On Initiative

This past week, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about success. Now, perhaps this is a somewhat pedantic exercise, but it seems that if I would like to be successful (and I assure you, this is a valid premise), then I ought to better understand the term — what it means, what it implies, and most importantly, how this meaning achieves instantiation.

Most people would agree, I think, that there are many ways to succeed, and a nearly infinite number of things upon which such success can be centered. But what does this mean? After all, a successful father is quite different from a successful businessmen, and yet “success” can be used, quite appropriately, to describe each. This is not a hard question; at first brush, the answer seems obvious. In each instance, a goal was set — meaningful fatherhood, or growing a business – and likewise, in each instance the particulars of a goal were achieved.

But is that all there is to success, the fulfillment of goals? It seems unlikely that an incarcerated man would consider the fulfilling of his imprisonment a successful endeavor. Clearly, there must be a subjective side to the term. To be successful at something, one must desire it. So success requires at least two things: a goal and a desire. Take either away, and you destroy its meaning. Consider the hypothetical beneficiary of vast and unexpected charity. She had no pans to acquire wealth, and so she is no more successful than our aforementioned prisoner, even if she counted money among her desires. Without a goal in place, its achievement means nothing.

Now, all this is quite obvious and boring; one might suggest that it’s just a quick and poor deconstruction of semantics. The real and practical question is whether all unique instances of success stem from any common source. Effectively, one might ask, among all the disparate successes of the world, do they have anything in common? Can the businessman and the father — at the most general of levels — share a common game plan? I would argue that they can, and that they do. Moreover, I think this common element is initiative.

Certainly, when starting a business, initiative plays an integral role. Every company in present existence required, at minimum, the initiative of creation, the actions of a prime mover who would set it up to succeed (or fail), as history will dictate. But more than this, there is a broader sense in which initiative is tied to the founding of companies. Businesses are started, and markets created, to meet the needs of a particular consumer base. Identifying that need, or alternatively, improving upon the realization of an existing need, by definition requires initiative. It necessitates a seeing thorough of reality, a questioning of what is, and the recognition of a world that might be.

Success in science, too, is bound up in initiative. Scientific research explores the undiscovered territory of human knowledge. It takes initiative to make that first step into the dark, to decide where to place one’s efforts, and to question and improve upon the current state of knowledge. Moreover, the grand revolutions of science are steeped in such character. I doubt it needs mentioning, but Einstein’s discovery of special relativity occurred while he was a patent clerk — that’s clearly initiative, if ever any has existed.

But what about the father, and those softer definitions of success? Here particularly, my argument can be seen to break down on some boundary cases. Take, for example, a rich and carefree fellow who has as his “fatherly” desire and goal: my children shall not starve. Well, even though by his own definition he is successful, it’s hard to see such a person as displaying initiative. But this, I think, is a special case. For most people, in most circumstances, the goals by which they characterize success are achieved by standards outside of their personal norm. And almost by definition, if a goal is difficult to achieve, then one might benefit from the application of initiative. After all, if it’s easy to acquire something without any initiative whatsoever, you probably have it already.

So, one might say I’m rather a fan of initiative — at least, as far as achieving success is concerned.  Yet strangely, most people that I talk to don’t hold the same opinion. I’ll ask them how they think most people succede, and the answers are usually intelligence, dedication, or perhaps, luck. All these things surely play a role in success, but, in my humble view, they are not the prime mover of successful endeavors — no, that role is played by initiative.