This week's podcast episode is called The Rosetta Effect and is inspired by Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers. The Rosetta Mystery is a central idea in the book, which explores the deconstruction of success. The story begins with a group of immigrants from the Italian town of Rosetto who settled in Pennsylvania. They formed a close-knit community and lived a healthy and fulfilling life, free from heart disease and other issues. This unique community became known as an outlier, a place where normal rules did not apply. The podcast discusses the significance of the Rosetta Mystery in relation to personal and professional success.
Hello, hi. Welcome to this week's installment of the Dirty Shirt Podcast with me, your host, Cheo. The podcast where we focus on holistic, professional, and personal success by growing and developing the common denominator to all your successes, all your failures, and everything in between – you. It's about the mindset, emotional regulation, and the intentional personal development that underpins holistic success. Today's installment is called The Rosetta Effect. The Rosetta Effect is inspired by the opening pages of one of my favorite books, and I have many favorite books, but this is one of my favorite, Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers.
The tagline to this book is the story of success, and in issuing their comments or their criticism or their view on the book, the Times called it inspiring, revelatory – just two words. And revelatory is a descriptive word that I found particularly apt in reading the book. The book has many ideas around deconstructing and demystifying success, but one of my favorite is The Rosetta Mystery, and I can do very little in its telling to improve on the way that Malcolm Gladwell has already told the story, so I'm going to stick very closely to his telling of the story, and in doing so, I hope that you can stick with me until the end and you can hear why The Rosetta Mystery is so pertinent to any journey of success, to any journey of a long and fulfilled life, and to any journey of a healthy life.
In short, The Rosetta Mystery is central to a long and well-lived life. So outlier, the definition, describes the word as a noun. The first definition is something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body. Number two, a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample. Rosetto Valtafore lies 100 miles southeast of Rome, in the Apennine foothills of the Italian province of Foggia. In the style of medieval villages, the town is organized around a large central square.
Facing the square is the Palazzo Marcesale, the palace of the Seghese family, and I'm saying these words in exactly the way I've read them, not knowing whether I'm reading them accurately or not, because I've never been there and I've never heard these words spoken by people who know how to say them, so I apologize if I am mispronouncing them, but it's the principle that matters. The Palazzo, or the palace of the Seghese family, is named for the great landowner of those parts.
An archway to one side leads to a church, the Madonna del Carmine, or the Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmine. Narrow stone steps run up the hillside, flanked by closely clustered two-story stone houses with red tile roofs. For centuries the people of Rosetto worked in the marble quarries in the surrounding hills, a hard existence, or they cultivated the fields in the terraced valley below, walking four and five miles down the mountain in the morning, and then making the long journey back up the hill at night.
Life was hard. The town's folk were barely literate and desperately poor, and without much hope for economic betterment. That was until word reached Rosetto at the end of the nineteenth century of a land of opportunity across the ocean. In January of 1882, a group of eleven Rosettans, ten men and one boy, set sail for New York. They spent their first night in America sleeping on the floor of a tavern on Marbury Street, in Manhattan's Little Italy.
Then they ventured west, eventually finding jobs in a slate quarry, ninety miles west of the city, near the town of Bangor, Pennsylvania. The following year, fifteen Rosettans left Italy for America, and several members of that group ended up in Bangor as well, joining their compatriots in the slate quarry. It's interesting to me that they traveled all those miles across an ocean, and they landed up doing the same job. But anyway, story for another day. Those immigrants, in turn, sent word back to Rosetto about the promise of the New World, and soon one group of Rosettans after another packed up their bags and headed to Pennsylvania, until the initial stream of immigrants became a flood.
In 1894 alone, some twelve hundred Rosettans, which is an astronomical number in that time, headed for Pennsylvania. They applied for passports to America. They left entire streets of their old village abandoned. The Rosettans began buying land on a rocky hillside connected to Bangor by a steep, rutted wagon path. They built closely clustered two-story stone houses with slate roofs on narrow streets running up and down the hillside. They built a church and called it Our Lady of Mount Carmine, and named the main street on which it stood Garibaldi Avenue, after the great hero of Italian unification.
In the beginning, they called their town New Italy, which is not surprising because it reads to me quite like they were recreating the place that they had left. But they soon changed it to Rosetto, which seemed more appropriate, given that almost all of them, almost the entire village, had simply relocated. In 1896, a young and dynamic priest by the name of Father Pascal took over Our Lady of Mount Carmine. De Nisco, I may have said that wrong, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, this is now the church they had built in New York.
