“It was another sleepless night followed by another cruel morning. We were running out of money, and I worried constantly about all the people who had sacrificed to come to work for me. They came and they toiled through the night and struggled to make ends meet for their families. The pressure was overwhelming—sometimes, I had to stop and throw up in the gutter on the way to the office.”
Keeping his dream going was the hardest thing he had ever tried to do in this life. Ed Penhoet had been comfortable as a biochemist and a professor, then reinvented himself as an entrepreneur and found himself barely keeping a fledgling firm afloat. Things would get worse before they got better, and he seriously considered merging with another equally desperate competitor or giving up entirely.
“Famous executives out there fundamentally gild the lily. They don’t tell you the awful truth about the pain you will face. They want you to think they’re brilliant and that they had it figured all out at the beginning. That’s revision-ist history. They might have had a clue, but that’s barely all they had.” Penhoet was teetering on the edge of a humiliating collapse of everything he had worked 24/7 to achieve. He could lose it all. Success as traditionally defined was not even a concept at this point. What Ed faced was the opposite of success—had he looked up the word “success” in the dictionary, he would have scored zero.
Why did he persist? It was not just because he was stubborn. There was something bigger than success at stake. When his favorite uncle died from cancer, he had long ago launched a career in biochemistry, determined to find new ways to bring basic research to the marketplace. That was a lifelong cause that had meaning uniquely to him. It was the way Penhoet would create a life that matters.
Creating a life that matters is what most everybody wants. It’s the subtitle of this book because it’s exactly what we heard from enduringly successful people all over the world. Builders,[†] as we call them, do things because they want to build a meaningful life. They want to create a life that matters, and one of the greatest tests of that conviction comes in those dark moments like those that Ed Penhoet suffered in the early days of his start-up. These are the times when Builders don’t feel successful—at least not in the traditionally defined terms of popularity, wealth, or influence. Yet they nevertheless choose to remain committed to what they care about despite success, not because of it. When faced with what they discover is so important to them, they summon the courage (or foolishness) to persist because it matters to them.
In fact, we discovered that for most Builders, the culturally accepted measures of success that you find in the dictionary have never been what they were seeking. The standard description must have been written for budding sociopaths. It is defined as
The achievement of something planned or attempted.
Impressive achievement, especially the attainment of fame, wealth, or power.
Something that turns out as planned or intended.
Somebody who has a record of achievement, especially in gaining wealth, fame, or power.[1]
Notice that nowhere in the dictionary definitions do you find any reference to finding meaning, fulfillment, happiness, and lasting relationships. No mention of feeling fully alive while engaged and connected with a calling that matters to you. No thoughts about creating a legacy of service to the world. Yet those are all realities that people who have lasting success say they value most in life and work.
For Builders, the real definition of success is a life and work that brings personal fulfillment and lasting relationships and makes a difference in the world in which they live. The question is why the rest of us tolerate any other definition.
Folks who chase a fantastic but vain hope for fame, wealth, and power—for its own sake—may even achieve it, only to become miserable and pathetic people. Not that there is anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld would say, but we think that the current definition of success is a potentially toxic prescription for your life and work. It is a description that makes you feel more like a failure than a success if it’s the standard against which all meaning in your life is measured.
Sure, you might be a little strange if you did not enjoy the “impressive achievement” of something that you “planned or intended.” But when you talk with Builders, you will hear that wealth, fame, and power are not actually goals or accomplishments for most of them. Money and recognition are external factors—they are outcomes of passionately working often on an entirely different objective that is often a personal cause or calling, like Ed Penhoet’s drive to find successful treatments for cancer. He chose a way of life that embodied his passions, making a difference to him and the world.
It was not just service or ambition; it was both at the same time. Penhoet’s passion was also his service to the world. On his journey from academic life to entrepreneur, and now in his current role running a nonprofit, Penhoet channeled his passion and made it a business that changed the status quo in medical research.
