no luck

I am torn by the work of Richard St John & his eight secrets to success.

I cannot disagree that passion, work, focus, push, ideas, improvement, service & persistence are good things to do. I would strongly advise people to do these things.

At the same time, Richard calls himself a "success analyst". And yet I think there's a gaping hole in his analysis. And this highlights a critical difference between Richard & myself. Richard seems to believe that the world is fair. I do not. And this has implications.

From my understanding based on his website (& please correct me if I am wrong), Richard has interviewed a lot of successful people and, based on his analysis of those interviews, has identified the 8 secrets to success*. If you do these things then you will be successful. Richard does not believe in luck: our success is NOT determined by this thing we have no control over called luck. Our success is the result of doing things that we do have control over – the Eight Success Principles.

That's because his chosen method blinds him to the role that luck plays in the lives of successful people for two reasons:

• There is this thing called the self-serving bias. If you ask people why they have been successful then they tend to attribute it to their own abilities. They tend to attribute their failures to their environment. Successful people may be different in this regard but if so, I would like to see the evidence. Asking people why stuff happened to them is not always a reliable way of establishing facts.
  
• The sample of people that Richard chosen are all successful. He has not spoken to people who did all of his 8 thing but were ultimately unsuccessful. So I'm guessing this bunch of people don't exist. Right?
  

I asked Richard about this latter point and he was kind enough to respond in this blog post. Please read the whole thing but I'm going to pull out a quote for you: So, there was a high correlation between not doing the 8 Traits and not achieving success.

Richard is right to use the word "correlation". He picked a group that are defined as failures - and quite an extreme group. There is an issue with this. Let me demonstrate this by adding a 9th secret of success: "owning a Bentley". There was probably a higher level of Bentley ownership aong millionaires than there is among street beggars. Does this mean that their lack of Bentley ownership is a cause of their non-millionaireness?

To put this another way, there is also a strong correlation between poverty & mental illness - but the cause & effect relationship may go in both directions. Being mentally ill decreases your ability to find an income. Being very poor causes you lots of stress that may increase your chances of developing mental illness. But all those unsuccessful people that Richard had talked to must have lost (or never had) passion and focus before they ended up in their situation. Right?

If Richard's method seems familiar that's because it is very similar to one used by Jim Collins in Good to Great. Good to Great looked at companies rather than people but has come in for a lot of stick from Bob Sutton & Phil Rosenzweig for using the "asking awesome people why they are so awesome" method. This recent HBR article noted that: we evaluated 287 allegedly high-performing companies in 13 major success studies. We found that only about one in four of those firms was likely to be remarkable; the rest were indistinguishable from mediocre firms catching lucky breaks. But I thought that luck played no role in success? How can this be?

In his blog post responding to me, Richard goes on to say: So, if successful people follow the 8 Traits, what differentiates the ones who achieve super success from those who achieve moderate success? Again, it’s a question of degree. The Gates and Oprahs of the world not only do the 8 Traits, they do them to a greater degree than other people. They love what they do more than most people. They work more hours (even after he was a multimillionaire, Bill Gates worked most nights until 10pm and only took 2 weeks off in 7 years).

Bill Gates is approximately 100,000 times richer than me. That means that he must work 100,000 times harder than me. Or else he loves his work 100,000 times more than me. Or could it be that environment and/or luck play a role here? But that can't be right because life is fair and luck plays no part.

Actually there is one group in the world for whom life is fair. And that's people like me & Richard - white males in the developed world. Life is more than fair for us. It is wonderful. It rocks being a white male living in a developed country (esp. if you have an education, money, status & power) - and don't let any self-hating liberal hippy tell you otherwise. And if the rest of you aren't as successful as us then you have only yourselves to blame. Be as passionate as us. Work as hard as us. Stop being losers.

So what will I tell my children?

I will tell my children that they must work hard & be passionate about they do & all the other things that Richard talks about. But I will also tell them that life is not fair and they are very lucky to be living in a country with access to education & health services (assuming we still do). I will then refer back to the previous point that life is not fair and state that they are also very lucky to be born into this wonderful country in a position of relative status & power.

And I will finish by reminding them that life is not fair and this all could be taken away from them in a moment.

*But wait? Are these really "secrets"? I don't really feel that "hard work is important" is something that anyone has kept from me. Every authority figure in my life has told me this.