The outlier problem

I was really saddened when I learned about Steve Jobs's death, not least of which because of the circumstances leading up to it. Jobs had pancreatic cancer, normally an instant death sentence, but in his case he had an exceptionally rare operable form. However, Jobs elected not to have surgery, hoping he could cure the cancer with diet and meditation. Unfortunately, he could not, and by the time he returned to the surgical option it was too late.

But the real tragedy isn't just that Jobs died from something that may have been prevented, it's that he died from the very thing that brought him success in the first place: hubris. Jobs had made a habit throughout his career of ignoring people who told him things were impossible, and that's not a habit that normally works out very well. For him, improbably, it worked – very well, in fact – until one day it didn't work any more. This is the essence of what I call the outlier problem.

We often celebrate outliers, at least when they outlie in positive ways. Elite athletes, gifted thinkers, people of genetically improbable beauty. The view from here, huddled in the fat end of the bell curve, gazing up at the truly exceptional, makes them seem like gods. But it's worth remembering that we are clustered around this mean for a reason: it's a good mean. This mean has carried us through generations of starvation, war, exile and death, and we're still here.

It's important not to forget that an exceptional quality is a mutation, no different than webbed toes, double joints, or light skin. Sometimes being an outlier lets you get one up on the people around you and start a successful computer empire. Sometimes it lets you remake the music industry, the phone industry, and the software industry in successive years. And sometimes it means you die from treatable cancer.

I remember Steve Jobs, not as a genius or an idiot, but as a specialist: perfectly adapted to one environment and tragically maladapted to another.