Ancient Vikings
There’s not a lot known about bronze era Scandinavians because way back in the bronze era which, was before about 1200 BC, there was never a large enough population to create lasting infrastructure that historians and archaeologists can look at and try to piece together what kind of society they had.
All they really have were various burial elements, but they do know that based on some of these burial elements, there were at least two distinct classes. The higher class people were farmers that owned a lot of animals and the lower-class people were farmers that only grew stuff out of the ground.
If you study fashion you’ll know a very consistent trend that happens and has been happening for quite a while. New fashion always starts out in the upper class, in the elites, and then eventually it is copied by the people just below them on the social status hierarchy. Then eventually it makes its way down into the riffraff, into the middle class.
Stay Above The Riff Raff
When it makes its way to the riffraff, in the middle class, then the elites have to come up with a new fashion.
One way to look at evolution as one long continuously randomly happening split test. Every time there is some type of random genetic mutations that happens to be beneficial to whatever species has that randomly created genetic mutation keeps it and gets rid of the old one.
Every time there’s an upgrade, the species slowly evolves towards more and more replicate-ability. There is one interesting genetic mutation that turned out to have a huge impact on human history. It’s very common to think of the idea of reverse engineering success.
Reverse Engineer Success
If you wanted to study a successful person, you would simply need to copy what they do and you can copy their success. Unfortunately this leaves out a lot of variables because one of the things that you need to copy is not only the stuff they do but the stuff they didn’t do as well.
Since a lot of success happens naturally automatically organically spontaneously the successful people don’t really know exactly why they were successful. To the extent you can reverse engineer what they did it might be better to think in terms of structure instead of thinking about reverse engineering the content of what they did. Think maybe about reverse engineering the structure of their behavior the types of behaviors they exhibited towards their success and see if maybe you can replicate that.
One of the most misunderstood functions, elements, variables of success is something called survivorship bias. If you imagine 10,000 people there were all going to try to become best-selling novelists, and you might imagine that they would each write one novel per year for 10 years. 10 years later you would have maybe 50 or 25 or 10 or less that were writing fantastic novels that were very powerful bestsellers.
Survivorship Bias
The question is if you look at all 10,000 people before they started would you be able to predict which ones would be the most successful before they started writing and the answer is almost certainly no.
Everything, every large group of things, people, elements, are necessarily constrained to the Pareto principle. The Pareto principle says within any given system, 20% of the system will be doing 80% of the work of that system. If you have 100 people, hundred salespeople at a big company, you’re going to have 20 of those salespeople making 80% of the revenue.
If you’re a publishing company and you publish fiction every year and if you publish 1000 novels every year, you’ll have 20% of those novels making 80% of the revenue for the publishing company. The problem is no one ever knows before hand which is going to go to that 20% and which is going to go into the 80%.
Predict Beforehand?
For every best-selling novel, you probably have 10 that the publishers and all the experts thought would become bestsellers but they crashed and burned. For every blockbuster movie you probably have five or 10 movies where they lost money.
Before any event happens, nobody knows it is going to be successful or not. But if you look after, if you look at any group and all that is left standing as the winners, you can mistakenly think that if you look at the winners you know exactly why they’re successful.
Survivorship bias says you can only wait for time to go by and see who the last man standing is. To find out who will actually win, there’s no way to predict that before, but you can however reverse engineer the structure of their behavior. One the most common elements of any kind of success is trial and error and a willingness to act in the face of uncertainty.
Trial And Error Learning
One thing all successful people do is they continue to try new things. They continue to act in the face of uncertainty. They continue to learn by trial and error and only by being willing to learn by trial and error can you continuously discover new techniques, new ideas, new skills, new behaviors that will help you become very successful.
One of the great paradoxes of the desire for successes is everybody is desperate for success. Everybody would love to be rich. Everybody would love to be famous, but at the same time everybody is terrified of any kind of failure. Everybody is terrified of any type of uncertainty.
This creates this strange idea that there can exist some ideas, some blueprints, some step-by-step set of guaranteed processes by which you can achieve success. This is absolutely impossible. The one thing in common that all successful people have is they kept trying. They kept trying, they kept learning by trial and error. They kept learning from their own results that they got.
No Copy and Paste System
They didn’t learn by listening to what other people told them to do. They learned by their own trial and error and unless you are willing to learn your own trial and error you will never have more success than you have right now.
One of the most powerful genetic mistakes in human history was the ability of humans to digest milk later into adulthood. Up into a certain time all humans were lactose intolerant past childhood, but what being able to digest milk allowed people to do was live up on the steppes. To live on the high plains of the Eurasian steppe.
If you look at the history of people, you have two types of people. You have the type of people that lived in these gigantic empires. They were based on farming. They were able to get a lot of consistent calories out of the ground. Then you had these nomads that lived in between these big empires.
Always Roaming
These nomads didn’t need to farm. These nomads didn’t need to hunt. These nomads didn’t need to gather. All they needed was a bunch of animals that would eat the only stuff that would grow naturally which was usually grass and the grass was all that could grow because on the steppe, the high plains the soil couldn’t support farming.
There wasn’t enough water. There weren’t enough nutrients in the soil but all these nomads had to do was hang out with their animals. Their animals would eat the grass. Their animals would convert the grass into food inside of their bodies. Then the nomads would just drink the milk from their animals.
Once humans had that genetic mistake to drink the milk of animals, they found ways to get food that was never possible before. One of the things that these nomads, one of the things that the existence of these nomads made possible was the Silk Road.
Global Markets of Antiquity
You could buy stuff in Italy, in Rome that was made in China. You could buy stuff in China that was made in Rome way back in the days of the Roman Empire. This was only possible because you have this long stream of people from one end of the continent to the other of the Eurasian continent.
You have these gigantic agricultural-based empires and in between them lived these nomads that lived off of their animals that lived off of the grass that was the only thing that would grow on the steppe.
Some of these nomads were very, very successful. Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, these were nomads that became so successful they took over these large agrarian-based empires.
Keep Changing Fashions
The reason, of course, that the elites keep changing fashions because they absolutely cannot, will not be caught dead wearing the same fashion as the riffraff. Once the new fashion that they wear becomes, once the new fashion they started starts to trickle down into the riffraff, they have to change because they do not want to be like everybody else.
That’s the whole point of being an elite. Of having everybody know that you’re above everybody else. So as soon as their fashion is copied by the middle-class riffraff they are forced to get another fashion.
One of the reasons they suspect that these cattle owners in bronze era Scandinavia were of a higher class and the farmers was because that far north there simply wasn’t a lot of farmland. Not like there was in Mesopotamia.
Poor Dirt Farmers
So the farmers that had to get food out of the ground were very limited to the amount of wealth that they could get.
The people that were of a higher class simply were higher class because they had more access to wealth. Of course back in those days wealth was the amount of stuff, the amount of calories you could get. Because the pastoralists, because the animal keepers could get more wealth than the farmers, they were considered of the higher class.
Because class distinctions are always about access to wealth.
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