Evolve or Die

by Thomas C Triumph

  If you can’t explain in 50 words or less why the company you are working for is the best place in the world for you to be working, you might not be working in the right place.

  Unless you are oriented horizontally (how the way you work compares with how everyone else does the same thing), vertically (how the way you work fits in with those above and below you in the company hierarchy), and in time (you have a clear idea of where you have come from and where you are heading in your work life), you are going to drift.

  Always connect with as many people as you can in your industry—the best will teach you a lot, the worst will teach you more.

  Always connect with as many people as you can outside your industry. Speaking with them about what they do and perceive, and explaining what you do and perceive, will teach you more about what you really do than years of discussions with your colleagues.

  Your only competition is yourself.

  If you find work that you like enough to do for a long time, there’s a chance that you will last long enough to become good at it.

  There are two excellent tests of whether you are doing the right work: how you feel on Monday morning and how you feel at the end of the work day.

  Thirteen People Who Turned Failure into Success

  Maybe the secret to success is to eat dog food. I never thought about eating dog food, but I know someone who did. It was what was necessary to keep his dream alive. You know who he is too.

  There have been a couple of times in my life when I had barely any money. During one such time, a friend surprised me and loaded my refrigerator and pantry with groceries. That’s something you’ll never forget and is guaranteed to make you want to pay it forward by doing it for someone else.

  A young person typically has two imagined scenarios about people who are hugely successful. One scenario is that wildly successful people became successful because they’re “just awesome.” Meaning they were mostly born with a profound and immediately apparent capability, and the world beat a path to their door. The other imagined scenario is that successful people reached greatness because they got extremely lucky, like drawing the winning lottery ticket. Note that neither of the scenarios involves eating dog food.

  Maybe, occasionally those scenarios are accurate. But, so far, I haven’t been able to find someone extremely accomplished who got there via those paths. If you know of anyone—please let me know. To the contrary, everybody I know who changed the world did so despite a long list of failures and challenges. In fact, it seems everybody’s road to success was actually a rocky trail with countless switchbacks and plenty of rockslides.

  Here’s a typical story. A guy takes his university entrance exam three times before getting in. Then when he starts looking for work, he applies to 30 different jobs and is rejected by all of them. One of the jobs is to work at Kentucky Fried Chicken, which by the way had 24 applicants, and KFC hired 23 of them … but not him. Finally he gets a job teaching English at a university in China for $12 a month. He says he applied to Harvard 10 times, always being rejected. “Nobody said that I would be a very capable person that would do something significant or meaningful in the future,” he said. That’s the short story of Jack Ma, who in 1999 founded Alibaba and is the richest man in China, worth an estimated $42 billion in 2018.

  That brings me back to the dog food.

  One of Walt Disney’s early jobs was at the Kansas City Star, a newspaper from which he was fired because of lack of creativity. Some years later, in 1921, he started an animation company called Laugh-O-Gram Studio, but eventually Disney had to shut the company down. It was during this period, that he could barely pay the rent and resorted to eating dog food. And then, things went downhill from there. In 1926, Disney created a cartoon character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. He visited Universal Studios, the cartoon’s distributor, where he later found out that Universal secretly patented the character, hired Disney’s artists directly, and continued the cartoon without paying him.

  The world didn’t beat a path to the recognizable talent of Jack Ma or Walt Disney, nor did anyone hand them a ticket to success. There are thousands of examples of people repeatedly failing before they succeeded. Here are twelve examples.

  Akio Morita

  His first company was called Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation, which came out with a rice cooker that burnt rice and ended up selling poorly. Rather than making knock-off products like many other Japanese companies, Morita wanted to develop quality innovative companies. He focused on a pocketsize radio. The best he could develop was just a bit too large for a typical pocket; he had his salesmen wear shirts with oversized pockets so the radio would fit. Morita foresaw the importance of branding and changed the name of his company to Sony.

  Elon Musk

  Musk poured his $200 million payout from PayPal into his next two companies—SpaceX and Tesla Motors. At one point, while teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, Musk debated if he should get rid of one of his companies so the other would succeed. He stuck with both, and the companies slowly made progress (through continual uphill battles). Musk and his team have accomplished the seemingly impossible, as both companies are revolutionizing their respective industries.

  Thomas Edison

  His grade school teachers said he was “too stupid to learn anything.” Yet he helped develop many inventions that ushered in the modern age, including the motion picture camera, the phonograph, and a practical light bulb. Edison was also an extraordinary businessman who was an early advocate of mass production and teamwork of innovation, with over 1,000 US patents.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Lincoln had his share of setbacks, including failing in business and failing to get into law school. He suffered from depression, was defeated for nomination to Congress, and was defeated for nomination for vice president. He kept moving forward and was elected president in 1860.

  Theodor Seuss Geisel

  Dr. Seuss’ first book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was rejected by 27 publishers. According to Geisel, he was walking home and thinking of burning the manuscript, when he ran into an old friend and classmate who helped him find a publisher. Dr. Seuss went on to sell more than 600 million books, translated into more than 20 languages.

