Chapter - 05

The Chart To Your Success

Discovering Your Real Values

"Never take counsel of your fears," said Stonewall Jackson.

"Attitudes are more important than facts," said Dr. Karl Menninger.

"Act as though it were impossible to fail," said Dorothea Brande.

I agree with all three of those powerful personalities. But how much better if Jackson had suggested some constructive forms of counsel, if Dr. Menninger had defined attitudes, and Miss Brande had listed the actions in which failure is impossible. Before you can act on their advice, you need more information about yourself, and that is to be found in your chart. There is more there than meets the eye.

In mentioning chart reading, I am reminded of my navigator friend who wanted to plot his own course to success instead of following the traditional "roads" or "paths." As he put it bluntly, "Before I ever guided a plane across the Atlantic, I studied everything on navigation in the air school, and then everything else I could get my hands on. I studied map reading, and star charts, and instrument analysis, and meteorology. I never worked so hard in my life. I sure didn't want that plane and everybody aboard to get lost at sea, and do you know why? I would be in it."

In the same way, you have as much at stake. Before using your chart to set a course for success, you must know all about it, and all about everything related to it. More work, yes, but fascinating work. It's your chart, and your future success is in it.

In my interviews with clients, at this point I am frequently asked why I deal only with the analysis of achievements and success factors, and not at all with mistakes, failures and their cause. The argument advanced by them is that most of the success books to date recommend knowing your weaknesses as well as your strengths—so that you may make a list of both, weigh them, and if your strengths out-weigh your weaknesses, you're in.

That is a premise about as false as one can find. A weakness results from an absence of strength, and a strength is usually the presence of many strong factors. How can you counterbalance an abundance with a nothingness? Picasso is weak on Einstein's theory of relativity, and Einstein was weak on impressionistic painting. I can assure you that they did not become the most successful people in their fields by trying to counter-balance their weaknesses.

When the mind is sound, only strengths really count, as witness Helen Keller, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and, among thousands of others, my friend Hank Viscardi. Hank, who heads a successful factory and several civic and charitable organizations, refused to believe that his weakness counter-balanced his strength though several agencies to whom he went for help tried to convince him, in the kindliest manner possible, that as a legless man he could hope for little more than charity.

Your weaknesses offer no structural strength on which to build success. Achievements are solid and dependable; they happened and therefore are quite as real as mistakes. Sometimes a minor failure can be so painful and humiliating that its importance or weight is exaggerated out of all proportion. But how to discover how little of your woe is real and how much imaginary? You can't weigh it to discover if it is large or small, but today we can give you a substantial clue.

In the same way that you picked your ten greatest achievements, pick two or three of your greatest mistakes. Analyze them in terms of the success factors involved. I suggest you do this on a separate sheet of paper that can be destroyed immediately, since you will not want to have it around. Now compare the factors that figure in your "mistake list" with your Dynamic Success Factors. If your analysis has been sound, you will find that your "greatest mistakes" were concerned with experiences that made little or limited use of your strongest success factors. In short, you will find that your greatest mistakes, occurred in those areas where you were stretching yourself thin in a desperate and losing effort to make good.

In that manner you can see for yourself that your so-called weaknesses result from excursions into areas where your strengths can't be used to advantage. The muscle-bound weight-lifter who aspires to be an artist on the flying trapeze, the chess champion who would be full-back with the Los Angeles Rams, and the bank teller who would be a space pilot are traditional examples of what I mean. Yet today they are not as far-fetched as they seem. The weight-lifter might make an excellent catcher in a trapeze act, the chess player a masterful quarterback on complicated plays, and the bank teller a whiz at handling the computing machines and electronic controls that fly our space ships.

No matter what the area in which your Dynamic Success Factors might fall, in today's world of unlimited opportunities, there is a need for them, and unlimited room for your success. How to find the opportunities that are uniquely your own, or how to make them, will be discussed in detail later, but right now I'd like to intrude a seeming contradiction.

