“The Best and the Rest: Revisiting the Norm of Normality of Individual Performance,” by Longwood University’s Ernest O’Boyle Jr. and Indiana University’s Herman Aguinis, included an amazing amount of research across a wide range of professions: five separate studies, 198 samples, and 633,263 people in fields ranging from academic research to entertainment, politics to sports. In virtually all those professions the authors found a huge difference between the best and the rest. They also found that performance was typically not distributed in the bell curve seen in the blue-collar work studies I’d previously reviewed, but rather in a long-tail (what statisticians call Paretian or power-law distribution). It’s a lot like book sales: millions of titles sell few copies a year, while only a handful sell millions of copies. Figure 8-1 shows a contrast between the two distributions.