And, yes, in case you’re wondering, Penhoet and his colleagues eventually enjoyed many of the traditional measures of success, too, such as becoming wealthy, but these measures weren’t his focus. Penhoet’s lifelong cause inspired the creation of Chiron, the company he cofounded in 1981 and where he ended up serving as CEO longer than any other person ever had in that industry. Chiron is a $1.9 billion biotech innovator, and today, Penhoet is well into his second career as director of his friend Gordon Moore’s $5 billion foundation, where he’s supporting the sciences, education, and the environment.
When you feel pressure to pursue the elusive outcomes of traditional success, it’s often driven by the burden of making a living, pleasing others, or achieving status. Ironically, it appears that success often will fade, vanish, or become the dungeon of your soul unless it is not your primary objective. Builders like Penhoet tell us that when success just means wealth, fame, and power, it doesn’t last and it isn’t satisfying. If he had let a culturally promoted definition of success be his guide, he doesn’t think he would have ever achieved the success that matters to him.
Instead, people who seek to build long-term success by their own definition—Builders—insist that success may never come without a compelling personal commitment to something you care about and would be willing to do with or without counting on wealth, fame, power, or public acceptance as an outcome.
In reality, most Builders are hailed as leaders in their field usually long after they commit to their calling or to a particular way of living in the world that holds special meaning to them. The mainstream media stories about successful people—along with wishful thinking about instant gratification or a magic pill for success—may make it seem as if they were overnight successes, but it rarely happens that way.
Builders mostly toil with every ounce of their energy and persistence, with heart and soul, for their whole lives. They become lovers of an idea they are passionate about—for years and years—creating something that continually seduces them into obsessing over every detail, losing track of the passage of time. In a real sense, it’s something that they’d be willing to do for free, for its own sake. Quincy Jones wouldn’t give up music if it wasn’t popular, nor would Mandela rest until apartheid was crushed. It’s hard to retire from an obsession. Jack Welch is no more likely to stop teaching his brand of business than Maya Angelou is likely to stop writing poetry or teaching. They do it because it matters to them.
After being at it for years, and with the coincidence of whatever “it” is becoming popular, success came for some of them as defined in the dictionary. They may now have success as hailed by the culture, but this is a serendipitous outcome rather than an original goal.
Considering this mismatch between the dictionary definition of success and what you as an individual and your organization might actually care about, it shouldn’t be a surprise that you might yearn to “make something of yourself,” only to find that you’re strangely dissatisfied along the way because what you are working so hard for doesn’t really matter to you. Indeed, too many people at some point in their lives set goals and go on to achieve them, often brilliantly, only to find that they are mysteriously disappointed, empty, and unhappy.
Could this be why, despite acquiring material luxuries undreamed of even a few decades ago, there is a rising epidemic of clinical depression and suicide among the wealthiest citizens in America, China, and other rapidly growing economies? The World Health Organization predicts that depression will be the second leading cause of disability by 2020—a prediction that is, well, depressing.
How is it possible to achieve the very definition of success and yet find happiness so fleeting? Builders say it’s a simple matter of being cheated by the absence of knowing what really matters to you in your life, not just for today, but for today and for the long term. This is why the people who win the lottery have such a terrible track record of staying happy or sober two years later. It’s one of the many reasons why nine out of ten start-up companies fail to sustain themselves for the long term and why it’s tough to keep a career on track for decades.
It’s why most governments are fraught with needless acrimony and inefficiency, said Vaira Vike-Frieberga, president of Latvia. A former psychology professor at the University of Montreal, she noted that, “All too often, legislators launch their grand plans before making sure there is a shared sense of what success means or whether it matters when we get there.”
This also may be a reason why many partnerships, including marriages, don’t have happy endings. And it may be why Hollywood celebrity becomes synonymous with short-term relationships and long-term addictions.
You read about these folks all the time in People Magazine and the Wall Street Journal—the lifestyles of the rich, the famous, and the unbelievably disappointed. These are the people who so many of us aspire to be, and yet even these idols find themselves incomplete, feeling much less excited than when they had nothing but the promise of their imagined future.
You either know a person like this, or you are one.
To avoid this poignant dilemma, be careful what you wish for. When achievement for you or your organization comes without meaning, then it doesn’t last. Builders experience a success that does not leave them half full, as can often be the case for those who pursue only material treasures or other short-term measures instead of their own internal definition of lasting fulfillment.
