The first question that comes to my mind is probably also the most important one: what is success?
It seems like a trivial question, yet giving it a definition is not that simple. Of course there's always the dictionary definition but as you can imagine this article wouldn't have any reason to exist if that definition were enough for us. Success is not simply an event that had a good outcome [1].
It is extremely hard to pin down a single meaning. For some people success means wealth, for others fame. For other people success is living a quiet life, with a certain family stability, without excessive worries and anxieties and with a reasonably good health. The definition we give it changes with age, the context we're born into, our cultural background and our gender. What is considered "success" at twenty often changes when you hit forty. What is seen as success in a small town in southern Italy might not be so for a New Yorker.
The difficulty we have in giving it a single meaning makes it a slippery concept, almost abstract. If success is everything but also its opposite, then it is nothing. And yet despite its ambiguity, we keep chasing it, talking about it and measuring ourselves through it, implicitly or explicitly.
The problem is not that success doesn't exist, but that we don't use it as a tool for direction.
We talk about success as an emotional state, a feeling and an ideal condition to reach, but we rarely give it any concreteness.
To do that, if we want to give a definition that holds beyond the cultural, biological and psychological boundaries we talked about earlier, we need to strip it of many layers.
For instance by saying that success is not necessarily happiness or balance. It is not a synonym of material wealth either (even though it often includes it but we'll talk about that later). All these attributes can be consequences but not the substance.
We need to measure it, compare it and evaluate it in a way that can guide our choices and help us understand if we're going in the right direction (if we have it as a goal).
My personal definition, which I believe to be among the most honest and which I will use as the foundation of my reasoning is:
Success is the ability to achieve goals significantly above average.
So we give it a first initial value. Not minimal goals and not just any goals. Goals that, statistically, most people don't reach. [2]
Obviously a person who manages to live peacefully, maintain healthy relationships and fulfill their own basic needs and those of their family, has already achieved something extremely important. Even though by now given the global conditions and the rampant historical pessimism we're living through, even reaching these goals seems extraordinary, in truth they are stability and balance, and in many ways should be our starting point.
Success instead should begin when we decide to aim higher than average and incredibly manage to get there.
From here a second question arises: Why do some people make it and others don't?
Instinctively we could attribute everything to talent, luck or privilege. But there are plenty of stories of talented people or people born into privilege who don't achieve success. On the other hand, if poverty or difficult social contexts made success impossible, there wouldn't be stories of people who managed to overcome their initial condition, yet they've always existed.
This suggests that success is not democratic or meritocratic, but not random either. [3]
There are recurring patterns. Obviously I'm not talking about certain rules or magic formulas from gurus. I'm talking about behaviors, attitudes and choices that over time tend to produce similar results. Some of them are counterintuitive while others get trivialized and distorted by a ridiculous motivational narrative, with no real practical backing and spread with the sole purpose of taking advantage of people. Yet even these latter ones, once you remove the noise, remain surprisingly consistent.
Throughout my life [4] and especially during my professional and entrepreneurial journey, I've had the chance to observe these patterns up close. Sometimes I applied them unconsciously, while other times I was forced to learn them through the most common method of all: By failing. I don't want to use this as an excuse to tell a personal story. Rather my attempt is to extract a logic from lived experience in order to understand which of these events or elements truly made a difference over time in the path toward success.
When we observe the path of those who manage to build something relevant, to reach extraordinary goals (beyond the ordinary), the temptation is to look for a logical, tidy and clean sequence. As if success were the result of a series of correct choices made in a certain order. Thinking about success this way makes the narrative reassuring because it suggests that all you need is to understand the map to reach the destination and find the treasure. But reality is much less elegant.
Almost no path of this kind is linear, and above all, almost none starts from initial clarity. Much more often it starts from managed confusion, decisions made with incomplete information and from attempts that only half work. It's the effect of the narrative fallacy [5], the human tendency built into us to create coherent and causal stories after the fact to make sense of complex and unpredictable events, simplifying reality and underestimating the role of random occurrences. Often this narrative fallacy leads to distorting the past [6], believing we understand the present and how we got here and even incorrectly predicting the future. [7]
Recognizing this is a fundamental point, because this is where many people stop, not because they lack ambition and ability, but because they wait for the moment when "everything will make sense". But that moment, in most cases, never comes.
