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Morgan Housel, my favorite financial writer, has this expression: “Wealth is what you don’t see”. Essentially, Housel’s point is that because wealth accumulation by definition requires forgoing consumption in order to invest and save, displays of opulence (fancy cars, big houses, designer clothes, etc.) are not effective signals for true wealth.
For example, there are plenty of materially rich people on the verge of bankruptcy and plenty of materially modest people that are financially well-off.
Sometimes, reality runs counter to our expectations.
Over time, I’ve learned that these revelatory, expectation-violating realities are quite common. Reality is rarely what it seems.
Nowhere is this more true than in studying “successful” people.
This past week I finished Nassim Taleb’s 2001 classic Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in Markets. In it, Taleb uses the phrase “Empty Suits” to refer to “experts” that have no differential abilities from the rest of society. Basically, these people are frauds that somehow managed to feign competency all the way to the top of their field.
Coming across Taleb’s notion of “Empty Suits” got me thinking about my own personal interactions with people I viewed as “successful”. In nearly every encounter, what I found was that these “successful” people were almost always much less impressive than I’d originally expected. Now, this isn’t to say that none of these people’s successes were well-deserved by any means. It’s simply to say that these encounters exposed me to the reality that people I viewed as wildly “successful” had weaknesses and struggles I couldn’t have predicted.
You’ve probably heard the common expression, “Never Meet Your Heroes.” Like Taleb’s term “Empty Suits” and Housel’s phrase “Wealth is what you don’t see” it gets at this broader idea that reality is often not what it seems. What you think of your heroes is almost certainly a glorified construct of your imagination.
Personally, I think this advice to “Never Meet Your Heroes” is completely backwards. In fact, I’m convinced that the most powerful advice (especially for the young and ambitious) is to “Meet Your Heroes Quickly”.
I can’t help but think of the Steve Jobs quote:
“Life can be much broader once you’ve understood one simple fact: everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.”
Social media makes understanding this simple fact difficult. The information asymmetry inherent on social media skews our attention towards novelty and achievements. Twitter bios. Produced Podcasts. Instagram photos. This is not reality. Reality is what you don’t see.
In the 2004 Pixar film, The Incredibles, there’s a scene where Mr. Incredible finds himself exposed. After being stuck in a traffic jam, slipping on a skateboard in his parking lot, and repeatedly failing to shut his car door properly, he lifts his car in a bout of frustration as if he’s going to chuck it across the neighborhood. But before he has a chance to do that, Mr. Incredible sees his neighbor, a small boy on his tricycle, staring at him in shock from the sidewalk. Mr. Incredible proceeds to slowly set his car back down and begins walking into his house as if nothing happened. (link)
The realization that Mr. Incredible’s young neighbor experienced - that Mr. Incredible was just another fallible human - are the exact realizations all people should have as quickly as possible. Rather than feel disappointed that the people we once admired were not who we thought they were, we should instead feel empowered to learn that attaining success does not demand perfection. Look to shatter your perceptions of who “successful” people actually are as soon as possible.
Meet Your Heroes Quickly.