Having taken over, Father Pascal set up spiritual societies, organized festivals. He encouraged the townsfolk to clear the land and to plant onions, beans, potatoes, melons, and fruit trees in the long backyards behind their houses. He gave out seeds and bulbs. The town came to life. The Rosettans began raising pigs in their backyards and growing grapes for homemade wine. School, a park, a convent, and a cemetery were built. Small shops and bakeries and restaurants and bars opened along Garibaldi Avenue.
More than a dozen factories sprang up, making blouses for the garment trade. Bengal was largely Welsh and English, and the next town over was overwhelmingly German, which meant, given the fractious relationship between the English and the Germans and the Italians in those years, that Rosetto stayed strictly for Rosettans. If you had wandered up and down the streets of Rosetto in Pennsylvania in the first few decades after 1900, you would have heard only Italian, and not just any Italian, but the precise southern Foggian dialect spoken back in the Italian Rosetto.
Rosetto, Pennsylvania, was its own tiny, self-sufficient world, all but unknown by the society around it, and it might well have remained so but for a man named Stuart Wolfe. Stuart Wolfe was a physician. He studied digestion and the stomach, and taught in the medical school at the University of Oklahoma. He spent his summers on a farm in Pennsylvania, not far from Rosetto, although that, of course, didn't mean much, since Rosetto was so much in its own world that it was possible to live in the next town and never know much about it.
One of the times when we were up there for summer, he describes it. This would have been in around the 1950s. I was invited to give a talk at the local medical society. Wolfe would tell the story years later. After the talk was over, one of the local doctors invited me to have a beer, and while we were having a drink, he said, you know, I've been practicing for 17 years. I get patients from all over, and I rarely find anyone from Rosetto under the age of 65 with heart disease.
Wolfe was taken aback. This was in the 1950s, years before the advent of cholesterol-lowering drugs and aggressive measures to prevent heart disease. Heart attacks were an epidemic in the United States. They were the leading cause of death in men under the age of 65. It was impossible to be a doctor, Common Sense said, and not see heart disease. What was going on? Wolfe decided to investigate. He enlisted the support of some of his students and colleagues from Oklahoma.
They gathered together the death certificates from the residents of the town, going back as many years as they could. They analyzed physician records. They took medical histories. They constructed family genealogies. We got busy, he described it. We decided to do a preliminary study, and we started in 1961. The mayor said, all my sisters are going to help him. He had four sisters. You can have the town council room, he said. Where are you going to have town council meetings, Wolfe asked him.
Well, we'll postpone them for a while. Isn't it lovely to be self-sufficient? The ladies would bring us lunch. We had little booths where we could take blood, do EKGs. We were there for four weeks. Then I talked with the authorities. They gave us the school for the summer. We invited the entire population of Roseto to be tested. The results were astonishing. In Roseto, virtually no one under 55 had died of a heart attack or showed any signs of heart disease.
For men over 65, the death rate from heart disease in Roseto was roughly half of the United States as a whole. The death rate from all causes in Roseto, in fact, was 30 to 35 percent lower than expected. Wolfe brought in a friend of his, a sociologist from Oklahoma named John Broon, to help him. I hired medical students, sociology grad students. We did interviews, and in Roseto we went from house to house and talked to every person age 21 and over.
This happened more than 50 years before he told the story, but Broon still has a sense of amazement and had a sense of amazement in his voice when he described what they had found. They found that there was no suicide, there was no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn't have anyone on welfare. When we looked at peptic ulcers, they didn't have any of those either. These people were dying of old age, that's it.
Do you understand how extraordinary that is, that people would just be dying of old age? Wolfe's profession had a name for a place like Roseto, a place that lay outside everyday experience where the normal rules did not apply. Roseto was an outlier. Wolfe first thought that the Rosetans must have had some sort of dietary practice from the old world that had made them healthier than other Americans, but he quickly realized that wasn't true. The Rosetans were cooking with lard instead of with the healthier olive oil that they had used back in Italy.
Pizza in Italy was a thin crust with salt, oil, and perhaps some tomatoes, anchovies, and onions. Pizza in Pennsylvania was bread dough, plus sausage, pepperoni, salami, ham, eggs. Sweets such as biscotti and taralli used to be reserved for Christmas and Easter in Roseto, but they were eaten all year round in America. When Wolfe had dieticians analyze the typical Rosetans eating habits, they found that a whopping 41% of their calories came from fat. Nor was this town where people got up at dawn to do yoga or run a brisk six miles.
The Pennsylvanian Rosetans smoked heavily, and many were struggling with obesity. Why weren't they dying? If diet and exercise didn't explain the findings, then what about genetics? The Rosetans were a very close-knit group from the same region of Italy, and Wolfe's next thought was to wonder whether they were of a particularly hardy stalk that protected them from disease. So he tracked down relatives of the Rosetans who were living in other parts of the United States to see if they shared the same remarkable good health as their cousins in Pennsylvania.
