The Power of Cosmic Collaboration

Build a life of mass, forget speed.

Over the course of his 50 year career, Frank Sinatra recorded more than 1,300 songs.

Let that sink in for a second. That means from the age of 19 to the age of 69, old blue eyes was recording, polishing, and producing a new song every other week. Zero days off. That’s not even mentioning the movies, TV shows, and live performances he was doing every single night.

The massive body of work he created had a certain gravity to it. It’s as if the weight of his work, of his talent and his sprezzatura, imbued him with a natural level of attraction. Stars would get sucked into his orbit, and stay there for the rest of his life.

Stars like Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Judy Garland, and Katharine Hepburn. They were all superstars in their own right, but they were drawn to each other. As if a cosmic attraction brought them together. These influential actors and musicians, formed a group that lasted well into their old age. This group was called The Rat Pack.

The Rat Pack would work on projects, star in films, play nightclubs, vacation, host charity events, and produce albums together. It was a package deal. When one succeeded, they all succeeded. They were brought together by their talent, their industry, their age, and their proximity, and they stayed together for a lifetime.

The Rat Pack provided the buoyancy to Sinatra’s career that kept him afloat during the hard times. During a decade long slump, during his divorce, when changing record labels, and moving to Vegas. The Rat Pack, more than anything, was the key to Sinatra’s success.

The Blue Eyed Black Hole

Sinatra was a Black Hole, and so were his friends. They all had an inescapable gravity to them.

In physics, the more mass an object has, the more gravitational force it exudes. The same applies for human endeavors. If we want to become more attractive, we can add personal mass to increase our gravitational pull.

Now this isn’t a call to arms for cheeseburger lovers everywhere. No. The mass that attracts one person to another manifests not in our physical bodies, but in our bodies of work. The shows that we play, the articles that we publish, the people that we know, and the promises that we keep. Mass is studying biotech in college, then working for a biotech company after you graduate, and starting a biotech company after that. It’s building a robust and influential body of work. The more mass you add, the more attractive you become.

Sinatra never sang Rock n’ Roll.

He didn’t change his style in the 1960s or 70s or 80s. Sinatra was Sinatra through and through. As a result, the Sammy Davis Jrs, Dean Martins, and Nat King Coles of the world were drawn to him. The mass and specificity of his work drew Sinatra to The Pack and The Pack to Sinatra.

Like a cluster of black holes circling each other’s obits, the members of The Rat Pack became locked in a cosmic dance. The gravity of their work bonded them for life.

The Loneliest Heavenly Body

The opposite of a high-gravity Black Hole, is the solitary life of a nimble Comet.

Fast and fiery, Comets blaze across the night sky. Their orbits are astronomically long. The most famous, Halley’s Comet, is a 3-mile wide space rock that’s currently past the orbit of Neptune. She won’t revisit our night sky until 2061.

If Sinatra is a Black Hole, then his Comet counterpoint might be Howard Hughes.

Born in to unimaginable wealth, he died mysteriously at 90 pounds while on a flight home from Mexico. His hair was stringy and unkempt, his nails several inches long, needles dangling from his arm. Hughes spent his final years in absolute isolation and obscurity. He suffered the same fate that besets nearly all Comets, burning up in the heat of his own frenetic pace.

Comets are small, they’re fast, they see a whole lot of the universe, but they do so alone.

Building Cinematic Influence

An amusing spin off to the Rat Pack of the 1950s, is the Frat Pack of the early 2000s. Members included Jack Black, Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson, John C. Reilly, Steve Carell and Paul Rudd. They’ve starred—through some combination or another—in 58 films together over the past 27 years.

But that’s just one such group. Think of the reoccurring cast members of every Wes Anderson, Adam Sandler, or Quentin Tarantino film. High mass, Black Hole actors are attracted to each other.

These unofficial teams start with humble beginnings and end with an impressive level of career security and camaraderie. They also result in some of the most influential movies of all time. Films like The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Wedding Singer, and Pulp Fiction, just to name a few.

Why are we all acting like Comets

With all the benefits of being a high-mass individual, why do we opt for speed instead? I believe there are two forces at work here. They’re undermining our ability to build an attractive body of work, and hindering us from finding a deeper sense of meaning, in our lives. Those two culprits are Optionality and Technology.

Optionality

As writer Nat Eliason argues in his piece Addicted to Speed, our inclination to live low-mass lives stems from our relatively recent reverence of optionality. Some of the narratives we buy into sound like, “Be a digital nomad. Don't own too many things. Switch companies every 2 years. Pick a job that will give you more opportunities later. Don't be too quick to pick a romantic partner”. But we have to ask ourselves, what are the hidden costs to this speed-first trend?

Coveting optionality means that we stay small, and can pivot at any time. While this is a simulating way to live, the cost is our personal gravitational pull. People will never be organically drawn to our influence, and we will never be a part of something bigger.

A life of unlimited optionality, is often a lonely one.

Technology

For centuries, technological advancement meant life was getting better. Now technology just means life is getting faster. Technology for the most part, is additive. Time, however, is not. With each passing year, we have a whole lot more to fit into that same 24 hour container.

Ask yourself, how many more technologies are in your house than in your parents? Sure, you might have an old school can opener like mom, but you also have an air fryer, a sous vie, a Nutribullet, and an emersion blender. And that’s just the kitchen. That’s not to mention the abundance of screens, and multiplicity of Apple devices, that all serve virtually the same purpose.

And we have to ask ourselves, is all this additional stuff actually moving the needle?

For instance, I have Notion, Google Docs, and ChatGPT all at my disposal. Yet, Leo Tolstoy, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens all wrote far better than I ever will, with nothing more than a pen and a notebook (seriously, they didn’t even use typewriters). I have godlike technology in my possession, but in this respect, it makes little difference. In fact, it may only hinder my ability to create a high-mass body of work.

The societal draw for optionality, and the technological lure toward complexity, push us to become high speed Comets. Always distracted, never building enough mass to be truly attractive.

How to attract the right people

So what to do?

We have the dark forces of technology and the cultural pull towards optionality to contend with. It seems like the cards are stacked against us. The path forward is simple. To build an attractive, high-mass life, we must embody three main attributes.

1. Work in a small set of fields.

Working in a single field for a significant period of time is scary. By picking and sticking, you’re watching all the other versions of yourself die. You’re saying no, more than you’re saying yes.

Take, for example, the actors who repeatedly star in Tarantino films. They’re all cool, classic, bad asses. They were before Pulp Fiction, and they would be after. They’re not theater actors, nor are they stand up comedians. By choosing what you are and, more importantly, what you’re not, the right people will be attracted to you.

2. Make your work easily available to the world.

People need to be able to find you. Sinatra was just a 19 year old kid in Hoboken, New Jersey when he started singing. He joined a small band, and together they won a radio show contest. That radio show would then go on to play his music for the next year, on repeat.

After this initial success, Sinatra was able to land a gig at the “The Rustic Cabin”. This time instead of being played on the local station, The Rustic Cabin was directly attached to WNEW, a station that covered all of New York City.

He kept leveling up his distribution.

He played show after show, spending his days in the studio, and his nights on the stage. But he wasn’t just broadcasting his music to radio listeners and “Bobby Soxers”, he was sending his message to Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. as well. He was transmitting a message to his fellow Black Holes as if to say, “I’m going all the way to the top, who else is gonna come with me?”. 

So by the time he finally made it out to LA, The Rat Pack was primed and ready to coalesce.

3. Live in a very intentional place, for a significant period of time.

There’s a reason people move to Los Angeles, or New York, or London. The phony reason is that they’re seeking job opportunities. But the real reason is, they’re seeking is elbows. They want to be in the proverbial “room where it happens”. They want to be in the next cohort of up and coming artists, actors, and athletes. People don’t move to be around the right jobs, they move to be around the right people.

And that’s exactly what Sinatra did. He moved to Los Angeles so that he could rub elbows with all the right people. And did he ever.

It wasn’t just Sinatra that moved. Nat King Cole came to LA from Alabama, Elizabeth Taylor from London, Dean Martin from Ohio, Sammy Davis Jr. from New York. None of them were magically birthed in the right place at the right time. They uprooted to take that final step.

But relocating is only the half of it. The real key is that you have to stay. Once again, forgoing optionality. You have to stick around, and so do your friends.

By sticking around—forgoing the remote work opportunities and the weekend trips to Tahoe—you allow yourself to become bonded to the right people. After all, they’ll need to be able to get ahold of you for any semblance of a relationship to form. Even the most massive body of work and attractive gravitation pull, can’t force people to love you. You need to build love with your time, and attention.

“The success of the Rat Pack was due to the camaraderie, the three guys who work together and kid each other and love each other.”
—Sammy Davis Jr.

The power in becoming a Black Hole is that you distribute your success to the success of your friends. When you win, they win. The reverse is also true. When you fall upon tough times, you’ll have a group of influential people to lift you back on your feet.

There is also a momentum to a body of work with mass. As the writer Nat Eliason points out, “The more massive something becomes, the more it attracts other bodies into its orbit. Growth becomes effortless. Compounding interest and gravity are the same phenomenon.” Mass allows us to take our foot off the gas. It’s like rolling a boulder downhill. With just the tiniest push, a giant stone will be carried by its weight alone.

One of the last great mysteries of physics is what lies behind the event horizon of a black hole. What actually happens in there? Attracting other people—who decided to put mass before speed—is a bit like peering over the edge of a Black Hole. We’re inviting the unknown to our doorstep. We’re opening our lives up to wonderful collaborative opportunities, and engaging in a cosmic dance.

—Zac

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