Many Roads to Success

In her book, Mindset, Carol Dweck points out what every one of us knows is wrong with the famous story of the hare and the tortoise:

“The lesson was supposed to be that slow and steady wins the race. But, really, did any of us ever want to be the tortoise? No, we just wanted to be a less foolish hare.”

Then there is the story of Arjuna and how he saw nothing except the eye of the bird he was shooting at. Concentrate, focus: that was the lesson. While that’s obviously necessary for certain types of goals, isn’t Max Gunther right in what he says in many other cases, especially goals spread over long time periods?

“If you put blinders on yourself so that you can see only straight ahead, you will miss nearly everything. This is what the unlucky typically do. They stick to preplanned life routes even when they are going nowhere or are actually plodding downhill to disaster.”

Consider how Lee Kuan Yew made Singapore what it is today. In his terrific book, The Ocean of Churn, Sanjeev Sanyal points out Yew started off being a socialist. But once in power, he changed his stance and converted Singapore into a manufacturing hub by inviting foreign capital. In the 1980’s, he decided to diversify into the electronics and pharma industries. Next it became a financial hub. Here’s what Yew had to say about his approach of jumping from one theme to another:

“My life is not guided by philosophy or theories. I get things done and leave others to extract the principles from my successful solutions… We were not ideologues. We did not believe in theories as such. A theory is an attractive proposition intellectually.”

Instead, he always kept a Plan B and even a Plan C ready:

“Presented with the difficulty or major problem or an assortment of conflicting facts, I review what alternatives I have if my proposed solution does not work. I choose a solution which offers a higher probability of success, but if it fails, I have some other way. Never a dead end.”

In their superb book on forecasting, Superforecasting, Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner talked about the characteristic of the most successful forecasters:

“(They apply the) core insight of gradually getting closer to the truth by constantly updating (their view) in proportion to the weight of the evidence.”

In other words, the key is to not get married to any idea, however well analyzed or appealing it may be.

The roads to success are many and well documented: knowing which one to pick is the hard part. But even harder is the willingness to change roads, as the situation evolves. And yet that is key, as Yew and the Superforecasters prove.