In previous posts, I have shown three things regarding learning information from successful people:

• Learning from the successful is recommended by personal development authors to become successful yourself
• Humans seem to have a certain tendency to learn from the successful
• People don’t learn from the successful as much as it would be optimal for them

The logical conclusion from these statements is that we should learn more from the successful. However, I believe that it is important to stop to think about what we should learn from them. In this post, I will define three types of information that can be learned from the successful and discuss the value of each of them.

Three Types of Information that can be Learned from the Successful

There are three types of information that can be learned from the successful, which I call within-domain, cross-domain, and transferable information [1].

Within-domain information refers to the knowledge and skills that successful people have about their domain of expertise. Learning within-domain information means learning biology from a prominent biologist, trading from a professional trader, and dancing bachata from a top bachata performer.

Cross-domain information is the knowledge and skills that successful individuals have about domains outside of their source of expertise. A classic example of cross-domain learning from the successful is copying a professional football player’s hairstyle.

Transferable information is the knowledge and skills that successful individuals have that can be applied to any domain. For example, Michael Jordan’s growth mindset and Beyonce’s work ethic are applicable to areas outside of basketball and music.

From my point of view, learning within-domain and transferable information from the successful are especially useful while learning cross-domain information should be reserved for very specific circumstances. Let’s discuss the value of each of them one by one.

The Value of Learning Within-domain Information

The value of learning within-domain information from the successful is quite clear. They have already mastered what you are trying to learn. So, following their advice and copying what they do in their domain of expertise will save you considerable time and effort. They will also give you invaluable tips to put you in the right direction.

Learning within-domain information from the successful is what gurus of personal development (explicitly or implicitly) recommend. They won’t tell you to learn mathematics from a football player or lovemaking from a celibate monk.

Fraser Doherty in the 48-Hour Startup is very explicit when he discusses how to find the right mentor to develop a business:

“In my view, what’s most important is that you find someone who has started a business as similar as possible to the one you are trying to start. That way, they will have been through all of the steps you are about to face and can tell you exactly how they did it- what the practical, time-saving lessons they learned were”.

When Learning Within-domain Information is Especially Useful

Although learning within-domain information is always useful, there are three circumstances in which is especially useful. One is when you want to know something very specific relatively fast. For instance, if you want to know how to fix a technical issue with your website. In this case, learning within-domain information would mean asking an experienced web developer to teach you how to fix this specific problem. Here you are not learning how to design websites from scratch. You are learning something very concrete that can be easily reproduced by someone who already has some knowledge about web design.

A second circumstance in which learning within-domain information from the successful is when you require an overall view of the learning project you want to tackle. This normally occurs at the beginning of a new learning project. Learning how other people have mastered the skill will help you to identify key stages and critical moments in the process of acquiring a new skill. Successful others in the relevant skill will also provide you with valuable tips and learning strategies that are relevant to your project.

Requiring prolonged feedback is the third circumstance in which learning within-domain information is especially useful. The motivation for requiring prolonged feedback tends to be the wish to learn very well and/or fast a new complex skill. For example, if you are a novice who wishes to become a good bachata dancer you will require a lot of practice. The help of an expert will provide you with a scaffold to support your learning and give you feedback on your progress. [2]

Nevertheless, it is necessary to point out something: although learning within-domain information from the successful tends to be very beneficial it might also be costly. The costs are also important when deciding to select your learning sources.

The Value of Learning Cross-domain Information

At first sight, following the medical advice of a successful actress doesn’t make any sense. The actress doesn’t have medical expertise. How is she going to give sound advice in an area she isn’t an expert? However, there is some evidence that suggests that people might be influenced by everything that successful people do and say [3].

Could this tendency to learn everything from the successful be advantageous, at least under certain circumstances?

Some cultural evolutionary scientists [4] have given a positive answer to this question. Because it is often quite difficult to identify what makes someone successful at something, they believe that natural selection might have favoured an indiscriminate tendency to copy the successful [5].

Take hunting in a foraging society. What makes someone a successful hunter? It could be his tracing skill, his ability to make bows, the materials he uses, the way he sleeps, or many other factors. As we don’t know, copying everything in the hope that at least one of the many characteristics copied is casually related to success in hunting might be advantageous, even when might also lead to copying some neutral or damaging characteristics.

There is another potential cause of the evolution of an indiscriminate tendency to copy everything that successful people do: the existence of general traits that lead to success in multiple domains such as having a high IQ [6].

When Learning Cross-domain Information Might be Useful

In my opinion, learning cross-domain information should be avoided as a rule of thumb. There is only one circumstance in which it might be useful: when there aren’t experts in the domain you are interested available. The rationale for this is the plausible existence of general traits that lead to success in multiple domains. So, if you must choose between someone who you know is an expert in something non-relevant and someone who isn’t an expert in anything, choosing the expert in something non-relevant is your best bet.

