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LIFTING THE LID ON SUCCESS THE CAPACITY MYTH

Recently I was asked to demonstrate and discuss Success Factor Analysis (the techniques presented in these pages) at the American Management Association—before a group of executives representing corporations throughout the country. They gave me the topic: "How to discover your capacity." I believe in man's unlimited potential, so I accepted the invitation as an opportunity to attack a long-established myth.

The conference chairman, who was aware of my views, indicated to those present that I was expected to produce a formula which would enable each of them to rate their capacities as though they were so many different-sized motors to be rated on horsepower. My opening remark was, "I will not talk on the topic of any man's capacity. This word 'capacity’indicates there is just so much a man can do.

"Capacity is a word that can't be applied to any man of ambition. We can say a truck is loaded to capacity, that a motor is running at capacity, or that a theater is filled to capacity because we know their limits. Our scientists and engineers rate everything from the atom to the world's largest power plant in terms of capacity, but who is to say when our scientists and engineers have reached capacity and can *hold' no more? Yet because this is a scientific age, with 'scientific* psychological tests—intelligence, personality and aptitude tests—we think we can measure men as we can measure a machine or a chemical reaction. We can't."

I paused to let that sink in, and then continued: "No inanimate object can be suddenly inspired to double capacity. Man does it all the time. Call it inspiration or determination, the fact remains that when a man concentrates on doing his best, he is constantly improving himself, his performance, and his over-all effectiveness. And as long as he is improving, how can he reach capacity? The whole idea is absurd."

"What I believe you really want to know is, how to determine the pattern of improvement of a man's best capacities." That evening, those successful executives learned how men are motivated—self-motivated; how men can be helped to know themselves—their best selves; how men can gain the self-appreciation which stimulates them to be and do their best more often. They learned what this book will help you to learn.

You need to know yourself, to be your constantly-improving best. And you also need to decide if you want to be your "best," or if you want to improve only your "average performance." There's a lot of difference between the two. If you want to improve "average performance," all you need do is cut down on mistakes—the safe and traditional way; but it must be obvious that the reduction of mistakes has nothing to do with the improvement of your best work. The reduction-of-mistakes approach merely raises slightly the level of mediocrity. Besides, if all you want to be is upper-crust mediocre, this book is not for you. This book is for men and women who are willing to accept the responsibility of individual excellence, for people who really want to be their best more of the time.

You need to understand what your "best" is; so you need to explore and appreciate those experiences which applied your "best" capabilities. You need to appreciate them. My understanding of what I think is your "best," will surely be different from how you feel about your own experiences. Only you know
how you feel about your experiences. You may have done something that brought you praise and an increase in salary, but if in your own considered opinion it was a stroke of luck, that's all it was. Or maybe you worked to all hours completing a project that was greeted with apathy or even antipathy; it still is a big achievement if that is the way you feel about it.

One afternoon I was sitting next to the president of a professional organization at its monthly luncheon. As is my habit I prompted him into telling me of his achievements, achievements being my abiding interest. He listed a touchdown he had made at college, his election as senior class president, the first big contract he had landed by himself, and his election to his present post. At that point his friend and close business associate seated at my other side leaned over to suggest, "Tell Mr. Haldane about the boat you built in your basement. That certainly was an achievement."

"No," replied the president immediately, "that was just a little boat, a hobby."
Obviously the president considered as achievements only the successes that contained public recognition as an important factor. Another man building the same kind of boat might regard it as a masterpiece, a magnificent achievement in craftsmanship, project planning, and perseverance.

This is an important point. To create your own success and make a habit of it, consider only those achievements of yours that are important to you, regardless of what tradition, or your boss, or your friends might have to say about them.

