4 Traits Of A High-Achiever

In last week’s post, I shared the marketing lessons I learned upon my recent escape from the record-setting frigid temperatures of Chicago to the warm, sunny climate of Scottsdale, Arizona – and in particular, my visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter home that he called “Taliesin West.”

In today’s follow-up post, I’ll share my observations about four of the “high achiever” traits that Wright possessed.

I gathered some of these during my tour of Wright’s home/school, and discovered a few more upon further research that I felt compelled to undertake after my visit…

1. Frank Lloyd Wright was a renegade. “The rules” simply didn’t apply to him.
   1. In an era were almost all cars were black, Wright had many of his cars painted his favorite color, “cherokee red.” (Wright was an early adopter and lifetime lover of the automobile, and reportedly owned over 60 cars during his lifetime.)
   2. On a related note, Wright also didn’t believe that speed limit laws applied to him. He was constantly spotted zooming around town in one of his souped-up, customized roadsters and amassed an impressive collection of speeding tickets.
   3. He had three marriages, including his second one to a woman with whom he had an affair when she was the wife of one of his clients.
   4. At the age of 59, he spent time in jail for violating the Mann Act (known officially as “The White-Slave Traffic Act” of 1910).
   5. Wright dropped out of high school, then attended college part-time for just three semesters before dropping out to go to work for a Chicago architectural firm. (He expressed his disdain for formal education with his quip, “Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes.”)
   6. He was fired from his first job for moonlighting – designing nine homes outside of work because he needed cash to fund his extravagant lifestyle.
   7. He developed his own architectural and design style, being responsible for many groundbreaking innovations and refusing to conform to accepted rules and standards of his day.
2. Wright was a major perfectionist and “control freak.” He insisted on having things exactly the way he wanted them.
   1. Many aspects of his designs revealed his need to control the actions of other people. For example: He was known to create low ceilings in entryways to homes and offices, to make people uncomfortable there and force them to continue on to the main rooms instead of loitering in the entrance areas.
   2. Wright’s projects routinely ran over budget, forcing his clients to pay higher fees than they had been promised.
   3. On many of his projects, Wright designed not only the home, but all of the furniture, artwork and other aspects of the interior. He was so adamant that everything be just the way he wanted, that on more than one occasion he was known to demand that a homeowner put all the furniture back in its original position when he visited the home and found things re-arranged from his original mandate.
   4. He located Taliesin West far away from civilization, and ran it like a commune (our tour guide explained that “everyone lives together, eats together, works together”), controlling almost all aspects of his students’ lives, including having them build the entire compound as part of their educational experience.
3. Wright had a huge ego, and a much-larger-than-life personality.

   Biographers have used all of the following to describe him:

   1. “Selfish and self-preserving”
   2. “Chaotic, reckless, flamboyant”
   3. “Restless, famous, unpredictable”
   4. “An arrogant narcissist”
   5. “A colossal egotist”

   As Loving Frank author Nancy Horan said, “He viewed himself in a sense as a prophet, and a person who had gifts that other people didn’t have.”

   And Wright himself explained, “I had to choose between an honest arrogance and a hypercritical humility… and I deliberately choose an honest arrogance, and I’ve never been sorry.”

4. Wright was a consummate self-promoter.
   1. He “was as much a showman as he was an architect,” according to Brendan Gill, author of Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright.
   2. Mark Favermann wrote, “Frank Lloyd Wright was a wonderful self-promoter. He was a very persuasive and gifted orator, and he very much enjoyed giving public lectures. Part of Wright’s self-promotion may have been a little exaggerated, even fabricated or just plain mythmaking. He felt that these added to his luster as a great architect and a great man.”
   3. Once, when he was sworn in as a witness in a court trial and asked his occupation, he stated “I am The World’s Greatest Architect,” and then explained his supposed “boast” with the defense: “I was under oath.”

Alas, although he was a prolific author and speaker, and came up with that ingenious self-branding statement, he failed to transfer his promoting and money-making skills into long-term wealth, because he neglected to implement smart business strategies and was notorious for living an excessive, indulgent lifestyle.

He was constantly in need of money – even to the point of losing his cherished collection of Japanese artwork and his beloved Taliesin home in a bankruptcy at the age of 55.

It is my sincere hope for you, dear reader, that you become as much of a high-achiever as Frank Lloyd Wright – yet you add to that a sharp business and wealth-building sense so that you enjoy long-term business AND financial success.