  Stephen King

  His first book, Carrie, was rejected 30 times, so King threw it in the trash. His wife rescued the manuscript and told him to keep submitting. King has since published over 64 books (as of 2018), all worldwide bestsellers, having sold more than 350 million copies.

  J. K. Rowling

  At one point, a single mom without a job, Rowling was living off unemployment benefits, had an unfinished book, and two mouths to feed. She was rejected by 12 different publishers and began to lose confidence in her book. Finally, Barry Cunningham, of Bloomsbury Publishing, agreed to publish the book (in part because his eight-year-old daughter liked the first chapter), though Rowling was admonished to get a day job because she wouldn’t make any money writing children’s books. She said, “Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”

  Elvis Presley

  “The King” hardly needs an introduction. Yet when Presley tried out as a vocalist for the Eddie Bond band, Bond rejected him with the advice to stick to driving “because you’re never going to make it as a singer.” Similarly, Presley was told by Jim Denny, manager of the Grand Ole Opry, “You ain’t going nowhere, son. You ought to go back to driving a truck.”

  Oprah Winfrey

  Born in an economically troubled neighborhood and raised by a single, teenage mom, Oprah experienced considerable hardship, including being physically abused as a teenager. Winfrey became a successful media proprietor, talk show host, actress, and philanthropist.

  Orville and Wilbur Wright

  After several years of building kites and gliders (and numerous crashes), the brothers changed the world on December 17, 1903, when they broke the bounds of gravity and flew a heavier-than-air machine. And this wa
s achieved by two men with no formal engineering training. The two brothers were originally inspired by a toy helicopter that their father brought home and flew around the room. Orville took his father on what was his dad’s one and only flight. As Orville gained elevation, his dad enthusiastically yelled out, “Higher, Orville, higher!”

  When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon on July 20, 1969, inside his spacesuit was a piece of fabric from the wing of the original Wright Flyer.

  Soichiro Honda

  Honda started a machine shop in 1937 to produce piston rings for Toyota, where he labored long hours and even slept in the workshop. To keep things going, he pawned his wife’s jewelry. Unfortunately, his product failed to meet Toyota’s quality inspection standards and was rejected. Rather than give up, he went back to school and kept working until winning a contract with Toyota two years later.

  As steel was not readily available during the war, he collected surplus gasoline cans discarded by US fighters, calling them “gifts from President Truman,” which he used as raw materials for manufacturing. Honda endured his factory being devastated by a bomb and then later being destroyed by an earthquake.

  The gasoline shortage after the war resulted in people walking or riding bicycles, so Honda started modifying bicycles by attaching small engines. Honda Motor Company’s revenue was $138 billion in 2018.

  Henry Ford

  The first automobile Ford designed was the Quadricycle, which wasn’t fit for mass production. Then Ford founded the Detroit Automotive Company, which failed because Ford’s perfectionism got the better of him, and he couldn’t stop tinkering. Ford had little to show for his work 18 months into the effort, and the company was disbanded.

  Ford eventually started the Ford Motor Company and built the Model A. The first cars had so many problems that Ford had to send mechanics throughout the country to fix them. The good news was that the mechanics came back with ideas to improve the cars, and that knowledge went into correcting the future builds. Ford learned that “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”

  Counterintuitive Secrets to Grow Your Career

  My dad used to call me “Donkey Number One” when I was a kid. I know that might sound kind of mean, but that really wasn’t his intent. I was the oldest, and it was just his way of being funny and probably trying to curtail my overzealous imagination. Like sitting in a small closet pretending I was in a rocket ship, or trying to build a real robot when I was seven or eight. (It was made out of wood boxes so heavy that its legs wouldn’t support its own weight. I must have thought it would “walk” by magic … because there were no motors.) So yea, maybe that was kind of “donkey-like.”

  Don’t get the wrong impression; my dad has always been a great guy. Everybody loves him, and I do too. He was the best man at my wedding. Besides, if I occasionally exhibited donkey behavior, well, I’m not alone. There have certainly been a lot of people who seem to do things that don’t make sense. Maybe occasionally you’ve done some seemingly irrational things too. Maybe it’s not always bad.

  Everybody likes to study what looks like winning behaviors. But for every right, there’s a left, and you can surely learn a lot from those people who take a counterintuitive approach. It’s the people who go against the grain that were celebrated in the Apple “Here’s to the crazy ones” campaign. Who knows what percentage of time people go against the prevailing wisdom and use a counterintuitive approach? But, you can be sure that sometimes, they … are … right.

  It’s what inspired American poet Robert Frost when he wrote “The Road Not Taken,” where he considered two possible paths, one worn and the other nearly untrodden. Frost must have known something, as he was awarded four Pulitzer Prizes.

  Here’s an example of someone who did a lot of seemingly counterintuitive things. Let’s protect his identity at least until you guess who it is. Let’s call him Mr. X.

