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You know the old joke: An out-of-town gentleman wanders down 5th Avenue in New York City while looking at his map. A native New Yorker walks up to him and the following exchange ensues: "Pardon me. You look lost. Can I help?" the native asks. "Why yes," the lost gentleman responds. "Can you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?" The New Yorker then admonishes him to "practice, practice, practice."
Ba da bing!
The moral of the story: Work hard and you'll achieve your goals. The truth: Hard work is a necessary component in goal achievement, but it's insufficient.
Here's an instructive story: As baseball's last .400 hitter in 1941, Ted Williams was a notoriously hard worker, but the foundation for his exceptional success was laid in his youth.
While Ted was still very young, his parents noticed his incredible perception of time/space relationships, his quick reflexes and his incredible hand-eye coordination. When he began to play baseball as a young boy, these talents served him extremely well. He enjoyed rapid success and began working really hard to hone his hitting skills. As he became more successful, his love of the game developed. Increasingly, he pushed himself harder to improve, but it wasn't hard or tedious work for Ted. He loved what he was doing, so while it required tremendous effort, to him it seemed effortless.
In both World War II and the Korean War, Ted served his country as a pilot — maybe I should say the pilot. Those who served with him stipulated that he was one of the greatest military pilots they ever saw. The same talents, attributes, skills and knowledge that propelled his baseball success made him an incredible combat aviator.
There's more: During and after his baseball career, Ted's love of fly-fishing developed and grew. He became an award winner. Again, his hand-eye coordination, highly developed sense of time and space, love of the sport and diligent practice fueled his success.
Now you've read the "what." Here's the "so what:"
Most of us spend our professional lives focusing on improving our weaknesses. Whether you're an entrepreneur or a company employee, you've probably either told yourself or been told by managers or corporate HR staffers that success requires well-roundedness. If you're analytical, develop your collaborative capability. If your strength is "x," you also have to become adept at "y" to be successful.
Not quite!
Peter Drucker said that the primary job of a manager is to make strength productive and render weakness irrelevant. In business, the most effective competitive strategies rely first on strength. Many executives and entrepreneurs are convinced, however, that while strengths should be engaged and deployed, weaknesses should be the focus of their people development initiatives.
Here's the truth: Most weaknesses, with lots of work, money and time, improve slightly, but they're still weaknesses.
Do you want to know the real requirement for personal success? It's confidence, and its equation looks like this:
CONFIDENCE = talents x attributes x knowledge x skills x passion.
Here are my definitions of the elements:
Talents are genetic strengths. They are gifts and they are immutable. Take a look at the things I labeled as talents in the Ted Williams story. They can be augmented by the other elements that contribute to confidence, but if you're tone deaf — and pardon my grammar here — a year of training with Andrea Boccelli ain't makin' you a world-class tenor.
Here are two tidbits: First, everyone has specific, unique talent. Second, ignoring one's own talent always creates a longing later in life. Don't ignore yours.
Attributes are characteristics of morality, character or personality initiated genetically and developed primarily in childhood. This category includes such characteristics as discipline, courage, emotional endurance, optimism, honesty and persistence. A recent study found that, while they can develop further in later life with patience, persistence, practice and reinforcement, these traits are typically 80 percent hard-wired by the age of 18. The degree and nature of parental love and support — the aggregate of actions parents take with their children to instill self-worth and inspire exploration in a safe and supportive environment — typically do more to develop specific attributes (for better or worse) than any other factor. Given that fact as well as the reality that attributes undergird successful professional performance, this presents an enormous challenge.
Knowledge represents the level of learning of concepts and facts from the most basic (curiosity) to the most mature (perspective). In most companies, the acquisition of knowledge is deemed to be synonymous with development. For example, if John has a problem with collaboration, he's sent to a seminar.
When John returns, he may have learned a lot about collaboration, but he won't have permanently changed his behavior.
Passion is the zest from commitment. It typically develops when attributes, skills, talent and knowledge converge. Its energy then feeds the development of even higher levels of skill and knowledge, which in turn create additional passion. You get the idea. A quick word to the wise: To the observer, passion does not always look like Jack Welch on steroids. I recently worked with a client who was roundly criticized for having a lack of passion. In reality, he didn't display his passion in an overt, fist shaking, evangelical way, but he had plenty of zest and commitment.
Whether you are concerned with your own development, that of others or both, here's the lesson: Personal confidence evolves out of a messy, non-linear collision of experiences in childhood. Further, and with apologies to Jim Collins, going from good to great almost always requires the ongoing development and leverage of existing strengths and implementing multi-dimensional strategies that address the elements of confidence appropriately.
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