In hundreds of interviews, we learned that Builders find lasting success when at least three essential elements come into alignment in their lives and work.
The first essential element is Meaning. What you do must matter deeply to you in a way that you as an individual define meaning. It’s something that you’re so passionate about that you lose all track of time when you do it. It’s something that you are willing to recruit other people to, but will do it despite criticism and perhaps even secretly do it for free. In fact, you could not be paid to not do it.
“Success is about building lasting relationships and serving others,” said Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro in India. He took the reins of the Bangalore-based firm at age 21 when his father died, then turned it from a fledgling hydrogenated cooking fat producer into an almost $2 billion information technology services company.[2] When it comes to creating lasting success in your life and career, Premji asked, “Don’t you think that building a meaningful lasting relationship with yourself about what matters to you is a good place to start?”
We’ll look at the many ways that Builders strive to build Meaning in Part I, “Meaning—How Successful People Stay Successful.”
The second essential element is ThoughtStyle—a highly developed sense of accountability, audacity, passion, and responsible optimism. We call it ThoughtStyle. Steve Jobs told us in an interview back before his famous ad campaign: Enduringly successful people “think different.” They have a talent, yes, and perhaps some even have a genius. But they also have a ThoughtStyle that supports their special accomplishments.
As Gerard Kleisterlee put it, “When you can organize your thinking around creating real value, and your thoughts remain focused on what is important to creating that value despite all the incoming distractions, crisis, and complexity crashing down all around you...then you’re really lucky because you have a sustainable model” for your work and your life. Kleisterlee is chairman, president, and CEO of Royal Philips Electronics in the Netherlands, with over 160,000 employees in 60 countries and 2005 sales of more than $37 billion.
We will focus on ThoughtStyles of Builders in Part II, “ThoughtStyles—Extreme Makeovers Start in Your Head.”
The third element is ActionStyle: enduringly successful people find effective ways to take action. This is hardly mind-blowing news, but there is more to ActionStyle than first meets the eye. Many Builders told us about times in their lives when they had a clear sense of meaning, but found it almost impossible to make things happen—to turn meaning and thought into action. Be thoughtful about meaning, but don’t let that paralyze you.
When you envision something that is meaningful to you that seems to be ideal or perhaps even perfect, sometimes “it’s like a beautiful pastry—too lovely to ruin by eating it,” said Alice Waters, the restaurateur and pioneer in organic cooking who, through an initiative called the Edible Schoolyard,[3] is determined to change the world one mouthful at a time.
Anyone who has “a perfect picture in his or her head of what must be done and what matters” also knows that the results of acting on that idea might “never be as perfect as that image in their mind,” Waters said. The reason this happens is because moving from thought to action puts idealism and beauty at risk as “your dream might lose something in the translation!”
Ultimately, “it’s about the pleasure of work itself—we’ve almost completely forgotten about that. The quality of loving the work is one of the most important values that we can bring to people,” Waters said with an appreciative eye on the talented chefs who were passionately tossing, chopping, and stirring lunch in her award-winning restaurant, Chez Pannise. They looked like sculptors as they arranged individual masterpieces on each plate.
“Do it because it’s worth doing even if you can’t quite make it as perfect as your original fantasy,” said Jack Jia, who grew up “with nothing but a head full of dreams” in Chengdu in China’s Sichuan Province. Today, he’s a serial entrepreneur, president of the Hua Yuan Science and Technology Association, and founder and CEO of Baynote. “If you refuse to do something you believe in, your mind will never leave you alone. It just will torment you. If it really matters, you might as well get on with it despite the problems that will occur when you take on a new challenge. Any new beginning, anything creative, will get messy in parts,” he said. “If you do it with your eyes wide open, with discipline, it will only get better when you do it more.”
That’s the way it is, Builders told us countless times. “So, get moving and get on with what you really care about doing.”
