What does it mean to succeed in life and business? Is the most successful person, the richest person? Is the happiest person, the most successful person? Is the person that leaves the biggest legacy, the most successful person? What about the person who has the most control of their time?

I initially started thinking about this question in regard to business. When I worked for a big consulting firm, I really knew my subject area, but we worked crazy hours and would travel for extended periods without seeing friends or family. I remember working late many nights and watching the client go home at five (we had a policy to always work later than the clients). I wondered who was winning in this equation?

I was probably making more money and definitely knew the technology better, but they had a lot more control over their time. And, in the end, isn’t time our most valuable commodity? To paraphrase Ben Franklin, you can always make more money, but time once spent is always lost. So one of the driving factors behind starting my own business was that I could still do the work I loved (building IT systems), but I could focus on more local projects and have better control of my time.

When I first started out running my own consulting business, I felt successful because I was doing just that. Even though I was probably working more, I was doing it on my own time (usually after the kids were in bed). For a while, that made me feel successful.

Then, I felt like to really be successful, I needed to build a company that could run without me. This would allow me to do things like actually take a vacation. So I moved forward in securing client contracts, getting office space and hiring employees. So am I successful now? Would I be more successful if the business were ten times its size and had locations throughout the US? Is bigger always better?

McDonald’s has an interesting history that is relevant to this discussion. They started out as a small hamburger chain with a couple stores run by the McDonald brothers. Ray Croc was a milkshake salesmen who came along and was impressed with their business. He felt like he could really take their formula and grow the business dramatically. He offered the McDonald brothers a deal to work with him in growing the business.

But they felt successful exactly as the business was and saw no need to grow it. Ray Croc finally raised enough money to buy the business from them outright and the rest is history. There is a similar story regarding Starbucks which, for many years, was a local Seattle coffee company with a couple shops until Howard Schultz bought out the original owners and rolled out a nationwide growth plan. Are these bigger businesses more successful than the local ones?

And, if the bigger businesses are more successful, is the biggest business the most successful one. I guess that would be one of the oil companies or possibly WalMart. Should the goal of every business owner be to build one of these monoliths of commerce?

In my opinion, it really depends on the vision of the business and its owner. If I set up a business whose main vision is to serve the people of Aurora, IL and their specific IT needs, then I could be small and successful. Or what if the vision of my business is to create the next #1 PC game. Id software created the bestselling game Doom when they only had 10 employees. Also, businesses do not need to be big to be highly profitable. Most of the “millionaires next door” own and run small local businesses like garbage collection.

So I think business success like life success can be defined in many different ways.  In my opinion, the most important thing is to add value to the world in whatever you do. This usually involves exploiting your talents and skills.  I also think that success is more of a journey than a destination. The most successful people and businesses tend to be those that are continually striving and re-defining success. They never rest on previous successes or as Andy Grove (former CEO of Intel) puts it “Only the Paranoid Survive”

You need to define what success means for you and then focus on making it happen. Then once you’ve achieved one level of success, re-define the goal a little higher and keep pushing.

Stay hungry

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Somewhere I read that when you are trying to hire the best people you should look for someone that is borderline obsessed with what they do.

For example, one of the QA guys we used to work with was insane about QA. He was obsessed with finding bugs in the software we wrote even if it meant putting the entire text of hamlet into one of the input fields to make it overflow. He was going to find a bug.

Even though he was obsessed with breaking the software we wrote, it made him brilliant at his job. I knew that if our software could get by him then it was as bug free as possible. If he didn’t find a bug then our users probably never would.

If you are looking for a good salesman, it is probably good to find someone that is obsessed with money. Because you know they will go that extra mile to the earn their commission which in turn means they will get your company more sales.

People that are obsessed focus on one thing..well obsessively. And one of the keys to success in life is focus. The more time you spend on one thing, the better you get at it.

I read a funny story about Warren Buffet, the famed money manager, that talked about how when his wife would have company over sometimes he was so obsessed with looking over the details of a company he was researching that he didn’t even come out of his study to meet them.

