The laughably obvious guide to being successful

There are two and a half laws to securing success. Actually make that three and a half, as the ability to sound wise is quite essential, writes LUCY KELLAWAY

MIRROR, MIRROR on the wall, who’s the most successful of them all?

At the beginning of her new book, The 10 Laws of Enduring Success, US financial journalist and television anchor Maria Bartiromo describes gazing at her own reflection and asking: "Maria, are you a success?"

The answer turns out to be a lengthy one, running to 293 pages, in which the “Money Honey” (as she’s known) ruminates on her own life and on the lives of the famous people she has interviewed.

I tried the same trick one day last week and stared at myself in the mirror as I was cleaning my teeth.

“Lucy, are you a success?” I asked.

It was hard to concentrate on the question, as my eyes kept straying to the roots of my hair and I wondered how much longer I could last without having to visit the hairdresser again.

But I forced myself to focus, and came up with some simple points that can be expressed in just a few hundred words.

For a start, this isn’t a good question.

You should no more ask whether you are successful than whether you are happy or whether your life has any meaning.

If you decide the answer is no, then you feel horrible.

But if you answer yes, then that is complacent and arrogant and will almost certainly mean you will soon come unstuck. The few times in my life when I have felt successful, I’ve celebrated by screwing up royally almost at once.

The really successful people I’ve come across fudge the question.

They feel successful but paranoid at the same time.

They live either in mortal dread of losing that success or in a state of gnawing dissatisfaction, wanting even more.

And so I thought of these people, and wondered what were their enduring laws of success. Before I had even finished cleaning my teeth, I’d completed my list – which has only two items on it.

The first and most important is luck – yet it never gets a look-in in books on the subject. You need to be as wildly successful as Warren Buffett to admit that the biggest thing he did right was being born white and male in the US at that particular time.

Most successful people have had big lucky breaks at birth and a succession of smaller ones thereafter.

The second law is ambition. Everyone who I have met who has been successful in business has really, really wanted that success. From this wild desire almost everything else that is needed flows – hard work, thick skin and ruthlessness.

Otherwise I can only think of one thing that is vital to success, at least in some lines of business: good looks. If you are an Anglo-Saxon businessman it is fine to be (fairly) ugly. But if, like Money Honey, you are female and want to make it on television, beauty is essential.

So that’s it. My two-and-a-half laws of enduring success.

Maria is evidently more ambitious than I am and so has worked harder to come up with 10 laws, but alas some of hers are total duds.

Maria’s first law is self-knowledge. What was she thinking of? People who have a lot of self-knowledge understand their frailty and fallibility, and this disqualifies them from having the total faith in themselves that they’ll need to succeed.

Then she claims integrity is essential. It would be nice if it were, but it so clearly isn’t that it’s not even worth debating. Most bafflingly of all, she says that humility is vital.

If you live in the UK, then I can see it’s good to be fake humble, as we like self-deprecation, but otherwise humility is a disaster.

In any case it’s not an enduring law that Money Honey has much truck with herself.

On the cover of her book, the words “Maria Bartiromo” are in 72 point, glossy serif typeface, heavily embossed. The name of ghost writer Catherine Whitney (I’m very impressed that Bartiromo has one – remember she’s a journalist) is in sans serif, flat, matt, 18 point.

There is one thing that features neither in my two-and-a-half laws nor in Maria’s 10: ability. I’ve left it out not because it’s unimportant, but because it’s too common. There are far more able people than there are slots at the top.

While I’ve been writing this I’ve thought of one more law of success: to be able to say something obvious and make people think you’ve said something wise. All senior people in business do this effortlessly every day.

What I’ve just said about luck and ambition is, of course, laughably obvious.

Hopefully you’ll think it’s wise though, and I can go off to the hairdresser feeling flushed with success. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010)