"The ability to grab opportunities"

"The ability to grab opportunities"

Reading Ries and Trouts Horse Sense made me think of all the boys in school who had consistently stood first in class, year after year. I have not heard of most of them for a long, long time. Some joined the IFS (Indian Foreign Service) and have yet to become ambassadors. Some joined the private sector and have yet to become CEOs. By 55, they should have. Some became doctors and lawyers. What put me into this reverie was Riess statement that in the dairy, cream rises to the top. In daily life, its generally not true. It's mostly milk at the top of the corporate bottle. Top executives come from the middle of the IQ curve. As the college president said to the faculty, "Be nice to your A students because they will come back and be your colleagues, but be exceptionally nice to your B and C students because they will come back and give us a new auditorium and a new science building." Top executives may come from the middle of the IQ curve. Peter McColough, former chairman of Xerox, made the same point about his Harvard School class of 1949. The record of accomplishment corresponds negatively with the standing of the class. The top people did not do that well. The one-third in the middle did. The guys who got the highest marks tended to be in the middle in accomplishment. Why is this ? Why does success in the classroom generally not correlate with success in a profession ? The smarter people are, the more they depend on themselves. After all, they know everything. They depend only on themselves to get ahead. Less intelligent people are more likely to look for others to help them up the ladder and to look for opportunities and grab them. Opportunities do not just arise in the environment. They are not presented to us by others, as the earlier incidents show. They can be inherent in us. They can be accidents that we may take to be calamities but that we can turn into opportunities. A young singer with a fine soprano voice was assigned to perform 'The End of a Perfect Day' for admiring relatives. When his adolescent voice cracked and broke at the family gathering, he discovered he had the ability to make people laugh. The singer-cum-comedian was Bob Hope! Moral: Believe in yourself first to succeed in life!