In a culture where the slobbering hoi polloi fawningly idolize extreme wealth, fame, and performance, a suggestion like “stop aiming for the top” might seem counterintuitive if not outright heretical.
But there are reasons that it makes sense. For one, achievement is not always representative of ability.
We often perceive the most successful as being the most talented, or the most intelligent, or the most skilled, or the hardest working. In fact, they are often simply the luckiest.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t aim high. We should. Aim high, start wherever you are, and keep going.
We just need to be careful who we choose to emulate in the pursuit of our vision, because the extreme top performers are often outliers whose success may be hiding a chain of exceptional circumstances that landed them where they are now.
Instead, the people we should analyze and imitate might well be the consistently excellent runners-up who demonstrate a sustained application of high skill and effort, and who – while they may just miss the very top – are almost always close.
So, why shouldn’t we just copy the absolute best?
Because we can usually learn more from the second-best.
Acknowledging luck’s impact on performance
Economist Robert H. Frank says that performance depends in varying degrees on talent, effort, and luck.[1]
I agree, but I would add skill to the mix. To me, talent and skill are different. Talent is a natural aptitude, while skill is developed expertise. We are born with talent. We acquire skill.
So, performance is the result of some combination of talent, skill, effort, and luck.
The field of professional film and television acting is a microcosm of how luck can affect performance.
There are unknown actors (some who will eventually be well-known, many who won’t), there are supporting actors who we are constantly looking up on IMDB (because they seem to pop up everywhere but we can’t ever remember their names or exactly where we know them from), there are well-known actors, there are household names, there are stars, and there are superstars.
Actor Bryan Cranston is widely considered one of the finest television actors of our time, and portrayed what might be the greatest television character of all time.
But he didn’t rocket to overnight stardom.
Cranston was born in Hollywood. His mother was a radio actress, and his father was an actor as well.
He dabbled in acting throughout school and while pursuing a police sciences degree, but didn’t begin an acting career in earnest until after college, when he started acting in local and regional theaters in Los Angeles.
In 1983, Cranston became one of the original cast members of the ABC soap opera Loving. A quarter of a century passed before he landed the iconic role of Walter White in the smash AMC series Breaking Bad.
During that time, he worked steadily in supporting and voice roles. He had recurring roles in Seinfeld and The King of Queens, and we saw him in shows such as L.A. Law, The X-Files, Chicago Hope, and 3rd Rock from the Sun.
But his biggest part prior to Breaking Bad was the role of Hal, the immature patriarch of the dysfunctional family featured in the successful and critically acclaimed Fox sitcom Malcolm in the Middle. This role would provide Cranston with the first three of his many subsequent Emmy awards.
It was Cranston’s appearance on The X-Files, however, that convinced Breaking Bad creator (and former X-Files writer and producer) Vince Gilligan that Cranston was the right actor to play Walter White.
But while Gilligan wanted Cranston from the get-go, AMC muckety-mucks weren’t sold. They offered the part to John Cusack, who passed. Then to Matthew Broderick, who also passed.
When Gilligan finally convinced the suits to watch Cranston’s appearance on The X-Files, they came around.[2]
It’s safe to say – based on his heritage and his early pursuit of acting – that Bryan Cranston probably had some natural talent for acting.
And it’s clear from his nearly three-decade long body of work prior to Breaking Bad that he had honed his craft and developed his expertise as an actor.
It’s also probably safe to say – based on interviews with Cranston and those who have worked with him – that he is a tireless worker who obviously has the drive and puts in the effort.
And then there’s the fourth element of performance: luck.
Acting is one of those careers where a lot of people seem to be sitting around behind the scenes making decisions that affect your career trajectory without even consulting you, so luck is a significant factor.
“There’s no career that has ever been achieved in entertainment – I truly believe this – without a healthy dose of luck,” says Cranston. “I got a lucky break at age 40 and was cast in Malcolm in the Middle. At 50, I got an even bigger break when I was cast as Walter White on Breaking Bad.”
“That was my trajectory,” continues Cranston. “It came when it was supposed to come. And that’s the interesting thing about luck. It doesn’t work on your timetable. It works on its own.”[3]
Bryan Cranston has talent, skill, and a hardscrabble work ethic. But it took more than all that to be cast as Walter White. It took the happenstance of having worked with Vince Gilligan some 20 years earlier, it took two prominent actors turning down the role, and it took Gilligan standing his ground and persuading the network suits to see it his way.
In short, it took luck.
Many people who rose to the top of their fields (like Bryan Cranston) acknowledge the impact of luck on their success. Countless billionaires – including Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Mark Zuckerberg, and Mark Cuban – openly discuss how big a role luck played in their lives and fortunes. Most economists also acknowledge the influence of luck on performance outcomes.
If so many successful people – and the people who study them – can readily see the effect of luck on their lives, why do so many people who have not yet reached the top have a problem acknowledging the significance of luck?
Overestimating skill and underestimating luck
In Lake Wobegon, “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”
Garrison Keillor’s characterization of his fictional town gave rise to the “Lake Wobegon effect” as another term for the cognitive bias of illusory superiority, which is the tendency to overestimate our own abilities.
