The Wrong Side of the River

Looking back, 1999 was an incredible year for film.

These films launched careers (e.g., M. Night Shyamalan / The Sixth Sense), franchises (The Matrix), and new chapters of old favorites (Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace). They spurred technical innovations, like Tarzan’s 3D Deep Canvas painting and rendering technique, The Matrix’s incorporation of wire-fu techniques, and The Phantom Menace’s use of the first main actor-driven/motion-captured CG character in a feature film.

With so many incredible films, it’s hard to say which was the most influential. But there’s a strong case to be made for one that may have flown under your radar: The Mummy.

While successful in traditional Hollywood terms, The Mummy’s success extends beyond its box office gross. When released, critics were lukewarm on the film, calling it fun to watch but fell short of any meaningful cinematic achievement.

Twenty years later, the film was heralded as the only perfect movie, the Indiana Jones for a new generation, and the nineties' pivotal blockbuster. Whether you agree with those descriptors or not, it’s hard to deny how enjoyable it is to watch with its unique blend of genres, special effects, and storytelling. Perhaps the most impactful contribution The Mummy had on action films was on what action heroes look like.

When traditional action stars (e.g., Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and Sylvester Stallone) turned down the lead role of Rick O’Connell, it paved the way for a new type of action hero with the casting of Brendan Fraser.

Fraser was already making a name for himself with more serious films, including Gods and Monsters and The Passion of the Darkly Noon, as well as family comedies like George of the Jungle. The film not only catapulted him to another level in Hollywood, but it also expanded how we thought about the titular lead, paving the way for heroes who could be innocent and buffoonish in addition to strong and smart.

Despite the legacy and accolades, Brendan Fraser disappeared from the big screen in the mid-2000s. In 2018, Fraser sat down with GQ for a heart-breaking exposé, where he cataloged the toll his Hollywood career took on him. In addition to a #metoo moment with a producer, his body was battered and broken.

If you aspired to be an action star in the early 2000s, Fraser was likely a model of what success looks like. Knowing what you know now, though, would you consider trading places with him?

Success is tricky.

It’s easy to envision what we want: fortune, victory, status.

With a little more thought, we can envision what it looks like: what we’ll have, what we’ll do, what we’ll let go of. We can even map out how we’ll get there: the habits honed, the metrics measured, the accomplishments achieved.

This process - converting what we want to what we’ll get and how we’ll get it - moves the goalposts ever so slightly. The path becomes far more tangible than the destination as our goals are translated from heart to synapse. The ethereal becomes tangible.

Fortune often goes hand-in-hand with fame. Victory stems from defeating an opponent. Being the best comes down to how your measurables compare to peers.

In our data-driven world, this grounding of goals seems like a good thing. You can’t (accurately) measure feelings. To arrive at where you want to go, you need signposts along the way. In work and our personal lives, we plot a path to a destination and track our progress along the way.

The movies we’ve starred in. The battles we’ve won. The page views we’ve amassed.

Herein lies the problem: we could get exactly what we want and not like what we get. We lose sight of what we want in the process of determining how to get it—a collapse between heart and synapse.

Success is tricky because we focus so much on navigating the rapids that we don’t even notice if we’ll land on the wrong side of the river.

Fortune and Glory, Kid

Sometimes we end up where we wanted to go, only to find it wasn’t what we hoped it would be.

To honor the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing, LEGO polled three thousand children in the United States, China, and the United Kingdom about their attitudes towards and interest in space. While the headline statistic was that 86% of children aged 8 to 12 said they were interested in space exploration, the more striking result lay in a rather innocuous question.

When asked what they wanted to be when they grow up, about 3 in 10 American students reported aspirations to be vloggers and YouTubers - careers built on publishing videos on the internet. While the survey didn’t dive into the motivations, a UK-based study found that 30% cited fame and fortune as the driver, followed by creativity (24%), self-expression (11%), and travel (4%).

These drivers likely align with two of the other top four choices: professional athlete and musician. But if fame and fortune are the goals, are these the right careers to pursue?

Let’s start with fortune. Take a look at the earnings potential in each of these categories:

• Vlogger: In 2020, the highest-paid YouTube star (Ryan Kaji, age 9) earned $22 million with 12.2 billion views. That being said, the average YouTube video earns just under 10 thousand views, which would net ~$180.

• Musician: In 2019, the most-streamed Spotify artist (Post Malone) racked up 6.5 billion worth $28.4 million. When you exclude the “top-tier” artists, the average Spotify creator earns roughly $144/year.

• Professional Athlete: In 2020, Roger Federer was the top-earning athlete with $106 million in pre-tax earnings. This is the most exclusive of the three professions, so the average salary runs higher and depends on various factors, but the wealth is often short-lived. For example, one in every six NFL players files for bankruptcy within 12 years of retiring from the league.

If you’re chasing fortune, these careers may not be the best way to do it. You can make a higher than average living in professions like anesthesiologist ($208,000), IT Manager ($142,530), and lawyer ($120,910), where the odds of success are significantly higher.

Perhaps these statistics aren’t as impactful as they ought to be. We rarely consider ourselves average. For example - how good of a driver are you? Odds are, you consider yourself above average, as 73% of Americans did in a 2018 AAA survey. A strong belief in oneself is needed to break into such competitive fields, but the reality is, few of us will.

