Why Successful People are the Worst Models of Success

I really couldn’t understand how come there would always be successful people rising up amid the fiasco created by the citizens of the world. While most of us are toiling ourselves away to an honest day of work fueled by our meager salaries that will sustain us for a month which is allocated for food, bills, rent and a little extra for our entertainment like sweets and recreation, there would always be a class of people who could whizz away their money without bankrupting themselves to financial ruin. Such people couldn’t be better and they are always well – off no matter what kind of global catastrophe the world would accept. Financial crises, which ultimately punished the working people, didn’t affect the rich and the people who run the banks that ultimately bankrupted and destroyed their own companies are still get rewarded, despite that their collective decisions lead the global economy to a shithole. No wonder that the idea of electing rich politicians to poor places (and economically – challenged countries) is a joke because they don’t understand what is like to be poor and they always look at things at a bird’s eye view, standing among the giants, not seeing what is happening on the ground because it is covered by trees. The policies they have created rarely benefited the ordinary people and favored the rich and powerful entities like the companies. As if we the ordinary people is being held hostage by these companies and they demand to the lawmakers to get themselves off the hook with the exchange of increased employment for labor with their disappointing salaries and sometimes, contractual work arrangements. If the lawmakers won’t budge to the desires of these companies and business people, they’ll just simply threaten the government by slashing thousands of workers, create unemployment and discourage their counterparts in investing in particular country that demands higher wages. Worse, the kind of jobs that has proliferated aren’t the high quality jobs that is desired. Most of these jobs can be done by a high school graduate or a college – level workforce and the requirement that a potential candidate must be a college graduate is an overkill. Even the small – scale businesses are with the big daddies, albeit in a subtle way because the can take advantage of their plight (these small business can’t offer higher salaries, couldn’t pay insurance to their workers and they’re just small businesses). The conglomerates and the business people says to the government that big companies can manage to achieve the higher bar set by them to protect their workers by increasing their benefits and wages but what about the small businesses that will be affected if the law will be properly enforced and their wages be increased. In short, the business people is telling the government that before they deal with big companies for changes, they should look on the small businesses. This kind of tactic renders the government tied because this is akin to a doctor healing a stage four cancer. No wonder that too many unfortunate people try their hand at founding a business but ninety – nine percent of these start – up will fail and only one percent of these start – ups are destined to become full fledged businesses and noisy enough that they would tell us lies like “If we were able to do it, so can you”. Traversing in business is akin to avoiding thousands of minefields in a small, grassy field and when somebody got exploded, at least you know you are not in his situation and not in his place. Business is overrated anyway.

I remember getting sucked into a multi – level marketing schemes years ago after I got dragged by my classmate to attend a seminar. At first I don’t have an idea of what I was getting into and what kind of seminar I will be seeing. When we got there I noticed that there are many people inside, mainly in their twenties and some were of middle – age, getting excited about something, standing up with glee while the emcee entertains the crowd and talks to some guest speakers. When the seminar has started, they introduced themselves as multi – level marketing company (I only realize that they were multi – level marketing company years later. I thought that they were a networking company, aggressively recruiting people for profit) and discussed their products, which is not actually their main source of income. They also told us an alternate way of getting rich in multi – level marketing scheme, which is recruiting more and more people so you yourself will become rich. They then now showed us a guest speaker getting on stage, claiming himself to be a very rich person who earns a lot more money than his brothers and sisters who had Latin honors when they graduated. This is where it gets interesting; he told us a part of his life. He had a plenty of brothers and sisters (I couldn’t recall how many siblings he had). In his youth, he was considered a delinquent, a “black sheep” to his family and his brothers and sisters are doing academically – well. He became an embarrassment to his family being a slacker in school while his brothers and sisters well on their way on carving success on academics, and quite possible, life.

Many years later, when he got into multi – level marketing business where he ended up making a lot of money, he was able to succeed more than his brothers and sisters who are working in very good companies and good salaries. He was able to out – earn them and put his brothers and sisters in embarrassment. His family become well – off because of him and he supported his mother when she got hospitalized. He is now at the front of the stage telling us that we just need to work harder toward our goals and achieve our dreams to become rich. That if he was able to overcome all odds towards success we should be able too. But I slowly realized after some years since that seminar (which is actually a first step in recruiting unsuspecting people to get into multi – level marketing business so that the people at the top could profit) that working hard for your dreams is not enough to get you ahead in life. That all I see on those speakers in commencement exercises and seminars are just the remaining people who had somehow avoided failures in businesses and careers and now imparting their knowledge to us, that they know how to be successful while the listeners scramble to their feet their words of wisdom. “Matira ang matibay” (survival of the fittest) is actually the main mechanism of their success.

