One of the Most Critical Keys to Success May Surprise You
Study those who've gone before. You'll learn how little you really know, and how few of your ideas are really original. You'll also learn how to become truly great.
by Rod D. Martin
Inc. Magazine
September 21, 2015
One of the most essential keys to success? Study those who've gone before.
History gets a bad rap. Children are conditioned to hate it: they are told it’s boring, they are told it’s all memorization of facts and dates. And sadly, all too often, that’s exactly how their teachers teach it.
But history isn’t facts and dates. History is a story, the narrative of those who’ve gone before. And very few people make it into the history books unless they were pretty successful, or at least if their story wasn’t pretty interesting.
To the degree that success is about solving problems (and that making money is about solving other people’s problems), history teaches us both the nature of those problems and how other people solved other problems before us.
The first of those is essential. You can’t solve a problem you don’t understand. This is the great handicap of many a diplomat hoping to bring peace in the Middle East. They don’t speak the language, th…