typed by Hans

I just watched Richard St. John: Secrets of success in 8 words, 3 minutes.  Inspired by a question that a teenager asked Richard - “What leads to success?” - and the fact that he wasn’t able to give her an answer, Richard started asking TED conference attendees what they think leads to success.  After talking to more than 500 people over 7 years, he summarizes the answers in this talk.  Richard says the following factors lead to success:

Passion

Do what you do for love, not money.  He quotes Carol Coletta (radio producer of Smart City) as saying “I would pay someone to do what I do”.

Have you ever enjoyed your work so much that you couldn’t believe you were actually getting paid to do it?  The times in my life that I’ve felt like this were also the times during which I excelled.  A boring job makes you goof off and there is no way to be successful at something if you are not paying attention!

Work

Richard quotes Rupert Murdoch: “It’s all hard work.  Nothing comes easily.”

That’s good to know!  Successful people most often make it look so easy!  They tend to make me think “of course they can do it, it’s easy for them!”.  It’s good to know that’s not the norm!

Excellence

The word Richard used is “good”.  He quotes Alex Garden (a game developer) “To be successful, put your nose down in something and get damn good at it”).  Richard says: “There’s no magic - it’s practice-practice-practice”.

But how do you find out what you can become good at?  Is it only the things you have passion for?  How do you discover your passion?  Richard, I think the 3 minute talk was too short!  Could you add another minute and help answer this question?

Focus

I like it, but again, what should I focus on?

Push

Meaning “push yourself” (not other people!).  Perseverance.  I’ve heard that before.  But again, some things are better not pursuing.  How do you identify those before putting all your energy into it?

Serve

“Perform or provide a service” almost sounds like a charitable activity, but it does not have to be so.  You can get rich if you serve people something of value!

Ideas

To get good ideas, Richard offers the string: “Listen, observe, be curious, question, problem solve, make connections”.  Good idea!

Persist

Persist through failure and “crap” (criticism, rejection, assholes, pressure).  Sounds good, but again I have to ask for more guidance.  Some criticism and rejection is valid (and sometimes unwittingly you are the asshole!)- how can you learn that a course of action should be abandoned?

Richard’s talk is inspiring and a “feel-good” talk, but on the flip side are people trying to do something crazy or impossible things (like trying to sell Hummers or believing in clean coal!)  What guidance can convince these poor souls to abandon their ill conceived causes?

Barry Schwartz wrote the book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less more and gave this TED talk on why too much choice can be a bad thing.

To summarize, too much choice is bad when:

• It paralyzes decision making because you fear making the wrong choice.
• You recalculate the benefit of your choice by subtracting the benefits of the choices you didn’t make (i.e., subtracting the opportunity cost).
• Choices leads to escalation of expectations.
• You blame yourself for not making the right choice (if you didn’t have to choose then you couldn’t be blamed for making the wrong choice).

A couple months ago I signed up to do the Hood To Coast relay run, which is next weekend.  I’m running with a really well organized and experienced team.  The team captains are taking care of all the organization, pretty much all I have to do is show up and run - so this is a fantastic opportunity!

However, since I signed up for the run I’ve had some regret because I’ve discovered I’m missing out on several other things (the company picnic, the first Chinese class of the new semester, an annual 100 mile cycling event, and watching the last couple of days of the Olympic games).  Why should having all these options available reduce the benefit of my decision to do the HTC run?!  Except for missing the class, none of the other options would even remotely be valid reasons for not doing the run!

Thanks to Barry, I now understand why I feel a little bit of regret, even though I shouldn’t.  However, in his TED talk Barry didn’t say what I should do about it…  it’s not unlike Daniel Gilbert, who explains in his book - Stumbling on Happiness - why we are often unhappy about our choices, without really explain what to do about it!