In the previous post, I integrated ideas coming from the literature on Personal Development with ideas coming from Cultural Evolutionary Theory. The main conclusion from that post was the following: people don’t learn enough from the successful. This has been documented in laboratory experiments conducted by cultural evolutionary scientists. Similarly, gurus on Personal Development have provided anecdotal evidence of this phenomenon.

In this post, I explain the reasons why people don’t learn as much as they should from the successful.

Lack of Motivation

There are multiple causes why people decide not to learn from the successful. The most obvious one is that some people lack the motivation to maximize their learning. For example, the main motivation for many people who attend evening classes is not to maximize their learning. Instead, their motivation might be trying something new, making new friends, or avoiding doing something else (e.g., drinking). There is nothing intrinsically wrong with any of these motivations. However, it explains why people don’t learn from the successful as much as it would be optimal for their best learning experience.

Similarly, many people don’t seem to want to achieve astonishing success. It seems as if they aren’t motivated to learn from the successful. However, they often want to enjoy some of the benefits of other people’s success. For example, they can request tangible resources from friends who are successful. This is well illustrated by Robert Kiyosaki in Rich Dad Poor Dad: “I have several friends who have generated over a billion dollars in their short lifetimes. The three of them report the same phenomenon: Their friends who have no money have never come to them to ask them how they did it. But they do come asking for one of two things, or both: a loan, or a job.”

Difficulty

Another cause of why people don’t learn enough from the successful is its difficulty. Cultural evolutionary theory emphasizes that learning from others has the advantage of being less costly in terms of time and resources than learning individually. However, the truth is that learning complex skills from the successful is still costly.

Learning from the successful in everyday life is not as easy as copying the answers of a successful participant with a mouse click in a laboratory experiment. You may also find it impossible to copy the skill of someone extremely successful at something without having already developed the skill yourself.

Let’s say that you consider Slash, the famous guitar player from Guns n’ Roses, the best guitar player in the world. Imagine that you want to imitate him although you have never played before. How the hell are you going to do that if you have never played the guitar before? Sure, you can wear a hat like his, but this is only good for taking a picture. Yes, you can use the same guitar as Slash, and this would help to have a similar sound. But you’re going to need to put in the hours to become a competent guitar player before you can even dream of imitating Slash’s guitar playing style.

Slash playing the guitar on stage

Because of this difficulty, learning from the extremely successful is often best to leave for the later stages of learning a skill. This way of learning has been well documented by anthropologists. They have found that the acquisition of complex skills in foraging societies follows two stages [1]. In the first stage, individuals learn from other individuals who are easily accessible. For example, children initially learn from their parents, other relatives, neighbours, and peers. In the second stage, which starts once they have acquired enough competence in the skill, learners would learn from the most skilful. This is what I suggest is the best way to learn a complex skill in our society today too.

Out of Reach

Successful individuals within a valued domain are in high demand. That is, many people want to observe them and learn from them. Unfortunately, successful individuals tend to be very busy and don’t have time to help everybody.

Consequently, successful individuals are out of reach. This often makes it impossible to benefit from their advice tailored to your specific needs. However, this might depend on several variables. The way you approach them, the level of commitment for them to your request, or the characteristics of their niche might make it affect the chances you get help from them.

In my experience, receiving career advice from successful scientists is relatively easy. Successful entrepreneurs, artists, streamers, etc also seem to enjoy talking about their path to success. So, there seem to be ways to ameliorate this problem, at least if you ask people who are successful but not extremely successful. In this sense, Fraser Doherty reports on the 48 Hour Start-up: “Throughout my career, I’ve been amazed at how willing successful entrepreneurs are to share what they’ve learned with those who are trying to climb up the ladder behind them”.

Envy and Resentment

Envy and resentment towards the successful also prevent people from learning from them. Some economists and political scientists have argued that envy toward the rich is what explains the anti-capitalist mentality among many intellectuals [2].

Similarly, many men and women tend to dislike people of their own gender and sexual orientation who are more popular in the love market than themselves. This attitude causes them to miss valuable opportunities to learn from these more attractive or popular individuals, which would be invaluable to enhance their own attractiveness.

Mario Luna in Psicología del Éxito defends that the solution to this problem is to “replace envy with admiration” because envy programs yourself for failure, while admiration “pushes you towards having the qualities that you admire from that person”[3].

Poor Learning Skills

Poor learning skills also seem to be a contributing factor in the underuse of learning from the successful. This is clear in psychology experiments. For example, in the experiment described in the previous post, only a minority of participants systematically engaged in learning from the successful. These participants were also the best at individual learning, which suggests that they were the best at integrating information from their own experience with information from external sources.

The conclusion from this is clear: improving your learning skills in general will lead you to learn from the successful to a greater extent.

Egocentric Discounting

Another cause of the underuse of the strategy of learning from the successful is to give much more value to the information gathered by yourself than the information provided by others. This is known as egocentric discounting. This phenomenon is pervasive and widely documented by psychology studies on advice-taking and social learning.

Why does it occur? One likely cause is that the information gathered by yourself is often more relevant to you than the information gathered by others. However, egocentric discounting frequently prevents you from reaching greater levels of success within a given domain. Because of this, considering the insights from successful others might be strongly recommendable if you want to improve faster in a specific area of your life.

This is the end of this post. In the next one, I will discuss three different ways that you can learn from the successful.

Dr Ángel V Jiménez

Notes

[1] For a review, see section “Prestige, Competence, and Age” in Jiménez, Á.V. & Mesoudi, A. (2019). Prestige-biased social learning: current evidence and outstanding questions.

[2] See The Anti-capitalistic Mentality by Ludwig von Mises.

[3] The quote is my own translation from Spanish. In his first book, Sex Code, Luna describes how he envied a man (‘El Mellao’) who wasn’t good-looking or rich because of his incredible success with women. Later, Luna changed his envy with admiration and learned a lot from him.