The personality trait that most often leads to success is conscientiousness, according to Paul Tough, author of How Children Succeed, who draws on countless studies that have linked successful people with this trait. In fact, there is probably no such thing as success without it.
We define conscientiousness as “the precision and care put into doing or examining something and into carrying out one’s tasks. Its synonyms would be diligence, care, dedication, exactness, neatness, precision…”
How conscientiousness helps you
A large body of research links conscientiousness in children with better grades at school and university, fewer crimes and even longer-lasting marriages, as Drake Baer’s piece in Business Insider reports. Conscientious people also live longer, smoke and drink less, and have fewer strokes and a lower incidence of Alzheimer’s disease. They also tend to keep their jobs for longer and have fewer failures when starting a business.
They tend to be aware of their actions, and to be organised, responsible planners. They work hard at challenges and keep their impulses in check.
Conscientiousness is one of the Big Five personality traits that lead you to success. The others are agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism and openness to experience.
(Read: 7 things the world’s most successful people have in common)
Each of these traits can help us depending on our profession. For example, being an extravert is essential for someone who works in sales.
But why is this trait so important?
First of all, the simple fact of planning is already an advantage over most people, who go through life without a defined plan. There are very intelligent, very talented people who end up failing.
For example, while IQ does matter above a certain minimum level, the truth is that, according to psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth, IQ doesn’t predict success; grit and self-discipline do. It was not the most intelligent students who got the best grades, but those who worked hardest and were disciplined in their studies.
Because they are planners, conscientious people also have clear goals, so they tend to work towards meeting them. They are persistent, so setbacks don’t bring them down. As a result, they look for every possible way to reach their goal.
They lead an organised life, a fundamental requirement for success, because the way you are in your personal life is the way you are at work. Someone who is disorganised at home is disorganised at work, and so tends to waste more time and feel more lost.
Being conscientious is like brushing your teeth: it keeps problems from turning up in the long run.
A very easy way to spot who lacks conscientiousness at work is punctuality. Unpunctual people are not usually aware of their actions, and so they tend to arrive late to their own goals or, rather, tend not to achieve their goals and objectives at all.
(Read: A profile of chronically late people)
A punctual person is punctual because they are organised and respectful.
Psychologist Brent Roberts says that people like this always have a plan, and even if they fail, they have another plan for dealing with that failure.
Conscientiousness seems to be a trait that encompasses many others, such as resilience, which basically means responding positively to adversity and managing to learn a positive lesson from failure.
So instilling many of these habits in our children from a very young age can help forge this trait in their personality, sparing them the hard road of changing ingrained habits later on.
Further reading
- 8 questions that predict your success, and that of the people you hire
- 10 tips for raising entrepreneurial children
Featured image: annulla from Brooklyn, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
.jpg){kind=link}