There’s a science to success — and it’s a science worth studying
The Israeli army devised a test for predicting which soldiers would make good officers: Eight soldiers who didn’t know each other, with no markings of rank, had to get themselves and a long log over a six-foot wall without touching it. Psychologists observed the soldiers to predict which were most likely to succeed as officers.
Long before psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for behavioral economics, he spent his yearly army service making those predictions. “We were completely confident in our evaluations and felt that what we’d seen pointed directly to the future.”
Thing is, they were wrong. Their predictions were only slightly better than blind guesses. But while they never mastered the key for predicting a soldier’s success as a sergeant, they — and other psychologists — learned a lot from this test about what makes a successful person.
You can’t get anywhere if you don’t know where you’re going. Setting a goal is the first step toward success; as baseball player Yogi Berra put it, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else.”
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