Interesting. Yes, changing the prevalent approach or status quo takes a lot of courage. However, i am not able to agree that that is more difficult than Extremistan professions. In Extremistan, you don’t have any recipe which makes it exponentially harder. Whereas, in Mediocristan, the recipe is known. yes people attempting to change the recipe do need to have a lot of courage but i would argue that it is less risky than the Extremistan professions.

As for the debate on the ideas that NNT proposes via Black Swan, yes….I agree with you. Even a person who is in a ‘common’ job can get highly successful if she deviates from conventional approaches and invents something radically different. In fact, such a person could perhaps end up being more successful – from the perspective of society at large – than a person who adopts an unconventional profession and charts a brand new path altogether. It takes more courage to break the conventional approaches in a known area than adopt a brand new path altogether. Because there will be more resistance in the former situation than in the latter. People who take brand new paths are, arguably, likely to be ignored. People who try to change approaches that have been used for centuries, on the other hand, are seen as a threat. If they succeed in overcoming the threat and go ahead to prove another – better – way of doing something, they will perhaps be seen as braver and stronger than many other people.

Thank you, once again, for a thought-provoking post!