EVERY time that I open YouTube, I am bombarded with ads offering various video masterclasses from the great and the good – often at a significant cost.
The intuitive appeal is clear. Wouldn’t bestselling authors, the likes of Carol Ann Duffy or Neil Gaiman, be the best possible guides to better writing? And if you aspire to be an actor, why not spend a few hours listening to the words of an Oscar-winner like Natalie Portman?
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People such as these have passed through all the ordeals necessary to reach their dreams, and they should have plenty of lessons to teach us. But we may do well to question the pearls of wisdom dropping from their lips.
Firstly, there is the risk of “survivorship bias”. We tend to pin success on someone’s behaviour, but people’s achievements are often due to factors beyond their control – such as social and financial privilege or plain good luck. There may have been thousands of people who had exactly the same behaviours as the successful but who were unable to reach their goals. We don’t hear of their failures because they never achieved fame. This gives us the sense there was something special about the high-flyers’ strategies, when they really contributed very little to their achievements.
Top performers may also struggle to articulate their winning strategy to others. Many expert abilities rely on implicit knowledge that is inaccessible to the conscious mind, after all. Once someone has gained a skill, it can be very difficult to get back inside the beginner’s mind and remember the steps they went through to build that knowledge.
Such difficulties were evident in by David Levari at Harvard Business School and his colleagues, who recruited thousands of people to play a difficult verbal game called Word Scramble. After they had taken their turn, some players took on the role of adviser, giving tips to subsequent participants on the best tactics to use. Surprisingly, the adviser’s level of skill didn’t transfer to the advisee: having a true hotshot as a mentor was no better than having someone of mediocre ability.
Interestingly, the advisees did tend to rate the better performers’ advice more highly – even when they had been blinded to the advisers’ actual credentials. The researchers found this positive impression was linked to the detail of their descriptions. “The advice from the best performers was not better,” the researchers concluded. “It just sounded better because there was more of it.”
I am certainly not suggesting we should ignore our heroes, but we might take some of their guidance with a pinch of salt – particularly if they are trying to sell us a fast track to success. Some people’s talents may be a mystery even to themselves, and we can admire them from afar without emulating their every move.
David Robson is an award-winning science writer and the author of The Expectation Effect: How your mindset can transform your life
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