The chaos that cripples us - the role of randomness in the struggle for success

7 books selling over 500 million copies worldwide birthing the production of 8 films with a total box office of over $7 billion dollars. Absolute no brainer right? Well no, apparently not according to the twelve publishers who had rejected JK Rowling’s script before it was finally accepted by Bloomsbury Publishing. There are a myriad of other examples that could be used to highlight the same point; 14/15 rejections to Stephanie Meyers’ Twilight series before selling over 100 million copies in 37 languages worldwide, rejection and poor sales to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick before becoming a staple of American literature. The principle remains the same, if so called experts frequently fail to recognise the inherent talent and abilities in work, is success really a true reflection of a person’s faculties or it is largely determined by random, chaotic processes which pervade the world we live in?

Keeping in the literary world, the Sunday Times carried out a study in 2006 where the opening two chapters of two Booker Prize winning novels, In a Free State by V.S Naipul and Holiday by Stanley Middleton, were sent to 20 publishers. Even though the typewritten manuscripts were produced as if done by aspiring authors, with the prestigious Booker Prize behind them and a Nobel Prize in Literature for Naipul, surely the quality in these pieces would be transparent to the people whose job it is to decide their worthiness? All but one reply which the study received were rejections. So yes, it would seem talent is important for success in the literature world but whether that talent is shown to the world can often be down to random chance and persistence. Somebody who gave up persisting, John Kennedy O’Toole. The weight of constant rejection led to O’Toole committing suicide. His mother didn’t let John’s work die with him and 11 years later, The Confederacy of Dunces was published selling around 2 million copies and landing O’Toole a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The translation of talent to initial success would appear to be the biggest step, a step often fraught with chance and chaos. The old adage of the rich getting richer plays a role in success, which can be demonstrated by a couple of real-life experiments by Stephen King and J.K Rowling. I will apply these concepts to non-literary examples soon bare with me, they hold true. To counter the problem of flooding the market with too many books, Stephen King published 7 novels under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Same author, same talent, same success, right? Bachman’s books were less successful than King’s. Are people buying into the name rather than the content? Well, it was reported that Bachman’s novel Thriller had sold around 28,000 copies in its initial release which increased ten times when it was revealed that Bachman was actually King. This was mirrored when J.K Rowling was publishing a novel entitled The Cuckoo’s Calling under the pseudonym Robert Gaibraith. Rowling shared two rejection letters on Twitter which included statements such as ‘a writers’ group or writing course may help’. Around 1,500 copies were sold before her identity was revealed whereby sales increased by a reported 150,000%. In a world where information overload is constantly saturating our senses, we often run our own algorithms, where a process of sticking to what you know is more time and energetically efficient.

This general phenomena is called the ‘The Matthew Effect’. Previous success or popularity attracts people to certain songs, films, TV shows, books, further increasing their popularity, attracting even more people in a positive feedback loop. ‘The rich get rich and the poor get poorer’. This can often further compound the difficulties for people with talent to achieve success. A study into the Matthew Effect in music will help elucidate this point. Watts, Salganik, and Dodds used 14,000 participants and asked them to listen to, rate, and download songs they had never been exposed to before. Half the participants were provided with the name of the songs and bands whilst the other half were split into 8 smaller groups. The individuals in the 8 smaller groups could also see how many times each song had been downloaded by other members in their group. They found that when people could see how many times a song had been downloaded the most popular songs were much more popular than with the people who didn't have this information. Conversely, the least popular songs were much less popular than in the group which only had the band and song name provided. In addition to this, which songs became ‘smash hits’ in each of the 8 smaller groups were different from each other. This study not only highlights the randomness of success, but also the Matthew Effect acting on small initial differences, leading to larger chasms in popularity.

The Matthew effect can be seen in a wide range of circumstances. See the bullet points below for a couple examples - it has also been reported in business, Amazon reviews, and science funding amongst others.

Education - pupils who succeed early on can get labelled as being ‘clever’, teachers may bias marks based on these early judgements as they are looked more favourably upon, they can be placed in higher sets or gifted and talented programmes which increases the gap between the higher and lower achievers.

Sport - there is a disproportionate amount of Canadian NHL players born in the first few months of the school year. It is thought their physical advantage from being older than their peers at a young age leads them to be selected for elite training programmes which further betters their skills compared to other players.

Social Media - disclaimer this is my completely speculated idea - I think people are always more likely to like a photo with 30/40 likes already than when it has only 3/4. Maybe because your like is less important if it makes up less than 5% of total likes compared to 20% or so, who knows.

Well at least we can take away some of the randomness in determining success by using expert predictions, or can we? As previously highlighted in the world of literature, we often see people in positions of power fail to recognise the talents and potential success of many pieces of work. Is this pattern found elsewhere? Larry Swedroe, an economist and director of research for Buckingham Strategic Wealth studied the predictions made by financial experts from 2010 to 2017. Only 17 out of the 62 'dead cert' predictions were correct, giving a 27% success rate - something you wouldn’t put your money on! This is supported by a 1995 study in which some of the most highly paid Wall Street wizkids were invited to Barron’s to make market recommendations and only managed to match the average market returns for that period. Failure to predict successes has also been shown for technological developments, politics, and experts picking the results of Supreme Court cases amongst others. If in doubt have a look at some of the results from blind-taste experiments by experts.

