Enough With the Cargo Culting

If you’ve been online for long enough, you’ve almost certainly come across articles about the habits of successful people. These articles all over the place here on Medium, and usually end up talking about how successful business people get up at dawn, go exercise at the gym for the first thing in the morning and do every Silicon Valley cliche under the sun too.

They’re basically 90% of your average internet influencer’s article output.

And they’re also entirely useless. Why? Because here’s the thing:

None of that matters. None of your pointless ramblings about the ‘five things successful businessman do every day’ means a damn.

That’s because none of these things are actually why said people became successful, nor how they stay as such now.

It’s not the clothes they wear that matter. Nor whether they go to the gym after work or get up at dawn.

It’s all down to what they do. At the end of the day, you become successful by doing something people care about. By providing a product or service there’s a market for at the moment.

And that’s the true reason people like Steve Jobs became successful. Because they had the ability to see a potential success before anyone else and pursued it. It’s not how they behaved in their personal life that made Apple or what not successful, it’s what they offered.

Same goes with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. It’s not his dress sense or exercise habits that made him a billionaire, it’s the product he created and marketed. People wanted what Facebook offered at the time, and then the growing network effect caused by everyone being there kept the success going and going.

For all we know, the next successful startup CEO could eat McDonalds three times a day, stay in bed til 1 and dress like a clown and still end up creating a billion dollar business. He’d just be successful because he had the right idea at the right time and put in the effort to make it popular.

Still, let’s not forget something else too.

Life isn’t ‘fair’.

Yes, a good idea and good execution can make someone or some organisation successful…

But it won’t guarantee they will. No, there are tons of people out there who try exceptionally hard to succeed, then find it’s just not happening. Heck, I list dozens of them on my site’s ‘underrated gaming YouTube channels’ lists, and there are hundreds or thousands more I’ve not even found yet.

Why don’t they succeed?

Because again, success isn’t down to one factor, and it’s often not entirely down to factors within your control. Having rich friends and family is highly correlated with success, as is going to a good school/university, having worked at a good company or two in the past, being first to market (this is a massive one), being lucky with timing (like say, having a product at just the time your competitors are going through a major scandal), etc.

Point is, there are thousands of factors that make the difference between a successful business or project and a failed one.

Heck, you can even see them brought up here on Medium. How many times have you seen an article by some young guy/girl boasting their business has succeeded through their own hard work, yet noticed the following line in the article?

“My grandfather gave me $200,000 to help start the business”

More times than you can likely count. It’s like people are wilfully blind to how out of the ordinary their situation may be.

Point is, what makes someone successful is a huge mix of factors both inside and outside of their personal control. It’s not really how they dress or when they get up or how they go rock climbing every weekend. It’s what they do, how they work and what resources they used to get there.

Yet even with this, we still see hundreds of ‘thoughtpieces’ about how Jobs or Gates or whoever else dresses and goes about their day. They’re not insightful, they don’t help anything and they don’t give any useful information.

So where do they come from? Why do they still come about?

Well, because of the cargo cult effect mentioned in the title. Put simply, the people writing these things don’t know why successful people are truly successful.

Instead, they merely see the outer ‘signs’ associated with success, and mistakenly think those are what’s responsible for it. In other words… they’re like the tribe people who saw planes dropping supplies a few decades ago, and thought they could get the same thing to happen again by making ‘airports’ out of coconuts and palm trees. Obviously that doesn’t happen.

And the same is true of these ‘success factors’ from articles about how Steve Jobs dresses. Of course you won’t succeed by copying his wardrobe or going through his daily routine. Because that wasn’t why he succeeded in the first place.

But it’s easy to write about, and it gets clicks. Hence the dozens of pointless stories making mountains out of molehills everyday.

So if you’re thinking of writing one, stop. Stop writing these pointless thoughtpieces about how every minor habit Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg have somehow ‘makes them successful’.

Because it really doesn’t, and it wastes our time with worthless ponderings rather than things we actually need to read.

Write stories actually help people, not pointless filler.

Thank you.