I started to read the success and achievement literature because I wanted to be successful.  I wanted to provide value and wanted to feel that I was valuable.  But after awhile I became disenchanted with such guides.  I began to notice contradictory advice, and even where the advise was similar the priorities were different.  What matters most?  I came to realize that if I did it all, I would fail.  Take anyone of the popular process methodologies and do everything it says and you will not have any time to do the real work. Some writers anticipate this point by saying that you need to select what is of importance, but that is the advice I was seeking.  So I started asking, “How does the author know this is true?  Is it true?” 

There are many opinions of what is critical for organizational and personal achievement.  Can we get past opinion?  I believe we can.  Anyone with some science training knows that opinions have a very high probability of being inaccurate and often simply wrong.  That this must be the case in the "achievement literature" is obvious since the opinions often contradict each other. 

One approach to get beyond mere opinion would be to rerun a specific situation over and over, changing one proposed achievement factor each time.  We cannot do this in real life but we can do it in a simulation.  Can we create simulations of complex human systems that are up to this task?  Within this text I present the theory and the tools with which we can create such simulations.  I have elected to present the simulation results before describing either the theory or the details of the simulations.  I leave the theory and the simulations to the end of this text.  Perhaps some stout hearted readers, or should I say stout headed readers, will get to that part of the text.

I searched through a wide range of literature to find candidate critical factors.  I then built simulations to test how sensitive outcome was to these candidate factors.  I believe the reader will find some of the factors that survived this test are no surprise.  The simulations put them on a more quantitative foundation, but they are generally not a surprise.  That there are only 5 may be surprising.  What is not in the list 5 may also be surprising, or, at least, contrary to much that is widely promoted. 

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(C) 2005-2014 Wayne M. Angel.  All rights reserved.