They didn't. He then looked at the region where the Rosetans lived. Was it possible that something about living in the foothills of eastern Pennsylvania was good for their health? The two closest towns to Roseto were Bangor, which we've already spoken about, which was just downhill, and Nazareth, a few miles away. They were both about the same size as Roseto, and both were populated with the same kind of hard-working European immigrants. Wolfe combed through both towns' medical records.
For men over 65, the death rates from heart disease in Nazareth and Bangor were three times that of Roseto, another dead end. What Wolfe began to realize was that the secret of Roseto wasn't diet or exercise or genes or location. It had to be Roseto itself. As Brun and Wolfe walked through the town, they figured out why. They looked at how the Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street. Say hi, cook for one another in their backyards.
They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town's social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted 22 separate civic organizations in a town of just under 2,000 people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the community, which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.
In transplanting the culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania, the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills protected them. He says, I remember going to Roseto for the first time, and you would see three-generational family meals. All the bakeries, the people walking up and down the street, sitting on their porches talking to each other, the blouse mills where the women worked during the day while the men worked in the slate quarries, Brun said.
It was magical. When Brun and Wolf first presented their findings to the medical community, you can imagine the kind of skepticism they faced. They went to conferences where their peers were presenting long rows of data arrayed in complex charts and referring to this kind of gene or that kind of physiological process, and they themselves were talking instead about the mysterious and magical effects of people stopping to talk to one another on the street and having three generations under one roof.
Living a long life, the conventional wisdom of the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were, and that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made, on what we chose to eat and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community. Wolf and Brun had to convince the medical establishment to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new way.
They had to get them to realize that they wouldn't be able to understand why someone was healthy if all they did was think about an individual's personal choices or actions in isolation. They had to look beyond the individual. They had to understand the culture he or she was part of, who their friends and families were, and what town their families came from. They had to appreciate the idea that the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.
Malcolm closes this section by saying, in outliers, he wants to do for our understanding of success what Stuart Wolf did for the understanding of health. And I hope that in sharing this section, I've done for your understanding of success what Malcolm Gladwell intended, that I have made it clear to you that who you surround yourself with, that the community you're a part of, is an essential feature, an essential cornerstone of the success that you are capable of achieving.
I have experienced this personally in the last three years. I've made no secret of the fact that my life has changed dramatically for the better over the last three years. And one of the biggest things that I changed, despite being afraid to do so, was the community around me. It was realizing that I had no control over what the algorithm was showing me. I let go of my Instagram account, which was successful by any standards. It was my novice mommy Instagram account, because the algorithm was haywire.
It showed me whatever was trending. It showed me whatever was doing great. And I didn't have the strength to fight the algorithm at that time. And so I started a new Instagram account. And I was ruthless in selecting what the Instagram algorithm could show me. I was only prepared to see things that had to do with well-being, with conscious parenting, with holistic success. And over time, as the algorithm understood that that is all I was prepared to see, I've come to a place now where that is all I see.
No matter what wild story is trending in the world, I almost never see or hear about it unless someone mentions it to me. Because I've insulated myself from the things that were causing chaos in me, or causing chaos in my mind, and in my heart, and in my head. I went through a difficult divorce. And in doing so, as one does, I also lost a lot of friends, some of whom were mutual friends to my former spouse and I.
But that was all right. I let go of a lot of relationships that had been rooted in a version of me that no longer existed. I had to learn that in order for this new version of me to take root and to do well, I had to be planted among similar plants. There's a reason why when a plant grows amongst other plants that are not the same and not complementary, it dies. I had to choose to uproot myself and seek out relationships that would nurture me in the way that I wanted to go.
And that meant a loss in that time, but an amazing benefit in the years since then. I learned, not as a part of the divorce, and not in the last three years, but over the last four, five, six years, I understood what it means to eat healthy. And I started learning it not because I had some great aspirations about eating healthy. I started figuring out food because my then husband had very high cholesterol and was in danger of having a heart attack.
He was not overweight or he didn't look overweight, but somehow his health statistics were dangerous. And so I changed the way everybody ate, as one does for someone else when you care about them. I changed the way everybody ate. I learned what was good for us, what wasn't good for us. And I introduced the concept of eating brown rice, more vegetables, roasting meat instead of... I did away with stews. I did away with oil-based cooking. A lot of our meat became baked.
