Why do we succeed only when we are challenged? That’s simply because success is a partner word to challenge (competition and probability)
I think we need to clarify the question / scenario posted here before we dwell into discussing it. Every winner has a story about hardships. Winner can be people, countries, companies or even movies for that matter. We never come across winners who said “it was all very easy”. It would have been all very easy if one is naturally talented, is there something in these lines of “naturally talented” ?
Champions, take any sport we have these people !! Looking good, rich, making others jealous, selling products which transforms our lives etc. is there a champion in any sport who says “oh I didn’t practise at all, oh I didn’t follow a diet at all, I just woke up and ran from Athens to Marathon in 3 hours, I was writing a cloud security code and decided to swim from France to England in 40 mins or one who says oh felt like wearing a necklace so went over to the games with 5 rings and got myself a golden one by simply running 100m in 9 seconds”. No, this doesn’t happen. It’s always a story you don’t want to hear. Trained for 10 hours a day, ate practically to most disgustingly tasting food for 15 years, etc etc. what this all means is there is always a lot of practice and planning that goes behind every success.
Having set the platform for the story of success by taking the simple example of sporting champions let’s extend ourselves to companies and countries. Majority of rich countries are cold countries or countries where you practically have no support from weather. If people need to survive in these places they need to prepare and plan for every day. Vegetation is not natural, you need alternatives, choose a small window of period in an year to grow crops, all this is hard work and with it you imbibe the art of planning and preparation. When people imbibe this naturally any country develops in a faster pace as compared to countries where people don’t have to plan much. Take an example, tropical weather, you can grow something or the other practically 12 months an year, you can do anything you want and it’s not too cold or too hot, which means tourism can be year round. End of the day, the need to plan and prepare is lesser so people don’t actually develop this skill and the country takes a slower pace to develop (as they say developing nation).
There are lot of similarities between a country a commercial organisation. When people in any organisation plan and prepare their next steps there would be no surprise upon getting successful. It’s more than the short term achievements, really successful companies might not actually have any short term big success at all, instead they develop a culture / attitude / skill with in people to plan and prepare through their elaborate processes, quality controls, risk evaluations etc. The controls are exercised by making a process and following the process forces you to plan and to plan you need to prepare, even if an individual does not learn the art of planning or preparation the system drives your energy through this path of success.
Let’s plan, prepare and exercise our next steps, a trained horse wins races and lives in a warm stable where as a wild one tastes good on a plate.