3 Takeaways - Cass Sunstein Reveals How to Become Famous: lost Beatles, lost Steve Jobs, lost Mona Lisas, lost Tom Bradys and other missed superstars (#197)

Episode Date: May 14, 2024

The world is filled with talented, amazing people, but only a few find fame and success. What’s the essential magic behind Taylor Swift, The Beatles, Steve Jobs and others? Here, Cass Sunstein, author of “How to Become Famous,” shares his keen insights into the essential attributes of hugely successful people. Want to join them? Join us.“There are plenty of Steve Jobs out there. We tend to think he's unique. But there are Steve Jobs, parallel amazing people, who never made it.”

I'd like to begin this podcast the same way my guest starts his book, which is with a provocative question from the movie Yesterday. The question is, what would happen in a world in which the Beatles had never existed, but in which one person, by some kind of magic, knows all their songs and delivers them afresh to that world. You might hypothesize that the Beatles songs would become wildly successful and that more generally quality would always prevail. But is that always the case? Is spectacular success due to the intrinsic qualities, the excellence of those who succeed. Hi, everyone. I'm Lynn Thoman, and this is Three Takeaways. On Three Takeaways, I talk with some

of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. My guest this week is Cass Sunstein, presidential advisor, Harvard Law School professor, and author of the new book, How to Become Famous. He analyzed what it actually takes for one product or one person to rise to the top in music, art, movies, literature, science, business, sports, and politics. Quality, it turns out, is not sufficient. I'm curious what it takes and whether that means there are lost Beatles, lost Albert Einsteins, lost Mona Lisas, lost Tom Brady's and other missed superstars. Welcome Cass and thanks so much for

joining Three Takeaways today. Thank you, a pleasure to be here. It is a pleasure to have you as a guest again. Cass, can you start by telling us about the famous Music Lab experiment? What happened? This is a metaphor for life, where in the Music Lab experiment, there was a big website with lots and lots of songs, and people could download the songs that they liked call that the control condition in the treatment condition people are sorted into seven or so separate groups which are large in number and the only difference in the treatment condition is that you can see how many downloads have been made of each of the song in your group so there might be a song and this is real called trapped in an orange peel it's not a very promising title for a song but that's real and it might be a song, and this is real, called Trapped in an Orange Peel.

It's not a very promising title for a song, but it's real. And it might be that this is tanking in the first minutes or hours in your group, or it might be that it's doing great. There might be another song, and this is also real, called Naw, K-N-A-W, and it might be doing fant fantastic leader tanking in your world. Now, you might predict that all worlds or subgroups would converge and that if trapped in an orange peel is great, it will go to the top in all the worlds. And if not as terrible, it'll sink to the bottom in all the worlds. That's a reasonable, I think, intuitive prediction, but it's completely wrong. Nod can be a bestseller or a failure, depending on whether it has the luck of lots of early downloads. And the same is true of Trapped in an Orange Peel. So the basic idea is whether a song does spectacularly well on online websites depends in

significant part on whether early people give some sort of signal that it's good and other people can see that signal. Then you can create Taylor Swift, kind of. Well, there's only one Taylor Swift, but you can create some spectacular success or you can create Synergy, which was the rock group I was in. And no one's ever heard of Synergy because we were really terrible, but we also didn't get the benefit of early downloads. Was the Mona Lisa always famous? Was it always recognized as one of the world's greatest art masterpieces? Not at all. So for most of its history, the Mona Lisa was widely unknown. For most of its history, it wasn't believed by the experts to be one of the best paintings in the world. People liked it in the early days,

people who knew about it, but it wasn't particularly famous and it wasn't especially celebrated. In fact, da Vinci was thought to be very good, but he wasn't the iconic da Vinci that we now celebrate. He was one of the very good artists and his own amazing status and certainly the status of the Mona Lisa is the most famous painting and in some ways the most admired painting in the world. That came through a series of accidents and fortunes and misfortunes, one of which probably pivotal to the success of the Mona Lisa was that it got stolen. If it hadn't been stolen, we might be talking about some other painting, maybe even some other painter in lieu of the Mona Lisa and da Vinci.