Not in your weaknesses will you find opportunity to develop strength, but through some of your strengths you will find weaknesses. By way of illustration, a few years ago I was doing some research work at Sing-Sing in the course of which I met a quaint character, somewhat withdrawn and quiet, but charmingly friendly and incapable of harming a flea. His achievement was that he was one of the best engravers in the world. So good was he, in fact, that he made the mistake of putting himself in competition with the legitimate engravers of stocks and bonds. The forged plates he turned out were excellent, and some, owing to the dominance of his artistic-design factor, were even better than the originals. To the mistake of being too good he then had to add the mistake of spreading himself thin in the areas where his success factors were few and far between. As a solitary artist, he was weak on organization, people, production, sales, systems, and just about every other factor on the list. He was caught when his salesmen, suspiciously unlike Wall Street brokers, offered cut-rate prices on certificates so perfectly engraved that they looked too good to be true.

Should the amiable little engraver read this book and learn how to use his talents more successfully when he is released a few years from now, he will not return to crime. He will have learned that enduring success cannot be built upon a mistake, and that any anti-social or criminal act is the biggest mistake of all. Hence there can be no such thing as a successful criminal. As my research at Sing-Sing proved time and time again, the first mistake—the criminal act—can only produce more and more mistakes until finally, in the confusion of trying to keep matters "straight," the big mistake, or often just a tiny slip, is made that leads to capture or death. Nor can the punishment of a long prison sentence teach a man to profit from his mistake. As penologists are finally discovering, unless the prisoner's honest achievements are recognized and his success factors given a chance to develop while his sentence is being served, he is, upon release, quite apt to repeat his mistakes.

But enough of the underworld where everything is upside down, and careers are based on mistakes instead of achievements. Strengths can still function as weaknesses and lead to set-backs in the world of honest people. For example, a skilled dress-maker in a Fifth Avenue shop could complete a grown so expertly and swiftly that her less-talented co-workers complained she was trying to show them up. When she tried to coach them in attaining some of her own skills, her well-meant overtures were misinterpreted, and she was accused of being "a meddlesome busybody trying to run everybody's business." In the end, to keep peace in the sewing room, her employer reluctantly let her go.

She was a worried woman when she came to see me, hoping I would locate the weaknesses that had caused her dismissal. I didn't have to advise her. By the time she had completed an analysis of her success factors she had discovered the source of her trouble. Of her dynamic factors—creative, design-art, energy-drive, individualist, manager, and production—she commented, "I guess they made me seem pretty bossy. Now that I see myself, I don't blame the girls for not liking me. What I have to do is learn to keep quiet."

She looked at me for a sign of agreement, but I said nothing. Finally she said slowly, "Yes, I see what you mean when you don't say anything. You don't believe in concealing strengths; you believe in using them to best advantage."

She had figured it out for herself, as you can. Today she is the supervisor and shareholder in a large dress-making shop. Her staff is raided constantly by rival firms because of the excellent training she gives her employees. As a highly-skilled supervisor, her "Let's try it this way," enlists immediate cooperation in the same way that, as co-worker, her, "Why don't you do it my way?" created immediate resentment. She doesn't even mind the staff-raiding. "What's good for the business," she told me recently, "is good for us." A happy, well-adjusted woman. I can also add that because the girls who leave her shop step into top-paying jobs in the industry, she never lacks for skilled replacements eager to do their best for her because of the extra training and inspiration she provides.

Her commendable attitude is being met with increasing frequency but it is far from being wide-spread. As I will have occasion to enlarge upon later, not all supervisors are so magnanimous. If never before has there been so much room at the top, and if never before has the search for ability been more desperate in all forms of business, it also follows that never before have the lower echelons been more reluctant to surrender good men to the top. They need good men, too, and no one in all honesty can tell them that their need is any less pressing than that of their superiors. I am as much in favor of a foreman's keeping a good man on a shovel as I am in favor of a company president's keeping a good vice-president in a secondary position until he—the president—reaches the age of retirement ten years hence. What I don't favor is the man's staying on the shovel, or the vice president's playing second fiddle if their achievements indicate something better.