Personally, I’m obsessed with books and time management. I’m also looking for new ideas and knowledge. Books satisfy that need for me. It’s hard for me to keep my reading time in check and if don’t get a chance to relax with a good book at least once a week, I get surly.

I’m also obsessed with time management. I get very unhappy if I have to do something that feels like a waste of time.  That’s part of why I got into computers. I love automating manual tasks to make them more efficient.

And I’m always trying to make sure that I’m using every minute in the best possible way. I’m a hard-core disciple of all the time management gurus from Allen’s GTD for tracking my daily tasks to Covey’s First Things First to plan my big goals.

Obviously there can be a dark side to obsession. You can be obsessed with something negative or sometimes you can be so obsessed with something that it controls your life. But kept in check obsession can push you to become the best at any given subject area, and greatness is usually achieved by being the best at one thing.

So what are you obsessed with?

I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent; curiosity, obsession and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism, have brought me to my ideas.

-Albert Einstein

There is a disease that has affected nearly all of American society. It leads to chronic unhappiness; it ruins our financial markets; it handicaps our children; it ruins our planet. Can it be cured in time?

This disease is afflueza:

affluenza, n. a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.

-wikipedia

People in America have more stuff than most any other society in history. We live like the kings of old in our giant castles with 3-car garages, pools and full-service kitchens. To be poor in America means to not have a TV in every room of the house.

My kids actually share a room because we only have three bedrooms for a family of five. Thirty years ago this would have been the norm. Now it’s like you’re committing a form of child abuse if each kid does not get their own.

But we pay a heavy price for all of this affluence. In order to pay for all of this stuff, we have to work more and more. Americans work more than nearly any other country in order to maintain their standard of living and it brings us no more happiness. And the worst part is that the standard keeps rising. Just when you buy that nice new boat, you see that your neighbor has a bigger one. Where does it end?

A shocking takeaway from the book Richistan (which chronicles the lives of the new rich) was that even at that level of billionaires they are not satisfied and get stressed out and depressed (they even set up high net worth support groups).

One of the funnier stories from the book is about a couple of tech billionaires fighting it out to have the biggest boats. Each kept building bigger ones until their boats were too big to fit under bridges so they couldn’t even sail them.

Even well below the level of billionaires there are sad examples of the scourge of affluence. When I was consulting at a now defunct investment bank, there was a guy who really hated his job and would literally get ulcers from putting up with the stress of it. But he knew that he would not make nearly as much at any other job and he had just bought a nice big new house so he was trapped by those golden handcuffs.

The examples go even deeper though. All of this working to maintain a standard of living means more kids growing up with parents that are out of the picture or too stressed after a day of work to be involved in their lives.

Now don’t get me wrong. I love working and I’m a die-hard capitalist. I’m all for finding a job that you love and committing to it with all your energy. I’m just saying that it has to be more about the work rather than the money or possessions.

Possessions and the chasing of them has ripped apart many families whether due to working too much or  getting mired in credit card debt. When most people retire, they will not have enough to live on. This is an issue not only at a personal level, but at a national level and international as well.

You could argue that our current financial crises is due to people overspending on mortgages and banks over lending. And the amount of money that the government is spending to fix it is only putting us more in debt and leaving a larger burden on our children and grandchildren.

Also, we are exporting our affluenza. As other countries like India and China rise in wealth, they want the American lifestyle which includes the boats and 3-car garages. As all of these countries buy new cars and houses it creates a global demand and shortage of oil and further taxes the planet with industrialization. This macro trend is well chronicled in Friedman’s new book Hot, Flat and Crowded.

Is there any escape from the scourge of affluenza or are we doomed to unhappiness?

Luckily, there are small groups, and books that are beginning to arise and sound the alarm. Books like Your Money or Your Life are a great start for the affluenza affected.

The book is about looking at your possessions and calculating how much of your life you had to spend in order to get and maintain them. It’s an eye-opening exercise and will definitely make you wonder if your life’s time is worth all of this stuff. It really helps you to understand how possessions can often be more of a burden than anything else.

