DOUBT FAILURE ANXIETY

A controversial new formula for success

In the entire world, there are only 120 restaurants that have earned the highest honour of three Michelin stars.* One of them is Gordon Ramsay’s flagship on Royal Hospital Road, London, at which Clare Smyth MBE ran the pass until 2016. She opened her first solo restaurant, Core, in London last year, and was named Best Female Chef In The World this year.** Now, aged 39, Smyth has reached the top. If you’re hungry for a hot dinner, hers are the best. You might expect her to be pretty pleased with herself.“Oh, I’ve not achieved…” she trails off, when asked.“I’ve got a lot to do.” For Smyth, feeling you’ve made it is a terrible danger.“You can’t allow yourself to think that. If you don’t continue to evolve, you’ll be gone in 10 minutes.” That’s the sound of real success. Contrary to what you might have been led to believe, the super-achievers who walk among us are not swollen with their own marvellousness, nor are they laden with IQ points. They probably weren’t even born with any particular talent. The secrets of these individuals are almost all surprising. Take, for instance, Smyth’s upbringing. In recent decades, it’s been widely believed that if children are to grow up to be successful, they need high self-esteem. That means receiving praise for everything they do, believing they’re special and being protected from failure. Were Smyth’s parents like that? “Not at all!” she laughs.“We were very disciplined as children. We didn’t speak unless we were spoken to.” Raised in Northern Ireland, Smyth is the youngest of three children.“I used to do showjumping and, for Dad, it wasn’t good enough to win, I had to be perfect. If I made a single mistake I would’ve heard about it,” she says.

None of this comes as much of a surprise to psychology professor Carol Dweck of Stanford University, who began studying the effect of praise on children in the ’90s. “This was during the height of the self-esteem movement,” she says. “Parents were told to

“Constant feedback fuels success”

“Seek out wise and regular criticism”

praise their kids to the hilt, that this would give them supreme confidence and set them up for life.”

In one of her studies, a group of children was asked to complete a simple IQ test. Some were told, “You’ve got a really good score. You must be really smart at this.” Others were given ‘process praise,’ which concentrates on hard work, focus, improvement and perseverance, rather than the end result.“We found most of the kids who were praised for their intelligence did not want a challenge,” says Dweck. “They wanted to make sure they kept on looking smart. But the vast majority of the kids who were praised for the process wanted to try something hard that they could learn from.”

Dweck believes overpraised children risk forming an unhealthy obsession with their own success. A parent who makes a constant issue of how clever their child is risks making them think cleverness is what counts more than anything. The effect is that image maintenance – rather than success in the world – becomes a priority. If a task becomes tough, and threatens a child’s feelings of superiority, they give up.“If someone praises you excessively, it often becomes almost addictive,” says Dweck. “You start defining yourself by it. The kids we praised for intelligence had these self-satisfied little smiles… but the smiles were short-lived because when we gave them a hard task, they fell apart.”

Not only is self-doubt something that’s normal for high-achievers, then, but a certain amount of the right kind of it seems to be essential.

As well as not being over-praised as a child, Smyth also had the fortune to work under a series of fantastic chefs. Her kitchen life began with making sandwiches at the Bayview Hotel in Portballintrae, Northern Ireland, for £1 an hour. Next was the posher Hill Crest Country Guest House.“That’s when I started really getting into cooking,” she says. “I realised there was an amazing career to be had.” She was 15.“My chef really took me under his wing. He taught me a lot.”

After her stint at Hill Crest, she trained under superstars Heston Blumenthal, Thomas Keller and the Roux brothers. She taught herself French just to get a spot in the kitchen at Alain Ducasse’s three-star Le Louis XV restaurant in Monte Carlo. Throughout this period, she benefitted from a regime of constant feedback that continues today, with her dishing out the advice: “It’s funny because HR was talking about having ‘job chats,’ telling people how they’re doing. But my guys get job chats every two minutes – it’s constant.” This environment of constant feedback, it turns out, is perfect for achieving success. Surprisingly, if you practise alone, it’s unlikely to actually make you better. “I sometimes use the example of playing doubles in tennis and missing an overhand volley,” says psychologist Dr K Anders Ericsson.“The game is just going to continue. It’s not like you’re getting opportunities to [stop and] make adjustments. You need that cycle of feedback, where you get a sizeable improvement.”

Even more surprisingly, Ericsson has found that years of experience can also add up to not very much. “There are relatively few domains where we’ve found a correlation between more experience and higher performance,” he says. “Surgery is one, and that’s because you have very immediate feedback. But if a doctor diagnoses a patient, the patient goes away and the doctor never really learns whether or not they’ve made a mistake.”

