Prologue

Throughout history, people have debated about why some achieve much greater success than others. These are the four most widely believed theories:

• Hard work, perseverance, risk taking, and superior individual habits are the essentials for great success.
• Everyone is capable of great success. You just have to find a way to get beyond your fears to discover and liberate the creativity within you.
• Big breaks come from being in the right place, with the right people, at the right time.
• Heredity and early environment form the basis for future success.

The Truth and Limits of Success Theories

There is truth in each of these theories of why people succeed. But the last two suggest that there is a “life lottery” determining your chances of success. The life lottery idea is comforting for those who have accomplished little. It’s hopeful for those who believe in luck. It’s disheartening for those who believe they were not given a great start in life. It’s a good excuse for doing little to prepare for success. And it does not inspire us to greatness.

The most successful people do not live their lives as if they believed in a life lottery. They believe that you can create your own future. And because they believe this, they search for and discover a path that can lead to great success.

The first two theories acknowledge that the individual has some control over his or her success, but they fall short of explaining the achievements of most of the highly successful people who were studied in researching this book.

Consider Leonardo da Vinci. The historian Vasari called him superhuman. Leonardo da Vinci was an illegitimate child of a notary and a peasant girl, and thus by tradition he could only enter a working-class trade. Drafting, art, and science were considered working-class trades at that time, so when he showed some early signs of liking to draw, he was encouraged by his father. In 1466, at the age of 14 years, he was apprenticed as a studio boy in an art bottega owned by Andrea del Verrocchio, a leading painter and sculptor. From this humble beginning, he went on to produce theMona Lisa, The Last Supper, a vast treasure of engineering drawings of his inventions, and extensive writings full of powerful insights.

There are people who say that Bill Gates benefited from the third theory—that he was in the right place at the right time. But they don’t know the whole story. His lucky break supposedly came 25 years ago when his friend Paul Allen walked by a newsstand in Harvard Square. A photo on the front cover of a magazine caught Allen’s eye. The headline above the picture said, “Breakthrough—World’s First Minicomputer.” Allen grabbed a copy and ran across campus to tell Gates that the revolution had started without them. The next morning, Gates and Allen called Altair, the company that built the tiny computer, and claimed that they had a software program that would run on it. Then, in a two-week burst of creativity, they wrote a software program that actually did what they had claimed.

Many leaders of major computer companies also saw that article and dismissed the tiny computer as a plaything. But Gates and Allen saw the potential. They knew they had the software expertise and that, if they moved fast, they could seize the opportunity. The company they built, Microsoft, today is the largest personal computer software company in the world, and both men have earned vast fortunes. So why didn’t other software experts and leaders of large computer companies see the opportunity? Weren’t they also in the right place at the right time with the right people?

Strategic Keys to Success

We believe that none of the most popular theories adequately explains the success of da Vinci and Gates. Instead, their success came from following the same path to greatness as followed by Winston Churchill, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Galileo Galilei, Abraham Lincoln, Fred Smith, Sam Walton, Oprah Winfrey, and Frank Lloyd Wright, to name a few. In this book, these and others are called the “great achievers.”

In more than 20 years of research, we have discovered that all these great achievers have followed a path guided by 10 powerful strategic keys to the overall strategy of pursuing opportunities, mobilizing support, and seizing opportunities. These keys— rather than heredity, traits, intelligence, environment, or work habits—have made the great achievers more successful than others. In recent years, we have been helping individuals and organizations to grow and prosper using the keys. We have shown how anyone, at any age, can use them to succeed.

These 10 strategic keys to success are needed today more than ever. For example, in the past 10 years, Asia’s industrial might and innovative capabilities have risen rapidly. Asian firms can produce a lower-cost version of most products and a lower-cost alternative to many services, and they can do high-quality research and software development at a fraction of the cost of the same work done in the United States, Canada, and Europe. In the competitive global economy, the ability to realize the highest potential achievement has become a critical competence for the survival for both individuals and organizations. The 10 keys can bring greatness to your own life and help you lead others to greatness.