things, as Facebook's old motto used to go. As new industries, from ridesharing to coworking spaces, emerge almost overnight, and the job market offers less long-term security than ever before, there is an opportunity to do something about that feeling of frustration so many of us experience each morning as we head out to work. It's time to be more primitive. Luckily, we have a primitive brain that's already making far more decisions than we realize.

For decades, neuroscience was comfortable telling us that we had two brains: a primitive one and a more evolved one. The primitive one contains a group of structures collectively called the basal ganglia. It's that big thing right in the center of the brain that looks like a swirly cinnamon bun, and it's in charge of, among other things, our voluntary motor actions. Then there's the cerebral cortex, the outer layer of neural tissue in your cerebrum that is in charge of complex cognitive functions like long-term memory, language, and abstract thought—all the smart and complex stuff. It's why we often call thoughtful or intelligent people "cerebral."

With this breakdown in mind, scientists assumed that there was a simple relationship between the basal ganglia and the cerebral cortex. The former was the part of the brain where our cave-dwelling ancestors made "gut decisions" that helped them survive. Aggression, dominance, territoriality—all these come to us courtesy of the basal ganglia and other primitive regions of the brain. But as humans evolved, our survival no longer relied on grunting and growling and grabbing, but rather on inventing and theorizing and thinking in the abstract. That's why we developed a big cerebral cortex, a civilized brain for a more civilized existence. Meanwhile, the primitive part of our brain was considered less critical to our modern way of life. Or so we thought, anyway. About a decade ago, scientists at MIT began conducting experiments that revealed the striatum—the part of the basal ganglia that receives input—adapted far more quickly to stimuli than the cerebral cortex. It was the primitive brain, they observed, that was first to identify change and learn to adapt.

You don't have to be a neuroscientist—and I'm certainly not one—to know that for all our material comforts, emotionally and psychologically we aren't that far removed from our cave-dwelling forebearers. We may have iPhones and Netflix and Instagram, but the moment danger arises we do what our species has always done and let our fight-or-flight instinct kick in. This means our brains are still geared to immediately identify threats and opportunities, without too much thought or complication, before handing all that data over for more sophisticated analysis. For all our adaptations, it means that we still have a primitive brain, one that is often faster and more accurate than its civilized counterpart. The key, as we'll see in this book, is to learn how to listen to it.

Take a look around your workplace. How many of your peers seem drained, or simply not connected with their work? My friend Linda went into journalism years ago because she loved the adventure and her ability to constantly explore new subjects. But as she climbed the ladder of managerial success, she feels less creative and fulfilled, and more boxed in by her bosses. Another friend, Kevin, has a great career as a transactional lawyer. But he can't stop dreaming about quitting his job to open a health food store. It's a fantasy he's had since he left college, but one that seems to loom larger in his imagination as his professional status rises. Then there's Matt, who has done very well in corporate real estate, but hates it to the point that he wonders if his work life would not have been happier and more successful if he had followed his early dream of becoming an athletic trainer. You probably know people like Linda, Kevin, and Matt. Maybe their struggles even remind you of your own.

Business, among other professions, trains us to depend on our civilized brains rather than our instincts and our emotions. Our professors and mentors and colleagues teach us to keep the personal and the professional separate, to depend on metrics and data and other tangible, objective yardsticks. The way we're socialized in business is often antisocial; we're taught to be "professional," to not take business problems "to heart." This can be sage advice that is necessary to the effective functioning of a big organization.

But in the information economy, where innovative ideas can often go from inception to implementation—and even world-changing fortune—in a matter of months, I would argue that we need to think differently about the ways we, and our organizations, work. In many realms, business as usual is increasingly an imprudent plan. Yes, "disruption" is already becoming a tired buzzword, but many of us are still searching for ways to engage more genuinely with our work, and to find more satisfaction in it. Part of the solution, I think, is to let that faster brain, the primitive one, loose. To do that, we need a guide that helps us understand just how it works, and how we can tap into the instincts each of us already possesses.

Which is the purpose of this book.

Organizations require a balance between the civilized and the primitive to thrive—you can't have one without the other. And to thrive within an organization, we can't seek some bogus one-size-fits-all prescription for instant happiness. We need a blueprint for a new model that can help us understand our ingrained strengths—including some we didn't even know we had—and chart our professional course accordingly.

To simplify decades of experience and reams of research into clear, easy-to-follow principles, I've come up with two streamlined sets of acronyms that neatly capture the primitive and the civilized mindsets.

Civilized people are HOMING, which stands for Hierarchical, Occupational, Measured, Insulated, Nonconfrontational, and Grounded. These are all fine qualities that may also, unfortunately, stand in the way of much needed change and growth. I like to think of primitives, on the other hand, as ROAMING. Each letter describes a different trait that each of these personalities embodies. Those traits inevitably overlap, so that people may have several of them and find themselves within a range.

R stands for Relentless, which doesn't just mean trying hard or never giving up or having grit or any of that stuff you'll find on inspirational blogs. Relentless primitives have a radical way of charging forward with their careers, and it colors everything from how they approach rewards to how they bounce back from failure. It's the instinct that guided my client Austin McChord from his father's basement, where he was building his first prototype out of Legos, to founding a billion-dollar company. But as much as relentless primitives know how to barrel full steam ahead, they know when to pump the brakes and abruptly change direction.

