Three Myths of Success

By Suzy Welch

1. Forget about fun. You have to suffer in order to advance. Once upon a time, I actually believed that in order to grow and learn, you had to suffer. I fell in love with a line from Crime and Punishment, where the protagonist proclaims, “Suffering is the origin of consciousness!” Even worse, I actually thought that if you were happy, you were unlearning and ungrowing. Somehow, I came to believe that fun was bad, and I went on to live my life accordingly for the next, oh, 20 years.

Now, there was certainly an enormous upside to not valuing fun. When you aren’t out enjoying yourself, what do you do? Well, you work hard. You work constantly. You think it is perfectly normal, and even good, to work seven days a week until you are foaming at the mouth. I did that, and it helped me advance from a girl reporter at the Miami Herald, to the top of my class at Harvard Business School, to a management consultant at Bain and Co. and beyond, simply because no one worked harder. The day after I had my fourth baby, Eve, I was on the phone with my team discussing a client presentation. Eight days after she was born, we had a team meeting in my bedroom while I was nursing her. My bosses loved me for it.

When I went on to work at Harvard Business Review, all that suffering again proved great for my career. I would work all day, rush home to put my kids to bed, and then edit manuscripts until 1 in the morning. And I would be up at 6 a.m. to start it all over.

Look, I will never regret how hard I have worked in my life. I still work very hard, and I’m never going to stop. But about eight years ago, I came upon a letter from a woman in my class in the alumni magazine for HBS. I hadn’t known her well. I didn’t know a lot of people there, since I had skipped parties to study. But she was married to another student, and they always seemed very happy. Her entry went something like this: “John and I have both recently been promoted. I’m still in sales at Microsoft, and John’s with HP. Timmy is now three and cuter than ever. Our fun quotient remains high.”

I put the magazine down and thought to myself: fun quotient? These people think fun is good? I must have stared at their photo for 10 minutes. They looked completely normal and clearly successful. The scales fell from my eyes. I thought, “Maybe fun is something you should try to have.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. My hard work has been extremely helpful to my career. But I missed a lot along the way by not taking the time to play, to celebrate, to restore myself and to get to know people – a tragedy that I am now, I assure you, making up for with gusto.

2. Your life needs to look picture-perfect from the outside. Let me let you in on a big secret. Nobody cares how your life looks from the outside. In fact, most people even prefer your life to look messy and broken so that they can feel superior. So don’t waste any energy pretending things are better than they really are.

I made the mistake of thinking the appearance of a perfect life mattered when I married the cute lacrosse star from my high school at age 23. People now ask me why we got married. My then-husband and I ask each other that, too, now that we are finally friends, about 10 years after our divorce. And the best we can come up with is that it looked like a fairy tale. Plus, we had a lot of momentum.

Indeed, we all spend a lot of time trying on personas. When I got married, my persona was “Married Career Woman.” I wanted to be married. But it was chilling to peer inside the reality that you should really know and love the person you are marrying. My husband was in the same boat. He also wanted to be a married career person. And so we muddled through 16 years of faking it.

But what did the outside world see? Two well-educated high school sweethearts with great jobs, living in a big house in the suburbs with their four well-behaved, above-average children. The picture was perfect. Except that we were withering away inside.

I will spare you the details, as all marriages unwind in slow motion, but when I finally realized it was over, I basically thought the world was going to end. I believed everything would fall apart when the pretty picture was revealed to be a fake. But to my surprise, I discovered that almost everyone I knew could already tell it was a fake, and those who couldn’t got over my divorce in about five minutes. My husband and I had been putting up a nearly two-decade front for nothing! Even the kids knew it was all phony.

So don’t bother to do that, please. Somewhere inside all those costumes is the real, authentic you. Who is it? Only you know. All I can say is, let that person out now, without delay. Do not play a role. Do not pretend you are someone else. It’s a waste of life. Be who you need to be. As I tell my own kids, I did that so you won’t have to.

3. A mentor must look like a mentor. I learned very quickly that your life can be transformed if you just listen to the angels floating around – people who, for no reason other than love and goodness, want to help you understand yourself. Don’t argue with them. In other words, don’t just take your own counsel, because you are usually your own worst adviser. What do you know? Listen to the people who are telling you hard news, bad news, news about your flaws. There is so much wisdom out there if you only open your heart to it.

What closes you off to other voices is usually cynicism, or arrogance. “How can anyone know me?” “Everybody has an agenda.” Those are such easy places to fall into. They are natural stances, especially among people like us, who might rather take our cues from Gawker and the New York Times.

I was like that in college. I knew everything; I was Miss Smarty Pants, future leader of the free world. Then I graduated, moved to Miami and found myself in a world I could not fathom. There were riots, boatlifts and Latin men who couldn’t understand why you didn’t smile when they nodded in your direction. I was Alice in Wonderland, indignant and confused, and I didn’t like it.

Then I met a woman named Maria, who was a Realtor in Coconut Grove and a former Playboy bunny. She was actually a centerfold in 1987. Maria was Cuban, real and funny – and we hit it off quickly. She started telling me how Miami worked, and how I didn’t always come off particularly well to the people who lived there. And even though it sort of stung at the beginning, I had the lucky realization that listening to this woman would change my life; and to this day, she is a friend and a fountain of wisdom to me.

I remember calling Maria one morning when I was at once overwhelmed by work and pulling out my hair over how to best feed my children nutritionally balanced meals. Maria, who had raised her baby boys before I even had mine, sagely informed me, “Suzy, listen up. First baby, you feed him hand-peeled boiled beets. Second baby, put the pizza in the blender.” So yes, I actually fed my older children pizza in the blender, and today they are perfectly healthy near-adults.

My life has been filled with wise people like Maria. I only closed them out during my “smarter-than-thou” college years, and if you’re not yet past that phase, slap yourself. And start listening to everyone. Amass mentors in the organizations where you work – people above, beside and, yes, even below you. All of their voices will enrich you. Never forget that no one – no one at all – is less smart than you are.

Suzy Welch is an author, commentator and business journalist. She writes a column for BusinessWeek and O – The Oprah Magazine, and is co-author with her husband, Jack Welch, of Winning, a No. 1 Wall Street Journal and international best-seller.