THE NINE-DOTS PUZZLE

We have one more obstacle to overcome before we can start building on your achievements. That is the boxed-in feeling. The feeling that a lid has been nailed down on one's opportunities to grow. By far it is the most mentioned obstacle of those who come to me for assistance, closely followed only by the question, "But what can I do successfully?" One has held the same job for seven years, and can't expect a promotion until his amazingly youthful and healthy superior dies or retires. Another is boxed in by six rivals in his department, all so evenly matched that the last time a promotion came up his boss hired a man from outside rather than break up an efficient combination. A third finds his capacity for growth restricted by the slow-but-sure growth of a century-old firm that prides itself on the number of watches it hands out every year to those that have served 25 years, usually in the same department. So, in scores of variations, runs the boxed-in theme.

Some years ago I discovered a revealing test that exposes the boxed-in feeling for what it is. It has opened the eyes of so many that I have every reason to believe that—unless you are the one out of a thousand that can solve it—it will help you, too.

In the space below are three sets of nine dots, thusly:
.1 .2 .3 . . . . . .
.4 .5 .6 . . . . . .
.7 .8 .9 . . . . . .

The test calls for you to join all nine dots with four straight lines without taking your pencil from the paper. You have three chances, and I urge you to try all three of them, taking all the time you need, before reading further.

If you are like the 999 out of a thousand of the thousands who have tried it, you have spent some 15 minutes on the problem to produce nothing but frustration. You have been boxed in.

Now let's see what happened. In the first place, I introduced the test by presenting the enormous odds against your being able to solve it. And when you believe the odds are overwhelmingly against you, you will not try as hard as when you believe you have a 50-50 chance.

This is a dangerous policy, based upon what I call "statistical hypnosis." In this state you find it easy to believe that as long as thousands of others have failed, you are in good company when you join them. You are using statistics to lull yourself when, with a little individual resourcefulness, you might have found the problem made to order for you. To arouse yourself from this state, you need but remember you are not a statistical unit to be told that you will fail because thousands of others did. You are unique. What applies to thousands does not necessarily apply to you. Sometime early in 1960 a child was born who brought the population of the United States to 180,000,000. He became the last zero on a string of seven, according to statistics, but I doubt he will think of himself a zero reduced to the seventh power. Of this, too, I will have more to say later.
In the second place we have been taught so many things that restrict or limit our achievement potential that even in our contemplation of the nine dots we tend to restrict our imaginations instead of turning them loose. Since infancy we have been trained to conform, whether it be with playmates, fellow-students, or fellow-workers. In some instances these efforts to conform—to keep up with the crowd—have led to enormous bursts of energy and productivity. Oddly enough, however, most of these bursts of energy were spent, not on getting ahead, but on trying to bring one's lesser attributes up to par, or trying to cut one's superior talents down to par. Today, except in a few enlightened schools, the fate of the gifted child is a lonesome one.

To confuse matters, in certain activities like athletics, dramatics, art, and craftsmanship, an undue stress is placed on excellence. The boy who scores a touchdown at a critical moment is not hailed as a good player but as a football "hero." The girl who sings the lead in the school opera is not just a competent singer but the "star." By the same token, the boy who fumbles the ball and loses the game can crash from "hero" to "bum" in one five-second play. The boy in shop who gouges a piece of woodwork, though he be the best chemist in his class, has revealed himself as a "clumsy dolt." Scars like that can be of long duration, and even permanent. I know of an actor whose career was nearly ruined in college by the mistake of the leading lady in a dramatic club play. At the high point of the melodrama, with the heroine gazing expectantly at the wrong door, he made his entrance at the opposite side of the stage. Deadly silence, followed by a roar of laughter that broke up the play. It was the girl's mistake, but it was his entrance, and he became the goat. "They laughed at me everytime they saw me on the campus after that," he told me miserably. "Why, the next fall, in my first day in class, the professor greeted me with, 'Well, Lawrence, I'm glad to see you managed to find the right door.’ "
I was a long time in working with him before he convinced himself that his real achievements in acting had not been ruined by another party's mistake. He returned to the stage and television where he is now enjoying increasing success. Not all are so fortunate.

Achievements tend to be minimized; mistakes tend to be amplified, even though they be another's mistakes, and so strong has tradition made this influence that one girl's mistake had nearly caused him to abandon the career of his choice.