And the author of the book really lived the life he advocated. He was a successful wall street analyst earning a six-figure salary when he decided to simplify his life, retire at 31 and live on 7K per year for the rest of his life. He spent his time on humanitarian efforts, writing this book, and helping to heal others of afflueza.

Along with this book, there are voluntary simplicity movements popping up to teach people that it’s not stuff that makes us happy, but having control of our time and doing something meaningful with our lives.

Only time will tell whether Americans can overcome affluenza, but a positive side of the current financial meltdown may be a wake up call that money can always be made or lost, but time once spent can never be regained.

Live simply so that others may simply live

Mahatma Gandhi

Imagine that you were working on the 73rd floor of Tower 1 in the World Trade Center on Sept 11th, 2001. How would you react when the first plane hit and the building shook?

Would you run for the stairwell immediately? Would you first take some time to gather belongings, chat with friends, and then slowly make your way to the exits? Would you be paralyzed and unable to move? Or would you just stay at your desk and convince yourself that it was nothing?

People exhibited all of the above behaviors. Do you know which you would do?

That is the subject of The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes by Amanda Ripley. Ripley interviewed survivors of various recent disasters (including 9/11, Katrina, and various hostage situations) looking for patterns in those who survived. It is fascinating what she found.

She discovered that there is a “survival arc” that all survivors go through consisting of: Denial, Deliberation, and the Decisive Moment. Quickly getting through the phases of the survival arc is often the key to living through the disaster.

Denial

As I’ve discussed before, the brain is very good at taking extreme situations and making them seem normal. This is necessary because oftentimes there isn’t anything life-threatening going on. You hear an odd noise at night and, most likely, it’s not a threat to you. So you brain tries to look for patterns that you’ve seen in the past and convince you that all is well.

This is necessary because we can’t sustain being on alert all the time. Unfortunately, this also sometimes prevents people from acting. During Katrina, many people convinced themselves that it would not be that bad and that they could ride it out just like they had many other hurricanes in the past. In fact, Ripley comments that age contributed to Katrina deaths more than economics:

“As it turned out, the victims of Katrina were not disproportionately poor; they were disproportionately old. Three-quarters of the dead were over sixty”

In a true disaster scenario, survivors are able to identify it as such and move on to the next phase, Deliberation.

Deliberation

Once you have moved passed denial, and identified the situation as life-threatening you move onto deliberation. In other words, what should you do about it?

You have to make a decision, and it has to be done with fear coursing through your veins. As Ripley describes, fear gives you many benefits but it also impairs your decision-making:

The brain must decide what to prioritize and what to neglect. Our muscles become taut and ready. Our body creates its own natural painkillers. Bur out abilities to reason and perceive our surroundings deteriorate. Cortisol interferes with the part of the brain that handles complex thinking. We suddenly have trouble solving problems, even simple ones–like how to put on a life jacket or unbuckle a seat belt.

One important way to get through this phase of the survival arc as quick as possible is preparation. If you have been through this situation before or trained for it in simulated situations you are much more likely to make a quick decision.

In the book, Ripley tells stories of people who survived the trade center collapse because they had been in the stairwell before so they new exactly where to go. Or those in plane crashes who had studied the exits so they knew exactly where to go when disaster struck without having to spend a lot of time thinking about it.

I always feel like this phase would be my Achilles heal. I like to really think through alternatives methodically before making a decision. I’d like to train myself to make quicker decisions with only say 80% of the information I need so that if I’m ever in a disaster, I can make it to the next phase, the Decisive Moment.

The Decisive Moment

We have now made it to the last step of the survival arc — the Decisive Moment. This is when you take action and see the final outcome. Preparation also plays a large part in the decisive moment. For the action that you’ve chosen to take, can you actually do it under stress? In fact, due to the stress, some people freeze up and take no action.

