Successful people do not do it alone; they are the products of particular places and environments
Joe Flom is an outlier. But he’s not an outlier for the reasons you might think, and the story of his rise provides a blueprint for understanding success in his profession.
We tell rags-to-riches stories because we find something captivating in the idea of a lone hero battling overwhelming odds. But the true story of Joe Flom’s life turns out to be much more intriguing than the mythological version. All the things in his life that seem to have been disadvantages — that he was a poor child of garment workers; that he was Jewish at a time when Jews were heavily discriminated against; that he grew up in the Depression — turn out, unexpectedly, to have been advantages.
His Jewish antecedent made it difficult for him to land a job at any law firm despite his brilliance. If you were not of the right background and religion and social class and you came out of law school in that era, you joined some smaller, second-rate, upstart law firm on a rung below the big names downtown, or you simply went into business for yourself and took “whatever came in the door” — that is, whatever legal work the big downtown firms did not want for themselves.
That seems terribly unfair, and it was. But as is so often the case with outliers, buried in that setback was a golden opportunity.
The old-line firms did not involve themselves in hostile corporate takeovers. That offered an opening for Joe Flom. His law firm had to accept those jobs and it made him grow to become an expert in hostile takeovers — a skill that would become valued as soon as the 1970s.
The second advantage for Joe Flom was demography. He was born at just the right time. Two of the great cataclysmic events of the twentieth century were: The Great Depression and World War II. If you were born after 1912 — say, in 1915 — you got out of college after the worst of the Depression was over, and you were drafted at a young enough age that going away to war for three or four years was as much an opportunity as it was a disruption (provided you weren’t killed, of course). If you were born before 1911 and graduated from college at the height of the Depression, when job opportunities were scarce and were already in your late thirties when the Second World War hit, your career and adult life would have been disrupted. To have been born before 1911 is to have been demographically unlucky.
The decade of the 1930s is what is called a “demographic trough.” In response to the economic hardship of the Depression, families simply stopped having children, and as a result, the generation born during that decade was markedly smaller than both the generation that preceded it and the generation that immediately followed it.
For a young would-be lawyer, being born in the early 1930s was a magic time, just as being born in 1955 was for a software programmer, or being born in 1835 was for an entrepreneur.
The third lesson that served as an advantage was the type of work they did at the time. Jewish immigrants like the Floms who came to America in the 19th and early 20th centuries did not enjoy the same privileges as the Irish and Italian immigrants. For centuries in Europe, they had been forbidden to own land, so they had clustered in cities and towns, taking up urban trades and professions. 70% of the Eastern European Jews who came through Ellis Island in the thirty years or so before the First World War had some kind of occupational skill. They had owned small groceries or jewelry stores. They had been bookbinders or watchmakers. Overwhelmingly, though, their experience lay in the clothing trade. They were tailors and dressmakers, hat and cap makers, and furriers and tanners.
Meaningful work combines three things: autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward. The most important consequence of the miracle of the garment industry, though, was what happened to the children growing up in those homes where meaningful work was practiced. They learned that if you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires.
Jewish family trees go on for pages, each virtually identical to the one before until the conclusion becomes inescapable:
Jewish doctors and lawyers did not become professionals in spite of their humble origins. They became professionals because of their humble origins. Their world — their culture and generation and family history — gave them the greatest of opportunities.