Focus on external factors for success and internal factors for failure

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Dear readers,

Thank you for coming here!

Focus on external factors for success and internal factors for failure

If you grow up in Chinese culture, I am sure you have heard this many times.

It is usually used to educate us to stay modest and keep improving.

For most of us, we received it from our parents or teachers and we just accepted it without question until it became the “culture” or “attitude” we took for granted.

However, most of us had the moments when we doubted it and even felt unfair. How come I always came hard on myself and still was not as successful?

First of all, this “attitude” could never guarantee success. Very few things in this world can.

It can only guide us, if we still believe in it, to focus on improving ourselves, which is probably the most certain way to increase our chance for success.

Secondly, we never realized the sound “logic” behind this “attitude”.

Probably it never occurred to us that we should or need to try to understand the logic behind the statement because we were so young when we accepted it.

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The logic

Any success or failure is caused by the combined effects of external and internal factors.

Then why should we focus on external factors for success?

Because the internal factors are relatively stable.

In order to complete something, what are our internal factors? 

Soft ones like our mindset and network.

Hard ones like our skills and capital.

The chance of any of these changing much in the short term is very slim.

Therefore, in the short term, the success depends largely on external factors. If we want to repeat the success, we need to focus on analyzing them.

Success this time could well be a coincidence. The same efforts could fail miserably under different circumstances.

Focusing on external factors for success will help us convert the unknown and uncertainties of external factors into known and certainties for success.

So why should we focus on internal factors for failure?

Because, in the case of failure, external factors are typically constraints we cannot change.

Lack of resources, regulatory restrictions, disasters etc etc

We can only change ourselves.

When we lose a business opportunity, we can complain about lack of support from upper management and back offices; we can also complain that the client is not capable of recognizing our good value proposition; we can also complain that the opponent leverages the “grey area” to gain a unfair advantage.

However, our job is exactly to deliver success subject to these constraints. These constraints are just facts that we need to accept and dance with.

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Summary

Focus on external factors for success and internal factors for failure.

This is an old saying that we generally accept and try to abide to.

However, it may never occur to us to deep dive into the logic behind it.

Understanding the logic will help us abide to it and increase our chance for success.

Till next time!