Mediocre you

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 And that’s before you take any account of the practical realities of the specific situation.

• 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.

Ten thousand hours? It’s nonsense.

• Ten thousand hours won’t guarantee you world leadership. You might not even be very good.
• Almost every example of outstanding success has a significant element of being in the right place at the right time. You might have been the greatest flanker in the history of rugby union, but if you were three years younger than Richard Hugh McCaw, you would never know it.
• So much of outsized success has nothing at all to do with pure talent. See: the sex pistols. See: Fund managers - whose success may be as likely to be a product of random chance as deliberate strategy to beat the market.

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: