Clever, Brave, Persistent

I wonder: is there anything more predictive of success than being clever, brave, and persistent?

Clever means we see opportunities. Brave means we go for them. Persistent means we don’t give up.

Two Ain’t Enough

“Brave and clever” tries good ideas but quits too early. They see good opportunities and are thrilled to get started, but as challenges naturally arise, they’re unable to rekindle their bravery and cleverness to overcome them. They either silently quit or find something else to get excited by.

“Clever and persistent” does good work but never leads. Even when they see clear opportunities, they’re afraid to speak their mind. This fear is especially present when their ideas go against the grain, though that’s when clever ideas are most valuable.

“Brave and persistent” tries a lot of bad ideas and doesn’t quit them soon enough. We admire their confidence, despite rolling our eyes after hearing about their next big thing.

“Brave, clever, and persistent” will see opportunities, go for them, and stick with them until they succeed. We want them on our teams, if not leading them.

More Decisions Than Skills

There’s something special about cleverness, bravery, and persistence. They’re not skills, they’re more like decisions.

Communication is a skill. In some domains, it’s a very important skill. But as a skill, there are techniques we need to learn and practice to become skilled.

Bravery isn’t a skill, it’s how we measure a decision. A lifelong coward can become a hero with a single brave decision.

Persistence isn’t a skill either: it’s a series of decisions, none of which include quitting. One hard-earned success can make up for a lifetime of early defeats.

Not even cleverness is a skill. There are no standard techniques for being clever: sometimes cleverness comes from thinking outside of the box and other times it comes from sticking to the fundamentals. Cleverness is about seeing opportunities, and opportunities are context-specific.

Cleverness isn’t a decisive quality, but it’s driven by a decision. You can’t be clever unconsciously or without caring. You need to decide to look where others aren’t looking.

If someone is clever, brave, or persistent, it’s only because they have a history of clever, brave, or persistent decisions. Any significant challenge can test a lifetime of cleverness, bravery, or persistence. In an important sense, we’re only as clever, brave, or persistent as our next decision to go for it instead of giving up.

Compared to skills, cleverness, bravery, and persistence are enacted on an even playing field. We’re constantly faced with decisions to be clever, brave, or persistent, and we only need one big success to be identified with those qualities.

Essential Will

You can explain cleverness in terms of bravery and persistence. To be clever, you often need to be brave enough to decide to look for an unseen opportunity, persistent enough to find it, and then brave enough to seize it.

You can also explain persistence in terms of cleverness and bravery. Sometimes, persistence is about being clever enough to see a better option than quitting. But often times, persistence is just about being brave enough to find any option besides quitting, no matter how bleak it may seem.

Essentially, each of these qualities is a different form of will. Cleverness is the will to see, bravery is the will to act, and persistence is the will to continue.

Will is our power to decide, and bravery, cleverness, and persistence are qualities of the decisions we make.

Should we then rather say that will is the most important quality for success? If we had to pick one, then yes.

But bravery, cleverness, and persistence sit at the right level of specificity. We can distinguish these specific qualities easier in ourselves and others, and we can practice them more intentionally.

The Trifecta

Even if we aren’t strong in all three qualities, the trifecta tells us who to partner with and why. While individual success is difficult without all three qualities, we can easily achieve shared success by partnering with people who excel at what were missing. Rather than despising people who are too risky, too contrarian, or too stubborn for our liking, we can focus on how these qualities as essential for success. By complementing each other, we can achieve greater success together than we can as individuals.

Another elegant aspect of the trifecta is that it’s predictive of success while being open to many degrees of freedom. Extravert or introvert? Agreeable or disagreeable? Creative or operational? Marketeer or engineer?

Come as you are - our success is generally the result of our decisions to be clever, brave, and persistent.