Psychological Principles of Success and the Key Elements of the “Winner’s Psyche”

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle (1925) highlights courage, practical reasoning, and self-control as the essential qualities of a successful individual and a long-term effective leader. Cicero (1913), meanwhile, emphasizes integrity, eloquent rhetoric, and a predisposition toward serving and giving back to the society one is part of. Daft et al. (2020) point to personal characteristics commonly found among successful individuals in leadership positions—traits such as energy, physical endurance, self-confidence, honesty, integrity, optimism, the desire to lead others, independence, a strong need for achievement and excellence, conscientiousness, risk-taking, persistence, education, mobility, interpersonal skills, cooperativeness, the ability to encourage collaboration, tact, critical thinking, decisiveness, knowledge, intelligence, and cognitive capacity.
With Slovenian business leaders and politicians, I wanted to explore the psychological principles of success to gain an exploratory insight into how they think about my central research question.

I listened to accounts from a U.S. Secret Service agent describing how she had never heard a single American president raise his voice. One trait they all shared was resilience. They had egos soft enough—and emotional resilience high enough—that constant scrutiny and criticism across major media outlets never broke them to the point that they could not step onto a stage, attend a conference, or stand in front of the White House and perform. I wanted to understand what Slovenian business and political leaders consider to be the psychological principles of success—the elements of the psyche that allow an individual to pursue their interests and goals in an uncompromising way. I was curious which psychological characteristics they believe help them achieve success, fulfill their goals, and realize their vision in life, politics, and business. As Liu (2020) writes, “What separates winners from losers is the ability to turn fate to their advantage. Those who win are often not the most capable—they are simply the ones who know how to turn the game of life in their favor.”

According to the participants, success is the result of several abilities: seeing the light at the end of the tunnel (“For long-term work in routine, perhaps monotonous situations, motivation must be internal. You must see the light at the end of the tunnel.”), setting clear goals (“Clear goals and the will to fight for them no matter what.”), being visionary (“True leadership connected to vision is difficult to explain from within. Someone from the outside could perhaps describe it better.”), luck (“Sometimes a lot depends on luck.”), fate (“Everyone who succeeds also has luck. This factor of fate, which you researchers like so much. You can work very hard, but still lack luck.”), emotional intelligence (“A good leader needs a huge amount of energy, emotional intelligence, and allies—without that it doesn’t work. You can’t achieve much alone.”), a realistic outlook, strong alliances (“Especially in business, but also elsewhere, you must have allies, not enemies.”), the ability to be tough on oneself and on others (“I am very harsh—on myself and on others.”), the ability to apply optimization logic and look for “simple and unambiguous solutions,” strong will (“Nothing breaks my will.”), inner fire (“Charismatic people are hard to find today. People with backbone, with fire. I don’t like lukewarm people. I like people who radiate something—who have ambition. That’s why I helped you, that’s why I accepted you. Such people—living people—are unfortunately very rare today.”), self-control, focus, ambition, and sobriety in crises (“I’m not a panicker. In the most unpleasant situations, I’m very calm. I know how to organize myself and focus.”).
Another participant emphasized a further important aspect of victory: “In politics, business, and sports, we lose far more often than we win. Winners are simply losers who held on one minute longer.”

Participants believe it is important to remain “normal” despite success (“First, you must stay normal.”), to be able to give up a large part of one’s private life, and also to recognize that there is no universal recipe for success—or that psychologically healthy individuals may, paradoxically, struggle to succeed (“I’d say successful people, your so-called winners, fall into two categories: all are deeply disturbed. The only difference is whether they know it or not, and what they do once they find out—whether they seek help or not. Because if you’re not at least somewhat disturbed, you wouldn’t go into this. No. The happiest people are those who are slightly above-average average and don’t need to prove themselves. To be successful, you must be at least a little disturbed. I truly mean this.”).
They also stated that “the hardest part is always finishing” and that to do so, one must be capable of making decisions, moving forward despite setbacks, being attuned to “the spirit of the times and one’s mission,” “turning natural dispositions to one’s advantage,” “enjoying creating,” and “not bothering with others.”

As key psychological characteristics of successful individuals in business and politics, participants highlighted the ability to set goals, to walk away when one feels a certain path is not right, to set one’s own conditions, to motivate and protect one’s people, to rely on strong intuition, to be relentless, to avoid euphoria, to find experts in areas one does not master, and to clarify for oneself what “winning” actually means (“To begin with, it makes sense to ask what victory is. The realization of a personal ambition that may be ‘costly’ for the environment or those around the ‘winner’? What is his goal or motive?”). The reflections of Slovenian business and political leaders on the psychological principles of exceptional success align with Gruden’s (2024) observations that top performers are marked by competence, emotional strength, knowledge, and the ability to recover quickly from setbacks. I consolidated the mentioned psychological principles of success into higher-order categories, and then into five third-order categories, presented and illustrated with first-order units of analysis in the table below, which also shows their comparison with ancient, East Asian, and contemporary scientific literature discussed in the introduction.

Table 1: Comparison of Findings for Research Question I with Insights from the Field and Philosophical Thought of the East and Antiquity