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Never too Late to be Great by Tom Butler-Bowden
AN UNDUE amount of the literature on personal development is devoted to "transforming your life" in as short time as possible.
If the techniques actually worked as promised everyone who read the books, listened to the audios or went to the seminars should have been a superstar in a year or two.
What is almost always overlooked is the role of time and this is unfortunate because slow-cooked success is not only the norm, but is in fact the only path to genuine achievement.
But, I guess, that motivational speech at the annual gathering wouldn’t be all that motivating if the speaker promised that your life would change in 10 years if you followed a daily routine.
Butler-Bowden’s engaging (and, dare I say, motivating) book is founded on two principles. Firstly, most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year, but underestimate what they can achieve in a decade.
Secondly, you are rarely too old and it is rarely too late to achieve something that is truly important to you.
A hundred years ago, a boy born in America could have expected to live to 46. By 2000 this had gone up to 74 for males and almost 80 for females.
Across our now relatively long lifespans most of us are given not just a second chance, but the possibility of a third or even a fourth chance to succeed at what we really want to do.
From first being perceived as an obstacle, we can begin to see time in its true light: as the friend of success.
Warren Buffett became history’s greatest investor through seeing time as a friend. Having picked a company to invest in, he lets time reveal its value, often holding on to a stake for decades.
“No matter how great the talent or effort, some things just take time: you can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant,” he points out.
The 125-year-old General Electric, a firm with a market capitalisation larger than many countries, has had fewer leaders than the Vatican has had popes during the same period.
The most successful parts of GE are places where leaders have stayed in place for a long time.
There is a Chinese proverb: time and patience change the mulberry leaf to satin.
In early 1970s Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon and William Chase studied top international chess players and noticed that bar one, Bobby Fischer, none had reached the highest levels of their field without at least a decade of intense study and practice.
The “10-year rule”, as Simon and Chase called it, was later confirmed by studies of people in a range of fields including maths, music, swimming, tennis and literature.
Psychologist and creativity researcher Mihaly Csickszenthihalyi found people rarely become truly great in their field until they have first assimilated all its rules and passed all its tests – a process that takes at least a decade.
Henry Ford, for example, did not launch his motor company until he was 40. By then he had completed a long apprenticeship as a mechanic, inventor and failed businessman.
For every celebrated case of a prodigy, wunderkind or star that bursts into the limelight comparatively young, there are at least 40 or 50 more who have achieved greatness the longer, slower way.
Not having achieved great fame or wealth early is most often not an impediment, but an asset. Early success can be a double-edged sword.
It makes you “someone”, but also creates a weight of expectation and typecasting that can prove almost too heavy to carry.
Churchill’s failure at 40 was the foundation for his success at 60, but at the time it probably did not seem that way.
It was only the older Churchill, with greater moral courage, policy knowledge and standing among his peers, who was able to put up the fight against Hitler and save Europe from tyranny.
Jack Dorsy, one of the co-inventors and founder of Twitter, pointed out that although it may seem so, simple technologies don’t happen overnight.
What appears like a story of one to three years, he reports, actually has a shadow of 15 years of work, mistakes, false starts, late-night frenetic insights, and patient distillation. An “overnight success” takes 15 years.
In 1990 Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, had a substantial job in finance in New York City, but was drawn to the emerging online world.
When he told his manager he was going to leave to start selling books on the internet, his manager took him for a two-hour walk around Central Park trying to dissuade him.
Bezos had applied his “regret minimalisation framework”.
At 80, would he regret having taken the leap and starting an online business, even if it had failed? Answer, no.
Would he regret not having thrown himself into the internet if it turned out to be a huge success? Answer, yes.
Never Too Late to Be Great is filled with examples of people who started doing important things later in life. and many of the examples Butler-Bowden reports could never have been predicted from the person’s past record.
At 40, Bill Wilson was a desperate alcoholic without hope. At 43 he launched the worldwide movement Alcoholics Anonymous.
At 38, Jean Nidetch was an office clerk losing her battle with obesity. Two years later she was a different person, the founder of Weight Watchers International. Both were at their nadir when they unexpectedly found success.
Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi and Eleanor Roosevelt only came into their own after they were 40.
For some, fame only begins at 50. Annie Proulx, the hugely successful (financially and literally,) author of Postcards, The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain, was in her 50s. Ditto for Momofuko Ando, who perfected the recipe for instant noodles and the cup noodle, and went on inventing until he was 96.
At 50 Joanne Herring, the pampered, partying Texas socialite, changed the course of history through her battle to get America to arm the Afghan rebels and oust the Russians from Afghanistan. (How she achieved this through the agency of congressman “goodtime” Charlie Wilson is the basis of the Tom Hanks movie Charlie Wilson’s War.)
It is rarely ever too late - we live long, and everything takes more time than we estimate it to at first.
A woman came up to a musician after a particularly virtuoso performance, and breathlessly announced: "I would give half my life to play as you have done tonight."
The musician replied: "Madam, that is exactly what I have given."
Readability: Light +---- Serious
Insights: High --+-- Low
Practical: High ---+- Low
* Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy.
