I recently read a brilliant piece by Ben Kuhn titled “Searching for outliers.” He explains that there’s a difference in expected outcomes distribution, based on what we are sampling. It all depends on what area of life or science we are researching.

Although I encourage everyone to read the whole post, here’s a short explanation of that thinking:

“Heavy-tailed distributions are really unintuitive to most people, since all the “action” happens in the tiny fraction of samples that are outliers. But lots of important things in life are outlier-driven, like jobs, employees, or relationships, and of course the most important thing of all, blog posts. 
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Some examples of heavy and light tails:

• Income is heavy-tailed: the median person globally lives on $2,500 a year, while the top 1% live on $45,000, almost 20× more.
• Height is light-tailed: the tallest people are only a few feet taller than average. If height followed the same distribution as income, Elon Musk, who made $121b in 2021, would be about 85,000 km tall, or about ¼ of the distance from the earth to the moon.”‍

Ok, so it’s probably good for us to understand what we are looking at in a given situation or context in our life, so that we can create more realistic and scientifically better expectations for both how many samples to draw and what results to expect from our samples. It’s also very helpful for us to make sure that we understand that many of the most important things in life are heavy-tailed distributions.

Often, we shouldn’t limit our expectations, but rather focus on making sure that we sample enough and properly to find the results that are exceptional but also realistic. In simple terms: in some areas, the rare exceptions matter much more than the averages.

Now let’s bridge this idea of distributions into something practical: culture.

Think about it this way: from a standard point of view, we are the ones taking samples and testing things in our life. We expect certain results and we get results that we are either happy about, or not so much.

Then we try more.

And more.

But what I suggest here is flipping the script. What do I mean by that? In my mind, it is about totally changing our thinking about the outliers and sampling.

Listen, for everyone else in the world, you are the sample. You might be the rare exception they’ve been hoping to encounter — the one-of-a-kind colleague, friend, or partner who proves that extraordinary relationships exist.

Changing our thinking about this can make us become a positive outlier for others. And that’s how we build a great culture. Not in a company context only, but in life in general. Do you want people to have a great time at work? Become a great person to be with at work. Do you want people to have fun and inspiring conversations? Provide them for others. Do you want people to find kindness, truthfulness and thoughtfulness in their daily life? Be a kind, truthful and thoughtful person.

Recently, one of our support reps brought in fresh plum muffins; a small act that brightened a cold autumn day.
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To create an inspiring and truly exceptional culture in any environment, there must be individuals that lead by example. That’s what many of us in Rocksoft are trying to do.

It really is a sensational group of people pursuing personal development each day. It’s not only the people in leadership or management roles whose influence is so crucial, the influence - or zeitgeist - can be created by anyone in any role across the firm.  

When our people bring outlier kindness and initiative to each other, that spirit naturally extends to our work with clients. And when culture is being built like that - by real life examples, trying to be the 99.99th percentile outcomes for other people, the company slogans and values aren’t only slogans, but are the experiences of our daily situations and relationships at work.

At Rocksoft, we believe culture isn’t built through slogans and carefully outlined company values, but through everyday outlier acts of kindness, thoughtfulness, and initiative. When people choose to be that rare positive exception for others, whether through big gestures or something as simple as muffins on a rainy day, values start becoming lived experiences.