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Find a horse to ride

Some ambitious, intelligent professionals find themselves trapped in situations where their future looks bleak. So what do they generally do?

They try harder. They try to compensate by long hours of hard work and effort. The secret of success is to keep your nose to the grindstone, do your job better than the next person, and fame and fortune will come your way, right? Wrong. Trying harder is rarely the pathway to success. Trying smarter is the better way.

The truth is, the road to fame and fortune is rarely found within yourself. The only sure way to success is to find yourself a horse to ride. It may be difficult for the ego to accept, but success in life is based more on what others can do for you than on what you can do for yourself.

Kennedy was wrong. Ask not what you can do for your organization. Ask what your organization can do for you. Therefore, if you want to take maximum advantage of the opportunities that your career has to offer, you must keep your eyes open and find yourself a horse to do the job for you.

The first horse to ride is your organization. Where is it going? Or more impolitely, is it going anywhere at all? Too many good people have taken their good prospects and locked them into situations that are doomed to failure. But failure at least gives you a second chance. Even worse is the organization with less than average chances for growth.

No matter how brilliant you are, it never pays to cast your lot with a loser. Even the best officer on the Titanic wound up in the same lifeboat as the worst. And that’s if he was lucky enough to stay out of the water. You can’t do it yourself. If your organization is going nowhere, get yourself a new one. While you can’t always pick an IBM or a Xerox, you ought to be able to do considerably better than average.

And when you change jobs to join one of those tomorrow-type organization, don’t just ask how much they are going to pay you today. Also ask how much they are likely to pay you tomorrow.

The second horse to ride is your boss. Ask yourself the same questions about your boss as you asked yourself about your firm. Is he or she going anywhere? If not, who is? Always try to work for the smartest, brightest, most competent person you can find. If you look at biographies of successful people, it’s amazing to find how many crawled up the ladder of success right behind someone else. From their first assignment in some menial job to their last as president or director of a major organization.

Yet some people actually like to work for incompetents. I suppose they feel that a fresh flower stands out better if it’s surrounded by wilted ones. They forget the tendency of top management to throw the whole bunch out if they become dissatisfied with an operation.

Two types of individuals come in looking for jobs. One is inordinately proud of his or her specialty. He or she will often say, "You people really need me around here. You’re weak in my specialty." The other type says just the opposite. "You’re strong in my specialty. You do a terrific job, and I want to work with the best." Which type is more likely to get the job? Right. The latter person. If your boss is going places, chances are good that you are too.

The third horse to ride is a friend. Many business people have lots of personal friends but no business friends. And while personal friends are awfully nice to have and can sometimes get you a deal on a TV set or braces for the kids, they’re usually not too helpful when it comes to finding a better job. Most of the big breaks that happen in a person’s career happen because a business friend recommended that person.

The more business friends you make outside of your own firm the more likely you are to wind up in a big, rewarding job. It’s not enough just to make friends. You have to take out that friendship horse and exercise it once in a while. If you don’t you won’t be able to ride it when you need it.

When an old business friend you haven’t heard from in 10 years calls you and wants to have lunch, you know two things will happen: (I) you’re going to pay for the lunch, and (2) your friend is looking for a job. When you need a job, it’s usually too late to try that type of tactic.

The way to ride the friendship horse is to keep in touch regularly with all your business friends. Send them tear sheets of articles they may be interested in, clips of publicity items, and congratulatory letters when they get promoted. And don’t assume people always see stories that might have mentioned them. They don’t. And they always appreciate it when someone sends them an item they may have missed.

The fourth horse to ride is an idea. On the night before he died, Victor Hugo wrote in his diary, "Nothing, not all the armies of the world, can stop an idea whose time has come." Everyone knows that an idea can take you to the top faster than anything else. But people sometimes expect too much of an idea. They want one that is not only great, but one that everyone else thinks is great too.

There are no such ideas. If you wait until an idea is ready to be accepted, it’s too late. Someone else will have preempted it. Or in the in-out vocabulary of a few years ago: Anything definitely in is already on its way out. To ride the "idea" horse, you must be willing to expose yourself to ridicule and controversy. You must be willing to go against the tide.

You can’t be first with a new idea or concept unless you are willing to stick your neck out. And take a lot of abuse. And bide your time until your time comes. Never be afraid of conflict. An idea or concept without an element of conflict is not an idea at all. It’s motherhood, apple pie, and the flag, revisited.

The fifth horse to ride is faith. Faith in others and their ideas. The importance of getting outside of yourself, of finding your fortune on the outside, is illustrated by the story of a man who was a failure most of his life. His name was Ray Kroc, and he was a lot older than most people and a failure to boot when he met two brothers who changed his life. For the brothers had an idea, but no faith. So they sold their idea as well as their name to Ray Kroc for relatively few dollars.

Ray Kroc became one of the richest people in America. Worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The brothers? They were the McDonald brothers, and every time you eat one of their hamburgers, remember it was the vision, courage, and persistence of the outsider who made the McDonald’s chain a success. Not two guys named McDonald.

There is one other horse. An animal that is mean, difficult, and unpredictable. Yet people often try to ride it. With very little success. That horse is yourself, the sixth horse. It is possible to succeed in business or in life all by yourself. But it’s not easy.

Like life itself, business is a social activity. As much cooperation as competition. Take selling, for example, You don’t make a sale all by yourself. Somebody also has to buy what you’re selling. So remember, the "winningest" jockeys are not necessarily the lightest, the smartest, or the strongest. The best jockey doesn’t win the race. The jockey that wins the race is usually the one with the best horse.

So pick yourself a horse to ride and then ride it for all it’s worth.

 For the four keys to career success, send an email to bs@futurevisions.org
    with "MWS Career Success" in the subject and nothing in the body