The Arrival of The Fittest: How The Great Become Great

336 Pages·2017·2.05 MB·English

Greatness:

How The Great Become Great…
and You & I Don’t

Bill Dorris, Ph.D.

School of Communications
Dublin City University
Dublin 9, Ireland

© 2017 2020
Contents

Contents 2

Note to Users 4

Blog and Reading Tips 5

Brief Bio and Endorsements 7

Acknowledgments 9

Introduction 12

How The Great Become Great – The Analysis 13

Key Characteristics 15

The Right Kind of Problems 17

Flow Activities & Escape Activities 20

How Many Potential Greats? 24

Generational Problems 25

Community of Birth 28

Matching the Person with The Right Kind of
Problems - The Arrival of The Fittest 30

Organizations and Teams 32

Continuous Matching 33

Links 36

Cumulative Matching 38

Catalytic Matching 43

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Catalytic Accelerations to Greatness 51

Chaotic Matching 56

Spwins 60

Spwins from Beginning to End 74

Where to look for Spwins 79

Women and Other Outsiders 90

How The Great Become Great - Implications 99

And as for Heroes? 99

What's It All Mean? 102

And You & I 107

einstein and santa claus 113

Notes 115

References 264

Indices 309

Greats 309

Concepts 313

Authors 317

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Note to Users

Greatness is written for Anyone who is interested in the
question of How The Great Become Great... and You
& I Don’t. This includes the general public, university
students, and academics as well. How so? Simple.
The Text of this book is written almost in story form,
with barely a hint of academic research to be seen, so
it can be easily read by anyone. As for the academic
research, it is thoroughly discussed and easily
accessible in the book’s Notes, when and if you’re
interested. But you don’t need to read a word of the
Notes to understand the entire analysis, and in fact
experience it coming to life for everyone from Einstein
to Elvis, Mozart to Marilyn, or for that matter, Serena,
Madonna, or Marie Curie. Anyone can also easily
apply the book’s analysis to their own development
and success / or lack thereof.

If you are a Student, like the hundreds of students I
taught while writing this book, you can apply the book’s
analysis to understanding how your favorite great
became great. In fact you can send me your work to
put up on the book’s blog, alongside, eg, Lady Gaga
and Novak Djokovic ( www.greatnessbd.com )

If you’re an Academic, teaching any of a wide range of
courses related to human development and
achievement – eg in psychology, communications or
business – where the question of how individual
development / creativity is influenced by interpersonal,
organisational, institutional, even societal factors – you
might want to consider Greatness as a free supple-
mentary eBook for your students to use in project work
relating a topic of immense personal interest to all
students, ie the How question. Just contact me via the
blog and I’ll send along info re how other academics
are using Greatness, plus a copy of the book.

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Blog and Reading Tips

My Blog - www.greatnessbd.com - related to this
book may be worth a visit; especially if you’d like a few
photos, curious details and asides; plus a chance to
post your own (and read others’) comments, queries,
and observations. You can also check out my
responses to these, and download a free PDF of the
book.

Re the question of How to Read this Book, here are
my thoughts:
* The Text is quite short as social science research
goes (102pp), and it is written almost in story form. So
hopefully many of you will read it straight through.
* Another possibility is to simply jump ahead to the
short summary of the overall analysis (“And as for
Heroes?”, p99+), and then go back into the Text and
chase up the bits that irritate you the most.
* Likewise you could go to any of the sections in the
analysis, as outlined in the Contents, and zoom in
there as this will give you case studies illustrating the
relevant analysis.
* Another possibility is to simply start out with the
stories related to any Greats who interest you – eg
Einstein, Elvis, Mozart, Marilyn, etc. If you go to the
Greats Index, you can find the pages you want, in both
the Text and the Notes. (some of the longest case
studies – for eg, Darwin and Monet – are in the Notes).
Over 40 Greats, across many generations and fields,
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are considered in the book. These range from the
classic fields of music, art, science and literature to the
likes of popular culture and sport.
* If you are interested in the academic research which
underlies the entire analysis developed in the Text, go
to the Notes (p115+) These are considerably longer
than the Text and consider how the existing academic
research is relevant to the arguments made in the
Text.
* Finally if you want to try out the analysis in relation to
your own greatest achievements, or lack thereof, go to
the section entitled “And You & I” (p107+). There, by
way of illustration, I analyze in detail how it was that I
ended up writing this book.

