Find a mentor, or take someone who has the results and success you want, and then model their behavior. That’s the kind of common sense advice which is very popular in leadership and self-help circles today. But does modelling successful people work?
Books, coaches, consultants, podcasts and entire businesses have sprouted in the past decade around the idea of reverse-engineering success or modelling the success mindset. In other words, you take successful people, figure out how they think and then act and apply those strategies to your life to become as successful as they are.
While there are certainly great benefits in applying some of the traits that many successful people seem to share (e.g. constantly learning, focusing on what they can control vs. what’s beyond their control, focusing on solutions instead of criticism or blame etc.), there’s another side to this story that’s been largely left untold.
In this article, I want to explore this side of the whole story and how modelling successful people might even be a perfect recipe for disaster in your life. When buying into this common sense advice, you’ve overlooked a lot of statistical evidence: reverse-engineering success can turn out to be complete nonsense, depending on a number of factors.
It all starts with the ….
SIZE OF THE POOL
For any endeavor in life, business, sports, arts, science, you need to look at the pool of people competing and striving towards the final prize. How large is the sample pool? Because the larger the sample pool, the more its size alone will account for extraordinary examples and special features, caused by pure randomness.
If you take an infinite number of monkeys and have them type on a keyboard infinitely, eventually one of them will produce a Shakespeare’s book! It’s statistics. Would you draw the conclusion that the monkey is as good as Shakespeare and try to reverse-engineer and model her mindset?
This concept is so foundational for a proper understanding of reality, that once you fully grasp it, it will completely alter your life-view.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has written at least two enlightening books on this topic: Fooled by Randomness and the more famous The Black Swan. They both make my top-20 list of the most insightful books I’ve read. I’d recommend – in particular – the former: shorter and more on point with respect to the topic we’re covering here.
If you take an infinite number of monkeys and have them type on a keyboard infinitely, eventually one of them will produce a Shakespeare’s book!
Unless you embed these ideas into your worldview, your understanding of success and life endeavours, I believe, will remain partial and biased.
You can extend the power of the pool size to virtually anything and Taleb provides many examples in his books.
Now imagine a roulette at the casino. Red or black stand exactly at the same probability for each toss (if you happen to disagree, then take a crash course in statistics before you read on and make sure you grasp it). Anytime you toss the ball, there is an identical chance that it will land a red or black square.
However, a very long streak of the same color may always occur. The record for the highest number of reds in a row in history is 32 times. The probability of this happening on a European Roulette table is 1 in 10,321,314,387 chances!
Now if you were to see that specific roulette on the day it happened, you might be tempted to conclude that it has some special feature or it is rigged. However, you need to put it in the context of how may roulettes are spinning around the world, every day, every year, throughout the whole history!
The sample pool then becomes so large, it’s statistically predictable that at least one of those thousands and thousands of roulettes spinning every day and night, will eventually hit a streak like that!
And this is easy to accept intellectually for you, because you’re aware that it’s a randomized process. But now imagine that you might be doing the same whenever you look at success in any field. Perhaps the field you’re looking at, is no more meritocratic than a roulette spinning and yet you look at that outlier and listen to his words of wisdom about what mindset and habits led him to that point.
You assume he has some special feature, but perhaps he doesn’t. What if he’s a ‘roulette’ like any other, with no better skills or mechanisms, just like the one that randomly defeated 10,321,314,386 chances?
I’m not saying this is the case in all fields, but you have to be very careful before jumping to the conclusion that someone who made it up there had some special skills or mindset, without first looking at the size of the pool. And then, you must ask yourself the uncomfortable question: for how much of the success could variance and randomness account, as opposed to his mindset and habits?
What if your hero is just like a roulette among thousands of others, with no better skills or mechanisms, just like the one that randomly defeated 10,321,314,386 chances?
ACCESSIBILITY BIAS
Another issue with success is that media give successful people a lot of visibility. Losers don’t get any.
