On Success

If I were to use an analogy to describe success, in my mind rock climbing is an apt one. 

Paired with risk, adventure, autonomy and a constant tackling of the unknown, success in Rock Climbing requires momentous endeavors; for one has to possess the heart, the strength and ambition.

But the aspect of Rock Climbing I wish to expound is of a different nature; it’s broader, and, I hope, if explained justly, we could understand the intricacies of success.

When a person decides to devote himself to this sport, and for him to climb the thorny mountains, he undergoes extraordinary amounts of technical preparation. This is attained in a place known as the climbing gym, where the novices train tirelessly on artificially constructed walls with grips for hands and feet. It is a daunting discipline; it requires deliberate practice, profound mentorship and plenty of patience.But once that is done; once migrated to the outdoors; once the sun replaces the neon-light; once edgy stones replace the artificial grips; once a mere robe replaces the safe trampoline, the odds escalate to astronomical proportions. The adrenaline level is irrepressible; fear of heights is more menacing; hot breaths evaporate rapidly; the limbs tremble and quiver; palms sweat ceaselessly; teeth grind against each other agonizingly. This time it is not artificial; it is life.

As the Climber and the companions ascend from the foot of the mountain, they accumulate inches, and those inches translate to inches of success, if he mistakes, the process corrects him, but in a costly manner.
The further the Climber and the companions ascend, the smaller those who observe them appear; they matter less now. The more those inches of success accumulate, the more perilous the passages becomes. The Climber is aware that one faulty step will drag him a few inches back; he can’t bare it; it consumes more effort, more time. And while the adversaries grin, the supporters distress. The group he leads counts on him as he explores unfamiliar territories; as he places his palms where varmints could be lurking. His decisions are half made; uncertain.

The Climber ascends in a pace that allows his group to be in tandem; he can’t go too fast and ignore them, nor can he go too slow and impend them. If he loses sight of the balance, his journey will be a lonely one; he might ascend to the top alone, or he might descend to the bottom alone.

And such is life: a man is prepped to endeavor his passage with and for those ones he loves, family, friends and followers. The greater he ascends, the more liabilities he accumulates. He can’t distract himself by the adversaries; their negativity might cripple him. And he can’t over celebrate with his supporters; that ecstasy might elude him in to comfort.

He can’t be afraid of accumulating inches, for the disadvantages of stagnation are direr.

On Intellect

Seldom in my inquiries I have received a consistent definition of Intellect, most people erroneously pair it with the act of reading books; but I have met many people who read plentiful, whilst conforming to the doctrinaire of the herd. That is a fallacy that I wish to abolish. Did reading, universally, symbolize acquiring knowledge?

In light of this, I wish to rearticulate Intellect as the manner of perceiving intricate foreign ideas, liberated from dogmas. Dogmas are the archenemy of intellect, for intellect stems out of unprejudiced contemplation; a man who passively reads books that were written to his joy and his complicacy, would be underprepared or unprepared to the views of rest of the world, and thus he follows either of two paths: he plunges deeper to his dogmatic ways, where he replicates the immoderate unfitting conducts of his forefathers. Or he contemplates the revelations of what he read, thus he shall attain the universality of thought, and onward he shall meet people of foreign tongues and lands, but reincarnations of thoughts and experiences, regardless of the minor variations; each mind, fundamentally, has their agenda and aspirations. And thus, there exists no absolute intellect, only glimpses of men who strived, and those we tend to idolize.

I once met a man who read Moby Dick, and deemed it as the endeavors of Captain Ahab hunting the White Whale and failed because the Whale is a monstrosity. Whilst another man, benefiting from a religious context, deemed it as Satan hunting God, and he failed because God is might. Another, benefiting from a secular context, deemed it as Man’s attempt to control Nature, and he failed, because Nature is untamable.

Men of intellect seldom speak in absoluteness; they’re privy to their fallibility, to what’s beyond their comprehension and to the vastness and assortments of human genius. This I can say this in absoluteness.

Another archenemy of intellect is pride, the great sin of Lucifer and Hubris. A verse from the Proverbs 18 says: Before his downfall a man's heart is proud, but humility comes before honor. Malcolm X had a humbling experience that liberated him. True men of intellect are often the progenies of certain morbidness; Life humbles men that way.

Aristotle described the prideful as a person who’s a victim of his own gratifications. Pride cripples a man from reading the other’s mind. And therefore he possesses no intellect. Mind you, intellect is not to agree, but to appreciate; they are not mutually exclusive, but also, in brilliant marriages, they can align.

