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OPEN YOUR LIFE TO SUCCESS

There certainly seems to be a lot to what Alice says in the prologue. Just the same, you were told to learn from your mistakes when you were a child, weren't you? I was. All of us were.

And we were not told to study the right things we did, our achievements and successes. To do that would have been immodest, we were told.

I've asked lots of people how they go about learning from their mistakes. They all say they do. But they seem to have difficulty explaining how they go about it, and what benefits they get from doing it.

Do You EVER MAKE MISTAKES?

Of course you make mistakes. All of us make mistakes. All of us wish we made fewer mistakes. And it seems as though we all vow never to make the same mistake a second time.

But let me give you a warning right now. The more time you give to studying your mistakes, the more likely you are to increase the number of mistakes you make.

I won't say it's impossible to learn from your mistakes. But it comes very close to that. One obvious reason is that you are not really willing to study your mistakes; they are painful to think about, and perhaps embarrassing. The more you think about them, the more pain you inflict upon yourself.

So it is reasonable that you stop thinking about them before you can study them thoroughly.

I'll say it again. People don't learn from their mistakes. When you admit your mistakes, as we are generally taught to do, you are following an ancient and charming practice which was invented to prove modesty and willingness to learn. Over the centuries, this quaint custom has been distorted, twisted to almost the reverse in meaning: "you can learn from your mistakes" instead of the old idea—"admit your mistakes and thereby indicate your willingness to learn."

The idea that you can learn from your mistakes is one of the biggest causes of failure, and certainly a stumbling block in the way of your increased success.

Everyone says you should profit from your mistakes. I have said it too. But if you do learn or profit from your mistakes, you should want to make more mistakes in order to profit more.

That sounds like nonsense, the idea that the more mistakes you make, the more you can profit. But it certainly follows from the idea that you can learn or profit from your mistakes.
Frankly, I am trying to shock you into realizing that something you have taken almost for granted just doesn't make sense at all.

If you are going to speed your progress, comfortably, you will need to break with some of the old practices which have been holding you back.

Every great advance by man has followed a break with tradition. Tradition and precedent must give way to principle. New principles, and old principles better understood, are the gateway to progress.

Tradition and precedent are, too often, crutches that support decayed practices.
For example, here's an outworn idea: "The burnt child fears the fire." There is some truth to it. But if a little girl who burned her fingers on a hot stove were to stay away from stoves forever, how would she learn to cook?

And, again, how about those who played with fire, were burned, and then went on to found the Bronze Age, the Steel Age, and now the Nuclear Age?

Another example, this one leading to the point I wish to make: "If man were meant to fly, he would have been born with wings." Millions of people cling to that old belief, even though the 3000 mile Atlantic Ocean has shrunk to five hours of flight. The curious facts here involve the limitations of winged life as well as the accomplishments of man-made wings.

The creatures born to fly are remarkably limited in their conquest of the air. Bees constantly overshoot their landings on blossoms. Migrating birds injure themselves by the thousands, flying into cliffs, tall buildings, trees and other obstructions. Soaring birds cannot venture into tumultous winds. And even radar-equipped bats are vulnerable to changes of light and temperature. Envious man studied their strengths and weaknesses for centuries, gave too much consideration to the latter, and wound up fearing their limitations.

During the last fifty years, man has taken a different scientific approach: he has paid attention to their strengths, added up their achievements alone. To these, he added some accomplishments of his own. Only then, by piling selected elements of one achievement on another, did man succeed in conquering the sky. Flight, radar and under-the-water sonic developments —these and other advances come not from brain-limited birds and fishes, but from man's observation of the uniquely effective uses they make of their "equipment."

OPPORTUNITY UNLIMITED

Some of the same rules that help man achieve scientific success also help corporations to make a habit of success. For instance, corporations study the relative profitability of their products. Profits permit corporations to grow, in much the same way as accomplishments and successes challenge a man to grow. Corporations are concerned with continued growth and continued profits.

The companies that grow most, the giants, have made a habit of success. Did they do it by concentrating on their least profitable products? Not on your life! They did it by concentrating on the products actually or potentially producing most profit. "Radio Corporation of America is progressing so rapidly that 80 per cent of its more than a billion dollar business is in products that did not exist fourteen years ago." The company said just that in its recent brochure on our current decade.

RCA dropped its outmoded and unprofitable products. RCA focused on using and developing products which have consistently carried it forward.

What does this mean to you and your success? It means that your opportunities can be limitless, if you will concentrate on applying your best and most profitable qualities or capabilities. It also means that you may be limiting yourself when you try to strengthen your weaknesses, or concentrate on avoiding mistakes.