Thus it is up to you to know and use your strengths to greatest advantage.

How To Strengthen Your Dynamic Success Factors

Your success factors will respond to exercise in the same way your muscles do. The more you use them, the stronger they will become according to certain well-defined laws. Recent studies by scientists trying to learn why humans behave the way they do show that an individual can, by application, improve any given talent by as much as 20 per cent. Before we can use their discovery, however, we must know what the talent is worth before we can tell what a 20 per cent improvement amounts to. If the talent is zero, a 20 per cent improvement is not going to help matters.

It is here that we can refer to your Success Pattern and Dynamic Success Factors for an accurate standard of values. Place a value of ten on the success factors checked once or twice, and give increasing values to the other factors in proportion to the number of check-marks. Place a value of 100 on the highest scoring of your Dynamic Success Factors.

Now let's consider the work and the results of improving each factor the maximum 20 per cent. After considerable and often unhappy exertion, the 10-point factor can be raised to an even dozen points. With the same amount of exertion under far happier circumstances, the 100-point factor can be raised to 120 points. The raise alone is worth twice as much as the 10-point factor was to begin with, and the two-point improvement in the latter adds up to a lot of hard work for very little reward.

With those figures before you, the only conclusion to be reached is that your success lies in applying yourself to the development of those factors where the number of points can be increased most emphatically.

To put it more bluntly, if you are in a job that does not require the use of your Dynamic Success Factors but does require, instead, the use of factors low in value, you may work yourself into a state of frustration without making any significant advance. You all know well-meaning, hard-working people like that who have driven themselves to exhaustion to accomplish what others around them are doing with ease. It is these people, too, who often make the most mistakes. In struggling to raise a ten-point factor to the 30-50-point efficiency required by a job, they put themselves under such a strain that mistakes are bound to follow.

In seemingly better shape is the man who uses a 40-point factor on a 50-point job. Through application he can increase his strength to 48 points and thus hold his job without too much strain and worry. The danger here is that in reaching what my previously mentioned executive friends would like to call "his capacity," he may think he has hit his whole peak instead of the peak of one of his weakest factors. In that state of mind he will hesitate to take a better job, feeling that if the present job is tough enough, the new one might be more so.

Not knowing what his Dynamic Success Factors are, he could be right. Should he, as often happens, find himself promoted to a higher job in the same field, his already strained ability could let him down sadly. On the other hand, should the promotion elevate him to a job in which his Dynamic Success Factors could be brought into play, his performance record, his attitude, and indeed his whole life would be vastly improved.

Introducing Functional Self-Analysis

It is one thing to know what your Dynamic Success Factors are and another to use them most effectively. In just what career or occupation do they apply? This is a complex question made attractive by the rich selection now offered to your discriminating eye. Today there are more than 30,000 different occupations or careers in the United States. These can be divided into five broad groups: The commercial world of finance and sales; the industrial world that transforms raw products into salable goods; the service world that teaches, transports, feeds, houses, cleans, etc.; the professional world of scientists, doctors, lawyers, accountants, consultants, etc.; and the ownership world of individual enterprise.

A breakdown of the five groups reveals 12 classifications: Artistic, computing, mechanical-technical, words, persuasion, ideas, science, human relations, problem solving, musical, physical, and leadership.

Here is a simple illustration of how the above information can be used. Suppose your Dynamic Success Factors are words, design-art, ideas, and writing. In combination they point more strongly to the commercial and professional groups than to industrial, service, or ownership, so your attention can be concentrated on those two groups.

Of the 12 classifications, supposed "words" is strongest—that it has been double-checked with several achievements on the analysis chart. Words are essential to both writing and the expression of ideas. Thus the occupation to be sought would be a words job strongly supported by ideas, design-art, and writing. Where is such a job to be found? Advertising, editing, publishing, television, and display printing are obvious fields that come to mind.