Lest of the perils of pride, Marcus Aurelius appointed a servant to follow him when he entered the gates of Rome whispering to his ear: you are just a man, to fortify himself against the praise of mob. He was wise.

Another crippler of intellect is willful obedience to the teachings of fellowmen. It disallows our faculties from inspecting their façade.

Thomas Jefferson wistfully championed that it is the right of Man to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; alas, he was profiteering from his plantation slave farms.

When Voltaire learnt of Isaac Newton’s fondness of magic, he made great efforts to conceal this fact in his publications of Newton. Hadn’t been for Economist Kinsey it might have remained unearthed. Does Voltaire’s behavior suit a man of intellect? Should this dismiss his formidable contribution to philosophy? I can’t supply an answer, but I ask of you this: would you rather be a Voltaire? Or a Kinsey? Yet who is privy to Kinsey’s intellectual mischiefs himself? The prospects are windingly endless. But we mustn’t forget Rumi’s filed beyond the fields of right-doing and wrong-doing. There lays grayness between whiteness and blackness of life.

Thus I say true intellect is the perusal of greater good, which demands contemplation liberated from ignorance, arrogance, pride and dogmatism.

I shall conclude with this: motives of the intellectual must be driven from within, thus he himself sets the standards of what ought to be and how it ought to be. If the motives were external ones, then his intellect will be his damnation, for he shall frantically measure it against alternating variables. And he is likely to deem himself a deceptionist and thus inherent a sense of inferiority, and his genius would be a squander.

The Virtue of Failure

Success can be illy devious; it alludes us into extended leisures; upon actualizing our goal (promotion, graduation, marriage, etc...) we tend to over celebrate; consequently our drive slows down. 

As the cliché famously says: Success is not a destination, it is journey.

But definitely there are destinations in that journey. In our path we often stumble upon them. We disguise them differently: experiences, learnings, and upward curves... I think we avoid labeling them for what they truly are: Failure. We grow up ashamed of it; toss it to the abyss of memory. Alas, squandering all its fruitful lessons. Failure empowers us, unveils unseen horizons, and keeps us alert. Individuals who ascend from failures' ashes recognize the existence of various unfamiliar paths of success; this in itself cleans the judgmental visor staining our outlook. Failure gifts us with compassion and understanding, thus reuniting ourselves with our hardened humanity. 

In her inspiring speech, author JK Rowling declared that ‘…some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.'

Drawing on this, it’s critical to recognize that we’re not discussing fake success, which I define as laboring unsatisfactorily to gain acceptance of others (parents, managers, peers...), but rather the unreasonable success which manifests our most inner dream, by conquering the demon that awakens us late at nights, that is if we slept at all. 

Conquering that demon leads us to virgin paths; others might have embarked upon parallel paths, but never ours. It's designed for us individually, for we’re the creators of its borders and boundaries.

Poet John Keats dubbed this notion as Negative Capability. He defines it as: 'the willingness to embrace uncertainty, live with mystery, and make peace with ambiguity.'

Allow me to assert the notion further and borrow a page from the psychology literature known as Desirable Difficulty; which states that 'introducing certain difficulties into a process can greatly improve long-term retention of the process material.' Life imposes difficulties upon us without permissions; it's wiser if we prepped ourselves to deal with them. Such practice enables us to extract advantages from disadvantages; we become invincible. Indeed, Economic states that the greater the risk, the greater reward.

Now, when I say Embrace failure, I don't mean to have it inferred that rashness and sloppiness should be celebrated. Rather, it’s a invitation to tackling the unfamiliar, and acknowledging the risky destinations on unknown paths, face them with irrevocable grit and unspoiled determination. This undoubtedly bestows happiness upon us; by doing so, our happiness will contagiously shine and allow those around us to bath in our light. 

The Consistency Assumption

Reader’s Digest magazine cited the following story:

'Golf immortal Arnold Palmer recalls a lesson about overconfidence: It was the final hole of the 1961 Masters tournament, and I had a one-stroke lead and had just hit a very satisfying tee shot. I felt I was in pretty good shape. As I approached my ball, I saw an old friend standing at the edge of the gallery. He motioned me over, stuck out his hand and said, "Congratulations." I took his hand and shook it, but as soon as I did, I knew I had lost my focus. On my next two shots, I hit the ball into a sand trop, then put it over the edge of the green. I missed a putt and lost the Masters.’

What happened to Palmer? What crippled his foreseen triumph? His dazzling track demonstrates extraordinary professionalism. He’s anything but incompetent. So why did he miss those seemingly easy shots?