Many surveys have demonstrated the Lake Wobegon effect:
- 65 percent of Americans believe they have an above average IQ[4]
- 93 percent of U.S. drivers rated their driving skills as above average
- 87 percent of Stanford MBA students rated their academic performance as above average
- 85 percent of high school students said they had an above average ability to get along with others
- 68 percent of faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln rated themselves in the top 25 percent for teaching ability
- 94 percent of those same faculty members rated themselves above average[5]
Maybe our tendency to overestimate our own abilities causes us to overestimate the abilities of others, too. Especially if they are seen as successful.
But the best, as it turns out, might not always be as good as we give them credit for.
There is a tendency for people to believe that the most successful are also the most skilled, while the least successful are, conversely, the least skilled.
However, chance events beyond our control significantly impact performance, making observed performance an unreliable indicator of skill. External processes can create advantages and opportunities that amplify chance occurrences, producing a weak association between ability and performance.[6]
While it may be true that the highest performers are more skilled than most – and the lower performers less skilled – neither group’s skill level is especially far from the mean. The distribution of outcomes, however, is often highly unequal.[7]
This applies not only to individuals, but to businesses and other organizations as well.
In winner-take-all economic markets, Robert Frank explains, “the quality difference between best and second best is often barely perceptible, but the corresponding difference in rewards can be enormous.”
This amplifies the impact of chance, because the huge rewards that accrue to a small number of winners attracts an outsized number of competitors. And the more competitors there are, the more luck matters.[8]
Sociologist Robert K. Merton coined the term Matthew effect (after the parable of the talents in the biblical Gospel of Matthew) to describe these rich get richer and poor get poorer tendencies.
The fact is that exceptional successes often have more to do with exceptional circumstances than exceptional merit.[9]
What is earned is not always what is deserved.
Imitate the consistently good
In 1962, rental car company Avis introduced a new ad campaign that championed its position behind market-leading Hertz.
“When you’re only No. 2, you try harder. Or else.”
The Avis campaign was so successful that within a year of rolling out the new ads, the company turned a profit for the first time in over a decade. They would continue to run the ads for another 50 years.
The point of the campaign was simple enough. Hertz may be the bigger name, with the bigger fleet, and more customers and revenue. But that doesn’t make it a given that they offer the best cars, or the best rates, or the best service.
Just because the market has given Hertz the most rewards doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re the best rental car company.
Both individuals and businesses are subject to social and market processes that tend to decouple rewards from underlying talent and effort.[10]
Sometimes we can learn more from the world’s number twos because they have an established history of being consistently good, if only occasionally great.
Under conditions where luck is a minimal factor, high performance can be a reliable indicator of high skill. However, where luck is a moderate to high factor, the correlation between performance and merit is low.[11]
And in most circumstances in life, luck is at least a moderate factor.
Often, the less exceptional (but still high) performers demonstrate a more reliable correlation between performance and skill. And in situations where the impact of luck is even higher than the impact of skill, the expected skill of the second-tier performers is highest.[12]
Extreme high performance can also be the result of taking excessive risk, and might not be an indicator of the soundness of the strategy used or exceptional skill.[13]
If we are looking for a role model, we might do best to imitate those who are consistently good, rather than those who are only occasionally great. Of course, the consistently good may also be occasionally great.
Consistent high performers, though, are a more viable source for skill assessment and emulation than are occasional extreme performers. Their consistency indicates that their performance correlates more strongly with true skill than with exceptional circumstances.
But don’t ignore the outliers completely
It is often accurate to assume that the highest performers are also the most skilled.
But in can be grossly inaccurate in situations where luck could play a significant role in the outcome.
In those situations, should we entirely dismiss the extreme performances of the outliers, whether good or bad?
Regardless of what we can learn from their talent, skill, or effort, we want to examine the extremely high performers to see how they were able to position themselves to encounter the opportunities that made them successful. We also want to know specifically what opportunities they were presented with, and how they were able to successfully recognize, evaluate, and exploit those opportunities.
As Napoleon Bonaparte said, “Ability is of little account without opportunity.”
We can learn from the extreme low performers, too. People often tend to over-blame others for failure, even if that failure may have been largely due to bad luck.
Was the failure a case of wrong place, wrong time? Was the failure due to a cascade of errors that may have been out of the person’s control? Was the failure due to lack of support? Taking excessive risk? Not taking enough risk? Was the failure simply the result of trying something new or innovative?
There is usually a lot of hidden insight to be gained from analyzing failure.
Aim to be better
We should focus on doing better, not being the best.
If our aim is to be our best self, and if our best self also happens to be the best in our field – or whatever pursuit we are engaged in – then more power to us.
We shouldn’t let the idea of being the best distract us from doing our best.
In his book The Success Equation, Michael Mauboussin explains that sorting out skill and luck can provide us with specific recommendations for action. He further suggests that the best way to improve skill is often contingent on where an activity or task lies on the luck-skill continuum.[14]
We need to understand the relative impact of talent, skill, effort, and luck on performance. We should work on getting better, and on analyzing the opportunities that others were able to exploit (or that they missed).
And we should be ready for luck.
“Celebrity is a byproduct of what I do and what I like to do,” said Bryan Cranston. “It’s not what I was after. I was a working actor. Things were fine. I was paying my bills, leading a very middle-class economic life.
“And then I got a lucky break.”