If that is true of the career fields based on visible activities like athletics and dramatics, consider how much more insidious it becomes in the intellectual, commercial, industrial, and governmental fields where success is not based necessarily on a starring role or a grandstand play. The evidence indicates that we attach much greater importance to the things we see, the visible careers, than we do to the intellectual—including memory—activities that are invisible. At the same time, not more than 50,000 people can be considered relatively successful in the fields of dramatics, sports and arts. The rest of us 179,950,000 must find our successes elsewhere. But how are we to find them, if, for the most part, the fields are "invisible"?

That is tradition asking the question. In science, industry, and government an entirely new appreciation of these so-called invisible talents has been reached. These bodies know that ideas are the currency of progress. They know that not one wheel can turn until an idea stirs it, that not one board can be nailed to another unless an idea directs the motions, that no world peace can be reached until the ideas have been hatched to base it on. They know, too, that ideas without management skills to keep them organized, without craftsmen's skills to see them realized in finished form, and without operators' skills to make them work are just empty dreams. They need successful men in all these fields if they are to succeed themselves.

TESTS

To that end they developed all sorts of tests. Their hope was that the future physicist, rampaging through a technical aptitude test battery, would stand out amongst his rivals as conspicuously as the football star rampaging off to his All-American title. In the same way they hoped to identify the future diplomat, the spaceman, the natural resources conservationist, the heart specialist, and the millions of others needed to be successful in some 30,000 varieties of jobs, changing at the rate of 2% yearly.

But it is one thing to test for the right man, and another to get the right man to take the test. All too often the job is handed to the one with the highest score, and in too many cases that score can be very low indeed. In those instances both the job and its winner suffer. These tests apply what I referred to earlier as the "capacity myth."

At this point I break not only with tradition but with modern practices, both of which are working backward. According to tradition, in analyzing the lives of great men, we accept first their greatness, and then search through their pasts for the achievements that made them great. That is easy to do. With Edison we can say he invented the electric lamp, the phonograph, the motion picture, and more than a thousand other items. But what did Edison think about his inventions? Were they real achievements in his own mind, or were they only the by-products of some secret problem that, once conquered, led the way to all his other victories? And what about George Washington at Valley Forge? Did he think of that bitter winter as an achievement in heroic fortitude, as history has it, or did he think of it as a stupid trap into which he never should have fallen? Only the individual can know his own achievements, and only the individual can use them. Otherwise we would be what the Communists call "the masses" instead of a collection of 180,000,000 individuals.

Just as one cannot select certain achievements in the life of a great man and say, "These are what made him feel great," neither can available psychological tests determine who is going to become great in the future, and who is doomed to lasting failure. Only you can decide what you are going to become, and the moment of decision is reached when you declare yourself open to success.

Now let's return to the nine-dot test. Did you box yourself in, or did you let your imagination roam beyond the limits of traditional confines? Here's the way it works: The first line is drawn through dots one, four, and seven. Tradition would have you stop there, but nothing in the rules prohibits you from continuing on down the page as long as the line is straight. Do so to an imaginary Dot Ten, which will be, if your imagination is working right, in line with dots eight and six. Thus your second line will be from Dot Ten through dots eight and six. Don't stop. By projecting your imagination, you will also project the line to an imaginary Dot even with dots three, two, and one. That becomes your third straight line, after which your fourth can pass only through dots five and nine.
Simple, isn't it? And do not think I tricked you, or that it was, to use a current expression, a rigged show. If you really want to get ahead, you must be willing to work beyond what your eye can see. Increased success requires that you look beyond where you are to where you want to be. The visible confines must be lifted to provide room in which your imagination can rove. Your past achievements were not just a pattern of dots adding up to a box on which you pull the lid down on yourself. They contain the clues through which you get to know your best self and solve the problems of success by throwing off the lid on your ambitions.

MORE AIDS TO SUCCESS, AND WHERE TO LOOK FOR THEM

"I yam what I yam," says Popeye, the famous comic strip character, "because that's what I yam."

