All his life, George Washington was fond of quoting a line from Joseph Addison’s play Cato to the effect that we cannot insure success but we can deserve it.

A lot of my e-mail traffic (much of it reproduced in this resource) comes from advisors who aren’t happy with the way "clients" or prospects are responding to their efforts. Part of the problem, of course, is that these advisors insist on thinking of people with whom they have accounts but who do not follow their counsel as "clients." This is a bit like throwing sand in one’s own eyes.

The larger issue is that these advisors have invested their emotions in outcomes (in the way people are responding to them) rather than in inputs – the quality of their work, in and of itself. The problem (nay, the potential disaster) implicit in that emotional construct is that we can have total control over inputs, but none at all over outcomes. The outcome-oriented advisor has vested his identity in the reactions of other people, and that’s always a mistake.

One of my few living heroes, Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, has said that he strives not for success but for excellence, because when you achieve excellence, success just naturally follows. I take him to be saying much the same thing Addison said, and Washington believed. But the outcome-oriented advisor seems to believe that if his "client" or prospect says no, he is ipso facto not excellent – that, because he was not successful, he did not deserve success. This is, to use the technically precise psychological term, crazy.

Excellence (per Coach K) is a way – maybe the only way – of deserving success (per Addison). You have the capacity to do excellent work, holding nothing back, in every advisor/advisee interaction you have, irrespective of the outcome. If you do top quality work in every interaction, and simply have enough interactions, (1) you are excellent, (2) you deserve success, and (3) success will naturally – and surely – follow.

The only two variables that matter are the only two variables you can control, and they’re both inputs: do great work, and offer it to enough people. This formula always works. Moreover, it’s the only formula that ever works.

A common feature of the emotional responses of outcome-oriented advisors is anger: they get mad at people who turn aside their counsel, or who transfer their accounts. This, to paraphrase Carrie Fisher, is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. And it’s a downward spiral: the angrier we get at a "rejection," the less we feel like doing more great work, and the less we want to risk showing it to yet another person who may yet again reject it. Thus, anger and resentment, more efficiently than any other tools, make stumbling blocks out of stepping stones.

Do great work, striving constantly to improve it (and yourself). Show that work to enough people. No harm can come to you. All success must – and will – come to you. Believing this, you are impervious to outcomes. Despairing of this, you are hopeless.