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 percent 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. Whose experiences should you study to benefit most: the repeated failure, or the constant success? Whose 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 "earthshaking" 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.
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 tests 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 thousands 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 let's 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 principal common "ingredients." These are your very personal qualifications. They point the way to opportunities and success in your own future.
