One of my favorite quotes if from Arron Sorkin’s “Sports Night”:
Dan: The distance is always 100 miles between first place and second place. You know, Jackie Robinson had a brother, and he ran the 200 meters. At the Olympics, he ran it faster than anyone had ever run it before, and he still came in second.
ABBY: I didn’t know Jackie Robinson had a brother.
DAN: That’s because it was the 1936 Olympics, and the guy who came in first was Jesse Owens.
Robinson’s exceptional performance, just a fraction of a second behind Jesse Owens, relegated him to a historical footnote. Because they get so much attention, we assume that the first-place finisher is fundamentally better than the second. This pattern isn’t limited to sports but is prevalent across our culture. Consider, for instance, that pinnacle of invention. The most brilliant inventor, Thomas Edison, and his most famous invention, the light bulb.
While Thomas Edison is credited with inventing the light bulb, several inventors before him had developed similar ideas. Notably, Joseph Swan, an English physicist, independently developed a functioning electric light bulb around the same time as Edison. Swan even challenged Edison’s patent in the UK and won, leading to a partnership between the two. Despite this, Edison’s name remains synonymous with the invention of the light bulb, while Swan’s contributions are less recognized.
This happens across our culture. What’s the most famous painting in the world? The Mona Lisa. But why is it so famous? Artistically, it’s celebrated for Leonardo da Vinci’s skillful execution, including the use of sfumato and the subject’s enigmatic expression.
But there’s more to the painting’s fame. In his book “Everything Is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer,” Duncan Watts challenges the notion that the most famous or celebrated works are inherently superior; instead, he suggests that their status may be as much a product of circumstance and social dynamics as of their intrinsic qualities.
For centuries, the Mona Lisa was relatively obscure and thought of as just another painting by Leonardo da Vinci, who was not regarded as a first-rate artist at the time. Its fame skyrocketed only after it was stolen from the Louvre in 1911. This event drew significant attention, and once it was perceived as valuable enough to steal, its popularity soared to the revered position it holds today.
So why do people come up with these elaborate explanations about why the Mona Lisa “deserves” its fame? As Phil Rosenzweig writes in book The Halo Effect (with great summary here) humans are people are rationalizing beings rather than rational beings. So once everyone agrees that the Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world, they create reasons for it.
Rosensweig points out how business analysis is particularly susceptible to this. He notes that companies can only be evaluated by one real variable—how it’s doing financially. Companies that are doing well have all these awesome attributes: great leadership, great culture, etc. And companies that are doing poorly have all these horrible features: poor leadership, poor strategy, etc. This happens even when they haven’t changed their strategy! He uses the example of Cisco:
When Cisco Systems was growing rapidly, in the late 1990s, it was widely praised by journalists and researchers for its brilliant strategy, masterful management of acquisitions, and superb customer focus. When the tech bubble burst, many of the same observers were quick to make the opposite attributions. Cisco, the journalists and researchers claimed, now had a flawed strategy, haphazard acquisition management, and poor customer relations. On closer examination, Cisco really had not changed much—a decline in its performance led people to see the company differently. Indeed, Cisco staged a remarkable turnaround and today is still one of the leading tech companies.
In the end, the stories of Mack Robinson, Thomas Edison, Joseph Swan, and the Mona Lisa serve as a reminder: greatness isn’t always where the spotlight shines brightest. It’s often in the perseverance of the runner-up, the ingenuity of the overlooked inventor, and the layers of history behind a celebrated painting. These narratives encourage us to seek out and value the whole story, not just the part that shines the most.
This is part of my ChatGPT experiment. With the help of ChatGPT, I wrote the post in 1 hour 3 min, though the research was done before. Here’s the ChatGPT conversation.