A statement like that has been accepted for so many centuries that it has gained the stature of a truism. You are what you are, it would have you believe, and nothing can change you. But if that is the case, why do we worry about our young geniuses doomed to a life of mediocrity through lack of educational opportunities that would transform them into scientists and engineers? And why do we worry about the young Russians being developed into scientists when in back of them is nothing but centuries of serfdom? Change is inherent. Change is unavoidable. Merely because changes came slowly for a few million years doesn't mean they are still inching along today. Those first aeons were like the first few moments of a three-stage rocket taking off for space. A dreadfully slow, heart-stopping struggle to overcome inertia, a gradual pick up in speed, followed by acceleration such as only could be imagined fifteen years ago.

Here are some others that have received general acceptance: "Like father, like son," "A chip off the old block," or, by way of contradiction, "From shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations." Mark Twain was not like his father. Professor Millikan was not a chip off the old block. The Rockefeller brothers are not sweating it out as laborers in their shirt sleeves. When it comes to personal success, as a matter of fact, we don't have another old saw, "Exceptions prove the rule." Exceptions are the rule.

As I have pointed out, any change, any break with tradition, is as painful as running away from home. That is because our thinking is still based on training inherited from the past while our careers are linked to the swift pace of the future. Willy-nilly, ready or not, our scientists have tossed us into a changed world. What is more, while the scientists have been perfectly willing to do the tossing, they have been notably remiss in providing the nets in which to catch us. Having proved otherwise, they no longer believe that what goes up must come down. And since they have proved the point, we no longer have to believe it either. Neither do we have to believe that pride goeth before a fall, if pride is based on achievement.
I'm not going to get philosophical. I am a career development specialist, and as such I can recognize opportunities as they are created without having to create them myself. And they are being created at a fantastic rate. R. G. LeTourneau, who welds together the world's largest earth-moving equipment, says that had he been born ten years earlier, the best he could have achieved would have been a job as a blacksmith.
Or I could take my own field. A hundred years ago careers were not so much developed as thrust upon apprentices whether they liked them or not. The opportunities available were much the same as they had been for centuries. But as of the moment I am writing on an electric typewriter that is in itself the embodiment of thousands of new opportunities. As a business machine it is a part of the clan that range from vest pocket dictation machines to giant electronic computers. The plastic in its keys comes from a new world of petro-chemicals. Its nylon ribbon represents another world of synthetic fibers. The paper that receives the impression is the product of a lumbering industry revolutionized in the last generation. The ink, the metals, the glass-fiber insulation, and scores of other parts represent new products, or new versions of old ones, and hence new opportunities. And to think that a hundred years ago, I would have been sitting here writing on rough paper with a quill pen dipped in squid ink, and the only career suggestions I would have to offer would be the standard, "Work hard and save your money."

The very fact that opportunities are so numerous and so varied can in itself be confusing. A company executive may be aching to hire a man of your achievements, but in the meantime he must hire the best man he can get. A few exceptional personnel departments know the kinds of men their companies need, but that doesn't mean they always get the men they want. As a matter of fact, most executives are well-prepared to modify their pre-determined requirements of the kind of man they are seeking. Much as they might wish to reach out and grab a man with your achievements, that does you no good if you don't know what your talents are, where they can take you, and where to take them.
It was this impasse that attracted me to career work more than a quarter of a century ago. There was something very backward in a system that fitted inferior men into good jobs because they were "the best men available," while superior men fitted themselves into inferior jobs because they were "the best jobs available."

I couldn't blame the executives who did the hiring. In their quest for men of ideas and ambition, they were using the best aptitude and intelligence tests their personnel people and psychologists could provide. What they wanted was a net to bring in the good men, but what they devised was a protective screen that kept out both the exceptionally good and the least desirable ones. Yet at least they were trying, and if the right individuals did not come forward to be interviewed and tested, it was not their fault. By right individuals, of course, they meant right for the company. Should a highly superior man pass the tests for a job beneath his abilities, the hiring organization usually was not going to discard him for being too good. That was the traditional rule of business talking again—"Get the best you can for the money."

