#blahonlife: On whether most achievers are misfits and the difference between narrative and insight.

 

Kunal Shah, the founder of Cred put out a tweet recently that really intrigued me. 

He said “Most achievers struggled to fit in growing up and eventually became hyper independent and then built their own tribe”.

Now let me start with a caveat. This post isn’t a criticism of Kunal Shah. This man is many many times more brilliant than me and has achieved things that I can’t even dream of. More importantly, he continues to go out there and build and do, while at this stage I spend more time thinking and analysing than doing something productive. 

But I found it interesting because it was a statement that many would find insightful. Mainly because we lack the skill sets to analyse such statements, to distinguish between a narrative based generalisation and a true insight that holds true under almost every circumstance.

Kunal comes from the world of tech founders. Brilliant people who were rarely the jocks or the frivolous party kids in their youth. People with the focus, drive and intelligence to stand apart at a young age and make it to top colleges and then the discipline to maintain that attitude throughout their professional lives and build large companies. Bill Gates. Mark Zuckerberg. Jeff Bezos. Kunal himself. Deepender Goyal. Elon Musk. 

Kunal’s statement holds true for all these people. And for many many others in this world. But the statement wasn’t about tech foudners. It was about achievers in general. Across industries. Politics, sports, movies, art, music, business, tech, social impact, military and more…

When you look at this with a wider lens, the statement stops being true. Bill Clinton never found a room he never fit into. I’m currently reading an autobiography by Bono of U2 and it’s much the same. In my professional career I hung with some of the most famous people in India and the world and in some cases also got to know their personal stories well. Novak Djokovic. Leander Paes. Ranveer Singh. Andre Agassi. Anil Kapoor. Deepika Padukone. Arvind Kejriwal. Farhan Akhtar. Harsh Goenka. Just some of the many achievers I’ve met who I would never describe as misfits, people who walk into a room and own it through their charisma or empathy or curiosity. 

So what’s going on here exactly?

We make sense of the world around us and our place in it through stories and narratives. These stories validate us, explain our success, justify our choices. And subconsciously we look for other examples that reinforce the validity of the narratives we tell ourselves. 

This is something all of us do, including me. And that is why we take a statement, a perspective and then seek to interpret and share them as life truths. 

To avoid this, I use two filters to see whether a statement is an insight or a narrative.

First, does the statement validate or reinforce the person’s own brand or self image? If so, then it has the DNA of narrative and should be examined further.

Second, does the statement hold true in very different data sets. In Kunal’s statement, it holds good if the data set was tech founders. But by definition, this is a self fulfilling data set. The moment you take it to different data sets like politics or movies, the statement doesn’t hold true. 

A statement only works as insight if:

• It is true across individuals who are not similar to the person making it.
• It is true across groups of people in different cohorts and situations than the person making the statement.

These two rules have stopped me from getting excited about much of the gyan I see from experts whether on Twitter or on podcasts and videos. We live in an age where people consume sound bites and clips from interviews or superficial self help books or tweets and believe they are gaining life insight.

It’s never that simple.

Insight is gained by the ability to develop analytical and critical thinking skills, the ability to question before accepting.

And that, my friends, is what I would describe as an insight about insights 😊.