King Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel; President Jonathan and Who?

The subsidy debate has engulfed Nigeria, albeit the entire known world and I’d like to add, even the heavenly host who by now most certainly would have been bombarded by innumerable petitions and supplications from citizens of the most populous black nation on earth. This existential crisis has knocked tenderly at the door of Nigerians for more than a few months and was eventually formed and happily delivered on none other than the first day of 2012 (recall that 2012 is the year the world ends according to the Mayan calendar, so we can expect 2012 to be action packed from start to finish). The nature of that action will depend on us.

Before I digress, let’s dive into the chronicles of King Nebuchadnezzar. Who was King Nebuchadnezzar you might ask? He was one of the few kings known to have practically conquered the entire world. Daniel, a great Prophet of God went even as far as to describe him as king of kings. This king was specially chosen by God to execute judgment upon a stubborn nation that had consistently ignored divine instructions. As you might have figured, that stubborn nation was His first born son – Israel.

This king ransacked God’s own nation and carried off everything and everyone worth confiscating as slaves to his own country. He chose the finest of their princes and deployed them as strategic human capital to stabilize and expand his kingdom to the far ends of the earth. To make matters worse, God defied all protocol and declared this pagan king as His own very servant sent to accomplish divine mandate.

The Story of Success - Its beginning...and then conclusion.

Malcolm Gladwell's latest book offers great insight into the dynamics, subtleties and undercurrents that influence and somewhat induce exceptional achievements amongst humans.
Using historical data, and referencing a diverse range of vignettes and experiences over centuries, he carefully carves out a "cause and effect" correlation between a host of environmental, cultural, psycological and physical factors, and the corresponding 'output'.

In a few words, successful people don't get successful by accident! There's often a long chain of causatives and other events that may have been set in motion long before we came on board this plane called earth. While pondering over the possibility that my position in life today may have been conditioned (to a significant degree) by events that lie outside of my domain of influence and control, i began to realise that there's so much to be grateful for. (Where would i be today if i had been born in war torn societies like somalia, somewhere around the mid nineties?) I'd rather not imagine!

Days later, i read through Daniel Goleman's blog (As is my custom) in search of new updates on the social/emotional intelligence theme, and i hit a jackpot! He had just written a review on "Outliers - The Story of Success" and there it was. The missing piece of the puzzle in Gladwell's best seller.


Here's the rest of the "Story of Success"

by Daniel Goleman -

In his fascinating new book Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell makes a strong case that people owe their success to a lot more than IQ. He reviews data and offers convincing cases to show that above an IQ in the neighborhood of 110-115, IQ fails as a predictor of success in a career. In other words, you need to be smart enough to handle the cognitive complexity of the information you need for a given role or job, be it engineering, law, medicine, or business. That’s the IQ around 115. But after reaching that threshold of “smart enough,” your intellect makes little difference.

That explains why, when Harvard’s Howard Gardner reviewed longitudinal data that follows people from their early years into their career, he concluded that IQ alone predicts just 6 to 10 percent of career success. That leaves lots of room for other factors, like luck and circumstance. Gladwell makes the case for these very factors, arguing that one’s cultural and family background offer habits and outlooks that, given fortunate historical circumstances, can make some people highly successful.
But there’s more to the story.
Gladwell illustrates the case for circumstance and luck with fascinating tidbits about success, like the fact that Bill Gates and Bill Joy, two titans of the computing industry, just happened to be lucky in getting access to some of the earliest computers around in a day when almost no one had even seen one – and then were able to practice thousands of hours writing computer code starting in their teen years, and so get a jump on the fledgling software industry.

Or the fact that an entire generation of Jewish immigrants around the turn of the century was able to bring business and craftsmen’s skills they had mastered in Europe into entrepreneurial success in America. Their industrious and enterprising habits then became a model that benefited their children, some of who were to become lawyers. Those who happened to be born around 1930 and had easy access to good schooling because their generation had relatively few children; on entering a career in law, many were turned down by the most prestigious law firms of their day, but then went on to become enormously successful because they were the first to get involved in litigation for corporate takeovers – a business those other, more haughty law firms disdained.

There’s little doubt that the mix of such lucky circumstance and personal backgrounds matter for success. But there’s more to the story. A maxim of social science tells us that in some respects, every person is like every other person, like some other people, and like no other person. Gladwell has unpacked the middle range of factors, the ways certain groups or cohorts experience unique circumstances that can, with a bit of circumstantial luck, make them hugely successful.

But here’s where the rest of the story starts. Gladwell says nothing about individual differences within those groups or cohorts – why only some in that fortunate group go on to great success. He does not raise the next set of questions like: Why didn’t all the members of the school club that gave the young Bill Gates that early access to a computer become billionaires like him? Or why didn’t all the Jewish lawyers born in 1930 become huge successes like the handful of cases Gladwell focuses on?

