“Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.” -Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Taleb
Most types of achievement I have observed follow a power law.
You see this pattern in lots of highly-visible areas of life: wealth, power, followers, attention, income, and corporate titles to name just a few. As technology becomes increasingly pervasive and people have more access to world markets, talent pools, and social circles, this trend will continue to accelerate. Taylor Swift briefly holding every spot in the billboard top 10 is not an anomaly: most types of success are being concentrated in ever-greater quantities in the hands of a dwindling number of humans.
But I’m not interested in rehashing my very long series on income inequality, I’m interested in some observations that I’ve made about how people traverse this curve and achieve greater things. If you are all the way out on the far right-hand side of the curve, how do you move to the left? Frame this in whatever way is personally relevant for you: maybe you are a deeply-passionate musician, novelist, teacher, or farmer. It’s natural to want to sell more records, write more books, teach more students, or increase per-acre yields.
Climbing Mountains
I like climbing mountains. When you are planning a hike up a big mountain, there are two categories of logistics you plan for:
Getting to a place on the mountain where you can make a summit attempt.
Making a summit attempt.
Preparing for the former is often 90% within your control. You carefully inventory your gear, check your permits, and drive to the trailhead early in the morning.
But getting up that last little bit of the mountain to stand on the summit is mostly about playing the odds. If you want to climb Denali, for instance, the best thing you can do to increase your odds of actually doing it is to block off a couple weeks (preferably a whole month) so that you’ll be there when the weather is just right. You can always try to force it, of course, but that carries the very real threat of injury or death. And in case you think that never actually happens, 96 people have died on Denali since 1903. [source]
The Determinism Tree Line
What I’ve been describing is a system where the inputs and outputs have a discrete discontinuity. If that language sounds fancy, there’s a good hiking metaphor here too. On a big mountain, there is a point in the ascent where the trees suddenly disappear. The vegetation is discretely discontinuous at a certain elevation. Below that elevation and you’re hiking through a thick forest, above it, there’s nothing but sky, rocks, and some small shrubs.
For many important deterministic systems, inputs and outputs are deliberately transparent and predictable. The most ubiquitous of these systems that I’ve come across is education. In the US public school system, things are predictable: you memorize the things the adults tell you to, you write the memorized stuff down, and you are rewarded for it. This is predictable because we have a lot of control over the inputs: ourselves! You see the same thing in other systems built for young people: internships, apprenticeships, and entry-level jobs are built to make it clear that taking a desirable action results in desirable results and vice-versa.
And this is where a lot of smart people get lost and confused. After spending twenty-some odd years in artificial, deterministic systems where inputs and outputs are prescribed, measured, quantified, and transparent, they make the mistake of assuming that other important dimensions of life are similarly predictable. They try to apply the tool set that made them successful in deterministic systems to systems that are increasingly random. They try to ascend Mt. Everest wearing the light pants they wore while hiking to the base of the Khumbu Glacier.
But the way that you get an entry-level job is very different from the way that you become the CEO of that organization. The way that you learn to run a small diner is very different from the way that you become a multinational franchise owner.
Tactics for Managing Randomness and Reaching the Summit
Just because systems become less deterministic as you level up in your chosen pursuit doesn’t mean that you lose all ability to influence them. But that wording is important: for most stuff in life, the older you get, the more you work within systems where your desired outcome can only be influenced, not directly controlled.
The rational thing to do is to start treating the things you want to achieve in terms of probabilities. Rather than taking direction from peers and superiors and assuming causal relationships between the directions and outcomes, you must formulate guesses about what relationships exist between your actions and the things you want. You then test those relationships and then invest your time in the activities with the highest correlation.
In my career so far, I’ve identified a number of things that seem to be strongly correlated with outsized returns: network size, generalist skill sets, intellectual leverage, and sustainability.
Maximize for professional network size. One of the best ways I know of to increase the odds of experiencing unprecedented good luck in your career is to build a very large and very high-quality network of peers. This is what MBA programs are actually good for: introducing you to a lot of really hard-working, connected, ambitious people. But for folks that don’t want to spend 2 years of your life schmoozing your peers or for folks like me who are too old to get the benefits from such a program, when a career decision comes up, you should always choose the option that allows you meet and work with large groups of other bright and ambitious people. This means switching companies, teams, or projects regularly. It also probably requires you to work at one or two really big companies where you can meet a lot of people rapidly.
Don’t over-specialize. If you’re already at base camp, you probably have enough specialist skill that you’ll hit strong diminishing returns if you keep investing. Early in your career, it makes lots of sense to go deep and become an expert at a couple of skills, but by the time you’re mid/senior in your discipline, you’ll find that people are rewarded not for deep specialization, but for modest specialization and the ability to spot patterns and create solutions across disciplines. Avoiding over-specialization also helps the first goal by forcing you to meet all sorts of different people working on different problems.
Learn to clone yourself. Invest in skills that increase your leverage instead of increasing your deliverables. Writing is a good way to clone yourself. As you read this post, you’re engaging with words and ideas that I wrote at some point in the past, but you are still engaging with me, George Saines from across space and time (hello by the way!). Responding to questions on Quora or Stack Overflow has the same effect: you get to multiply your presence. The more “surface area” you have, the more likely that you’ll be considered for the lead role in that new broadway play about one of the American founding fathers (who is Alexander Hamilton anyways?). You’ll be more likely to be invited to be employee #5 at the next Facebook. You’ll be front of mind when a seasoned angel investor is syndicating a financing round for the next Uber.
Avoid burnout at all costs. It’s fine to work intensely. It might even be fine to work intensely for a substantial period of time, but avoid burnout at all costs. If you burn out, you risk being incapable of making a summit push if the opportunity presents itself. As Nassim Taleb discusses in Black Swan, if you burn out (he uses the phrase “blow up”), the game is over and you lose all the leverage you’ve carefully built up. The way this has worked for me is that if I find myself in a role where I’m having to work nights and weekends, I give myself a deadline. It’s an up or out system: if I hit my deadline and I haven’t achieved my goal, I leave the role, quit the company, work for a different manager, etc. It takes discipline to see the pattern and commit ahead of time, but avoiding burnout is worth the effort.
You might look at this list and think “George, that stuff is super boring. Don’t you have any better advice that can get me to VP in the next 6 months?” And the answer is “not really.” If you think this stuff is boring, you’ll be disappointed to learn that climbing huge mountains is much the same. You take seriously all the boring, mundane, everyday logistics of getting to basecamp. Then you give yourself as many opportunities as possible to seize the first 3 clear days to touch the heavens.
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