Most of us are pretty good at blaming outside factors for our failures.
- The economy sucked
- My business partner screwed me
- Our team stinks
- Etc.
Now I’m not going to tell you to stop making such excuses, and to start taking responsibility for yourself (even though you should). No, for the purposes of this piece I’m going to accept that yes, OK, sometimes shit does indeed happen, and we fail through no fault of our own. Fine.
But there’s a catch.
If we accept that, we must also accept something else:
Sometimes we succeed through no fault of our own too.
Ah. Not such a common belief is it? And yet logically it must be true. If fate can bring us down, it can build us up too – but in this latter scenario we simply choose to ignore it.
Generally speaking if we succeed we think it’s because our plans came to fruition. We think:
“I cleverly did A, then B, then C, and thus X happened, aren’t I smart!”
But there’s a trap here. We actually have little evidence that ABC led to X. Perhaps some totally random things happened to produce the result, and ABC made no difference. Perhaps even the success would have been greater if you hadn’t done ABC at all!
But no. We don’t accept this. We just take simplistic linear credit for what goes right, and only admit the cruel hand of fate when things go wrong.
(You don’t often hear about the “kind hand of fate” do you, but it’s just as common).
So why does this matter?
Well, such hubris isn’t just a psychologically unattractive trait – it actually results in a pretty severe strategic disadvantage. You see developing great strategy in any field comes down to understanding what works, and doing it on purpose. You find the “unlock”, the thing that makes progress easy, and you attack it.
And where do we generally find this mystical thing?
In the residue of accidental success.
When something works but you aren’t sure why, there is gold to be found. If you can figure out what random factors are responsible for the results you want, then you can claim them for your own, and use them at will. But this only works if you can admit that your success is accidental in the first place!
Taking credit for your success means you de-mystify it, and bury the true causes. You say “oh, it’s because I worked so hard”, or “it’s because my product is so great”, or whatever, and have no curiosity as to what other factors brought it about.
You are very curious about your failures, because that’s what protects the ego. But in the case of success it is lack of curiosity that serves the ego’s purposes.
The moral then is clear.
To accelerate your understanding of reality, and your future successes, you must assume every time that your victories are not down to you. Or at least not down to you alone. You must assume that the kind hand of fate has come to your aid, and you must make it your mission to uncover just how it did so.
Do this, and the irony is that your delusion of grandeur will gradually become more and more true. Your successes will become more attributable to your genius.
But only – only – because you borrowed it from somewhere else.