Let's see what you would do in a situation like this. You know two very different men. One of them seems to fail at whatever he attempts. The other does better than expected with virtually everything he undertakes. Here you are, concerned with making a habit of success. Who's experiences should you study to benefit most: the repeated failure, or the constant success? Who's secret would you rather know?

Every successful man likes to have successful people around him. This seems to establish a "climate" in which success grows most comfortably. Consequently, since you are planning to be more successful, you will want to study the experiences of the successful man, rather than those of the failure.

In other words, you should feel you will benefit most by knowing the "secret" of the successful man. His experiences are what you should study; and, as Alice said, you might try to copy some of them.

But has it occurred to you that you are both of these men: you have experienced both failures and successes. Yet it has been your practice to "let well-enough (your successes) alone." If you do unto others as you would be done by, you really should study your own most profitable experiences, your achievements and successes (not your mistakes or failures). If corporations can increase their profits by identifying their greatest "pay-off" items, you may be able to do it, too.

It isn't as simple as that, unfortunately. Until now, there has been no formalized method for the study of man's achievements.

What do I mean by "achievement?" What do I mean by "success?" It is likely that you feel you have no "great" or "earth-shaking" accomplishments. And you haven't made your million dollars. I haven't made mine, either. So I had to meet the problem of defining achievement in such a way as to be understood and appreciated by each reader in his or her own individual way.

AN ACHIEVEMENT is an experience which gives you this combination of feelings: you feel you have done something well (what others may think of it doesn't count); you have enjoyed doing it; you are proud of what you have done.

A "success" is a high-quality achievement.

By these definitions, you have had "achievements" as an infant, in and out of school, in connection with many different segments of your life as adult, youth, child. It is the way you yourself feel about them that counts. An achievement is certainly something personal, perhaps something private.

It is not easy to think about or study your achievements. People who do that are called braggarts, conceited, and worse.

So let's consider a man whose reputation proves he was a 99 per cent failure. After only a few years of primary schooling, he was given up by his teachers as hopeless. Eventually he became a railroad newsboy and candy butcher on the Grand Trunk Line running out of Detroit, after which he "sort of disappeared" into a limbo of failure. In his late teens, he emerged again as a railroad telegrapher and tinkerer. For every thousand tinkering experiments he conducted, 999 failed. Not once did he look back at his mistakes, hoping his unseeing feet would carry him forward. "That's one more experiment I won't have to try," he enthused after a particular dismal flop. And by concentrating on only the most promising leads his experiments furnished from time to time, along about Experiment 5,000 Thomas Alva Edison produced the incandescent electric lamp.
Even as a child young Tom was interested in electricity. His inventiveness showed up early, too; it took the form of outwitting his father who insisted on interrupting experiments and making him go to bed.

Edison's biographies show him to be a man of purpose who was not concerned with mistakes and failures. He did not give time to dreaming up ways of how to avoid repeating his mistakes; his concern was always with achieving his objectives.

ABOUT AVOIDING MISTAKES

If you concern yourself with backing away from or avoiding repeated mistakes, you are not likely to find yourself "back-ing-up" into achievement or success.

It has been traditional to believe that the avoidance of mistakes will result in progress. Yet it should be clear that not getting what you don't want, is quite different from getting what you do want. (I believe Alice made that "clear.") For instance, the avoidance of war, is not at all the same as the achievement of peace.

Yet world-moving theories have been based on the idea that study of what is not wanted will somehow reveal how to gain what is wanted. Karl Marx developed one such theory. His monumental studies of the Industrial Revolution's ravages, its starvation, unemployment, slums, and great differences between the poor and wealthy—these led to his system to avoid inequities and hardships: socialism, Marx's thoughts were more about sharing the wealth, than about multiplying and distributing it. It took a capitalist concerned with multiplying and distributing goods, Henry Ford, to spark practices which have increased and spread wealth more evenly throughout the United States than Marx ever dreamed possible in his socialistic economy.

Be concerned with what you want, rather than with what you don't want!

Another world-moving theoretician gave his life to the study of the mentally sick. Dr. Sigmund Freud said that to be "normal" we must sublimate or redirect our natural aggressive feelings, and adjust with understanding to feelings of guilt arising from real or imagined mistakes (sins). Why should study of the mentally sick teach a man about normal behavior? Why should we learn to adjust to what is the worst in us, or what is wrong in our attitudes?

Instead, be concerned with adjusting to what is right and best in you. Learn about your best, and use this knowledge both to live up to your best and to overcome your difficulties.
Do you drive a car? If you don't, ask anyone who drives a car about this: What happens to the driver who concentrates on watching the ditches he wants to avoid, instead of keeping his eyes on the road he is traveling? The answer is, he ends up in a ditch.