Those who manage to move forward accept an uncomfortable truth: acting must become the priority and must come before understanding. [8] Understanding is only the result of a long sequence of choices and mistakes interpreted the right way. [9]
It is in this space, between uncertainty and action, that we find a word that's now on everyone's lips: Mindset. Which stops being a simple slogan from a seller of false hopes and becomes something concrete. When we talk about Mindset we shouldn't make the mistake of associating it with positive thinking or with concepts that have no scientific basis like the law of attraction. It has to do instead with the ability to stay clear-headed when feedback is negative, when everything around us becomes ambiguous or even catastrophic.
Psychology professor at Stanford University Carol Dweck described this attitude as growth mindset:
In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work: brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment. Virtually all great people have had these qualities.Carol Dweck
Her research shows that people who interpret failure as information, and not as a judgment of themselves, tend to improve more over time and to persist longer in the face of difficulties and life's challenges. [10]
In my opinion there's also another aspect, less often mentioned, to keep in mind during our path toward success: The relationship with our personal responsibility.
In complex contexts, it is very easy to build an external narrative of failure. Many times I've found myself hearing people complain about the laws, the cost of living, taxes, the political system, nepotism, corruption. In many cases these statements are not entirely false but the problem is when they become the only lens. Attributing all responsibility to the outside has an immediate effect: it relieves frustration, but it also has a hidden cost: it prevents us from moving forward. If the solution is outside our control, then the only rational response becomes giving up.
People who achieve the extraordinary make different choices. They do it not so much because they believe in a fair, equitable system free of corruption, but because they are convinced that a significant part of the outcome depends on them anyway. [11] Even when it would be easier to believe the opposite.
This assumption of personal responsibility is not a moral act but rather a strategy that forces you to look for levers, alternatives, lateral paths. It forces us into a self-examination where the question is not "whose fault is it?", but "what can I do right now?".
From here another fundamental ability arises: critical thinking.
Critical thinking is a method that analyzes evidence and observations to form an opinion. The goal is to arrive at a judgment that is solid and empirically verifiable. [12] It is the opposite of living a certain way or making certain choices just because "it's always been done this way", "I was told to do it this way", or worse yet, letting yourself be guided only by emotions and feelings. [13]
It means questioning what seems obvious, not taking for granted that something, just because it works for many, will work for you too. It means doubting consensus and doubting even your own emotions.
The mistake many people make is trying to find success by following paths already taken, expecting extraordinary results. It's an obvious contradiction yet extremely common. You choose a reassuring road because it's been validated by others and then you're surprised if the results are mediocre.
To make this concept clear we can use many real examples. For instance if we choose to open a magnet shop in an extremely touristy spot already saturated with shops selling the same product, we'll hardly achieve results above the others [14].
In the same way if we choose to learn skills or a profession with a now low demand and with so many people with the same skills, it will be hard to reach prominent positions or results above average.
The world doesn't reward good intentions, it rewards usefulness. Usefulness almost always comes from the alignment between what we know how to do, what we're willing to improve and what people actually need. Being useful requires a lot of effort from us to learn to observe and listen to the market and above all, to adapt.
Over time I've seen with my own eyes how damaging the lack of critical thinking can be, especially when applied to oneself. Not so much the absence of ideas, but the inability to actually put them to the test.
I remember for instance a client convinced he could revolutionize the beauty market with a service entirely conceived by him. He was sincerely convinced that his proposal was innovative, almost inevitable. Before coming to me he had never done a real market research, he had never verified if that service addressed a real need or if, more simply, it didn't exist because nobody needed it.
The problem was not the lack of ambition, he had plenty of that. Nor the creativity (it was a really creative idea). The problem was the absence of confrontation. His idea had never been challenged, never measured against real data, never separated from the feelings that sustained it. In that void, personal conviction had taken the place of validation and empirical evidence. It's a much more common mistake than it seems. Confusing what excites us with what is useful, only to discover too late that the market doesn't reject ideas because they're wrong, but because they don't solve anything.
On the other hand I've had the chance to experience firsthand the benefits of critical thinking applied to the job market. At the end of my middle school (in Italy middle school covers ages 12 to 14) when it was time to choose high school (your professional path), before choosing I searched the internet for information about the most in-demand professions. The world was looking for IT professionals, software developers…so I chose to enroll in the technical institute in the computer science and telecommunications track. That choice was spot on, it turned out to be one of the best I could have made. Over time I understood that building skills that the market demands is a form of freedom, whoever possesses them can fall and get back up multiple times. They will always be useful to the market and always in high demand.
