Four special words from Granddad’s Dictionary
June 26, 2021
(This meditation was a gift to Patrick Moffitt, my eldest grandson, on his graduation from high school this May)
What is success? In a perfect world, we each get to decide for ourselves what will make our life a success. We may decide and then change our mind many times, but to fulfill our happiness, we each must be the Captain of our own ship, the master of our own destiny. This is the self evident truth memorialized in our Declaration of Independence, “…that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
We can adopt and live by four very powerful values that will inevitably lead us to discover our destiny and navigate our unique success, and happiness. To understand the importance of these values, we must first realize that each of us accomplishes very few things in life completely alone. We are all chosen and we all choose others, to collaborate or to teach or to learn from, thousands of times and in thousands of ways throughout our lives. Our first “team” efforts are in the family. Then at play, in classrooms, in sports, on committees, at work, choosing friends or partners… the possibilities are infinite. Teams can last for moments as in a brief discussion, or for the length of a game or project or a season, or for a lifetime. In everything we do we depend on other people to be on our team; to help us succeed. Perhaps the best way to express the importance of our four powerful values is to think of them as skills and behavior we look for when selecting teammates. These four values are Integrity, Curiosity, Goals, and Perseverance.
Think of yourself choosing teammates for any endeavor. First, you need someone you can trust. You also want someone with a zest for learning, someone who will learn and make the team stronger over time. You want someone who will help to develop and then share and pursue goals for the team. You want someone who will stick with the team when times get tough, someone who will not give up, even when things seem completely hopeless. When you find such a person, don’t you want them on your team? If you want to be on the best teams, don’t you need to become that person? Let’s dig a little deeper into the meaning of these four values.
Integrity
No team of any size or duration can be successful without trust, and trust is not possible without integrity. Integrity is telling the truth, and much, much more. It is telling the whole truth all the time. If you only tell the truth most of the time, who is to know when you are not telling the truth? If you don’t always tell the whole truth, who is to know what important truths you are withholding? Integrity is always being true to your word. It is believing in your teammates as peers. It is living the golden rule. How can you better describe integrity than doing unto others, as you would have them do unto you? Without integrity, any effort or organization is chaos. Integrity allows people to leverage off of one another, to depend on one another, to believe in one another.
Integrity is an ageless value. Henry Ford said, “Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.” Integrity drives us to think and act as if the whole world is watching all the time. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus opined, five hundred years before Christ, “Good character is not formed in a week or a month. It is created little by little, day by day. Protracted and patient effort is needed to develop good character.”
Character or integrity is not something we are born with. We are born with a blank slate and are taught or teach ourselves how to build our character and our behavior so that others trust and depend on us. If we do this well, all of civilization is at our disposal. If we fail to cultivate our own integrity we are destined to live alone, or to live in chaos, or both.
Curiosity
We are also born with a clean slate, empty of worldly knowledge. We do inherit some basic instincts for survival. Perhaps the most useful of these is curiosity. The infant begins immediately to explore the information its senses provide… to feel mommy’s breasts, to taste her milk, to touch her face and smell her aroma, to perceive and explore motion. Every perception goes into the infinitely interconnected memory system in the infant’s brain. Every memory can be accessed to associate with new perceptions. The puppy’s fur is short and his bark sharp. The kitten’s fur is silky and its purr soothing. The child, a little later, learns that things have names and wants to know the name of everything. We teach rules and it wants to know why. Then why it rains and how does the umbrella work. Every new bit of information, every image, every thought is stored in the memory bank of the infant or child’s brain.
Without thinking about it, all of our lives, every day, we collect information, images, experiences and thoughts. We cross reference them, sort and file them. Every time we ask a question, we practice filing away the answer and thinking about what else in our memory bank this new information might relate to. Just like hitting a baseball, the more we do it, the better we get. The more questions we ask, the better we get at building and using this magnificent memory bank.
In the course of our lives we often face questions for which there is no ready answer. This is the fastball we have been practicing for. The more we have practiced using our memory bank and the more we have stored in it, the more likely we can put together a combination of seemingly unrelated images and find a clue to the creation of a new idea. At the simplest, most ancient level, the wheel probably emerged from the mental image of a rolling log. More recently, the image of a falling apple caused Newton to ask, “Why does the apple fall toward the earth and not toward the moon and the answer became the law of gravity. The Wright brothers won the race to first flight by studying the geometry and aerodynamics of birds’ wings and applying light structure and machinery principles from their bicycle shop. The fundamental nature of innovation is applying two or more observations from different contexts to answer a challenge unmet by conventional wisdom. Curiosity is the force of character to always question how or why, to always file the answers and bring the images back through different channels of neurons to meet new intellectual challenges. This is why curiosity is the second of our four values necessary and sufficient for success.
These first two values, integrity and curiosity, are closely related. Albert Einstein observed, “Most people say it is intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong; it is the character!” His point was that a great scientist must never be afraid to be wrong. Science is only “settled” according to what we now know and can measure. Proving something beyond or something different from what we think we know is the way we advance science. Great scientists, indeed all truly successful people, are curious enough to question their deepest and the most widely held convictions. They have the integrity to accept that new answers, including new science can prove any of us very right or very wrong at the most unexpected or inconvenient moments.