If you want to avoid repeating your mistakes, and concentrate on how to avoid them, you are not likely to find success or make a habit of success. If you fix your mind on the problems and poverty you want to avoid, you'll end up with both of them. Job said it better: "That which I feared most has come upon me." On the other side, the man who led America from the depths of the depression said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Be concerned with what you want, not with what you don't want! Let precedent give way to principle in your life. Recognise that happiness, achievement and growth are normal, and look for ways to increase them, have more of them. Of course sorrow, mistakes, sickness, rut jobs and problems are also parts of life; but the more attention you give them, the more you encourage them to settle into your everyday affairs.

Attention is a kind of reward; and whatever you reward in life, you encourage to come back for more reward. Pay attention to the experiences which pay off most. Stop studying your mistakes; start and concentrate on studying your achievements and successes, however small they may be.

An important difficulty arises here. Suppose you have failed at something, or not done well at it; won't other people hold that against you? They probably will, but there are ways, described later in this book, to surmount obstacles like that.

It is so customary to look for what's wrong with people, rather than for what's right about them. "If you can't make good at one thing," says tradition, "how can you expect to make good at something else, something bigger?" But let's say you are a good quarterback, and the coach puts you in at tackle. You play your heart out, and get slaughtered. That still doesn't mean you are not a good quarterback, and might have won the game playing in your right position.

If you're put into the wrong job because of a company's "convenience," and turn in a poor record, it will be held against you. But you're less likely to get over that hurdle if you try to say how wrong the company is, than if you develop proof of how much more effective you can be for the company in another spot. The one way "blames" circumstances; the other takes control over your own progress—to the benefit of both you and the company.

Again, this requires that you become well-acquainted with your achievements, and the ingredients of those achievements.

Throw modesty to the winds—false modesty, that is. You'll admit to mistakes; so you might just as well admit to achievements and small or large successes. And you should consider this: the applause accorded the man who admits his failures is rarely so excessive as to include promotions to bigger jobs where he can courageously admit to greater failures. Besides, if you don't look at your achievements, why should anyone else?

We do have boasters and braggarts to spare, and they still dwell loudly on past "accomplishments." The big difference here is that you are not going to DWELL on past achievements; you are going to USE them and build on them.

In your pathway to greater success, you cannot USE failure, that is clear.

False modesty influences you to concentrate on your mistakes. It is only when you achieve, that you can express humility. "Let your light shine" it: says in the Sermon on the Mount, "so that others may see your good works."

WHO'S ROAD TO SUCCESS?

I couldn't estimate the number of qualified persons who have pointed out the road to success, and it would appear from the diversity of their directions that there are as many roads as there are advisers. There are indeed, just as many kinds of successes to be reached by them; but are they the roads for you, leading to where you want to go? And how do you know you'll like it when you get there?

There is a serious danger in following these "established" roads to success. Many of them are as out-moded as the directions for following the Oregon Trail. Many of them lead to goals that no longer exist, or are over-crowded, like the quaint ocean resort of two years ago that is now a mess of fishing piers, bowling alleys and dance halls. Today lives of great men all remind us that they made their lives sublime by altering the
very circumstances that made them great. In his autobiography the great physicist Robert Millikan wrote: "For it has been the lot of all the generations of mankind up to the two generations my life span has covered to leave the world at death very much the same kind of place they found it at birth. But this will not be true of those of us who came from the vintage of '68. Our ordinary life experiences bear little resemblance to those of my father, and much less to those of my grandfather."

Most of our traditional rules of success have been passed down through so many generations that they are in a rut. What was good in one century was good in the next. No longer is this true. I'm not saying that the successful men of history would be failures in today's world. I'm thinking they would take one look at our existing opportunities, compare them with the meager few they had, and really take off. I'm also thinking they would find the rules for success they had used too restricting for modern living, and would use their rugged individualism to make a fresh start. Not for them the old recipe for rabbit stew: "First you catch the rabbit—" They would head for the frozen food department, and if their chortles in Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman could be translated in general terms, they would add up to, "Boy, in this modern world how can you fail?"

THE BREAK WITH TRADITION

Every great advance by man has been the result of a break with tradition. If this were not so, we would still be savages, for man's intelligence today is no greater than that of the Sumerians of 5,000 years ago. According to Dr. George G. Hackman, Professor of Archaeology at Wagner College, the Sumerians had approximately the same Intelligence Quotient as modern man, but until they broke with tradition that had kept man roaming as nomads for generations, their intelligence had had little opportunity to manifest itself.

When they settled down as city dwellers, one achievement had a chance to be related to another. They became clean-shaven, sophisticated metropolites, with a culture in which all forms of art had time to flourish. So advanced did they become that in mathematics alone some of their formulas we now prefer to have handled by electronic computing machines.

