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Characteristics of Successful People.
There is some evidence that we are all just apologists for our behavior and that we really have no conscious control over what happens in life whatsoever. If that's true, then I cannot help myself for what I am about to say. If it's not true, then there are behaviors you can adopt to improve your lot in life.
--Knowing what you want.
--Persistence in pursuit of what you want.
Arguably, that's it right there. Everything else sort of grows out of that. Here are more:
--ability to achieve a state of Flow. (Read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)
--getting along well with others. (Read Dale Carnegie)
--showing up (Read Studs Terkel)
--meeting obligations (Read David Allen)
--the capacity to stand and deliver (Read about George Washington)
Is this list exhaustive? Heck no. Why there's a better list available just by Googling the topic. Want more out of life? Pick someone from history who you admire and read all you can on him or her. Rinse and repeat. After a while, you'll start to see trends but you will also see that there are many, many paths to success. There are also many definitions of success. For example, I always thought you had to be smart to be successful. Then I started reading Ted Turner's autobiography. Turner is a scrapper but he is no genius and actually you'll be shocked by his book compared to a book about Warren Buffett or Bill Gates.
The point, is, however, that if you are suffering because of circumstances stop it. Viktor Frankl pwned you back in 1939.
--Knowing what you want.
--Persistence in pursuit of what you want.
Arguably, that's it right there. Everything else sort of grows out of that. Here are more:
--ability to achieve a state of Flow. (Read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)
--getting along well with others. (Read Dale Carnegie)
--showing up (Read Studs Terkel)
--meeting obligations (Read David Allen)
--the capacity to stand and deliver (Read about George Washington)
Is this list exhaustive? Heck no. Why there's a better list available just by Googling the topic. Want more out of life? Pick someone from history who you admire and read all you can on him or her. Rinse and repeat. After a while, you'll start to see trends but you will also see that there are many, many paths to success. There are also many definitions of success. For example, I always thought you had to be smart to be successful. Then I started reading Ted Turner's autobiography. Turner is a scrapper but he is no genius and actually you'll be shocked by his book compared to a book about Warren Buffett or Bill Gates.
The point, is, however, that if you are suffering because of circumstances stop it. Viktor Frankl pwned you back in 1939.
Post edited by Thaed on
Comments
CEOs are four times more likely to be psychopaths than the general populace. In other words, a primary characteristic of being a successful person is being an evil dick with no empathy. We have structured a society in such a way that the people who care least for others possess the majority of the wealth and power.
Well, I suppose that would include:
- No minorities (at least, no easily identifiable minorities) for everyday success. If you're talking about entertainment, when there is a screen between the entertainer and the public, some minorities are okay, as long as they aren't too threatening.
- If you want to be a lawyer, your grades in Law School must place you in the top 1% of the top 10% in your class, and your school had better be either Harvard or Yale. Also, you need to have been the notes editor on at least two law reviews.
- It also helps if Daddy was very successful.
See, that Ted Turner guy displayed a few of these characteristics. He is no genius, but he's a scrapper (also a straight white guy - that helps a lot). A real bootstraps guy. Of course it doesn't hurt that his father left him a business, Turner Outdoor Advertising, which, according to Wikipedia, was worth ONE MILLION dollars when Ted Turner took it over in 1963. One million in 1963 dollars, when a dollar was worth about ten dollars of today's virtual monopoly money dollars, back in the days when a comic book was wort ten cents and you could buy a house for 20K and most people thought they were rich if they made 25K a year.
One million 1963 dollars. Yeah, ol' Ted is a real self-made bootstrap-ey American success story.
Oh yeah - circumstances don't matter. I totally agree with you there. That's why you see so many poor African-American kids raised in the ghettoes of Baltimore and DC go on to become the CEOs of major companies like Halliburton. That Halliburton CEO was a poor black kid from Baltimore, right? Yeah, well anyway, that's why you see so many of those kids as partners in national law firms and U.S. Senators and so forth - because their circumstances didn't matter.
Yeah.
At least your comment makes me think of a cool Rush tune:
There are those who think that life has nothing left to chance take,
A host of holy horrors to direct our aimless dance.
A planet of playthings,
We dance on the strings
Of powers we cannot perceive
"The stars aren't aligned,
Or the gods are malign..."
Blame is better to give than receive.
You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill;
I will choose a path that's clear
I will choose freewill.
There are those who think that they were dealt a losing hand,
The cards were stacked against them; they weren't born in Lotusland.
All preordained
A prisoner in chains
A victim of venomous fate.
Kicked in the face,
You can't pray for a place
In heaven's unearthly estate.
Each of us
A cell of awareness
Imperfect and incomplete.
Genetic blends
With uncertain ends
On a fortune hunt that's far too fleet.
