Lottery of Popularity

AKA How much objectively "Better" is it really?

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. - Ecclesiastes 9:11

Time and chance happens to us all

Here's a question for you. How much of an idea's success depends on how good of an idea it is, and how much depends on time and chance?

Many things that have great success are good, but do they succeed simply because they're good? Or because they are good and in the right place at the right time? Is goodness necessary but not sufficient?

I think we can all agree that the answer to that is "yes". An idea can be good, but things can interfere. A fly may be born with an super-mutation that makes it immune to aging, but if it gets swatted before it can pass it on, that beneficial mutation is gone, while the thousands of fly male pattern baldness genes  or stubby proboscis genes continue to muck up the pool. An business venture might be wonderfully innovative, but if your start-up gets hit halfway through by a recession, too bad. Luck matters. There's no magical scale that weighs the intrinsic value of an idea and sends the golden ones off to fame and the bad ones down the chute. 

But have you ever wondered how much it matters? How much bad luck could a specific good idea suffer and still come out on top? How much good luck would you need for a really bad idea to take off? (Stephanie Meyers, I'm looking at you) [1]

Let's get concrete

When we think of "classic" we tend to imagine something that can reach across barriers of language and culture to pluck at the heartstrings, regardless of one's upbringing. We like to hope that there's some intrinsic humanity to those works that give them a value in their own right.

But what if we took word-for-word reproductions of great works of literature and reinserted them back in time under other authors names? Or in other time periods? Would they still rise to the top? Would critics gasp in awe regardless, and hold these jewels of human nature up to the world? Or would many of our greatest works be considered trivial, perhaps moderately passable reading, and then brushed aside. [2]

Would Hamlet be as adored as it is if it wasn't written by Shakespeare?

What if it had been authored by a woman?

Would Bill Gates be a billionaire if his dad hadn't been a lawyer?

Would [random play] be well-loved if it had been written by Shakespeare?

Would the Coca Cola formula be just as popular if it had started in India?

We already know you can present an idea as good as "wash hands after corpse-handling and before childbirth" to the medical community and still have it be a complete failure, if you go about it right. Just ask Ignaz Semmelweis. What did spreading the joys of hand-washing get him? A one-way ticket to a mental asylum so good he lasted two full weeks there before dying at age 47.

Your Life

You might feel discouraged at the thought of all the little random factors that steal the race from the swift and the bread from the wise.[3] My advice? In your own life, it probably won't have that much of an effect in the end.

The bell curve and standard deviation was to me an epiphanic model.[4] When studying it, I realized that while I couldn't predict an individual iteration of a behavior in my life , I could predict the mean perfectly. And every little inch of behavior I could muster to shift that mean would increase my chances of the rare spectacular success, and decrease my chances of the rare catastrophic failure. I may have no control whether tomorrow's random variables are one standard deviation above the mean or one below, but I can sure as heck control the nonrandom variables' mean.[5]

Too often, we think that one little bit of luck can make or break us. If we'd just bet on that horse or this stock, or just gotten on the other train rather than that one, life would be made and all would be dandy. Let me tell you something.

Life doesn't work like that.

Bill Gates didn't become a billionaire just cause his father was a lawyer, and Semmelweis didn't fail to spread antiseptic theory just because he was born in 1818. Those each played their part, but life has a lot more going on in it. There are principles and patterns and knowledge which can lever history with far more force than any random duke getting shot ever could.

Thomas Jefferson is quoted as saying "I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it."[6] Work steadily, and learn a lot. Focus on what's under you control rather than the success or failure of the dice, and you'll have all the luck you need.

Remember, our lives are taken as X approaches infinity. When you look at eternity, all the little bumps and little troughs get smoothed out, and there's nothing left but you and your trajectory. So make it a good one.

[1]If I had a time machine, one of the many things which I would be to conduct empirical studies on the social sciences. Mostly performed on the future, so as to give me a stable reference point. (Thanks T-Rex)

[2]Side note: Some "classics" are so merely because they were the first in a genre or movement, not because they were the peak. The first guy to independently invent something is a genius. The second guy to invent independently is lame.

[3] Or encouraged, if you're worried about not fitting in the "wise and swift club".  Why not be optimistic if you have the chance?

[4] Differential and integral calculus also had life-altering impact on the way I view the world.

[5] If I had a particular video game score with a normal distribution, a mean of 50, and SD of 25, I could try a hundred times and have a good chance at a coveted 95 score. For better chances I could also increase my number of trials or increase my mean, or both.

[6] A saying which, though said to have been said by him, was apparently never actually said by him. "Is quoted as saying" is yet another one of those handy phrases which makes anything that follows it necessarily true.