Their success is your success
Let’s conduct a quick thought experiment. Imagine for a second:
- You are given the power to know the solution to all the world’s problems: it won’t make you a hero. It’ll make you a sad know-it-all no one even listens to even though you’re right. It has a name, it’s called the Cassandra complex after the Greek goddess who was granted the power to accurately predict the future and the curse never to believed.
- You are given the power to teach others how to solve their own problems: you still won’t be a hero but you will have the satisfaction to see problems getting solved and as happiness is contagious, the more happy, successful people surround you, the happier you’re likely to be.
There are very pragmatic reasons for why this is so. Historically, what we now know as solutions to then intractable problems were never accepted easily. Unless they are also gifted entrepreneurs, many discoverers are ridiculed and shunned before their solution is accepted – and then someone else profits from their ideas. And even so, it then takes a generation for the solution, once recognized as such, be accepted widely. Pushback is to be expected.
A practical reason is that in any complex system, solving one problem will likely have unexpected effects and create other, unanticipated, problems. Unless new solutions are introduced incrementally to see what else they trigger as we go, chances are that one large and serious adverse effect can undermine the fragile trust in the new approach – even though it doesn’t make the solution wrong.
The social reason for that is that every status quo is made of winners and losers. In any society, large problems are dealt with stop-gap measures were a few winners benefit and most others lose. The solution, when it appears, threatens the livelihood of these few winners, who will fight back, as we can now see with every lobby (oil, guns, tobacco, insurance, predatory capitalism, etc.), sometimes very effectively.
The psychological reason is that no ones likes to apply something invented by someone else, regardless of the benefits: people want to succeed, but in their own terms and often prefer not succeed rather than change their terms (which is felt to be an impossible compromise), and that’s fair enough. People will defend what they are part of building and fight against anything imposed on them – it’s called freedom.
We are taught to think in terms of people-free solutions: the cure for cancer, when found, should apply to all, equally. But there are no such things. Real solutions are people-centric, people must themselves participate in the solution for it to work – which is why the near future is so unpredictable. We simply have no idea what new problems some people will crack and what the rest will do with their solutions. Succeeding at solving problems means first succeeding at getting others to solve the problem:
Your success goes through the success of people around you: if you’re serious about succeeding, first think about how to make your boss look good, how to help your colleagues solve their issues and how to develop the people in your charge.
