Mediocre you
- “If you aim at the moon, you may only ever hit the top of the tree
- But if you aim at the top of the tree you may never get off the ground”’’
- It’s not so bad on the ground You have more options. And what good are you to anyone stuck in the top of a tree?
False assumption: that the people who get to the top necessarily deserve it.
- being in the right time at the right place has alot to be said for it: all the silicon valley titans were born within a few years of each other. Your time can come early or late. Would Steve Jobs, if born in 2017, be the revolutionary he was? Conversely, would Einstein's theory have made a dent in 1780?
- it is dead easy being a peacetime General: in the corporate world there are thousands of senior managers who never face an existential crisis. Survivor bias: most of those who do aren't here to talk about it.
- much of the complexity of modern management is precisely to conceal how uncomplicated management is. Jargon, technical language, continuing professional development, post graduate qualifications - these are cosmetic flourishes to make the task seem more complicated than it is.
Nutshell: the converse of it being no criticism of you that you never made it, is that it is no feather in the cap of the other person that she did.
Excuses, excuses, excuses
Systematic bias, at a personal level, reads like a conspiracy theory. Get over it. It follows from what goes before (that no industry is an altruistic meritocracy - that all are capricious; full of bullshitters, cads and blaggers who get away with it) that it will be skewed, stacked and biased in favour of low-grade incumbents who, because they are dispositionally undeserving of their own positions, will be similarly ill-disposed to choosing suitable successors. Most of the time, they'll be white middle class men. But that's by the by. It'd be the same story in Kenya, Nepal or Chile.
Organising principles
- Mean reversion
- Mistaking luck for talent
- The investment manager who beat the Dow nineteen years in a row
- Promotion by random
- Ten thousand hours buys you a ticket to the raffle.
- You need to have innate skill
- You need to be lucky
- To catch the light at all
- To be in the right place in the first place.
Personality types and business
The COO as an ISTJ: Quiet, serious, earn success by thoroughness and dependability. Practical, matter-of-fact, realistic, and responsible. Decide logically what should be done and work toward it steadily, regardless of distractions. Take pleasure in making everything orderly and organized - their work, their home, their life. Value traditions and loyalty.
Design of business
Models of organising complex distributed systems:
Have a common design feature: They are not centrally planned. Design of business - The will to bureaucracy - optimal size for an organisation? Central management as the antithesis of good system design.
“No-one is well-rounded”
Maybe — just maybe — that’s the problem?
Statistically, it won’t be you.
The bigger the organisation, the less likely it is to be you. Your football team: one in 11 chance. Your work: one in 5,000. President of the USA: 9 in 300,000,000 [1] And that’s before you take any account of the practical realities of the specific situation.
- The best person doesn’t always win. Donald Trump overcame 9 in 300,000,000 odds, remember.
- Even if you are unusually talented, you’re have to be in the right place at the right time.
- Seven Habits of Highly Effective People sold 25,000,000 copies. So even if it were true that these were the difference between success and failure, bad news: your competition just got a whole lot stiffer.
- The world wide web made your competition a whole lot stiffer yet. You’re not just competing with the village any more. You’re competing with 7 billion.
Factually, it won’t be you
You’re reading self-help books looking for a summary; a short-cut; some anecdotes of famous men — and women — which, it is claimed, will distil the essence of that great person’s success. These people got their success without the benefit of such short-cuts.
- If you stack all the
Ten thousand hours? It’s not the whole story.
Put it this way: If you do put in ten thousand hours, there’s no guarantee you’ll make it. But if you don’t, it is a pretty good guarantee you won’t.
Looking at existing success stories is a waste of time.
- We are brilliant at fitting known facts to our narratives - confirmation bias.
- Curiously, our social sciences are brilliant at explaining how things happened, but utterly hopeless at predicting them in advance.
Any discipline worth getting to the top of has a rigid social hierarchy. Don’t underestimate it.
One of the main aims of any social hierarchy is making sure outsiders can only enter from the bottom. There are perfectly good reasons for this, but they have by-products:
Look for work that is important but unglamorous
The income profile is different. Many people earning solid but not spectacular
- ↑ working on the assumption there will be 9 presidents in your adult lifetime.