It was never your idea

Hi friend,

In the 1950s a young Frenchman arrived in America needing work, and took a job teaching French literature at a university that did not look too closely at his credentials.

His name was René Girard. His doctorate was in history. He had not read most of the novels he was hired to teach, so he read them the way any bluffing man reads, one week ahead of his students, at night, at speed, with no professor's training whispering what he was supposed to find in them.

And because nobody had told him what to look for, he found something.

He was working through Cervantes, then Stendhal, then Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Proust. Different centuries, different countries, different men with nothing in common but talent. Yet the same machinery kept turning underneath their characters, and once Girard saw it he could not stop seeing it, not in the books and eventually not anywhere else.

The characters were not choosing what they wanted.

They were catching it from each other.

Here is the shape of what he found, and it is worth slowing down for, because it contradicts something you have believed your whole life without ever once inspecting it.

You think desire runs in a straight line. There is you, and there is the thing, and between you sits a private preference that belongs to nobody else. You want the house because you like the house. Girard read five great novelists and concluded that the line is not a line at all. It is a triangle. There is you, there is the thing, and there is a third person who wanted it first, and that third person is doing far more of the work than you will ever admit.

He gave his first book a title that says it plainly in French and loses everything in English translation. Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque. The romantic lie and the novelistic truth. The lie is that your desires are your own. The truth is what the novelists knew, which is that we borrow them, constantly, from whoever we are watching.

Girard put it in one sentence late in his life. Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, so he turns to other people to make up his mind.

He spent the rest of his career at Stanford, where among his students sat a young man named Peter Thiel, who has spent the decades since telling anyone who will listen that this idea explains almost everything about competition.

For fifty years it stayed a theory. Beautiful, unfalsifiable, the kind of thing a literature professor can say and a scientist can shrug at.

Then in 2006, three researchers built a machine to test it.

Matthew Salganik, Peter Dodds and Duncan Watts created an online music site and recruited 14,341 people to listen to forty-eight songs by bands nobody had heard of, rate them, and download whatever they liked. Then they did the thing that makes this experiment beautiful. They split the participants into separate, sealed worlds.

In one world, you saw nothing. Just the songs. You had to decide with your own ears.

In the other worlds, you could see how many people before you had downloaded each song.

Same forty-eight songs. Same population. The only variable was whether you could see what other people wanted.

The results were published in Science, and they are brutal. The worlds produced different winners. A song that finished near the top in one world finished near the bottom in another. In one of them, after more than eight hundred downloads, a song sat at zero while another had eighty-one. Quality did not vanish entirely; the very best songs rarely bombed and the very worst rarely triumphed. But between those two poles, anything at all could happen, and what decided it was not the music.

Then the researchers went further, and this is the part I want you to hold onto. In a follow-up, they lied. They took the download counts and inverted them, showing people fake popularity for songs nobody had actually chosen.

The lie came true. The songs they had falsely marked as popular became popular, and stayed popular after the false signal was gone.

I should tell you the argument against all this. Later researchers pointed out that in the original design, popular songs also appeared higher on the page, so position and social influence were tangled together, and at least one study found the position effect was the stronger of the two.

Fair. But notice that the objection does not rescue you. Either you are copying what others want, or you are choosing whatever happens to be nearest the top of a list somebody else arranged. Neither of those is taste.

So here is the uncomfortable work.

Take the thing you want most right now. The specific one, the real one, not the sanitised version you give at dinner. The revenue figure. The apartment in a particular city. The body, the audience, the recognition from a particular kind of person.

Now trace it backwards and find the man who wanted it before you did.

There is one. There always is. He might be someone you know personally, or a stranger whose life you have watched in fragments for two years, or a version of your father, or someone you have never met and quietly measure yourself against every week. The number in your head has an author, and the author is not you.

And this is where Girard turns genuinely dark, because he noticed what happens next. The person you copy your desires from does not stay a teacher for long. He becomes an obstacle, since he wants the same thing you now want, and the admiration curdles into rivalry so gradually that you never catch the moment it turned. It explains something you have probably felt and been ashamed of. You resent the people you learned from. Not because they wronged you. Because they got there first, and you cannot want what they taught you to want without competing with them for it.

Girard was not telling you to stop wanting things. Desire is how anything gets built, and a man with no models learns nothing.

His point was narrower and harder. You did not choose your ambition off a shelf in a quiet room. You caught it from somebody, in a moment you cannot remember, and you have been carrying it since as though it were your own idea.

So the question is not the one everyone asks themselves at three in the morning. It is not what do I want.

Who did I catch it from, and would I still want it if he stopped?

Until next time
Lorenc - Founder of Success Skill