Podcast
Morning Joe
Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law professor and best-selling author, shares his research into how celebrities like the Beatles, Stan Lee, and Taylor Swift rose to fame. He emphasizes the role of luck, timing, and champions, and he also stresses that while talent and hard work are important, they aren't always enough to achieve iconic status.
I learned one day that there was a journal called the Journal of Beatles Studies and I thought it would be improbable and really fun for me to write it for the Journal of Beatles Studies and they trie...
— Episode: Morning Joe 5/21/24
Episode: Morning Joe 5/21/24
Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law professor and best-selling author, shares his research into how celebrities like the Beatles, Stan Lee, and Taylor Swift rose to fame. He emphasizes the role of luck, timing, and champions, and he also stresses that while talent and hard work are important, they aren't always enough to achieve iconic status.
I learned one day that there was a journal called the Journal of Beatles Studies and I thought it would be improbable and really fun for me to write it for the Journal of Beatles Studies and they tried to write about music but I knew nothing about music so I was awful and this changed to being a paper about Beatlemania and how it started.
There's a bunch of studies saying that the reason people get successful or famous is that they're amazing maybe there was something about determination maybe there was something about persistence maybe there was something about talent and that's not false entirely you've got to be really good usually to be like the Beatles and the Beatles were amazing but you need some breaks and you need some serendipity and you need some champions and you need a network.
The number of people who have a force of will is very large and the percentage of those who do well is very small so force of will might be a necessary condition for spectacular success though I bet you can find a thousand people who did really really well in music or literature who kind of had some well but not particular force of will.
So it's often think of Stan Lee for example the guy behind Marvel Comics did he have fantastic force of will kinda he also had a stroke of luck where at some moment he thought I'm not gonna do these boring comics about people with square jaws who say up up and away I'm gonna do something that has smart Alex and personality that wasn't force of will it was a little like a stroke of creativity combined with an audience that vaulted him to Stan Lee-ness rather than Stanley himself being sufficient.