What Really Causes Success?

What causes success?

According to a recent survey of highly successful people, hard work and education were the most important factors. Also, investing money intelligently was described as crucial. Interestingly, they ranked the “silver spoon” factor — being born into a financially advantageous situation — as the least important. (See the video “What Rich People Say is the Key to Success” for details.)

This is contrary to what a lot of people think, and contrary to what nearly all of our poltical and intellectual leaders claim. The conventional thinking is, “If you get a good start in life, then you can and will likely succeed. If you don’t, then you’re doomed to failure through no fault of your own.”

Of course, the people who claim this have an agenda. In the case of politicians, they’re making this claim so that they can seize wealth and gain power, all in the name of supposedly helping other people. If you’re naive you’ll think their motives are “pure,” but in fact they have nothing but power to gain in their positions.

With more ordinary people, they’re making the claim to perhaps rationalize or excuse their failure to succeed as they might have wished. “Well, my parents weren’t rich. My parents didn’t have a lot. How could I succeed?” You’re supposed to agree with such people, because failing to do so — well, that would mean you’re not compassionate. That would make you insensitive or cruel. We can’t have that!

Yet are they necessarily right?

When you study the history of people who succeed financially and otherwise, they usually don’t come from a lot of wealth. As we all know, the people who start out with a lot of wealth or other advantages don’t necessarily make the most of these advantages. In fact, some children of wealthy parents either squander the wealth or become entitled, nasty brats. This observation seems to support the contention of these successful people that being born with a “silver spoon” in your mouth is the least important factor in success.

A panel of economically successful people also gave their own answers in this short video.

The answers were in some respects familiar. Success is not due to “luck.” Luck, in fact, involves hard work meeting opportunity. Yes, it’s a cliché. But does that automatically make it false?

There’s no substitute for hard work. Those who cynically dismiss this fact don’t offer an alternative. If hard work isn’t the most important factor, then what is? Usually there’s no answer. Perhaps it’s fate; or perhaps it’s society or the government. It has nothing to do with the individual. Yet any individual who is highly successful must have put some concentrated effort into it. And took a lot of risks, as well. How could it have been otherwise?

The other thing successful people talk about as an ingredient for success is risk-taking. Risk and persistence. If you take a couple of risks and they don’t work out, we could freeze-frame you at that very point and you might say, “See? Risk-taking doesn’t work for me. It does for others, but not for me. That proves life is inherently unfair.”

However, life is neither inherently fair nor unfair. “Fairness” is a moral evaluation that applies to human beings, by some moral standard. It cannot apply to inanimate things, and it cannot apply to broad abstractions such as “life” or “existence.” Life and existence are neither inherently fair nor unfair. They simply are. Some risks pay off, and some do not. There are reasons for this, and it takes time to discover them all. There’s no guarantee that you will discover “the way” to be successful. But if you fail to take risks and persist, in some context, you definitely will not discover them.

There is no intrinsic mystery to resolve. All mysteries can ultimately and potentially be understood, via the process of human reason. At the root of it, successful people seem to have one thing in common: A confidence in the potency of human reason. Not just their own reasoning; but reason as such. That’s why they tend to get more accomplished than those who sit back and wonder what supernatural force, government authority or some other unnamed entity will do — or discover — for them.

The best advice I ever received when I embarked on my career goals was, “It’s no mystery. You can figure this out. What you don’t know or understand now you can and will figure out.”

If you watch the video, one of the successful persons interviewed commented that two overlooked keys to success are, “Be who you are,” and “Treat others as equal.” Interesting. What he’s talking about here, quite possibly, are the practical benefits associated with (1) integrity (being who you are); and (2) basic fairness (which is what I assume he means by “equal”). Capitalism and business get a bad name because, it’s assumed, people with more success and visibility inevitably treat others poorly. But if you study the example of successful businesses — Southwest Airlines is one example that comes to mind — you’ll find that the most successful outcomes involve entrepreneurs and business owners who treat their employees fairly, by rational standards. In other words, they don’t give people anything they don’t deserve, but they do compensate the best people well. It’s not so much a matter of treating people equally as treating them according to what they deserve.

One thing seems really clear from all this. You don’t attain success in life — not success of any kind, to any degree — by feeling and exhibiting anger at the universe. The people who succeed the most are the ones who accept that success is not guaranteed, but it’s worth the effort, even if they spend their whole lives attempting to acquire it. Anger and negativity solve nothing. On the emotional level, it sometimes seems as if they do, because — like a drug — anger and negativity give you the delusional sense that you’ve answered a question. “There no success or value in life possible to me anyway. I knew it.”

The successful people are the ones who don’t adopt this attitude. They’re confident, optimistic and hopeful, at least on the whole. They recognize that it takes effort, reason, logic and persistence to get what they want. Success in practice presupposes, and requires, a successful way of thinking.