Kelly connects with Berkely Professor Toby Stuart to discuss his fascinating new book, “Anointed: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner-Take-Most World.”  

One of the things that’s interesting about your book is that in addition to asking us to be aware that people are cultivating what we pay attention to, you note that it’s also necessary give all the choices we face. 

“I have this bad habit that probably every single person listening does, which is I wake up and I look at my phone. And, if you wake up and you look at your phone, that’s a portal into the most incomparably immense content stream. Like, there’s literally no end to what you could look at on your phone. You never have to get out of bed again. You could literally spend the entirety of your life viewing the content that’s posted in the two minutes that you look at your phone before you get up and do something else. And that raises the question of how we do and we don’t tend to spend hours. We don’t sit there and think, okay, there’s, you know, 18 billion things I can look at right now. Which one of those am I going to look at?” 

At The Second City, I guess we see this idea of anointing play out all the time. 

“Now we have to stop because that’s just so cornerstone to the book because effectively what you are and, the people who are listening, I assume they know this, but I’m not sure the whole world knows this, how influential your organization is. By definition Second City is the training ground in comedy, right? This is where people come through and when they come through, they make it big afterwards, many of them. A super high proportion of people come through, you know, relative to the odds in general. And what that means is you are anointers. That is exactly where you are. You are maybe the most important anointers in this field.” 

And as much as I’d like us to take all the credit for training all the famous talent that came out of Second City, you also note that some of it is simply that these folks started at a place known by the name: The Second City. 

“That’s the Matthew Effect in a book. In a nutshell, when you have high status, there’s often a presumption that whatever you choose or whatever you do is high quality. So, you know, because you’re in this seat, the choices that you make are right. And there’s the self-fulfilling prophecy element to it, because once you choose them, then the whole world pays attention to that set of comedians – and then, I’m assuming, they get help and support and they get money and they get endless opportunities, and it all happens. And so, it all kind of spirals and feeds itself in a virtuous cycle that pushes people up. This is definitely true in any of the kind of human capital talent businesses: in the world of actors or comedians or writers or artists. These are all places where you need to catch a break if you’re the talent. And when you catch the break, you often have a whole push like an engine behind you that pushes you up the status hierarchy, which isn’t based on the fact that you’ve gotten so much better at your craft. It’s all the things that happen when you’ve been anointed.” 

Photo Credit: Christopher Michel