Recently I saw some “advice” on social media that got me thinking about the troubles of vague and sophistic advice. The speaker in the video claimed that you should search for [business] partners who have high intelligence, high energy, and strong integrity and that those characteristics are a three-part checklist of non-negotiable items. Here I would like to argue, contrary to what most would likely believe, that each of these characteristics is neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve success. I am NOT saying that these characteristics are undesirable or inferior, rather I am trying to demonstrate that this advice does not necessarily map onto reality nor is it practical for most people. From here, I will tackle each leg of this bright triad individually and then show how even together, they still do not rise to the level of either necessary nor sufficient when the aim is financial success. At the end of this essay, I will conclude by highlighting how this erroneous line of thinking is socially damaging, and I will call for it to be retired from sincere minds. With this essay mapped out, let’s now begin with the first leg of this bright triad: intelligence.
To be clear, suggesting that intelligence has no impact on financial success would be to forsake intelligence in one’s self. However, just as equally, it would be a mistake to overestimate the role of intelligence when considering the development of success. Someone may have all the “intelligence” particular to a field and still produce no success because of factors outside of their control or awareness. Similarly, someone could invest their life savings into a digital currency that they know nothing about and become an overnight success. But wait, what does intelligence even mean? Can it be defined by how much knowledge someone can recall, or does it rely on one’s ability to manipulate and apply their knowledge? Is intelligence gained over time through learning, or is it only attainable through a lottery won by correctly organized A’s, C’s, G’s, and T’s? Now, I could make this essay 16 pages longer by just going through the intricacies required for defining “intelligence” and further, I could similarly bloat this essay with an in-depth analysis of the separation between category and degree. But in the interest of my reader’s time, I will merely mention them and hope you can intuit where I might go with those. Instead, I’d like to propose a thought experiment to elucidate the whole necessary and sufficient business.
John is a stock trader who has 20 years of experience, a masters degree, and a proven track record of being profitable in the field. John demonstrates, through his resume, that he has a record of being occupationally competent AND that he has completed an educational program that testifies to his knowledge of financial concepts to a level beyond average. You hire John and he gets to work. 6 months in, he is negative 5% and he suffers more losses due to an unforeseen overseas war that caused businesses that he had bought stock in to file Chapter 11. From this year forward, he loses every year for the next 5 years due to other unforeseen events. At the same time John was hired, you decided to hire a scientist who brings in a monkey to roll a pair of dice where each number corresponds to a particular stock. The monkey then rolls two more sets of dice that determine your activity with the selected stock (buy, sell, short) and the quantity of your action (lot size). The dice-rolling monkey is up 12,000%. Do you hire more John’s, or do you hire more monkeys?
Do you suspect that I will say that you should hire more monkeys? Well, I won’t, as badly as I do want to though. Ultimately, while I do think that hiring more Johns will increase the likelihood of producing success, I also hold the position that the same number of monkeys could out earn the Johns. In other words, you can’t escape the gamble. As funny as this thought experiment may be, it actually isn’t too far from reality (see the multiple articles that pop up when googling “Monkey throwing darts beat stock market pros). People seeking to challenge my position on the grounds that the stock market is volatile, or simply a “different beast” when compared to other industries, I say: not so. I could describe businesses that succumb to unforeseen circumstances that had nothing to do with the “intelligence” of operators or partners. Just think of what a global pandemic might do to a restaurant business in a community of elderly people who don’t know how to operate food delivery apps and who are fearful that going to restaurants will expose them to a life-threatening viral disease. I could continue with this example, but I think my readers get the point. Hopefully reading this hasn’t been too much hard work because we haven’t even scratched the surface.
As for the second leg of what I call the “bright triad”, this idea that a trait like “hard-working” is non-negotiable in a partner is frankly quisquilious (totally trying to boost this word and end up in the latest version of the OED for those reading this in 2324). Just think of a partner who provides financial benefits to a company merely by leveraging their social circle. Would this partner be “working hard” by merely placing a phone call to a childhood friend who subsequently lines the company with cash? Who is the determiner of hard work anyway? Is it effort-based or impact-based? Please notice how these words (intelligent and hardworking) are so overloaded and rely on some form of a momentary, context-driven consensus. Anyway, to provide another example, imagine that your business partner is a savant of some kind, and their computational ability requires no hard work and they deliver exceptional results for the business. If your savant of a partner does not work hard and produces success for the business, that means that hard work is simply not necessary for success. Just as equally, if the same savant began to work really hard, that would not guarantee the success of the business in the future. Hard-working small business owners (and partners) who fail every year and crypto millionaires who become business partners to support their family member’s businesses aren’t unheard of, so it would be ridiculous to say that my argument is limited to the theoretical.
And then what about integrity? Is it required that your business partner has it, or does them having it guarantee success? Most certainly not. There are plenty of people who start businesses with integrity (them and their business partners) and have no success. Yet imagine that someone’s business is “network marketing”, or something like providing loans to people who are on hard times with monstrous interest rates designed to make them permanently indebted to them. Where is honesty there? Where is the integrity there? Nonetheless, if they are at the very top of a long chain or sell lots of loans, they are undoubtedly successful (financially speaking). A serious problem with the term integrity in this context is that it begs the question: integrity to who or what? The answers to these questions will undoubtedly complicate the understanding of integrity and will demonstrate how subjective it can be. From this, it is very difficult to make the argument that integrity in a business partner is either necessary or sufficient for success when, at least as of now, the main term is elusive.
Those interested in logic might say, “Well, it might be true that each of these elements individually are not sufficient for success, but together they are.” But to that, I say: not so. I’d argue that even if everyone in your business had every element of the “bright triad”, you could still NOT be successful. You could be producing a product that becomes obsolete overnight, a competitor could cut you out of a particular market, or you could be selling a service to a certain demographic who simply decides against buying. While controlling your inputs and the liminal space between your inputs and outputs may increase your odds of success, it is important to remember that we cannot control outputs. In other words, there is no guaranteed set-in-stone formula for individual success; you can’t escape the gamble.
Conclusion + Why This Matters
If you have been on the internet at any point over the last 5-10 years, I am sure you have seen some variation of a “success guru” or some tech millionaire/billionaire who seems to know how to solve every complex non-tech-related problem. One of the implicit thinking patterns that most of them share is that whenever a specific mindset, a certain level of intellect, or an acceptable work ethic is present, success is necessitated. Worse, many will even say that if someone is successful, then these traits must be present. For a moment, think of what their logical contrapositives say, namely:
If you aren’t successful, then you don’t have X traits.
or
If you don’t have X traits, then you aren’t successful.
When read this way, these conditional statements sound ridiculous. If these statements were said in public conversation, I’d be shocked if no one laughed; yet, when said on social media by designer-clothed demagogues or by out-of-touch tech millionaires, these statements gain traction. Maybe it’s the inspirational music in the background or the cool camera effects that circumvent the grift detectors in our brains.
Either way, I’m posting this reflection on Naval’s video on selecting a business partner for success to highlight how social media “success advice” like this is ultimately too vague for practice and often sophistically misleading. It requires way less than the bright triad to become “successful” and it takes way more than the bright triad to guarantee “success”. As a higher-order purpose, I’m trying to communicate that you simply can’t escape the gamble; no concrete formula will lead us all to success. I think that as soon as we collectively accept this, the sooner we can escape some of the harsh societal binaries that limit empathy and social cohesion in our society.