I am all for good bargains as long as they are in merchandise and not human lives. My own idea is that a job is not a hammer, a typewriter, a sales counter or a desk to be manned, though an organization may feel it should look at it that way. To me a job is the whole individual, complete with his intelligence, past achievements, and ambitions for the future. If the company hires the man for his skill with hammer and nails and then keeps him there—the job has to be filled—though he may demonstrate greater skills in another field, both man and company are losers. Hardest hurt is the man, with his one and only career at stake. He is jeopardizing his progress while his employer is getting what he pays for while losing the man's potential to produce more.

What it boiled down to is that while no employer would think of using a giant tractor to push a little wheelbarrow, he was all too often using human beings on tasks that left most of their abilities unused, while at the same time bemoaning the scarcity of good men. Well, that was tradition again, presenting its usual unreasonable logic. Tradition says the employer must get the utmost efficiency out of his machines, and the utmost efficiency out of the men on the jobs, and to that end all sorts of time studies and efficiency programs have been developed.
But if the man is not getting the most efficiency out of himself? That, says tradition, is his own look-out.

I looked over the advice provided by tradition to help a man look out for himself. "Grasp your opportunities," says tradition, about as helpfully as advising a drowning may to grasp straws. "Strike while the iron is hot." it says. "Break in," and "make good," and "get in the hay while the sun shines." It sounded like a lot of painful hard work to me, especially when my own idea of success was to be doing something you enjoyed doing well, to the mutual benefit of yourself and others.

In the library I found many books ready to help one achieve success. Inspirational books based on the lives of successful men who may or may not have been able to find their way around in our modern world. Books to restore self-confidence, books to send ambition soaring, books to keep you working through all of your hours of "spare time," books to renew your faith in the power of God. All were good books, and some were amazingly so. In fact, I found in them the encouragement to continue my research into what I came to recognize as their common weakness. They could help you if you knew where you were going, but no one of them could point out your way.

Having reached that point, I was brought face to face with a paradox: How to point out the way if the individual didn't know where he was going? I studied the psychological and aptitude tests that were assuming "voice of doom" proportions.

I could come to this conclusion. Psychological tests screen out, and do not screen in. The man who got the job too often was the last man "screened out," and there was no guarantee that he was the best man for the job, nor that he would like it when he got there. And the best of success books could only help the men who were already determined to get where they wanted to go, and hence were already half-way there.
At the same time, much though I might deplore men and women wasting their lives on jobs too small for them, I could see that the first move toward personal success had to be made by them. Even in enlightened industries—and the number is increasing daily—where special courses and training programs were being offered to those with the ambition to advance themselves, the move had to be made by the individual. So why didn't they make the move, even when being nudged in the right direction by their immediate superior?

When I reached that question, I knew I was getting warm. The best training programs offered by a company are the programs best for the company. In that respect I agree heartily with the companies. I want companies to become more successful through training programs that make their employees more successful when, as is fortunately often the case, the programs do as much for the individual as for the company. And
that brought up a fine point. The companies spend thousands of dollars on their programs, they have made scientific studies of them, and they try to know how many trained employees for what jobs they will get out of them. But how much of a study had the employee made of himself to discover, if he could, whether the program would lead him to lasting satisfaction or merely a promotion to ultimate frustration?
That question has now been answered by the thousands of case histories of successful men in my files. The schools can educate you, and the psychological tests can try to rate you, and the training programs can try to train you. Opportunity may lead you one way, and a "lucky break" may suddenly lead you in another direction. This, tradition says, is the way it always has been and always will be. Man, it says, is the pawn of fate, and his best laid plans are no better than those of mice. These are all external influences, leaving you little to say, and tradition would keep it that way.
No longer is this necessary, if it ever was. From now on the guiding influence is going to come from within where it always should have been, and would have been if tradition hadn't taught you to profit from your mistakes instead of finding your successful self in your achievements. As I have said before, and will probably repeat at frequent intervals, only you can know your achievements, and in getting to know them you will meet, possibly for the first time, that most interesting and increasingly successful stranger who is yourself.

Success