Success With a Long List of Co-Authors
The culture of success likes one hero in the centre of the frame. The team, the infrastructure, the teachers, the lucky moment and other people’s unnoticed work usually stay outside it.
Behind that hero there is usually:
- family;
- teachers;
- colleagues;
- staff;
- infrastructure;
- accumulated knowledge;
- a lucky moment;
- people who corrected the mistakes;
- a society that provided relative safety and working rules.
This doesn’t mean one’s own effort counts for nothing. It can be decisive. But the decisive element isn’t necessarily the only one.
A surgeon performs the operation, but the outcome depends on the team, the equipment, the training and decades of medical research. A manager gets the award for a project built by hundreds of people. An author puts their name on the cover, though without an editor, a typesetter and readers the book would have stayed a file full of good intentions.
Fame isn’t dangerous in itself. Recognition is pleasant and sometimes deserved. It attracts new opportunities and lets ideas spread.
The danger begins when attention is taken as proof of one’s own exceptional nature.
People argue with you less and less. Your ordinary remarks start getting quoted. Your mistakes are explained as boldness. The people around you gradually filter out everything that gets in the way of a convenient version of the great man.
That is how the trumpets work: they don’t destroy a person with a blow, they play, at length and convincingly, music written specially for him.
The useful measures are fairly prosaic:
- remember who took part;
- share the credit;
- keep people around who can disagree;
- don’t confuse renown with competence in every field;
- keep doing the work, not just presenting it to the public.
Fame reports that people are looking at you. It says nothing about the direction of travel.
Checking the list is easy: look at what happens when one of the invisible participants disappears. A restaurant with a famous chef loses its buyer — a week later there is different fish on the plate, and the reviews say the chef has run out of ideas. A sales department loses the person who kept the paperwork and chased payment deadlines; the number of deals is the same, but the money arrives a month later, and it suddenly turns out that this was the main figure of the quarter.
The list of co-authors is more reliably drawn up not from the results of a victory but from the consequences of somebody’s holiday. The first list is written by vanity, the second by the absence schedule, and the second is usually shorter and more accurate.