O is for Oppositional. Often wild and pugnacious, oppositional primitives know that a healthy dose of discord is the best source of energy. They despise groupthink and are never afraid to say, "You're wrong and here's why." My best friend Danny Lewin, who tragically lost his life during 9/11 trying to thwart the hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 11, was the consummate oppositional primitive. I watched Danny, once a teenager sweeping the floors of a Jerusalem gym, argue and trash-talk until he became an internet 1.0 billionaire at age twenty-nine. Like other oppositional primitives, Danny sought out impossible challenges and found innovative ways to solve them.

A stands for Agnostic, the ability to jump from one field to the next without getting too attached to any one industry, method, or goal. A former coworker of mine, Love Whelchel III, is familiar with this skill, having been a roadie for hip-hop group N.W.A, an IT recruiter, a chief talent officer, the CEO of his own company, and the right-hand man for rapper and entrepreneur Sean Combs among many other zigs and zags. Agnostic is when my friend Tanya Valle gave up her lucrative job at an entertainment PR firm to become a zookeeper.

M is for Messianic, or having a zealous attachment to a mission that is not necessarily grounded in solid projections and reliable facts. It's the capacity to see oneself as destined for a unique mission that drove the neuroscientist Ali Rezai to devote himself to finding a cure for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, addiction, and countless other diseases using cutting-edge technology. Messianic primitives like Ali are guided by a singular calling to achieve a seemingly unreachable goal, fix a daunting problem, and to change the world.

I stands for Insecure, which you sometimes have to be to push yourself hard enough to get the best results. Insecure primitives are near and dear to my heart because I am one. As an agency guy serving an array of clients, I've been fired and let go more times than I can count. I've had my professional life upended time and again, and I've lived to tell my story. Insecure primitives are survivors who never rest on their laurels; they scratch and claw their way to success by embracing their shortcomings and turning them into powerful advantages. Take it from Riki Drori, a marketing executive at YouTube, who has become one of the highest-rated managers at the company by being honest and open with her team about her weaknesses and insecurities.

N is for Nuts, or being just plain crazy and, on occasion, taking chances that no careful or rational person would advise. Being nuts is what led a successful physician named Dorian Paskowitz to abandon his lucrative practice, load his young family into a rickety camper, and spend the rest of his life surfing. These are rare souls who follow their dreams, no matter how crazy, insane, or downright dangerous they might be. Nuts primitives may allow civilization to rein in their worst impulses, but they are the ultimate risk-takers, eccentrics, and misfits.

And, finally, the G is for Gallant, a trait that combines both courage and nobility, and one that compels primitives to protect those to whom they're loyal and who are loyal to them. It's what drove India Howell, a successful American businesswoman, to give up her privileged life, move to Tanzania, and adopt dozens of homeless children off the streets. Gallant primitives measure their impact by how much good they do for others. It may sound surprising, but being gallant is perhaps our most primal instinct of all.

Each chapter of this book will present these principles at work, backed by everything from neuroscience and organizational psychology to anecdotes I've observed throughout my own life exploring both the civilized and primitive ends of the spectrum. Having been raised by primitives—my father, in a nuts primitive move, pulled me out of school at the age of eight to go live on a sailboat in Mexico—I eventually embarked on my own, different path and pursued a career in a host of civilized institutions, from Capitol Hill to the United Nations to some of the world's most influential marketing agencies. I then returned to my primitive roots, starting my own businesses—some failed, some very lucrative—while making highly unorthodox decisions along the way. Learning how to balance these two dueling parts of my brain has been a defining feature of my life.

Humans are complex animals, and just as we don't all fit neatly into a Myers–Briggs personality type, primitives don't fall perfectly into one of seven archetypes. Some are mutts who identify with two, three, or four traits. Some primitives successfully tap their civilized side; others are über-primitives who are inspiring, but exhausting to be around. By learning from the characters in this book, even the most civilized among us can make a primitive move now and then to advance our careers—or pivot to new ones.

Maybe you've been at the same job for years and it's time to shake things up. Maybe you're just starting out, and you know the same civilized rules that got your parents lifetime employment with the same company no longer apply for your generation. Maybe you'd like to do things differently at work, but all you keep hearing from your colleagues is, "It's always been this way" or "That can't possibly be done." Maybe you're finally launching that business you've always dreamed of starting. Or maybe you're a primitive manager who'd like to light a fire under your civilized employees. Whatever the case, this book is here to offer inspiring stories and applicable to-dos designed to help you discover and rekindle the primitive spark, that urgent and irreverent temperament lying dormant in your belly.

Don't worry, this is not an invitation to have a Jerry Maguire moment and declare war on everything and everyone civilized. It's not a call to arms for brutish behavior. There are certainly some primitives among us who have been accused of highly inappropriate conduct—think of Uber's disgraced former CEO, Travis Kalanick, who reportedly had knowledge of sexual harassment at Uber and did nothing; or Carlos Ghosn, the former CEO of Nissan accused of misappropriating company funds; or former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann, whose freewheeling style likely contributed to the infamous failure of his company's IPO in 2019. Like everything in life, the key is to find balance, to unleash the right primitive elements and give them just enough energy to move us along.