This quote by Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor at Stanford GSB, sums up the difficulty of achieving something different by doing the same things. You can apply this to “success” or any venture really. For example, it’s highly unlikely that Tony Hawk became the best skateboarder ever by living a conventional life.
There is an important nuance that I think people forget—it’s not about personality, it’s about behavior. Emulating Steve Jobs personality completely misses the point, his moodiness and assholery did not a good product make. It was the cultivation of taste and building a cathedral with maniacal focus and decision making. He was extreme, but I highly doubt being an asshole was the essential part.
See also:
- “Extreme people get extreme results” from Sam Altman’s essay How To Be Successful.
- Controlled self-deception
Links to this note
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Personality and Cognitive Ability
A meta-study of research of 1MM people, found differences in personalities and cognitive abilities. Neuroticism was negatively related to most cognitive abilities like reasoning and knowledge. Extraversion was positively related to processing ability and retrieval fluency. Industrousness and compassion was positively related to knowledge found different correlations for neruorticism, extraversion, conscientiousness.
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Imitating High-Status People Doesn’t Work
People tend to closely emulate individuals of high-status but the counter signaling they pick up on doesn’t work unless you are already high-status. For example, being an asshole to others because Steve Jobs was famously demanding and extremely blunt doesn’t work unless you are also a widely accepted product visionary, or spending many hours a day reading because that’s what Warren Buffet does won’t work unless you have decades of value investing experience.