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The Myth of the Solo Superstar

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The most exceptional individuals, those whom we personally know and those known to the world, never achieve their brilliance by themselves. Sure, they are immensely talented, but the outsized success of exceptional individuals in every field-be it Roger Federer or Usain Bolt or Thomas Edison or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates--are based on a team of expert collaborators.

No matter what area you want to excel in, it is almost impossible to become exceptional individually. The reason for this is that it keeps getting harder and harder to achieve greatness. There is an exponentially increasing amount of knowledge and sophistication required to achieve outstanding results. As the world gets more complex, the solo superstar becomes more of a relic.

If your goal is to become exceptional in your field, you need to learn to embrace complexity and learn to thrive in an increasingly more complex world.

Increasing complexity is a universal rule

Researchers from the University of Bath studying fossils from the last 550 million years found that organisms developed in only one direction: from simple to complex. They observed that evolution always results in a form with more complex structures and features. In fact, the move towards increasing complexity is about as close to a universal rule of evolution as possible.

In a way this makes perfect sense. We have evolved from single cell microbes to teeming cities and vast ecosystems. We share the planet with almost nine million other species, each one having increased in complexity over the course of time.

Increasing complexity is not limited to life forms. It increases in your work, your relationships, in business, in sport and in every other area of life. The bar to being exceptional gets higher with each passing generation. A simple example we can relate to is that Jesse Owen’s 1936 gold medal time for the 100-meter race would not even qualify him for the US Olympic team in 2019. Every exceptional performance is sure to be surpassed.

The World Economic Forum understands this. They have listed the ability to deal with complexity as the top skill required for employees to thrive in the coming years. As society progresses, the amount of knowledge we have to deal with increases. As a result, not only do you need to understand the large number of advances directly in your field, but also the even larger number of advances in related and unrelated domains that will help your cause.

The people who are most successful--who create exceptional outcomes and consistently achieve their personal best--are the ones who have learned to embrace complexity and use it to their advantage.

Burden of knowledge

This increasing complexity that we need to overcome may be referred to as the burden of knowledge.

Benjamin Jones from Northwestern University highlights examples in the scientific world where we can see the increased burden of knowledge in play. For example, the age at which people receive doctoral degrees is increasing. Likewise, scientific papers have increasing co-authorship (as opposed to single researchers). Even the average age of Nobel Laureates is consistently getting older.

Complexity will never travel in the other direction. While we may dream of a simpler time, it is just not happening. As a result, exceptional output from individual efforts is decreasing and the outsized returns invariably go to high-functioning teams.

Distributed expertise

Elite athletes need to know more about training methods, nutrition, physics, physiology, biomechanics, psychology and a host of other topics than they ever did before. This is the burden of knowledge they need to shoulder in order to be successful. They can only be effective by distributing the expertise, which is why modern athletes have an entourage of experts. The modern athlete can only be successful if this team works in unison.

Distributed expertise is not limited to athletes. World-class musicians have their teams (often comprised of instructors, therapists, massage therapists, and trainers). Nobel Laurates in large part owe their success to work done in areas outside of their direct areas of expertise.  Newton’s quote “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” highlights the need for distributed expertise and adopting the learning of other experts to achieving your own success.

Don’t confuse distributed learning with teamwork, as we colloquially know it.

While teamwork is important, distributed learning implies that exceptional output is never the result of knowledge in a single discipline. You must constantly scan other areas (outside of your domain) and bring in relevant knowledge to advance your own work. The people who do this the best are the ones who achieve the most.

Embrace (and don’t simplify) complexity

Very often the advice we get is that the best way to manage complexity is through simplifying things. While convenient and easy, this thinking is flawed. You can’t achieve excellence by attempting to make a complex problem simple. You do it by embracing the complexity, bringing in experts, and creating a simple and elegant solution that captures and addresses all the intricacies inherent in a complex problem. That is how exceptional output is generated.

So, forget about being a solo superstar, and focus on relying on others for their expertise. The results will surprise you.

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