Stealing bases in baseball is correlated with this one thing.
Being a younger sibling.
Of course, this sounds crazy. But the intuition makes sense.
In short, younger siblings are simply more likely to take risks.
But this fact is not only true in baseball. It is true in the type of sport chosen to begin with and in nearly every other area of life.
The point is that if you need a rebel on your side, pick a younger sibling.
But if you come from, or have, a big family, you already knew that – didn’t you?
Aiming to determine why some baseball players steal more bases than others, historian of science Frank Sulloway and psychologist Richard Zweigenhaft did something clever. They identified more than four hundred brothers who played professional baseball, which enabled them to compare individuals from the same families, who shared half their DNA and had similar upbringings. Their results revealed a striking fact: birth order predicted which brother tried to steal more bases. Younger brothers were 10.6 times more likely than their older siblings to attempt to steal a base.
-Adam Grant, Originals
This it me later: This idea also has a persuasive component to it.
If you want someone at work or school or whatever to accept your new idea, look for someone with older siblings.
They are much more likely, on average, to accept upending innovations.