For many people, success is a lifelong pursuit. It may mean a satisfying career, a fulfilling relationship, or the attainment of wealth. While there is no one answer, a growing body of research suggests that some common characteristics can help people find and sustain success.
This week’s success news takes a look at those qualities and what it means to be successful.
The self-made billionaire Sara Blakely recently told GOBankingRates that she defines success as “being willing to try and fail.” As the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire, Blakely is uniquely qualified to talk about this subject. She’s seen firsthand that success requires the willingness to try and fail—and then try again.
In a new study, researchers set out to figure out what distinguishes people who are able to succeed from those who can’t. They began by assuming that success must be the result of either learning or luck. If it’s the former, then those who improve over time will win more often than those who don’t. But if success is a matter of chance, then everyone would be equally likely to win on the hundredth attempt—since past results wouldn’t much influence future ones.
The team then tested whether people who learned from their previous failures were more likely to have success on the next attempt—and they were. The team found that people who were able to learn from their mistakes—for example, continuing to work on the parts of an invention that weren’t working instead of throwing them away—were more likely to have success on the next attempt than those who didn’t. Moreover, those who were able to learn from their failures and persevere were also more likely to achieve sustained success. The study, which was published in Nature, also reveals that the ability to recognize which parts of a failed idea to keep and which to scrap was another crucial element of success. This helps explain why a successful business person like Henry Ford or Thomas Edison was able to come up with new ideas that led to their subsequent successes.