Transcription
Um, this old client of mine, he was about 85 when he came to see me. And he was a financier, in a kind of a mathematical genius. He made these little pendants out of a mathematical symbol for the most beautiful mathematical equation that was ever written. He made them out of gold, and he would hand those out. And and he, he'd studied psychology as a young man, and he introduced me to this concept that I didn't know about called the Pareto distribution. Which, see, I'd been taught as a psychologist that most human characteristics were normally distributed, right? So most people were average, and some people were extreme. That that's a priori our normal distribution. Intelligence is like that, and height; there's more people of average height than very tall or very short, and weight is like that, and lots of things are normally distributed. And psychologists tend to assume that everything is, but they didn't. Creative products are distributed in a Pareto distribution, and that's a whole different thing, and it's really important to know this. It's another fundamental fact, the knowledge of which can sort of transform the way you conceptualize, let's say, the political landscape.
So here's an example of the Pareto distribution, huh? You know, there's a rule of thumb that if you run a company, that 20 percent of your employees do 80% of the work; or the 20 percent of your customers are responsible for 80% of your sales; or the 20% of them are responsible for 80% of the customer service calls. Same thing. But that's not exactly the rule; the rule is worse than that. The rule is, in a given domain, the square root of the number of people operating in that domain do half the productive work. So you think, well, you have ten employees, three of them do half the work. It's like, yeah, okay. What if you have a hundred employees? Then ten of them do half the work. What if you have a thousand employees? Then it's thirty. And if it's 10,000 employees, then it's a hundred. And this actually turns out to be a rather ironclad rule. It, it applies across very, very many situations. It applies, for example, to the mass of stars and the size of cities. So you can see how universal it is as a law, and it's, it's something like those that have more get more, and those that have less get less. That's the Matthew principle, right? To those who have, everything more will be given; from those who have nothing, everything will be taken away. And the economists sometimes call that the Matthew principle.
And so what, what that lays out is a wolf world that's rife with inequality. So you know, you, you hear this idea that, I think it's the 85 richest people in the world have more money than the bottom 2 billion. That's a Pareto distribution phenomena. And you might say, to hell with capitalism for producing that. It's like, sorry, you got your diagnosis wrong; it's a natural law. It's, no, no matter what society you study, you get a Pareto distribution of wealth. You get a Pareto distribution of number of records recorded. You get a Pareto distribution of number of songs written or goals scored. Like any creative product has that characteristic, and it's partly because as you start to become successful, let's say, people offer you more and more opportunities; and as you start to fail, people move away from you, and you plummet. And so, okay, so that's rough. So what it is, what it means is that there is always a landscape of inequality. And I'm not saying that we shouldn't do anything about it, although I am saying that we don't know what to do about it. That's the thing, you know, because you can modify the Pareto distribution of wealth, let's say, but if you, but we don't know how to do it without maybe disrupting the system so completely that it collapses, which is what happened in the Soviet Union, for example, and in Mao's China. They were trying, at least in principle, to adjust inequality, but the cure was far worse than the disease. And the, the truth of the matter is we actually don't know technically how much inequality there has to be to generate wealth. We can guess, and you could say, well, there should be less; and you might say, well, there should be more. If you're left-wing, you'd say less; and if there, if you're right, we need to say, well, we'll just let the inequality flourish. But we do know that it's inevitable, and we also know that we don't know how to regulate it.
So there is inequality. What that means is there's always gonna be people around that are better at something than you are; and the, and that's a, that's a problem because you can get jealous, and you can get bitter, and you can get resentful, and worse, you can get hopeless, you know, because you look, looked like, I have this, this friend of mine, he told me something so funny. He was, he was decrying his, his lack of success in the world, and he compared himself to his roommate, and he said, you know, his roommate has, called roommate was doing much better than he was, and his bloody roommate was Elon Musk. It's like, really? It's like, oh, you're not doing as well as Elon Musk? Well, it's, I mean, you can see MIT would take it rather personally because they were roommates and everything. It wasn't like he was doing badly; like he wasn't doing pretty damn well. It's like, I'm not as good as Elon Musk. It's like, yeah, well, you and like seven billion other people, you know. But, but I thought it was instructive because, well, yes, you have to be careful who you compare yourself to. Now, you can't just not compare yourself to others, to successful people, right? Because then you don't have anything they mapped. And one of the things I learned from Jung—this was a cool thing—I'm gonna make a real lateral move here—Jung thought the book of Revelation was appended to the Bible because the Christ in the Gospels was too merciful; he was too nice a guy. Now he's an ideal, right? And Jung said, wait a second, an ideal is always a judge; that's the thing about an ideal, because you're not as good as your ideal, so your ideal is a judge. Revelation has Christ coming back as a judge, and that was Jung's explanation, at the level of the collective unconscious, for the pasting of that remarkably strange and terrible book onto the end of the, of the, of the, of the Bible.
