To get what you want you can’t fear success

When I was working through my list of “Andy-isms,” I wrote the title of this post down but felt myself feeling the need to further explain it.

A lot of what I focus on in this space is personal success, primarily in careers but also somewhat in life. Much of it radiates from the Peter Principle: That we will progress to a level in which we find an area of incompetence, and then we stop progressing. This is what defines the barriers that so many face and why I am committed and determined never to get to this point.

I reflect upon some advice I once heard from Justin DiCiocio, a former Jazz teacher of mine. Justin is recognized as perhaps the greatest Jazz educator of all time and someone who had a profound influence on my life. Justin wasn’t the greatest technician: he didn’t really conduct us, he was a drummer so he couldn’t fix most issues in tonality (though he could hear if something was off), but he knew how to make a jazz band sound amazing. He had a small set of principles which he stuck with, but every so often he’d veer off script. Once he went into a long diatribe about success & life and he told us “It doesn’t matter what you do but understand, no one can ever take your dreams away from you. You just give them up. If you are willing to do the work to be a little bit different and a little bit better, you will succeed” In the rough and tumble world of music where almost everyone fails and so much is based on talent, I was a bit skeptical. But he had a point — you can make the decision whether or not you want to be successful. It is a decision and if something is your dream, you have to accept everything that goes along with it and be willing to outwork your peers to get there.

Later in my career I felt this point in my summer of strategy consulting during business school and have written about some of the mistakes I made. But to explain that summer I have to explain how I got there. I was initially drawn to consulting because, like many who are, I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I grew up (I’m still not sure I do). Consulting holds a lot of appeal because you you get paid to work on short-term projects with a variety of focuses & industries until you find an enjoyable area of expertise. Plus you get to spend your time with senior executives and are never held accountable for delivering any business results. It’s like you’re a well-paid intern — and after working a career on the client'-side of consultants I’ve come to find that consultants are about as helpful as an intern but that’s another matter. The only problem in this “no commitment” career thing I had going was that when I first started at Accenture after college, I was working at a consulting company but not actually doing consulting — I was working on large projects implementing expensive, complex software. So like many, I put strategy work on a pedestal and set off to reach the pinnacle of consulting: Being a consultant at a “Big 3” Consulting company. The Big 3 are Bain, BCG & McKinsey. They only hire from elite schools and generally get to pick from the best of the class. So after many years of failing to win at the shortcut to land one of the internal strategy or corporate development roles that one might get after working as a Big 3 strategest, I sucked it up, took the GMAT, grinded my way into Columbia Business School, got cases I could nail and people in my summer internship interviews with BCG and landed a coveted summer offer. These offers are a career golden ticket; because these are the top jobs they make the first offers so it means you get your summer internship search out of the way quickly and your career is pretty much set . You get a well-paid summer with an almost guaranteed chance of an offer at the end with a name that will always look great on your resume. So either you become a rich consultant living the fast life or have no problem landing at a plum job after a couple years living in PowerPoint. And in the cauldron of Business School, you win instant respect of your peers for being a winner in the recruiting rat race. But in the end (which I have talked about in other columns), I ended up as a business school pariah for being that “one guy who didn’t get an offer.” When bad things happen, often you’ll be consoled by hearing that it’s the greatest thing that ever happened to you and thought it sure didn’t feel like it at the time, in retrospect it was true. It took a therapy session for me to realize I was like a dog who always chased after cars and finally got to one. For the first time, I talked about the concept of positive stress. Achieving great things in life may seem wonderful but introduce their own set of problems. In this case it meant facing what the work actually was (and how it may not be for me), the lifestyle and raising my level of career performance in an environment when more was expected of me than had occurred before. I thought I wanted to be a successful in becoming strategy consultant but I never fully considered what it meant to BE one and when I did, I sabotaged myself.

Sometimes fearing success can be more basic. In the recent pandemic, I’ve had to find new ways of exercise to maintain my balance and so running has become a much bigger impact in my life. Generally my attitude to working out is to constantly strive for a personal record and then use that to raise the bar to do better. I’d usually max out at a certain level and then either plateau or stop short of my best due to a minor, nagging injury. Running this past fall I realized that I couldn’t get past a 5K. And then it struck me: I was afraid to run it. Having a good 5K made the old ceiling the floor and the next day, it would take more time and effort to go farther. So I adopted a new mentality and fought myself not to hit the wall that would give me a reason to quit and told myself to stop being afraid. I busted through and was running 6 miles within a month.

I’ve also found that this principle can be applied to romantic relationships. I recently hit a wall with my girlfriend over my children. As a recently divorced father I’m fiercely protective of my children and worried that long-term, the personal choice I made will irreversibly harm them and my relationship with them. My girlfriend is amazing; she may be my soulmate, I want to spend the rest of my life with her and we’ve talked about marrying & having children. She’s someone I’ve known since I was 16. After many years, multiple tries at being together and a marriage with two kids in between, I am still totally over the moon with her. I full trust her and have always believed all along that she would be great with kids. But I still put up a lot of barriers to initially meeting them and then integrating her into the time with them. This led to a lot of tension regarding the walls I was putting up and how I was leading two separate lives, from which one she was excluded. It also wasn’t fun having to transition between the two. Eventually, I relented to allowing her and her dog to stay with us over weekends my boys stayed with even though I was pretty sure no one was ready to take such a big leap from brief visits. And though the time with my favorite people all together initially was wonderful, it didn’t take time for our relationship to hit a wall. I was so focused on getting things right and she on overcoming my resistance and “being ready” that we didn’t at all consider the impact it would have on her to have a new set of responsibilities and limits around small children. We missed a huge blind spot that she wasn’t ready so ultimately getting what she wanted overwhelmed her.

I’m not remotely close to being successful enough to give much advice but I am at a place where I’m finding I have the skills, resources and acumen to often get what I want. But I’ve learned that increasingly finding success at things means saying no to other things and accepting the tradeoffs that come with that. Want to be a great athlete? That means you have to spend hours on end in the gym honing your craft, avoiding the wrong foods, maximizing your sleep. That means neglecting your studies, your social life and your family. Sure you see that athletes on TV at the pinnacle celebrating their wins and we all want to be them. But they and their families should celebrate because of all of they’ve given up to make it happen. Want to be a successful entrepreneur? You may have to fail a number of times and that may mean going bankrupt, giving up friendships, taking loans and not repaying them and spending little time with friends & family for the sake of your mission. Want to rise in corporate America? Your values will often be challenged, you’ll need to conform in a culture to “play the game” and find yourself holding your tongue in the name of not making waves. It may mean sacrificing your relationships with your family, spending years living abroad or on the road and way too much of your time. But it’s more than just that. Being a leader means you’re held accountable. It means being the most prepared, being the first, leaving last & being the most present in setting the example in between. If business results don’t happen, you have to answer for it. That may mean not having the resources to advance your people’s careers, you might need to let them go or it may mean you lose your job. But if you want to title, the money & the recognition, you also have to accept the pressure, stress & accountability that goes along with it.

But if there’s something you want, it’s not about just doing the work for yourself, it’s about kissing the right assess, sacrificing whatever needs to be sacrificed and owning up to the accountability and responsibility that comes your way. In the end it’s not just about what you want, it’s about the trade-offs you are willing to make and whether the juice is worth the squeeze for you. Once you come to that point, realize you’re on the right path and stop worrying about what happens if you fail, you’ll find some incredible breakthroughs.