Behavioural scientists Jerker Denrell and Gaël Le Mens call this the competency trap.39 Being good at one thing can stop us from becoming good at something else. Once you have committed to a career and become expert, it gets harder to revert to a period of being bad at something new while you learn. Once we are competent we know how unpleasant it i

Some talents are discovered in a flash of brilliance, but all talents must be patiently worked at to keep shining.

It is hard to become good at something – once we have become accomplished, we can feel reluctant to go back to being bad at something new. This is the opposite of a Vampire Problem: we know what it was like to struggle last time, and we don’t want to do it again.

Eric Yuan founded Zoom aged forty-one.28 Yuan spent fourteen years as a corporate employee and left to start a company when his idea for Zoom was rejected by his employer, Cisco Systems. If they had said yes, he would still be a corporate executive, not a billionaire.

When a city doubles in size, every measure of economic activity increases by 15 per cent per person.

Had he died at forty, he would have left behind a few poems and some journalism, read only by specialists. And it would have been difficult to see how he could have become anything greater. Before he was famous, he was a failure.

She couldn’t force what that change would be like, though, and often when we decide we want to be different, we don’t know what that new reality will be like. We have to take a leap of faith.

Many decisions, however, are not Vampire Problems: they can be reversed or adjusted. There are also many people who don’t experience change as a Vampire Problem.

Different people are influenced by different things. Some people are more strongly influenced by their parents but not by their peers, and vice versa. Some people are going to be strongly susceptible to the influence of music but not painting.