At this point it might seem like my choice was based purely on logic and devoid of any passion or natural predisposition. This might bother some readers who prefer to follow their heart rather than doing something they don't love. But the reality is quite different.
Throughout my childhood I always had predispositions and passions that weren't always connected to each other. I loved drawing and painting, I dreamed of becoming an artist, but I also loved technology and computer science. Over time I learned to connect both passions and I adapted them for the market in order to find a balance between logic and passion.
Passion continues to play an important role in the pursuit of success but this shouldn't mean giving up common sense and rationality. If it's not treated as blind enthusiasm but as a way to sustain the friction, then passion too remains fundamental. [15] Steve Jobs used to say that the only way to do great work is to love what you do. Not so much because love or passion make the path less steep, but rather because it makes the difficulties sustainable. Without a deep passion for what you do, the first failure we encounter is often also the last.
At this point success, seen up close, doesn't seem to resemble an orderly climb, it's an irregular process, made of attempts, corrections and restarts. The person who achieves it is not someone who never falls, but someone who with the right mindset, critical thinking and a balance between logic and passion, has built a system that allows them to always get back up.
And this system doesn't come about by chance.
A concrete pillar of this system that was fundamental for me even though it's often treated superficially is networking. It's a word that immediately evokes two opposite reactions. On one hand those who consider it the key to everything, on the other those who reject it because it's often associated with opportunism, superficiality or even hypocrisy.
But in this case too the 2 different readings are incomplete.
Networking is that ability that allows us to extend and build our network (net) of contacts, professional and otherwise. Networking that really works though has nothing to do with simply collecting business cards or asking favors from more influential people. In fact, in most cases, the direct and utilitarian approach produces the opposite effect: Those people we want to learn from or get attention from, pull away.
The strongest professional relationships almost never arise from an explicit request, they arise from a much simpler but rare dynamic: being useful without asking for anything in return, at least at the beginning.
People who have built something extraordinary are constantly exposed to requests. It's normal then that they develop a sort of automatic filter. This filter drops immediately when on the other side there's someone who instead of asking, offers. Not necessarily something incredible, sometimes a smart observation or a small problem solved is enough. So we must fix in our minds that this type of relationship cannot be built in a rush. We must start by being present in the right contexts, being curious and capable of listening. It also requires a certain humility, often in these contexts we must accept the idea that we're not the most competent or the most brilliant. But it's precisely in environments like these that we learn faster.
At this point, though, we can't ignore a question deeply connected to what we've just said, and often also the hardest to talk about: Starting conditions.
Not everyone starts from the same point, not everyone has access to the same information, environments or social networks. [16] Some grow up in environments rich with stimuli, others instead in isolated contexts where even just imagining a path different from normality requires an enormous cognitive effort.
I myself grew up in a situation that, in many ways, made things harder. After having lived in different environments and contexts (Italy, China, South Korea), I ended up in Emilia-Romagna (Northern Italy) and not in a big city like Bologna or Ferrara, but in the middle of the countryside. Far from decision-making centers, far from the best schools and far from those places where networking happens almost by osmosis. To go to school I needed my mother to drive me and make a 30-minute trip, my classmates lived even further away and shared projects were hard to put together. If I had stayed there, things would have probably been even harder.
Even though my situation later improved and I made choices that brought me to better environments, still compared to someone who might have been born into rich families or in even more fortunate contexts it remains unequal if we want to compare it with the number of possibilities available to reach extraordinary goals.
Very simple example, an American kid from a wealthy family who maybe lives in San Francisco and attends Stanford, has objectively greater chances of professional and personal success than a kid born in the outskirts of Naples to a poor family.
Difficult contexts however don't make success impossible, they make it slower and the cost in terms of effort and money greater. It requires more energy, more intentionality, greater conscious efforts and an attitude that is very rare to find in these environments (poor families tend to be conservative, frugal, tend not to take risks that are too high [17], which for instance helps a lot when you decide to start a business and moreover they tend to set limits on the type of goals they'll be able to achieve because of an inherited negativity that leads the individual to think it's impossible to climb their social class). And it's right to say it, without romanticizing hardship, that starting disadvantaged is not a virtue, it's simply a fact that many people have to deal with.
At the same time though, stopping at this observation is not enough. We live in a historical era where, despite all its contradictions, AI stealing jobs, wars, etc…access to information is unprecedented.
