Courage to Accept and Dedication to Improve Are Two Keys to Success

On 10 August 1979 India's first Satellite Launch Vehicle, SLV 3, lifted off from Sriharikota carrying a small satellite. The first stage worked, and then the second stage malfunctioned and the vehicle fell into the Bay of Bengal. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, the project director, later recalled in his memoir Wings of Fire that the chairman of the space agency, Satish Dhawan, took the failure on himself at the press conference and told journalists that the team had done well and would succeed next time. In July 1980 SLV 3 put the Rohini satellite into orbit, and this time Dhawan asked Kalam to speak to the press. The episode shows two keys, the courage to accept and the dedication to improve.

Acceptance in this sense does not mean resignation. It is the willingness to see what is true, to acknowledge a failure, a limit or a hard condition without denial or blame. It takes courage because the facts are often unwelcome and the pride of the person or the team is at stake. The prayer of Reinhold Niebuhr, often adopted by recovery groups, asks for the serenity to accept the things that cannot be changed, the courage to change the things that can and the wisdom to know the difference. Acceptance marks the starting point of any improvement, since only what is faced can be fixed.

Improvement requires dedication, the steady application of effort over time. Anders Ericsson's research on experts in music, chess and sport, published in 1993, showed that the best performers had practised in a particular way, which he called deliberate practice. It involves working on tasks just beyond one's present ability, receiving immediate feedback and repeating until the skill is mastered. Hours alone do not account for success, but hours of focused, critical practice do. Angela Duckworth gave the quality a popular name in 2007 as grit, passion and perseverance for long term goals.

The two keys work together. Carol Dweck has distinguished between a fixed mindset, in which people believe that ability is innate and failure shows a lack of it, and a growth mindset, in which they believe it can be developed through effort. People with a fixed mindset tend to avoid challenges and hide mistakes, because errors threaten their image. Those with a growth mindset are willing to admit failure because they treat it as information. Acceptance makes learning possible and learning makes improvement real. Without the first, the second has nothing to work on, and without the second, the first is only a painful honesty.

Acceptance makes learning possible and learning makes improvement real.

Stories of success are often stories of this kind. Abraham Lincoln lost several elections before becoming president. The basketball player Michael Jordan was cut from his school team and in a famous advertisement said that he had missed more than nine thousand shots in his career and lost almost three hundred games, and that this was why he succeeded. Marie Curie persisted through years of laborious work in a leaking shed. Closer to home, the cricketer Sachin Tendulkar is said to have practised the same strokes at dawn for years, and Kalam himself failed the entrance test for the air force and turned to rocketry.

The two keys also describe good teaching. A teacher who tells a student plainly where his answer is wrong, and then sets exercises just beyond his reach, is practising acceptance and improvement together, and the student learns that failure is information. Coaches do the same, filming a player's technique so that he can see his errors, and many sportspeople credit video review for rapid gains. Seeing oneself accurately is painful, and the pain is the price of progress.

Organisations that succeed also practise acceptance and improvement. The Toyota production system encourages any worker to stop the line on spotting a defect, and the company asks why five times to find the root cause of a problem. Airlines investigate every accident openly and share the findings, so that commercial aviation has become far safer than it once was. In medicine, hospitals that discuss errors candidly have seen better outcomes than those that conceal them. The culture of blame leads to concealment and the culture of learning leads to progress.

The keys do not open every door, however. Success depends on factors outside a person's control, such as the family he is born into, the school he attends, the health he enjoys and plain luck. The economist Robert Frank has argued that successful people consistently underestimate the role of luck in their achievements. A child who is malnourished or who has no school nearby cannot compensate by courage and dedication alone. To say that success is a matter of the right attitude can be a way of blaming those who lack opportunity for their circumstances.

There is also a risk in each key. Acceptance can slide into resignation, a belief that nothing can be changed, and the poor and powerless have often been advised to accept their lot. In the spirit of the topic, acceptance has to be of the facts, and not of the conclusion that nothing can be done. Dedication, for its part, can become obsession, a refusal to admit that a goal is hopeless or has become harmful. A person who throws years at an impossible aim shows persistence, but not wisdom. Knowing when to let go is part of both courage and dedication. The wise improver revises the goal when the evidence demands it, and counts that revision as a form of courage.

The topic treats success as the result, but the word is elastic. Dhawan and Kalam measured theirs by an orbit, and others measure theirs by a family's contentment or an honest day's work. The same two habits serve each of these, but the person must decide what he is trying to succeed at. Without that choice, even a person with great courage and dedication may reach a place that does not satisfy him, and find, having improved at everything but the question of purpose, that the key was cut for another lock.