Unlocking the Secrets to Our Success

Last Saturday in the NY Times I read a piece by Paul Brown about a magazine article appearing in Rotman, the University of Toronto business school magazine. The article presented the authors’ view on the nature of success and how it is achieved.

Based on interviews with 200 people “who have made a difference in their fields“, they broke it down to three things -three “essential elements” that need to come into alignment:

• Meaning – what you do must matter deeply to you
• A highly developed sense of accountability, audacity, passion and responsible optimism
• Finding effective ways to take action

The overall conclusion was that “success in the long run has less to do with finding the best idea or business model that it does with discovering what matters to us as individuals“.

“Discovering what matters to us“…………..the more I dwell on that phrase, the more it resonates.

If I discover the best widget of all time and make multi-billions because of it, but it doesn’t matter much to me, than I won’t be “successful”.

It sounds too simple, doesn’t it? Can the real keys to our success be essentially found in our hearts and not our heads?

I had come up with my own list of 10 essential success elements about 14 months ago:

1. Common Sense – The definition says it all: “Sound judgment not based on specialized knowledge”. It’s an innate logic barometer that guides me from situation to situation and counsels me from decision to decision.
2. Intellectual Curiosity – I’ve always had a huge appetite for learning, since I started reading encyclopedias when I was 3 (at least that’s what my mom tells me!). This curiosity has pushed me forward in opening up my world to new ideas and experiences. It also keeps me humble in a sense that there’s so much I DON’T know.
3. Passion – The best way to figure out the importance of this one is to recall a time in one’s life or career where it didn’t exist – that happened to me, and it’s like draining all the oil out of an engine and still trying to go 100 miles an hour. It’s not pretty, all the grinding and gnashing. Passion is the “oil” that keeps me going at peak performance.
4. Relentless Optimism – Yes, my glass is half full – and in a recent post I explained how I got there. I’ve also defined half-fullism as “dealing with the literal world in a favorable way”, and that really speaks to my viewpoint – I’m always trying to make lemonade out of lemons (without rose colored glasses).
5. Influential Mentor and/or Parent – The influence of my parents and a couple of key mentors have been invaluable to my personal and career development – my parents taught me the value of trust, and my two mentors taught me about business, leadership and optimism in two totally different ways, but both utterly valuable.
6. Love – When I think of love I can’t help but also think of those lines by Ewan McGregor in “Moulin Rouge” (one of my favorite musical movies)-”Love is a many splendored thing, Love lifts us up where we belong, All you need is Love!” In some respects it is indeed the only thing – while passion is the oil, love is the gas.
7. Good Moral Grounding – For me, the ability to make personal distinctions between right and wrong couldn’t happen without being properly grounded in moral principles – I was fortunate to get that from my family, and from the parochial education I received all the way through college.
8. Luck – I know one can “create” luck, or put oneself in a position to take advantage of luck, but it’s still luck. I had several instances where luck, fate, karma, or some similar phenomenon intervened and changed my life, mostly for the better (but sometimes not).
9. Integrity – The net result of the moral grounding, I always try to keep my my promises and fulfill my committments- being trusted by others is one of the gifts I treasure the most.
10. Belief in Yourself – This is the foundation of all successes – a deep seeded confidence that someway, somehow you can get to where you want to go. For me, I always wanted to be a leader, and I kept at it knowing that if I was given that responsibility, I could do it and do it well. Fortunately I have been given that opportunity, and it’s been a great ride.

In re-reviewing this list and comparing it to the Rotman article list, “heart” has a very distinct presence in both. So does the element of optimism – they call it “responsible optimism“, I call it “realistic optimism“, or “half-fullism“.

No matter how I slice it, I keep coming back to the simplicity of these “secrets” – I just can’t over complicate it, or shift to more materialistic factors like wealth, power, or fame (my friend Trevor is really on the right track here!).

Thus, the “unlocking” comes from digging deep within, and keeping it simple. And given the way we know our minds can work sometimes, doesn’t that make perfect sense?

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