History tells us that there are definitely different pathways toward success and toward achieving leadership positions. And this basic story speaks to the fact that there is different pathways for success in life more generally. There are different pathways towards success and reaching leadership positions, and there are different ways to achieve those pathways.
Strategic Pluralism
When it comes to natural selection, it is often the case that multiple phenotypes (observable features of an organism) emerge to address various selective pressures (i.e., things that tend to impede survival and/or reproduction).
- In humans, there are multiple pathways to success. People vary from one another in terms of how truly other-oriented and how dispositionally selfish they are. The concept of strategic pluralism provides a framework for understanding this variability in behavior.
Bottom Line Human behavior is complex
People utilize a broad suite of behavioral strategies in their efforts to succeed in life
- Multiple-and often wildly different-strategies have the capacity to lead to successful outcomes
- In large part, the strategy that you utilize as you navigate the obstacles of life is up to you
- A self-serving approach to life might lead to all kinds of success, but it often does so at a cost to the welfare of others
Dark vs. Light Approaches to Life
In recent years, work in the field of personality psychology has found that there are reliable and measurable individual differences in terms of the degree to which people tend to employ a dark strategy when it comes to dealing with others2 versus a light strategy
- These two different behavioral strategies in humans seem to each have the capacity to lead to success
- Under some conditions, an all-out selfish approach leads to success in life-largely via tactics such as intimidation and bullying
- In other conditions, a genuinely, other-oriented approach has the capacity of boosting one’s social reputation and opening the door for all kinds of success
Two Broad Paths to Success in Life
A selfish approach to life, for better or worse, can have its merits when it comes to success.