And it had a slow effect over time, but then it had a dramatic effect health-wise. The statistics came into the right range. He became healthy again. But an interesting side effect for me was that I then lost weight. My body balanced out to a healthier weight. And I found that I got asked by many people, what did you do to lose weight? What did you do something special? It's a question I still get asked. Do you have a secret? And I would answer, no, I just eat clean.
And a very interesting thing would happen each time. They were just like, can you tell us exactly how to do it? And then I would say it. And it's very uninteresting. You really have to make the better choice. Or you just make the better choice 80% of the time. If you have a choice between a healthier option and a not-so-healthy option compared to the other, pick the healthier one. That's it. And I found that I would get added to WhatsApp groups or to conversations about this.
And I found that people would form groups that were ostensibly to gain weight, but everything about the language and behavior supported by the group had to do with the opposite outcome. Consequently, no matter how much the information was laid in front of the participants, they would consistently achieve the opposite outcome. And it's not a thing that I'm judging. It's an observation. Because that is the power of the community that you surround yourself with. And I've found that eating healthy and eating clean and eating etc.
is always easier when you're doing it with people who do it too. My community is not necessarily the people that I live with. My community is online. It's seeing people eating that way and doing well and how they're building muscle, etc. And that has worked really well for me. I also found that sometimes you get accustomed. If you're a person who has grown up accustomed to emotional difficulty, whether that is rejection or exclusion or anything of the sort.
If you're a person who's grown up in that manner, it is very easy to settle or to think that you belong in spaces where you are rejected in subtle ways because your alarms don't go off early enough. Or where you feel pain in subtle ways and your alarms don't go off because that is normal for you. And when you heal and you remove your... One of the side effects of healing is learning to remove yourself from those places.
Understanding that loving someone or loving people doesn't necessarily equate to them being good for you. Loving a certain food doesn't equate to it being good for you. Loving a certain community doesn't equate to it being good for you. What you have to do is be mindful of the fact that you are the average of the people that you're hanging out with. This quote has been used and reused many times, I think. Sometimes it's attributed to a motivational speaker.
I think his name is Jim Rohn. I could be saying him incorrectly. But the truth is, whatever the goal you're trying to achieve, you are not going to achieve it if you are surrounded by people who are not aiming for the same thing. And in a world where we are so connected by the internet and we're so connected in so many other ways, you have no excuse to not find your people and to be with them in one way or the other.
In Atomic Habits, one of the key habits that James Clear identifies is, go where the behavior that you seek to achieve is normal behavior. Where the behavior you seek to achieve is normal behavior. Steve Harvey, in giving one of his talks, he gives motivational talks. He's a comedian, yes, but he also gives short little motivational talks and he's rather good at it. One of the things he said was, if you aspire to first class, if you aspire to traveling business class, save money, get points, whatever it is you need to do, figure out the credit card system.
But when I say figure out the credit card system, I mean earn travel points, not that you should go run a line of credit. And experience what it is to be in business class. Once you have experienced what it is to be in business class, excuse me, so I'm still recovering and I'm sitting very precariously and I've decided to record this in the middle of the night because I can't sleep and then I've opted not to take my painkillers because I want to be clear headed to make the recording because, you know, I'm a crazy person.
And here we are. So yeah, I just, I just knocked myself in the wrong way there. But the idea is this, and I think we've spoken about it before, I'm sure I've done an episode on the flea in the lidded jar. If you grow up seeing people only jump so high, you will believe that you can only jump so high, even if your potential is higher. If you grow up around people who are generally happy, people who understand that joy is an integral part of living, then you are also prone to joy and understanding that joy is an integral part of living.
In fact, what the research then shows from Malcolm, that Malcolm Gladwell summarizes, is that surrounding yourself with people who are living a holistically successful life not only makes you more likely to be holistically successful, it also against all odds means that you live a longer and a healthier life. Isn't that what we all want? A longer and a healthier life in which to enjoy our holistic success, no matter what that may look like. Understand the power of the communities that you're placing yourself within.
Understand that you are the average of the communities that you spend time with. You are the average of the five friends that you spend time with. You are the average of the five mindsets that you spend time with. You are the average of the five people that you gossip with. Are you proud of that average? If you're not, do something about it. I hope you have a wonderful week. If you like the episode, please like, subscribe, share, send me feedback.
I love, love, love receiving feedback. I'm receiving more and more of it. I so appreciate it. I often feel like I'm speaking to no one in particular, but I'm so driven to do this that I get up anyway and I do it. And every time I get a message from someone telling me that they've listened and it has changed something. I recently got one telling me about how someone managed to get a raise using some of the principles that I had given them.
And I was elated for it. I was absolutely delighted and I felt truly fulfilled. Thank you to everybody. Have a blessed week. Go create something. And I'm going to go take my take.