So the fact that it got stolen, that became a famous kind of-like event, only it was real. And then everyone was thinking about the Mona Lisa and people started attaching themselves to it and it became a big thing. Mona Lisa mania, as we might call it, is a little like Beatlemania. And though it was spread out over a longer period of time, Beatlemania took years rather than many, many, many decades. It had a similar dynamic. Can you explain what was the dynamic with the Beatles? Wasn't their music always recognized from the beginning as being extraordinary? The Beatles were what got me going on this improbable quest.

Thank you, Beatles. And the reason the Beatles got me going was I learned that they had a really hard time getting a record deal. They were a good Liverpool group. They did pretty well in Germany. But the idea that they could get a record deal was to the record companies not a very good idea because they didn't think the Beatles were very good. And the Beatles were turned down repeatedly. And one letter was sent by one of the executives whose job it was to know talent and probable success. Four words, the boys won't go, which is a way of saying, you know, forget about it. They're not going to go. And Paul and John at the time were thinking

seriously about giving up because they couldn't get a record deal. And then some things happened that might not have happened. They were a little like the theft of the Mona Lisa, though no one did anything criminal, I don't think. But they involved people intervening in odd ways at odd times that finally convinced George Martin, who sometimes describes the fifth Beatle, kind of very identified with the Beatles. What's necessary to know is George Martin had no confidence in the Beatles in the early days. He thought, no, not the Beatles. Even what name, what kind of name is that? The Beatles with an A. And so he didn't want to do it, but he was convinced to give it a try. And he did give it a try because he maybe was in a good mood on relevant days or feeling he wanted to take a chance. And the Beatles turned out to do

pretty well in the early days. Not incredibly well, but pretty well. That was good enough to keep them going. And then what happened? How did they go from pretty good to the world stars they became? It's a little like what happened to Jane Austen after she died. It's a little like what happened to John Keats after he died. And it's a lot like what happened to Taylor Swift in real time, when thank goodness she's around. What happened was to Taylor Swift in real time when, thank goodness, she's around. What happened was there were people who quite liked them, not a huge number, but people quite like them who bought their records and created clubs. And this was all founded in Liverpool. And then it spread a little bit about the UK.

Then they got on TV and they got on TV in a time when there were snowstorms. So people were staying at home. So they got seen by a lot of people and people liked them. So they became successful and then it became like a snowball. They got more and more and more and more. And then the Beatles became a group that you kind of had to know about because if you didn't, who were you? Because other people who you wanted

to be friends with or like you love the Beatles and it was a little like a cultural thing in England and like many cultural products and many things that are bought and sold like the iPhone Beatles are kind of like the iPhone it's a time when people thought I kind of have to have the iPhone because everyone else does now the iphone is great i believe and i'm also a huge beatles fan i don't mean to diminish them in any way but it was a little bit this person likes the beatles that person sees that this person likes the beatles third person sees that both this and that person like the beatles and then it's England. England loves the Beatles. How about the iconic movie Star Wars? Was that immediately recognized as outstanding? This startled me, I confess, even more than the Beatles history and the history of the Mona Lisa,

that Star Wars was shown to the studio executives by George Lucas, and they basically thought it was terrible. No one applauded. No one had enthusiasm. The studio had little or no faith in it. The actors thought it was kind of ridiculous and were saying at the time, you know, what is this about? Who's dressed up? How? And so no one really thought it would do particularly well george lucas the genius behind it thought it might it might do okay he really liked it but he had no thought it would become what it did and there was one person who kind of pressed it on the movie theater

so it got shown more than it otherwise would have it wasn't what the studio was pushing on movie theaters and it was hard to get it in in movie theaters one person who really tried and worked hard especially in california and it took off very fast much faster than the beals or than the mona lisa and why that happened i think we have to say that its spectacular visual was not understood or appreciated by the studio, but the viewing audience caught it like immediately. I was there in an early day and the early scenes just knocked your socks off. So it was amazing to see that. But that was not appreciated. And probably that wasn't sufficient. It had to have the same thing that happened to Beatlemania or to Barack Obama or to Donald Trump, which was the snowball effect where people amplified the volume of the very famous people in the world. Was her music recognized early in the beginning as being outstanding?

