"Attitudes are more important than facts," said Dr. Karl Menninger.
"Act as though it were impossible to fail," said Dorothea Brande.
I agree with all three of those powerful personalities. But how much better if Jackson had suggested some constructive forms of counsel, if Dr. Menninger had defined attitudes and Miss Brande had listed the actions in which failure is impossible. Before you can act on their advice, you need more information about yourself. There is more there than meets the eye.
I am reminded of my navigator friend who wanted to plot his own course to succeed instead of following the traditional "roads" or "paths." As he put it bluntly, "Before I ever guided a plane across the Atlantic, I studied everything on navigation in the air school, and then everything else I could get my hands on. I studied map reading, and star charts, and instrument analysis, and meteorology. I never worked so hard in my life. I sure didn't want that plane and everybody aboard to get lost at sea, and do you know why? I would be in it."
In the same way, you have as much at stake. Before using your chart to set a course for success, you must know all about it, and all about everything related to it. More work, yes, but fascinating work. It's your chart, and your future success is in it.
In my interviews with clients, at this point I am frequently asked why I deal only with the analysis of achievements and success factors, and not at all with mistakes, failures and their cause. The argument advanced by them is that most of the success books to date recommend knowing your weaknesses as well as your strengths- so that you may make a list of both, weigh them, and if your strengths out-weigh your weaknesses, you're in.
That is a premise about as false as one can find. A weakness results from an absence of strength, and strength is usually the presence of many strong factors. How can you counter-balance abundance with nothingness? Picasso is weak on Einstein's theory of relativity, and Einstein was weak on impressionistic painting. I can assure you that they did not become the most successful people in their fields by trying to counterbalance their weaknesses.
When the mind is sound, only strengths really count, as witness Helen Keller, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and, among thousands of others, my friend Hank Viscardi. Hank, who heads a successful factory and several civic and charitable organizations, refused to believe that his weakness counter-balanced his strength though several agencies to whom he went for help tried to convince him, in the kindliest manner possible, that as a legless man he could hope for little more than charity.
Your weaknesses offer no structural strength on which to build success. Achievements are solid arid dependable; they happened and therefore are quite as real as mistakes. Sometimes a minor failure can be so painful and humiliating that its importance or weight is exaggerated out of all proportion. But how to discover how little of your woe is real and how much imaginary? You can't weigh it to discover if it is large or small, but today we can give you a substantial clue.
In the same way that you picked your ten greatest achievements, pick two or three of your greatest mistakes. Analyze them in terms of the success factors involved. I suggest you do this on a separate sheet of paper that can be destroyed immediately, since you will not want to have it around. Now compare the factors that figure in your "mistake list" with your Dynamic Success Factors. If your analysis has been sound, you will find that your "greatest mistakes" were concerned with experiences that made little or limited use of your strongest success factors. In short, you will find that your greatest mistakes occurred in those areas where you were stretching yourself thin in a desperate and losing effort to make good.
In that manner you can see for yourself that your so-called weaknesses result from excursions into areas where your strengths can't be used to advantage. The muscle-bound weight-lifter who aspires to be an artist on the flying trapeze, the chess champion who would be full-back with the Los Angeles Rams, and the bank teller who would be a space pilot are traditional examples of what I mean. Yet today they are not as far-fetched as they seem. The weight-lifter might make an excellent catcher in a trapeze act, the chess player a masterful quarterback on complicated plays, and the bank teller a whiz at handling the computing machines and electronic controls that fly our space ships.
How to find the opportunities that are uniquely your own, or how to make them, will be discussed in detail later, but right now I'd like to intrude a seeming contradiction.
By way of illustration, a few years ago I was doing some research work at Sing-Sing in the course of which I met a quaint character, somewhat withdrawn and quiet, but charmingly friendly and incapable of harming a flea. His achievement was that he was one of the best engravers in the world. So good was he, in fact, that he made the mistake of putting himself in competition with the legitimate engravers of stocks and bonds. The forged plates he turned out were excellent, and some, owing to the dominance of his artistic-design factor, were even better than the originals. To the mistake of being too good he then had to add the mistake of spreading himself thin in the areas where his success factors were few and far between. As a solitary artist, he was weak on organization, people, production, sales, systems, and just about every other factor on the list. He was caught when his salesmen, suspiciously unlike Wall Street brokers, offered cut-rate prices on certificates so perfectly engraved that they looked too good to be true.
Should the amiable little engraver read this book and learn how to use his talents more successfully when he is released a few years from now, he will not return to crime. He will have learned that enduring success cannot be built upon a mistake, and that any anti-social or criminal act is the best mistake of all. Hence there can be no such thing as a successful criminal. As my research at Sing-Sing proved time and time again, the first mistake-the criminal act-can only produce more and more mistakes until finally, in the confusion of trying to keep matters "straight," the big mistake, or often just a tiny slip, is made that leads to capture or death. Nor can the punishment of a long prison sentence teach a man to profit from his mistake. As penologists are finally discovering, unless the prisoner's honest achievements are recognized and his success factors given a chance to develop while his sentence is being served, he is, upon release, quite apt to repeat his mistakes.
But enough of the underworld where everything is upside down and careers are based on mistakes instead of achievements. Strengths can still function as weaknesses and lead to set-backs in the world of honest people. For example, a skilled dress-maker in a Fifth Avenue shop could complete a gown so expertly and swiftly that her less-talented co-workers complained she was trying to show them up. When she tried to coach them in attaining some of her own skills, her well-meant overtures were misinterpreted, and she was accused of being "a meddlesome busybody trying to run everybody's business." In the end, to keep peace in the sewing room, her employer reluctantly let her go.
She was a worried woman when she came to see me, hoping I would locate the weaknesses that had caused her dismissal. I didn't have to advise her. By the time she had completed an analysis of her success factors she had discovered the source of her trouble. Of her dynamic factors-creative, design-art, energy-drive, individualist, manager, and production-she commented, "I guess they made me seem pretty bossy. Now that I see myself, I don't blame the girls for not liking me. What I have to do is learn to keep quiet."
She looked at me for a sign of agreement, but I said nothing. Finally she said slowly, "Yes, I see what you mean when you don't say anything. You don't believe in concealing strengths; you believe in using them to best advantage."
She had figured it out for herself, as you can. Today she is the supervisor and shareholder in a large dressmaking shop. Her staff is raided constantly by rival firms because of the excellent training she gives her employees. As a highly-skilled supervisor, her "Let's try it this way," enlists immediate cooperation in the same way that, as co-worker, her, "Why don't you do it my way?" created immediate resentment. She doesn't even mind the staff-raiding. "What's good for the business," she told me recently, "is good for us." A happy, well-adjusted woman.
I can also add that because the girls who leave her shop step into top-paying jobs in the industry, she never lacks for skilled replacements eager to do their best for her because of the-extra training and inspiration she provides.
Her commendable attitude is being met with increasing frequency but it is far from being wide-spread. As I will have occasion to enlarge upon later, not all supervisors are so magnanimous. If never before has there been so much room at the top, and if never before has the search for ability been more desperate in all forms of business, it also follows that never before have the lower echelons been more reluctant to surrender good men to the top. They need good men, too, and no one in all honesty can tell them that their need is any less pressing than that of their superiors. I am as much in favor of a foreman's keeping a good man on a shovel as I am in favor of a company president's keeping a good vice-president in a secondary position until he-the president-reaches the age of retirement ten years hence. What I don't favor is the man's staying on the shovel, or the vice-president's playing second fiddle if their achievements indicate something better.
Thus it is up to you to know and use your strengths to greatest advantage.
