The secrets to success we cling to are a misleading mystery

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Beware of being seduced by narratives of success. We all have them, perhaps advice bestowed at the dinner table by parents, a successful uncle’s most obvious skill that we have coveted or lessons from an athletics coach. They also come at us from biographies, research studies and the popular media. Work harder than anybody else. Listen to your elders. Follow your passion. Double down on your strengths. There can be an element of truth in them – certainly most of the narratives we have chosen to follow have common sense appeal – but they can also be misleading.
Harvard University professor Cass Sunstein, in his book How to Become Famous, points to a study of 64 famous scientists that found all of them showed a “driving absorption in their work.” He then asks: “But what about the 64,000 not famous scientists who also showed a driving absorption in their work?”
He notes that chronicles of success tend to focus on one factor shared by many and then build a plausible narrative that is hard to resist. “If the particular variable that is singled out, and on which you focus, can be intuitively associated with success, in a simple, satisfying story that your imagination helps to write, you might have to work pretty hard to see that the variable has little or no explanatory power,” he says.
He cautions that there is a lot of randomness in the world and success has everything to do with randomness. We attribute the Mona Lisa’s fame to the enigmatic smile, but for centuries the painting was widely unknown, he observes, until it was stolen from the Louvre in 1911.
“Whether one product rises to the top, one executive becomes iconic or one person (John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama, Donald Trump) becomes president of the United States, depends on numerous things happening to break right at the right moment,” he says.
Fleetwood Mac was not a particularly successful blues band in 1974 when its guitarist quit and founder Mick Fleetwood remembered a tape of another group he heard a week earlier when an engineer was demonstrating how a new recording studio sounded. Mr. Fleetwood turned to that group’s guitarist, Lindsey Buckingham, who brought singer Stevie Nicks along.
Serendipity counts. So does luck.
“It is a mistake to attribute spectacular success to the intrinsic qualities of those who succeed,” he argues. “The Beatles were extraordinary, and so is Taylor Swift. Of course, it is true that without their extraordinariness they may not have gotten very far.” At the same time, their extraordinariness was hardly sufficient to get them where they ended up. “Countless extraordinary people, in business, politics, science and the arts never get very far,” he adds.
The Zeitgeist can help or hurt. Some people catch a wave and others don’t. The Matthew Effect, raised by sociologist Robert Merton, is based on the Biblical observation that the rich get richer. Cumulative advantage, in which an initial or acquired advantage grows over time, is true of many successful careers. Mr. Merton found that once a scientist acquires a terrific reputation, it snowballs. Popular songs get downloaded more, becoming more popular. Stephen King was once a struggling author but after he broke through it became easier to sell his books. “Even if quality is skewed, it would be surprising to find that it is nearly as skewed as fame,” Mr. Sunstein suggests.
Group polarization can help with success, as people with similar interests share information and reassure each other that what they like is valuable. Products and people, today and through the ages, have benefitted from group connections. “Individuals move their judgments in order to preserve their image to others and their image to themselves,” Mr. Sunstein writes.
Bob Dylan is a singer-songwriter with an ability to capture wisdom so evocatively that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Surely, he understands success and fame? Asked about it in a 1965 press conference, he replied, “It happened, you know … You don’t try to figure out happenings. You dig happenings. So I’m not going to even talk about it.”
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Cass Sunstein is a professor at the University of Chicago. This version has been corrected.