Kanye’s ninth album is here. And it’s good. But rest assured, this isn’t a post about Kanye. This post is about Rick Rubin, one of his collaborators and a fascinating person. Rick Rubin worked closely with Kanye on his sixth studio album, Yeezus.

Rubin described to The Wall Street Journal how he started working with Kanye on Yeezus:

Kanye came over to play me what I assumed was going to be the finished album at three weeks before the last possible delivery date. We ended up listening to three hours of partially finished pieces. The raw material was very strong but hadn't yet come into focus. Many of the vocals hadn't been recorded yet, and many of those still didn't have lyrics. From what he played me, it sounded like several months more work had to be done. I joined the project because after discussing what he had played for me, he asked if I would be open to taking all of the raw material on and help him finish it.

Rick Rubin has a long and prolific history as a music producer. He’s produced albums with Red Hot Chili Peppers, Johnny Cash, the Black Crowes, Jay-Z, the Dixie Chicks, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Metallica, AC/DC, Aerosmith, Weezer, Linkin Park, the Cult, Neil Diamond, Adele, System of a Down, Rage Against the Machine, Lana Del Rey, Lady Gaga, Shakira, Eminem, and Kanye.

That’s quite a list—one that’s all the more remarkable for its range: Johnny Cash, Dixie Chicks, Metallica, and Kanye.

Typically, a music producer’s role in an album is like a director’s role in a film. They oversee all aspects of the creation of the album. Rubin’s role, however, is a bit more nuanced.

From the book The Age of Ideas by Alan Philips:

Ironically, if you ask Rick Rubin what a music producer does, he will tell you, “I don’t know what music producers do. I can tell you what I do.”

So, what is it that Rick Rubin does? How has he helped artists make their best music for almost half a century across such disparate genres and styles? The secret seems to be rooted in self-discovery. As Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks put it, Rubin “has the ability and the patience to let music be discovered, not manufactured”—or, to use our terminology, he has the understanding that magic needs to come from within.

Rubin describes the process similarly: “We try to go on a journey and let the artist discover who they are, and in the process the best art comes from them. It’s like getting them to be their true selves and trying to take away all of the things [that get in the way].”

This discovery process involves less doing and more listening, which Rubin says is vital to the process. As he explains it, “I’ll spend time with an artist and listen very carefully to what they tell me and get them to talk about their true goals, their highest, highest goals. We go back to the heart of why they started doing what they are doing in the first place.”

This combination of the internal, intangible emotional journey and the practical skill of making music, or, as Rubin describes it, the “heartwork and headwork,” is how he’s sustained his craft across genres for so many decades. He taps into something far beyond the type of music or production style, and instead connects to the artist through a first-principle truth: that their greatest work can only come from manifesting and sharing a reflection of their true purpose

The concept of “heartwork and headwork” echoes how I’ve felt when I’ve done my best work and what underlies many of the biggest successes I’ve seen across disciplines, not just technology startups.

The book The Intelligence Trap by David Robson touches on this same concept in the chapter, “Your emotional compass: The power of self-reflection.”

Robson is trying to tease out what drives good decision making, and while he doesn’t use the same language, he’s ultimately getting to the same concept—the role that heartwork plays in decision making. Robson describes some elegant research that sheds light on the heartwork part of this process.

Here are three examples:

1. The Iowa Gambling Task

The neurologist Antonio Damasio was studying brain injury patients who had sustained injuries to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex. These patients were otherwise completely normal but would exhibit bizarre decision making behavior. In some cases, they couldn’t make inconsequential decisions, and in others they’d quickly make terrible decisions with major stakes. In each case, even when faced with significant, terrible consequences, they would remain perfectly, eerily calm.

Damasio ultimately proposed the “somatic marker hypothesis” in which any experience is processed unconsciously, triggering a series of subtle changes in our body, such as a change in heart rate, sweating, a feeling that could be described as a knot in the stomach, etc. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is key to this process.

To test this hypothesis, Damasio created the Iowa Gambling Task. In the experiment, participants have to choose a card from one of four decks. Each card can yield a small monetary reward or a penalty. But some of the decks were stacked against the participant. These decks had slight bigger rewards but much bigger penalties, which of course the participants didn’t know at the outset. One group of participants had damage to the relevant areas of their brains and the other did not. Damasio monitored their bodily signals for stress as they chose from the decks.

Damasio found that the healthy patients started to show signs of stress when they were about to choose from the bad decks long before they were consciously aware that these decks were stacked against them. And, validating the theory, the injured patients performed far worse at the task.

In short: we tend to develop an intuitive feeling about our decisions before we do so logically.

2. Interoception and Trading

In the Iowa Gambling Task, the insight wasn’t just that participants without injuries to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex performed better than those with injuries. Among the healthy participants, those that were more sensitive to their bodily feeling—a specific, measurable capability called interoception—were quicker to learn how to make winning choices. A different experiment showed that traders with higher interoception had higher returns.

In short: the more in tune we are with our intuitive feelings, the better decisions we can make (at least in certain domains).

3. Heart and Head Reflection

This begs the obvious question: Can’t relying on intuition lead us astray? The answer is yes, of course, and Robson shows that experts make bad decisions all the time based on intuition. But there’s also way to get the best out of both modes, and some emerging practices in medicine offer good models.

Damasio sets up the problem:

The field of medicine has been at the forefront of these explorations—for good reason. Currently, around ten to fifteen percent of initial diagnoses are incorrect, meaning many doctors will make at least one error for every six patients they see. Often these errors can be corrected before harm is done, but it is thought that in US hospitals alone, around one in ten patient deaths—between 40,000 and 80,000 per annum—can be traced to a diagnostic mistake.

Robson then outlines what he learned from Sylvia Mamede at Rotterdam’s Erasmus Medical Center, where Mamede had been working to improve doctors’ decision making process.

Mamede pointed out first that actively replacing doctors’ intuitive decisions with a more analytical approach, such as immediately listing all possible alternatives, actually led to worse outcomes than a more intuitive approach.

The solution (emphasis mine):

…Mamede suggests that doctors note down their gut reaction as quickly as possible; and only then should they analyze the evidence for their gut reaction and compare it to alternative hypotheses. Sure enough, she has since found that doctors can improve their diagnostic accuracy by up to 40 percent by taking this simple approach—a huge achievement for such a small measure. Simply telling doctors to revisit their initial hypothesis—without any detailed instructions on re-examining the data or generating new ideas—managed to boost accuracy by 10 percent, which again is a significant improvement for little extra effort.

Reflecting

Relatedly, when investor and author Michael Mauboussin asked Daniel Kahneman, “What is a single thing an investor can do to improve his or her performance,” Kahneman told him (emphasis mine):

…go down to a local drugstore and buy a very cheap notebook and start keeping track of your decisions. And the specific idea is whenever you’re making a consequential decision, something going in or out of the portfolio, just take a moment to think, write down what you expect to happen, why you expect it to happen and then actually, and this is optional, but probably a great idea, is write down how you feel about the situation, both physically and even emotionally. Just, how do you feel? I feel tired. I feel good, or this stock is really draining me. Whatever you think.

Another researcher, Francesca Gino at Harvard University, explored the intuitive part of this reflection process. She asked trainees at an IT center in Bangalore to spend fifteen minutes a day writing and reflecting on what they had learned, drawing out the more intuitive elements of their daily tasks. She found that those who reflected in this manner improved their performance by 23 percent, compared to participants who had spent the same time actively practicing their skills.

In short: reflecting actively through writing and doing so with an explicit focus on both the head and heart elements of the decision making process can improve results.