success

If You Aren’t Adding Value to Other People’s Lives, You Need to Think Bigger

“He is great who confers the most benefits.

”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I could have chosen an Internet billionaire to illustrate Emerson’s dictum about greatness. Pierre Omidyar of eBay, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google are living proof that successful people create benefits for others.

It would make sense to write about these remarkable men. But it’s time to set the record straight.

I’ll forgive Emerson for his use of sexist language: He lived in an age when writers made no attempt to be gender-sensitive. But as the life of Martha Matilda Harper demonstrates, “he” is very often “she.”

At the age of 31, Martha was working as a live-in maid in Rochester, New York. She had served others since she was seven years old, when her father bound her out as a domestic servant. Her dream was to be financially independent by running her own skin care and hair-dressing salon. She perfected her secret formulas and saved money.

Business was slow at first; wealthy women expected hair-dressers to go to their homes. Then a music teacher rented the room next to Martha’s salon. By offering him the use of her salon as a waiting room for mothers of students, she created the opportunity she had been waiting for. The business started to grow.

What she did next was unprecedented. Out-of-town customers had urged Martha to open a salon in their cities. Beginning in 1891, the 34-year-old Harper started the first retail franchise network in the United States.

Working-class women owned their salons as long as they followed the Harper Method and used Martha’s products. Franchise owners benefited from Harper’s promotional campaigns and advertising. There were 500 salons in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Central America.

Did the Harper Method work? A look at some of Harper’s better-known patrons answers that question: Jacqueline Kennedy, Helen Hayes, and Lady Bird Johnson, to name just three. Men went to Harper salons too: Woodrow Wilson and Danny Kaye were loyal customers.

The former servant girl became rich by creating benefits for others. She could have been richer: She invented the reclining shampoo chair, but didn’t bother to patent her invention.

Martha’s bottom line was different from the one that most business people care about. As she wrote in one of her personal messages to salon owners, “The Great Achievement of the Harper Method is the women it has made.”

The only remaining Harper salon is in Rochester. But Martha Matilda Harper’s legacy is everlasting: If you want to be successful, ask how you can make other people’s lives better.

She is great who confers the most benefits...

I’ve decided to rephrase Emerson’s dictum. I’m not sure he would have been happy with my unauthorized version.

But anyone who knows the story behind the Harper Method will understand.

After decades of research, thousands of books in the self-help genre, and who knows how many Web sites devoted to personal development, people are finally getting the message.

“ When something inside motivates you like that, you don’t even notice time. You can go without sleep and not even sleep the next day.

”

Steve Wozniak

And the message is: Stress isn’t caused by working hard. It’s caused by leaving things undone.

Successful people do the hard jobs first. They don’t allow themselves to fall into the procrastination trap. Less procrastination means they accomplish more. And that means less stress.

Put it all together and you have the picture of a “work-a-frolic.” Successful people work hard and have fun doing it.

In the mid-1970s, mainframe computers were so big and expensive that only large companies, research labs, and the military could afford one. In 1975 two hard-working college dropouts, both named Steve, started selling their homemade computers in Silicon Valley.

When Steve Wozniak developed the Apple II a couple of years later, Steve Jobs showed it to Atari and Hewlett-Packard. Neither company was interested in backing the young visionaries. Jobs used venture capital to finance Apple’s extraordinary growth.

The Apple II was one of the most revolutionary innovations in the Twentieth Century, yet it wasn’t a technological breakthrough—there was no new technology in it. Wozniak used existing components to create a breakthrough product. The Apple II didn’t rely on huge amounts of capital investment. It was all about vision, hard work, and sleepless nights.

When the Apple Macintosh was introduced in 1984 with a graphic desktop and handheld mouse, anyone could learn how to use a computer. The Macintosh made personal computers easier to use, but it was the Apple II that changed the way we work and live.

Jobs and Wozniak made history because they were passionate about their work. Every person has the potential to be passionate about something. But passion without hard work is like chasing the wind: No matter how hard the wind blows, it does us no good until we build a windmill or hoist a sail.

Passion without a plan doesn’t generate revenue or attract investors. The plan doesn’t have to be complicated: Intel’s initial business plan was a page and a half long. Successful entrepreneurs know how to turn their passion into products and services that other people can be passionate about too.

People like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak aren’t workaholics. They’re “work-a-frolics.” When they want to have fun, they get down to work.

If You Want to Be Extraordinary, Do What You Love

“Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.

”

Buddha

Successful people are passionate about what they do. When we listen to entrepreneurs like Richard Branson or Steve Jobs, the first thing we notice is their passion.

But many unsuccessful people are passionate about something too. What makes Branson and Jobs different from the millions of people who give up on their dreams?

The difference is passion with a plan. From Buddha’s day to the days of economy airfares and personal computers, the secret of success has not changed: Discover your life’s purpose and, once you do, pursue it with every drop of passion that’s in your blood.

“My core, my whole life was medicine,” Sir Roger Bannister told the American Academy of Achievement in 2002. As a neurologist, Bannister gave his life to science. But history will remember him more for his legs than for his brains.

When Bannister was a medical student in the early 1950s, many scientists believed it was impossible for a human to run a mile in less than four minutes. Convinced that he could break the 4-minute barrier, Bannister applied his growing knowledge of human physiology to his athletic training.

On May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister ran the distance in 3 min 59.4 sec. The press called it “The Miracle Mile.”

By the end of 1954, 36 other runners had duplicated Bannister’s feat. The Miracle Mile wasn’t a miracle after all. Bannister believed it was a result of “the ability to take more out of yourself than you’ve got,” which sounds like something that Buddha might have said.

“Running, which is a pain to a lot of people, was always a pleasure to me because it was so easy,” Bannister explained in a 2002 interview. And though his love of running is what got him on the track, it was his passion for medicine that got him across the finish line in record time.

Roger Bannister always loved to run. When he discovered his life’s work, he gave himself to it with all his heart. His success, on and off the track, was a result of living life with passion and purpose.

Find your passion, harness it to a plan, and be willing to put in the “track time.” When your heart is in the race, you have the ability to run your own miracle mile.