The great successes of our time are just extraordinary people on whom fate smiled, aren’t they?
No, in reality, they’re not. Successful people get where they are by following a strategic plan. They learn what it takes to get ahead.
We understand that to build a house it takes a plan, a blueprint, but we sometimes forget that to build a successful life, it also takes a blueprint.
Chef Walter Potenza owns three thriving Italian restaurants in Rhode Island.
He studied and trained to be a chef, but he sees now that his abilities are the product of a lifetime education. When he opened his first restaurant, “All of a sudden my schooling, the knowledge and the history of my family, the respect and ethics of my father came into play. It made me an academic, a person who explored the food business.”
And the learning never stops. “One of the secrets is, it’s a business where you constantly need to stay on top. Chefs are not born.” Walter explains that the process continues for him every day: “I’m an obsessive reader. Every time you read a book, you get ideas. Then you introduce your ideas into your workplace. You make more work for yourself, but you make that work better.”
And success in the cooking business is something he has a clear definition of: “The success that I would like to have is to be remembered as a man who was innovative, who believed in authenticity and the culture of Italian cuisine in America. Food is the link to the past and to family. Success to me is not how much money you make. But if at the end of the day I was able to make fifteen or twenty customers happy, I’m a happy man.”
Case study research on business executives reveals that 98 percent see their position as the result of plans and strategy and that more than half credit their use of a successful person as an example to help define that plan.
Gordon 1998