  Lots of people lose money investing and starting companies. But Mr. X did it in a big way. He poured a lot of money, including his own, by investing and starting companies that were outside the norm of what were generally accepted viable business ideas, and he did this with three atypical companies at the same time. The businesses were so outside the norm of what everyone else was doing that experts in those industries often mocked his plans (maybe they secretly thought he was a donkey).

  So, it wasn’t a big surprise to the naysayers when countless delays and continued expenses sped the companies toward bankruptcy. Still, he kept pouring his money into them until it was gone. So, after one counterintuitive decision after another, he’d gone through his fortune, and even had to sell his car. About this time, his wife divorced him. He was repeatedly thrashed in the media.

  So, there were lots of counterintuitive things that he did, including his take on the criticism. He was quoted as saying, “Always seek negative feedback, even though it can be mentally painful. They won’t always be right, but I find the single biggest error people make is to ignore constructive, negative feedback.”38 Seeking negative feedback is certainly contrary to how most people feel.

  In addition to (1) accepting criticism, here are other counterintuitive things I’ve observed that can actually be good practices.

  Put yourself on the line.

  Basically, almost nobody wants to be the one stuck with the big problem—because when it goes wrong, they don’t want to be anywhere near it. On October 2, 1945, a friend of President Harry Truman made and mailed him the sign that remained on his desk that said, “The BUCK STOPS here!” More than seventy years later, and it’s still memorable because it’s counterintuitive.

  Intrinsic motivators are more important than extrinsic motivators.

  You might think what drives people is money or power, but studies conclusively show that the opportunity to collaborate, contribute, and make a difference are much bigger motivations.

  It’s OK to be wrong.

  It’s been drilled into us our entire lives that the right answer gets the points on the tests or in the corporate world. But the hard reality is that if you’re generally right all the time, you’re generally not reaching far enough.

  It’s OK to not know the answer.

  Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said, “It’s okay not to know all the answers. It’s better to admit our ignorance, than to believe answers that might be wrong. Pretending to know everything, closes the door to finding out what’s really there.”

  It’s OK to be different.

  Think about it: basically everyone who has accomplished a remarkable achievement is different. This isn’t just about the mad genius artists, brilliant scientists, or revolutionary industrialists. The quiet, single parent who manages to successfully raise his or her children into productive, giving, and loving adults is also remarkable.

  My dad likes to tell the story (ahem, repeatedly) about how a nun from my school called him in for a “private meeting” one day, where he was asked by the sister about the “evident trouble at home.” He had no idea what she was talking about, but the nun explained she could tell something was awry, as my little brother (probably in first grade at the time) had used red and purple to color the trees and skies in his coloring book. My parents moved us to a public school the following year.

  Forty some years later, my brother had a cabin in rural Alaska and painted it tangerine orange with red stripes. It looked cool as hell. Even the pilots flying overhead loved it. It was probably a message to Sister Thaddeus.

  Listen more (talk less).

  It’s hard to learn something new when you’re talking. William Ury is the cofounder of Harvard’s Program on Negotiation, author of seven books, and has consulted for dozens of Fortune 500 companies, and the White House. He’s served as an advisor or mediator to corporate mergers, wildcat coalmine strikes, and countries struggling with ethnic wars. In an excellent TED Talk, Ury explains when you listen to someone, they’re more likely to listen to you.39

  Remain a beginner/s
tudent.

  There’s a great Zen quote, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.” Maybe that’s the simple reason so many amazing leaps are made by young minds—they didn’t know it couldn’t be done.

  Unplug.

  Get away from the constant interruptions resulting from being online. Turn off the external interruptions. Tune in on your thinking.

  Go with your gut.

  In an era when the business world is abuzz with metrics, data mining, analytics, etc., etc., sometimes you still have to simply trust your gut. “There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.”

  —Malcolm Gladwell

  Sometimes bozos succeed.

  I’ve seen it. You’ve seen it.

  Life is not fair.

  I’ve seen it. You’ve seen it.

  Be real.

  Often the tendency is to want to not look the fool. To look cool. To fake it ’til you make it. But remember that those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.

  So, back to our example extraordinaire of counterintuitive things—Mr. X. He persisted through the most difficult times, teetering for a time on financial ruin. Slowly, his companies started to gain traction and in 2018 Mr. X (Elon Musk) is CEO of SpaceX; CEO of Tesla, Inc.; CEO of Neuralink; founder of The Boring Company; and chairman of SolarCity. These companies are revolutionizing their respective industries.

  “Two roads diverged … I took the one less traveled by,

  And that has made all the difference.

  —Robert Frost

  Career Advice from the World’s Most Famous Robots

  There’s a lot of uncertainty about the future of American jobs. And it’s understandable. The highly respected research firm Gartner published a report stating that 30 percent of the current jobs will be eliminated by 2025. And for those of us thinking that applies to jobs like tollbooth attendants, Gartner made a point of noting, “white collar jobs are certainly not immune.”