However, this circumstance is unlikely in this digital age, where large amounts of information are always available to you. If you have time to plan and consciously choose your sources of information to master a skill, it would be unwise to rely on cross-domain information.

The Value of Learning Transferable Information

If instead of copying what successful individuals do in one domain, we copy their general traits that lead to success in multiple areas; therefore, we are learning transferable information.

Psychologists have extensively studied some of these general traits. For example,

• Having a high need for achievement: a high desire to accomplish big goals, master hard skills, and keep high standards.
• Having an inner locus of control: the belief that your success and failure in life depend on the actions and decisions you take instead of external forces.
• Having a growth mindset: The “belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts, your strategies, and help from others” (Carol Dweck, Mindset) in contraposition to a fixed mindset, which refers to the belief that your abilities are immutable.

If there are certain traits that lead to success in multiple domains and these traits are learnable to some extent, then copying these general traits from successful individuals would be advantageous even when their domain of expertise is not the domain you want to master.

When Learning Transferable Information is Especially Useful

Learning transferable information is mostly a long-term strategy that can be applied to multiple domains. It is considered “mostly” long-term because changing your mindset is something that requires time and discipline on your part. You will require to apply this learned mindset to the area you want to master and develop the skill for yourself, which requires hard work. Nevertheless, temporarily adopting transferable information might also lead to better results in a specific task. More importantly, the advantage of learning transferable information over within-domain information is that, once you have internalized, it will help you to achieve success in multiple important domains in your life [7].

Fortunately, transferable information is perfectly compatible with within-domain information. You can learn them both from the successful and combine them for better results. In my opinion, the combination of these two types of information is the best way to implement the social learning strategy of learning from the successful. It would provide you with general guidance that leads to success across a wide range of circumstances plus specific guidance tailored to a particular domain and context.

Next post

In the next post, I will discuss two views about learning from the successful. In the first view, learning from the successful refers to learning from someone extremely competent in a domain. In the second view, it just means to learn from someone a bit ahead of you in something you want to learn. I will also discuss when it is best to follow someone extremely successful or someone just a bit ahead of you.

Dr Ángel V Jiménez

Notes

[1] I have taken the terms within-domain and cross-domain information from a paper by the evolutionary anthropologists Joseph Henrich and James Broesch (2011): On the nature of cultural transmission networks: evidence from Fijian villages for adaptive learning biases.  I coined the term ‘transferable information’ in my doctoral thesis: The cultural evolution of social hierarchy: dominance, prestige, social learning. See pages 254-255.

[2] Here I am focusing on the benefits of learning within-domain information from the successful. Note, however, that I have pointed out before that there are some limitations to learning from the successful under certain circumstances: 1) when the identification of successful individuals in a domain isn’t clear, 2) when successful individuals in a domain are out of reach, 3) and when their circumstances are very different from yours. See ‘Social Learning: How to Select Your Learning Sources’.

[3] I am referring to the Angeline Effect: when Hollywood actress Angeline Jolie wrote a newspaper article about her decision to undergo a preventive double mastectomy due to testing positive for a gene associated with breast cancer, there followed an increase in online searches for information about breast cancer, increased demand for genetic screening of this disease, and an increase in the number of referrals to undergo similar preventive operations.

Nevertheless, cases like this one remain anecdotal and ambiguous, given the difficulty of using observational data to determine cause-effect relationships. When Jolie wrote her article, there was already a growing interest in genetic screening for cancer, and guidelines about detecting breast cancer had just been published by public health organisations. Moreover, it is difficult to separate the effect of the content of the information she provided from the effect of her success in an area not related to medicine. For a critique of the research on the Angeline Effect and similar, see Chapter 3 “Prestige” in the book by Alberto Acerbi (2019). Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age.

This note has been adapted from my paper with Alex Mesoudi (2020): Prestige does not affect the cultural transmission of novel controversial arguments in an online transmission chain experiment.

[4] Cultural Evolution is an interdisciplinary scientific field in which biologists, psychologists, economists, anthropologists, linguistics, and other scholars study the diffusion of ideas, technologies, and other cultural practices from an evolutionary perspective. They consider cultural evolution an evolutionary process on its own although it interacts with biological evolution. The reader interested in the topic will benefit from reading books such as Cultural Evolution by Alex Mesoudi and The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich.

[5] See Joseph Henrich & Francisco Gil-White (2001). The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. For a recent study testing to what extent the human tendency to learn from the successful is within-domain or more general see Brand, Mesoudi, & Morgan (2021). Trusting the experts: the domain-specificity of prestige-biased social learning.

[6] These two paragraphs have been adapted from my paper with Alex Mesoudi (2019): Prestige-biased social learning: current evidence and outstanding questions.

[7] In this post, I am just suggesting the possibility of learning transferable information from the successful. To what extent learning this type of information from the successful would lead to your own success is something that requires further research by my part. So, I will leave it for future posts.