Drunkard's Walk - Leonard Mlodinow [112]
Another physicist I knew had a story that was strikingly similar to John’s. He was, coincidentally, John’s PhD adviser at the University of California, Berkeley. Considered one of the most brilliant scientists of his generation, this physicist was a leader in an area of research called S-matrix theory. Like John, he was stubbornly persistent and continued to work on his theory for years after others had given up. But unlike John, he did not succeed. And because of his lack of success he ended his career with many people thinking him a crackpot. But in my opinion both he and John were brilliant physicists with the courage to work—with no promise of an imminent breakthrough—on a theory that had gone out of style. And just as authors should be judged by their writing and not their books’ sales, so physicists—and all who strive to achieve—should be judged more by their abilities than by their success.
The cord that tethers ability to success is both loose and elastic. It is easy to see fine qualities in successful books or to see unpublished manuscripts, inexpensive vodkas, or people struggling in any field as somehow lacking. It is easy to believe that ideas that worked were good ideas, that plans that succeeded were well designed, and that ideas and plans that did not were ill conceived. And it is easy to make heroes out of the most successful and to glance with disdain at the least. But ability does not guarantee achievement, nor is achievement proportional to ability. And so it is important to always keep in mind the other term in the equation—the role of chance.
It is no tragedy to think of the most successful people in any field as superheroes. But it is a tragedy when a belief in the judgment of experts or the marketplace rather than a belief in ourselves causes us to give up, as John Kennedy Toole did when he committed suicide after publishers repeatedly rejected his manuscript for the posthumously best-selling Confederacy of Dunces. And so when tempted to judge someone by his or her degree of success, I like to remind myself that were they to start over, Stephen King might be only a Richard Bachman and V. S. Naipaul just another struggling author, and somewhere out there roam the equals of Bill Gates and Bruce Willis and Roger Maris who are not rich and famous, equals on whom Fortune did not bestow the right breakthrough product or TV show or year. What I’ve learned, above all, is to keep marching forward because the best news is that since chance does play a role, one important factor in success is under our control: the number of at bats, the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized. For even a coin weighted toward failure will sometimes land on success. Or as the IBM pioneer Thomas Watson said, “If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.”
I have tried in this book to present the basic concepts of randomness, to illustrate how they apply to human affairs, and to present my view that its effects are largely overlooked in our interpretations of events and in our expectations and decisions. It may come as an epiphany merely to recognize the ubiquitous role of random processes in our lives; the true power of the theory of random processes, however, lies in the fact that once we understand the nature of random processes, we can alter the way we perceive the events that happen around us.
The psychologist David Rosenhan wrote that “once a person is abnormal, all of his other behaviors and characteristics are colored by that label.”25 The same applies for stardom,