So anyways, my point is, is an ideal is, it, you need an ideal because you have nothing to aim at, but an ideal is a judge, and you always fall short of the ideal. So how the hell can you have the benefits of having an ideal without having the crushing blow that goes along with having the judge that always regards you as insufficient? So I was trying to work that out in the chapter, and this is something I've had to work out a lot as a clinical psychologist. It's like, well, let's say you need a goal, but we don't want to let your distance from the goal crush you. So you got to set up a goal, and then you go to make the goal, break the goal down into parts so that you can move towards it. You have a fairly high likelihood of doing it. So that's a bit, a bit of practical, I wouldn't say advice, it's, it's because it's better than advice; it's some practical knowledge about how to go about achieving an aim. Set a high aim, but differentiate it down so you know what the next step is, and then make the next step difficult enough so you have to push yourself past where you are, but, but also provide yourself with a reasonable probability of success. It's also what you do with children, right? You, you want to push them because they need to grow up and be more than they are, right? But you don't want to crush them with constant failure. So what you do is aim high and make the goals difficult but proximal. So anyways, so that's one, one, one, one way of looking at it, but then the next thing is, you know, I've had clients, many clients in their 30s who are trying to—this is more true with women, I would say—a lot of women who were very high achieving and who established their career goals at 30 and then want a differentiator, differentiate out their life; they want to have a husband, they want to have a family; they're trying to figure out how to do that. And one of the things I've noticed is that around 30 you really have to stop comparing yourself in some ways to other people. And the reason for that is that the particularities of your life are so idiosyncratic that there isn't anyone really all that much like you, you know, because the details of your life happen to matter. And so maybe you compare yourself to some rock star or something like that, and you know the person is rich and famous and glamorous and all that, but you know they're alcoholic and they use too much cocaine and they've had three divorces, and it's like, how the hell do you make sense out of that? Is that someone that you should judge yourself harshly against or not? The answer is you don't know because you don't know all the details of their lives. And who do you know that you can compare yourself to that's easy? You, yesterday.
So here's a good goal: it's something like, well, aim high, and I really mean that. It's like, talk about that a little bit, to aim high, but use as your control yourself. It's like, so your goal is to make today some tiny increment better than yesterday, and you can use better, you can define better yourself. This doesn't have to be some imposition of external morality, you know, you know where you're weak and insufficient, where you could improve. Think, okay, well, this is what I'm like yesterday; if I did this little thing, things would be just an increment better. And, well, that's a great thing because you get the ball rolling, and incremental improvement is unstoppable. You can actually implement it, and it starts to generate Pareto distribution-like consequences; it starts to compound. And I've seen that happen in people's lives over, people writing all the time and tell me that they're doing that, but I've seen that happen in people's lives continually. They make a goal, a goal that the goal should be, how could I conceive of my life so that if I had that life it would clearly be worth living? So I wouldn't have to be bitter, resentful, deceitful, arrogant, and vengeful. Like that's sort of the bottom line, right? Because that's what endless failure does to you; it's not good. And, and, and that's what life without purpose and a goal does to you as well, because life is very hard. So you think, okay, well, I need to adopt a mode of being that would justify my suffering. And you can ask yourself that question: what would make this worthwhile? Need a quote Nietzsche, I think, in that chapter. He said, he who has a why can bear almost any how. That's a lovely line, man. I mean, it's a lovely line, and it's really worth thinking about. So you think, well, how do I manage all this misery and suffering and futility? It's like, well, I need to figure out what I would have to do in order to make that clearly worthwhile. And so then you have your goal, and then you think, well, I need to move towards that incrementally because I'm kind of useless and can only do so much, and maybe not even that; and but all I have to do is be a little bit better than my, my miserable self yesterday, and that'll propel you forward very rapidly. And, and you can succeed at it, which is also really lovely because why not set yourself up for success, you know? Because otherwise you droop around like a number-ten lobster, and you know that's just not good; you get all pinchy when that happens, and it's not a good thing. So that was, that was Chapter four.