So if experts often struggle to predict success successfully, at least our results will be indicative of our talents and abilities? Not always. Sometimes our initial bad luck can cripple us before our true talent can show. Let’s take Mark Canton, a Colombia Pictures head, who was released after consecutive years with disappointing results. After his dismissal, the films he left in the pipeline included Men in Black, Air Force One, and Jerry Maguire, which grossed over a billion dollars between them. Bad runs do happen. Let’s say a person has a specific talent and therefore has a greater chance of success than the average person for a given yearly situation (0.5) - we will say 0.7. Therefore every year their chance of success is 0.7 and failure is 0.3. The chances that the person will fail three years in a row is 0.3 x 0.3 x 0.3 = 0.027 which equals 2.7%. Whilst this seems a low probability for one specific person, if we take 100 people with the same chances of success and play out the three years then around 3 will fail all three years - even if they had the same talent and chances of success as those who had 3 successful years in a row (around 34 people). There would also be a 2.7% chance that someone with a below average change of succeeding (0.3) would have three successful years! The demand for short-term results in today’s climate can often lead to the perceived failure of individuals/teams before their true capabilities could come to the fold, and there is arguably no better example of this than in the results driven world of sport.

Sir Alex Ferguson, 13 English league championships, 2 Champions League trophies, 5 FA and 4 League cups. He may divide opinion on his likeability but his success is unanimously agreed upon. But could things have ended differently? Ron Atkinson was fired as Manchester United manager after a poor start to the 1986/7 campaign after previous league finishes of 3rd, 4th, 4th, 4th, so clearly not a poor side to have inherited. Ferguson guided United to 11th that season followed by 2nd, 12th, 13th and 6th place finishes. These seasons also included a 5th round and two 3rd round exits in the League Cup and a 4th round and 6th round FA Cup exit, before an FA Cup win in 1990. Would people have predicted Ferguson’s future success based on these past performances? Maybe it is in situations such as these where quantitative data doesn’t provide the only source of information but should be combined with judgement of the capabilities and character of a person. Such circumstances are very rare to see now, football managers simply do not get the luxury of having a few seasons of failure without getting the boot, often leaving a lot to chance whether their first seasons will be the lucky ones.

On an alternative note, it can work in people’s favour, situations where great feats are achieved not necessarily by the most talented people. Using another example from sport, in 2004, Todd Hamilton, a golfer from the US, won the Honda Classic followed by one of golf’s prestigious majors, The Open Championship. This led to him finally earning his PGA Tour card, allowing him to play in the best tournaments at the age of 38, and winning the title of Rookie of the Year. Had Todd finally found some secrets to the game of golf which led to a series of successes? Not quite. Of the next 187 tournaments, Hamilton only made the cut (top 70 after 2 days) in 76. A more likely scenario being that the talent he had, combined with chance and fortune on his behalf resulted in a stand out season, before his results reverted back to a similar level they were at before he reached his golfing pinnacle.

Unfortunately, randomness and chance can play a huge part of our lives. It can often be difficult to admit because as humans we feel the need to be able to determine our own outcomes. This has been revealed in studies where a sense of control has been shown to serve as a protective function for some negative mental health outcomes. Talent and hard-work are very important, but not the only determinant of success, and as we have seen those in the position to judge quality can be far from capable to do so. We are often reliant on those chance moments, those turns of fate where the hard-work and determination of a person is given a chance to shine; Edward Lorentz’ Butterfly Effect where “If the flap of a butterfly's wings can be instrumental in generating a tornado, it can equally well be instrumental in preventing a tornado.” Whilst our failures may be down to our own shortcomings, they can often be due to randomness, and a few bad results should not work to discourage people developing their craft in search of personal betterment. (Within limits - I am more than aware no amount of hard-work, chance, or auto-tune will make me a chart-topping singer). And if you’re still not convinced that chance can play a large role in our lives....

28th June 1914, despite warnings of potential terrorist attacks during their visit to Bosnia, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, take few safety precautions and travel in an open topped car. After a thrown bomb results in a failed assassination attempt, Ferdinand and his entourage continue to meet with dignitaries in Sarajevo’s city hall. Prior to departing, Franz Ferdinand, wants to visit those in hospital who sustained injuries during the assassination attempt. Rather than travel along the planned route which took Ferdinand through the narrow streets of Sarajevo’s bazaar district, it is agreed that they should leave the city via the Appel Quay. The drivers of the car, being Czech, don't understand the change of itinerary, conducted in German, and proceed to drive through Franz Joseph’s street, the original route. It is here they run into 19-year old Gavrilo Princip who fired two shots into the car, killing both Franz Ferdinand and his wife.

The assassination is often attributed to being the defining moment in the start of World War I. No World War I means no Treaty of Versailles, which the economist John Maynard Keynes described as having “no provisions for the economic rehabilitation of Europe — nothing to make the defeated Central empires into good neighbors, nothing to stabilize the new states of Europe”. The economic depression and resentment in Germany which was born from these harsh reparations paved the way for the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, and the rest is as they say, history.

Acknowledgement - The Drunkard's Walk - Leonard Mlodinow