Mayer 40, Nadella 47, Pichai 43, Rajaram 40, Williams 33…..

When you look at the below statistics, what questions and thoughts come up for you?

Marrisa Mayer, Age 40, President and CEO of Yahoo!

Satya Nadella, Age 47, CEO of Microsoft

Sundar Pichai, Age 43, CEO of Google

Dhiraj Rajaram, Age 40, Founder and CEO of MuSigma

Serena Williams, Age 33, No 1 in women’s singles tennis

Perhaps you may say….

How did they make it?

They are all young and made it from ground zero. Not born with silver spoon.

How come i am nowhere close to their accomplishments?

How can i help my kid get there?

I am a loser

They are lucky

Let us reflect more on what is going on here.

Individual success or company success fortunately don’t come from doing 100s of things right. It comes from doing a short list of fundamental things right. You may have heard about the 80 – 20 rule. When you read these, none of these would be big surprises. It would sound common sense to our thinking mind but may not be that common when it comes to implementation. I also don’t believe that we need to get a perfect score in each and every one of these factor to be successful, just got to be better than competition overall.

1) Passion
Do you know your true passion? What things will result in you forgetting time and food? What is your zone? All these questions have the same end goal which is to know our true passion. These highly successful people generally are working on their true passion. This is why what they have achieved doesn’t stop them and seek retirement, but continue taking it to the next level.

This is what Steve Jobs had to say on this topic “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.”

When you do things you don’t like, the more you do, the more tired, bored or frustrated you get. When you do what you love, the more you do, the more fun you have. At a TiE ‘My story’ event, i asked a serial entrepreneur who has made a few hundred million why he continues to work and why he doesn’t retire and enjoy life with family and friends. He said he wouldn’t know what do to if he is not doing what he is doing.

2) Risk
These successful people took a lot of risks. I personally know one of them sold their first home, moved to an apartment and invested the money in their start up. You all know about the CEO who went back to work after a 2 week maternity leave. Some would argue that the risks they took were crazy and some would call it calculated risks. Whichever camp you are, there is no denying that they took some significant risks on an ongoing basis.

3) Faster PDCA
For folks who have worked in a manufacturing job, you have heard about PDCA. Some know it as Deming wheel. Plan – DO – Check – Act.

In new initiatives, we don’t know whether it will be successful or not. You do the best planning you can, you execute the plan, you look for feedback and then you act on it. When we learned this in college, we probably said to ourselves “how else one would do it”. However, while at work, you probably saw and see repeated incidences of this not being followed, or followed well.

There are 100s of stories that support #2 and #3 but here are a few famous stories if you don’t believe me….

“Henry Ford failed and went broke five times before he succeeded.

Albert Einstein did not speak until he was 4-years-old and did not read until he was 7. His parents thought he was “sub-normal,” and one of his teachers described him as “mentally slow, unsociable, and adrift forever in foolish dreams.” He was expelled from school and was refused admittance to the Zurich Polytechnic School.”
To be successful, we not only need to do PDCA but we need to not take too long to do repeat the PDCA cycle if the expected results are not there. Don’t ever give up. Instead of worrying about the past or the future, invest that energy in the next PDCA cycle!

4) Health is wealth
If you worry too much, i strongly recommend you order Dale Carnegie’s book “How to stop worrying and start living” and begin reading. You will soon learn how you are torturing yourself and how to get smart about it. I am serious, worrying too much will lead to ulcer and other diseases that will limit your productivity and ultimately kill you sooner.

Poor eating and poor exercise habits may be alright when you are young. Similar to stress, these bad habits will soon eat us up alive. You don’t need a lecture on this. You know what to do. Just do it!

5) Sustained high performance
While at traditional schools and colleges, we knew grades where the thing. It was a simple success criteria and one could rank the whole class from 1 to n. Fortunately or unfortunately, life success ranking is not that simple as you know. There is no one metric that ensures success in life. Even the kids who want to get into Ivy league schools are expected to know this. Shouldn’t the more experienced ones like us know this even better?

One of my clients who is a CEO of a 10M business once said that big success comes from not working hard for a phase of our life and taking a backseat for the rest. It got to be high performance on an ongoing basis. Another friend of mine would say that life is not a 100 meter sprint but a marathon.

6) Partners
No man or woman is an island. Family, friends, mentors (official and unofficial) and professional network all become partners. Successful people have a couple of people who are their coaches / mentors / advisors who they regard highly and constantly bounce off key matters. Each of us have blinders or what some call filters or blind spots. Without a network of trusted advisors, we are limited by our filters and live far below our potential. Sports stars are a great analogy. Every one of the stars has a coach. Business is no different from sports in many ways. Even the super successful like Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt had coaches. Check out Eric’s video on my website.

7) Luck
This is a big discussion topic. Some people think this is THE factor for success. Not everyone who is smart and hardworking becomes a Mayer or a Pichai, right? So, is it all this one factor – luck. A lot has been debated and written about this. You may check out this Forbes article when you get a chance.  In summary, i would ask you to make sure you are hitting in all cylinders on things you can control. Keep doing it again and again. There is a very high chance you will be very successful eventually.

For me, i know i am doing well in some aspects of these success factors and not so well in other aspects. I plan to walk the talk and strive to celebrate where i am doing well and work on where i am not doing well. What do you want to do?

by Nirmal Chandrasekaran, August 29, 2015