It’s tempting to simplify things. The game is rigged. Some people have all the advantages, and they succeed. Some people have all the disadvantages, and they fail.
It is also, however, terribly misleading.
Your success is far more dependent on your behavior now than it is based upon where you grew up, where you went to school, or whether your path so far has been easy or difficult.
Opportunity lies ahead; it is a matter of whether or not you choose to pursue it.
John Peterman had an idea to create a unique retail catalog and transform himself into J. Peterman.
Thirty-five investors in a row told him it was losing proposition. The thirty-sixth invested one million dollars.
His sales philosophy is based on awakening the imagination, because “your imagination is far more powerful than anything I could show you or tell you.”
How did Peterman keep going in the face of so many rejections? “You fail a lot in life. Success is just overcoming failures.” He compares the process of moving on after a failure to playing baseball. “If you think about your error, you’ll make another error. Making mistakes is just a learning process.”
Peterman’s start down the road to success began with a childhood lived in modest circumstances. “By today’s standards we were poor, but I didn’t realize it.” Instead he focused on what he did have: “I had ample opportunity to have nothing to do but cultivate a vivid imagination.”
The current pattern of behavior employees engage in (both inside and outside the office) is six times more likely to predict job performance than is their background and job history.
Arrison 1998