Guest Blogger Jane Lovas' weekly series called “What I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Life and Career” runs each Thursday

You’re getting ready to graduate and like most of us you’re probably thinking about having a successful life and career. I’m going to share a secret with you: Pursue happiness and success will follow.

How does this work? You tend to be more successful when you do things which you love doing, thus encouraging yourself to feel more confident in your ability to do other things.

When you are having fun and feeling confident in yourself, it’s easier to work and collaborate with other, again allowing you to feel more successful. When you like what you’re doing and interested in it, you are more likely to spend the time to increase your knowledge about it and related areas, again making you feel more successful.

On the other hand, when you focus on success, it often gets defined as more money, a bigger house, a higher position or a new bigger car. The problem is that these things can begin to define you, and as you look around and there is always someone else with a bigger, better, newer something which leads you to be dissatisfied with what you have.

Instead, if you are having fun doing what you love, you’ll find that you have the things in your life that really mean something to you and you can enjoy them because they don’t own you.

Think about this; did Bill Gates get to be so successful because he said "I want to make a billion dollars," or did he say "I have this really cool idea and I’m going to build it and sell it?" Whether you end up making a bazillion dollars or not, remember what Henry Ford's quote, "Quality is Job 1."  I think we should change that to "Happiness is job 1."

Have fun and be successful!

Jane Lovas is a career specialist who is the creator of the life changing 12 week tele-seminar “Creating the Life of Your Dreams”. She is also our guest blogger, whose column will run every Thursday. If you would like to contact Jane, you can reach her here, here or here.

"Smiley detail" courtesy renaissancechambara via Flickr Creative Commons

Malcolm Gladwell's essay in this week's New Yorker tackles the characteristics of a few successful entrepreneurs (this, unfortunately, just links to the abstract. To read the whole thing, go to the newstand - now! - and buy a copy of the New Yorker), as well as the mistakes of failed. Gladwell looks at some existing research and books on entrepreneurship and highlights two models - the "risk-taker" and the "predator" model:

There is almost always, they conclude, a moment of great capital accumulation - a particular transaction that catapults him into prominence. The entrepreneur has access to that deal by virtue of occupying a "structural hole," a niche that gives him a unique perspective on a particular market. Villette and Vuillermot go on, "The businessman looks for partners to a transaction who do not have the same definition as he of the value of the goods exchanged, that is, who undervalue what they sell to him or overvalue what they buy from him in comparison to his own evaluation." He moves decisively. He repeats the good deal over and over again, until the opportunity closes, and - most crucially - his focus throughout that sequence is on hedging his bets and minimizing his chances of failure. The truly successful businessman, in Villette and Vuillermot's telling, is anything but a risk-taker. He is a predator, and predators seek to incur the least risk possible while hunting.

[...]

The risk-taking model suggests that the entrepreneur's chief advantage is one of temperament - he's braver than the rest of us are. In the predator's model, the entrepreneur's advantage is analytical - he's better at figuring out a sure thing than the rest of us.

What this says, then, is that many previous notions of the entrepreneur do not necessarily hold up. Among these would be the conception that failure is good for an entrepreneur, as it can be used to learn for future endeavors. But, rather than a shotgun spread approach of risk-failure-learn, risk-failure-learn, risk-success, it's much more worthwhile to be calculatingand analytical in the approach to entrepreneurship. Which, if you actually think about it, makes a hell of a lot of sense. Gladwell goes on to offer a number of examples (Ted Turner) for why and how this method works (all of which are worth reading). But for the aspring entrepreneur, the strength of the lessor resides in the charecteristics of entrepreneurship that set the successful apart from the failures - specifically preparation and risk-aversion.

