Disclaimer:
There’s a large group of people out there, that firmly believes that there is a secret to success. If you are a hardcore believer of this theory, you will regard this article as an attempt to dodge the question or a blunt evasion of letting you in on the secret. You’re probably right too. The secret can’t be freely available, because that would forfeit the status of secret and you wouldn’t believe me anyway.

The secret of success, it’s a mysterious concept that appeals to the imagination of a lot of people. If it’s a secret it must be something really valuable, otherwise it wouldn’t be kept a secret. If only “they” would let me in on it, then I can be successful too. If only someone would tell me…

It’s the lazy man’s conviction: “Successful people make it look so easy, they must know something I don’t. If only they would tell me, I would be successful too.”

Why do people insist on believing that there are such things as secrets, or magic or tricks that successful people use to be successful? Wake up people! There is no secret, there is no magic and it’s not a trick! Face it: there is no secret!

…but there is an ingredient

The ‘secret’ ingredient of success is a liquid. It’s prepared with a fair amount of dihydrogen monoxide, some parts sodium chloride, a pinch of 2-methylphenol and one part 4-methylphenol. The bad news is that it can’t be bought. The good news is that you can make your own home brew.

One of the most common ways of preparing a dose is by standing up, placing your right foot about two feet in front of your left foot. Now place your left foot about two feet in front of your right foot. Alternate this while increasing speed for about 10 minutes and the secret ingredient will appear in a thin film evenly distributed over your body.

That’s right, the secret ingredient is sweat! Edison has been telling us that for over 150 years now:

Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration. - Thomas A. Edison

Edison does leave an opening though, there can’t be a secret in the perspiration (yuck, gross!), so it must be in the inspiration! If only I knew what was in the 1%… if only, because then… Yeah right! BS!

The 8 secrets to success (most of which are pretty sweaty)

Richard St John defined his version of 8 secrets of success. He has a short 3 minute, funny and inspiring talk about them at TED that’s definitely worth a look. In the talk he answers the question a teenager once asked him: “What’s the secret of success?”. Unable to give a swift answer to that question, he talked to a lot of successful people and defined 8 common factors that they had in common. These 8 factors are:

Passion and Ideas could be labeled as the Inspiration traits, although Ideas arguably is a Perspiration trait. Richard says: “There’s no magic to Ideas, anyone can be creative.” Ideas are generated by listening, observing, being curious, asking questions, solving problems, making connections… Yep, that’s definitely a Perspiration trait as well.

So 7 out of 8 are Perspiration, and only one is Inspiration. That’s still almost 90% sweat, and that still is the main ingredient of success.

So success is all work and no play?

No.
Definitely not!

Work, or putting in sweat, is the largest factor in being successful. You could be successful in almost anything if you just put in the 90+% perspiration, but to keep it fun and sustainable over the long run, it’s important to find something your passionate about.

Now that’s not easy to do, and a lot of people don’t know what exactly they’re passionate about. I struggle with this on regular basis myself. It’s just important to realize that finding your passion is an activity; you have to look for it actively to find your passion. It won’t pop up in your head someday, while you were waiting for your passion to find you.

And the best way to look for it, is to start working on stuff that you like. If you like to do something, feel satisfied about, have fun doing, feel proud about, look forward to something, that’s when you’re touching on your potential passion.

If you put in the 90+% perspiration on those subjects, it still will feel like a lot of work to be successful, but at least you’ll have fun doing it.

“Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.” - John Ruskin (1819 - 1900)

I wrote down this quote when I was a student while attending one of the (compulsory) courses on quality. I didn’t like the course that much, yet this quote struck a chord. I carried it around, changed courses and did nothing with it.

Until now, 10 years later. I found the quote again while cleaning up stuff at home. I read it again, and it struck a chord again. But this time I knew why. I got a pen and replaced “Quality” with “Success” to get:

“Success is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.”

I know, it’s just one word, but how powerful is this! And quality and success are not that far apart anyway. There’s so much value in this quote and I’m going by every part of it separately. Click to continue »

What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There

How successful people become even more successful
by Marshall Goldsmith with Mark Reiter
ISBN-10: 1401301304 ISBN-13: 978-1401301309
Published by Hyperion (January 9, 2007)

I love the title, as the title alone makes you think already. This book has a lot to offer, both in insight about habits that may prevent you from being (more) successful, as in recognizing and understanding the behavior of your boss!

