Transcript

How Greatness Emerges From Social Media: Jim Ost at TEDxLehighU

Thank you everybody. Thank you. Uh thank you so much for coming out and listening to my uh talk today on how greatness emerges from social networks. I'm a researcher and I study social networks and my expertise is studying social networks within the world of science in particular the world of medicine. And I've been trying to examine how do these medical researchers that rise to prominence and gain admiration and respect, how do they get there? How do they get so well recognized and how they influence so many others? And what I found through almost a decade of research is that it's pretty surprising and pretty fascinating what's really happening, the mechanism that causes these individuals to rise to greatness. So the first person that we all think about when we think about greatness is Albert Einstein. And we also think about Albert Einstein for being a genius. His his name Einstein is synonymous with genius. So that leads us to believe that the greatness somehow comes out of Einstein that is just held within his brain. And in fact, what have people done? Researchers after Einstein passed took his brain and tried to study it to see if they could clone it, maybe reproduce it. And if you could reproduce that brain, the thought is you could reproduce the greatness. But I think this is folly. I don't think this is true. And I don't think this is true because there are scientists and there are great people who are smarter than Einstein who have never realized that kind of admiration and that kind of success. Uh in there's uh the smartest man in America right now has an IQ of 200 and he's a bouncer in a bar. I've seen interviews with this individual. He doesn't want to be a bouncer in a bar. He wants to be an academic but he's not welcome in the world of academia because he lacks the social skills of someone like Einstein. So Einstein was not only a genius but he was socially gifted as well. So that gets me while we're on the topic of IQ I want to look at two distributions here. The first distribution we all know very well. The bell curve distribution on the on the left side of the slide. This distribution reflects the distribution associated with intelligence. And what's interesting about this this distribution is that from the top end of the scale to the bottom end of the scale, it shows that people aren't that tremendously different. From average to maybe the top end of the scale, we have we have individuals that might be twice as smart, but we don't have individuals that are 100 times or a thousand times as smart. But if you shift your focus to the next distribution on the other side of the slide, the paro distribution, otherwise known as the 8020 rule or the power law distribution, what we see is this is a distribution of wealth and other measures of performance. It's called the 8020 rule because 20 one example is 20% of the population, the richest people possess 80% of the wealth. And if you look at scientists, 20% of the scientific authors write 80% of the publications. And if we actually look at the numbers, the average scientist is writing one to five publications while the top scientists in their field are writing hundreds or maybe even as many as a thousand. So if you have somebody with just a little bit more intelligence, not that much different. And by the way, the the Gaussian distribution or or bell curve also uh is reflective of how many hours people work in a week, the distribution of hours worked in a week. So if you look at people not being that much smarter, not working that much more hours in a week, well, how do they write so many more papers? How do they do so much more? How do they earn so much more money? And I think one signal that you see in the power law distribution is the fact that this is a signature of network activity at place. And the networks that we're talking about in the world of science are um are social networks. So I want to switch gears for a second and talk about how greatness actually happens. How the the great discoveries that we all know, how do they actually happen? So Isaac Azimoff had an observation here that actually many scientists have had who have studied scientific communities that these discoveries were accidents. They're random occurrences. And if you really look at the history of a lot of these scientific discoveries, you'll see that scientists all over the world are trying to solve something. They're looking for that hidden truth and they stumble upon this discovery. But later, I think when they tell the story of how they do did the discovery, they romanticize a little bit, maybe uh glorify what they actually did. But I really look at these scientific communities almost as search parties. And the search parties are spreading out looking for that hidden or elusive truth that they're pursuing until one member of the search party stumbles upon that truth. Now, at best, these scientists are well trained and wellprepared enough to find the thing when they see it. So, we can credit them with that. But most of the rest is trial and error, randomness. So, once somebody finds it, what happens then? Once somebody makes the find, well, famous sociologists who study the world science, Robert Mertton, said that it's the eminent scientists that often get the credit. So, if you've ever been a graduate student that's had a little fine in a lab somewhere, you probably realize it was the the the professor or the head of the lab or maybe the head of the university, head of the academic institution that made the fine. And this might not just be the the the eminent scientist taking all the credit. It might be the scientific community itself saying it couldn't been that lowly graduate student. It had to be this eminent scientist that actually did it. So we see credit going to these top scientists. Now the interesting thing is we go back to Einstein. Guess what? Theory of relativity. Many people think that Einstein didn't discover that. In fact, some people think it was Henri Pankare a great uh French scientist and mathematician that made that discovery and then Einstein came across it later. So what did Einstein do that was so great? And this is what I this is where I think the greatness comes from that makes it worth it that we give um uh the credit to some some of these scientists like Einstein. This is how the greatness emerges. An individual like Einstein made the discovery of relativity supposedly in in 1905 and published it but immediately was ridiculed for that. And you have to think about about Einstein for a second. He was a German Jew during the time of Hitler and they