Goals
The inventor of the wheel in pre-history had a goal to move something. Newton had a goal to understand the forces between the planets. The Wright brothers had a goal to build a heavier than air flying machine. Every journey of any length or difficulty either begins with a goal or has an accidental result. Goals are essential if a person or a team is to clarify their purpose, to visualize success, and channel energy. Goals can be about this moment, such as to finish this task or to win this game. Goals can also be lifetime drivers such as to win Olympic Gold or a Nobel Prize. Important achievements rarely occur by accident. Any success short term or long term, simple or world changing must be driven by goals. Without goals, we are aimless, our efforts are random, and outcomes are accidental. Without goals we cannot recognize success when we see it. More fundamentally, without purpose in our lives, we have no reason for being.
President Lincoln said, “The best way to predict your future is to create it!” In America for Lincoln, and for each of us today, anything is possible. But to convert possibilities to realities we each must create a vision of our destiny, and then goals for each step along the way.
Perseverance
Goals alone, however, are not enough. Goals give us self-directed guidance and focus. We draw the energy to accomplish these goals from within ourselves. That energy must be continuously renewed as we face accidents and obstacles along the way… and there are always accidents and obstacles. Perseverance is the act of persistence. It is the act of being steadfast. It is moving ahead without expecting others to catch us when we fall. It is keeping our confidence when others lose hope. It is translating confidence into action. The importance of perseverance has been described too many times to count. Thomas Edison said, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close to success they were when they gave up.” Teddy Roosevelt said, “Complaining about a problem without posing a solution is called whining.” C. S. Lewis said, “God allows us to experience the low points in life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.”
Success, Happiness, Family and Freedom
To fully appreciate the power of these four values, Integrity, Curiosity, Goals and Perseverance, we need to think about how we learn them, why they can work for everyone, and why they work especially well in a free society.
We learn these values beginning at birth. We learn them from our mothers and fathers, our grandparents, from our priests and ministers, from a few of our teachers and coaches. A great education system is helpful, but the uncurious and unmotivated student gets little benefit from it. A student with a zest for learning and focused on goals will flourish even in the lowest rated schools. It is individuals, not school systems that drive individual behavior. We learn the foundations of our values and behaviors at home. We begin to practice these values long before going to school. We continue to hone them throughout our lives. Often we learn them from failures. They have been learned in the cradle, at school, at work, on the battlefield, in many competitive sports and even in prisons. All it takes is loving teachers and open minds to build our character and train us to live these four values and find success and happiness throughout our lives.
It does not matter that we each are endowed with different talents and blessed with different starting points in life. No matter who you are or where you start, you can always visualize your destiny in any way you can imagine. You can always follow the path of Integrity, Curiosity, Goals and Perseverance to achieve that destiny. If this were not true, we would not so often hear, “I was the first in my family to finish college or the first to travel to Asia!” If this were not true neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama could have traveled from humble and broken families to become Presidents of the United States. If these values did not matter we would not see many with “privileged” birth falter and achieve far below the level of their parents and below their expectations
It does matter that we can best exercise these four values in a free society. We each freely embrace, or not, each of these values. But our exercise of them can be limited by the rules of society. In a place without free speech, whomever controls speech, controls what information is available to satisfy your curiosity. In a place governed by a dictator or a controlling party, rule by law inevitably evolves to rule by men, and those in charge inevitably limit the destiny of most of the population to favor themselves. In a society with frozen classes such as kings, queens, lords and ladies, Brahmins and Untouchables, or members of “The Party,” those classes define destinies. Take a moment to appreciate the importance of mobility and fluidity in America to our free exercise of these four very magic values.
We of course are not completely free of rigidity or friction, but think about this: In 2019 there were 18.6 million millionaires in the United States. Nearly one quarter of these are people of color or of Hispanic or Asian decent. Eighty percent of these did not inherit but earned their fortunes. For those who inherit millions, their fortunes do not typically last more than three generations. Each year individuals, rich and poor, give over $300 billion to charities to help others find better destinies. When fortunes are inherited, what is not taxed or given to charity gets diluted with each generation. Each member of the fourth generation that has preserved but does not grown a large bequest is likely to inherit no more than 5% to 10% of its initial value, and frequently much less.
There is also great fluidity in American incomes. The median tenure of a CEO of a large cap American corporation is five years. The average NFL Career lasts less than four years. Elected officials face unemployment at every election. Every year there are people with new successes among the most wealthy and people who lose wealth through death or errors or economic misfortune.
In 2019, Americans started three and one half million new businesses. In each year one in every eighty-six Americans visualize their destiny as becoming the master of their own business and execute a major step. Many of these businesses are very small. Many will fail, but many will succeed and next year there will be a whole new crop. Each one of these that is founded with Integrity, Curiosity, Goals and Perseverance will be among those most likely to succeed. Each of the athletes who follow these principles will be more likely to succeed in their sport. Each year, many newly successful people will climb into the top income categories replacing others no longer at the top of their game. Each year many people in every imaginable endeavor grow and raise the top of their game.
Your personal purpose and vision of success can be anything you imagine. It may, but does not need to have any particular financial dimension. You can be thankful that in America you can be master of whatever destiny you define for yourself. Your success and your happiness will depend largely on your dedication to the practice of Integrity, Curiosity, Goals and Perseverance.
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts.”
WINSTON CHURCHILL