I found this book at San Francisco airport last January. When I took a closer look at it however, I almost discarded it. You really, really have to look through the overkill in shameless (self?) promotion. The first 6!! pages are testimonials. Alan Mulally in particular is obviously very important to the publishing company, as his testimonial is repeated three times (inside cover, back cover, and testimonial section). I’m glad that I could see through it all, as the book contains a lot of useful advice from Marshall’s many years of experience as a coach to successful managers, business leaders and CEO’s.

The trouble with success

The book starts with the belief system of successful people. These beliefs (the skills, confidence, motivation and free will to be successful) are necessary for your success, but they also make us superstitious; superstitious in the way that we tend to believe that we are successful because of our behavior. Marshall adds to this that a lot of the times we are successful in spite of our behavior, and we tend to defend our dysfunctional behavior, because we are successful. Pretty twisted, huh?

Nasty habits (about 20 of them)

It’s better to stop with habits that are holding you back (not always, but most of the time anyway). Changing habits takes time, and requires motivation. Marshall does an excellent job at proving why these 20 habits are as nasty as they are, and he provides plenty examples to spark an intrinsic motivation to change some of yours. I’ll go over some of the habits (that I feel connect well with this blog).

2. Adding too much value
Too much value? Can you add too much value? Marshall focuses on interpersonal interactions and the behavior associated with it. In interpersonal relationships you can add too much value! Have you ever been in a conversation where you were trying to get an idea across, but you kept being interrupted with remarks about how it would even be better? Up to the point where you felt that your idea was subject to a hostile takeover? That’s when someone’s adding too much value. They have the need to always add value to a conversation, when sometimes just listening is enough.

10. Failing to give proper recognition
Failing to give recognition deprives people from closure. If someone does a great job at something, but he or she does not get the recognition for it, they feel forgotten or ignored. I recognize how often this happens. If you’re goal-oriented and you put everything on achieving it, by yourself or as a team, recognition of important contributions is often omitted. It doesn’t bring us closer to where we want to be, so why waste time right? Wrong! And you probably know it. I know too, this is one I have to work on…

17. Failing to express gratitude
We express gratitude all day long, try counting the times we say Thank you. A lot of times they are mechanistic (someone hands you something, you say Thank you) and the rest consists mainly of accepting compliments. There are a lot of situations where Thank you would also be the best response. This is when people give you feedback or criticism. We usually start defending and arguing, when the best response would be simply “Thank you”.

You can probably remember a situation where you gave an honest feedback to someone (“Like the suit!”) and the response would undermine the feedback (“Nah, it’s a 10 year old one, my really good suits are at the drycleaner’s”). Worse still, when you give feedback based on sensitive emotions (“When you say to me to watch what I’m eating all the time, you make me feel insecure.”) and the person starts to argue with you (“No that’s not true, it doesn’t make you feel insecure…”). Don’t you just hate that? Wouldn’t “thank you” be a much better response on an interpersonal level?

20. An excessive need to be “me”
I liked this one. I think it’s important to be me; this blog about being authentic after all. What happens when this gets excessive though? It starts when we regard behavior (good or bad) to be part of our inalterable essence, part of ourselves. I had have this with being late at appointments, I have been late for as long as I can remember. I don’t like being late, I have had a lot of unpleasant situations due to being late, yet I’m always frigging late. It came to a point where I convinced myself and others, that this was just part of me, deal with it! This is the excessive need to be me… we regard habits or behavior to be part of our essence, and that’s plain wrong. You can change the habit. Don’t put yourself up as the excuse!

Changing for the better

Now you probably don’t need to change all 20 habits, so there are some guidelines as to how to discover what to change, how to change it, and how to measure if you’ve succeeded. To discover which habits are holding you back, your need to turn to your environment to solicit feedback. In the end, they will also determine whether you have been successful at changing. Dysfunctional behavior that nobody in your environment cares about doesn’t need to be changed as far as Marshall is concerned.

Summary

I learned a lot from this book. I could write a lot more about the good stuff that’s in there (like the rules of changing, the importance of apologizing and much more). It focuses on behavioral change, and provides a lot of insight in bad habits you didn’t even know existed. It does assume that you want to be successful (in my opinion a fair assumption).

Marshall writes in a conversational style that’s easy to read, and he provides a lot of examples. Not in the least from his own experiences (in trying and failing to change habits) which he describes in a way that’s filled with humor.

If you want to be more successful, and don’t mind examining your own behavior, this book is an excellent read. If reading is all you do with it, you’ll probably recognize the habits that your boss needs to be working on! And that in itself makes for some good conversation at the coffee machine.

Interested? Get it here from Amazon, or click the picture.