We celebrate college-dropouts that have gone on to create gigantic corporations by “following their passion”, but we don’t see the millions that have probably ending up regretting questionable decisions, because those guys don’t make the cover of Inc.
We are prone to overestimating the likelihood of the events we are exposed to through the media and in particular those which cause stronger emotional impact. That’s why we concern so much over planes safety, although car crashes are something we should concern a lot more about, statistically speaking. Plane crashes are more spectacular on the news, although they happen far more rarely and kill a lot less people than car accidents on a yearly basis.
Likewise, terrorism always ranks very high in our global political agenda and as our personal concern, although the number of lives it takes yearly are negligible compared to those taken by hunger and starvation.
For one Steve Jobs, how many what-ifs and close shots you’ve never heard about?
SELF-SELECTION
Another problem with reverse-engineering and modelling successful people is the following.
When a large sample pool of people is competing for the same thing, profits, a gold medal or whatever, why do you assume that success is about how the winner played the game, as opposed to the competitive process which acts a selection mechanism and filters those who already had innate qualities?
In other words, when you reverse-engineer success, you expect your role model to tell you how he approached the game and he might be honestly convinced that his approach indeed mattered.
But what if it was instead something in his DNA or inherent to his unique history that made him stand out and the competition was nothing but an involuntary mechanism to select the fittest and filter out the unfit? In that case, there wouldn’t be much for you to learn.
SURVIVOR BIAS
Related to the case above is the ‘survivor bias’. In other words, you always get to see those who survived a process: the business that didn’t fail, the people who survived a war, the sons of those who passed down their DNA. But survival may have nothing to do with inherent qualities and could be simply the result of a random process.
As Nassim Taleb points out in The Black Swan, some cities like New York have become famous in popular culture for having a certain resilience or ability to get back up time and time again after multiple setbacks in history. It might be tempting therefore to think that there’s some special quality or personality trait that’s unique to that city and its citizens, although the notion makes little scientific sense.
Truth is, with so many cities around the world that have gone through difficult historical times, through wars, bankruptcies, epidemics, over the centuries, many have failed and collapsed, but you only get to see those that have made it to this day.
Same thing for the inhabitants of countries that have been through multiple wars. They’re now known for being tough-skinned or resilient, as if this was a property of that nationality, when in truth it’s the wars that have simply weeded out the weakest. It’s not singing their national anthem that makes them so strong and resilient! If you try to reverse-engineer their resilience by interviewing them, you’ll be far off track!
GAMBLER’S FALLACY
This guy has consistently beaten the market. That guy has consistent track record of success. He’s won so many games he must be good, he’ll win the next. This cannot be a fluke.
Okay, maybe he’s really good, you should invest. Or partner with him.
Or maybe not. After all, you might be tricked by the so-called Gambler’s fallacy: the mistaken belief that, if something happens more frequently than normal during a given period, it will happen more frequently also in the future (or less frequently because it already happened a lot). For example, many people believe that in a coin-flip game, if head has come up ten times, the 11th toss will be more likely to be tail. Which is an irrational belief.
If you look at a coin-flip game structure, that belief is easy to eradicate. But when it comes to success, the same type of bias might be tricking you, very subtly and convincingly.
Anywhere between 80 and 99% of actively managed equity funds underperform. And yet, periodically, some of them will beat the benchmark for a few years in a row, leading many to believe that they know what they’re doing and they’re worth investing in.
WOULD YOU STILL WANT SUCCESS AT THE COST OF… YOU?
At Zen @ Wall Street, our primary concern is to live a sane, balanced life in modern society. So what’s the point in sacrificing your mental or physical health on the altar of success after all?
For example, author Malcom Gladwell has greatly popularized the idea that successful people in most fields have to put in at least 10,000 hours of work to gain mastery.
As a matter of fact, there is little evidence that 10,000 hours will take you anywhere, but if you take that route you might indeed end up exhausting yourself and sacrificing a lot of things that would otherwise make you happy, for a mere delusion.
As a joke, we might say that if you decide to put 10,000 hours into anything, you don’t have it all together to begin with!
