How to Become Famous: Lost Einsteins, Forgotten Superstars, and How the Beatles Came to Be by Cass R. Sunstein
Cass holds a AB and JD from Harvard. He is currently a professor at Harvard and was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School for 27 years. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School.
How to Become Famous investigates mechanisms behind why certain individuals, groups, or works become famous while others, in fact superior in quality or talent are overlooked and even forgotten.
Clearly Cass is not focusing on a step-by-step guide to achieving fame, it is in fact exploring unpredictable and often times arbitrary forces that result in fame and fortune and those who fade into obscurity.
Cass is revealing the role of luck actually serendipity. It’s the fact that talent and resilience were always important but simply not enough to achieve fame and fortune. Rather its about being in the right place at the right time: chance or having the right connections.
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So how does public opinion sway or create enthusiasm to propel certain people or works to fame, sometimes regardless of merit. Cass takes readers into social science research on phenomena such as informational cascades, network effects, and group polarization. He does not overlook stories of both famous and forgotten ‘stars’ in music, business, science, politics and literature.
The book’s central thesis is that fame is less about inherent greatness and more about a complex interplay of social dynamics, luck, and contingency planning. Perhaps more about luck. The stories are very impactful as he challenges the idea that fame is a straightforward reward for merit, suggesting instead that it often results from ‘winning the lottery’ in a set of key circumstances.
In conclusion, Cass is always going to be on the top of my to read list. His book here provides readers with a lot of thought-provoking regarding how today’s forces shape cultural fame which is so drastically different than our past 100 years.