The mix of success

05 April 2005

Vijay Sarup highlights the mix of factors that contribute to success.

As I head towards the end of my career — I am two years away from retirement age — I was reflecting on this feeling of not having exploited my full potential in my career and that I could have been more 'successful'.

I then scanned my career and that of several colleagues at work, especially the 'successful' ones to see why I had 'not made it'. In my case, if I was to identify the one single factor which was absent for my success it was ambition or rather the lack of it. It was only a couple of years ago that it dawned on me that ambition is not some thing negative. Most of my life, the word ambition instinctively provoked in me negative reactions. I evaluated people as: "Oh he is too ambitious".

Looking further I discovered the next important factor, for me was energy. All the successful people I know had tremendous energy — I am referring here basically to physical energy. I could never achieve that consistent energy level, though I did exhibit spurts of energy but most of the successful guys were energetic all the time.

The next thing that came to mind was values. I do believe that values are extremely critical for success. However, I feel that my "value balance" was a little skewed — I tended to emphasise values a little too much and that clouded my judgment. I went a little overboard in the sense that I made values universal rather than personal. I expected the world to come up to my value system and I defended those values a little too aggressively — often irrationally and unfairly.