What If Success Has Less to Do With You Than You Think?

We love the story of the lone genius. From Archimedes in his bathtub to Newton under his apple tree, we celebrate the idea that human progress is a story of singular, brilliant minds solving the world’s problems through sheer brainpower. The common belief is that our species dominates the planet because our large brains give us a unique capacity for individual intelligence.

But recent findings from anthropology, psychology, and risk analysis tell a completely different and far more surprising story. Our greatest triumphs are not the product of individual intellect. Instead, they are rooted in counter-intuitive forces: our collective brain, our hunger for ritual, our embrace of chaos, and the deep social bonds forged through shared suffering.

This post will explore five of the most impactful truths about human success that challenge our most cherished myths and reveal the real secrets behind our remarkable journey.

We Aren’t Smart as Individuals—We’re Smart as a Species

The idea that we conquered the world with our big, smart brains is deeply ingrained, but it falls apart under scrutiny. As evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich argues, the true engine of our success is our “collective brain”—a vast, shared pool of knowledge, skills, and strategies accumulated over countless generations through social learning.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the stories of “Lost European Explorers.”

• The Franklin Expedition of 1845 was the best-equipped Arctic mission of its time, with 129 men, reinforced ships, and a three-year supply of preserved food. When their ships became trapped in ice, every single crew member perished. Yet, smaller, less-equipped crews who found themselves in the same predicament survived by learning from the local Inuit, who had millennia of cultural knowledge about how to thrive in the Arctic.
• The Burke and Wills expedition in Australia provides an even starker example. Starving in the desert, the explorers were shown a plant called nardoo by local Aboriginal people, which they believed would save them. For over a month, they collected and ate pounds of nardoo daily, yet grew weaker and weaker until they died. They had the food source but lacked the vital cultural technology—a specific, non-obvious processing technique that the local population had perfected over centuries to neutralize the plant’s poison.

Stripped of our culturally acquired know-how, humans are surprisingly helpless. The complex knowledge required to survive—from building a kayak to detoxifying a plant—is not something one person could invent in a lifetime. It’s the product of a cumulative process where accidental discoveries and small improvements are passed down and refined across generations.

The secret of our species’ success resides not in the power of our individual minds, but in the collective brains of our communities. Our collective brains arise from the synthesis of our cultural and social natures—from the fact that we readily learn from others (are cultural) and can, with the right norms, live in large and widely interconnected groups (are social).

Civilization Wasn’t Built on a Full Stomach, but on an Urge for Ritual

If our intelligence is collective, not individual, what about the very engine of our civilization? Here too, the story we tell ourselves about rational self-interest may be wrong.

The conventional timeline of human history is simple: first came the Agricultural Revolution, which provided a stable food supply. This allowed hunter-gatherers to settle down, form large communities, and eventually build complex societies with monumental architecture and organized religion.

The archaeological site of Göbekli Tepe in modern-day Turkey turns this entire story on its head. Uncovered in the 1990s, it is a massive, sophisticated temple complex with intricately carved stone pillars. The astonishing part? It was built around 11,600 years ago by hunter-gatherers, thousands of years before the invention of agriculture.

The implication of this discovery, as anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas explains, is radical. The immense effort required to build Göbekli Tepe suggests that it was the powerful, unifying urge for collective ritual that first brought people together in large, settled communities. Farming may not have been the cause of civilization, but a consequence of it—a solution to the problem of feeding the large, stationary populations that had gathered for ceremonial purposes.

This is especially compelling when you consider that the shift to agriculture led to a “sharp decline in living conditions” for early farmers, who suffered from poorer nutrition and worked longer hours than their forager ancestors. The motivation to make such a drastic and initially detrimental change must have been incredibly powerful. Göbekli Tepe forces us to ask a profound question: What if the engine of civilization wasn’t our hunger for food, but our hunger for meaning and community?

We Don’t Just Tolerate Chaos; We Thrive on It

In our modern world, we strive to eliminate volatility. We want stable incomes, predictable markets, and controlled environments. But according to scholar and risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb, this relentless pursuit of stability is making our systems dangerously fragile. He introduces the concept of “Antifragility”—a quality that goes beyond mere resilience. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.

Here we find a profound paradox for our modern sensibilities: our relentless effort to shield our systems from stress and shocks is precisely what makes them so vulnerable to catastrophic failure. Small-scale volatility acts like a source of information and a series of strengthening exercises. Removing it doesn’t make a system safe; it just makes it blind and vulnerable to a single, catastrophic collapse.