One of the best examples of preparation from the book is the story of a police officer who had survived a record number of shootouts. Before he went out chasing the bad guys, he ran the police shooting range for many years and, due to that, the knowledge of how to shoot a gun became second nature to him:

“[While on a stakeout], the crotch piece on his bulletproof vest fell off, clattering to the floor. The robbers turned around and pointed their guns at him. What happened next was nothing short of a miracle, Cirillo said. His training took over. His pistol sights came into focus, nice and steady, just like the shooting range. He found he could count the serrations on his front sight…he heard a shot and saw a flash of fire from his own gun barrel. ‘My subconscious was saving my ass.’ He felt the revolver buck in his hand several times. And his conscious mind said, “Who the hell is shooting my gun?”

Will you quickly make it to the decisive moment in a disaster? In some ways, you will never know until you are in that situation. But until that time comes, you can make sure you are always prepared.

I cannot imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modern ship building has gone beyond that.
-Captain Smith, Commander of Titanic

There is a large part of me that is a doer. I’m not happy each day until I can cross items off my list and feel like I’ve made progress toward a goal. In many ways this is a good thing. It helps me to be productive with my time and make steady progress toward achieving goals.

In fact, my business is often about implementing IT projects for clients. I pride myself on running a consulting company that “gets things done” rather than one of those lofty consulting companies who charge a small fortune only to generate a list of all the things that are wrong, but can’t actually help fix them.

But because I’m so focused on making daily progress sometimes it’s hard for me to step back and look at the big picture. And the reason why the big picture matters on an individual or corporate level is that it helps establish who you are and where you’re ultimately going. These things can sometimes get lost in the details, but they are vitally important especially when you are looking to get a group of people working toward a common goal.

A friend of mine works for Hilton. He could say that his job is to ensure that the beds get made and the dinner gets served to the various people who travel through the O’Hare Hilton. And that’s nice, but it sure sounds like just a job and would make you wonder “what’s the point”? 

Instead what if he said, quoting Conrad Hilton, that his job  ”has been and continues to be [my] responsibility to fill the earth with the light and warmth of hospitality.”   Wow! What a difference. Now that’s something worth working for!

Setting a vision for a group helps add meaning for the people that take part in achieving that. People are happier and more driven to work hard when they feel like they are working toward a shared goal and something that brings meaning to their life. It sure sounds a lot better than I’m here to make money or for a company to say that the company exists to make money for partners or shareholders.

Having a vision helps to define a corporate culture, and some of the classics of business literature have agreed that this is the best way to ensure that a business succeeds over the long term. For example, “Built to Last” from Jim Collins talks about how those businesses with a bold mission (BHAG – Big Hairy Audacious Goals) and cult-like culture do much better than those that just focus on profits:

Profitability is a necessary condition for existence and a means to more important ends, but it is not the end in itself for many of the visionary companies. Profit is like oxygen, food, water, and blood for the body; they are not the point of life, but without them, there is no life.

…Highly visionary companies often use bold missions–what we prefer to call BHAGs (pronounced bee-hags, short for “Big Hairy Audacious Goals”)–as a particularly powerful mechanism to stimulate progress.

-Built to Last, Jim Collins

Take a look at some vision/mission statements from famous companies to get a feel for what I’m talking about:

• Facebook: Facebook is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. The company develops technologies that facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph, the digital mapping of people’s real-world social connections. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment.
• Google: Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful
• Amazon.com: seeks to be the world’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they may want to buy online at a great price.
• Mcdonalds: McDonald’s vision is to be the world’s best quick service restaurant experience. Being the best means providing outstanding quality, service, cleanliness, and value, so that we make every customer in every restaurant smile.

I think the key to the vision is to come up with something inspiring, unique but not trite. Some corporations just go off to an executive retreat and throw a bunch of fancy words together without really identifying the unique DNA of their company. In my mind, that is key to the vision.  In other words, define what makes your group special.

All of this has led me to begin developing a vision for my company. Otherwise how can I or my employees really know where we’re going? 

We are limited, not by our abilities, but by our vision.

-Anonymous