The Gallup Survey on Success

Of the 1200 books listed in The Library of Congress on the subject of success, not one backs its success premise by hard facts. Until now. Enter George Gallup, Jr. and brother Alec Gallop, who using polling techniques established by their famous father, set out to discover the truth behind the success myth. Their study, published by Dow Jones Irwin in an eminently readable book called The Great American Success Story, details how top achievers reached exalted heights in a variety of fields.

Along the way the brothers Gallup debunk many a success myth, like the myth that whom you know helps you achieve success, or that money is the main motivator for successful people, or that insensitive aggressive types always end up farther up the success ladder. Such ideas turn out to be, happily for the authors and for us, almost without foundation.

Setting out to discover their own definition of success based on their father’s model, George, Jr. and Alec Gallup have given us a book with truly useful insights and altogether human role models. It proves what the editors of PSP have maintained all along that success is attainable for anyone who is willing to set goals, work hard, and serve the needs of others.

In this exclusive interview with PSP, George Gallup, Jr. reminisces about his father’s work principles, and shares some of the characteristics of highly successful achievers.

PSP: In your study on success, you found an interesting difference between your results and a Roper Organization study on the same subject.

George Gallup: Well, the Roper Organization results, as reported in U.S. News and World Report, showed the public perception of how to become a success was knowing the right people. In the public view it’s all political whereas hard work is pretty far down the line. It’s just the breaks and whom you know – But as we know from our own study of successful individuals, that’s simply not so…or at least that’s not how successful individuals perceive their own achievements. Whom you know doesn’t come up particularly high on the scale of values nor do “the breaks. “One man in our survey said, and I think this is almost a cliche by now, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”

PSP: But this is only one part. Successful people don’t always consider themselves as successes. If I read your study correctly, the successful people in it do not rank themselves very high on the killer of success on a scale of one to 10 yet they are perceived from the outside as being tens.

George Gallup: That’s quite right. They have their own hidden agenda, if you will, which they are trying to live up to. The outside world perceives the famous name and an important role but is not privy to the drive and the frustrations of the person in that role. The outside world never sees that person in terms of his own criteria of success.

PSP: It seems to me that your father was certainly a success by all the criteria in your book. Would you agree?

George Gallup: Yes, certainly, he was a success.

PSP: And I read in his obituary that he was also a salesman. Did you see your dad as a salesman?

George Gallup: I think that’s a misnomer, really. He was a salesman in spite of himself. He was not interested in making a sale but if he was trying to sell a survey or an idea he was just so turned on by a discussion of the idea that the enthusiasm would often bring about intense interest.

PSP: He was selling his awareness of problems.

George Gallup: Yes. The end result wasn’t to get somebody to sign on the dotted line but to increase his own information and knowledge on a given subject.

PSP: He must have been very persuasive in presenting his views.

George Gallup: Very. He’d always think through a problem and consider every angle before he propounded it. And before he really went with it. I mean there would be a lot of informal discussion in the kitchen in his house where the family would bat around ideas and stuff. And when he really got down to one he would really be quite thorough.

PSP: So he would ask the family to shoot holes in his ideas.

George Gallup: Oh yes. There were a lot of lively discussions in the kitchen, that’s for sure, on a tremendous range of topics.

PSP: When you started out to do your survey on success, were you conscious of any definition of success for yourself?

George Gallup: Well, I did have some rough ideas for myself of what a success might be. I had some assumptions that a successful person would probably be happy and probably feel challenged, would be a pretty versatile person. He or she would contribute to society, would be a reader and a person of pretty broad interests – willing to investigate ideas. I guess I projected my dad into my success model to some extent.

PSP: So you almost saw some duplication of his characteristics in other people?

George Gallup: Yes I did.

PSP: In the prefix of your book you say that one of the happiest surprises for you was that the achievers surveyed were not overly aggressive and were not insensitive people.

George Gallup: Yes.

PSP: Why did that surprise you?

George Gallup: We are dealing with averages when we are talking about samples and I was somewhat surprised by the fact that success was a by-product of their very intense pursuit of some interest. It was sort of a reaffirmation of my own success model.

PSP: I find that paradoxical because successful people have a fairly high drive for achievement and at the same time a fairly high desire to cooperate and to contribute. How do you explain this paradox?

George Gallup: These people did not set out with the idea, “Someday I’m going to get into Who’s Who.” I think by achievement they did not mean clawing their way to the top. Instead, there was a feeling of “I am contributing to society,” and the success was a by-product of that feeling.

PSP: Before I read your book on success, I thought that the natural goal of competition would be winning. Now I think the major result of competing is to create a forward momentum which is going to help move a person toward his or her goals. The contributing to society drive that you describe is also creating momentum toward a goal.

George Gallup: That’s a good point and it is supported by our research of successful people.

PSP: Then the opposite of competition is not cooperation, and competition and cooperation may be at the same end of the spectrum. At the opposite end would be, “I don’t care about anything.”

