The Elements of Success

Google the word “happiness,” and the Internet comes back with 314 million entries. Google another much sought-after bit of information, “diet,” and you’ll get 468 million responses.

But try “success” and the response is overwhelming: 1.2 million postings, some serious, some facetious. Here is the advice of Arnold H. Glasow, a Wisconsin businessman and humorist: “Success is simple: Do what’s right, the right way, at the right time.”

Not really helpful?

Amy Chua and her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, are professors at Yale Law School who have done a lot of thinking about success, and how to reach it. In the preface of their 2014 book, The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, they acknowledge the elusiveness of a sure-fire success formula:

“It is one of humanity’s enduring mysteries,” they write, “why some individuals rise from unpromising origins to great heights, when so many others, facing similar obstacles and with seemingly similar capabilities, don’t rise at all.”

The Demographics of Success

The paucity of convincing explanation for why some people are winners is particularly curious because in America, there are so many of them. And not only that: there is ample statistical evidence of their success.

For example, Asian Americans are just 5.6% of the population of the United States, but they make up more than 30% of the recent American math and physics Olympiad teams and Presidential Scholars, and have won 25%-30% of National Merit Scholarships. In 2012, Asian-American kids overall had SAT scores 143 points above average and a 63-point edge over their white counterparts.

Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, New York City’s selective public high schools that admit students based solely on a standardized entrance exam, in 2013 offered admission to 177 whites and 620 Asians.

Every second Asian American has a bachelor’s degree, compared with 28% of the general population. Indian Americans earn almost twice the median household income of the rest of our population. Iranian, Lebanese and Chinese Americans are also in the top income categories.

Cuban Americans rose in one generation from austere beginnings to relative affluence. Within four decades after their arrival, they were twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to earn over $50,000 a year. All three Hispanic United States senators are Cuban Americans.

Yet another successful group is Nigerians. They make up less than 1 percent of the black population in the United States, yet in 2013 nearly one-quarter of the black students at Harvard Business School were of Nigerian ancestry. More than a fourth of Nigerian Americans have a graduate or professional degree, as compared with only about 11 percent of whites.

The striking performance of these and other groups has led many social scientists to regard success in American as a racial characteristic – an approach that Chua and Rubenfeld consider an error. The authors back up their position with some impressive arguments. For example, they point out that although success seems to favor recent racial minorities, it is also characteristic of two well-established groups of white Americans.

One of them is Mormons – members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – who are disproportionately prominent among the leaders of major American companies. Although less than 2% of the U.S. population, Mormons hold or have recently held top positions in at least 13 major America corporations, including the American Express, Black and Decker, Citigroup, Dell, Fisher-Price, Deloitte, Marriott International and Sears. Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, is a Mormon as well as a successful businessman.

The other equally small but in its own ways even more successful group is Jewish Americans, who account for three of the current eight members of the U.S. Supreme Court; over two-thirds of Tony Award-winning lyricists and composers; and a whopping third of American Nobel laureates.

Yet another weighty point made by Chua and Rubenfeld is that the success of the various immigrant groups tends to dissipate after two generations. For example, the authors cite a 2005 study of over 20,000 adolescents which found that third-generation Asian-American students performed no better academically than their white peers. This the authors say, debunks the claim that the group possesses some innate, biological superiority.

A Different Success Formula

What Chua and Rubenfeld propose is that success is fueled by three forces that are products not of race, but of culture. One of them is superiority complex, “a deep-seated belief” that the individuals or groups are exceptional. The second is the opposite – insecurity – “a feeling that what you’ve done is not good enough” and the necessity “to prove oneself.” The authors’ third trait that is not innate but can be learned is grit: “the ability to resist temptation,” and to systematically “sacrifice present gratification in pursuit of future attainment.”

However counterintuitive it sounds, the authors maintain that it’s precisely this unstable combination of superiority, insecurity and grit that generates drive. They support their position by well-known as well as obscure cultural characteristics of the successful groups. For example, they point out that Jews regard themselves as “the chosen people”; Mormons believe they are “gods in embryo” who were “placed on earth to lead the world to salvation”; and Iranians are notorious for their “superiority complex.”

Regarding insecurity, Chua and Rubenfeld believe that it “runs deep in every one of America’s rising groups; and consciously or unconsciously, they tend to instill it in their children.” They cite a study of thousands of high school students which indicated that Asian-American students had the lowest self-esteem of any racial group, even as they work hard and get the highest grades.

Frequently, the authors say, successful kids feel “motivated to achieve” because of an acute sense of obligation to their parents. For example, studies have shown that Chinese immigrant parents frequently impose exorbitant academic expectations on their children, making them feel that “family honor” depends on their success.

Chua and Rubenfeld warn that in isolation, each of the three qualities would not lead to success. They say that alone, the superiority complex is a recipe for complacency; mere insecurity could be crippling; and impulse control can produce asceticism. In their opinion, “[o]nly in combination do these qualities generate drive.”

They conclude that the way to develop the three “success” qualities is through self-discipline and determination to overcome one’s insecurity. “[That] turns the ability to work hard, to persevere and to overcome adversity into a source of personal superiority,” they argue. “This kind of superiority complex isn’t ethnically or religiously exclusive. It’s the pride a person takes in his own strength of will.”

The Triple Package has been praised for tackling a controversial and complex subject and positing a new theory for success in America. The book has also been panned for ignoring such success-driving factors as transfer of wealth between generations. But the authors’ basic judgment – that the road to winning is paved with grit – is far from novel, and has a broad support from both social scientists and successful people.

One of them was former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who led his country to a victory during World War II. He summed up his experience like this: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal. It’s the courage to continue that counts.”