Now try to apply your own Dynamic Success Factors as indicated, selecting first one of the five groups and then those of the 12 classifications in which you find yourself the strongest. Maybe the job "made to order" for you will emerge with startling clarity on the first try. More likely further study is needed along the lines that follow. In either case, the advantage of this "success hunt" is that you conduct your trials painlessly on paper and in your mind instead of experimenting for months or years with one real job after another, hoping with blind faith that "This one will turn out all right." Furthermore, I can assure you that when you follow through on the next steps, the results will be more revealing than the months or years of "trial and error" job hunting.

For the next step you need a good public library which carries a comprehensive file of trade and professional magazines as well as books on business and industrial subjects. Here in a few hours of research you can dig up the information you seek on one or more of the jobs for which you feel qualified. Remember that it is your future you are researching, and not some dry subject like the fall of Rome. I might also add that the man who is well read on the current details and background of the company he would like to join is bound to make a favorable first impression when he goes in for his interview. One of the most frequent complaints of employers is that many of their own men, some of whom have worked for the company for years, know little about it beyond the confines of their own jobs.

The procedure you are now ready to start is called Functional Self-Analysis. The name was coined in 1948 by Walter Rust, Placement Director of the Harvard Business School, when we were working there together on a Placement Seminar. Under that name the procedure has become a part of the program I have been developing over a period of years, and was recommended to more than 40,000 alumni of the Harvard Business School.

Much improved in recent years, Functional Self Analysis now enables you to determine how effective you have been in the past, and how much more effective you can be when you function in a job that uses your best talents to best advantage. Through the discovery of your Dynamic Success Factors you know where and how you were most effective in the past. Through your library research you learn about the component parts—or functions—of a job, and can then relate these functions to your experiences and success factors.

To provide a pattern for your research, I will "functionalize" three typical jobs. First, write down a description of the job, providing as many details as you can from what you have learned of it. This is important, just as it was important that you write down the details of an achievement before you could analyze it.

1. SECRETARY: A position which requires accuracy, speed and neatness in taking and transcribing dictation of letters, reports, statements and meeting remarks. Also required is the ability to maintain orderly records and files, an ease in dealing with visitors by telephone or in person, and poise in dealing with superiors.

FUNCTIONS—six or more: Words—writing, speaking; filing; organization; technical requirements—shorthand and typing; neatness; poise.

2. ACCOUNTANT-OFFICE MANAGER: Supervisor of busy sales office, including eight girls and credit manager (assistant). Customers' orders are received and processed, likewise salesmen's reports and orders. The office handles billings, salaries and financial records under the direction of the Treasurer. The Office Manager is expected to prepare monthly balance sheets for the auditor. He will have a free hand in regard to systems and procedures, providing innovations do not increase costs and lead to greater accuracy, more meaningful facts, and lower budgets.

FUNCTIONS—six or more: Management (leadership) and organization; systems and procedures; personnel; report writing; budgets and cost controls; problem solving.

3. FOREMAN, machine shop: Responsible for supervising the production of twelve machine operators; also, inspection, maintenance, personnel and materials handling.

FUNCTIONS—six or more: Planning and organization; systems and procedures; trouble shooting; training personnel; cost reduction; production management; quality controls.

The previous examples show three different job descriptions, and how they may be broken down into six or more segments or functions. Now for the related self-analysis.

Before giving you these instructions, here is why I use the term—"related" self-analysis. Each year more than a million people all over the United States seek their first jobs. Many of them do not have direct experience in a particular function; where they do have, that's fine. But where they do not have experience, let us say, in selling, how are they to prove that they probably have sales talent?

The way to do it is to use "related" experiences. For instance, a sales job requires persuasiveness, and ability to meet and talk to people—among other things. A high school graduate who was on the debating team, and who had been elected president of his class, could use these experiences to prove his ability to meet and talk with people, and his ability to speak persuasively.

This technique of using "related" experiences is particularly valuable to the adult who wants to change his or her career, the widow who needs to find a job, the man who is too active for "retirement" and needs to continue working.

It is important to know this principle of "related experiences," because it will help you if your kind of work is automated, or otherwise becomes out of date. It will help you when you need to adapt your talents to meet changed conditions. It will give you added flexibility. When you know this, you will be better able to accept changes, take advantage of them, and even welcome them.