To explain Arnold Palmer failure, we need to borrow a terminology from the language of psychology; What Palmer suffered from is a textbook example of effects of overconfidence.

Not my phone!

What ignited this piece is a personal episode. Few months ago, I purchased a new cell phone, and in order to maintain its brand-new status, I bought a protective leather cover.

And to my bewilderment, I gradually became careless! The phone started drop off more often. At one occasion, I spelled a considerable amount of coffee over it, and I was so confident that the protective cover will do its job. Unfortunately, it did a poor job!

This incident provoked a thought: how often do we assume safety if we are “qualified”, or that certain equipment were in place to ensure our safety? And more importantly, WHY do we make this assumption?

This sort of behavior occurs frequently in different disciplines. Social psychologist and recipient of Nobel Memorial Prize Daniel Kahneman gave it a simple term: Overconfidence. And here is him describing it and its perils: ‘The exaggerated expectation of consistency is a common error. We are prone to think that the world is more regular and predictable than it really is, because our memory automatically and continuously maintains a story about what is going on, and because the rules of memory tend to make that story as coherent as possible and to suppress alternatives.‘

This kind of behavior reveals itself across various disciplines. Chief among them is car driving. Read the accounts of The Royal Automobile Club (RAC) in a survey conducted on drivers to test their level of confidence: ‘The survey revealed that 79 per cent of young drivers think their driving skills are better than other drivers in their own age group.’

Overconfidence doesn't happen overnight. According to Don Moore, associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, It surfaces in one's behavior when one (or more) of three factors is achieved: overestimation of one's actual performance; over-placement of one's performance relative to others; and over-precision, or the excessive certainty that one knows the truth. For example, in a study conducted by the insurance company PEMCO revealed that for drivers, overconfidence kicks in after 6 to 12 months of driving. This period can be translated to other venues where overconfidence can be a potential peril; think cooking or working on a rig for example.

When we trust our ‘adequate qualification’ we take safety for granted. We assume that external faculties will align with our experience. But in reality we shouldn’t assume that our experience will solely protect us; because that's when we start missing golden Golf shots, or spell coffee over our newly bought cell phones. Because we start to turn a blind eye on contingences and we underestimate the complexity of the world we inhabit.

This is however isn't an invitation to dump basic measurements of confidence, or pretend that you are inadequate to accomplish tasks and deliverables; rather, it's reminder that we should keep our ego in check! Don Moore recommends that we should compare ourselves not to those who inhibit our familiar world; rather to those who are competing with us; thus we keep updating our ledger and stay alert.

In order for us to avoid the perils of overconfidence, we need to dump the auto-pilot attitude we usually operate under. If we don't, it is usually things we adore the most that become at risk; such as championships we designated so much effort for, or an item we designated certain amounts of money for. Or in other more terrifying scenarios, our lives if we drive carelessly.

Safety isn't the thing we execute when accidents happen, it's the practices we do prevent accidents from happening.

Astronaut Neil Armstrong famously said: ‘Well, I think we tried very hard not to be overconfident, because when you get overconfident, that's when something snaps up and bites you.’

You Can't Tame a Genius!

Meet the Consultant!

Have you heard of Ram Charan? 

It's highly unlikely that you did. I certainly didn't before working on this piece. But most CEOs of the top Fortune 500 did, and they consider him to be The Rain Man of management. Back in 2007, Fortune Magazine wrote a lengthy detailed profile on the exotic life style of Ram Charan, and the opening statement was:

"What he does is hard to describe. But the most powerful CEOs love it enough to keep him on the road 24/7 and make him the most influential consultant alive."Charn's life is anything but ordinary. A typical week of his is normally composed of daily traveling around the globe, across the 7 continents catering to the needs to multibillion dollars corporates. He's so extraordinary at what he does that Ivan Seidenberg, CEO of the giant communications company Verizon says "I love him. He's my secret weapon."An investigation at Charn's early life revels a hard working, highly driven individual. This is a snapshot of the past 40 years of Charn's life:This is his 37th year working for GE, his 33rd for DuPont. He has been with Ivan Seidenberg at least 20 years, and with former West Virginia Governor Gaston Caperton more than 30 years.In contemporary terms, the reason why Ran Charan is an exceedingly proclaimed consultant is because he is an expert. And through the past 40 years he has been cultivating these expertise and created an unparalleled track of extraordinary accomplishments.'Experts' psychologist Anders Ericsson tells us that a person needs at least 10 years (more accurately: 10,000 hours) of deliberate practice to achieve true mastery. It seems the brain needs that amount of time to comprehend an apprenticeship.Experts in today's world manage companies. They know so much about the business that business owners like to keep them around. Their vast knowledge it too valuable to be squandered.However, this post isn't a celebration of corporate or management experts. Nor to undermined them. In this post I want to discuss the particulars that separate Experts from Geniuses. Charn is a good example of an expert; he's a loyal corporate person, committed to a job, reliable and, like most other professionals, his job comes first.

