“Nice guys,” sneered the famously hard-nosed US baseball manager Leo Durocher, “finish last.” We have mixed feelings about ambition and success. For many, the ruthless singleminded scramble for the top is distinctly unappealing, yet in our celebrity-obsessed culture, success has never been more important. “You gotta have a dream,” urge the self-improvement gurus; admitting that you’re not committed to reaching for the stars marks you out as a failure.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be like that. Even though ambition and success have usually been seen as a morally toxic combination as far back as the Ancient Greeks, modern science suggests that the choice isn’t just between being an alpha male or a wimp. Being harder and meaner than everyone else is not the only masculine route up the greasy pole.
In fact, a new generation of biologists, sensitised by feminism and armed with DNA and other biochemical tests, has found that ruthlessness is far from being the best way to pass on your genes, even among red-of-tooth-and-claw primates. Softer males who build relationships and help to look after the offspring not only father more children but also have far lower levels of stress, are healthier and live longer.
It’s a lesson that applies equally to human beings. “What’s clear to me now is, screw the alpha male stuff,” says Robert Sapolsky, professor of biological sciences at Stanford University, after a lifetime of studying baboons in the wild. “Go for an alternative strategy. Go for the social affiliation, build relationships with females, and don’t waste your time trying to figure out how to be the most adept, socially cagey, male-male competitor. Amazingly enough, that’s not what pays off in that system. It turns out that females have a hell of a lot of control over who they’re mating with and, irrationally enough, they like to mate with guys that are nice to them!” And, of course, this doesn’t apply only to sex. The genes underlying this affiliative behaviour still run their programmes in our cells and in our infinitely more complex societies they can be applied to many more situations. In fact, being an entertaining and imaginative male may have been a powerful evolutionary driver in itself, according to the controversial ideas of Dr Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at University College London.
He believes that it wasn’t such utilitarian activities as tool-making and hunting that drove the development of our big brains. Instead it was story-telling and art. “The mind is actually an entertainment system designed by evolution to stimulate other minds,” he says. It was the wittier more imaginative males around the Palaeolithic camp fire who were most likely to score afterwards, and we are their descendants.
Inextricably entwined with the super-butch male is his meek female helpmate, and she is proving to be an equally unrealistic model, thanks to research by the anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. “The kind of idealised mother that is still held up for us — warm, patient, nurturing, supportive and, above all, self-sacrificing — would have been an evolutionary disaster,” she says. Drawing examples from primates and hunter- gatherers, she shows that motherhood isn’t just about bringing up nice, healthy, welladjusted kids. It also involves the rather more ruthless business of getting your genes into the next generation and the one after that. So it’s also concerned with resources, money, alliances and deals.
“The secret of her success,” writes Hrdy about one primate matriarch, “is that she was able to carve out a reproductive territory deep within boundaries patrolled by males, many of whom were either former sexual consorts or her sons.” It’s a model that suggests that women have all the psychological programmes necessary to survive in the boardroom jungle.
However, both the entertaining males and the new matriarchs have to learn to lie. “One of the reasons we have such big brains is because we are good at deceiving each other,” says Dr Richard Byrne, of St Andrews University. He has found a link between how good a primate species is at manipulating one another — cheating on mates, stealing food — and the size of their brains. What’s been called Machiavellian intelligence involves finding the right balance between trusting people when it’s appropriate and spotting when they are trying to take advantage of you by lying or cheating. One study has found that future leaders are those who are the most effective liars in the playground.
“We seem programmed to start social interactions by trusting people and wanting to co-operate with them” says Dr Paul Zak, of the Centre for Neuroeconomics Studies, at Claremont Graduate University in California. “In fact, trusting triggers off the same ‘feel-good’ brain chemicals that go with addiction and sex — but when we find someone has cheated on us we also get a kick out of punishing them.” Success comes from not being too trusting or too much of a cheat.
So we come programmed with a number of alternative ways to fulfil our ambitions. How well do they fit with the way that successful people behave today? Very well, as it turns out. Psychologists such as Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology at Lancaster University, have interviewed famous people to uncover the common features that make them tick and found that both in the primate troop and on the corporate ladder social networking skills are vital. “
Despite the stereotype, successful and ambitious people usually don’t mistreat others,” he says. “In fact, they are the ones able to connect with people and to inspire loyalty.”
Some years ago one of the risks for having a heart attack was supposed to be the Type A personality — the ambitious, driven go-getter. But further research showed that the health risk didn’t come with being over-stressed, but was linked with how you felt about it. It wasn’t the high-flyers having the cardiac incidents but the middle managers who felt that they had no control over their work. If you are successful, you are more likely to be healthy as well.
Of all the other success traits — perseverance, readiness to take risks, being comfortable with ambiguity — there is one in particular that shows up on brain scans as being hard-wired. Delayed gratification — putting off jam today for the chance of lots more tomorrow — turns out to be vital for social success. Sapolsky’s baboons are poor at it and are less successful than chimpanzees as a result. The key lies with a region of the brain known as the orbital frontal cortex — tiny in baboons, bigger in chimps, it is huge in human beings. Women are better at delayed gratification than men, while many people with addictive problems — alcohol, drugs, shopping — are often poor at it.
One of the most surprising links with successful entrepreneurs, discovered some years ago by Cooper, is that they often had some kind of loss-related event in their early lives. “It could be the death of a parent or even some sort of deprivation — like their parents going bankrupt,” he says. However, critics have pointed out that the same might be said of people in prisons and psychiatric wards, which throws you back on to the question of what exactly is it that makes one person come away from childhood troubles with a determination never to be that helpless again, while another is crushed by it? “It’s not something we understand yet,” says Dr Parkinson, an independent business psychologist. “If you are looking for a magic bullet for success, there probably isn’t one.”
And that’s perhaps the most heartening lesson from all of this research. There seem to be many routes to fulfilling your dreams — being ruthless, networking, needing control. “A change in circumstances can create ambitions and drive people to succeed in something that they might not have considered, like founding a charity or setting up a business,” Parkinson says.
What’s more, now that psychologists have identified traits found in highly successful people, we can all polish these qualities in ourselves. Maybe we won’t be sufficiently talented to become a multimillionaire or an Olympic skier, but we can improve our chances of fulfilling more modest ambitions — starting a commercial website or walking across the Sahara.
HOW TO GET AHEAD
Successful entrepreneurs have often had some kind of loss-related event in their early lives.
