I’m going to take the far opposite route of most of the people in this thread and say; Luck.
Those who are born into traditionally successful families are typically successful; if you don’t believe this, look at the Kennedy and Bush families for high profile examples, and there are a plethora of others. Every town has their own. In Columbus, Ohio one of them was the Wolfe Family (Owned by the Wolfe family - who also owns 2 or 3 radio stations).
For those who aren’t born into successful families I’m going to say that it’s a combination of Luck and Drive to be successful.
Since both require luck (either by Genes which we’re born with) or drive for success and luck (in that we’re in the right place at the right time), I’d say that 2/3 of success is luck.
Yes, pretty much everybody in the back country at the time lived in a log cabin, but Lincoln lost his shirt more than once before he got to be President. For that matter, he lost more than one election. And you certainly can’t say he got by on his looks. Dude had drive - he never gave up. He lost one business, so he started another one. He lost an election but didn’t stop running.
I can’t argue with that. Conversely, you can be an Einstein or a Da Vinci, but if some Nazi is herding you into a gas chamber or you’ve been drafted and blown apart in some trench during warfare, that’s tough luck. You need the good luck of a certain set of circumstances for your skill to thrive.
I wonder just how much the “drive for success” is also genetic, and hence also based off of luck. Some people are just born to be workaholics. I’d probably slit my wrists if I had to work more than 10 hours a day for an extended period of time, I freely admit I’m not as “driven” as some people are.
So maybe that is your chance to be an Anne Frank or a Sergeant York? Success isn’t just about making a bunch of money or popping out a couple of kids (way to set the bar high by the way). People find ways to be a “success” under some of the worst circumstances.
Some of the greatest “successes” were born out of total failures. Ernest Shackleton isn’t known as some chump who got his ship trapped and ground up by Antarctic ice. He’s know as the guy who managed to keep his entire crew alive in the most extreme conditions imaginable until they were able to rescue themselves.
Sure, luck plays a part in it. I mean you can’t do anything about a mortar shell taking off your head as soon as you step off the landing craft. But since you can’t control luck I don’t think it’s even worth mentioning as a factor.
I would say “balls” are the biggest factor in success.
But he wouldn’t be known at all if he wasn’t lucky enough to get trapped in the ice, know how to survive, and have a crew full of men who just happened to be willing to follow his commands.
No one told me that we had to be able to control the factor.
So we are not talking success in terms of money, or success in terms of being happy with your life. Success in terms of influencing millions. Being born to wealth may be a recipe for being wealthy, but not for that sort of success. Cross that off. But as has been said, of course there is no single factor but several -
The first factor is something like passion but perhaps more often closer to obsession with achieving your goals. Some of the most significant scientific geniuses had a touch of OCD and many of the great artists were bipolar and produced much of their art in manic phases, for example.
The second is the raw talent.
The third is that your goal is one one that will effect millions.
Opportunities appear for those who possess all three of those goals if for no other reason than that they will keep swinging until they get a good pitch to hit. And sooner or later they’ll get that pitch.
None of them alone is enough. And this kind of success is no recipe for happiness.
Actually, Paterson became an employee of Microsoft and retired in 1998, worth tens of millions of dollars because of his MS stock options.
It should be noted that Paterson began working at Microsoft prior to MS’s purchase of SCP 86-DOS, and that his employment began because Paterson asked Paul Allen for a job.
Cite: Microsoft: Inside/Out, interview with Tim Paterson, page 20.
The issue there is that how does one define “luck”?
My wife (who is reading Outliers as well) and I were discussing this question today. I referenced a Harvard study conducted in the early 1970’s that stated that luck played a large part in success. However, the researcher* has backed down from his original conclusion, saying that further studies showed that his original subjects all defined luck differently, thereby rendering the conclusion invalid.
An example I gave was this: You go to college, majoring in whatever. You get a job, put in your time, start to know (and be known by) a number of people. When you’re 32, one of those people, Todd, gives you a call out of the blue with a new job offer that doubles your salary.
Luck?
Some would say yes. Some would say no. Both viewpoints are valid: You didn’t start your career with the expectation that Todd would make that offer, nor did you meet him for the purposes of landing a better job - so it was pure luck that it happened, when it happened, and how it happened.
However given the length of a typical career, having at least one good job offered “out of the blue” is not a statistically unlikely occurence - and if you’re merely meeting the long-term odds, where’s the luck in that, even if the specific offer was unexpected?
Again, it’s how one defines “luck”. I’m of the mindset that the job offer above isn’t particularly “lucky”. My wife thinks it is. C’est la vie.
To answer the question, I’m going to mention a couple of things that haven’t been mentioned (or tangentially so) yet:
Successful people are very high-energy - they don’t sleep a lot.
