Michael Jordan, arguably the greatest basketball player of all time got cut from his high school team.
Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg both dropped out of Harvard, one of the best schools in the world, and would go on to be billionaires.
Benjamin Franklin, famed author, inventor, diplomat and scientist would air bath. He would stand naked in front of an open window as he said the shock of cold water was too violent for him.
Too Specific to be useful
So does that mean that in order to become an amazing basketball player you should get cut from your high school team?
If you want to be a billionaire then you should drop out of university, especially Harvard?
To become a household name you should expose yourself to your neighbours every day instead of having a normal shower?
No. Absolutely not.
What this tells us is that when looking at successful people you have to ask yourself what happened to people that did the exact same thing but didn’t become successful.
Nuance Counts
There are numerous get rich quick gurus who say follow what I did and you will get the same results. Or they say they have studied some successful person and if you buy their book you too can be successful.
The challenge is that the devil is in the details and nuance matters.
Many people around the world have been cut from their high school basketball team but there is only one Michael Jordan.
The fact that he got cut probably didn’t affect him at all, it is just a nice story, and people love a good narrative. What made him successful was a number of things, some you can replicate and some you can’t. It helps that he was 6’6″ (the same height as me, it also helped me with basketball), that he was one of the best athletes in the world, hyper-competitive (which he has called a curse), smart, hard-working, at the right moment when basketball was in a place where his skill sets could take advantage of the state of play.
Both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard, so already they were not normal students or had normal lives. They both entered into an emerging technology environment. They both had access to that technology at home before they went to Harvard and were ahead of the curve in terms of skill. They both came from well off families so they weren’t risking everything by dropping out.
Benjamin Franklin doing air baths is just plain weird. I have nothing for that.
Context matters
If you look at someone that succeeds in doing x, then you need to look at all the people that did x and didn’t get the same results.
Are you in the same environment as the successful person? Do you have the same connections, privileges, or advantages?
Are you playing the same game or are you competing at a different game? Do you have the same natural talents as Michael Jordan or should you approach playing basketball another way?
Also, if someone fails doing x, that doesn’t mean it is a bad idea, look at all the people that did x and succeeded.
There are many people that graduated from Harvard and have done alright for themselves.
There are many ways to be successful, and learning from others is a good shortcut to your advancement, but focusing on one thing about how they became successful without including all of the potential factors for success can lead you astray.
Context and nuance matter.
If someone succeeded did x, it doesn’t mean it was correct, are there people that did x and failed.
If someone does y and fails, it doesn’t mean that y isn’t right.
There is more to success than one variable.
Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe 