The American myth of success rests on the
idea that ours is an open society, that generally birth, family, and class
don’t circumscribe possibilities and opportunities. I don’t think success necessarily is a
function of ego. Thus, I deny the claim
that to reach our goals we must worship ourselves and lose our sense of
responsibility to others. The career
gamesman is afflicted with this modern pathology of the heart, and those
mirthless, driven people are live lives that I could never admire no matter how
much money and power they have.
It is not a function of health, and
there is a nugget of truth in the adage “creaking doors hang the longest.” I think there is an aspect of luck, if by
luck we meet the marriage of design and desire. I saw a news article many years ago that
expresses this thought with this headline:
“Test-tube baby MD: It took luck.”
In smaller print was a sub-headline: “79 tries, 2 successes.” I don’t think success is a measure of how
well we do when we are young. Early
promise seldom blooms, and without the tempering effect of failure is seldom
long lasting.
Success is a personal voyage. “Success is not a harbor but a voyage with
its own perils to the spirit,” Richard Nixon, a man who knew something about
success and failure, said. “The game of
life is to come up a winner, to be a success, or to achieve what we set out to
do. Yet there is always the danger of
failing as a human being. The lesson
that most of us make on this voyage never learn but never quite forget is that
to win is sometimes to lose.” I choose to measure success largely in family
terms. But I must do well at work so as
to ensure my family’s success. The
secret of career of success is simple:
1. Find something you like doing
2. Get good at it
3. Do that and you cannot fail
But there
is of course a lot more than that.
Successful people show initiative.
They do the right thing without been told. They overcome their fear of failure by
trying. They are able to transcend their
previous levels of accomplishment. They
avoid the comfort zone. They solve problems rather than place blame. They rehearse events mentally and confidently
take risks after laying out the worst consequences. They embrace competition and understand that
there is always a cause and effect relationship between effort and results.
What we fail to realize sometimes is
that we don’t have to be much better than most to do well. Only a slight superiority makes a vast
difference. People that we call successful
are not twice as smart or twice as able as the rest of the field. Indeed, if they are only ten percent more
proficient, this is generally more than enough to give them a consistent edge. In sports, for instance, the best batting or
passing records are not a great deal higher than average. In field of track the differences are even
smaller a fraction of an inch or a
fraction of a second may distinguish the winners from the also rans. Everyone is acquainted with the famous law of
diminishing returns. But hardly anyone
is aware of the opposite law-- that just
a little extra effort can add up to a significant difference. One more erg of energy in a push off at a ski
jump can give an extra foot of distance.
If you can average five to ten percent better than others in your field,
the rewards can be 100 percent greater.
This is the compounding effect of achieving over time. In chess, where there is no luck, the
advantage of a single pawn with matched players is often decisive. In bridge, holding just one more trump card
than the opponents may give the declarer or defender a lock on the hand. Experts win because they make fewer mistakes
not before they perform brilliantly. We
are often overwhelmed by the spectacle of superiority and wrongly imagine that
leaders are endowed with vastly greater capacities than the rest. The plain truth is that the similarities are
closer than we may think. We only have
to be a bit better than most in what we do.