Successful people are at least of a normal IQ. They might be freaks or assholes or passionate about their mission, but they are never mentally deficient.
Successful people are rarely afraid to initiate contact with other people. They have no problem calling people, demanding answers, resolving issues, making sales pitches. They don’t need to be egregious party-goers, but they’re not afraid of calling the bank about the status of the loan on a daily basis.
*Book in bedroom, along with sleeping wife. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow for a cite.
He got trapped in the ice because he had the drive and ambition to launch an expedition in the first place.
He knew how to survive because he prepared for his trip and did hard work to make sure he knew how to survive.
His crew followed him because he was the kind of man who inspired people to follow him, and who took actions which ultimately earned him the respect and trust of his crew.
Luck had nothing to do with it.
Certainly for some people luck plays a part. Dying of ALS when you’re 25 sucks. Being born with an IQ of 85 sucks. Being crippled in an accident you had no control over sucks.
But by and large, I believe that we are exposed to enough chance events that ‘lucky’ people tend to be the ones who learn how to take advantage of the lucky breaks and minimize the harm from the unlucky ones.
A man works his ass off at work, impresses people, goes above and beyond the call, and generally makes a name for himself. One day, he happens to get on a plane and lo and behold, he’s seated beside the CEO of the company. They strike up a conversation, and the man’s knowledge of the company’s product and his manner impresses the CEO. The CEO gets back home, makes a call, and asks about him. He finds out he’s a star employee, and people have nothing but good things to say about him. So, the guy gets a call asking if he’d like to be promoted to an executive position, and he’s on his way to fame and fortune. Is that lucky or what?
Another guy just puts his time in with the company. Doesn’t really care much. He gets on a plane, and lo and behold he’s seated beside the CEO. He’s fuming about how rich the CEO is, and how life isn’t fair. They make small talk, and the CEO discovers he works for the same company. Average guy. The plane lands, and they go their separate ways, and the CEO gives him no more thought. Later, when the guy gets home, he tells his wife about the meeting with the CEO, and how that guy probably got where he is because of lucky. He says to his wife, “Why can’t I ever get a break like that?”
The thing is, you can’t know about all the lucky breaks that came your way and went right on by because you weren’t in a position to grab onto them. You remember the unlucky things that happen to you, and never see the lucky ones you missed.
Not necessarily. If 99% of that 80% were children of people who were wealthy, but not quite millionaires, they still have a very large head start over your true “self-made” types.
As to the OP, I’m also going to go with “luck” as the answer. In fact, a large number of the various factors being mentioned boil down to luck, in one form or another.
Connections? Unless you have a crystal ball, there’s not always a good way to predict which of your drunken frat buddies is going to go and create a simple, but incredibly popular search engine. Ends up that your roommate and best buddy is that guy? Luck.
Intelligence? While I might have some power over what knowledge I gain, store, decide to let go of, etc., my intelligence was decided by genes. Luck.
Trying and willing to risk failure? Sure, having the right idea at the right time is useful, but sometimes it takes more than that. If you decide to go into real estate, and the first year sees the start of a 20 year bubble, that’s luck. Invented “pet rocks?” Not going anywhere unless you luck out on the correct strategy, enough funding, and a distribution channel willing to take risks for you. The best ideas don’t always succeed, and sometimes crappy ideas can make you incredibly wealthy.
There are buttloads of people out there that work very hard, are dedicated, have focus, and are smart as hell. A large number of them are never going to be more than office drones. Hell, some of them are picking the fruit you put on your table.
Finally, my whole life is a great example. I’ve tended to sort of go with the flow, and while there have been ups and downs, most of the paths that I sort of just followed along with have turned out to be very good for me. By the same token, another person with the identical qualities might have found themselves flowing down a slightly different path, and their results might have been not so good.
And more power to those folks, but really, for every success born out of failure, there must be countless other talented folks who wallowed in obscurity. The few who did manage to pull out success were quite, er, lucky to have done so.
Isn’t Shackleton’s story answering a different question? He became a hero, but he didn’t change millions of lives. He was man with the stuff to be a hero and a leader and trained to utilize the stuff he had who was put into an extreme circumstance. Heroism results.
Becoming a millionaire is also a different question. Millionaires, billionaires even, don’t always effect millions of lives - unless they choose to use their money to do so - as Gates is doing and Buffet as well.
Interesting that even such a nerdy crowd is not more focused on the great scientists and artists who affected milions of lives even if they made no money in the process.