Also, because we elected a minority, all those poor kids suddenly became, like Ted turner, heirs apparent to million-dollar businesses.
How short-sighted of me to forget that.
It's also nice to have Rush lyrics quoted:
"Here are the lyrics to an old song. Your argument is invalid."
What about Mr. Frankl? Do you dare take him on Joe? He kind of owns the success in impossible circumstance space.
However, the idea that personal gumption alone is what makes success is just not true. Further, the proposition that circumstances don't matter is even more untrue.
Look at your example of Ted Turner. He inherited a business worth one million dollars in 1963. According to one of those internet calculator thingees, that's about seven and a quarter million in 2011 money. If I started out in life knowing that I stood to inherit a seven and a half million dollar business, I'd hazard to say that I might be a little more well off than I am now.
Those kids I see on the street in Baltimore everyday and the ones i taught when I briefly taught high school on the wrong side of the Anacostia in DC are not going to inherit seven and a quarter million dollar businesses. True, they are not going to be concentration camp victims either, but the reality of their situation is that they are highly unlikely to be very successful in the ways that success is usually measured in America BECAUSE OF THEIR CIRCUMSTANCES. That's not negativity. That's reality.
I'm not the Joker, and you are certainly not Batman.
Well, you might be the ridiculously campy Adam West Batman, but even most incarnations of Batman were hard bitten realists who understood that they could do what they do because of their inherited wealth, i.e. their circumstances, and who realized that not everyone can rise to their level of wealth, largely due to their particular circumstances.
Go back and re-read some Batman to see some of his opinions on wealth. An especially good one is Batman: Year One. Read his comments about how he is lucky and how he doesn't feel like he can do his job very well. Does he sound like an optimist?
The amazing thing about humans is that we have the power to turn bad situations into good ones. The problem with humans is that we tend to take credit for things over which we had no control.
Frankl was lucky.
I'm not discounting luck. I've had more than my share of good luck. However, if you think that fate and luck are all there is to life then why bother getting out of bed in the morning?
How about the six million other people? Were they somehow lacking in personal gumption and/or motivation to achieve success because they didn't survive? Were they too lazy? Were they too stupid? What?
Circumstances are barriers to be overcome. If you want something, overcome the barriers. That's the point of boiling down life being as simple as what you want. If it's not worth it, don't do it. Do something else. Life is too short. If you fail, try again or do something else. Most successful people failed at one time or another. Because they were persistent, they tried again or tried something else.
Hey Joe, did you know that Rand was a woman? Oh, and she was an immigrant too. Probably just lucky though. Everyone who ever does anything is just lucky or their parents bought it for them. Yep, that's the way the world goes round, right Joe?
I feel like I know what "came before" this argument. Now, how can I turn this into world domination...
Wanting to advance certain fields might make you successful and be more achieveable for everyone, but achieving wealth is most certainly made easier by having wealth. Perhaps disproportionately so.
Really, I think my long term plan is to simply migrate to a different country once things settle down a bit. I have some decently sought-after skills and my fiance certainly does, so we should be able to make ends meet wherever we live.
As usual, reality is in the middle. Lots of bad things happened to her that she overcame, and some she never overcame (she was never able to get her family out of Russia). However, lots of good things happened to her by chance that didn't happen to a million other people and they probably had just as much to do with her success as her own hard work. Yeah, he worked really hard at being 7'1" when all his friends where just sitting around complaining about their lot in life. While this obviously isn't the ONLY reason he became a professional NBA player (I'm a 6'8" Canadian and I'm not an NHL pro), it probably helped.
I do recognize, however, that there are voids that can only be filled by government. I can't see a coastal navigation system (historically lighthouses and lightships, which aside from a short experiment have always been government-run) or public health (think the CDC not the British NHS) being handled by charities. It's too much of an abstract concept to a lot of average people, and you'd get a lot of people who simply say "I don't care about ships crashing." without thinking through the farther implications.
Whether or not you actually succeed after an attempt is immaterial. The greatest successes are born of long strings of failure, and incremental progression.
I'm also not a fan of what most people call a "goal-oriented" approach. Goals, to me, are far away. They're on the other side of the field. You need to know what your goals are, but those should be internalized.
No, I like an "accomplishment-oriented" approach. You have a goal, and you make a plan to achieve that goal in discrete steps.
The "capacity to stand and deliver" is incredibly important, because the odds are good that you'll get knocked down. You might get fucked and get knocked down permanently, but as long as you can still get back up (even if you need help), you owe it to yourself to do so.
Meeting obligations is also extremely important. If you can't meet the obligations that you've created for yourself, or that you have accepted from other people, then you have no hope of incremental success. Also, meeting obligations that relate to other people fosters social goodwill, and creates an investment that can later give you a return.