The example of "related self-analysis" that follows reveals how seemingly inconsequential experiences can become useful. When you do your own Functional Self Analysis, the attitude you should have is this: "My experiences themselves do not tell what I have learned from them; what I really have to offer is the sum of what I have learned from all my experiences. What I have learned is most clearly revealed by how I act when I am doing my best. The results that follow such action are achievements or successes. Consequently, I should associate parts of my achievements to parts of the kind of job I want, if I am to truly show what I have learned and what I can do best."

Two steps in F.S.A. have been demonstrated—first, the job description; second, the breakdown into six or more functions. For the third step, you need six or more blank sheets of paper. One function is written at the top of each page. Below it, write two or more experiences which show your highest level of effectiveness in relation to the function.

Here is how the "secretary" did it, without work experience; it is easier when you have work experience.

1. WRITING-SPEAKING-WORD POWER

A) Always did like to talk to people; member of the debating society at high school.

B) Successful as leading lady in a two-act church play.

C) Won spelling bee junior year in high school.

D) Won statewide American Legion essay contest, age 16.

E) As student government leader, frequently required to act as go-between for teachers and students. It was necessary to listen, understand and make myself understood, and also to get ideas across tactfully.

These examples leave no room for doubt about this applicant's ability to speak, write and spell. The first item, "A," flashes a red light; does she talk so much that she would interfere with others? When this is recognized, there is better possibility that it will be controlled—if there is need to control it. Item "B" also shows good memory. And item "E" indicates the possibility of tact and poise.

2. FILING

A. I'm the lost and found department in my family of five.
Everyone comes to me when they lose anything, and somehow I seem to find what has been lost.
B.The last half of my junior year I was a file clerk in the principal's office, and she complimented me on the orderliness of the files.

3. ORGANIZATION

A. As co-chairman of the senior prom, it was my job to make all the arrangements and follow them through to completion. I was told that it was the smoothest-running prom we ever had.
B. Can't think of anything else.

4. SHORTHAND-TYPING QUALIFICATIONS

By test, I type fifty words a minute, and take shorthand at 110 words a minute. I am known to be particularly accurate, and make very few mistakes in typing or transcription. With practice, I feel sure my speed will pick up.

Please note the attempt at an apology here, in the previous sentence. Functional Self Analysis is concerned with results, not excuses. Apologies are not helpful at this time, especially ones which can lead to self-confusion.

5. NEATNESS

A. My accuracy in typing, and my good spelling, help to insure neatness. I had top marks for accuracy during my last three terms.
B. My main hobby is sewing, and I have been complimented on two dresses I made and wear. This shows that I give attention to arrangement or design of things.
C. My report on the senior prom won third prize in the State for appearance and arrangement.

6. POISE

A. Student government leader: This job requires me to be able to get along with all kinds of students, as well as with teachers and some V.I.P. visitors.

B. Senior prom co-chairman: Many times I wanted to blow my top when things went wrong, but I realized that wouldn't do any good. So I just went ahead and did the best I could, and it worked out all right. I believe that
needed poise.

This example has shown how experiences that many people would think have little importance, can be used to help determine one's qualifications for a particular job. You will notice that one achievement may be used to support two or even more functions. It may also be obvious that a bit of weakness shows up under No. 3, Organization. If weaknesses were shown in several functions, this paperwork "experience" would disclose whether it would be necessary to think of a different type of job, or modify the job description to exclude the weak areas. Even when you know what your strongest talents are, when you know your Dynamic Success Factors, and the occupation for which you are best fitted, you will have problems to face, difficulties to overcome. You will need to know techniques that bring you the recognition you should have in the way of promotions, titles and money. You will need to know how to play office politics constructively (please don't shudder; the clean and effective techniques will be described later). You will need to know how to overcome lapses in your self-confidence (next chapter). And you may need to know how to change jobs. All of these can be done more effectively, now that you have come to know your best talents and other qualifications.

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