• Biology: The human body is a perfect example. Our bones get denser and stronger when subjected to the stress of exercise (a principle known as Wolff’s Law). Without that stress, they become brittle.
• Economics: Taleb contrasts the steady salary of an office employee with the variable income of a taxi driver. The employee’s income seems safe, but it is fragile to a single large shock, like being fired. The taxi driver’s income is volatile day-to-day, but that very volatility provides constant feedback, forcing adaptation and making them more robust to unexpected economic shifts. In Taleb’s terms, the taxi driver lives in ‘Mediocristan,’ a world of constant, manageable fluctuations that provide feedback. The salaried employee lives in ‘Extremistan,’ a world of artificial calm that is catastrophically vulnerable to a single, unpredictable ‘Black Swan’ event.

This reveals that our modern quest for perfect efficiency—from just-in-time supply chains to tightly scheduled lives—is not creating strength, but a hidden and dangerous brittleness.

The Strongest Social Bonds Are Forged in Pain

From fire-walking in Greece to the Thaipusam Kavadi festival in Mauritius, where devotees pierce their bodies with hooks and skewers, extreme and painful rituals are a recurring feature of human societies. To an outsider, they can seem bizarre and masochistic. But research by Dimitris Xygalatas reveals that these shared ordeals are among the most powerful tools ever devised for forging social cohesion.

When a group endures a costly and intense experience together, powerful biological mechanisms kick in:

• Physiological Synchrony: The shared high-arousal state causes participants’ bodies to sync up. In studies of Spanish fire-walkers, the heart rates of both performers and related spectators became synchronized during the peak of the ritual, creating a tangible sense of shared experience.
• Hormonal Bonding: These intense experiences trigger a flood of endorphins and bonding hormones like oxytocin. This creates deep feelings of trust and togetherness at a molecular level, transforming how individuals feel about one another.

This is amplified by a psychological principle called “effort justification”: we place greater value on groups that we had to suffer to join. The shared pain isn’t a bug; it’s the feature that makes the ritual so effective. This isn’t just about extreme rituals in distant lands; it’s the same psychological principle that makes military boot camp, grueling medical residencies, or even intensely difficult team projects forge bonds that last a lifetime.

The next day, you see another person in the street, and you know you’ve been through this ritual together, you’ve bonded, you now have a different relationship to this person. Even if someone was your enemy, when you’re there, they become your comrades, your brothers.

Culture Isn’t Just in Our Heads; It’s in Our Genes

We tend to think of “nature” (our genes) and “nurture” (our culture) as two separate forces acting upon us. But Joseph Henrich’s work on culture-gene coevolution shows that this is a false dichotomy. For much of our species’ history, culture has been the primary driver of our genetic evolution, reshaping our very biology. As our ancestors developed new tools, practices, and ways of life, they created new selective pressures that favored certain genes over others.

Two of the clearest examples are:

• Dairying and Lactase Persistence: Most mammals, including humans, stop producing the enzyme lactase (which digests milk sugar) after infancy. However, after some human populations began the cultural practice of domesticating and milking animals, a powerful new selective pressure emerged. Individuals with a random genetic mutation that allowed them to continue producing lactase into adulthood had a rich new source of nutrition. Over thousands of years, this gene for “lactase persistence” spread rapidly through dairy-farming populations in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
• Cooking and Digestion: The culturally transmitted technology of cooking effectively externalized a key part of our digestion. Heating food breaks down tough fibers and proteins before they even enter our bodies. This cultural innovation created an environment where smaller stomachs, shorter intestines, and weaker jaws were no longer a disadvantage. In fact, they were metabolically cheaper, freeing up energy that could be redirected to our growing brains. Our bodies genetically adapted to a world with cooked food.

This shows that our biology is not a fixed foundation upon which culture is built. Instead, our genes and our culture are locked in a dynamic dance. Most profoundly, this process is not glacial; culture can create selection pressures that are more powerful and rapid than those seen elsewhere in nature, fundamentally accelerating the pace of our own genetic evolution.

Conclusion: Rethinking the Human Story

The story of human success is not about the lone genius, but about the social learner. It’s not about rational optimization, but about the unifying power of shared rituals. It’s not about avoiding stress, but about harnessing it to grow stronger. Our triumphs as a species are built on a foundation of social learning, shared experience, and an embrace of uncertainty—forces that often seem messy, inefficient, and even irrational. The “collective brain” itself is a profoundly antifragile system, where the small, distributed errors of millions of individuals over generations build a body of cultural knowledge so robust it can outlast empires. We are, first and foremost, a deeply interconnected, cultural species.

If our success is truly built on these counter-intuitive foundations, what might we be losing in a world that prizes individual achievement, predictable comfort, and sterile rationality above all else?