Outliers change the world

There are experts and there are outliers.

Experts spend years learning an industry or skill set. They follow processes and procedures handed down to them by previous experts. This becomes their industry-accepted, well-worn path. They know what they know. They know what works and what doesn’t work.

However, outliers almost always start out as non-experts. They don’t know what they don’t know. They are not locked into accepted theories, processes or dogmas, which are accepted as fact by experts. As a result, they follow paths that experts would never take – paths that the experts have decided are dead ends. This causes outliers to stray and take contrarian paths. And while wandering, the outliers are the ones who find solutions to problems that experts can never find, because experts rarely stray or take contrarian paths.

This is why almost every revolutionary discovery is made by some outlier.

After my radio interview with Dave Ramsey, CNN wrote a sensational piece about my research. Many ‘study experts’, ‘experts’ who had never seen my research or discussed it with me, offered their opinions. Almost every “expert” mocked my research because I was an academic outlier who dared to conduct a study. Since then, my study data has been validated by several third parties, such as Wealth X and Chris Hogan.

But I learned I wasn’t alone. There were many outliers that were also mocked by the ‘experts’.

• Leonardo da Vinci was an outlier – He was a painter and sculptor who made many discoveries: arteriosclerosis, that the heart had four chambers (not two, as the experts believed), that blood swirls in a vortex at the base of the aorta, forcing the aortic valve to close. None of his discoveries were verified until 1968, about 450 years after da Vinci’s death.
• Benjamin Franklin was on Outlier – He was a printer and politician who discovered that lightning and electricity were one and the same.
• Charles Darwin was an outlier – a theologian. He defied the experts and the church by postulating the theory of evolution.
• Nicola Tesla was an outlier – Tesla discovered that electricity was ubiquitous – it was all around us and he built a large electricity receiver/transmitter in Colorado, allowing him to distribute electricity wirelessly. He called this Free Energy. When JP Morgan found out, it stopped all financing of Tesla because much of Morgan’s wealth was tied to petroleum products. Although the design of Tesla’s Free Energy Devices has been suppressed by the US government, six of his Free Energy Devices are still active in a small town in Switzerland, created by a mechanical engineer who followed Tesla’s design.
• Thomas Edison was an outlier: he was the first to control the flow and distribution of electricity, something the experts could not do.
• Einstein was an outlier – He discovered his theory of relativity while daydreaming on the train on his way to work as a patent officer.
• Henry Ford was an outlier: he was an aspiring automaker who got his idea for an assembly line after visiting a slaughterhouse in Chicago, forever changing the way cars were produced.
• Richard Branson was an outlier – Branson entered the music business and changed the way the industry sold records and discovered new talent.
• Steve Jobs was an outlier – He and Steve Wozniak were the first to adopt the use of icons and a monitor in the first personal computers they built.
• Elon Musk is an outlier – He had zero knowledge and expertise when he decided to become a rocket manufacturer. The experts laughed at Musk’s ‘Reusable Rocket’ idea.

Not everyone can be an outlier. Outliers must have very thick skin to endure the slings and arrows of “experts” until they prove the “experts” wrong and ultimately change the world in the process.

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