Wrecked by Success? Not to Worry
journals.sagepub.com
journals.sagepub.com
Most people are mediocre in their early years and get filtered out, even though a good percentage of them had the underlying talent and skill, and just never got lucky. Most of the ones who succeed once aren't going to succeed again, not because they're actually getting dumber but because non-success is the norm in this world.
Wreckage by success can happen, but it usually requires some odious externality that the person is unable to handle. You see this in the arts and in the literary world, because authors start getting invited to the parties that become necessary to make connections (for reviews, resources, and future publication) and then turn into coke zombies who can't write anymore. You don't see it as much with math professors, because there is no incentive pulling them into that scene--with the latter, it's just regular regression to the mean.
They can also turn into coke zombies who are still able to write. Stephen King claimed that he was so out of it during that period of his life, he straight up doesn't remember writing Cujo at all[0].
He's undeniably talented, which even his detractors will admit. (The complaint of literary snobs isn't that he's a bad writer, but that he puts his talent toward genres of writing they don't like.) His quality profile is also notably variable, which is also part of why he has so many detractors. He also came up in a time when publishing was more forgiving of idiosyncrasies and personal difficulties. (In today's world, a literary agent will fire and cancel you on Twitter if you get a pronoun wrong by mistake.) Finally, he was always a high-functioning drug addict, and there are a lot more of them than most people think (although it seems rare to stay high-functioning for more than a few years).
The thing about King, love him or hate him, is that he loves to write. Most people, even among successful novelists, don't--and that's OK, because it's extremely difficult to do well, and the rewards are astronomically uncommon. I think this explains why he was able to write decent books even while battling these demons.
When you fail, you are forced to confront the causes of your failure; the things you didn't see or anticipate (your blind spots) and you start to see the world in higher resolution. After enough failures, starting anything can become difficult because you can see all the things which can go wrong and you realize that there are so many of them that you have almost no control at all over your own success. Almost all the variables are against you; if any of them doesn't line up exactly right, it's over.
When you're successful, most of the variables tend to work in your favor, even those you don't see or understand... That's why most wealthy people still don't understand that the fiat monetary system is broken, for example.
People who succeed don't understand or know why. They might have earned their success (some did, some didn't) but being competent at something is orthogonal to knowing why one succeeded at it, over the hundreds of others who fell on their faces. They know the least about how the system works, because they won the lottery by having the whole edifice stay out of their way.
On the other hand, people who failed tend to know exactly why they failed. This doesn't mean they understand the system either. Individually, almost no one does--successful or otherwise. Thing is, no one wants to listen to them. All they can tell you is what not to do, through a story with a depressing ending. It's very easy to write them off as bitter old washouts who never belonged in the game in the first place.
In general, there's a conflict in our society that, I think, explains a lot of the weird dichotomies that emerge, including political ones, and it's this: holding an external locus of control and a negative view of society makes you correct, but isn't always conducive to ideal mental health. On the other hand, believing in an internal locus of control and holding a pleasant view of society, although it largely makes you incorrect, seems to increase the likelihood that you will enjoy positive mental health and therefore succeed. Classical decision theory holds that having more information leads to better decisions and higher utility; on the other hand, when it comes to locus-of-control and the nature of society, being correct is observably maladaptive. It's tough to say which is "better".
But really, who is the better player after 10 years? The person who keeps losing while playing the game in 'impossible mode' or the person who keeps winning while playing in 'easy mode'?
It may be that we've reached a point where the people who are running the world today are among those who least understand it (they certainly seem to be missing all the details and nuance). That might explain why a lot of what's currently happening in society comes across as ridiculous, nonsensical or hypocritical to the majority. Clown world.
Hard to say. I think they're both damaged, for lack of a better way to put it. The easy-mode player doesn't know what he's doing, but the impossible-mode player has developed a bunch of a heuristics that are probably counterproductive in a fair game.
In a two-player competitive game, this wouldn't be such an issue, because facing more adversity (a tougher opponent) will make you a better player in a theater that is strictly and always competitive. This doesn't apply as well to real life because sometimes you need to cooperate and sometimes you need to compete, and most people who have come up under adversity (which is far from a rare condition) will end up over-competing.
You see this in education, too. A lot of people think that Harvard Business School or Yale Law would be hyper-competitive environments. They're not, because it really doesn't matter if you get B's with that kind of brand-name school. The most competitive places are the ones in the midpack where some of the graduates will get good jobs but many won't. Harvard Business School is where people learn how to cooperate with douchebags, in the hope of being invited to join the douchebag class. Whereas graduates of, say, second-tier law schools make fantastic litigators but are never going to become biglaw partners because they don't have the social pedigree.
The easy-mode winner learns how to make people like him, which is all it really takes in business, because reliable mediocrity is quite enough. The impossible-mode player becomes hyper-competent but will usually fail socially because he can't get anyone to follow him. He knows exactly how everything works, but his knowledge is fucking depressing.
That might explain why a lot of what's currently happening in society comes across as ridiculous, nonsensical or hypocritical to the majority. Clown world.
Absolutely. And we live in a world where becoming famous or an "influencer" is all most people care about. I'm a novelist, releasing a book next year. I also burned down my social media platform in 2016 out of an ill-advised protest. So it will be an outlier success if my book sells 5,000 copies in the first year, which is not all that much. (You certainly can't live on that.) Meanwhile, Kyle Fucking Rittenhouse, who has 400k+ Twitter followers, could get a seven-figure advance for ghost-written garbage. This is why you see kids doing those unsafe, stupid "challenges" on TikTok. They're not any stupider than we were at their age, but they've figured out that this is a world in which, if you don't have at least a national reputation, you might as well be dead.
But by far most of the successful people I know have confronted a ton of failure as well, and adapt to it quickly: they treat it as a noisy data point, take what they can from it (like updating blind spots, etc.), and move on. You don’t make 100% of the shots you don’t take, and precisely because there are so many variables you can’t control, you need to take many shots.
The folks who see failures as inevitable and as barriers to success and who as a result don’t even bother to try…almost by definition cannot succeed.
I think you may have the causality pointing the wrong way here.
Study 1 seems difficult due to sampling bias - if you only look at successful people you are missing anyone wrecked by success. I only read the abstract - so they must have a way of dealing with that issue within the paper.
The people I have seen damaged by success is mostly due to unbounded ego: being humble seems like an antidote although is that cause (naturally humble) or effect (does trying to be humble also work).