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?"
"I'll 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.
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.
