In University Jim seemed a classic fast-tracker. He made good grades with little effort, and his classmates voted him "Most Likely to Succeed." After graduation, he had his pick of jobs.
Jim joined the sales department of a large insurance company and at first did well. He quickly hit a plateau, however, and switched to smaller company, where he also plateau. Bored with sales, he tried sales management. Again, the same pattern developed: well-liked, regarded as a fast-tracker, he soon fizzled like a wet firecracker. Today he is selling insurance for yet another company - and wonders why he isn't doing better.
Then there is Joseph D'Arrigo. "I've always regarded myself as average," D'Arrigo told me. "I got into life insurance and did reasonably well By a fluke, I was put on a committee with several of the biggest salespeople in the industry. I was terribly intimidated."
As he came to know these achievers, however, D'Arrigo realized something: "They were no more geniuses than I was. They were just ordinary people who had set their sights high, then found a way to achieve their goals." He also realized something more: "If other average guys could dream big dreams, so could I." Today he owns a million - dollar company specializing in employee benefits.
Why do ordinary individuals like D'Arrigo often seem to achieve so much more than people like Jim? To found out, I interviewed over 190 men and women in my work as a corporate consultant. The results of this informal survey confirmed for me what Theodore Roosevelt once said: "The average man who is successful is not a genius. He is a man who has merely ordinary qualities, but who has developed those ordinary qualities to a more than ordinary degree."
I determined that "average" people who excel:
1. Learn self-discipline. "You don't need talent to succeed," insists Irwin C. Hansen, chief executive of Porter Memorial Hospital in Denver, Colorado, who has gained a reputation for turning around under - performing hospitals. "All you need is a big pot of glue. You smear some on your chair and some on the seat of your pants, you sit down, and you stick with every project until you've done the best you can do."
Average achievers stay glued to their chairs and postpone pleasure so they can reap future dividends. Many fast-trackers, on the other hand, expect too much too soon. When rewards don't materialize instantly, they may become frustrated and unhappy.
Fifty years ago, a group of researchers began an ambitious, longterm study of 268 male university students analyzing the paths their lives were to take. Among these men, now in their late 60s and 70s, the researchers found school performance was little related to job competence. Qualities like "steady and dependable" and "practical and organized" were more important. According to Dr. George E. Vaillant, the psychiatrist who now directs the study, one crucial mental habit was what he calls "the capacity to postpone - but not forgo - gratification."
Frances Johansen, a financial planner, sees this principle at work in the way people manage their money, as well as their careers. She tells about two couples she counsels. One is a professional working couple, university-educated fast-trackers. "They bring home over $140,000 a year," Johansen says. "Yet they are $60,000 in debt and have nothing to show for their hard work except a big mortgage and a lot of bills. Then there's another couple in their 40s," she continus. "They sacrificed in the early years, bought a home as soon as they could, then made some investments and built a large equity. Now they are living in a lovely house and no longer have to stay on a budget."
The husband, a blue-collar worker, has only a secondary-school diploma," Johansen notes. "But he worked hard and built his career step by step, applying self-discipline and simply being patient."
2. Bring out the best in people. Franklin Murphy, one- time chancellor of the University of California at Los Angeles and later chief executive of the Times Mirror Co., puts it bluntly: he succeeded on the talents of others. "I always sought out people who were talented, who had self-discipline. Then I developed their affection and loyalty. I recruited them, motivated them, and when we achieved something, I shared the credit with them."
Many of the fast-trackers I spoke with couldn't tolerate getting help from others or sharing success, often because of an overpowering ego. Collaboration is the key, and one of the best collaborators I've met is Marilynn Surbeck, who supervises ten people for the Los Angeles County Bar Association. "Many of them are more intelligent than I am, and that's the way l like it," Surbeck says. "I'm there to manage their conflicts and motivate them enough so they can do the things they do well."
How did she learn these skills? Surprisingly, Surbeck notes, "by being a single mother with a daughter who required lots of professional help." Twenty-four-year-old Holly has multiple physical and mental handicaps, and over the years Marilynn Surbeck had to elicit help from many agencies, doctors and other specialists.
"Frequently," she says, "I found myself sitting at a table with five or six professionals, all with different ideas about what would be best for my daughter. So I had to learn negotiation skills in a hurry" - and basically, how to get everyone on the same track. "They knew more than I did, but I knew how to bring them together. When I got into management, I discovered these were transferable skills that were seen as quite valuable."