Perhaps the most remarkable thing Ericsson has discovered – partly through studying accomplished violin players – is that natural-born talent might account for not very much. His research suggests that the difference between elite violinists and the rest was likely to be related only to the amount of practice they’d engaged in, particularly during adolescence.“Some people assumed we’d find out the really talented individuals required less practice than the others,” he says. “But what we found was completely the opposite.”

So what does that mean for people who believe that, in order to succeed, you need to be born with a ‘gift’? “The issue is, do people have genes that others don’t have that would give them an advantage?” he says. This would prove there is such a thing as inherent talent.“We only have compelling evidence that genes give you an advantage in certain sports, with respect to body size and height,” he says.“People have generated data comparing the genes of competitive long-distance runners from Kenya with [athletes from other countries]. They haven’t been able to find even a single gene everyone agrees would give you an advantage. I’m taking the hard line here; I don’t know of any firm evidence that proves it’s necessary to have certain types of genes to be successful.”

So you don’t need to be supremely confident and you probably don’t even have to be talented – you’re not born with these things. That counts for successful moneymakers, too. “People think entrepreneurs are born,” says Kelly Shaver, professor of entrepreneurial studies at the College of Charleston.“But they’re definitely not.” Neither is the cliché true that successful moneymakers are happy risk-takers.“They describe themselves as people who are managing risk rather than taking it,” he says. “It’s the investor who is taking the risk.” And do they do it because they love

money? “They do it because it’s fun,” he says. “It’s about the game. Money is how they keep score.”

What is true, though, is if your interest is strictly business, you need to focus on the positive. You’re unlikely to find yourself profiled by the Financial Times if you’re constantly dwelling on all the terrible things that might happen. Shaver’s study of the secrets of super-wealthcreators suggests that many share an inability to imagine negative outcomes. They also have an unusual attitude towards failure and blame. “There’s a pile of studies that have come to the conclusion that people run away from blame,” he says. “But not entrepreneurs. If they fail, they embrace it. They say, ‘I’m going to learn from this.’”

If such a quality is abundant in a chef such as Smyth, so are two other traits: grit and willpower. Her belief that she’s not yet achieved what she wants to suggests, says Dweck, she possesses grit – the willingness to persevere over a long period of time. Less secure people tend to find failure so unpleasant they give up.“But if you have this vision of what you’re aiming for over time,” says Dweck, “you might not be satisfied with where you are now, but you’re gratified with the progress and aiming towards more.”

Willpower, meanwhile, is the shorter-term ability to push yourself to do things you might not want to. “There were times we’d work over 100 hours in a week,” says Smyth. “Sometimes I’d start at 5.15am having been to bed at 12.30am. I remember buttoning my chef’s jacket up in the morning and, because I’d been preparing langoustines, my fingers were bleeding. I was exhausted – physically and mentally. But there’s a kind of weird enjoyment you get out of that. I was pushing myself to get to where I wanted to. I knew I could handle it, whereas a lot of other people couldn’t.”

If you’re now thinking ‘Clare Smyth is a superhero, I could never be like her,’ you’re making a mistake. It, of course, comes down to ‘mindset’ – and the beliefs you hold about willpower rather than some special capability lurking in your frontal lobe that will dictate how successful you’ll be.“The idea that willpower is this very limited thing that’s easily depleted is only true if you believe it,” says Dweck.“People who don’t think that, you can give them task after task – they’re like the Duracell Bunny.” The same goes for talent and cleverness – if you think you need to be born with something, and it’s something you don’t have, you’re likely to fail. Even IQ isn’t especially important.“It’s predictive of some kinds of success, but not very much,” says Dweck.“And they’re mostly things that relate to what IQ measures, like academic success.” Even then,“not greatly”.

The myths about success, then, are many. And the lessons we can learn from the high achievers and the people who study them are valuable. Don’t believe the voice that says you could never do it because you lack the talent or the energy. Accept failure as an inevitable and valuable part of the learning process, not as evidence that you’ve let yourself and the universe down. Seek out wise and regular criticism. Self-belief is vital, but in a specific form. “There are two mind-sets,” says Dweck.“It’s fixed and I have it or I don’t have it, or it’s something that can be developed.” So don’t tell yourself you’re brilliant or you’re not. Reassure yourself that, if you work hard enough, then brilliant is what you’ll inevitably become.