Nature, Nurture, Drive and Success

Temilade Sesan and I discussed the relationship between personal drive and success as we made our way to work on Tuesday, January 31, 2017, and a few things of note came up. I shared this with the Paradigm Initiative team, and based on feedback, I’m now sharing this publicly with the hope that it adds value to someone else.

Why do some people succeed and others keep trying — maybe even fail while at it? Why do some people find success after success while others build a tent around their former success and then get lost? What’s the difference between two people who are subjected to the same conditions, and one of them builds a niche for herself (or himself)? These are the questions that my earlier conversation sought to answer. Why is 70% a big deal for some and nothing for others? What makes anyone know -- and demonstrate, not just believe -- that they’re so good at what they do that most people on their career path hardly achieve better success than they experience?

As far as success is concerned, it obviously doesn’t come to those who don’t plan for it and who don’t eat their frogs daily. One key factor that determines success — in life and in the workplace — is drive, personal drive. It can’t be imposed or forced through punishment, and it also can’t be wished into place. Drive comes through either nurture or nature. By nurture, I mean training and deliberate exposure to opportunities. When you decide to choose a relevant training program and don’t just attend for the sake of it, you are igniting drive by nurture. It’s the same when you approach a mentor to help you get where they are, and even beyond.

When you’re born into a home where the mother is a bookworm, you get to read like ‘Ladi and 'Timi. When your dad talks about his calendar entries before each school run, you plan by default. Nurture is a verb. On the other hand, nature is a noun. Nature refers to a state of being, or how you were born. If you were born an introvert like Temi, chances are that you were also caught hiding inside a trunk of books, reading, while other kids were out playing. Nature and nurture can help with the drive towards success, but neither nature nor nurture can guarantee success.

In addition to how we’re exposed to drive, either through nurture or nature, a critical factor remains our response to the stimuli. Anyone who understands the story of how Paradigm Initiative started knows that it was a response to a trigger. I was denied access to a computer in my third year in secondary school, and that became a trigger that made me decide to grow up into someone whose mission it was to create a platform that allows every young person who is denied access — by the reason of socio-economic status in this case — an opportunity to change their story. While triggers are random events that could also activate drive towards success, nature and nurture do a better job at prompting deliberateness. When nature or nurture nudge you towards success, how do you respond? Some respond with a let's-see-what's-possible attitude, and others with the who-cares stance. However, some take advantage of the nudge to build deliberately towards success.

Let me share a story with you. Someone at PIN (when we were still Paradigm Initiative Nigeria) came to work every day to tell all of us that she would become a huge success, so much so that I would always talk about her as our future ambassador. Each day she did this, everyone reacted differently to her now-almost-annoying prophecy about her future. Some of us laughed at her because she tried too hard. Some of us even knew she was a total joke because her first evaluation score was 49.9 which got rounded off to 50. She started talking about being successful while she was on probation. Well, to cut a long story short, she paid more attention during meetings, read every recommended book, disturbed everyone she could learn from and left PIN after four years.

A few months later, I was asked to moderate a panel at an event in Australia, and after everything was done, they introduced the Closing Keynote Speaker. Your guess is as good as mine. It was her! I was so glad when she mentioned how PIN laid the foundation for her career success during her speech, and I couldn’t help remembering how she started out. After her speech, questions rolled in like a tornado. I wasn’t surprised no one asked me or anyone on my panel questions because she stole the show. A young man in the audience asked her, “how did you become so successful?” She smiled. I thought I knew what would follow, but I was wrong. She told the story of her first evaluation and then said, “success is easy.” The room erupted in laugher at her joke. It must have been a joke. Right? Then she explained. She said success is like walking on water. It’s very hard, but that’s only if you don’t know where the stones you could step on to maintain balance are.

Okay, this is the part where I tell you she’s not real :) But you do get the point, right?

We can all be successful if we get to find out -- from learning, mentorship, exposure and more -- where the stones are and have the drive to walk on them. For some, nature places stones in our path. For others, it’s nurture. And for some, triggers do the job. For some of us, a mix of all can be spotted through various phases of our lives. However, the response to stimuli, that act of taking steps one stone at a time (or one skill at a time), is what determines the mix between drive and success for each person. I wish you nothing but success — the type of success that inspires others to respond to the drive towards success.