Outliers are terrible examples
(when thinking about large groups of people)
I haven’t yet seen the new Netflix show, “Inside Bill’s Brain”, but by all accounts it’s “amazing!”, “marvelous!” and other superlatives.
Some of the more forward thinking people I know even go as far as using that exposure to theoretically posit their ideas on education policy — “schools should be built to create more Bill Gatesies..”. Its not just education policy either. The spectacle of the massive intellect and how well he has harnessed his talents, often makes people imagine what could be, if we could have more of him or make more of him from mere mortals. What a wonderful world it would be!
I worked for Microsoft through the aughts and met Bill Gates a couple of times (during the launch of Vista). He was and is by all accounts a brilliant man, a prodigy. Not only that (knowing how hard it is to build a company like Microsoft), a force of nature. This was borne out by all I witnessed first hand at Microsoft. The legends are not wrong.
But I am here to confidently assert that not everyone can become a Bill Gates. Bill is what you call an outlier — someone who is essentially 1 in a few million. You already know a few of them — Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, Albert Einstein. Someone who by accident of probability is perfectly positioned to have an outsized influence on the human race.
Now for all the proto masters-of-the-universe reading this, note that I am not making an argument for socialism or am I anti self-determination. On the contrary, as has been borne out in my own life; I believe that will, determination and ambition are key ingredients in all extraordinary individuals. But what are will, determination and ambition but poorly understood neurological concepts that are often strongly correlated to the DNA lottery? Are Bill Gates or even I, fully responsible for our personal expressions of these things? Did our antecedents not have a say and if so; how much credit should we take? Well, I’ll let you puzzle on that for a few decades.
In the meantime, the reality is that a lot of things had to go right to produce a Bill Gates. Here are a few of them:
- He won the DNA lottery at least once, to be born to parents who were very well off by the time he was in middle and high school. This influenced his exposure and interest in computing before most people in world were clued into the mere existence of a computer; and allowed him to stew on the possibilities longer than most people on earth.
- He won the DNA lottery again, as previously noted, in having an exemplary brain that saw the world in a particularly advantageous way and could act on that insight with conviction and turn that insight into action.
- He was born at a time when computers were just emerging. It fell to his generation to shape this new technology and he took the bull by the horns and anointed himself as the main shaper (alongside folks like Jobs, Ellison, McNealy and others). Had he been born a generation later or earlier, its almost certain that others would have filled the void almost as effectively.
- He encountered key people in his journey that tremendously added to his life’s work — Paul Allen being a key figure.
- He capitalized on all these early advantages to make choice after choice that built Microsoft. He had the advantage and perhaps the luxury of correcting his poorest choices fast enough to not suffer insurmountable consequences.
- Even more stuff, but you get the picture…
These things are not necessarily a matter of pure luck (as previously stated, Gate’s success is largely his own and from his innate gifts), but they are a matter of combinatorial probability. And they add to up to Bill being a massive outlier. Hypothetically there are multiple people who had the same starting conditions as Bill Gates who utterly failed to be as significant as he was/is, through no real moral failing of their own — people who were as brilliant, as willful and as motivated. We just simply don’t know their stories and thus cannot learn from them. In addition, there are people who were also born with his native gifts who lacked the DNA lottery elements listed (perhaps born in Nicaragua, Borneo, Nigeria — with much fewer resources and possibilities) and could only rise to a fraction of his significance or not at all.
Which brings me to one of my rules for clearer thinking — do not make decisions that apply to a large population based on information about outliers. Outliers are terrible examples to use to make up ‘public’ policy. People make specious arguments all the time that fails this test. Bill Gates did this, therefore… If Steve Jobs did this, therefore… Harvard did this, therefore… Obama was elected president, therefore…!
Parents to their children, men to their wives, Congress crafting policy, schools to students; etc.
I wrote this because I saw a tweet from Benedict Evans, someone who I follow and I respect tremendously; that referenced Jeff Bezos, another outlier. In that instance, simply using him as an example, weakened the argument considerably.
In fact be careful about making decisions about yourself based on information about outliers. There is always someone who lost a hundred pounds in one year, in your social network. That person, my friend, is an outlier. Copying his methods alone will not lead to victory. There is usually more than meets the eye about that situation; and you can have much more modest wins by understanding that difference or what can be tailored to you more specifically.
The economic policy of a nation of 200 million cannot be based on information derived from outliers. It has to be indexed to the mean of what most normal people can accomplish and experience. And so on.
As a private note, I push myself personally to be an outlier. But I do this in a practical way and after assessing my true abilities and the gap between them and the truly aspirational things I want to accomplish. And I understand the tremendous amount of discipline and sacrifice I need, to reach even a vertex of any kind of outlier attribute. Understanding how much to hold myself accountable to those personal expectations is important for my sanity.
Outliers represent the ceiling of what is possible to expect. The average represents what you can mainly expect when you want something that broadly affects larger groups of people.
It’s simple statistics.