Today a person can learn almost anything for free or at low cost, can build a reputation and can get noticed without belonging to an elite. Obviously with this I don't mean to say it's easy or guaranteed but that it has never been more possible than today.
When I say it has never been more possible than today, I'm talking about the fact that until fifteen or twenty years ago, to get noticed, to build a reputation, to reach many people or the right people, you had to be inside certain circles. You needed the right connections, to belong to the right social classes or simply to live in the right zip code. Today anyone who knows how to do something, anything, has the tools to put it in front of thousands of people without asking anyone's permission.
Having this lever at your disposal doesn't mean knowing how to use it or that it will work on the first try. Rather it means that that insurmountable wall of social injustice has been lowered. It hasn't disappeared but it has objectively been lowered and this changes the rules of the game.
There is however a step that many avoid: risk.
You can have the right skills, the right mindset, a solid network of relationships and a very powerful lever at your disposal. But if you're not willing to put yourself out there, all of this remains untapped potential.
Risk is a word that scares people, especially those who have known precariousness, because they associate it with loss. [18] You tend to risk less when what we lose is everything we've built even if small. It's an understandable instinct, but it's also one of the most powerful brakes on achieving extraordinary results.
The risk I'm talking about is not that of blind sentimentalism or impulse. It's not betting on a hunch just because we feel it. It's the willingness to make considered choices that don't have a guaranteed outcome. [19] Leaving for instance a position that seems safe but that in reality leads nowhere, for something uncertain but with greater potential.
All the people I know who have achieved results beyond the ordinary have gone through at least one phase where they had to bet on themselves without safety nets. Not out of recklessness, but because they had understood something that many struggle to accept: Standing still is an invisible risk [20], it exposes you to mediocrity without you even noticing and when it happens it's already too late.
Another factor is time. We live in an era that has accustomed us to immediate results. You order something and it arrives in a day, you open TikTok and in a few seconds you get your dopamine hit. This immediacy has distorted our perception of the time needed to achieve extraordinary results.
Apart from rare and non-replicable cases, where luck is the main factor behind an individual's success, skills require time, relationships require time, your reputation requires time. None of these things produce visible results right away. There's an initial phase, sometimes long, where the effort is high and the return is practically zero. This is the phase where almost everyone quits.
But it's precisely during that phase that something important is being built. It's called compounding, the cumulative effect. [21] It works like compound interest: At the beginning the growth is imperceptible, then at a certain point it accelerates exponentially. The problem is that this effect is invisible while you're living it. From the outside it seems like nothing is happening and the temptation to change course or stop altogether sets in. People who reach the extraordinary are not necessarily more patient than others, they've simply understood that the initial slowness is not a sign of failure. It's the cost of entry.
At this point, if we put together everything we've talked about — mindset, responsibility, critical thinking, passion, networking, the lever, risk, time — what emerges is not a to-do list. It's something more like a system. [22] A way of operating made of habits, of criteria with which you make decisions, of priorities you're willing to question when they stop working. [23]
Whoever builds this system stops asking themselves "will I make it?" and starts asking a much more useful question: "how can I increase the odds?". [24] It's a huge difference. The first question paralyzes because it has no certain answer. The second sets things in motion because it always has an answer, even a small one, even a partial one.
And maybe this is the most important point. Those who manage to go above average don't wait for the path to become clear. They make it clear along the way.
Many people imagine success as a definitive conquest. A finish line. A moment when uncertainties finally dissolve. But those who have truly gone through non-linear paths know it doesn't work like that. Every milestone moves the starting point further ahead. Every result opens new problems. Every level reached makes visible limitations that didn't exist before.
This is one of the reasons why motivational rhetoric fails: it promises stability in a process that, by its nature, is unstable. Success doesn't eliminate uncertainty. At best, it makes you more competent at managing it. [25]
Looking back, what the extraordinary people have in common is not the absence of doubt, but the ability to live with it without becoming paralyzed. It's not certainty, but a form of operational trust: the conviction that even if the next move won't be perfect, it will still be useful.
Seen from this perspective, success no longer appears as a prize reserved for a chosen few, nor as a universal promise. It appears for what it is: a consequence of choices made consistently over time, by people willing to endure the asymmetry between effort and result.
If we go back to the question we started with — what is success — the answer at this point is less abstract than it seemed at the beginning.
