We gathered once a week for Professor Brian Lang’s seminar. The topic was a little hard to define, but the purpose was to prepare us for the required year-long senior research papers we would begin working on during the following semester.
All of us were writing papers on topics in our own majors, and among the twenty students in the course nineteen different majors were represented. One student was studying the civil rights record of the Johnson Administration, another the effects of lengthening the schoolday for elementary students, another the question of whether a computer could be taught to write a song.
Although the course was meant to help us pursue our chosen interest, it wasn’t about any one of them in particular. We were given no new information about Lyndon Johnson, no lectures on the attention span of seven-year-olds.
Instead, the course was about the process of undertaking a journey. While each of us was heading off in a different direction, Professor Lang hoped we would all reach the same destination.
The course explored themes of persistence and commitment and the unexpected discoveries that might be made along the way. “No outcome, no discovery, is really an accident; it is the product of the effort invested in the process,” Professor Lang would say.
We continued to meet while we were researching and writing our projects. During class, the professor would ask each of us about our progress, what had excited or interested us, and what roadblocks we’d encountered. Nearly all of us would recount with excitement the latest new idea we’d been struck by or the indispensable book we’d just read.
One student would usually hem and haw and try to avoid making any kind of progress report. Eventually Professor Lang insisted he give us a full update, and he instead admitted he really hadn’t been able to work consistently on the project. The professor’s face was full of disappointment.
The student defiantly offered, “But you don’t understand! I’ve got work coming out of my rear end.”
“Have you had a doctor look at that?” Professor Lang asked.
The rest of us had been caught up in the tension of the moment and were then overwhelmed with laughter. But it was no laughing matter to Professor Lang, for he had no tolerance for not trying.
“Knowledge isn’t going to track you down and force itself upon you,” he had told us more than once.
For him, these research projects were a chance not only to learn intensely about the subject we had chosen, but also to learn about ourselves—to commit ourselves to a considerable task and to deal with the good and the bad, the discoveries and the setbacks. Professor Lang didn’t really care if we could prove a computer could write a song or that twenty minutes tacked onto a schoolday would make kids better at fractions, but he cared passionately that we give our projects everything we were capable of, because if we could do that now, we could do it for the rest of our lives. And if we did so, we would succeed.
After the class stopped laughing at the doctor joke, Brian Lang turned reflective. He said, both to the slacking student and the rest of us, “What can any person do in the face of all the world’s challenges? He or she can try.”
As I conducted the research for this book, combing through thousands of studies on successful people, I thought often about Professor Lang’s course. Just as Professor Lang saw common elements necessary to creating a good research project, no matter what the topic, scientists have uncovered a set of practices, principles, and beliefs that are necessary for success, no matter what your goals in life are.
The 100 Simple Secrets of Successful People presents the conclusions of scientists who have studied success in all walks of life. Each entry presents the core scientific finding, a real-world example of the principle, and the basic advice you should follow to increase your chances of success in your life.