She didn't have quite the struggle that the Beatles had in the sense that there wasn't, to my knowledge, a period of utter failure. But it's not as if she appeared and people whose job it was to figure out who would become iconic thought, Taylor Swift, I've never seen anyone like that. It was instead they thought, okay, she's got some talent and we'll give her a try. And she went door to door, went studio to studio. She really worked very, very hard.

We need a great biography, I think, of Miss Swift, of whom I'm a very enthusiastic fan. We need a thick account of the sort that we do have for the Beatles and Star Wars and Jane Austen and John Keats and William Blake. We know something about that. But it's not as if she was an overnight success for Varma. And her current, I think, well-deserved stratospheric success is today. In 2012, she was really well-respected and admired. Nothing like now. And in 2008, nothing like 2012. It goes like that. Interesting. So we've talked about music,

about movies. How about sports? Was it always clear that Muhammad Ali or Tom Brady would be GOATs, greatest of all times? Okay, this is great. Thank you for this question. So for many things, fame and success don't have a clear objective measure. So it's not like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones are in some head to head competition, which we can say one beat the other. You can say they sold more records or more people have heard of them. But that's not quite the objective standard. You can say, by contrast, that Muhammad Ali beat essentially everybody. Lost to Joe Frazier, revenged himself twice. Lost to Ken Norton, revenged himself twice.

And then at the end of the career, he had losses. But basically, he beat everybody. Still, Ali started out, you know, not a boxer, but a kid. And then someone stole his bicycle. And he was really mad. He loved his bicycle. And he happened to see a police officer and said, I'm going to whoop that guy. And he uses the word whoop, by the way, throughout his career.

All he did. And he used it as a kid. And the police officer says, well, if you're going to whoop somebody, you better learn how to fight. And it happened that that particular police officer helped her on a gym that was right close to the place where they were talking. And the police officer said, OK, Cassius, named Cassius Clay, then finally learned how to box. And that's what did it. Now, if that person, that wrongdoer hadn't stolen Cassius Clay's bicycle, would he have become who he is? It's a good question. Maybe he wouldn't even have started to box. Now, of course, he was out of this world

talented, but what would his life have been like? Who knows? That's why counterfactual worlds are so interesting, I think, in novels and in movies and in TV shows, because they have a profound insight in them, which is with a little thing, maybe everything could be quite different. Brady was chosen very late in the draft, so it wasn't believed that he would be anything like what he became. Would he have became what he became in any system? A really good question. History's only run once, so we don't know. Did he need Bill Belichick? I tend to think not, but then I'm a Brady enthusiast. Did he need a congenial system? Undoubtedly. Did he need to be given a chance? Absolutely. Might he not have gotten the chance

in another system? He might not have gotten a chance in another system. What factors make someone or something a huge success? So a familiar answer to the question you're asking, which produces bestselling books through a process like the one we're now talking about. Some of the books I'm about to not name but criticize are a little like Taylor Swift. They sell spectacularly well. But unlike her, they're not right. What they do is they take the successful practitioners, let's say in business or in the arts or in something, sports, and they think, what do they have in common? So you might discover that

the successful CEOs, if you take 40 successful ones, they all are impatient, or they all had unhappy childhoods, or they all are really kind to the people immediately below them, or they all had some terrible setback in their teenage years. Then you might write a book saying that the secret to their success, which might be any one of those four things or all of them. And I just made that up on the spot because I was being ridiculous. But a book that did that could be, you know, really convincing. It could be kind of eye opening seeming. They all had unhappy childhoods and theyopening seeming they all had unhappy

childhoods and they're all impatient and they all had a setback in their teenage years gosh but there are plenty of people who had setbacks in their teenage years who flopped it's called sampling on the dependent variable and the reason it an error is if there's a shared characteristic by the famous or successful, we don't know yet that that characteristic isn't also widely shared by the non-famous and the unsuccessful. And so we haven't really proved anything, but intuition suggests we really have. So quality is not sufficient for sure and probably not necessary in some domains, but it's really important. If I were to single out one thing that is crucial, it's champions. So the Beatles had Brian Epstein, who was indefatigable.