The economist Scott Shane, in his book "The Illusions of Entrepreneurship," makes a similar argument. Yes, he says many entrepreneurs take plenty of risks - but those are generally the failed entrepreneurs, not the success stories. The failures violate all kinds of established principles of new-business formation. New-business success is clearly correlated with the size of initial capitalization. But failed entrepreneurs tend to be wildly undercapitalized. The data show that organizing as a corporation is best. But failed entrepreneurs tend to organize as sole proprietorships. Writing a business plan is a must; failed entrepreneurs rarely take that step. Taking over an existing business is always the best bet; failed entrepreneurs prefer to start from scratch. Ninety per cent of the fastest-growing companies in the country sell to other businesses; failed entrepreneurs usually try selling to consumers, and, rather than serving customers that other businesses have missed, they chase the same people as their competitors do. The list goes on; they underemphasize marketing; they don't understand the importance of financial controls; they try to compete on price. Shane concedes that some of these risks are unavoidable: would-be entrepreneurs take them because they have no choice. But a good many of these risks reflect a lack of preparation or foresight.

So, before you embark on your own career, investments and life of entrepreneurship, keep these characteristics in mind. And, if you're looking for a good entrepreneurship program, ReadWriteWeb has a list of the top 6 colleges for entrepreneurship.

The question of nature vs nurture is one that plagues every behavioral scientist. But on a personal level, it's also one the plagues any self-reflective individual. Personally, I've often questioned how I become who I am and what that says about the potential for my future? Am I limited in what I can accomplish on a professional level by an inherent cap on talent and intelligence, or am I a product of my environment, who can rise above whatever limitations that stand in my way?

The science necessary to answer these questions is intricate and untested, but this months Atlantic reveals some groundbreaking studies that may reinvent how we think about genes and environment. This research reevaluates previous thoughts on behavior in at risk children, posing the question: "Could it be ... that the children who suffer most from bad environments also profit the most from good ones?" Confused? Well, read the whole article, but let's take a sneak peak:

The Swedes, Ellis and Boyce noted in an essay titled “Biological Sensitivity to Context,” have long spoken of “dandelion” children. These dandelion children—equivalent to our “normal” or “healthy” children, with “resilient” genes—do pretty well almost anywhere, whether raised in the equivalent of a sidewalk crack or a well-tended garden. Ellis and Boyce offer that there are also “orchid” children, who will wilt if ignored or maltreated but bloom spectacularly with greenhouse care.

[This is] actually a completely new way to think about genetics and human behavior. Risk becomes possibility; vulnerability becomes plasticity and responsiveness. It’s one of those simple ideas with big, spreading implications. Gene variants generally considered misfortunes (poor Jim, he got the “bad” gene) can instead now be understood as highly leveraged evolutionary bets, with both high risks and high potential rewards: gambles that help create a diversified-portfolio approach to survival, with selection favoring parents who happen to invest in both dandelions and orchids.

Can liability really be so easily turned to gain? The pediatrician W. Thomas Boyce, who has worked with many a troubled child in more than three decades of child-development research, says the orchid hypothesis “profoundly recasts the way we think about human frailty.” He adds, “We see that when kids with this kind of vulnerability are put in the right setting, they don’t merely do better than before, they do the best—even better, that is, than their protective-allele peers. “Are there any enduring human frailties that don’t have this other, redemptive side to them?”

Research like this is obviously young and in no way conclusive. But still, it's useful in understanding our own behavior as well as the behavior of others. And while you're not exactly going to use this knowledge to map the success or failure of your future career path, it helps to understand how both your genetics and the environment in which you reside can shape your route to success.

"Molecule!!" courtesy of monkeymad2.0b via Flickr Creative Commons

Welcome to the Daily Roundup. Each day at the ThinkTalk Blog we will post some links that we find informative, interesting, or just plain funny. The goal is to let you know what else is going on out there, and ultimately help you with the development of your career.

Success comes in many forms. Like the time I studied all night, really hard, and got a B- on that Psychology as a Natural Science test. B-? That’s all, you say. Back off there, Hoss. If there are two things I have no comprehension of, it is Psychology and Science. For me, a B- was a success.