As far as luck goes and being ready to answer the door when opportunity knocks … one of my kids once had a unit entitled serendipity which made the point. he unit was full of stories like Fleming’s discovery of Penicillin. Fleming was obsessed about finding ways to reduce infections and had done some great (but far from universally accepted) work already showing why the antiseptics in use were actually making things worse. He was intensely studying Staphylococci and had some cultures contaminated by a fungus. As he was tossing it out he noticed that no bacteria was growing around the fungus, jumped all over it with full intensity, isolated the fungus, isolated the compound that the fungus produced, tested it to find out how broad of an agent it was, and worked for years trying to find a way to mass produce it (unsuccessfully - another team finally figured that out). Fleming’s discovery changed the world for untold millions of people. Was it luck that that fungus contaminated his plate, or his intensity and preparation for that moment of opportunity? A lesser scientist would not have been lucky I guess.
I should point out that luck is the reason each and every person is alive. Considering how many sperm go wasted and how many eggs get washed away, we’ve all really won the lottery just by being the one to take hold and develop into a fetus.
Conversely, being born with a knack for learning mathematics and engineering is “lucky”, even if it requires hard work to be successful at them. Having good health–both mental and physical–is lucky. Having parents who didn’t beat you every day of your childhood and who fed you more than nicotine and bacon is another lucky break.
When you look at successful people born in poverty, from my experience 9 times out of 10 they were simply luckier than the “failures” around them. Take my father, for instance. Born the last in a family of six. Add in his male gender and you get a child who was free from the familial burdens and expectations hanging over his older siblings head (his eldest sister practically raised him). Although the family was poor, he was lucky to have grown up in a two-parent household. He was a mischievious fellow growing up, but he happened to be smart enough that he was able to avoid scrapes that would have gotten anyone else ensnared by the law. His mother doted on him and made sure he went to college–at a time when everyone else was being drafted into the war. His light skin made him a favorable hiree during a time when most people were quite racist (early 70s), so he was able to score a principalship as a young guy. Darken up his skin and give him a vagina, and maybe that wouldn’t have happened.
He didn’t work harder than anyone else in his family. He’d be the first to admit it. He did make some smart choices (he left his small industrial town for a big city where he could take his pick of job opportunities). But he’s also made a few blunders that could have killed him if it hadn’t been for factors beyond his control. My father is religious and thinks God’s had a role in his life. But this agnostic simply believes he was dealt a good hand in life. You can’t say the same about his older brother, who was sent to Vietnam, came out as a paranoid schizophrenic, and has been institutionalized pretty much ever since.
I don’t think life usually works like this, though. The guy the CEO is seated next to usually isn’t superb, but merely above average. On paper he looks great, but he’s not the “best” in any objective sense. No, he impresses the CEO because of intangibles that the guy may or may not have intentionally cultivated. That’s where luck comes in.
My sis and I frequently talk about our stroke of luck (neither one of us are successful as defined by the OP, but we are successful in a general way). Years ago we were taking a genetics class in college. We were solid B students, only occassionally raising our hands. Through the whole semester, I hadn’t exchanged a single private word with the professor. On the one occassion when my sister tried to, he gave her a bad attitude. As far as we knew, he didn’t even know we existed.
Fast forward to the final exam. My sister turns in her paper first and he stops and asks if she has a job lined up for the summer yet. She tells him yes and walks right out of the door. I turn in my exam next and he asks me about my summer plans. I tell him I don’t have a job lined up and he offers me a place in his lab right then and there. No resume, no interview, no nothing. Just, “You’ve got a job. You start tomorrow.”
It started off as your average test-tube washer gig and evolved (through no extra effort on my part) into an internship resulting in my first publication. I would continue doing related research in graduate school (something I probably would have never considered otherwise) and years later would earn a Ph.D. Now I’m working for the state, doing work directly related to the area of research that I got my start in. In a few months, I’ll be in charge of water quality for the entire Commonwealth.
Now I can say I worked hard in that prof’s lab and I worked even harder in graduate school. But to get noticed by the professor, all I had going for me was 1) I showed up to class regularly and did okay, 2) I was a black woman in a school full of white males, and 3) I had a twin sister. Furthermore, I was lucky that my sister had a job lined up already and declined his offer. I wasn’t even his first pick! I wasn’t any more deserving of this lucky break than any of the other students in that class, students who had higher GPAs and test scores. I was just plain luckier.
So I think it’s rare that the CEO is paired up with the stellar, top-notch candidate. What’s more likely is the CEO is paired up with the “good enough” guy who manages to impresses for no objective reason.
(Because my job as a test-tube washer brought me in contact with the other professors and their labs, my sister was later recruited to do the same thing. Her job would also evolve into a successful internship. She’s now a scientist doing work in the public health sector (if you’re feeling a little rabid-y, go find her). So I wasn’t the only lucky one.)