George Gallup: That’s a good conclusion. It has to be noted that the sample, which we drew from Who’s Who, filtered out the notorious types, who although famous and “successful” in outer-world terms, were left out of our survey.

PSP: What is your own personal definition of success?

George Gallup: I think my own definition would be being able to integrate my faith fully into my everyday life. Something that I don’t ever expect to do, but that is my goal.

PSP: When you talk about your own faith and translating that into your everyday life, can you give me an example of how that would affect your everyday business decisions?

George Gallup: I would think, hopefully, that the ethics of a decision would be much clearer than they would be otherwise.

PSP: What was your biggest disappointment in the last 10 years or so?

George Gallup: I wish I could have spoken to my father on a deeper, more thoughtful level before he died. We had a lot of great conversations, but to really speak to him on a still deeper, more informed level, a more creative level – I sort of miss that. You never know when you are going to lose somebody. That is a regret. I used to see him almost all the time, almost every day, and I just still wish I had seen him more in the end.

PSP: In which way has your desire to translate your faith into your everyday consciousness helped you, in a sense, to manage that disappointment and grow beyond it?

George Gallup: I think when you have a faith as I do and there is a purpose, things do not have to be resolved within a certain time period. The really most important thing is not necessarily how intellectual one is but how one relates to somebody else on a deep level. That’s really, ultimately, the most important. So in that sense, I think my faith has helped.

PSP: In your book, one of the characteristics of the successful person was his or her ability to get along well with others. Can you think of ways to acquire such success skills?

George Gallup: I think we are a very lonely populace; we are cut apart from each other. I think there is a strong desire for deeper relationships in our population. We need to reconnect, to bond. I think that is a first step that can be very helpful.

PSP: What would be another way to acquire success that comes to your mind?

George Gallup: Well, judging from our survey, these successful people were avid readers.

PSP: This is something that really surprised me.

George Gallup: Yes, it surprised me as well. I had the impression of the busy business person, too busy to read anything but magazines or newspapers. I would think that the reading part of it is so important because that makes a person ready to converse. It seems to be a key to feeling confident. These people have a broad knowledge and feel they can shift over to another field or chain of thought. They have knowledge in several fields. In fact, one of the most interesting things to me was that they felt they could be a success in other fields.

PSP: Right. That they felt they were multidimensional.

George Gallup: And reading certainly contributed to that. I think reading would be a very big boost to self-esteem because then you have more information with which to make evaluations and decisions. So that would be one route. And then uplifting, too. That is a tremendous challenge and creates a need for people to be precise in their thinking.

PSP: It increases the ability to focus their thoughts.

George Gallup: Right.

PSP: I was amazed that some of those people read 50 books or more a year.

George Gallup: Bear in mind that some are older and therefore are semi-retired or retired so they have more time to read. But nevertheless, maybe they started reading just as my father did as a kid. His mother would let him stay up late and read. She would make the other kids go to bed but if father was reading she would let him stay up. So he had always read a great deal.

PSP: How do you explain the fact that 70 percent of the people in your success survey said that hard work contributed to their success and only 43 percent said it was ambition.

George Gallup: I think ambition alone, without anything to back it up, just doesn’t work. It is easy to be ambitious but not equally easy to be a hard worker. You can be ambitious going off in all directions thinking about stuff and not really act on specific plans for achieving those ambitions.

PSP: In a sense, there are a lot of dreamers who are not willing to do the hard work.

George Gallup: Right, exactly.

PSP: Was your father a hard worker?

George Gallup: Yes, very. But he thrived on it. He was always working, really. No conversation he had was without a thoughtful purpose.

PSP: He had intellectual discipline.

George Gallup: That’s right. And he had a strong belief in God. I don’t think he had strictly orthodox Christian beliefs. He did believe very much in a purposeful God, and that belief was based on the law of probabilities which is the same basis for surveys and samples.

PSP: He once said he could prove God statistically.

George Gallup: Yes, he did say that once.

PSP: I thought that was humorous.

George Gallup: Well, it was, yes, and quite remarkable as well.

PSP: How would you describe his drive?

George Gallup: Well, it was a drive for clarity, I think. He used to say there were two kinds of people: one type tries to make the simple complex; the other tries to make the complex simple. He couldn’t stand obscure writing such as you find in academic journals. He saw no reason for it. His view of writing was to communicate to the reader as clearly as possible. He liked to point out that the great communicators of the past wrote very simply – St. Paul, Shakespeare, and so forth.

PSP: Two other elements of success that your survey revealed are the courage to take action and the ability to get things done. And I think that applies to using your mind as well. To think issues through and to clarify and simplify.

George Gallup: Yes, that’s part of writing clearly and communicating simply. That’s true. And the whole business of poll taking was really a result of one man’s curiosity about almost everything.

PSP: He was in essence an information pioneer.

George Gallup: Right, he was.

PSP: Thank you.