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Brief Bio and Endorsements

I have a Ph.D. in Social & Clinical Psychology from
UCLA, and have published in JPSP, J. Pers, and other
APA-refereed research journals. Early on I was a
member of the Psychology Faculties at the University
of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Mount Holyoke
College. Later I worked as a family systems therapist
in the States and Ireland for several years. Inbetween
times I wrote and presented a radio program on
WMUA in Amherst (‘Dr Bill’s Myths, Lies, Facts, and
Songs’). In more recent years, in addition to a course
on ‘Social Systems, Communications, and Psycho-
logy’, I’ve been teaching the likes of ‘Creative Writing’
and ‘Dramatic Authoring for the Web’ at Dublin City
University. And yes, I once tried moving to Nashville,
but I’d say that was well before I met Mairéad or Utah
Phillips.

I spent about 15 years sorting the initial version of this
book, entitled: The Arrival of the Fittest: How The
Great Become Great (Dorris, 2011). It received very
strong endorsements from a number of internationally
prominent academics. For example, here’s a starter,
or as you baseball fans would have it, a closer. Well
actually – if you know anything about the research
literature on genius & greatness – the closer:
"Arrival is a truly fascinating book. It's not only highly
informative, but also equally inspiring!"
Dean Keith Simonton, Ph.D.
Distinguished Professor
Department of Psychology
University of California, Davis

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Since then several editors have offered me very helpful
advice re rewriting my work in a style which would
make it publishable as academic research… which I
suppose is reasonable since over half of it is still brand
new to the research literature. And after that?? I’d no
doubt get stuck into working up a few sets of exam
questions and next thing you know.. hey.. we’d all be
nodding off.

So instead I’ve added some new faces - Marie Curie,
Darwin, Mark Twain, Bob Marley, the Williams sisters,
etc. - and gone for a new, and hopefully “Google-
friendly”, title: Greatness: How The Great Become
Great… and You & I Don’t.

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Acknowledgments

In addition to many of my colleagues and students at
Dublin City University, I'd like to thank a number of
extremely busy academics – who didn't know me from
Doris Day – for taking time to read the earlier drafts of
my work, for raising a number of very helpful queries,
and for giving me such positive feedback regarding the
theoretical arguments. My favorite comment though, I
have to admit, was about the writing style: "Do you by
any chance have a revivalist background?"

My sincere thanks to Professors Robert Albert, Anders
Ericsson, David Henry Feldman, Ravenna Helson,
Robert Plomin, and John Sloboda.

Also I want to thank a large number of authors whose
works have been essential to the analysis developed in
this book, essential to documenting it. There is of
course no way I could have presented the theoretical
arguments of this book without using information from
numerous biographies and related works as data. I
have cited every quote and bit of information that I
used, but in order not to disrupt the flow of the
presentation, I rarely cite sources within the text. The
numerous sources and their authors are however fully
documented in the book’s extensive Notes. Beyond
this I especially want to thank those authors whose
works were essential to documenting the major case
studies presented in this book. After fifteen years
myself on this one, I know something of the chase.
Still whatever about my own marathon, thanks to them,
it feels like my feet barely touched the ground. So my
sincerest thanks to:

Donald Spoto, John Russell Taylor, Albert LaValley,
and Tanya Modleski re Alfred Hitchcock;
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Joe Klein, Henrietta Yurchenco, and Woody Guthrie re
Woody Guthrie;

Donald Spoto, Fred Lawrence Guiles, Carl Rollyson Jr,
Richard Dyer, and Marjorie Rosen re Marilyn Monroe;

Ernst Schenk, Edward Holmes, Michael Levey, and
Nicholas Till re Mozart;

Peter Guralnick, Charlie Gillett, and Albert Goldman re
Elvis;

Robert Katz & Celestine Dars, Carla Rachman, and
James Rubin re Monet;

Bill Russell & Taylor Branch re Bill Russell;

Abraham Pais, Ronald Clark, Roger Highfield & Paul
Carter, John Gribben & Michael White, and Albert
Einstein re Einstein;

James Watson, Francis Crick, and Harriet Zuckerman
re Watson & Crick;

Sharon McGrayne re Marie Skłodowska Curie;

Richard Williams & Bart Davis, and Serena Williams &
Daniel Paisner re the Williams sisters;

Ron Powers re Mark Twain;

Loren Eiseley, Alan Moorehead, and Arthur Koestler re
Charles Darwin.

I might also mention Mairéad re a few small matters
here and there along the way. Like, for instance, my
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