I don’t know why people are so reluctant to give credit to random rolls of the die. The outcome of every decision we make has some element of luck to it.
You didn’t address the people who choose not to follow the line of least resistance and manufactured a purpose for themselves. Though many people who start from the bottom and work their way to the top usually have advantages that they didn’t work for, they didn’t exactly gravitate to their successes as surely as water gravitates to the ocean.
Typically, these people go against the grain but they had a specific purpose in mind so as not to waste their efforts. In one of the best selling books of all time, Think and Grow Rich, the author stated that definiteness of purpose, concentrated effort, and persistence were the main reasons why 2% of people are able to consistently move forward in life. Considering other supporting factors such as effective use of imagination, cooperation with others, desire, belief, and thought habits, I think he may have hit a bullseye.
But how do you know that wasn’t unlucky? How do you know that if not for that offer you wouldn’t have decided on a different path and been even more successful. Maybe that meeting kept you from exploring an art career early on, and if not for that chance offer to wash test tubes you would be a famous artist today?
Of course much of what happens to us is outside our control - we roll the dice all the time. And we could always digress into whether or not free will exists in any case (but let’s not, 'kay?) - but the concept is what the psychologists call “the locus of control”: do you feel that you are responsible for what happens to you in life or are you merely a cork buffetted by the waves? I am sure that few of those highly successful individuals ascribe to the external locus of control. True or not, they perceive themselves as responsible for what happens to them.
In every case there is always an element of luck to things. Best example is Obama, if Oprah hadn’t thought “he’s so cute,” she never would’ve put him on her show.
There are a lot of African American or mixed race politician far better than Obama, but none that Oprah found so attractive. So she egged him on to run and pumped up his campaign.
People like to think “In the end things work out all right,” simply because it’s frightening to think about the fact just how random life is.
Again look at politics, if 300 Al Gore supporters had decided to vote in Florida perhaps Obama woundn’t be president.
The fact is there are simply too few things in life which are dependent on ONE person.
Perhaps, Hitler, Churchill, Bill Gates, Einstein and the Beatles are example of unique individuals that actually changed things.
For instance two of the biggest successes in music since 1950 are the Beatles and Madonna. (Like or hate them they are huge successes). The Beatles however CHANGED music and brought in a new type of style to the scene. Madonna on the other hand didn’t change music, instead she had the brilliance to see what was happening in the music scene and she capitalized on it. Madonna didn’t introduce anything new, but she was smart enough to say “OK this is in, and I can do this better than other people.” And she did. You see the difference between the two. Both the Beatles and Madonna are hugly successful, but they took two different routes.
As in most things, timing is everything. Think about the jobs you got or didn’t or the job you would’ve got had someone else not applied.
I guess we don’t really know how successful a life is until a person dies. People keep bringing up Bill Gates, but we don’t know what the guy will do tomorrow. Maybe he will lauch some fiasco of an idea that will plunge Microsoft into bankruptcy and his name will become synonomous with incompetence (kind of like “Way to go, Brownie”). And we will also never know if he’s as successful as he could have been given another set of events. Perhaps if he had continued college and gone on to graduate school, he would have engineered a biomedical tool that could cure cancer and other diseases. Which would you prefer? Microsoft Windows or a world without cancer?
Perhaps I’m just too humble a person, but I think as hard as I’ved worked and as smart as I am, I wouldn’t be where I am if it hadn’t been for a series of fortunate events beyond my control. I give myself credit for intentionally putting myself in the right place at the right time (for instance, going to a college and studying something I was suited for). I also give myself credit for working hard (my internship would have been worthless if I hadn’t worked hard, for instance). But ultimately I can’t pat myself on the back too hard because I still remember all the mistakes and wrong turns I’ve made. And all the successful people I’ve met tend to be the same way. (They tend to thank God instead of luck, but they’re the same thing to me).
Well, Madonna did something new and she was lucky. She dramatically changed the standard for pop music for female performers and pop stars in general. Don’t believe me? Who was the “Madonna” of the 60s? The 70s? Who are current pop vocalists compared to? Madonna.
She was lucky in that she’s been blessed with beauty, sensuality, and physical grace. But she has worked very hard at crafting her image and cultivating her talents (and she has them). She’s not a musician, but she’s still an innovative performer who influenced culture.
Furthermore, the Beatles are a prime example of good luck mixed with ability. If the guys had been born black, no amount of good song writing would have launched them to the heights they reached. They also were able to take advantage of the work of previous artists (like Little Richard and Chuck Berry). Other performers paved the way for them. Imagine if they had been born 10 years earlier and had to carry the burden of introducing rock and roll to the mainstream?
