Outdoing The Superstar is a large and complex task, and I won’t pretend to have all the answers. However, I’ve had this nagging suspicion in the back of my mind for years. My suspicion is that people drastically overestimate this risk, and that with a good plan and enough resources, you could have an excellent chance at “outdoing The Superstar”.
Music appears to be a straightforward counter-example to your claim. Loads and loads of artists and bands struggle in obscurity for their whole lives, without being close to superstar. As someone surrounded by highly trained classical musicians, I know that they are mostly not going to be famous, because I know lots that have spent their lives being exactly that. Daniel Kahneman did some work in hedonism, and I recall him saying that music was an industry you should get in to if you want to be reliably unhappy, and theorising that this was because you never get anywhere. I think that this argument misses out the behavioural economics side, that people not only want the best, but people are going to want to keep with the current superstar, because they are high status too. Also, have you spent time looking for theories about why nobody else is jumping onto this mahoosive gap in the market? Any bias theory?
If you feel that you have a way of beating the market in, say, the education industry, feel free to go out and actually do it. But saying that it appears to be easy, seems an obvious error. What you actually have done is noticed a number of problems and flaws with a current system. They are all valid, and you’re not the first to notice them. The education system is hard to change, due to the political situation it is controlled by, and that may be part of the reason that it is not fixed; because the people in charge have no incentive to do so.
Music appears to be a straightforward counter-example to your claim. Loads and loads of artists and bands struggle in obscurity for their whole lives, without being close to superstar. As someone surrounded by highly trained classical musicians, I know that they are mostly not going to be famous, because I know lots that have spent their lives being exactly that. Daniel Kahneman did some work in hedonism, and I recall him saying that music was an industry you should get in to if you want to be reliably unhappy, and theorising that this was because you never get anywhere. I think that this argument misses out the behavioural economics side, that people not only want the best, but people are going to want to keep with the current superstar, because they are high status too. Also, have you spent time looking for theories about why nobody else is jumping onto this mahoosive gap in the market? Any bias theory?
If you feel that you have a way of beating the market in, say, the education industry, feel free to go out and actually do it. But saying that it appears to be easy, seems an obvious error. What you actually have done is noticed a number of problems and flaws with a current system. They are all valid, and you’re not the first to notice them. The education system is hard to change, due to the political situation it is controlled by, and that may be part of the reason that it is not fixed; because the people in charge have no incentive to do so.