The Sweet Sound of Success: Misunderstaning Why Something Worked and How That Gets You In Trouble

Isn’t it obvious, that to get the best results you should only use thinking that has previously worked. How else can you judge anything if you don’t compare it to what was previously successful?

Never consider that those decisions also didn’t work in some situations. Never update your thinking.

Always think the same thing.

A Fateful Dumpster

He was homeless and had been abused.

A young man overdoses on drugs. This is his second time overdosing before he was 16. His friends don’t know what to do. They don’t want to be found with a dead body so they panic. They find a nearby dumpster and throw him in it.

This decision might have saved his life. Moving him around potentially kept him from dying.

Despite or because of the pain and darkness, he got into music and was a singer for a band.

He went to a show of another band and was so moved he said to himself he would be the lead singer of this band.

Two years later that pledge to himself came true.

Showtime

The new band is going well. Originally they were going to sign with Sony Records, and their producer was already on board to do it.

Their current manager worked for Sony and they were all lined up to sign for them but no one higher up had heard them.

The band had a showcase in Las Vegas and during their show, they destroyed the stage. It was part of their style of performance. However, they didn’t know in the back of this little space watching was a big Sony executive.

He did not like it at all.

He wrote a memo to everyone involved in the show – “if this is the future of music, I don’t want to be alive.”

Decisions, Decisions

The exec’s issue was that they only could gauge what good looked like based on what had already been accepted as good. 

This makes sense superficially but the thought process falls apart if you add any riguor to it. The exec was working on a system of referential validation. It was good because it was good previously, it then becomes the chicken or the egg. Nothing can be good if it needs to be good previously.

It is mostly a decision-making process based on fear. We have to pick what previously worked, not look for why something previously worked and use that thought process to pick something else that is different but also good.

You would have seen many times in job postings, that we want someone with this background and from these industries. It is a safe option. And also at the same time, people with this background and from these industries have failed, so it wasn’t the background or industries that made them successful. However, it is easier to look for those objective measures than to interview more candidates and understand what it really takes to be successful. 

Institutional Blindness

I was lucky enough to go to one of these fancy institutions, Brown University, one of the eight Ivy League schools. It opens doors, well overseas, not so much in New Zealand, that is another story.

The trouble is, if you just use acceptance into an institution as validity of talent without asking how they were accepted, you aren’t doing any thinking.

The best way to get into an Ivy League school is to be born from a previous Ivy League grad. The wonderful idea of legacy admissions. In 2009, Princeton let in 41.7% of the legacy applicants and only 9.2% of the non-legacies. My school, Brown University, in 2006 admitted 33.5% of legacies and only 13.8% of the normal admissions.

Conventional wisdom is always the right way to think until it is suddenly and painfully not. It only understands what has worked, not what could work.

Sweet Revenge

As for the poor boy who was left for dead in a dumpster, within the year of the exec saying that it wasn’t music, Corey Taylor’s band went platinum, and within two years they went double platinum.

The band then sent a boutique of dead roses to the exec at Sony and put a card with it. It said – We are the future of music, we want you dead.

On paper. Slipknot shouldn’t have made it. But that was because the paper was only looking for what had been successful before.

It is dangerous to make a decision if you don’t understand the thought process of why something is picked. If you only pick something because it was picked before you will soon find yourself being sent some dead roses.