One of the greatest success secrets is something we often miss when studying the greatly successful: Whatever field they are in, whatever business empire they run, the chances are excellent they have done it at some point with their own hands, learning it nuts and bolts, from the ground up.
Abraham Lincoln knew law. He’d practiced it in freezing-cold, bare-floored small-town courtrooms. So did Gandhi. They both emancipated millions, but only because they knew the feel of the craft in their hands.
Before he was a great general or the nation’s first (and arguably greatest) president, George Washington worked as a land surveyor. He knew the land he would later govern.
As a boy, Sam Walton milked the family cow and sold the surplus milk to neighbors.
Bill Gates spent thousands of hours as a teenager programming computers.
People who achieve great things that the world will never forget, start out by accomplishing small things that the world will never see.
And great leaders don’t expect anyone else to do anything they haven’t done themselves. They get dirt under their nails and mud on their boots.
Getting muddy is critical not only to building success, but also to hanging on to success. Once you start entering the heady atmosphere of big achievement, you find there’s a lot of voltage flowing through you — cash flow, recognition, notoriety, influence in high places, whatever it looks like, it’s voltage, and it can easily fry your circuits. The only way to survive, as with any encounter with massive current, is to stay grounded.
For electric wires, that means direct physical conductance to the earth. For human beings, it means humility.
If you want to be successful, it’s necessary to be humble. And if you want to be hugely successful, it’s imperative to stay hugely humble.
Hugely humble. Now there’s an oxymoron. Or is it?
There are few terms more misunderstood in our culture. People often equate humility with a lack of confidence or self-esteem, or think that being humble means being weak. But that’s backwards. In truth, the more humble you are, the more personal power you have.
The word humility shares a common root with humus. Being humble means being aware of your connection with the dust of the earth. The soil is the source of everything you have.
Remember your muddy beginnings, and you can accomplish anything.
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Bob Burg and John David Mann are coauthors of The Go-Giver Leader. You can learn more about it here.
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