We all hear them all the time. Those people who succeed no matter what kind of overwhelming obstacles they faced and their inspirational quotes will be framed and hanged to their offices that will serve to inspire everybody and jolt themselves into action to achieve something. Those successful few who had a say on what to do because it worked for them and we often see them on television to show the face of success. They’re glorifying themselves and become sages or superstars while we’re consuming on their bullshit. I’ve never seen a television show that features people who failed in their careers or businesses despite all their valiant efforts to float and following the advises on their so – called “gurus”. All they want is a successful story and I never heard from a successful person telling their audience how hard it is to succeed because looking simply at the successful people at work makes us think that it easy. It does look easy.

In a society where a single success brings unprecedented wealth and being a failure means you are forgotten from their sight and becoming a loser, an individual’s endeavor may mean the difference between being successful and being a mediocre performer. I know success is relative but let’s not kid ourselves because we know a success when we see one. Unlike successful launches of NASA that is consistently done throughout the years, churning out discoveries year by year, the launches of our own selves are at best a long jump, quit after many years then we do a long jump again and fail. Then we'll try again with no improvement in sight. Some can jump not that high, some could earn a moniker “skywalker” because they seemed to be floating in mid – air for two seconds but unfortunately, most of us are of average abilities, never getting off the ground and we stay in mediocrity because it’s too hard to push yourself to your limits, especially if we weren’t designed to be flying jumpers and could have mastered something else. Some say that to achieve peak performance, we need at least ten thousand hours to master something but in reality, if you need that ten thousand hours to master something, then it means you don’t have that kind of skill at all!

“Matira Matibay (Survival of the Fittest)?”

In the realm of business, there is an adage that newly – opened businesses have a probability of failure at sixty percent in their third year of operations while the probability of any business failure skyrockets at ninety percent at their fifth year of operations. And we are counting those businesses that had the guts to launch their endeavors in an uncertain business world. They were gutsy enough that they think they wouldn’t fail in the near future but in the end, only ten percent of these start – ups stayed open and turns a decent profit. And that’s not all because there’s gonna be the uber – successful one percent who would set a very unrealistic measure of success to ordinary people like us. It’s hard to know whether these very successful people worked quite hard to achieve their goals or they just lucked up because they produce the same effect but remember that working hard only increases the likelihood of success but it is not a guarantee of success in the long run. It is better than to be lucky than hard – working. For every one successful business, there would be a thousand failed businesses in the grave which are rarely talked about. For every one failed business, there would be a thousand wannabe businessmen who had the capital to put up a business but never did because they haven’t had a business idea yet or not yet ready. For every one wishful and ambitious future businessman who had some amount of capital, there are millions of people who didn’t have any money or idea to put up a business, ending up in all sorts of various versions of poverty: living paycheck to paycheck or making a very low two – dollar profit from selling anything (remember “takatak business”?) or being a victim of outright exploitation of their bodies in any form and our society keeps on telling us that we need to try a hand of putting up a business to theoretically escape from poverty but they often forgot that even most businesses are not even that profitable and the probability of achieving success in business is merely less than a percent. If the business would fail, they will easily use the scapegoat of “You aren’t working hard enough”, “Hindi ka madiskarte” or “You don’t have what it takes to be successful” but in reality, the system was against them from the start and it was doomed a failure. Worse, sometimes the failed businesses carry an albatross of fails. Your family loses finances, you lose your house, you lose your savings and you can no longer repay your debt from the bank. This life functions in such a way that we won’t be allowed to be successful and improve our lives and we need some sort of starter packs to get ahead in life given to us from the day we were born in order to succeed later in life. Fuck the probabilistic tendencies of deterministic objects because even if we are intrinsically deterministic beings (because we can touch each other, see and hear each other, and even love each other), in order to transcend to a higher level of living, probability would always win. What are the odds that you will meet a very good wife when you venture out? What are the chances that you will get a high – paying job if you applied to a certain company? What are the chances that you will succeed if you will start making your moves? All great decisions in life involves luck and misfortunes that when we marry a wrong person, you’ll suffer for the rest of your life. Or if you chose a wrong career, you’ll suffer for the rest of your life with a little hope of redemption. Or if you will try to put up a business, there is ninety – nine percent chance that you will fail. You have a better chance of surviving a gunshot wound to the head (ten percent) than you are succeeding at business (one percent).

