AFTER almost 30 years as an executive director and subsequently as a corporate lawyer, I have met a lot of successful people – entrepreneurs, chief executive officers, lawyers, accountants, investment bankers.
And I have come to a slightly uncomfortable conclusion. The people who look the most successful are often carrying far more pressure than anyone around them realises.
Through IPOs and other corporate work, I get to see much more than someone’s balance sheet or business plan.
I see how they make decisions when there is no obvious right answer; how they behave when a deal is falling apart.
I hear the story of how they started, the mistakes they made, the setbacks they survived and sometimes the lucky break that changed everything.
Of course, successful entrepreneurs have the qualities we normally associate with success – commercial instinct, financial discipline, strategic thinking, decisiveness, negotiation skills, the ability to build relationships and the ability to spot opportunities before others do.
But after watching successful people up close, I think there are three less obvious qualities that are equally important.
The first is that they are very good actors.
Not fake. Not insincere.
Running a business or leading a professional firm is a 24/7 job.
The pressure comes from everywhere – cash flow, payroll, clients, competitors, regulators, shareholders, bankers, litigation, acquisitions, financing, recruitment, resignations, declining sales and the constant question of whether the strategy that worked yesterday will still work tomorrow.
For a law firm partner, there are demanding clients, difficult negotiations, multiple transactions, staffing issues, collection targets and the expectation that you will bring in work while delivering the work already on your desk.
For a senior corporate executive, there may be an impatient board, shareholders demanding results, employees looking for direction and a market that has suddenly decided your carefully prepared strategy is no longer viable.
And then there is the stress behind the scenes: worrying about the future, making difficult decisions about people, wondering whether you have made the right investment or whether your biggest client might walk away.
Yet you cannot show all of this. Your people are watching you. Your clients are watching you. Your business partners are watching you. They need you to be the rock.
So you have to smile when you don’t feel like smiling. You remain calm when everything around you is anything but calm. You entertain clients at dinner, tell jokes and usually laugh the loudest.
Like a duck in water, you look as if you are gliding effortlessly while paddling furiously underneath. Whether you like it or not, you have to be a good actor.
The second quality is the ability to absorb stress without allowing it to consume you.
Looking calm is one thing. Functioning under sustained pressure is another. The most successful people have an unusually high tolerance for uncertainty, disappointment and responsibility.
They don’t necessarily have less stress than everyone else. They simply carry it better. And that is an important distinction.
The third quality is something stronger than resilience. It is relentlessness.
I was reminded of this recently when I hiked Mount Rinjani. The volcanic ash is so slippery that you take two steps forward and slide one step backwards.
It struck me that this is almost a perfect description of many successful careers. Nobody I know who has achieved significant success has had a career trajectory that simply went upwards.
There are failed deals, lost clients, bad investments, wrong hires, economic downturns, regulatory surprises, difficult partners, competitors who suddenly become formidable and transactions that collapse after months of work.
Sometimes you don’t take two steps forward and one step back. You take one step forward and three steps back. The difference is that the relentless keep climbing. Successful people don’t confuse a setback with the end of the journey.
And there is one more thing I have noticed. Many successful people, when you get close enough to them, will readily admit that luck played a much bigger role in their success than outsiders realise.
They met the right person. They happened to be in the right place. Someone gave them an opportunity at exactly the right time.
Ray Kroc was selling milkshake machines when he came across a small restaurant run by the McDonald brothers and an unexpected business opportunity eventually became McDonald’s.
Steve Jobs happened to meet Steve Wozniak through a mutual friend. That friendship eventually produced Apple.
But there is an important catch. Luck creates the opportunity. It doesn’t create the outcome. And, when things go wrong, you have to keep going.
After nearly three decades of watching successful people up close, I am more convinced than ever that success is rarely about being the smartest person in the room. It is about being the person who can walk into the room when everything is going wrong and make everyone else believe that things are going to be all right.
It is about having the strength to carry the pressure, the discipline to keep your composure and the stubbornness to continue when the mountain gets steeper. Success is not about never falling backwards. It is about refusing to stop climbing.