Nobody Ever Wants To "Bloom Where They're Planted."

Here's an uncomfortable fact: sometimes, your shining moment comes only after literal decades of excellent quality work done in obscurity.

Don't believe me? Let's look at a couple of my favorite examples: Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In addition to being two of the highest-ranking wartime commanders in the US Army, and later two-term Presidents of the United States, Grant and Eisenhower had a few other things in common as well:

• Both were from the Midwest, an area of the country not generally known for attracting a lot of wealth, power, or attention.

• Both graduated somewhere near the bottom of their classes at the US Military Academy at West Point.

• Both spent decades of military service as what I call "essential nobodies"; they were both generally well-regarded, and efficient staff officers. They were necessary, but not important. They spent years relegated to bases far from the centers of power, doing work nobody else wanted to do, and were passed over for combat command multiple times each.

Often when we read biographies of both of these men, we read words like “meteoric rise to fame” and “leapfrogging more senior officers” which makes it sound like their path to notoriety was one of leaps and bounds. Yet, the reality is that both Eisenhower and Grant spent the vast majority of their professional lives being completely ignored. Had it not been for the cataclysms of the American Civil War and the Second World War, both of these men would probably have lived and died without anyone beyond their immediate circle even knowing their names.

In April 1861, as America descended into the maw of the Civil War, Ulysses Grant was a shopkeeper in tiny Galena, IL.

He wasn’t even seriously considered for command, due to his competent, but less-than-spectacular military service during the Spanish-American War. George B. McClellan, newly-appointed commander of Federal forces, despised Grant, and wanted him kept as far from the action (and any chance of stealing McClellan’s spotlight) as possible. Because of this, Grant spent most of the next three years in the Western Theater, far from the centers of power, and favorable press attention, located in the East.

Despite delivering one victory after another, Grant’s efforts were basically unnoticed by the nation as a whole until he was summoned East by President Lincoln in March of 1864. Between March 1864 and April 1865, Grant’s relentless hounding of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and General Robert E. Lee brought him to truly national prominence for the first time. His defeat of Lee at Appomattox was heralded as achieving the impossible, given how many other Northern commanders had been humbled and disgraced by being outfoxed by Lee during the war.

From shopkeeper to national savior in under four years, it’s safe to say that Grant’s enduring fame makes it hard to imagine how ignoble were his beginnings.

Like Grant, Dwight D. Eisenhower also emerged on the national stage all at once, after languishing for years in relative obscurity.

While Eisenhower was a gifted and highly regarded staff officer prior to, and during the First World War, he never saw combat. Serving as an aide for a succession of other, more famous officers like John Pershing and Douglas MacArthur, Ike remained hidden in the periphery for decades. In fact, as was common at the time, after the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1918, Eisenhower reverted from his wartime, temporary rank of Lieutenant Colonel back to his permanent rank of Captain. While he was promoted to Major the next day, Eisenhower didn’t see another promotion for the next sixteen years!

But, as fate would have it, Eisenhower’s years of experience as a staff planner and his deep and broad understanding of processes, and bureaucracy made him the ideal candidate to head the US Army’s War Plans Division at the outset of World War II, and his capacity for working with difficult and haughty people, derived from his years as an aide-de-camp, made him the perfect officer to command the first, and largest coalition of forces in modern warfare. Without the years spent in the staff backwaters, and the years spent being the sounding board and voice of reason for mercurial and temperamental general officers, Eisenhower would have had neither the patience, nor the knowledge necessary to command the largest amphibious assault in world history, OPERATION OVERLORD, otherwise known as the D-Day Invasion.

Over the past few months, I’ve been caught up in studying and comparing the lives of these two men, and I can’t help but notice not only the similarities between them that I mentioned above, but also a few fundamental ideas that we can apply to almost any job, business, or career.

For me, I read biographies like most people read self-help books; I believe the purpose of a great biography is to take principles and lessons from the subject’s life and find ways to apply them to ourselves. So what can we take away from this quick study of Grant and Eisenhower?

Well, both mens’ lives teach us that it is far, far better to do great work in obscurity than to do mediocre work in the limelight. In addition to the positive examples that we have in Grant and Eisenhower, we find them repeatedly crossing paths with other men who seemed to be marked for success in ways that Grant and Eisenhower never were, and yet spectacularly failed to live up to these expectations.

