What Kind of Success do you Want to Be?

I have been thinking about success since reading this post by Christine, and after numerous discussions about business and personal growth.

It's actually not that complicated:

There are two classes of success: conventional and unconventional. Conventional success is linear; unconventional success non-linear. In the conventional space you can broadly expect your returns to be proportional to your efforts, in the unconventional space you are likely to fail far more than you succeed (but you might hit the jackpot).

A taxi driver is a conventional success role: the harder you work, the more you will earn - but you are never going to be a multi-millionaire. Most office jobs are like this: work hard, play by the rules, and you are likely to advance in time - but you are never going to become Richard Branson via this route.

Writer, actor; these are examples of unconventional success-type roles: the chances are you will be unsuccessful most of the time - maybe your whole life - but unlike your suited colleagues you actually have a shot at making it big. It's just not predictable.

So what does this model mean for businesses and individuals?

As a business your best bet may be a hybrid 80/20 model, with 80% of your operation relatively predictable (but constrained) and 20% of your investment in innovation: stuff which is likely to fail most of the time, but where you might get lucky.

Some cautionary notes:

Established businesses struggle to innovate. That is because having built a predictable source of revenue it is hard for a risk-averse, suited management team to stomach a model where money is invested in innovation with a low chance of return. They kill innovation with rules and risks and conventional thinking.

Another common mistake: don't hire conventional people, then expect them to be unconventional. The rules of conventional success are opposite to those of unconventional success: turn up on time, stick to the rules, do what you are told, don't take risks. If you hire these people, your are wasting your time trying to get them to think like entrepreneurs, or become innovators. Innovators are the people who scare you a bit : people you are reluctant to hire.

As an individual, think hard about what kind of success you want. There is no shame in working hard and playing by the rules to earn a decent income. In fact there seems to be an ugly expectation these days that everybody will become a billionaire celebrity. They won't. The rules of the two games are very different: conventional success is about reliability and conformity, unconventional success about exploration and risk. This is why many of the people who do well at school don't go on to change the world: school trains you to be a conventional success.

Conventional-success type roles are very much about being the same as everyone else. If you genuinely want to be an unconventional success then think about how you are deeply different: about the thing you have that no-one else has. And prepare to fail at everything, your whole life.

Finally - one approach you might consider is to mirror the 80/20 business strategy outlined above - i.e. hold down a boring day-job and write a best-seller in your free time. But a warning: this 'splits' your personality and builds significant psychological stress into your day.