Success is not a state you arrive at and stop. It's not a moment when everything finally makes sense. It's a position you build over time, choice after choice, mistake after mistake. It's the result of having decided not to stop at the first comfortable explanation, not to confuse the context we're born into with destiny, not to wait for someone to give you permission to try.
If I had to reduce it to one sentence, I'd say that success is the ability to keep choosing, even when it would be much easier to stop. To keep improving when progress can't be seen. To keep putting yourself out there when the outcome is uncertain. To keep building when nobody is noticing yet.
It's not a promise of happiness and it's not a guarantee of balance. But it is a rare form of freedom.
Success is not something you achieve once. It's something you practice. Every day. In silence. Long before anyone notices.
Notes
[1] Definition from the Italian dictionary.
[2] Having goals above average doesn't imply they automatically make you happy nor that they should be pursued at any cost (putting ethics, freedom or family bonds at risk).
[3] Pluchino, Biondo & Rapisarda (2018), "Talent vs. Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure," Advances in Complex Systems, 21(03–04). Agent-based simulation of 1,000 individuals over 40-year careers: talent was normally distributed, but success followed a power law. The wealthiest agent had a talent almost at the mean (T≈0.61 vs. mean 0.6), while the most talented agent (T=0.89) reached only a fraction of the maximum success. Talent increases the probability of exploiting luck, but alone it's not enough.
[4] Despite being very young, I have lived multiple personal and professional experiences around the world that allowed me to go through countless situations and learn from them.
[5] Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2007), The Black Swan, Random House. Chapter 6: the narrative fallacy is "our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them." Taleb identifies the Triplet of Opacity — the illusion of understanding, the retrospective distortion of history, and the overvaluation of factual information — and prescribes to "favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history."
[6] Baruch Fischhoff (1975), "Hindsight ≠ Foresight," Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1(3), 288–299. Participants who knew an outcome judged it as more probable by 9.2 percentage points compared to the control group. Fischhoff called this "creeping determinism." Warning people about the bias produced no observable debiasing effect. Confirmed by Guilbault et al. (2004) with d = 0.39 across 95 studies.
[7] Daniel Kahneman (2011), Thinking, Fast and Slow. System 1 builds coherent stories using the WYSIATI principle (What You See Is All There Is): "We are confident when the story we tell ourselves comes easily to mind, with no contradiction and no competing scenario. But ease and coherence do not guarantee that a belief held with confidence is true." Overconfidence is fueled by the illusory certainty of hindsight.
[8] Saras Sarasvathy (2001), "Causation and Effectuation," Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 243–263. Study of 27 expert entrepreneurs (companies valued at $200M–$6.5 billion) using think-aloud protocols. Over 63% used effectual logic more than 75% of the time: they started from what they had and imagined what was possible, instead of starting from a predetermined goal. "To the extent that we can control the future, we do not need to predict it."
[9] Karl Weick (1995), Sensemaking in Organizations. Systematized the principle "How can I know what I think until I see what I say?" Sensemaking is retrospective: we act first, then interpret. The concept of enactment implies that people don't "discover" their environment but create it through their actions.
[10] Mueller & Dweck (1998), "Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine Children's Motivation and Performance," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(1), 33–52. Six studies with fifth-grade children: children praised for intelligence chose easy tasks (67%), worsened by 20% after failure. Children praised for effort chose hard tasks (92%) and improved by 30%. Six words of difference in the compliment produced cascading effects on motivation and performance.
[11] Rauch & Frese (2007), meta-analysis in European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 16(4), 353–385. Internal locus of control correlated with entrepreneurial success at r = 0.13; when matched to specific entrepreneurial tasks, the correlation doubled to r = 0.25. Internal LOC predicted both business creation and business growth. Based on the foundational work of Julian Rotter (1966), Psychological Monographs, 80(1).
[12] Butler (2012), "Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment Predicts Real-World Outcomes," Applied Cognitive Psychology, 26(5), 721–729. Higher critical thinking scores correlated with fewer negative real-life events (bankruptcies, illnesses, legal issues, debt) at r = −0.38. For community adults: r = −0.59. Critical thinking concretely protects against bad decisions.
[13] Butler, Pentoney & Boo (2017), "Predicting Real-World Outcomes: Critical Thinking Ability is a Better Predictor of Life Decisions than Intelligence," Thinking Skills and Creativity, 25, 38–46. Critical thinking predicted negative outcomes (r = −0.33) better than IQ, explaining additional variance beyond general intelligence. Between two people with the same IQ, the one with better critical thinking makes better decisions.