But what if it turned out that indeed, some of the people we celebrate and look up to, possessed some of the same traits of a psychopath or are affected by psychological disorders? What if the game we have created in society at large, occasionally rewards people with personality disorders? Would you still want to reverse-engineer success and turn yourself into a mentally unstable person, only to model successful people?
As a matter of fact, a lot of research backs up the idea that traits associated with personality disorders can occasionally turn into an advantage when it comes to standing out from the crowd in many professions or arts. While these disorders defeat most and can be considered a handicap on average, they can also be responsible for performances far above the norm and place those who encounter the right set of circumstances, at the very top, far ahead of the average ‘sane’ individual.
Research has produced evidence for this, time and time again. Psychopaths are not at a disadvantage in a workplace and some research even suggests they might have an edge when it comes to climbing the corporate ladder; being closer to a psychopath apparently also helps being elected as President of United States, studies show.
Research backs up the idea that traits associated with personality disorders can occasionally turn into an advantage when it comes to standing out from the crowd in many professions or arts
People with attention deficit disorder appear to be more creative, which can be an advantage in artistic fields. Humor also seems to have a correlation with psychopathy and neuroticism, so put your favorite comedian in perspective too. Successful extreme sports athletes in many cases raise to fame and money through the same traits that sink so many drug addicts, and the list goes on.
Still convinced that modelling successful people is a good move?
SO, WHAT’S MY BEST MOVE?
All the above evidence should not suggest that books or seminars that decode the mind of the successful are completely useless.
As a matter of fact, several folks are up there precisely because of their resiliency and inner psychology, so there is value in studying habits or mindsets. But you might be overestimating their weight and spending too much time and money at this task. Once you understand the foundational attitudes and mindsets for growth, that’s about it. The rest is patient daily application.
Not all successful people – or I’d suggest only a minority – have made it up there through a conscious self-development journey though.
Rather, realize that society is like a bunch of people running recklessly through a minefield. Thousands get blown up and the lucky few that make it to the other side often enjoy giving interviews about how they crossed the minefield.
Is this demotivating? No, on the contrary, it should push you even more towards personal development, towards working deeply on your psychology, unwiring your own neurosis, because this is the safest possible way to get ahead and stay balanced.
Realize that society is like a bunch of people running recklessly through a minefield
For a Kurt Cobain that kills himself after having reached fame and glory in fact, thousands were sunk by their own neurosis and disorders before they could share their music with the whole world. Hence, the wisest thing to do is to work on your blind spots and make sure that nothing will sink you or hold you back from within, on your way to success.
Society isn’t concerned with your personal odds of success. It’s only concerned that at any point in time there must be some top-artist, top-sportsman, top CEO out there, it doesn’t care if it’s you. Society, as a whole, is willing to sacrifice thousands in the darwininan pursuit of one outlier. That’s why mainstream notions of success can be so off-track and ultimately pernicious for you.
You want to maximize your own personal odds, which is a completely different ball game. Hence becoming the most sane, balanced, conscious, effective and mentally healthy version of yourself, is the best possible investment when you weigh risks and returns of how to approach life.
Society isn’t concerned with your personal odds of success. It’s only concerned that at any point in time there must be some top-artist, top-sportsman, top CEO out there, it doesn’t care if it’s you
And since we believe that balance is the key to sanity, this article is designed to equip you with the other side of the story, so you can balance your worldview and march on even more wisely, without feeling discouraged by your occasional lack of progress or upward comparison.
Your personal development journey is a lot like planning that minefield trip by carefully charting out every step, probing the terrain, observing other’s people missteps. A highly strategic process that’s often slower, more confusing, patient and very individual. A process that no successful person can chart out for you and ultimately teach you. All they can share is techniques that might help you plan the next single step, but never the whole journey.
That’s your whole life’s journey: figuring out how to cross the minefield through a unique path that no one’s ever walked before. And no, you can’t do that by simply modelling successful people.
Also published on Medium.
