The two primary definitions of success are: (1) the achievement of something desired, planned, or attempted; (2) the gaining of fame or prosperity.
But what do you think success means? Do you believe, for example, that the most successful people are the best in their fields—or that the lack of success indicates a lack of talent or of the personal characteristics that create success? What do you tend to attribute your own successes or failures to?
Is There a Formula for Success?
If you assume the most successful people are also the most competent, you may attempt to find out how they do what they do and try to emulate them in order to become successful yourself. (There’s a huge market for this.)
It’s true that successful people do have some characteristics in common, such as passion, perseverance, imagination, intellectual curiosity, and openness to experience. And of course they are not completely without talent.
But talent, along with positive personal traits and characteristics, doesn’t account for all of the variance between successful and unsuccessful people. Recent studies suggest luck and opportunity play a significant role.
People overestimate the degree to which ability can be inferred from success. —Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk
What Is Talent?
Talent is whatever set of personal characteristics allow a person to exploit lucky opportunities. It can include traits such as intelligence, skill, ability, motivation, determination, creative thinking, and emotional intelligence. More talented people seem to be more likely to get the most ‘bang for their buck’ out of a given opportunity. But…
Even a great talent becomes useless against the fury of misfortune. —Allesandro Pluchino and Andrea Raspisarda, physicists, and Alessio Biondo, economist
In simulations run by Pluchino, Raspisarda, and Biondo, the most talented individuals were rarely the most successful. In general, mediocre-but-lucky people were much more successful than more-talented-but-unlucky individuals. The most successful agents tended to be those who were only slightly above average in talent but with a lot of luck in their lives.
Chance is a more fundamental conception than causality. —Max Born, Nobel Laureate
Why Isn’t Talent Enough?
In all except the simplest real-life endeavors unforeseeable or unpredictable forces cannot be avoided, and moreover those random forces and our reactions to them account for much of what constitutes our particular path in life. —Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk
We have a tendency to believe, as Mlodinow says, that the combination of our personal qualities and the properties of any given situation or environment lead directly and unequivocally to precise consequences.
That’s a mechanistic mental model that doesn’t reflect reality. We are complex adaptive systems living within multiple other complex adaptive systems. As a result, life isn’t always fair, good doesn’t always triumph over evil, and talent doesn’t always lead to success.
In The Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam talks about the often invisible undercurrents that may boost—or impede—our success, depending on whether we’re flowing with or against a particular current:
When undercurrents aid us…we are invariably unconscious of them. We never credit the undercurrent for carrying us so swiftly; we credit ourselves, our talents, our skills.
Our brains are expert at providing explanations for the outcomes we see. People who swim with the current never credit it for their success because it genuinely feels as though their achievements are produced through sheer merit.
And it isn’t just the people who flow with the current who are unconscious about its existence. People who fight the current all their lives also regularly arrive at false explanations for outcomes. When they fall behind, they blame themselves, their lack of talent. Those who travel with the current will always feel they are good swimmers; those who swim against the current may never realize they are better swimmers than they imagine.
When we assess the world, Mlodinow says, we tend to see what we expect to see. We define degree of talent by degree of success—and then reinforce a cause-and-effect relationship by noting the correlation. So although there may be little difference in ability between someone who is hugely successful and someone who is not, there is usually a big difference in how they are viewed.
Our assessment of the world would be quite different if all our judgments could be insulated from expectation and based only on relevant data. But our brains aren’t wired that way.
What Can We Do About It?
- Be clear about our desired outcome
- Recognize the extent and the limit of our personal agency
- Develop solid habits
- Follow through on our intentions
- Persevere
