I want to be like you!

Recently there was an event at which Bill Gates and Warren Buffett answered questions from students of the Columbia Business School in New York. I referred to the event recently when writing about Warren Buffett.

So why were these students interested in Messrs Gates and Buffett? It is, of course, because they are successful.

While different people define success in many different ways, we can be reasonably sure that, in the context of a business school, most of those business students would categorise Gates and Buffett as being among the most successful people alive.

So what did the students ask about? Well, of course, they asked about success! The questions were of two main types.

How to succeed?

The first type was essentially: “how did you succeed?” These included general questions, but also questions about specific events or actions. Very little of what either of them said in this area was particularly revealing, as much of it has been heard before.

The second type was: “how can I succeed?” The implication being “… like you?” This was, I found, a much more interesting area.  When asked about specific choices that one could make they gave some specific answers, and that is to be expected. But, when asked general questions, the answer was very consistent.

Students were advised to: “do what turns you on!”.

Watching the video of this, my sense from the audience reaction to this answer is that this was not what they wanted to hear! “No, no. Tell me what I need to do to succeed like you!” seemed to be the reaction.

It doesn’t work like that

Well … as we know, it is most unlikely that anyone can plan to be as successful as either of them. But maybe there is a halfway stage.

The introduction to the well known high-tech business book Crossing the Chasm by Geoffery Moore, begins with a different view. Rather than aiming to be like Bill Gates and accrue billions, Moore claims, it is more realistic to aim to be one of many people who are moderately financially successful and accrue tens of millions each.

Guess what? Gates and Buffett don’t seem to think that it works like that either. They said it, but people are not listening: “do what turns you on!”

They were actually answering a different question; they were ignoring the implied ”… like you” part of the question. They were not answering the question: “how can I be successful like Gates, Buffett or any one else?”.

They were answering the question “how I be as successful as possible”, that is, in comparison with themselves!

By all means gain inspiration, guidance and assistance from others. But, in the end, they are saying that the outcome depends on comparing the different paths that are available and choosing between them.

The objective is to be the best that one can be.

Overall, the person who is the most successful will depend on a variety of circumstances and is probably not very important anyway. Some of those circumstances include: which choices are available to us and which things turn out to be valued in our world; and neither of those, separately, is under our complete control either.

The issue, surely, is our ability to adapt by applying more effort to areas which are available to us, “turn us on” and are valued in our world. The choices that each of us make, not only in isolation but on the basis of our experience of the outcomes, will determine whether we achieve our maximum potential. This is not as simple as sticking with one thing, but is about selecting between options.

Charles Darwin recognised that. While performance is very important, it is not sufficient; diversity is also necessary for success, especially when the environment is changing rapidly. It is of course not quite that simple. Darwin’s understanding is normally considered to relate to diversity between individuals within a population; that is diversity between genes. But those business students were probably not thinking about sacrificing themselves for the benefit of the overall population. So, the point here is really about memes rather than genes; that this is a broader topic.

It seems, then, that the extremely successful people are the ones who focus on one thing which is highly valued; that is their good luck, especially if they start at an early age as both Gates and Buffett did. Some sportsman and musicians have the same experience. But, if they had continued to focus on that one thing when it was not been highly valued, then they might have been much less successful.

So, for most people, being as successful as possible involves selecting from the areas available to them based on the combination of how much it “turns them on” and its value. In isolation, this can sound rather mundane until, that is, we introduce some dynamic elements of continual review, feedback and reselection.

This is a form of natural selection “at work”.

Finally, in another presentation where Gates and Buffett were together, Buffett used a different description of the importance of getting the best out of oneself.

He advised people to be rational, to stop getting in their own way and to form good habits:  “the chains of habit are too light to be felt, until they are too heavy to be broken”.

By John Lewis

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