 At the conference I attended last week, the author of a new, unfinished book tentatively entitled Spike's Guide to Success
made a 10-minute pitch in which he presented the entire thesis of the
book: That according to his research, interviewing 500 of the world's
most successful people, the factors we usually think are necessary for
success (high intelligence, good looks, and good fortune) don't
correlate at all with success, while eight other factors correlate strongly with success:
- Passion and hard work (loving what you do, and persevering at it)
- Focus and skill (doing one or two things really well, through practice)
- Overcoming internal and external obstacles (pushing through
personal barriers and persisting through failure, mistakes, criticism,
rejection, obnoxious people and pressure)
- Creativity and meeting needs (solving problems, creating opportunities, and serving people what they need and want)
He handed out copies of the book's promotional website
in the form of a small pocket-sized brochure. His charming, modest,
well-rehearsed pitch really grabbed the audience's attention, and was
masterful marketing -- I predict the book will be a best-seller. What
was more astonishing to me is that it came one day after I wrote my Finding Your Place essay which included the graphic above and this paragraph:
What ... determines [our] role... is a product of four things:
- our passion -- the desire and focus and dedication to excel at doing this one thing
- our natural talents -- things we inherently find easy to do well,
- our learnings and experience -- which come from study, but more importantly from practice, and
- our audience -- the degree to which this role is needed, appreciated, respected and encouraged.
Spike's Guide will include profiles of Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates,
Martha Stewart and Albert Einstein, among its 500. My essay wasn't that
ambitious, and I confess I'm a bit skeptical whether we can reasonably
aspire to that level of
'success'. I've worked with a lot of entrepreneurs who have leveraged
passion, talent, practice and audience into profitable, comfortable,
joyous, low-stress businesses, but none of them will be, or expects to
be, a billionaire. In fact there is a lot of evidence that at that
stratospheric level of financial
success, heredity is more important than any of the factors in my essay
or Spike's book -- look through any list of billionaires and you'll
find many who have inherited their wealth. And inherited wealth and
influence is conspicuously absent from Spike's high- or low-correlation
success factors.
I can see a danger of Spike over-reaching in his celebrity profiles,
and undermining the value of his research in the process, and believe
that the humbler (but consistent) lessons of my book Natural Enterprise
are more useful to entrepreneurs than Spike's rules. But Spike's Guide
has perhaps another audience that is at least as important as aspiring
entrepreneurs: adolescents and teenagers.
Business Skills Scorecard
Green: exemplary; Yellow: satisfactory; Red: marginal
First column: Successful entrepreneurs' scores; Second column: New graduates' scores (author's assessment)
In my opinion, our young adults are not well equipped to decide what
to do with their lives -- how and with whom to make a living. Our
education system, and we as parents, are both to blame for this. How
could we tweak Spike's Rules to make it into a guide for young adults
and their parents?
What is most conspicuously absent, I think, are (i) the importance of
imbuing in our young people self-confidence, a belief in and love of
themselves, (ii) the importance of collaboration, of not trying to do
everything by yourself (our Western cult of the individual, at its
worst), and (iii) the importance of learning how to do good research,
both primary (through face-to-face interviews) and secondary (online)
-- what I call "information skills". The 'scorecard' above integrates
these with the qualities in Spike's Guide and my Finding Your Place
essay.
If you're a parent or a teacher, your task is to cultivate in the young
people in your care the eight qualities they will need to succeed, no
matter what they want to do: Self-confidence, common sense (critical
thinking), creativity, research skills, communication skills (oral,
written, and 'body' language), collaborative skills, focus, and
persistence through obstacles. Most of these qualities are better
learned by doing than by listening, and better taught by showing than
by telling -- by setting an example. Once they have these qualities all
they need to do is apply them to find the right partner(s) -- those
whose strengths and weaknesses complement their own -- and the right
application, at the intersection of passion, customer need, talent and
practice.
When I showed this to an artist friend, he said the only things that
mattered were self-confidence and passion. I would agree that these are
probably the most important, but I don't believe they are enough. In
the first column of the scorecard above, I've filled in what I think
are typical 'scores' for the 50 or so successful entrepreneurs I know.
These successful entrepreneurs are extremely self-confident and have
good common sense, creativity and research skills, and they have both
talent and acquired technical skill for what they're doing. Most of
them are weaker in either written or oral communication skills, most of
them are 'drivers' who could benefit from better listening skills, and
most of them try to do too much and give up on bold new ideas too
quickly. Most of them like, but don't love, what they're doing, and
meet their customers' needs competently but not brilliantly -- they're
vulnerable to competitive innovation.
In the second column, I've filled in what I think are the typical
'scores' for most of the young people I have met over the past two
years at graduate seminars or conferences for aspiring entrepreneurs.
They differ from the scores for successful entrepreneurs in only four
areas: They are less self-confident and less creative, have much weaker
research skills, and are discontent with their current job and/or its
prospects. I blame the lack of self-confidence on our brutal society,
which turns everything into a competition and never misses the chance
to knock us down. Successful entrepreneurs have greater self-confidence
either because their parents and peers gave it to them from childhood,
or because they're learned from failure what works and what doesn't.
The lack of creativity is also largely due to our Western society's
over-emphasis on exercising the left brain -- though I think creativity
can be (re-)learned, and will be by ambitious young people in spite of
the educational system.
I've written before about how good we are at searching but how poor we are at researching
-- posing intelligent questions, conducting interviews, drawing out
customer needs and wants iteratively, and engaging in what I've called
'knowledge conversations'. Very little of this can be done online (and
even online, true research skills are in short supply). The irony is
that this is not a difficult skill to learn. We are all
conversationalists at heart, and all we need is practice 'conversing
with a purpose' to get good at it.
As for hating what you're doing, there is only one cure for that --
having the courage (which comes back to self-confidence) to quit and do
something else.
I believe that poor information skills, and dislike of what they're
doing now are show-stoppers for young people -- they will never be
successful entrepreneurs until they learn to do good research (or at
least partner with people who do), and until they find something they
love doing.
I've left the third column in the scorecard blank for you to fill in
with your own scores, or those of your children or students.
If I were a parent or teacher today I think I would tend to be generous
(but not dishonest) in praising my children or students, because I
think self-confidence is so important. I would introduce games and
visits which exercised and strengthened their creative, communication,
collaboration and research skills. I would try to set an example of
focus ('do one or two things really well') and perseverance ('fighting
past' personal and external obstacles, as Spike's Guide puts it).
These days I am acutely aware of my children's (they're age 32 and 29)
intense interest in my current career transition, and how important it
is for them, as much as for me, that I not compromise and end up doing
more work that I don't love. I won't let them down.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
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