The Sumerians did not fall through their lack of intelligence. They fell when they began to rest on their achievements instead of climbing on them. And once they began resting on their achievements instead of using them, the barbarians took them over with ease.
For century after century civilizations would rise laboriously, relax, and finally come to rest on their achievements. Then the "barbarians" would move in. So often was this same mistake made that we have a dangerous old saw to describe it: "History repeats itself."
Did we profit from the mistakes? The historians and military leaders from the Sumerians to the present made a great study of them, and they did do better. Each mistake, from the Sumerians' to World War II, has been bigger and more devastating than the last. But consider where we might be if each new civilization had been built on the achievements of its predecessor instead of on the rubble.

Consider where we might be if we studied the successes instead of the mistakes. As a matter of fact, we have no choice but to study achievements. Any further study of mistakes leading to bigger and more devastating ones can only mean the end of the world. Thus the break with tradition becomes not only desirable but compulsory for both nations and individuals.

How THIS APPLIES TO YOU

"Go ahead, make me a success" a retiring major challenged me. "That's all I want. I've been out of civilian life for fourteen years, and I've got a lot of catching up to do. Fast."

This happened soon after I was called in to found and direct a volunteer counseling and placement service for World War II veterans.

"Major," I said, "if you don't know where you are going, how will you know when you get there?"

"Ill figure that out when I arrive," he said.

But how could he? If you don't know where you are going, how can you know when you get there? If you don't know where you are going, there can be no recognition of your destination.

I'll leave the major there with his—and my—problem to take up my next client, a young lieutenant who has spent three years as an aerial navigator in the Air Transport Command. "I don't want any of the old stuff about roads to success" he told me bluntly. "Ben Franklin and Horatio Alger and the rest of those guys wrote all about it. Look, when I'm navigating a plane, I've got the stars, radio, Loran, Shoran, and radar to help me get where I want to go. I don't have to follow Columbus. I go where I want to go, and I've got all these aids to help me find the way. Don't you career men have some modern aids to help people go where they want to go? Or do we have to follow the same old roads as Ben Franklin's Poor Richard and Alger's newsboys?"

He was both bitter and right. Here was a young man who was not asking for the road to success. He was asking me for some modern aids that would permit him to steer his own course. He wanted to find his own success, and he didn't care if there was a well-marked highway leading to it or not.

I did have some aids to help him—signposts in his own past achievements that would permit him to set a confident course for his future.

Now there are dependable aids that will permit an individual to determine his own course and then help him get there. Starting in 1945 when returning veterans first made the question urgent, I have been able through my consultant work with corporations, military, government, and academic institutions, to amass well over 10,000 case histories based on interviews with over 40,000 men and women.

Since then, too, through my work in the executive counseling firm I founded, and through my work as career development specialist at Wagner College and Fairleigh Dickinson University, I have been able to confirm my findings so repeatedly, that I can no longer hesitate in setting them down. If they make obsolete some of the time-honored roads to success, so do they eliminate a lot of ruts. And instead of pointing out a road to a success you might not like when you get there, they help you select your own goal, and then, roads or no roads, provide the aids that get you there.

YOUR NEW AIDS TO SUCCESS

In recent years a great deal of importance has been placed on intelligence and aptitude tests. The military services use them. Industry uses them. Colleges frequently use them to determine the courses students should take. Maybe you have taken such tests and produced miserable scores and a resulting feeling of inferiority. Maybe you passed such test with flying colors and still managed to end up at the bottom of the payroll. Whatever the result, the best thing to do is to forget it.

In 1954, social scientists headed by Columbia University Professors Thorndike and Hagen conducted a massive study of psychological aptitude tests. Nineteen different tests had been given to 500,000 men twelve years earlier. Seventeen thousand of these were studied. The study proved that the "scientific" forecasts based on these standard tests were not as good as guesswork. "Aptitude Test Is Found False Prophet On Jobs," headlined the N. Y. Herald Tribune. "They cannot predict success or satisfaction in your job," said Earl Ubell, Science Editor.

With your whole future at stake, it would seem then that the results of aptitude and intelligence tests—which are unreliable to begin with, and can be influenced by a good night's sleep, outside reading, a cold in the head or a hangover—are hardly conclusive.

But lets look at a future based on your past achievements. The achievements of weeks ago, or months ago, or years ago are not going to be influenced by the tensions preceding a critical examination. These are things you did well in the past, enjoyed doing, and which gave you a feeling of pride. Having done them once with gratifying results in the past, you can do them again, and kindred jobs in the future with equally gratifying results. Now we are not dealing with aptitudes hinted at in the course of a tense examination. We are dealing with demonstrated achievements.

Each achievement has focused and applied many of your best capabilities and other qualities. Many achievements, some small but all important to you, represent many occasions when your best capabilities and other qualities have been applied. Study of these achievements, then, will help to clarify their principle common "ingredients." These are your very personal qualifications. They that point the way to opportunities and success in your own future.

Success