Michael J. Berland - What Makes You Tick?: How Successful People Do It--and What You Can Learn from Them

B ooks about success typically have one thing in common: They almost always promise that there are simple steps you can take that will all but guarantee youll get to your destination. They are all basically selling the same idea, that achieving success is about following a prescription.

Our book is different. We believe that success is achieved not by changing your personality, but by enhancing the skills you already have. This book gives you a way to use your own skills, your own attributes, and your own personality as a path to chart your own course. The stories in this bookculled from interviews with forty-five highly successful peopleare models of success you can learn from. The book is about how highly successful people actually think about success; you learn from their experience and knowledge, not from instructions on how to behave or what path to follow.

After all, success means different things to different people. Sometimes its so intangible that even brilliant and successful minds have trouble articulating what it means. As best-selling author Bob Woodward told us, I cant put a definition on success because its more internal than external. Do you like what you do? Do you enjoy doing it? Success is not about the score. Its about much more.

People often confuse success with winning. Those two goals have some common traits, but theyre not identical. Success moves us into the realm of the thinking man; its more of an emotional quotient than a number at the bottom of a balance sheet. Its about what we want for our inner selves. Its easy to define winning; the definition of success, on the other hand, inspires an endless discussion.

As professional political and corporate strategists, were experts in how to win. For more than twenty years, weve been in the business of winning hard-fought battles on the campaign trail and in the boardroom. Were hired because we produce results. And our results can be defined in terms of winningwhether its an election or the publics hearts and minds on a serious or controversial issue.

Today, the prospect of winning has gone well beyond Americas voting booths and corporate boardrooms and become a catchword within our entire culture. Its as if the ghost of Vince Lombardi, the famed Green Bay Packers football coach, has jumped out of his grave and tried to remind all of Americafrom those in the corner offices to the lowest-level managers to the most struggling blue-collar workersthat theyve lost sight of their bottom-line goals. (What Lombardi actually said, remember, was, Winning isnt everything; its the only thing.)

A winning personality, winning on all fronts, winning in everything you do. Even Jack Welch published a book called Winning in 2005, a primer for strivers who wanted to learn secrets from the man Fortune magazine called the Manager of the Century. Probably the most viral of all clichs in the last twenty years has been a win-win situation, which refers to a transaction where all parties benefit. So is it any wonder that BusinessWeek reminded us in a cover story on competition in 2006 that Yes, Winning Is Still the Only Thing?

Its not hard to buy into Vince Lombardis philosophy. We all like to win. We all like the money, the attention, the recognition, and the rewards that accompany victory. And do you know anyone who likes to lose?

After interviewing forty-five leaders in their respective fields for this book, however, we discovered something very different: Winning is only a one-dimensional reward. Vince Lombardis mantra really relates only to the smaller matters of life, like football. And for all but a few of us in this world, football is not life itself. Even world-class champions like Tiger Woods and Roger Federerboth already among the greatest athletes of all timearent motivated purely by the final outcome of the game. Federer recently said, I can beat the main rival. But I think that what people like Tiger and I are more interested in is not who were playing. Its wanting to get the best out of yourself. Woods sees his own golf game as a constant exercise in self-improvement, not something to be defined simply by crushing the tournament field.

Of course, Woods and Federer wouldnt be who they are without winning at the highest level. But in any competitive situation, winning is functional. Winning is no longer an obsessive goalif indeed it ever really was. Its just one stat on the scorecard of a life well lived. Winning isnt the only thing; its simply what you do along the way.

So what else is there? Success.

WE CAN QUANTIFY THE SUCCESSFUL PERSONALITY

Over the course of a year, we interviewed captains of industry in business, politics, sports, and entertainment. The insights we gained in our interviews represent an unprecedented exploration of what success really means to a wide range of goal-oriented individuals. We found that these people went beyond the usual media sound bites, becoming introspective about the fact that their lives were shaped around much deeper concerns than simply winning. Success proved to be a much more complex and subtle topic than many of them may have expected.

And when it came time to assess individual experienceswhen we delved into the specific personality traits of these high achieverswe hit upon a very important lesson: For all of these people, finding success wasnt a matter of altering their basic profiles, or personalities, or emotions, or ambitions, the qualities that made these people what they are. It was a matter of figuring out what they truly valued, who they were what made them tick and then using that knowledge to lead them, consciously or not, in the right direction.

In that spirit, we devised this book to help you, the reader, discover what makes you tick, so that you can use that knowledge to help you get where you want to go.

None of the people youll read about trapped themselves by trying to change who they really were. They understood their own makeupgenetic, psychological, emotionaland this was the one thing they all had in common.

In talking with these people, we discovered that success has many different definitions. Upon closer examination, however, we also discerned that these diverse personalities settled into four distinct archetypes. While each success story was unique, there were several consistent character traits that allowed us to separate them into discrete groups. Not everyone interviewed approached his or her challenges in the same way, of course. But in our efforts to describe their personalities and quantify their skills, strengths, and weaknesses, the contours of these four archetypes emerged again and again.

These successful people fell into the following four categories:

• Natural-Born Leaders
• Independence Seekers
• Visionaries
• Do-Gooders

Each of these success archetypes exhibits unique strengths and potential. None of them was limited to a specific field or certain kinds of people. These types exist at the most fundamental level of human behavior; the personality tics and traits that define them seem to be present from childhood throughout adulthood and retirement. The interviewees themselves recognized these things as unchangeable and chose to work with them rather than against them.