I’m Not Spartacus

All of us are fascinated by the people who achieve great success, the outliers whose vision and achievements are an inspiration for strivers everywhere. All the stories about these superstars need to have an important disclaimer, however:

Don’t try this trick at home, or at the office, either.  When we seek to model our businesses or careers after one fabled genius or another, we lay down several traps that are nearly guaranteed to harm us, including:

•  We aren’t they. I cover this topic in at least two chapters of my life lessons book (Your Name Here: Guide to Life), but the short version is that what works for one person won’t necessarily work for another. What makes me effective isn’t going to help you and vice versa.
• They aren’t unique. History is written by the winners, as they say, so we read about the triumphs almost exclusively. In more than three decades (Yow, I am OLD!!) of working with business leaders, I’ve seen great success and great failure from people employing seemingly similar approaches. After the fact, we see the path followed by the victor, but we don’t see all the corpses along the same path. If 100 people adopted the same strategy and five of them succeeded, is it really a good strategy?
• We aren’t there. Ideas that worked for one person in one marketplace aren’t always transferable to another marketplace. Strengths that work in consumer product marketing can bomb in a B-to-B world, and vice versa.
• So yesterday.  We all know that timing is critical, but we tend to understate its impact when we look at business legends. When they grew up, when they entered the market and when they succeeded can all make them less relevant as examples for people seeking guidance today.  (Consider the different market conditions facing students who graduated in 2004 versus those graduating in 2009 as a way to gauge the impact of timing.)
• Post hoc analysis. After the fact, we can point to actions that succeeded and honor them as brilliant, but that doesn’t mean the actions were inspired then or now. In fact, we might not even know which actions were connected to success. It might be the activity we know about or it could be something completely different. Hindsight, it turns out is not 20/20.

All of us can improve our odds of success by identifying what makes us successful and doing more of it. Trying to replicate another person’s path is a fool’s errand.