Many people dream of success.

Many people dream of success. To me success can only be achieved through repeated failure and introspection. In fact, success represents the 1 percent of your work that only comes from the 99 percent that is called failure. Soichiro Honda (1906-1991) Japanese industrialist

Recently I have learned of the theory of 10,000 hour rule.  Margaret Wente in her blog stated: A year ago, Malcolm Gladwell, the phenomenally popular Canadian writer published a book called Outliers, which took the world by storm. Outliers is an intriguing effort to explain how extremely successful people got that way. At its heart is something called the 10,000-hour rule, which is approximately the amount of time you have to invest in order to become an expert. Both the Beatles and Bill Gates put in their 10,000 hours (playing in seedy bars in Hamburg, or writing computer code) before they achieved greatness.
 
I am not sure how success is defined, and that is something to consider in the reading of the article and the book. Is success measured in popularity, monetary richness, or personal ideals or another way for you?  Does success equate to greatness or is it something more personal?

She goes on to examine the idea of the rule a bit closer and I think her column makes interesting reading. Is persistence the key to success, or is ability, luck and drive the key. I believe that hard work, luck and motivation are the keys life, along with the ability to learn from failure. Life is an adventure and in all adventures there are many paths, and experiences, I am not sure if these paths can be defined as success or failures. If one is motivated then some experiences means what lesson did I learn and how can I grow and continue. If one is not motivated then some experience means I was not meant to do this, what else can I do

When I'm 64

There will be some interest, I think in the fact that the first of the Baby Boomers turn 64 this year and the old Beatles song will be talked about by the pundits and those who want to make more about the aging of the boomers then we do. My take is that the song is not about being 64 but the song is about the sustaining of relationships. The lyrics are about how to keep love alive and the need we have to know that the relationship we are in is the correct one for us.

I had an interesting conversation the other day with three young colleagues (two men and one woman), it was after school and they were talking about how to know if a relationship was good and what they could do to maintain. I was asked my views and I suspect they thought that they thought with the wisdom of age I would have the answer. Sorry to disappoint but we as boomers value relationships, but many of us are not good at keeping them. All I could talk about is the following:

The idea is that we need to be honest to our selves about what we want and what we need, at an emotional, physical, and intellectual level. To find out what we need requires hard thought, and self investigation and is not something that is done easily. However, once you have spent the time and energy to find these things about yourself then be honest and communicate using "I language" to your partner what you need. It may be that your partner cannot give you what you need at this time in your life. If this is the case move on. This is easy to say but hard to do, however if you want to be happy then you may have to make tough decisions about the type of relationship you want.

Back to the Beatles, I saw the Beatles when they came to Vancouver in the 60's and enjoyed the show and love their music still today. Boomers may hold on to old memories but we find ways to make them come alive today. Music was an important part of my life and I will talk about this in a later post.