All around us it seems like exam fever has taken over, especially with the young people around us. A couple words or phrases keep getting bandied around, typically, "All the best," or "Best of luck," or "Good luck." Most people appreciate that and go for their exams thinking, "It's going to be good 'cause I have luck on my side." What is luck? It made me think about that. What is it we actually send with those going in for exams, or a difficult situation or perhaps an interview by saying, "Best of luck"? Basically we are saying that we hope favorable circumstances will settle around this person and help them to have an added advantage during this time.
However, this doesn't seem to be very specific to any individual, because despite 'Best of luck' wishes, the circumstances surrounding that person, say, in an examination hall, are the same for everyone in that hall. It made me think about the way we use this term 'Best of luck' or 'Good luck'. Authors Jim Collins and Morten Hansen, in their book "Great By Choice", have a chapter on luck. They really pull this concept out in a way that allows us to examine it in some detail. They say it's not really the circumstances that help, but the return on circumstances – basically what one does with those circumstances. The behavior associated with these circumstances or this "luck" is what determines whether you are going to be successful or not.
To give an example, they say look at Bill Gates; through one set of lenses you might say that Bill Gates was extremely lucky. How? He was born into an upper middle-class American family and they had the resources to send him to a private school. The school that he went to, Lakeside School in Seattle, had just obtained a teletype connection to a computer through which he could learn to program, something that was very unusual in the late 60s and early 70s. It coincided with the advancement of microelectronics, which was leading to the personal computer at that time. Then he went on to Harvard, which happened to have the PDP-10 computer on which he could develop and test his ideas. So one could say that Gates was really lucky. The chips kind of fell the way that he wanted and he rode his luck on that.
But as the authors ask, was Gates really lucky? Did those lucky events or circumstances really make for him being successful? Because he was not the only person in his era who grew up in an upper middle class family. Was he the only person born in the mid-50s who attended a secondary school with access to computing? No he wasn't. Was he the only person who went to a college with computer resources in the mid-70s? He wasn't. Was he the only person who knew how to program in Basic? No. He wasn't the only math and computer whiz kid at either Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, MIT, or any of those colleges. There were plenty with him. But he was the one person who was able to leverage that set of circumstances to change his own life. To do that, he allowed those circumstances to disrupt his life in some manner.
How did he do that? He allowed those lucky events or circumstances to drive him to, what the authors would call, fanatical discipline. He took measured steps toward success. He allowed all of them to disrupt his life for a certain period to be able to walk very purposefully toward a goal. He didn't allow anything to sidetrack him. Then he had what they call empirical creativity – a sense of, "I won't accept all the data that is out there, I will get my own data. I'll do the research; I'll see what needs to be done."
Andy Grove in 1994, CEO of Intel at that time, found out that his PSA reading was very high, about 5, indicating that there could be a cancerous growth in his prostate gland. The first thing to do was see a urologist and figure out how to go about handling this. But he decided to take some time and do his own research. So he pored over magazines and medical research come out of the latest tests being done. He realized there were basically three things he could do. As Collins and Hansen put it, one was letting people slice him up with surgery. The other was having them fry him with radiation, or lastly, poison him with chemotherapy. But he put all of his own research that he was doing, empirical research, and came up with a new combination of radiation therapy that helped him weather this storm. Empirical creativity.
Then the third aspect was productive paranoia – anticipating disaster, looking ahead and saying, "I'm not going to expect that circumstances will always be favorable. I'm going to constantly look ahead and say: What if this happens? Am I ready for it?
I am throwing something out here that I hope will make you think, make you take a look at where you are right now and say: Are there circumstances aligning themselves well for me? If they are, I must not just accept them and say "Wow! This is great!" But I should look at them and wonder how I can leverage it right now so that it goes on to a wonderful pathway of success and excellence. May God give us wisdom to be able to recognize those circumstances.
Allow me to say this prayer for you. Almighty God, give to each one of us the ability to see a set of circumstances worth pursuing, worth leveraging, worth preparing for. Help us not to just use it for the present, but to be able to prepare for the future as well. Give us that kind of wisdom. We ask in the Name of Jesus. Amen.
• Jim Collins & Morten T. Hansen, "Great by Choice," Pages 23-25, 162-164
• Morten T. Hansen, "Three Leadership Skills that Count." https://hbr.org/2011/10/three-leadership-skills-that-c
• Meg McCollister & Ann Mesle, "Empirical Creativity: Shifting the Balance." http://shiftingthebalance.com/tag/empirical-creativity/
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