Don’t get me wrong, I love success and self-help literature. It’s way better than the alternative: failure and self-harm.
But the more I read it, from business magazine articles and books describing keys to success to the motivational quotes I see on the internet, the more I find something missing.
Something big.
Something that, ironically, undermines success while promoting it.
Consider these inspiring quotes about success:
- Almost every successful person begins with two beliefs: the future can be better than the present, and they have the power to make it so.
- The real secret of success is enthusiasm.
What they don’t say is that the ideas in these teachings are necessary conditions to succeed, but not sufficient conditions to succeed. There’s a hidden “confusion of conditions” that gets us thinking we’re well armed for success when we’re not.
It’s like sending out a soldier onto the battlefield with a gun, but no ammo. To fight, it is necessary to have a gun. But it’s not sufficient to have a gun. The soldier needs something else too – ammo. He thinks he’s got what he needs to win the battle, but he doesn’t.
Here’s another way of understanding the difference between necessary conditions and sufficient conditions. Say you want to bake a chocolate cake. So you go to the store to get all the ingredients: flour, sugar, unsweetened chocolate, and so on. Say the recipe calls for seven ingredients to make this particular cake. Flour is a necessary ingredient. It’s a necessary condition for cake, meaning, flour must be in the mix to make the cake.
But flour on its own isn’t sufficient to get our cake. If you have flour, but don’t have all six other ingredients to get cake, you won’t succeed. Sufficient conditions for cake is having all the ingredients. It involves flour, for sure, but it also involves other things besides flour.
With this in mind, let’s look again at one of our quotes: “The real secret of success is enthusiasm.” Enthusiasm is part of the mix, but it isn’t the real secret of success, because there are other ingredients in the mix. Sure, enthusiasm is necessary. But having enthusiasm isn’t sufficient to guarantee success. Enthusiastic people fail. It reminds me of the guy who said, “I left my job in the same way I started it: fired with enthusiasm.”
Hard work is another necessary condition. It’s a vital ingredient in the mix, but it’s not the only ingredient. I’ve seen a lot of hard workers fail miserably, because hard work is only one factor in the mix.
Another necessary condition for success is belief that the future can be better than the present. But this belief isn’t enough. It’s not a sufficient condition for success, because there are other ingredients. There are a lot of people who believe for better things and still fail.
Whenever you think about success in your life or in your business, there’s a question most motivators never ask, but you should: what are the sufficient conditions for success here? What vital ingredients am I missing? Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking one ingredient is all that’s required.
Success is more about the whole recipe than it is one or two ingredients.