Is There a Science to Success?

Posted on April 28, 2010 by The LearnVest Staff

Woman with laptop.We often look at chronically successful people and wonder how they do it. Gene pool? Supportive family? Nose surgically attached to the grindstone? All of the above? Entrepreneur.com columnist Scott Halford, who we are big fans of, has some idea:

Earl Miller of MIT and Mark Histed of Harvard found that our neurons retain memory and become more finely tuned when we succeed, but they don’t when success isn’t present. There is a difference between the absence of success and the presence of failure. For instance, when a mistake leads to a negative consequence, we have a tendency to learn from it and veer in another direction. We don’t necessarily learn what to do, but we learn what not to do. On the other hand, when there is absence of success but no apparent mistakes (you lose money in the stock market but have nothing tangibly to do with it), nothing appears to change in the brain, and relatively little–if any–learning takes place.

Here’s what goes on that makes success so…well, successful. When you’re learning something new and you have a success, even a small one, your brain gets a little reward bump of the pleasure neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine is used to thicken the neural pathways needed to learn a new skill. Your brain is drawn to activities that give you those little pleasure bumps. You can actually become addicted to success. But the big news is that the more you succeed, the longer your brain retains the proper information to help you succeed again.
To get onto the success train, Halford gives his readers five key tips:

1. Don’t set out to learn from mistakes. Set out to succeed.

2. Be positive.

3. Practice, practice, practice.

4. Acknowledge success.

5. Seek out positive feedback.

For more details on each of these points, see Halford’s article. While it’s written as advice for company leaders there’s no reason why you can’t adopt its advice for yourself. (We could say something about “You, Inc.” but we’re concerned about the utter cheesiness of that expression.)

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  • http://twitter.com/emerigent/lists/memberships Emeri Gent [Em]

    I sometimes feel that we are living in a society based on the premise of “monkey-see, monkey do”. I don't wonder as much why some people are chronically successful, as much as when I look at how we apply research done one primates as equivalency pointers to human behavior.

    If human success can be predicted through the behaviour of a chimp, it probably suggests to me that our attitudes to success and failure continue to be equally primal and baseline. If we are not trying to find the elixir of success then we are trying to find the formula for happiness and in all of these one dimensional searches, there is this constant reaching for short-term satisfaction rather than delayed gratification.

    We don't need a survey or major research work to remind us that if we look at what successful people do, we can unearth what it is we are not doing. Yet if we are not creating a dog-eat-dog culture, we are more probably continue to be childish brats fixated on either-or propositions.

    That form of blind ambition, self-delusion and fear of the negative or fear of failure does not mean that short term techniques such as “fake it till you make it” should be abandoned. Rather it tells me that I must be alert to the mythologies that make our society tick and face up to the realities of our own existence, lest I start bifurcating and segmenting my mind to look for touchstones of superficiality or alters of superstition – to find some magic pill that projects our need to “be more”.

    If we are truly evolved monkey's then my future path to success must surely come by learning to climb the ladder of success – so then why not do research on how monkey's climb tree's. Maybe that is what success really is then, learning to be a smarter or better or superior monkey?

    If we however are truly intelligent then future studies will simply confirm that, but if we are apes with intellectual abilities, then I am going to start enjoying taking trips to the local zoo.

    [Em]

  • http://twitter.com/emerigent/lists/memberships Emeri Gent [Em]

    I sometimes feel that we are living in a society based on the premise of “monkey-see, monkey do”. I don't wonder as much why some people are chronically successful, as much as when I look at how we apply research done on primates as equivalency pointers to human behavior.

    If human success can be predicted through the behaviour of a chimp, it probably suggests to me that our attitudes to success and failure continue to be equally primal and baseline. If we are not trying to find the elixir of success then we are trying to find the formula for happiness and in all of these one dimensional searches, there is this constant reaching for short-term satisfaction rather than delayed gratification.

    We don't need a survey or major research work to remind us that if we look at what successful people do, we can unearth what it is we are not doing. Yet if we are not creating a dog-eat-dog culture, we are more probably continue to be childish brats fixated on either-or propositions.

    That form of blind ambition, self-delusion and fear of the negative or fear of failure does not mean that short term techniques such as “fake it till you make it” should be abandoned. Rather it tells me that I must be alert to the mythologies that make our society tick and face up to the realities of our own existence, lest I start bifurcating and segmenting my mind to look for touchstones of superficiality or alters of superstition – to find some magic pill that projects our need to “be more”.

    If we are truly evolved monkey's then my future path to success must surely come by learning to climb the ladder of success – so then why not do research on how monkey's climb tree's. Maybe that is what success really is then, learning to be a smarter or better or superior monkey?

    If we however are truly intelligent then future studies will simply confirm that, but if we are apes with intellectual abilities, then I am going to start enjoying taking trips to the local zoo.

    [Em]