The formula for success

Humans crave success in whatever their endeavour. Getting a job, scoring a girl, winning a football match or starting a business. Almost by definition, success is: that thing that people want.

Like poet Henry David Thoreau said:

Men are born to succeed, not fail.

I’ve studied many successful people and their stories, and I’ve seen a pattern. I believe that there’s a universally applicable formula for success. The formula has four variables.

Time

Time is the amount of minutes, hours, days, months or years you spend pursuing your goal. Success requires time. There are no overnight successes—I love how Biz Stone of Twitter describes this idea:

Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.

Warren Buffett knows that great products or services will sell, gain notoriety and be improved over time:

Time is the friend of a wonderful company.

And very big challenges (like creating the world’s largest bookstore and the world’s largest online store) require a lot of time—Jeff Bezos said:

…a lot of the most important things we’ve done have taken a long time.

Legendary basketball coach John Wooden said:

[one] must have patience for success

And I’ve observed failure and frustration for impatient people. But Wooden’s wisdom goes further—he says:

the journey is better than the end

And I think that all of us high achievers and ambitious people need to remember to enjoy the now rather than punish ourselves for some potential, vague dream.

Effort

Success requires hard work. If it was easy, everyone would have it and nobody would want it. Easy is sitting on your ass, wasting your life. Like Gary Vaynerchuk says:

Stop watching fucking Lost.

With zero effort you get nothing. But even daring to enter the race in your field sets you apart from the masses—Woody Allen said:

Eighty percent of success is showing up.

Whatever you think of Margaret Thatcher, you can’t deny she had to work very hard to succeed in politics, a male-dominated field—she said:

I do not know anyone who has got to the top without hard work.

The idea that success requires hard work is rarely challenged. But few people realise just how much of that hard work is really needed.

Luck

Some already-successful people hate this idea because it insults their ego. And others love it because it’s an easy excuse. But I believe strongly that luck plays a major part in success.

The luck variable represents everything outside of your control. Luck not getting run over by a cab. Or your competitor losing a key member of their team or deciding to work on a different idea. But you can nullify the luck variable to some degree by preparing for different eventualities. Niccolò Machiavelli said, in terms more acceptable in his time than now:

fortune is a woman; and it is necessary, if one wants to hold her down, to beat her and strike her

Mathematician Daniel Bernoulli knew (and his mathematics proves) that the outcome of an endeavour is dependant upon more than one’s abilities:

One should not appraise human action on the basis of it’s results.

But Calvin Coolidge, 30th President of the United States, warned against gambling and leaving it all to luck:

Those who trust to chance must abide by the results of chance.

Frank Sinatra said:

People often remark that I’m pretty lucky. Luck is only important in so far as getting the chance to sell yourself at the right moment. After that, you’ve got to have talent and know how to use it.

This puts luck nicely in its place in the formula and introduces the next variable.

Ability

We are told (and we like to believe) that we can be whatever we want to be. But I’m afraid that’s bullshit. I can’t be a world-class golfer and I doubt Lee Westwood could run a great tech startup.

Aldous Huxley knew that hard work could only take you so far:

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.

But Zig Ziglar describes for me the essence of the importance of the ability variable:

Success is the maximum utilisation of the ability that you have.

I believe that true success will come from working at the thing that you’re best at. Competing in a chess competition when chess is not your thing is futile—simply because you’ll be up against someone for which chess is their thing. (Those who invest their time and money in web businesses but who do not understand the web should bear this in mind.) Warren Buffet has said many times of his own investment strategy:

we stick with businesses we believe we understand.

You should stick with endeavours that you believe can compete well in.

The formula

And so the formula for success is deceptively simple:

success = time × effort × luck × ability

It’s hard to use. It requires that you’ve got every single variable—a deficiency in any one will lead to failure. But it also means that in time, with hard, skilled work and a bit of luck, you can enjoy great success.