May Gray and Success

I was sorely disappointed last week when I was watching 30 Rock and Tina Fey's character Liz made the comment about the strange weather in New York being due to the resulting irregular weather patterns that result from global warming. I love Tina, but I hate her politics. And Alec's too, for that matter. A cold couple of days do not irregular weather patterns make. In spite of the fact that we just finished one of the coldest winters worldwide in the last couple of decades there are still so many global warming alarmists who will use anything and everything to support their belief in their superstition. It bothers me that smart people get so convinced about something that is unclear at best (at least in their favor).

As I had mentioned yesterday, I love the I Will Teach You To Be Rich blog, but I especially enjoyed this article about the Shrug Effect. Basically, the Shrug Effect comes from wondering how someone can be so successful, attributing the success to external factors, and shrugging your shoulders and doing nothing because you don't have the same qualities. This happens in a number of different areas - we wonder how people can lose so much weight or are in better shape but we can't or aren't, how one person seems to have time to be a super parent and we're not, or how someone can be so well-off while we continue to just scrape by.

In psychology there is a concept of locus of control (very closely related to Attribution theory, if not basically the same thing) which explains personality and behavior in terms of the attributions we make about events that occur, and whether they arise due to internal or external factors. People that exhibit typically healthy behaviors and attitudes tend to attribute negative events to external factors, and conversely, credit positive outcomes to internal ones. For most people, there is a certain amount of self-deception that is involved with these kinds of things. Without going into too much more detail, whether you're content/satisfied/successful/happy or not really depends on how you ascribe the events and circumstances to internal or external forces. The author of the article that I linked uses this example to make his point, while I do the same:

I want to tell you a story about a guy named Jim English. Many of you know that I co-founded a wiki product called PBwiki. Well, when I started my series on personal entrepreneurship a few weeks ago, I used one of the posts to ask for interns to help make PBwiki bigger and better.

Jim English responded and, among the other applicants, he was the most passionate by far. So we brought him on board and gave him some small tasks. In just a couple of weeks, it’s become clear that Jim is a superstar. He’s taken high-level goals like “Make this site better” and he’s achieved real, measurable goals by going step-by-step. Now he gets much bigger projects and increasing responsibility. Actually, he’s such an asset that I plan to continue having him work with PBwiki and, eventually, I want to recruit him to other companies I’m involved with in the future.

So if you see Jim as a senior executive in the future, I suppose there are two reasons you can attribute to his success: Maybe it was his connections, pedigree, luck, superlative intelligence, blah blah blah that got him so far.

Or maybe it was him seeing something that interested him, stepping up, and taking a chance on an unknown project. Maybe it was curiosity. Maybe it was the small step of sending just one email.

It’s easy to do The Shrug Effect and attribute others’ success to qualities you don’t have, shrugging because you can’t equal them. But that’s simplistic, and it’s an excuse to stay in your current state and do nothing differently.

Be patient. Do things with uncertain outcomes. Analyze why you haven’t taken advantage of opportunities in the past (for example, why didn’t you apply for the PBwiki opportunity? Was it a fear of rejection/qualification? Was it simply a lack of interest?). And start today.

When you do, soon people will wonder about you and your success.

Somehow busy people seem to still be able to do amazing things. It's easy for me to train for a marathon because I have no other obligations, but what about my Branch President who is a marriage and family therapist with four kids and a very demanding calling? I feel like people who achieve great things do it because they focus on the things that will facilitate their success rather than what will hedge up their way - their eyes are on the finish line and not the stumbling blocks in front of them, and a hundred other metaphors that illustrate the same point. I just thought that was worth mentioning.

So I guess I'm back to blogging.