The Success Code

Introduction

You deserve success

Success is not a selfish aspiration. It’s when we’re successful that we are most able to give to others: our family, friends, community and wider society. It’s when we’re successful that we are most empowered to be innovative, creative and compassionate. Each and every one of us deserves success! Each and every one of us is capable of achieving it.

We have evolved to become the most powerful and successful species to walk the planet. How has this happened? After all, we’re not the strongest nor the fastest. This extraordinary success has been driven by our unparalleled capacity to learn. We have an innate curiosity to seek out the unknown, which has driven massive exploration, expansion and growth. Learning is the key to our success as a species – and now more than ever, learning is the key to our own individual, personal success. Learning not just when we are young but across our entire lifetime. And learning is at the heart and centre of The Success Code. You will learn how to succeed and, at the same time, you will learn the best way to learn.

This is your opportunity to plan for your success, rather than leave it to chance or the decisions of others. You don’t need to wait to be selected for an opportunity – whether that’s a course, a promotion, or a new career. Our default position is not to make big plans for the overall direction of our lives; we tend to live more day-to-day, troubleshooting problems as they come along. Any highly successful person or organisation wouldn’t dream of taking on a big project, setting up a new business, planning a big event or changing direction without a fully thought-out plan and the strategies to help them get there. So why don’t we plan for the most important thing we have: the way we choose to live our life? Much of the time we settle for whatever comes along, even complaining that it’s not fair if things don’t go our way.

Not so anymore. With The Success Code as your guide, take time out. Step back from the detail of your life, gain a broader perspective and devote time to planning for what you want and how you are going to get there. Then take purposeful and constructive steps towards it.

Life can be tough, full of challenges and obstacles. Whatever your current situation or difficulties – if you’re stuck in a rut, overwhelmed with stress, or struggling to develop your career, navigate relationships, deal with finances, bring up children – it’s learning that will empower you to find solutions and bring about the change you want every time.

You can take charge, even change direction and determine where you want to go. You can continue as you are, or you can choose to skilfully manoeuvre yourself to a position where you can grow, develop and thrive.

Learning gives you the tools to take on these challenges, both big and small. The point is not that you will always learn how to solve your specific problems, but that learning builds your knowledge and skills, confidence and self-esteem, strength and resilience, enabling you to deal with whatever life throws your way.

Whatever your dreams – whether it’s to land your perfect job, change career, set up a new business, go to university, live a life free from financial worries, pursue your interests, enjoy your family and friends – you can take steps to create a life full of opportunities and choices. If you do nothing, you risk letting life pass you by. But with learning you become the narrator of your own story, your ambitions and goals.

Why now?

We stand out for the extraordinary progress we have made. In the last century alone we have invented flying machines to take us wherever we want to go, vaccines that save billions of lives, and the internet, which connects billions of people. We have put a man on the Moon and mapped the human genome.

Who knows what the world will look like in 50 or 100 years from now? As a child, I remember vividly hearing that one day we’d all be driving around in cars in the sky and that traffic jams would be a thing of the past. I couldn’t wait to see how that would work. How wrong was that? Meanwhile, we had one big, bulky phone which we’d all fight over at home, with a cord that wasn’t quite long enough to take anywhere to get any privacy, yet no one predicted mobile devices that would let us run our lives from the palm of our hands, connect us to anyone, anywhere in the world, and provide us with unlimited information and entertainment.

We’re entering a new age. It is always difficult to predict the future with any certainty, but now more so than at any other time in our history. Scientific, technological and digital advances mean that we are living in times of unprecedented progress – and with this comes greater uncertainty.

The only thing we know for sure is that change is inevitable – a prospect that is both exciting and daunting. Our working lives will undoubtedly change, with certain jobs likely to disappear. When I began my career, the job for life was a common phenomenon, even an aspiration, now it is rarely an option. I was not expecting to have a portfolio career and change careers several times, but now this is common. And looking further into the future, for those just starting out, we have to ask: will we be working at all? Will our economic structures become so different that we spend less time working and more on other things? And what will these ‘other’ things be? Leisure, helping others, being creative and innovative, developing ourselves?

We are now more likely to witness huge, unrecognisable changes in our own lifetimes, given the fact that we are more likely to live significantly longer than ever before. In the year 1800, global life expectancy was only 29 years of age; now it stands at over age 71 and rising.1 By 2100, it is predicted to rise to almost 82 years,2 and in many countries it is heading for the milestone of 100 much sooner.3 This makes it impossible to say what the world will look like in our lifetime, whether 20, 40, 60 or even 80 years from now.

Opportunities to learn

There are so many unanswered questions about the future, and with this uncertainty comes a sense of unease. How do we prepare when we don’t know what lies ahead? Stepping into the unknown can be daunting. Rather than see it as the cause of major disruption, see it as the most extraordinary opportunity.

The opportunities to learn are greater now than ever. The availability of information and knowledge has exploded, and the way we communicate this knowledge and connect with each other has reached new levels. Two hundred years ago, you would have had very limited access to knowledge: there were few newspapers, no radio, television or public libraries. And even if there was access to books, very few people could read. It’s astounding to think that if you had lived 200 years ago, in 1820, you would most likely have been unable to read, given that as few as 12 per cent of the world’s population were literate. 4 Knowledge was passed by word of mouth, from person to person. Your view of the world was limited to what lay within your own sphere.

Now, by contrast, most of us learn to read and write at a young age, with 86 per cent of the world’s population able to do so, and the figure is continuing to rise. For most of us, it’s a given that access to knowledge is unlimited – via books, media and online, much of which is freely available.