Without discipline, some overly ambitious folks encounter the opposite problem—all action and no meaning—cautioned Singapore-based entrepreneur and government advisor, Peng Ong. People who find action irresistible for its own sake often discover they’re taking the wrong hill. “You’ve got to get yourself and your team all on the same page about what success will require of you. Think about what matters and the people you are serving first. Then, organize your thoughts and creativity around that to make it happen.” Taking action without stopping first to determine what you hold meaningful is a big reason things don’t last. Builders use a special goal-setting process and even encourage contention to help them achieve those aspirations.
We’ll focus on these and other ActionStyles in Part III, “ActionStyles—Turning Passion Into Action.”
In our journey toward Success Built to Last, we discovered that these three elements—an individually defined Meaning, a creative ThoughtStyle, and an effective ActionStyle—when you have them in alignment, form the foundation on which you build and sustain the experience of success. It seems that you might not need all three aligned to achieve short-term ambitions or success as traditionally defined, but the more that you pull them together, the more likely it is that your success (that must be defined for you by you) will keep going decade after decade.
One way to remember these concepts is to think of these elements as the three primary colors of success built to last. When you overlap the primary colors of red, blue, and green,[4] what do you get? A bright, white light. If there is a “right” target to go after, this is it. Builders don’t seek goals for their own sake; they find something that holds great meaning for them first, so meaning is on top, informing the rest of the model. Builders manage their thoughts in ways that keep them on track and then take relentless action in pursuit of what matters to them (meaning). The great opportunity in life and work is to make that target in the center as big as possible by bringing all three circles together and increasing the degree of overlap.
Primary colors of success built to last
Become consciously aware of what matters to you and then rally your thought and action to support your definition of meaning. That is what we call alignment. As these elements come together to constitute a single target of white light, it gets easier to hit the mark in your life and actually experience success that lasts.
Of course, this is a simple model for a very complex and often challenging process. The greater tendency is for these three circles to drift apart wildly out of sync. Without continuous effort, many forces at work and at home make it difficult to keep the alignment together. In the immortal words of Peter Drucker, “The only things that evolve by themselves (in an organization) are disorder, friction, and malperformance.”[5]
When Jane Bryant Quinn, the money columnist and author of Smart and Simple Financial Strategies for Busy People, was growing up, she dreamed of becoming Nancy Drew, the heroic teen detective in the Carolyn Keene novels. This beloved character had been solving mysteries since the time when women weren’t allowed to do that for a living.
But when Quinn ran across comic strip sleuth Brenda Starr, she traded up on her fantasy. As the glamorous journalist for a daily newspaper, unapologetically called The Flash, “Brenda travels the world solving mysteries, unearthing scoops, and stealing the heart of almost every man she meets.”[6] Brenda was a career woman before the phrase was even acceptable, let alone fashionable—a smart, competitive, ravishing redhead created by Dale (Dahlia) Messick in 1940 when it wasn’t likely for a woman to get a job like that.
“Sounded like the best job in town when I was a teenager,” Quinn told us, “A life of adventure, boys, and making a difference all at once.” So, when she graduated with a liberal arts degree, she showed up at the doorstep of Newsweek.
“It was still legal at that time not to allow a woman to be a reporter,” she said. Undaunted, Quinn worked at the mail desk. Her ambition was to work in journalism. That’s what mattered to her—to have an extraordinary life and bring the truth to people. “I would live into my dream” even if the world wasn’t ready for it yet, she winked.
Quinn made herself more than useful, working behind the scenes on so many stories that she became indispensable to the reporting staff. Eventually, she took advantage of her growing interests in business and finance with a sort of Brenda Starr sense of righteousness about uncovering the dirt, dangers, and rewards of investing—a mission that makes her eyes shine with passion (and sometimes flash with rage) as much today as it did decades ago. That’s success built to last.
If Quinn had given in to believing that the only thing that had meaning was an egoistic need to be Brenda Starr on her first day at Newsweek—and if she thought that was the only way to turn her dream into action—then that would have been a tough target to hit. Such an attitude would have produced a minimal overlap of the three circles and a small bulls-eye. That would have made it terribly easy to miss the mark, become frustrated, and land in another profession. She might have missed her calling.