[14] Obviously this is an exaggeration, the product could be different, customized, with a different target and with greater advertising investment and this could nullify my statement, obviously we're talking about examples with equal market, product, price and investment.
[15] Vallerand et al. (2003), "Les Passions de l'Âme: On Obsessive and Harmonious Passion," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(4), 756–767; Vallerand et al. (2010), Journal of Personality, 78(1), 289–312. The Dualistic Model distinguishes between harmonious passion (flow, positive emotions, flexible persistence) and obsessive passion (burnout, conflict, rigid persistence). Prospective study of 258 nurses over 6 months: OP predicted increasing burnout; HP predicted increasing satisfaction. Same job, same conditions — the difference was in the type of passion.
[16] Chetty et al. (2018/2026), "The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility," American Economic Review. Data on 20.5 million Americans: outcomes varied enormously between neighborhoods just a few miles apart. Moving a child from a below-average neighborhood to an above-average one increases lifetime earnings by about $200,000. The strongest predictor of upward mobility is "economic connectedness" — how much poor children interact with middle- and upper-class adults.
[17] Haushofer & Fehr (2014), "On the Psychology of Poverty," Science, 344(6186), 862–867. Poverty generates chronic stress that impairs the brain's executive functions, producing greater risk aversion and preference for immediate rewards. Kidd, Palmeri & Aslin (2013) show that children in unreliable environments waited only 3 minutes in the marshmallow test versus 12 in reliable environments: delayed gratification is partly a rational response to trust in the environment.
[18] Kahneman & Tversky (1979), "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk," Econometrica, 47(2), 263–292. The pain of loss is about 2–2.5 times more intense than the pleasure of an equivalent gain (loss aversion). The prospect of losing what you have weighs psychologically more than double compared to potential gains. Replicated in 19 countries by Ruggeri et al. (2020), Nature Human Behaviour, with 90% replication.
[19] Sarasvathy (2001), the Affordable Loss principle. 63% of expert entrepreneurs reasoned in terms of affordable loss rather than expected return: they calculated the worst-case scenario and asked themselves if they could bear it. If the answer was yes, they proceeded — regardless of the probability of success.
[20] Gilovich & Medvec (1995), "The Experience of Regret: What, When, and Why," Psychological Review, 102(2), 379–395. In the short term people regret wrong actions more; in the long term the pattern reverses: 84% of respondents cited as their biggest regret something they hadn't done. At the end of life people don't regret failed attempts, they regret not having tried.
[21] Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer (1993), "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance," Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406. The "best" violinists accumulated ~10,000 hours of deliberate practice by age 20 versus ~5,000 for the lower-performing group. The accumulation is non-linear: paths diverge only after long phases of apparent stall. James Clear, Atomic Habits (2018): improving by 1% every day produces a 37× improvement in a year (1.01^365 = 37.78). The "Valley of Disappointment" is the phase where compounding is still invisible.
[22] Gollwitzer & Sheeran (2006), "Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta-Analysis," Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119. Across 94 studies (N > 8,000), implementation intentions ("If X happens, then I will do Y") produced a medium-to-large effect: d = 0.65. People who create specific if-then plans achieve goals significantly better than those with only generic intentions.
[23] James Clear (2018), Atomic Habits. "You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems." Winners and losers share the same goals; the differentiator is the systems. Goals restrict happiness to future outcomes; systems provide ongoing satisfaction.
[24] Scott Adams (2013), How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. "Losers have goals. Winners have systems." A goal is a destination with built-in failure; a system is a process that constantly improves the odds. Adams also introduces "skills stacking": you don't need to be the best at one thing, you need to be reasonably good at two or three things that combine in a rare way.
[25] Kashdan & Rottenberg (2010), "Psychological Flexibility as a Fundamental Aspect of Health," Clinical Psychology Review, 30(7), 865–878. Psychological flexibility — the ability to adapt to changing demands and shift perspective — is a stronger predictor of mental health than specific coping strategies. It's not the amount of negative emotions that predicts problems, but the rigidity of the response. Also supports Sarasvathy's (2001) Pilot-in-the-Plane principle: the entrepreneur doesn't predict the future but creates it while maintaining control over controllable elements.