He just didn't give up. And who knew that he, who had a clothing store or something, who knew that he would become the Beatles kind of necessary person? But he might well have been. And Taylor Swift had champions at multiple stages who really went to bat for her, including, I think, above all, her parents. Of course, that's true for many of us. But they not only loved her and supported her, they really went to bat for her career-wise. In addition to champions, networks. To have a supportive network, which can be people who engage with you, talk to you, help you, or can be just a bunch of people who are insistent on your success and will contribute to it, even if they don't particularly like you. They just like what you're doing. Pass, your new book is called How to Become Famous. It begs the question, what should someone do who wants to become famous? I think the first thing I would advise is enjoy what you're doing.

And the reason I'd advise that is if you succeed and become famous, then you will have both fame and enjoyment of what you're doing. And if you fail, at least you will have enjoyed what you're doing on your way to failure. So first, if you're really focused on fame, that has a lot to do with things over virtue of no control. Try to like what you're doing. That's going to be a big plus in any case. If you want to be famous or something, maybe analogous, successful achievement, lots of achievements to be really good at what you do of course is really important

to do it a lot is also really important and to be surrounded by a network that is supportive in multiple ways one that it helps you do the best you possibly can another is that it helps support and sustain a movement that follows the production of whatever it is you produced, whether it's a poem or a product. The fact is that there are plenty of, I say this with fear of trebling, but also with confidence that there are plenty of Steve Jobs out there. That's counterintuitive for reasons that are associated with the argument of the book. We tend to think he's unique. He was incredible, but there are Steve Jobs parallel amazing people who never made it because they didn't have either that got them going or the networks that followed their production of something.

Tell us more about the lost Steve Jobs, the lost Leonardo da Vinci's, the lost Einstein's and the lost other superstars. Particularly grateful you asked that because I find it inspiring that the fact that the people who did super well did that not only because they're amazing but because 15 things broke their way is a signal that the number of people who could have been like them that we've never heard of is probably astronomically high now it may be that they didn't get a chance to write a song even because they were discouraged or to write a book or to start a business or it could be that they did get to do that but no one paid a whole lot of attention and they died thinking they failed or maybe that they had a job and did well but they weren't that big a deal and they were disappointed.

But maybe late in their life, someone thinks, my gosh, this person is incredible. And then at the age of 70 or something, they vault into the stratosphere. And this suggests we should kind of open our eyes in a way that's a little like a kid in the best way, that all around us, there are amazing people who either are doing or are capable of doing amazing things. There are a lot of people like that, it turns out, and there's much more discovering to be had. That's a wonderful thought that there is much more discovering to be had. Cass, what are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today? The first is that success and fame are a product of good fortune. But good fortune is a black box that has a lot of sparkly things in it. And the clue to understanding it

is to identify those sparkly things. They might be, for example, someone who just refused to give up, who was working on your behalf, or someone who wrote a story in the newspaper about you that caught fire, or it might be a group of people who were like a snowball group and it got bigger and bigger and bigger.

The second lesson is the virtues of exuberance. That's not to say that exuberance is sufficient for fame or necessary for fame. Still, exuberance is both a big motivator for people who do super well and also it's contagious. If you look at people in business who do super well, that is often a secret source of their success. The third lesson is that all around us, there are people who have talents and capacities that aren't tapped, but if tapped, could change a community, a city, a state, the world. And the lesson then is they are lost Taylor Swift's and lost Eve Jobs. And it's really our job to find them. I love that third takeaway.

Thank you. This has been wonderful. I really enjoyed your book, How to Become Famous, as well as our earlier conversation on three takeaways on the latest findings in behavioral science. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Great pleasure. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can sign up for the Three Takeaways newsletter at

threetakeways.com, where you can also listen to previous episodes. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, and Facebook. And if you're enjoying the podcast, and I really hope you are, please review us in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. It really helps get the word out. I'm Lynn Toman, and thanks for listening.