I remember reading a story about a speaker in a certain seminar telling the audience that luck plays a larger role in our lives than people care to admit. To illustrate his point, one hundred volunteers were chosen to play a game with him of coin – toss. But it was a special coin toss. The mechanics of the game was this: The one hundred volunteers were asked to toss their coins simultaneously and see if their coins turn up has heads of tails. After the players’ coin toss, the host will then have a coin toss and whatever the result of coin toss, it should match to those of players. If the host’s coin toss turns up a head, those players that had a head in coin toss will continue the game while those other player’s coin that turns up a tail are eliminated from the game and a next round will start. They will continue to play this game until a victor will emerge.

When the game was finished and a winner comes up, the speaker encouraged his audience to ask the winner what is the secret of his success and what are the techniques that needs to be used in order to win the game. The winner was at loss on how to reply to their questions because he knew he was just lucky. Although he struggled and apparently beat the odds, he didn’t feel that he won because he knew he was just lucky and all players that were eliminated had struggled as hard as him but didn’t make it. The main point from that exercise is that luck plays a much larger role in our lives. That’s essentially what a success look like to those who managed to win at a game of life, amassing wealth and success and they couldn’t understand why most people didn’t success while they succeeded. Those people who competed knew what to do on how to succeed but most of them failed and the successful people will criticize them that they didn’t have the will power to succeed and the failure are caused by themselves but they often forget that they are just a product of lucky circumstances and rising above the noise is often an uphill battle to ourselves that no one had an idea on how to conquer it, even if some of them might make it because their techniques don’t often work on us and so the people must carve their own path to success using the other people’s templates. Though these successful people have worked hard and can now get whatever they wanted, there are simply too many people on the other side of the coin that had worked hard, choose decisions much more smartly than them but in the end, we never hear their failures or even asked them on television on why they failed, presumably because failures are much more common than successes and common things are boring. Failure is much more interesting than success because success looked the same on successful people but failure looks different on many people and it is unique to each failed person and serves a perfect example of what would happen when something goes wrong when people started to gamble on anything, including business. They sell their belongings to gain capital and get loans from banks, cooperatives and relatives only to fail in their business, leaving them financially ruined, unattractive to ask money from many banks (you’ll get slapped by a bad credit rating) and your relatives harbor resentment from you.

“Success is a monopoly run by winners”