AN UNDUE amount of the literature on personal development is devoted to "transforming your life" in as short time as possible.
If the techniques actually worked as promised everyone who read the books, listened to the audios or went to the seminars should have been a superstar in a year or two.
What is almost always overlooked is the role of time and this is unfortunate because slow-cooked success is not only the norm, but is in fact the only path to genuine achievement.
But, I guess, that motivational speech at the annual gathering wouldn’t be all that motivating if the speaker promised that your life would change in 10 years if you followed a daily routine.
Butler-Bowden’s engaging (and, dare I say, motivating) book is founded on two principles. Firstly, most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year, but underestimate what they can achieve in a decade.
Secondly, you are rarely too old and it is rarely too late to achieve something that is truly important to you.
A hundred years ago, a boy born in America could have expected to live to 46. By 2000 this had gone up to 74 for males and almost 80 for females.
Across our now relatively long lifespans most of us are given not just a second chance, but the possibility of a third or even a fourth chance to succeed at what we really want to do.
From first being perceived as an obstacle, we can begin to see time in its true light: as the friend of success.
Warren Buffett became history’s greatest investor through seeing time as a friend. Having picked a company to invest in, he lets time reveal its value, often holding on to a stake for decades.
“No matter how great the talent or effort, some things just take time: you can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant,” he points out.
The 125-year-old General Electric, a firm with a market capitalisation larger than many countries, has had fewer leaders than the Vatican has had popes during the same period.
The most successful parts of GE are places where leaders have stayed in place for a long time.
There is a Chinese proverb: time and patience change the mulberry leaf to satin.
In early 1970s Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon and William Chase studied top international chess players and noticed that bar one, Bobby Fischer, none had reached the highest levels of their field without at least a decade of intense study and practice.
The “10-year rule”, as Simon and Chase called it, was later confirmed by studies of people in a range of fields including maths, music, swimming, tennis and literature.
Psychologist and creativity researcher Mihaly Csickszenthihalyi found people rarely become truly great in their field until they have first assimilated all its rules and passed all its tests – a process that takes at least a decade.
Henry Ford, for example, did not launch his motor company until he was 40. By then he had completed a long apprenticeship as a mechanic, inventor and failed businessman.
For every celebrated case of a prodigy, wunderkind or star that bursts into the limelight comparatively young, there are at least 40 or 50 more who have achieved greatness the longer, slower way.
Not having achieved great fame or wealth early is most often not an impediment, but an asset. Early success can be a double-edged sword.
It makes you “someone”, but also creates a weight of expectation and typecasting that can prove almost too heavy to carry.
Churchill’s failure at 40 was the foundation for his success at 60, but at the time it probably did not seem that way.
It was only the older Churchill, with greater moral courage, policy knowledge and standing among his peers, who was able to put up the fight against Hitler and save Europe from tyranny.
Jack Dorsy, one of the co-inventors and founder of Twitter, pointed out that although it may seem so, simple technologies don’t happen overnight.
What appears like a story of one to three years, he reports, actually has a shadow of 15 years of work, mistakes, false starts, late-night frenetic insights, and patient distillation. An “overnight success” takes 15 years.
In 1990 Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, had a substantial job in finance in New York City, but was drawn to the emerging online world.
When he told his manager he was going to leave to start selling books on the internet, his manager took him for a two-hour walk around Central Park trying to dissuade him.
Bezos had applied his “regret minimalisation framework”.
At 80, would he regret having taken the leap and starting an online business, even if it had failed? Answer, no.
Would he regret not having thrown himself into the internet if it turned out to be a huge success? Answer, yes.
Never Too Late to Be Great is filled with examples of people who started doing important things later in life. and many of the examples Butler-Bowden reports could never have been predicted from the person’s past record.
At 40, Bill Wilson was a desperate alcoholic without hope. At 43 he launched the worldwide movement Alcoholics Anonymous.
At 38, Jean Nidetch was an office clerk losing her battle with obesity. Two years later she was a different person, the founder of Weight Watchers International. Both were at their nadir when they unexpectedly found success.
Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi and Eleanor Roosevelt only came into their own after they were 40.
For some, fame only begins at 50. Annie Proulx, the hugely successful (financially and literally,) author of Postcards, The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain, was in her 50s. Ditto for Momofuko Ando, who perfected the recipe for instant noodles and the cup noodle, and went on inventing until he was 96.
At 50 Joanne Herring, the pampered, partying Texas socialite, changed the course of history through her battle to get America to arm the Afghan rebels and oust the Russians from Afghanistan. (How she achieved this through the agency of congressman “goodtime” Charlie Wilson is the basis of the Tom Hanks movie Charlie Wilson’s War.)
It is rarely ever too late - we live long, and everything takes more time than we estimate it to at first.
A woman came up to a musician after a particularly virtuoso performance, and breathlessly announced: "I would give half my life to play as you have done tonight."
The musician replied: "Madam, that is exactly what I have given."
Readability: Light +---- Serious
Insights: High --+-- Low
Practical: High ---+- Low
* Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy.