But is he a Genius?

A 'Genius'?

'Genius' is a tricky term. Derived from the Roman word 'genii ', it originally meant the spirit that possess a person at given time, since those 'individuals' accomplishments were so exceptional and couldn't be explained. Media have distorted the term: they anchored geniuses with the 'crazy scientists' look working in a lap and microscoping down on a Petri dish with his shaggy hair and broken glasses or running around the streets naked and shouting 'Eureka, Eureka!!'
But this is a limited description of geniuses are like. The closest way to describe them would be "Intellectual Mavericks." But the term still demands further clarification. We often lump geniuses with scientific advances. That's probably why when we hear the term, we directly construct a mental image of people like Albert Einstein and Steven Hawking.
In this post I want to challenge those assumptions, and expand on what a genius is ought to be.
Just like experts, geniuses, too need their own 10,000 hours of deliberate practice; this requires an enormous amount of dedication and hard work. But what truly separates experts from geniuses, in my opinion, is the operating system. Geniuses operate on an entrepreneurial operating system; they take risks for what they feel passionate for. Experts on the other hand, don't have that luxury. Their operating system can't depend on chances or miracles. They operate to meet quarter deadlines and cooperate dividends. Geniuses create breakthroughs and paradigm shifts. Experts capitalize and optimize on those breakthroughs. Geniuses are artist. Experts are executors. Geniuses have inspirational mentors. Experts have managers.
The telling difference between those two concepts is the mindset. For us to appreciate what distinct between an expert and a genius, we need an example of a genius like we did for experts. And Hollywood is a good place to start.

Meet the Genius!

What is the common factor between The Lion King, Crimson Tide, Gladiator, The Last Samurai, The Dark Knight, and Inception; other than the fact that they're either Oscars winners or nominees?
A reasonable assumption would be that they share the same director. But they don't. And no one actor had starred in all of them. Nor were they written by the same author.Strangely, the common factor among them is something that lingers in the background: music. Those movies shared one composer: Hans Zimmer. Hans is a truly remarkable innovator, and throughout the past 20 years he scored an Oscar, and been nominated for a total of 8 Oscars. He's composed for over 100 movies through his illustrious carrier.

And if you were to list your top 10 movies from the past 20 years, chances are Zimmer composed one or more of them.
What makes Hanz Zimmer a genius? In essence: he's a risk taker. His unorthodox style of combining the old musical schools with the new musical technologies has earned him a unique reputation. He creates captivating art. His works can't be quantified. They aren't measured by quarter earnings; rather by how deeply impactful it was. And in order to produce such, you've to be adventurous. But experts can be adventurous, can't they? That mindset is attainable. Right?
Believe it or not, it's not that easy. They have followed rigid disciplines throughout their lives, starting from conventional education to control-based work environments. They're soaked in a sea of strictness.
A good distinction of what separates experts from geniuses comes from Neil Gaiman in his speech to the University of the Arts, describes what cripples experts:"People who know what they are doing know the rules and they know what is possible and what is impossible. You do not, and you should not. The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them. And you can. If you don't know it's impossible, it's easier to do.
And because nobody's done it before, they haven't made up rules to stop anyone doing that particular thing again."
The curious part is that both Hans Zimmer and Neil Gaiman held a dislike to formal education. In fact, they didn't pursue it. They operated in a world of their own invention, and they created the rules there. Unlike the experts who have to answer the board of directors.

A Trait of Geniuses!

Let's take the idea of how could institutionalized thinking paralyze creativity a step further.

Here is a list of arguably the top 9 novels in the past 200 years or so. Keep in mind while reading the following: Those writers are on this list not because they scored best sellers or achieved a level of celebritism. Rather, because their ideas have created paradigm shifts:

Anna Karenina
Madame Bovary
Lolita
To Kill a Mocking Bird
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Great Gatsby
In Search of Lost Time
The Stories of Anton Chekhov
1984

Now, let's run a quick analysis of the masters who created them:

Anna Karenina: written by Leo Tolstoy. And what did he study? law and oriental languages at Kazan University. In fact his teachers described him as "both unable and unwilling to learn." And later on, Tolstoy left university in the middle of his studies. He started writing after he joined the army.

