Lemmings Rarely Make History

The Social Default

The social default makes us fear being snubbed, ridiculed, and treated like an idiot. In most people’s minds, this fear of losing social capital outweighs any potential upsides of deviating from the social norm and disposes them to accept it.

Fear holds us back from taking risks and reaching our potential. While there is sometimes embedded wisdom in the crowd, mistaking the comfort of the collective for evidence that what you’re doing will lead to better results is the social default’s big lie.

The Ditchdigger Example

The only way to outperform if you’re doing undifferentiated work is to work harder than everyone else. Imagine a team of ditchdiggers working with their hands. A slight variation in the amount of soil moved per hour is barely perceptible. Your work is indistinguishable from that of the person next to you. The only way to move more dirt is to dig for longer. Within this paradigm, the ditchdigger who takes a week off to experiment and invent the shovel seems crazy. Not only do they look like a fool for taking a risk, but their cumulative production falls behind for every day they are not digging. Only when the shovel comes along do others see its advantage.

Success requires shamelessness. So too does failure.

Thinking Independently

Doing something different means you might underperform, but it also means you might change the game entirely. If you do what everyone else does, you’ll get the same results that everyone else gets. Established best practices may be useful starting points, but they do not guarantee the best result in a particular situation.

If you don’t know enough about what you’re doing to make your own decisions, you probably should do what everyone is doing. If you want better-than-average results, though, you’ll have to think clearly. And thinking clearly is thinking independently. Sometimes you have to break free of the social default and do something differently from those around you. Fair warning: it’s going to get uncomfortable.

Our desire to fit in often overpowers our desire for a better outcome. Instead of trying something new, we tell ourselves something new.

Overcoming the Fear

Deviating from established practices can be painful. Who wants to try something different that might not work? We could end up losing people’s respect, their friendship, and even our job if we deviate too far from the status quo without producing the right results. This is why we rarely try new approaches, and when we do, we often proceed with so much trepidation that the smallest setback sends us back to the safety blanket of conformity.

It’s easy to take comfort in the fact that other people agree with us. As legendary investor Warren Buffett pointed out, though, “The fact that other people agree or disagree with you makes you neither right nor wrong. You will be right if your facts and reasoning are correct.”

The people executing established practices say they want new ideas, but they just don’t want the bad ones. And because they so want to avoid the bad ones, they never deviate enough to find new good ones.

The Need for Divergence

While we need divergence from the norm to make progress, not all divergence is advantageous. To be successful, it’s not enough to do something different; you also need to be right. To do something different, you need to think different. And that means you will stand out.

Lou Brock might have put it best when he said, “Show me a guy who’s afraid to look bad, and I’ll show you a guy you can beat every time.” In other words, someone who’s possessed by the social default is easy to defeat.

Warren Buffett similarly highlighted the effects of the social default in his 1984 letter to Berkshire Hathaway’s shareholders:

Most managers have very little incentive to make the intelligent-but-with-some-chance-of-looking-like-an-idiot decision. Their personal gain/loss ratio is all too obvious: if an unconventional decision works out well, they get a pat on the back and, if it works out poorly, they get a pink slip. (Failing conventionally is the route to go; as a group, lemmings may have a rotten image, but no individual lemming has ever received bad press.)

Lemmings might make small changes, sure, but not the changes they need in order to make an outsize impact. While they’ll talk about how they’re doing great things to change the course of events, when you dig beneath the surface, things are the same as before. What’s really changed is the marketing.

Key Insight

Change happens only when you’re willing to think independently, when you do what nobody else is doing, and risk looking like a fool because of it. Once you realize you’ve been doing what everyone else is doing—and only because they’re already doing it—it’s time to try something new.

If you find yourself exerting energy to fit in with a crowd, if you’re frequently fearful of disappointing other people, if you’re afraid of being an outsider, or if the threat of scorn fills you with dread, then beware! The social default is in charge.