The five and a half things every successful person does

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There is a question I feel has not been specifically answered in the blogosphere, and it is “what are the five and a half things every successful person does?” Through second hand experience and first hand opinions, I share below the five and a half things every successful person does.

1. Successful people read... a lot!

And not illustrated books or, like, sensationalist magazines — they read difficult, long books — like Tolstoy and Hugo. And they read fast too! The average successful person devours about 200 pages per hour. And still have room for dessert! What’s for dessert, you ask? Well, why not an op-ed in The New Yorker or the latest long read from the Financial Times? And when you think that the successful person is in their office preparing for their next big meeting? Nope! They’re still reading!

2. Successful people prepare, prepare, prepare!

Practice makes perfect, right? Wrong! Preparation makes perfect! Every successful person knows that landing that client, investment or whatever comes down to having the conversation scripted. This means also researching the other party and, ultimately, knowing how to read their mind! This is a great skill innate only to successful people (mind-reading). And us mere mortals? Well, we must be content with preparing constantly.

3. Successful people always do something

Reading and preparing aren’t enough. The successful person also does things that grants them the status of “successful”. And these things are always deeply meaningful. For example:

• A successful person does not sleep: they reenergise their creative flow.

• A successful person does not take their kids to the cinema: they broaden the horizon of their mind through new perspectives and stronger ties to others.

• A successful person does not “grab lunch”: they peruse diverse cuisines and seek to increase their depth of knowledge through new experiences.

4. Successful people uphold the values of sincerity and transparency

In preparing this article, I interviewed the most successful person I know. Their name will remain anonymous as per their request, but a crucial line that stayed with me was “BS is not in our vocabulary”. This was followed by a long explanation of what they understood as “BS”. This made it clear that transparency is of paramount importance for successful people. By being transparent, they can communicate clearly what they want you to understand. By being sincere, they can make you do exactly what they want you to do.

5. Successful people find solutions, never problems

We often believe that the means to an end must be justified. This simply is not true for the successful person. Means do not exist. There are only ends. In not seeing means, there is no need to justify actions beyond the scope of the final action. And reflecting on ethics? That only proves problematic. Who has the time to ask whether saving your suit is better than saving a drowning child? Just do whatever you were doing and stay confident that the end you are pursuing is the right thing to do.

5.5. Successful people let others define them

This point is a bit questionable in that I feel my research for this article did not give me a clear idea of a sixth thing successful people do, so I am counting it as a 1/2-thing successful people do.

Success is a social construct. It is not a separate entity or a pre-determined identifiable attribute, but a series of conflating aspects that, when perceived in another person by a certain person who interprets those attributes in a way that is consistent with their own self-interpretation and view of the world around them, fits with their own understanding of “success”. Our general agreement of what a successful person looks like comes down to our sharing a more or less comparable background and language, a language in terms of shared meanings attributed to words — not as in English, French or Hindi (who can also understand each other through translation). Certain aspects of people’s lives can be related in our minds with “success” (such as expensive cars and a big house), and this can be deemed as something worth striving for. But what are we striving for? Success, or its conflating attributes? Do we want to be successful, or do we want a six-figure salary?

The specificity of the final aim raises the thought of a spectrum from individual, clear-cut, definable success factors, to the broader notion of “social success”. This same spectrum may be also seen as a range from our own personal understanding of success to the relatable social construct of success. In pursuing the social construct, one comes to find themselves, like the dog chasing a car it reaches at a red light, in a state of excitement from the run-up to this moment that is not met by the reality of the situation. And what is the dog to do other than wait for the car to move along again and chase it once more? What is success, in the socially accepted sense, if not a moving car we can reach but never enjoy? How do we strive to become successful if not by continuously re-imagining what we can do next, better, more of? And in a world where we can assign the virtue of social success to so many people thanks to the internet in general and social media in particular, are we not feeding further into a notion of success that is becoming evermore unattainable?

Returning to the notion of individually definable success factors, along with the idea that humans are interpreting beings, not only might success factors be more attainable than the great compendium of conditions held by the “successful person” (who also lived and became socially successful under complex circumstances), but may be different from person to person. For example, Taylor may view driving a fancy car as a symbol of success; meanwhile, Sam sees affording a nice coffee every Saturday morning as a sign of success. Both Taylor and Sam agree that social success is a much broader concept that their car-rides and coffees do not grant them, but they do view the success in having a routine, or feeling an aspect of their long-term goals fulfilled, through more or less commonplace habits. And this is where the divide becomes clearest. Whilst perceiving individual factors as fulfilling for oneself seems to lead to a life of enjoying the small things, living in the now and practising a “carpe diem” attitude to life; living under the constant pressure of a socially defined “successful life” is stressful and agonising in that it does not end: we never reach the car because there is always a green light up ahead. However, accepting that we, under our own set of personal circumstances, through our own history of human interactions and life events, having become who we are as individuals will allow us to uphold our own perception of success as true in contrast to a (seemingly) pre-defined social construct. And this shift is critical: if we all, as individuals, learn to view our own happiness (as constrained by the freedom of others) as the determining factor of success, the social construct can shift to a more open, inclusive and respectful notion that is actually worth striving for.