There is a cranky, exasperating, brilliant editor at The Post named Mike Hechtman. His name rarely pops up in our pages. He abhors attention. (Hi, Mike!) I didn’t ask his permission to mention him because I know he’d say no.
Once he refused to go see a revival of “Cabaret” at Studio 54, though he loves theater and badly wanted to see it, because he heard that at one point in the show a cast member interacts with a randomly chosen audience member and he freaked at the idea of the spotlight pointing his way for two minutes.
Even the most loyal reader of The Post wouldn’t know him if he was sitting next to him on the subway, and yet for some 40 years, Hechtman has been as important as blood and muscle to this newspaper. He rewrites shoddy prose, repairs and paves over story potholes, directs rookie reporters taking their first trembling baby steps through the Bronx or Bed-Stuy. And he ladles out scorn, abuse and comic putdowns on all of us every time we mess up a detail, send him a story that raises questions we can’t answer or try to cover up our lapses and ignorance with jargon or balderdash.
Mike is an Invisible. He typifies the unseen, little-celebrated but essential elements that make an organization work.
Contrary to what you may think, argues David Zweig in “The Invisibles,” Invisibles aren’t just miserable nobodies muttering in the backroom like Stephen Root in “Office Space” (“if they take my stapler, then I . . . I’ll . . . I’ll have to . . . I’ll set the building on fire.”). The spotlight-grabbing bosses who understand the importance of Invisibles value them highly. Often they’re successful, well-compensated, satisfied professionals who don’t need or want public recognition. They’re superstars in the shadows.
Without Invisibles, celebrities wouldn’t be who they are. Frank Lloyd Wright’s celebrated Fallingwater building would have been renamed Fallingdown if it hadn’t been for the engineering Invisibles who noticed that the beams needed far more reinforcing than Wright had planned for and secretly upgraded them. (Wright wouldn’t have granted permission if he had known in advance. Indeed, he threw a hissy and threatened to walk off the project when he finally found out.)
Meeting with anonymous, behind-the-scenes masters in many fields — music, filmmaking, magazines, interpreting at the UN and even perfumery — Zweig finds that the Invisibles love their jobs because they’re inner-directed. They find deep fulfillment not in adulation but in the work itself, the ever-renewing challenge of taking on demanding tasks, fully concentrating on them and achieving excellence. Almost every person Zweig interviewed used the word meticulous to describe his behavior at work.
So, no, you don’t need a million Twitter followers to be happy. To be outer-directed — forever craving new attention, compulsively Googling your own name — is to risk perpetual unease.
Pursuit of money, status and appearance — what researchers call extrinsic motivators — has repeatedly been linked to unhappiness in psychological studies. Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand, is associated with many religions and harmonizes with the ancient Greek concept of eudaimonic behavior — the pursuit of the rich or flourishing life.
Extrinsic motivation is Kim Kardashian. Intrinsic motivation? Bill Murray in the last act of “Groundhog Day.”
So why is there so much Kardashianization? Historian Warren Susman has identified a shift from a culture of character to a culture of personality: Whereas once we lived among people known to us and private behavior was how we were judged, urbanization meant living among strangers.
When mass media became the new neighborhood, wrote Susman, “Every American was to become a performing self.”
It wasn’t until 1960, Zweig points out, that the Chicago White Sox became the first major pro team in any sport to place the players’ names on the backs of their uniforms. For years after that, other teams considered that show-offy. These were professional athletes who shunned attention.
Invisibles, in the words of Wharton professor Adam Grant, give more than they take, and paradoxically that’s why they are so psychically rich.
“There Will Be Blood” director Paul Thomas Anderson is a superstar. But you’ve probably never heard of Robert Elswit, the cinematographer who turns Anderson’s ideas into magnificent images. Looking around him on a busy set, Elswit told Zweig, “I love the idea of trying to — within the limitations of my job — figure out the best version of whatever it is that we are doing, together, with all these people.”