And success, as Denrell revealed in an earlier study, is an especially bad teacher. In 2003 he published a paper arguing that when people study success stories exclusively — as many avid devourers of business self-help books do — they come away with a vastly oversimplified idea of what it takes to succeed. This is because success is what economists refer to as a “noisy signal.” It’s chancy, fickle, and composed of so many moving parts that any one is basically meaningless in the context of the real world. By studying what successful ventures have in common (persistence, for instance), people miss the invaluable lessons contained in the far more common experience of failure. They ignore the high likelihood that a company will flop — the base rate — and wind up wildly overestimating the chances of success.
New entrepreneurs often wonder why everyone else doesn't start their own business, choosing instead to remain in the safety of full-time employment. Entrepreneurship is fraught with failure. Financial failure is difficult to recover from. A regular paycheck is a warm blanket which is hard to put aside. And most people do not have the sort of social safety nets required to gracefully move from failure to failure until they hit upon a success.
In general, yes, people could be more successful in life if they had greater persistence and acted with a little more gumption. But focusing on base hits rather than trying to knock it out of the park every swing will produce better results. Keep the day job. Build the business on evenings and weekends. Be a chicken entrepreneur.
Said the little red rooster, "Gosh, all hemlock, things are tough!
Seems that worms are getting scarcer and I cannot find enough.
What's become of all those fat ones is a mystery to me.
There were thousands through that rainy spell, but now where can they be?"The old black hen heard him, didn't grumble or complain.
She had gone through lots of dry spells; she had lived through flood and rain.
So she flew up on the grindstone, and she gave her claws a whet,
As she said, "I've never seen the time when there were no worms to get."She picked a new and undug spot; the earth was hard and firm.
The little rooster jeered, "New ground. That's no place for a worm!"
The old black hen just spread her feet; she dug both fast and free.
"I must go to the worms," she said, "the worms won't come to me."The rooster wanly spent his day, through habit, by the ways
Where fat worms had passed in squads, back in the rainy days.
When nightfall found him supperless, he growled in accents rough,
"I'm hungry as a fowl can be -- conditions sure are tough."He turned then to the old black hen and said, "It's worse with you,
For you're not only hungry, but you must be tired, too.
I rested while I watched for worms so I feel fairly perk,
But how are you? Without worms, too? And after all that work!"The old black hen hopped to her perch and drooped her eyes to sleep
And murmured, in a drowsy tone, "Young man, hear me and weep.
I'm full of worms and happy, for I've dined both long and well
The worms are there, as always, but I had to dig like hell."
I don't blame people for talking about "tough economic times" keeping them down. That perspective is hard tp escape. But in any practical sense, all economy is individual. Many fortune 500 companies were started during the Great Depression, and some ridiculous percentage I have now forgotten of the Inc 500 were started in the period immediately following 9/11.
Fortune passes everywhere.
We are the caretakers of life's meaning.
A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of the dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Broni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the shepherd... "If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?" The shepherd looked at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looked at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answered "sure".
The yuppie parked his car, whipped out his IBM ThinkPad and connected it to a cell phone, then he surfed to a NASA page on the internet where he called up a GPS satellite navigation system, scanned the area, and then opened up a database and an Excel spreadsheet with complex formulas. He sent an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, received a response. Finally, he prints out a 130-page report on his miniaturized printer then turns to the shepherd and says, "You have exactly 1586 sheep. "That is correct; take one of the sheep." said the shepherd. He watches the young man select one of the animals and bundle it into his car.
Then the shepherd says: "If I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my animal?", "OK, why not." answered the young man. "Clearly, you are a consultant." said the shepherd. "That's correct." says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?" "No guessing required." answers the shepherd. "You turned up here although nobody called you. You want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked, and you don't know crap about my business...... Now give me back my dog."
What is intelligence, anyway? When I was in the army, I received the kind of aptitude test that all soldiers took and, against a normal of 100, scored 160. No one at the base had ever seen a figure like that, and for two hours they made a big fuss over me. (It didn't mean anything. The next day I was still a buck private with KP - kitchen police - as my highest duty.)
All my life I've been registering scores like that, so that I have the complacent feeling that I'm highly intelligent, and I expect other people to think so too. Actually, though, don't such scores simply mean that I am very good at answering the type of academic questions that are considered worthy of answers by people who make up the intelligence tests - people with intellectual bents similar to mine?
For instance, I had an auto-repair man once, who, on these intelligence tests, could not possibly have scored more than 80, by my estimate. I always took it for granted that I was far more intelligent than he was. Yet, when anything went wrong with my car I hastened to him with it, watched him anxiously as he explored its vitals, and listened to his pronouncements as though they were divine oracles - and he always fixed my car.
Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test. Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, I'd prove myself a moron, and I'd be a moron, too. In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly. My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.
Consider my auto-repair man, again. He had a habit of telling me jokes whenever he saw me. One time he raised his head from under the automobile hood to say: "Doc, a deaf-and-mute guy went into a hardware store to ask for some nails. He put two fingers together on the counter and made hammering motions with the other hand. The clerk brought him a hammer. He shook his head and pointed to the two fingers he was hammering. The clerk brought him nails. He picked out the sizes he wanted, and left. Well, doc, the next guy who came in was a blind man. He wanted scissors. How do you suppose he asked for them?"
Indulgently, I lifted my right hand and made scissoring motions with my first two fingers. Whereupon my auto-repair man laughed raucously and said, "Why, you dumb jerk, He used his voice and asked for them." Then he said smugly, "I've been trying that on all my customers today." "Did you catch many?" I asked. "Quite a few," he said, "but I knew for sure I'd catch you." "Why is that?" I asked. "Because you're so goddamned educated, doc, I knew you couldn't be very smart."
And I have an uneasy feeling he had something there.
A Christmas carol I can get behind.
He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who has left the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who has never lacked appreciation of earth’s beauty or failed to express it; who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had; whose life was an inspiration; whose memory a benediction.
I've never read this in full before. Pretty good stuff.
In this talk, Jordan Peterson uses a children's story, There's No Such Thing As A Dragon, to illustrate the power and purpose of facing our fears, and how this story illustrates it with mythological style. He points out that four of the top ten movies of all time are Disney animated films that distill wisdom that has stood the test of generations.
It's a long talk; nearly an hour in length. However, I found the lessons Peterson teaches to be important.
Some quotes from his talk:
"What a person learns in combat with the unknown is they can confront things that frighten them without being destroyed by the confrontation."
"What they learn is they are up to the challenge."
"The fear is not larger than they are."
While you're watching, listen for the real reason dragons hoarde gold.