The governor of the Federal Reserve is forbidden to comment or predict the stock value because it becomes a self – fulfilling prophecy and it would be disastrous for the investors who rely on speculation (this investing technique is known as speculative investment) to gain money when his predictions are wrong. The hedge fund managers who had a reputation of “correctly” predicting the outcome of betting on stocks and could increase the value of their own stocks from several millions dollars to a billion are hailed to be a superstar in the financial world, especially if large entities are involved like banks and big companies. Such is the demonstrated power of the successful people that the society consider them as sages of whatever domains they had excelled at because they claimed to be at the forefront in any endeavors. They see more clearly at the top and could dictate what would happen in the future (that’s why “futurists” exists). The tech industries are the most guilty of this because those companies that had succeeded breaking into the market are now predicting what kind of technology would appear in the future because they are realizing this technologies themselves. Listening to those people makes sense at first because they hold the keys on how to succeed in life, offering advises to unfortunate ones to follow their footsteps and acquire their techniques. I wasn’t always a fan of successful people because even if I deconstructed their secrets in achieving success, little is gained from learning them because they have done what they were supposed to do in order to win but they were relatively unscathed from all assaults of life. Let’s say we get one thousand students to prepare themselves for one important exam. They were given the same materials to study and they were on their own to learn it. Out of one thousand people, there’s gonna be some superstar students who can easily ace the exams while at the middle of the pack are the countless average examinees who could barely pass the exams. At the other extremes, there’s gonna be the exceptionally mediocre students who easily trembles at the sight of test papers and getting a perfect zero on their scores. Normies such as us could become topnotches (if we were very lucky enough), passers (boring) or a failure (loser) who would try again on the next assault. As expected, about thirty percent of them could pass; out of the thousand examinees who had taken the exam, only three hundred have passed and a topnotcher among those passers would emerge will be highly visible in many days to come, heavily featured in television and radio. As always, this topnotcher will be interviewed, asked things like “What is the secret to your success?” and “What is your message to those people who wants to be like you?” which will he then reply as “Study hard, work hard” and “If I were able to do it, so can you and believe in God that you’re gonna make it”. We’ll yeah… that’s true. That’s what were supposed to do in order to pass but how could we explain those other seven hundred people who has done exactly like that but still failed? They studied and prayed hard as them but why the hell did they lose? Was it probably the system was rigged in such a way that there will be always people who will rise to the top and exploiting their own advantages to gain a hand? Or it is statistically possible that given a large sample size, there will be always some people who will naturally rise on top among the normies? The latter is more plausible. Ever notice that the countries with pretty high number of population (in few hundred millions) tends to produce Nobel Prize winners and if a country is technologically superior like Japan, it could produce a Nobel prize winner out of fifty million people? Let’s take India for example. The population of India for 2021 is already 1.390 billion people but the country has produced only four living Nobel laureates (excluding people who was born in India but raised somewhere else except India and people with different nationalities who was born in India), which translated to 347.5 million people that must be born in order to produce one Indian Nobel laureate. And mind you, India is a relatively rich country and we knew that if the people live in a rich nation, there is a good chance that one among the billions of people would emerge as the next Nobel laureate or an Academy Award winning director. Do you know what is the probability of winning a PCSO (Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office) 6/55 Grand Lotto jackpot in Philippines? The number that must be chosen is from 1 to 55 and you can win it if the lotto matches to those in draw and it is fine if it’s numbers are not in order. The probability of winning would be 1/28 989 675. So it means a person have more chances in winning a lotto (1/28,989,675) than India that will produce a next Nobel laureate (1/347 500 000). Ever wonder why Philippines hasn’t been represented in Nobel Prizes and Academy Awards? Maybe Philippines must produce an additional hundred million more people in order to produce one Filipino Nobel laureate and depending on the economic conditions of the Philippines (which is a poor country), the Philippines might see its very first Filipino Nobel laureate after the population reaches a billion people. Even China, which is an even richer country than India, has only produced three living Nobel laureates (excluding people who was born in China but raised somewhere else except China and people with different nationalities who was born in China) from a population of 1.4 billion people, translating to China that it should produce 467 million people in order to obtain one future Chinese Nobel laureate. If there is a very large sample size, it is statistically possible that some of them will achieve extraordinary things in their lives and how could we explain their success if most of the people were hardworking and pushed themselves to their limits but still lead mediocre lives? The only explanation that is acceptable is those Nobel Prize winners were just a product of luck. In the realm of business, in the 100 – million strong population of the Philippines, there will be some people who will might become as rich as Gokongwei’s and Henry Tan but remember, in order to produce one Henry Tan, the Philippines might need to produce a couple of tens of millions of people in order to produce one rich man as rich as Henry Tan. And that is disconcerting because life is basically a number’s game. The more you take chances, the higher the chances of winning.

“What shall we do?”

But don’t fret whether you feel you aren’t getting ahead because most people are in your position and if you ever see a person getting ahead in life, saying that they were able to achieve their dreams and succeed because of hard work and perseverance, don’t believe them. They might be the unicorns that were a product of luck. They might be the manifestation of 1/1 000 000 chance of success. Don’t get blinded by them and you need to remember the coin – toss game in the first part of the article that blinded them that they did it because of hard work but in actuality, they just lucked up. If I were to succeed in life and they asked me what is the secret to my success, I will always tell them that I don’t know how I did it because I’ve seen too many people who had chosen correct decisions in their lives and busted their asses off in order to get decent lives but at the end, they led unmemorable lives. There are few things that you can do after you realized how punishing for you and for many people to get ahead in life and might not succeed after many years in trying. Lead a balanced life.

As long as you have a proper meal every day, as long as your family is safe, as long as you enjoy the journey of life without succumbing to worldly desires, you will be rich in other aspect of your life. You are rich in spirit.