Nothing Succeeds Like Success

[blockquote cite=” -2001, A Space Odyssey” type=”left, center, right”]”There before him, a glittering toy no Star-Child could resist, floated the planet Earth with all its peoples.”[/blockquote]

If you say the word “Success” to most people, it conjures up an image of a well dressed, smiling man receiving an award of some kind. But what is success?

Obviously it is the meeting of subjective, personal standards, usually only after a person accepts 100 percent responsibility for his or her own life. We can communicate in icons about it like our man with the award, but never define it for everyone because success is a private measurement.

We know that successful people are responsible and do not believe in luck. They make themselves successful. But, having said that, is there such a thing as a pattern of success that has its’ own momentum?

Success Feedback

Bill Gates describes a self-perpetuating cycle of good luck and success in his 1995 book on the Internet, “One of the most famous demonstrations of the power of positive feedback was the video cassette recorder format battle of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. As VHS-compatible players proliferated, video rental stores started to stock more VHS than Beta tapes. The owner of a VHS player was thus more likely than a Beta owner to find the movie she wanted at the video store, which made VHS fundamentally more useful to its’ owners, causing even more people to buy VHS players.”

This example is interesting to me because it is a real example of “Success Feedback,” it is not just an individual attaining their own standards, but rather the momentum of past successes generating further successes in the future. Nothing succeeds like success they say.

Success Fueled by Luck

Another example of this kind of Success Voodoo comes from a musician friend of mine who told me a story one day about the luckiest month of her life. It started when she found 200 dollars wrapped up in an elastic band in the park. “There was no one around, anywhere.” She said and she didn’t know who to try and give it too.

So, she kept the money and decided to treat herself to a hot chocolate with her new found riches. In the café she met her boyfriend who she has now been with for six years. “If I didn’t find the money, I would never have gone to the café.” She said.

A week after she met him, she got “discovered” through a friend of her boyfriend’s who worked in the music industry, or at least someone listened to her demo tape and introduced her to his superior. If she had never met her boyfriend, she’d never have met his friend.

Things Lead to Things

This story leads me to another expression used by actors, musicians and people in the entertainment industry: “Things lead to things.”

“Things lead to things” means if you do a show, you might get another, better show. If you go to a party, you might meet someone in the industry. If you phone that person back, you might meet someone else through that person. Momentum.

My friend is convinced that it was all part of the divine script but whether these sorts of accelerations of acceleration are divine or not, they do seem to happen, and I have been trying to understand them in a slightly more scientific way.

Buckminster Fuller

In physics this is just called Precession, which is defined as the effect of bodies in motion on other bodies in motion. Buckminster Fuller based much of his Utopian designs on this idea, that human beings can accomplish not just wealth and happiness, but the wealth and happiness that results from striving for more wealth and happiness when you’re already wealthy and happy. The rich get richer, as they say, and there’s a reason for that.

Michael Hutchison

Michael Hutchison in “Mega Brain Power” (the sequel to his now legendary “Mega Brain”) describes in exhaustive detail all the tools, technologies, nutrients, and therapies available that can be used to re-script, re-charge, boot-up, down-load or flame-broil your karmic identity and I can’t recommend this book enough times to people.

If positive thinking is about taking control of your internal habits, peak performance is about taking charge of your external ones.

As well as describing how to enhance sex, immunity, lose weight, and have mystical experiences, Hutchison outlines techniques that today’s top athletes use to seize the wheel of precession in their careers. This sort of work, along with research by NASA, Nintendo, and university labs like the Media Lab at MIT into Virtual Reality, might just change our relationship with history.

Is history just the repetition of a long series of tragic and boring accidents, or is history the result of very specific, imperceptibly small actions taken by trillions and trillions of conscious people?

Being a good winner, it seems, takes years of practice. Nothing succeeds like success.