Already we take the internet for granted, forgetting that it’s still brand new. In 1990, only 0.5 per cent of the world population was online. In the year 2000, it was still less than 7 per cent. Now over half of us around the world are online and this figure is rising rapidly, with an estimate of more than 640,000 people going online for the first time each day. 5 This means easier access to knowledge, easier connections to people around the world and far greater opportunities to learn.

It’s not just the increasing availability of knowledge that is so remarkable, it’s the addition of new knowledge. What’s of most interest for us here – and what compelled me to write this book – is the explosion of new scientific findings and exciting research in the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience. So much work has been done in recent years, helping us to understand how our mind works, how to motivate ourselves and how best to learn, grow and develop ourselves.

The opportunities are enormous, so why don’t we take them?

The opportunities to learn, and the imperative to do so, are now greater than ever before, yet instead of a deep respect for learning, we often have a stubborn resistance to it. What’s holding us back? If it’s obvious that learning is the key to success, why don’t more people want to learn – not just when young but across their lifetimes? The opportunities are enormous and the benefits immense, so, why don’t people take them?

I can see three reasons. Firstly, for much the same logic that many of us often fail to look after our physical health. We know that exercising is good for us, enabling us to live healthier, longer, happier lives, but even so, many of us are nowhere near as physically active as we could be. Why? Because it takes effort and motivation. It can be hard work and doing nothing just is easier. What’s easier in the short term, though, makes life harder in the long term. The same is true of learning.

Secondly, many people have been put off learning: a bad experience at school or with exams easily quashes a love of learning, leaving only disillusionment and damaging both motivation and confidence. People don’t know how to learn in the right way, meaning that learning can be stressful and difficult, and this inevitably puts people off.

And thirdly, we live busy lives. With progress has come an increased level of busyness. Our lives have become more complex and multi-layered, and many people feel under great pressure and struggle to cope with the stresses of everyday life. The digital age can leave us feeling overwhelmed by too much information and too many distractions. Rather than taking advantage of all the knowledge available, we may be tempted by the easier option, trawling through social media and picking up celebrity gossip that we know, in our heart of hearts, doesn’t need our attention.

We don’t devote the time to taking care of ourselves and fulfilling our extraordinary potential. Too often, we fail to put in place the structures that will support our action. Too often, sadly, we have low expectations of ourselves.

Success comes from learning, not luck

We achieve success as a result of what we learn, not what we are gifted at birth. It’s easy to argue that success boils down to luck: the talents we are born with, our families. If you’re born into a rich family, or to nurturing parents, or are born smart, or whatever advantage you have, you’re lucky. Not so anymore: with much freer access to opportunities to learn, and greater knowledge of how we can learn, we no longer have to allow luck to be the determining factor.

I was brought up on the idea that luck is not the determining factor. I could see that with my own eyes. My father had a particularly unlucky start in life yet went on achieve success, living life on his terms. His world was turned upside down at the age of four. Early one morning on 10 May 1940, he was ripped away from his wider family and friends and taken by his parents on the last coach out of Holland. They had nothing but the clothes on their backs. The Nazis gave chase and the driver of the coach was shot, but one of the passengers quickly decided to take over and keep going. They were taken to the port of Rotterdam, across a wonky gangplank, onto a cattle ship and then the safety of England.

After a few weeks in a London flat where an incendiary bomb went directly through the bottom of his parents’ bed, followed by a further couple of weeks sleeping in a station of the London Underground, they moved to Wales. He has fond memories of growing up in a little village called Lower Cwmtwrch, in the valley 14 miles north of Swansea. He lived in poverty, struggling to speak Welsh at school, and left at 15 with no qualifications. Soon after, further tragedy struck when his mother and brother both died. He left home to find work – with no qualifications or family to help him, traumatised and with little apparent prospect of success.

When he turned 21 he decided to take control and change the trajectory of his life. He undertook to master The Knowledge, the famous qualification for London taxi drivers which has the reputation for being the hardest of all such tests in the world. It required learning 320 basic routes, 25,000 streets and 20,000 landmarks located within a 6-mile radius of Charing Cross. He accelerated his learning, completing what should have taken up to four years in only 11 months, while juggling various side jobs. He tells us that it was this qualification that changed his life – not just because he now had the means to earn well but because learning itself empowered him. It changed his view of the world and made him realise that his potential was far, far greater than he had anticipated. Nothing made him prouder than this achievement, so much so that he carried on renewing his licence every three years, right up until his 80th birthday, long past the time he had any need for it. Mastering The Knowledge was the springboard for transforming his entire life, and he went on to build his own business and a large family, achieving success firmly on his own terms. He taught me loud and clear that life is far less a matter of luck and far more what you make of it.

We have greater choices than ever before to push beyond our circumstances and make of our life what we choose. We can’t determine where we start in life, but we can determine where we go from here. The opportunities are there for the taking, we just have to know how.

How to use this book

This is your life. You are taking control of it and it’s for you to choose how to use this book. Treat this as a project; Project You, if you like. You may choose to read it all the way through in one go and then go back to work on exercises and make your plans. You may choose to go through slowly, doing exercises and planning as you go along, or you may choose to use it as a constant companion and a resource to guide you through the different stages. It’s your journey, so you get to decide what works best for you.

Live your life to the full. The more you learn, the more empowered you become to live the life you choose – a bigger, bolder, more exciting life. A life with more meaning, where you are more deeply engaged, fulfilled, happier, making better decisions and choices. Where you grow, adapt and maximise your potential and create the life you want to live.

What a better place the world will be if we can all achieve success and cultivate a love of learning, where we all value ourselves and our contribution, and realise our true, extraordinary potential.

Reap all the magnificent rewards that are there for the taking. Yes, there will always be challenges. The Success Code empowers you to embrace them and grab hold of what’s in front of you: opportunity!

Step One

Find Your Ambition

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

WILLIAM EARNEST HENLEY