Let’s turn to fame, then. When we dream of fame, we’re likely thinking about the adoring fans, the parties, and the prestige. Rarely do we consider the repercussions: the lack of privacy, the mental/physical toll (e.g., Brendan Fraser), or the chance that what we’re famous for isn’t something positive.

Consider another 1999 film star: Jake Lloyd. After being cast as Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace, the then 8-year-old actor was ecstatic. Lloyd was already on an impressive career trajectory, with guest spots on four ER episodes and starring alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in Jingle All the Way. But this was a whole new level of fame.

It was great until it wasn’t.

Lloyd received criticism for his performance from critics and fans alike. Years later, the prequels were appreciated for what they were, but the initial response was ugly. The backlash was so brutal that Mark Hamill felt the need to speak out:

In addition to the critical response, Lloyd was plagued by a combination of being bullied at school and seemingly never-ending press junkets. As he put it, his life became a living hell.

By age 12, Lloyd had destroyed all of his Star Wars memorabilia and retired from acting.

Being famous isn’t the same thing as being appreciated. If you’re loved, fame can be rewarding (if not overwhelming), but if you’re hated, it can be soul-crushing. Jake Lloyd had a promising career and enough talent to beat out hundreds of fellow child actors for the role of a lifetime, but that wasn’t enough. Fame and fortune brought him pain and sorrow.

In most cases, fame and fortune aren’t what we’re after. As Tim Ferris put on a recent episode of the How I Built This podcast:

In condensing the goal into what will give us what we want, we risk not liking what we get.

Don’t Call It a Warning / This is a War

The other way we end up unhappy with our destination is when we misjudge the mile markers along the way.

The strategy was simple: wars are won by causing an enemy to surrender. Surrender occurs after a certain amount of damage is inflicted. Damage can be quantified by the body count, bombs dropped, and miles of land controlled.

This was revolutionary. Success in war could be measured by looking at these metrics in terms of ratios, such as the ratio of enemy deaths to those of our own. With this level of statistical precision, Robert McNamara, then US Secretary of Defense, could argue we were winning the Vietnam war.

How could he have been so wrong? The problem was two-fold:

• The data was incomplete. As discussed in The Homer Paradox, truth requires context, which requires measuring data from more than one angle. McNamara and the “Whiz Kids” hyperfocused on the metrics in their model, ignoring external data points like the Viet Cong's willingness to endure hardship, the relevance of communist ideology, and the American people’s growing opposition to the war.

• The data was corrupted. Intuitively, the data collected made sense, but it ceased to be accurate when those tracking it were measured against it. Reporting officers knew that kill data was tracked and used for promotions, so they inflated it. General William Westmoreland, commander of US forces in Vietnam, falsely portrayed progress by underreporting the count of enemy forces.

The Vietnam War, once described as McNamara’s War, went from a namesake McNamara was originally “pleased to be identified with” to one he “deeply regretted.” The intent was to strip the emotion and bias out of warfare, relying on data to drive the strategy. Instead, it became the prime example of one of the more famous cognitive fallacies in psychological literature.

The McNamara fallacy occurs when we decide based solely on observable quantitative metrics, ignoring all others. Daniel Yankelovich summarized the problem with this overreliance on the observable in Corporate Priorities: A continuing study of the new demands of business:

In other words, the more tangible we make the goal, the more we lose sight of what we’re trying to accomplish. We don’t ask to see the data that isn’t readily available or, worse, ignore it altogether. The data may be sound, but it doesn’t mean it tells the whole story.

In distilling the solution into the readily observable, we can inadvertently create problems that can (and often do) undermine the intended objective. Our focus on growing revenue can lead to bringing on customers we can’t (or shouldn’t) support. Our goal to hire talented employees doesn’t consider how we’ll retain them.

Another, albeit more ridiculous, example of this occurs in Family Guy when Peter Griffin teaches money management to a class of drug addicts:

By hyper-focusing on how we get to where we want to go, we can inadvertently confuse a compass for a GPS. We may be headed in the right direction, but we won’t end up where we want to go.

Forewarned is forearmed

We’ve covered many examples of how our pursuit of success can leave us feeling like failures, so I want to end on examples where leaders avoided that trap.

Despite how you feel about Facebook, it’s hard to argue that they’ve been hugely successful in using data to achieve their vision. In 2006, Facebook shipped one of the most important products in its history: News Feed.

News Feed was a novel idea and wouldn’t have worked if they relied on the available metrics. As Dan Rose, former Facebook executive, put it: websites were measured on page views, but News Feed was explicitly designed to reduce that metric by eliminating the need to click around friends’ profiles. It seemed crazy to launch a product that would reduce page views, which would reduce ad impressions.

As Bosworth put it, though, the team didn’t care about that metric. Facebook's vision was centered around posting and engaging with content on the platform, not simply clicking on the page. Their vision spurred them to focus on a new metric, activity, which doubled almost overnight and never regressed.

Facebook’s not the only one that knows how to avoid the trap. Amazon famously avoided being pigeonholed into standard metrics like earnings or earnings per share. In its 2014 Letter to Shareholders, Jeff Bezos said:

These are examples of how to combat the McNamara fallacy and align the vision with the path. Facebook’s goal extended beyond the standard website metrics, so they focused on new measures to assess their progress. Likewise, Amazon’s focus was on business growth, not earnings growth, so they made a case for investors to expand their analysis beyond the income statement.

Success is a tricky thing if you’re not careful. A strong vision, combined with a plan to get there, can lead to amazing outcomes.

Just don’t lose sight of where you’re going along the way.

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