In Grant’s case, this was Gen. George B. McClellan. Top of his class at West Point, son of powerful Eastern politicians, the youngest officer ever appointed to lead United States forces in combat. McClellan seemed to have everything in life handed to him on a platter, and yet he couldn’t make a meal of it. After a string of disastrous military defeats, McClellan was relieved of command and spent the rest of his life trying to rehabilitate his name and image.

For Eisenhower, his opposite number was George Patton. Patton’s grandiose and larger-than-life persona, as well as undeniable combat genius made him the ideal poster boy for US Army generals in World War II, but his inability to navigate the political realm required of high-ranking Allied officers led to his being cast into embarrassment and disgrace only a few months after his greatest tactical combat success. In fact, he was relieved by none other than Eisenhower himself!

The biographies of Grant and Eisenhower differ from much of the usual self-help advice in another way: Neither Grant nor Eisenhower were ever shown to be satisfied with their place in life. Both men deeply envied their more successful friends and rivals. Neither of them ever was put on record as espousing the joys of “blooming where you’re planted.” This humanizes them in our eyes, and it serves as a lesson for us in another way:

If you want to be more successful, be more competent.

There’s a saying that mankind naturally rises to his level of incompetence. That is, people continue to succeed until they have risen to the point that they are no longer capable of coping, at which point they usually screw up, and are either humbled and learn a lesson, or tumble from the pedestal all the way and never fully recover. It’s worth noting that both Eisenhower and Grant have more complicated legacies as President than they do as military leaders. For them, the political sphere was their level of incompetence. But their reputations in the domain of war far outshine any of their contemporaries, because they were truly brilliant in that arena. So what can we take from this?

Obviously, one takeaway is that to be successful you have to be competent. Not just “faking it til you make it” but you have to have skills and a certain level of brilliance in your chosen domain. What Grant learned from his years as as lowly quartermaster and shopkeeper he was able to expand and replicate on a massive scale when called upon to lead the vast engines of the Federal Army. What Eisenhower learned from his years as an Aide and planner he was able to replicate on a massive scale when faced with leading the Allied coalition during the D-Day invasions. Neither of these men, despite their yearnings for a combat command, truly made their mark on the ways they fought by virtue of their understanding or experience in combat. They made it by virtue of other skills that, on the surface, seemed less-than-critical for a soldier to know. Both McClellan and Patton were genuinely brilliant combat commanders, but neither had the requisite logistical or political skill to succeed on the scale demanded by the conflicts they faced. Both of them made much better colonels than they did generals. By contrast, both Eisenhower and Grant were unremarkable as colonels, but shone as generals, when their span of control was increased.

We see this, don’t we, all the time in the business and political world today? Look, for example, at Elon Musk. A brilliant entrepreneur, founder, and engineer, but he seems to be struggling to transition to the skills required in his role of CEO of a large corporation. He’s a brilliant tactician who lacks something when it comes to strategic thinking.

Let’s take it a step further and think about how things might have gone in both the American Civil War and in World War II had Grant and Eisenhower gotten their wishes and been named combat commanders early on; would they have been as successful? Would they have had the experience and depth of understanding of the inner workings of the military at that time that they needed? Would they have even been in position to become the commanders they later became? It’s entirely possible that if they had been granted their requests, one or both of them could have been killed prior to ever achieving the level of command they eventually reached! What would the consequences of that have been? I personally don’t want to think what might have happened had the Civil War not ended at Appomattox, or had World War II stretched on for years past D-Day.

In conclusion, I didn’t want to write this as another article telling us to bloom where we’re planted, but to remind us that, through the lens of history, things that seem to be unfortunate or even tragic for the persons involved can often be the “seeds that in other times, and on other fields, will bear the fruits of victory,” as General Douglas MacArthur (once Eisenhower’s commander who, like Patton, rose to the level of his incompetence and then was fired for insubordination) once said. The key is to focus on bettering ourselves. The key is to focus on becoming undeniably great at whatever our work is.

We never know what twists and turns our lives will take, but one thing is for sure: we’ll never be as successful as we might be if we expand and enlarge our areas of competence. Learn, and grow, in whatever position your life happens to take. Get really, really good at what you do. There is never anything to lose by learning! Whatever skillset you may think you have, may not be the skillset that is required of you in the moment of crisis, so learn all you can and become adept at as many different facets of your competence as possible. We’ve lost our ability to prize the polymaths, the renaissance men and women among us in the name of over-specialization.

Don’t be one of the many who are unwilling or unable to learn new things, and to embrace that learning with grace and humility. It just might save lives.