Success has no formula and nothing common
A friend sent me an article written by Stephen Covey. It is quite popular article of Covey title “7 Habits of Highly Successful People”
My friend is a professional psychologist and he gives me his opinion about “what are common among successful People” and he logically tells me that there are many misconceptions among writers on this issue and he gives his narrative that I am sharing with you:
1. The habits of successful people somehow lead them to success. If we are talking about financial success, evidence points to randomness. Nassim Nicholas Talib in his book ‘The Black Swan’ argues that there is so much randomness and near chaos in the financial world, that for anyone to predict – based on a given number of habits – that someone will be a success is next to impossible.
2. People who believe in themselves always succeed. It might be a good idea to believe in oneself, it keeps you motivated for one, most start-ups fail because people believe in themselves a bit too much, do not pay attention to frugality and throw caution to the wind. Four out of five start-ups fail in the first year. History is full of martyrs who believed they were going to win.
3. Team work is better than individual work. This belief is also absolute nonsense, unless you are Japanese. Team work in America, Europe and most of Asia and Africa, means that one or two people in the team do most of the work while others chill out. In psychology, we call it diffusion of responsibility. In my psychology class, I have noticed this phenomenon in group assignments every single time. I am sure teachers all over the world would bear witness to this. In Japan, people work well in teams. Everywhere else, individuals put in less effort in teams than when they are working alone.
4. Success stories tell us how to achieve success. They don’t. People who have failed do not write books about how they failed. Only the successful people do. And stories are exactly that, they are stories. Most are constructed in hindsight. The fact that our memories are imperfect and self-serving adds to the conundrum. Success stories help successful people make sense of their experience of achievement. For others, they are not worth much.
5. Consensus is better than majority, and majority is better than minority. We believe in democracy as a political system and therefore assume that the above principle is valid ubiquitously. Not true. History is full of examples where most people on any given issue were wrong but an inventor or innovator proved them wrong. I still recall how in the Dartmouth Community for Divestment, a group of students protesting against Dartmouth College’s investments in companies doing business in the Apartheid-ruled South Africa in the 1980’s, the requirement of decision making by consensus led to paralysis most of the time. It was only on few occasions, that bold decisions were made, and that too by few individuals acting independently.
6. If something is unlikely, it wont happen. Whenever someone suggests something unlikely, the experts pounce on them. These self-appointed gurus of the world calculate probabilities and predict what is likely to happen. But they are mostly wrong, because the unpredictable always happens. The unpredictable does not follow the laws of probability.
7. You will succeed if you plan well and think of every eventuality. Wrong again. One cannot possibly think of every eventuality, since the realm of possibilities is infinite. And even the best made plans are doomed to failure, if something unforeseen comes your way, which ironically is always highly likely.
There are in reality many others stupid things intelligent people believe because there are many books and articles proclaiming these things. And just because something is written in a book, doesn’t make it true.
