In his brilliant book, ‘The Atomic Habits’, James Clear helps us appreciate the benefits of small improvements made consistently over a long period of time compounding to build habits that translate into behaviour can help fulfil our aspirations. In this piece, he pulls up this 84yr old speech by Albert Gray of Prudential Insurance delivered to a group of insurance underwriters.
In his speech highlighting the secrets to success, Gray invokes the ‘inversion technique’ that Charlie Munger has now made so famous, originally credited to mathematician Carl Gustav Jacobi. It is a powerful problem-solving approach that flips conventional thinking on its head. Instead of focusing solely on how to achieve success, this method encourages us to consider how to avoid failure.
In his speech, Gray goes: “The common denominator of success – secret of success of every individual who has ever been successful – lies in the fact that he or she formed the habit of doing things that failures don’t like to do.”
“The things that failures don’t like to do are the very things that you and I and other human beings, including successful people, naturally don’t like to do. In other words, we’ve got to realize right from the start that success is something which is achieved by the minority of people, and is therefore unnatural and not to be achieved by following our natural likes and dislikes nor by being guided by our natural preferences and prejudices.”
Using insurance sales people as an example, he goes on to show why those who succeed do better at prospecting, calling and selling than others.
But how does one get to the habit of doing things that you don’t naturally like? Purpose.
“Why are successful people able to do things they don’t like to do while failures are not? Because successful people have a purpose strong enough to make them form the habit of doing things they don’t like to do in order to accomplish the purpose they want to accomplish….And may I pause to suggest to you managers and agents that when one of your good producers goes into a slump, the less you talk about production and the more you talk about purpose, the sooner you will pull that agent out of that slump?
Many people with whom I have discussed this common denominator of success have said at this point, “But I have a family to support and I have to make a living for my family and myself. Isn’t that enough of a purpose?”
No, it isn’t. It isn’t a sufficiently strong purpose to make you form the habit of doing the things you don’t like to do for the very simple reason that it is easier to adjust ourselves to the hardships of a poor living than it is to adjust ourselves to the hardships of making a better one. If you doubt me, just think of all the things you are willing to go without in order to avoid doing the things you don’t like to do. All of which seems to prove that the strength which holds you to your purpose is not your own strength but the strength of the purpose itself.”
He ends the speech with why our purpose should be more practical than visionary yet more based on emotional than rational or logical grounds using a couple of examples. Worth reading.
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