Madame Bovary: written by the French author Gustave Flaubert. And just like Tolstoy, he studied Law. And just like Tolstoy, he was an uninterested student.
Lolita: third person on our list is the Russian Vladimir Nabokov. He enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge, majored in Zoology at first, and then Slavic and Romance languages. He later drew on his Cambridge experiences to write the novel Glory.
To Kill a Mocking Bird: written by Haper Lee. She went to the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. She enrolled in law studies. After her first year in the law program, Lee began expressing to her family that writing—not Law—was her true calling. She went to Oxford University in England that summer as an exchange student. Returning to her law studies that fall, Lee dropped out after the first semester and moved to New York City to pursue her hopes to become a writer.The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: The American Mark Twain, he educated himself in Liberal Arts.
The Great Gatsby: authored by the great American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. At the age of 16, he was expelled from the St. Paul Academy for neglecting his studies. He later on joined Princeton University. He's academic curriculum there was unknown.
In Search of Lost Time: written by the French author Marcel Proust. Proust enrolled at the Lycée Condorcet, a French school, but his education was disrupted because of his illness.The Stories of Anton Chekhov: a Russin short story writer. He gained admission to Moscow University where he studied for a medical degree and became a prominent physician.
1984: The great influential novelist George Orwell. His family couldn't afford to send him to a proper university, and he failed to obtain a scholarship. Through external pressure he ended up working for the Indian Police Service.
The array shows a pretty consistent pattern, doesn’t? The authors of the most influential and memorable literature productions had to departure from conventional education. And why wouldn't they? It would have told them what is possible and what is impossible. Education would have smothered their passion and turned them in experts; someone who optimizes the works of others.

Albert Einstein held a similar grudge toward formal education. Read the following from the essay 'Einstein As a Student' by Dudley Herschbach of Harvard University:"He did well, both in primary and high school, but "the style of teaching in most subjects was repugnant to him."Especially galling at the Gymnasium was the 'military tone...the systematic training in the worship of authority.'"And what of his passion for intellectual prowess? Well, it wasn't the product of formal education. Rather it was an all- in the family effort. Here is Herschbach again:"Albert's intellectual growth was strongly fostered at home. His mother, a talented pianist, ensured the children's musical education. His father regularly read Schiller and Heine aloud to the family. Uncle Jakob challenged Albert with mathematical problems, which he solved with a deep feeling of happiness."

The Intellectual Mavericks!

Allow me herein, to present one finale example of how difficult it's for geniuses to fit with formal rigid methods because it tames their spirits. Someone who is just as famous and influential as Albert Einstein: Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who led the American efforts to develop the nuclear bomb during World War II. It could safely be said that this man had held one of the most important jobs of the twentieth century!

Robert Oppenheimer with Albert Einstein

As a student, Oppenheimer pursued his doctorate in physics at Cambridge University. There, he faced a repentant problem. His gift was for theoretical physics, but his adviser, a future Nobel prize winner by the name Patrick Blackett forced him to go for experimental physics, which Oppenheimer disliked. To resolve this obstacle, Oppenheimer, in an outrageously strange act, devised a plan to avoid experimental physics. He snuck into a laboratory, smuggled some chemicals and tried to poison his adviser! Luckily the adviser sensed that something was a mess and survived. Oppenheimer was subjected to therapy.


You can't tame a genius!

Geniuses, it should be pointed out, aren't always separated from education. They need to acquire knowledge from somewhere. It's just they don't function well under rigid management!Most of us, I can safely assume, are future experts. Except the lucky ones, all of us have been subjected to conventional education were control replaced engagement, orders replaced autonomy, and monetary rewards replaced passion.But are we condemned to this fact? I strongly believe we're not. We are born to seek enlightenment, in whichever form it may come. Just look at the array presented up there of creative geniuses, they all made the decisions and sought control and mastery. They realized that their inner fire could be extinguished, and they repelled. They took a risk, and now we're enjoying the fruits of their decisions. Any highly motivated, hard working individual can optimize a system. With proper knowledge and education, we can all become experts. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, some individuals make a conscious, rational decisions to serve an entity. But the outcomes of conventional education predetermined that this is the way we all ought to be. It stripped of our chances. But knowledge doesn't only come via that entity. It can be sought elsewhere; it comes in various forms and vast options.Take the opportunity, seek your true self and embrace it. Your happiness is your own responsibility.