* The Secret To Success

Years ago as I was holding court in my office which, thanks to a window and exhaust fan was the defacto office smoking lounge in our little company (back when smoking was only bad for you and not illegal), someone asked me what the "secret to success" was.  My answer came quickly and without reflection: "Know where you suck, and stay away from there."


It wasn't bad advice. I was reminded of the moment recently when a friend posted a line a lot like it by a motivational speaker on Facebook, a guy who used more words and less gutter language but said basically the same thing.  I don't know who the motivational-type is; someone who's achieved success by telling other people how to be successful, no doubt, but remembering that afternoon of years ago made me wonder about "success."  The word means so many different things to people.


I dropped out of high school and got a GED back in the 60's to go to work in radio because I always understood electricity, fell in love with the work and found high school literally painful.  Over the years since I went back to school and built my way through five different careers, all related in some way to electronics, a field that came to me intuitively and not as the result of my formal education or exceptional math skills or even much planning.  I married a woman who complemented my "inspired laziness" with her own combination of drive and wits.  We were lucky enough to find a couple of people who believed in our ideas enough to fund them and then hire a group of smart, motivated, talented local people who, working together doing things that nobody was trained to do since we invented a lot of it as we went, we all built a successful high tech business. Like most things in life, it didn't last forever, but nobody was the worse for the experience of doing it.  We sold the company during the dot.com boom, since as  the world's first global satellite Internet provider there was a lot of interest in what we'd done. The company's still around, huge and unrecognizable to us who remember how it started.  Everyone who'd been hanging out in my office that day has moved on, moved up, or in my case, moved out of the way, but for a moment, we made a lot of memories and a little dent on satellite and Internet history.  Overall, the venture was a success, as are the people who made it all happen.



So, what is the secret to success?


Obviously, knowing what you suck at and then not doing that is a good start.  Just showing up is 90% of the rest of it, according to Woody Allen, and I have lived long enough to see the value in persistence.


Calvin and Hobbes, a couple of cartoon characters, pointed out years ago that since "the secret to success is being in the right place at the right time," and "since nobody ever knows when the right time is, you may as well go to the right place and just hang around."  I framed that one and hung it on my office wall for years.


My dad gave me a little blue pamphlet published by the Bordon Dairy years ago, back in the 60's. I was about 13 and that little booklet claimed the most important trait needed to succeed in business was simply "the ability to get along well with a wide variety of people and personality types."  I've always thought that was sage advice.  So did John D. Rockefeller, when he said basically the same thing back in 1913.


John Dvorak once wrote in PC Magazine that "perceived performance is more important than actual performance."  He was reviewing software back in the DOS 3.0 era, but it applies to everything.


Probably the most profound line I remember from the popular media was the very last thing said in the 1980's movie "Being There." This was Peter Sellers' last film, in which Sellers, as "Chance," a gardener, becomes "Chauncey Gardiner," a trusted adviser to the President and captains of industry.  As Sellers wanders away from a funeral during a Presidential eulogy and walks calmly across the surface of a pond, the President quotes the departed industry leader's "better known quotes" and the words "Life ... is a state of mind..." are the last ones you hear before the credits roll.


In my case, I knew one area where I sucked  -  I never liked "working."  I'd much rather do what interests me, which is fun and never seems like work, even though it changes every few years.  Everything changes. There have been years I made money doing what interested me, and a lot more during which I've barely made enough to survive on.  Some of the financially leanest years were actually the most rewarding, but my Social Security newsletter, that thing that comes in the mail every now and then, telling me what to expect if I live another decade or so and "retire," really looks like a case of identity theft.


The secret to success?  I've no idea, since success is like life - it's a state of mind.


I sure have met some interesting people at the right place, though; hanging out waiting for the right time to arrive.