Predicting a person’s success from a few questions may seem a little utopian. Following the talk by psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth, who said that success depended not on IQ but on grit and self-discipline, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania kept studying what other skills or “things” were involved in thousands of successful people across all fields, sectors and professions.
One of the factors found in all successful people, besides courage (grit) and self-discipline, is the ability to recover from and learn from failures and disappointments.
We are all going to fail, and many of those failures will bring us to our knees, but the difference between those who get up and keep fighting and those who stay on their knees is what separates success from failure.
Of course, this quality or skill is very hard to see in someone we are about to hire, since it’s hard to see even in ourselves. That’s why Wharton published 8 questions on its website that you should ask yourself, and that you should ask anyone you want to bring onto your team for a management position. If you are able to answer these questions honestly, you’ll be closer to correcting those supposed flaws, because, despite what some people think, even a fearful person can become brave and focus on a goal once they know they need to change in that respect.
If success in business and in your career requires adding up a whole series of qualities and habits, failure needs only one “ingredient”. That ingredient is often not having a goal, not focusing on a specific target, or constantly abandoning and/or changing our goals.
You’ve probably come across, more than once, those people who one day say they want to be civil servants, the next day dancers, now they want to start a business (but they don’t know what kind) and next week they want to be lion tamers. If you don’t have a goal, you’re unlikely to reach any goal.
“Failing to plan is planning to fail”
Without further ado, these are the 8 statements you’ll have to rate on a scale on Wharton’s website, which will finally give you a score (a percentage). I never pay attention to scores, but the truth is that the questions are very useful for getting to know ourselves:
- New ideas and projects sometimes distract me from earlier ones.
- Setbacks don’t discourage me.
- I have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a while, but later lost interest.
- I work hard; I am a hard worker.
- I have often set goals but later chosen to pursue a different one.
- I have trouble keeping my focus on projects that are only a few months old.
- I always finish what I start.
- I am diligent (careful, interested, active…).
(You can take the test by clicking here.)
I’m sure that most people, if they answer these questions honestly, will get a truly disappointing result. But in that disastrous result you’ll find the answers to why you haven’t achieved your goals or reached your targets.
Once you have the answers, you know what you need to change. We could sum up the whole test like this:
“To succeed, you need to focus on one goal, not keep changing that goal and not get distracted, and also be consistent, persistent and, above all, tenacious.”
Now many of you will be wondering how you can achieve this and how you can change certain aspects of your personality to become stronger in the face of adversity, more focused, and so on. We’ll cover all of that in a later article so as not to make this one too long.
Further reading
Featured image: Smallbones, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