Here a good part of the answer no doubt can be found in which individuals among those groups has a higher level of competencies like adaptability and initiative, the drive to continually improve performance, and empathy skills like sensing how another person thinks or feels. Such abilities give a person the drive to achieve, the initiative and the interpersonal effectiveness that success in a field like software (drive and initiative) and law (add in interpersonal effectiveness) require.

A massive amount of data collected by companies on their own people suggests that such personal abilities are the secret ingredient in success over and above those Gladwell describes so ably. The data I’m referring to derives from “competence modeling,” in which companies systematically analyze the abilities found in their stars (those in the top ten percent of performance by whatever metric makes sense for that specific job or role) but not found in counterparts who are mediocre. A goodly amount of these abilities – like initiative, the drive to achieve, and empathy — are in the emotional intelligence domain. Competence studies show that the higher a person goes up the organizational ladder, the more prominent the role these personal abilities play in performance. In other words, the more successful someone is, the greater the contribution of this skill set to his or her triumph.

This is good news for anyone who would like to see success in life shared widely, rather than given to a lucky few who happen to be born into a fortunate, charmed set of circumstances. One way to give every child a greater chance for career success – and a good life in general – would be to have curricula in social and emotional learning (see http://www.casel.org/) a standard part of schooling. Data shows that children who are systematically taught social and emotional skills like how to manage their distressing emotions better, empathize and collaborate do better: have fewer problems like substance abuse and violence, like school more and pay more attention in class – and score significantly better (11%, on average) on academic achievement test scores.

The best news: the benefits are greatest in those schools where children need this boost the most, like those from the poorest families. That’s the rest of the story of success. END

Need i say more!? Thats the end of the story.

Will-Power - How much can we achieve?

Here is an excerpt from Daniel Goleman, The EQ (Emotional Intelligence) master on the subject of will-power. He provides us with some insight into why we seem to perform better at the things we do first, and then experience a dip as we attempt other things.

Daniel Goleman – …….A slew of studies suggest that we each have a fixed neural reservoir of will power, and that if we use it on one thing, we have less for others. Tasks that demand some self-control make it harder for us to do the next thing that takes will power. In a typical experiment on this effect, people who first had to circle every ‘e’ in a long passage gave up sooner when they then had to watch a video of a fixed, boring, scene. The same loss of persistence has been found when people resist tempting foods, suppress emotional reactions, even make the effort to try to impress someone.

This all suggests we have a fixed will power budget, one we should be careful in spending. Some neuroscientists suspect that self-control consumes blood sugar, which takes a while to build up again, and so the depletion effect.
But the good news is that we can grow our will power; like a muscle, over time the more we use it, the more it gradually increases. But doing this takes, of all things, will power.

As the muscle of will grows, the larger our reservoir of self-discipline becomes. So people who are able to stick to a diet or exercise program for a few months, or who complete money-management classes, also reduce their impulse buying, how much junk food they eat and alcohol they drink. They watch less TV and do more housework. And this ability to delay grasping at gratification, much data shows, predicts greater career success.

(complete article at http://www.danielgoleman.info/blog/2008/04/20/build-your-will-power/)

This article basically strengthens the proposition that though we have the ability to accomplish anything we set our hearts and minds to achieve, we obviously cannot do everything!The balancing act is in determining which specific (well defined and relatively few per time) activities we would apportion our time, will power and resources to.
Many do have the belief that they can overcome every single weakness and in-competencies that they have, but that in my opinion is some unrealistic goal.What’s critical is finding out or discovering (and not choosing) our areas of natural strength. We must then learn to polish and exploit these inherent abilities for maximum profit.

For illustration purposes, a 4 x 4 could never outperform a McLaren or Ferrari on a smooth race track, no matter how hard it tries. Reverse the equation by changing the circuit to rough sandy terrain. The speed-masters would hardly move. By their very nature and inherent design, each machine already has competitive advantage as a function of the environment and frame of reference.
Indeed, we do have will power and as much as we could develop it through constant use, we still do have limitations. Paradoxically, those limitations are to our advantage.

A research carried out on different sets of kids exposed to confined and unfenced playgrounds showed startling results. The kids in the well demarcated playground were adventurous and moved about freely through all nooks and crannies of the playground.The other kids (in the vast open playground) were less adventurous, stayed put in a small place, and exhibited less creative tendencies.

I believe the learning point is that we’ve all got limited but sufficient measures of will power to achieve what we are specifically (and strategically) designed (and perhaps destined) to achieve.