That’s not to say that you should settle for less. Quinn would argue that she didn’t settle at all. That’s the point. The toughest thing is to get out of your own way, even if life is incredibly unfair. Things seem to work out better for remarkable people when meaning, thought, and action overlap to create an abundant target for their dreams. Quinn realized that Brenda Starr wasn’t a destination; it was a way of life. She went for a bigger long-term prize. Quinn’s dedication to Starr’s sense of purpose rather than a job title got her on the playing field early, where she could build her skills and demonstrate her talent and creativity.
It didn’t bring her popularity in the beginning. A woman advising you about your money didn’t get much support 30 years ago. But Jane Bryant Quinn’s discipline to trust her head and her heart—to stay wide awake and bring them into alignment without relying on external adulation—freed her to develop passions that inevitably made her successful by her own definition. She worried less about being loved than being what she loved, and that meant many things to her: a fighter who would unearth injustice, a bestselling author, a wife, and a mother of five. In all parts of her life, Quinn brought together the domains of meaning, thought, and action and, as a result, she went from great to lasting and helped change the face of financial journalism in America.
Being what we love means doing what matters on and off the job. When Hector de J. Ruiz was busy starting his career and building a life with his wife in the early days, he found himself deeply troubled by the plight of young Hispanics in east Los Angeles. One of the things that greatly mattered to him was the notion that he “always had somebody that was willing to help [him]. That meant a lot to me,” he said. “So [at one point], I finally kind of grew up,” which to Ruiz meant that he would dedicate himself to helping the disadvantaged go to college despite the personal cost (and even when he had not long ago graduated himself).
“I was making very little money,” Ruiz said. But over time, “my wife and I both realized that it seemed like the more of it we did, the easier it got,” he said. “A lot of people in east L.A. feel like the Hispanic community is not capable of being able to perform well in some of the things that are required to be effective today in technology. You do a survey of people in east L.A. and they tell you that they are afraid of mathematics. And so I go and talk to these high school kids about the fact that the people who invented the zero were the Maya Indians in Mexico. The people who had one of the most sophisticated architectures in the world were the Aztecs. All of a sudden, you can see these kids beginning to develop a sense of self-worth, and that’s what these kids are missing,” said Ruiz, who today is CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, with 2005 net sales of $5.8 billion. (He’s really good at math, too.) “To be able to in some way contribute to that [before even his own traditionally defined success was assured] has been incredibly rewarding for both my wife and I.”
When we first started sharing these principles during the development of Success Built to Last, some people feared—and others hoped—we would impose on them celebrity personalities as role models for success, or at the other extreme, we would expect you to become selfless and perfect, whatever that means. That may be a nice aspiration, but this book is not about worshiping the accomplishments of inaccessible, larger-than-life overachievers. That simply doesn’t work. Your enduring success is not about following anybody else’s roadmap, goals, or achievements. It must be constructed on a foundation of very personal choices that only you can make. None of the people you will meet in the coming pages are being offered as folks you ought to imitate. Take them or leave them, our pledge is to share with you some practices that Builders we met had in common and that work for them. What is more important is that we hope to stimulate a probing dialog about your lasting success and creating a life that matters (to you).
In the process, you may discover you are currently tracking some definition of success never explicitly challenged. It would be a shame for this to remain the unconscious default of your life. Until you compare what really matters to you with what may haunt you about the popular notion of success, your existing concept of both could remain the invisible tyrant you unknowingly resent.
If any of this feels uncomfortable at some point, it could be because of an unexplored gap between what deeply matters to you and what you think the world expects of you. When meaning and success sit together side-by-side out there fully illuminated for your consideration, you suddenly are in a stronger position to demand an answer to the question, “Why am I not doing what matters to me right now?”
It’s all too easy to dismiss this line of inquiry. Yet if there was one thing we saw that Builders hold to be true, this would be it: Although many things in life and work are temporary, and nothing seems to last, Builders believe that meaning actually does last—forever. They said that what they do (or do not do) while they are here matters. They feel that it might even matter beyond their lifetime.
Let’s see what else you have in common with people who have success built to last.
[†] The terms “Builders” and “enduringly successful people” are used interchangeably in this book to describe people who define their own success and have achieved lasting impact in their field for at least 20 years.