ridiculed him so much they actually said that relativity was Jew science. This is pretty horrible. This is what these are scientists. These are supposed to be the most impressive people that are ridiculing that way. And as as the the theories start to gain momentum and they start to get more accepted, it starts to threaten the status quo. And the scientists that are the leaders of the time, they get threatened by this. They don't want to lose their leadership position. So then they violently oppose this new discovery. So Einstein has to battle through this. And what happens for most scientists, they go their whole career and they die before they ever see acceptance. So that theory is left laying out there for somebody else to come along and discover. And that's what Einstein might have done. He might have found an old theory, polished it up, and then taken it through decades of the early uh 1900s to try and get acceptance from the scientific community. Took him 35 years. and and for his other discoveries as well. So finally these these theories are accepted as self-evident and and guess what everybody forgets about how they drag these poor scientists through the mud for all those years on on route. So how does Einstein get this acceptance? I want to show you a picture of a of a social network. So social network diagrams visualizations are comp uh comprised of nodes which are the dots which represent people and the links which are lines that relate to the relationships. And what we find is that the the people that popularize a theory, gain acceptance to a new idea. These are people that are always wellconed and well positioned. So this has been a finding through some of the research that we've been doing in my institution that it's these people that go on to really uh be associated with success, admiration, respect, celebrity status in their field and to get there I think is the real big question. How do you get to the point where you're very extremely wellconed and well positioned? The other interesting thing about this is guess what the network links distribute according to what distribution? the power law distribution. So there are 20% of people that are getting 80% of the links to everybody else in the network that are that highly connected. So why is it so important for a scientist or for the rest of us to be wellconed and well positioned in a social network? Well, first of all, these individuals can transmit information. So they can have a new idea, transmit that new information to others and inspire the others to transmit it and so on and so on as it spreads through the network. And using the power of a social network, you can spread ideas as we're spreading through these TED presentations. Within just a couple degrees of separation, you can spread it to thousands or millions of people. It's exponential growth. And then the other thing these scientists do is because they're so well connected to the right people, they're receiving information. So they're a transmitter and a receiver. And when you're receiving such powerful information, you know who you should work with. You know what things you should study. You should know how to solve problems. Uh or you you know you might know solutions to problems that other people have tried to solve maybe in different applications. So all that information that you're driving from the network is so powerful for your success. So what can we do to build those kind of connections to rise to the level of being well-connected and extremely well positioned? I advocate to people to implement a social network strategy. And a lot of people kind of take this for granted. They build relationships, but they don't make an active effort, especially scientists. A lot of scientists think, I'll just file myself away in a laboratory and search for the cure for cancer, and I'll do it. I have a plan. I'm going to do it. But they also need to get out and talk to people. They need to go to society meetings. And the same is true with us. If we want to have success and we want to rise up that power law distribution and have exponential increases in what in in our success, we need to build a social network strategy. So it starts with intentions. Now this is another big problem. Social networks are a sexy term these days and a lot of people are trying to do social network strategies, but then they do it because they want to make lots of money. They want to be a billionaire like the Facebook founder. But the intentions are all wrong. You need the intentions of trying to build the relationship. That should be your intentions. And your other intentions should be aligned with the social network. Often when you're just focused on making money, you're doing it at the expense of the others in the network. So you're immediately putting yourself on the wrong foot. Once you have the right intentions, you have to move through a couple steps here. A few steps. First, identify the right people. You have to take unlike what you probably think of when you think of Facebook and Twitter and and uh LinkedIn, you don't have thousands and thousands of friends. You can only build so many really strong relationships. You can only manage so many strong relationships because you're worried about what that person thinks about you and what you think about them. So, you have to identify small numbers of people that you're going to go out and actively build relationships with that might help you achieve a goal. might be a scientific discovery, but you're kind of creating that search party, that search party for success. Then you have to learn about these individuals. You have to learn, and this I'm probably telling you the obvious here. You have to understand what makes these people tick and what's important to them and what do you have that could benefit them and what do they have that can benefit you. And then finally, you have to behave. Now, this I think is the hardest piece of all because we often think, well, I'll just be really nice. I won't be a jerk. Obviously, you don't want to be a jerk if uh to get people like you. So, but that but what we find is that being overly nice isn't a way to win friends and build relationships either. So, finally, I would just say that we have this overarching area of interactions. As you interact with the networks, you'll you'll constantly revise your plan and be get be better, but you have to implement a social network strategy in order to have that success. So to conclude, I'll say Einstein knew something extremely valuable. He knew that he and other uh very successful people know that people do not do great things alone. Thank you very much. [Applause]