Sokanu: The Blog

As I continue to read books about innovation, ideas, technology and accomplishment, there are things that I become curious about.  One of these things is 'what type of person creates this innovation?'. Generally, they are relatively well off, well educated (usually Ivy's + Stanford), intelligent and driven. Of course, you will have outliers that create massive change in the world coming from very little, but not very often. The fact of the matter is that truly successful people are hard to come by, and that is why we are so enthralled by them. But the reason that we treat these people like "role models" is because we are measuring them on their career successes.

We can go to LinkedIn and take a look at what a person has done in their life. Oh, so they went to The University Of Western Ontario? That's okay I suppose, wonder if they got rejected from MIT? We look at how much they have accomplished in their lives by a certain age. We have a top 40 under 40 list, a top 20 under 20, and a list of the richest people in the world to analyze. And analyze we do. What makes these people so successful? What makes them tick? Were they successful because they went to Harvard Business School? Was it because their parents were doctors?

Our culture is stuck in a cycle of endless career achievement (the Western world at least). Now, with the Internet and the constant flow of information and access to everyone's accomplishments, this is only going to get worse. This isn't all bad. I am ultra-competitive, and use this information to see who I am competing with on a business level. 

Whereas career success is relatively easily measured and out in the open, personal success is the opposite. LinkedIn is a database of career resumes showing accomplishments for professionals across the world. What is the equivalent for personal success? Facebook? Doubt it, unless you want people to judge you based on the pictures you are tagged in and what you have written on your wall. What about a personal blog? This is getting closer, but there is still no way to truly determine what kind of person is writing that blog.

Do you ever have an encounter with someone, business-wise or other, where you are shocked at how genuinely nice they are? It's as if our standards have dropped so low for first-time encounters that being 'nice' has become a competitive advantage. In hiring, I know a lot of CEO's that would rather hire a nice person with 8/10 skills then a not-so-nice person with 10/10 skills. Culture fit is extremely important.

If we somehow had a method to measure personal success, the world would be totally different. Instead of focusing on how much money someone has made, how many academic prizes they have or how many gold medals they've won, we would judge them on their personal relationships with others, their attitude towards the world and the knowledge they have about their own makeup and biology. But we don't have a method for this (yet). All of the things I just mentioned are intangible, impossible to measure, subjective. They are many of the traits that we describe in multiple intelligence theory.

So if we can't measure personal success, why even bother with it? This is the analytical point of view. The answer is because it is much more important than career success. There are two certain items that we have in life. One is money and the other is time. We can control the amount of money we have, how we get it, yet we can never control time. It's an obvious but interesting statement. There is a wonderful article in the Harvard Business Review written by Clayton Christensen about measuring your life. In the article he talks about the importance of personal success rather than career success. This is amazing coming from a Harvard professor that has generated millions of dollars in revenue for huge corporations. Anyone in the business world knows the massive success that Clayton has had via his books and teachings. But like he mentions in that article, the true value he gets out of life, the most important thing, is the value of his personal success.

People very often have a tough time understanding things they can't see or measure. That's why we don't talk about it. We can't really tell if parents are okay or great, because what is the measuring stick? Personal success is something that you will never be externally rewarded for, but always intrinsically. People rarely come up to you and say "wow, you are an awesome parent/friend/husband/wife because of XYZ". But they will often come up and say "you are a great businessperson, because of XYZ".

This is okay, because as long as you know what is truly important in your life, you don't mind being measured on your career success. And even if you don't have that many tangible career successes, you can have great personal successes. The latter is what makes you feel content and complete at the end of the day.