3. Build a knowledge base. Average achievers are not looking at the top job, as many fast-trackers tend to do - but at the job one step above. So they often broaden their knowledge base in a way that many fast-trackers don't.
Consider a young man named Holtz, He wasn't good enough to stand out in any one, single position on his secondary-schol America football team. So he studied every position and waited for his opportunity. After graduating in the bottom half of his class, he went off to university, where he attracted little interest. Following his graduation, he became an assistant coach at five different universities.
By the time he took over as football coach at Notre Dame Univetsity in the United States in 1985, Lou Holtz had built a broad base of coaching knowledge and soon returned the school to the pinnacle of university football. During Holtz's six-season reign, Notre Dame has won a stunning 77 percent of its games.
4. Develop special skills. Howard Gardner, a psychologist, notes that standard I.Q. tests primarily measure only two kinds of ability: math and language skills. In fact, he says, there are at least seven basic intellectual skills: mathematical-logical, linguistic, musical spatial, bodily kinesthetic and two types of personal intelligence-how we understand others, and how we deal with our own dreams, fears and frustrations. So while you may not be good at math, you may have an aptitude for design; or you may have an ability for persuading people and could, with training, become an excellent negotiator.
Thomas J. Wastson, Jr., had trouble living in the shadow of his father, the long-time head of IBM. Always a lackluster student, the younger Watson even needed a tutor to get through the IBM sales school. "I had no distinctions, no successes," he writes in Father, Son & Co.
When Watson started flying lessons, however, something happened. "What a feeling!" he says. "I was good at flying, instantly good. I plowed everything into this mad pursuit and gained a lot of self-confidence."
This single success led to greater successes. Because of his experience as a pilot, Watson became an officer in the U.S. Air Force during World War II. He was not brilliant, he concedes. But he discovered he had "an orderly mind and an unusual ability to focus on what was important and to put it across to others." Watson eventually became chief executive of IBM - and took the company into the computer age. In 15 years, he increased IBM's revenues almost tenfold.
5. Keep Promises. Wendell Will, an attorney in my town, once told me, "I'd like to think my success as a lawyer is due to my brilliant legal mind. But I think it is really because I always keep my word. If I promise a client that a document will be ready at a certain time, it is ready. That quality is so rare today that if you have it, people think you're a genius."
Three women started a design company 14 years ago, furnishing model homes for the U.S. housing industry. From the first, they built their business far more on simple dependability than on any strokes of creative genius. Last year, company volume exceeded $2 million.
"Because we've never been late with an installation," says Kathey Scroggie, one partner, "we've survived the recession when our competitors were declaring bankruptey. Once, with a grand opening scheduled for the end of the week, and much of our furniture still on a truck somewhere between here and the wholesaler, several days' drive away, we went out and bought $5000 worth of items at retail prices. That ate up most of our profit, but we couldn't let the builder down."
Samra Keller, vice president of sales and marketing for the developer on that project, verifies the value of such reliability. "The best ability is dependability," she says. "We'd stick with these women to our dying day because we know they'll go to such lengths to keep their word."
6. Bounce back from defeat. Sylvia Erdman was the victim of a cutback. "I did okay in school," she says, "but nothing outstanding. Then I got into marketing and discovered I had a kind of 'street smarts' about what people like." At 42, Erdman joined Revlon as senior director of marketing for European designer fragrances. But after only seven months, she was let go as part of a cutback. "It was like somebody had punched me in the nose," she says.
A month later, a publishing friend asked for advice on selling advertising to the beauty industry. Two and a half years later, working out of her apartment, Erdman is now supplying that advice to major clients at roughly the same income she earned at Revlon. She likes being her own boss. "Getting laid off forces you to be creative," she says. "It lights a fire under you."
Ultimately, there is nothing more powerful than a person with an average mind who holds his or her head high and goes about life with zest and surety. U.S. President Abraham Lincoln could have been destroyed by his seeming ordinariness. He came from a poor backgroud and had an ungainly appearance. Instead, he went on to greatness-while giving new meaning and dignity to what the world considered "aveerage." As Lincoln was once quoted as saying, "God must have loved the common people, because he made so many of them."(1995. 1. 9.월)
* Alan Loy McGinnis is a family therapist and corporate consultant. He has written five books, including The Friendship Factor, Bringing Out the Best in People and The Power of Optimist.
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