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Perseverance and leadership skills, of course. What is less obvious – and much less boring – is what the speaker neglected to mention: that those traits are likely to be the charecterstics of extremely unsuccessful people, too. Think about it, Denrell observed afterwards. ‘Incurring large losses requires both persistence….and the ability to persuade others to pour their money down the drain.’ People without much perseverance or charisma are more likely to end up in the middle, experiencing neither great success nor great failure. (If you never stick at anything and if you can’t persuade others to follow you, you may never lead an army of like-minded souls to a stunning victory – but neither will you lead them off a cliff.) It seems entirely likely that the very successful and the very unsuccessful might actually have rather similar personalities. The only indisputable difference between the two is that the very unsuccessful are much, much less frequently interviewed by management scholars who are studying the causes of success. They are, after all, failures. Even if researchers wanted  to interview  them – which, by and large, they don’t – it is hard to imagine how they might track them down in significant numbers. Success happens in public; indeed, achieving celebrity is part of many people’s definition of what constitutes success. Failure is occasionally spectacular at first, but people who fail dwell largely in obscurity.

Excerpted from ‘The Antidote – Happiness for People who can’t stand positive thinking’ by Oliver Burkeman