LinkedIn Influencer Jeff Haden published this post originally on LinkedIn.
It's not that hard to be successful. But it is hard to be extraordinarily successful.
Yet we all hope to achieve exceptional success (something we all define differently — and should define differently).
Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet. There is no one-size-fits-all prescription.
But there are certain qualities that incredibly successful people share ... especially those who also make a significant impact on the lives of other people.
See how many apply to you:
1. You find happiness in the success of others.
Great business teams win because their most talented members are willing to sacrifice to make others happy. Great teams are made up of employees who help one another, know their roles, set aside personal goals, and value team success over everything else.
Where does that attitude come from?
You.
Every successful person answers the question, "Can you make the choice that your happiness will come from the success of others?" with a resounding "Yes!"
But according to Dr. Robert Cloninger, "Novelty seeking is one of the traits that keeps you healthy and happy and fosters personality growth as you age ... If you combine adventurousness and curiosity with persistence and a sense that it's not all about you, then you get the creativity that benefits society as a whole."
As Cloninger says, "To succeed, you want to be able to regulate your impulses while also having the imagination to see what the future would be like if you tried something new."
Sounds like every successful person I know.
So go ahead. Embrace your inner novelty seeker. You'll be healthier, you'll have more friends, and you'll be generally more satisfied with life.
3. You don't think work-life balance — you just think life.
Symbolic work-life boundaries are almost impossible to maintain. Why? You are your business. Your business is your life, just like your life is your business — which is also true for family, friends, and interests — so there is no separation because all those things make you who you are.
Incredibly successful people find ways to include family instead of ways to exclude work. They find ways to include interests, hobbies, passions, and personal values in their daily business lives. If you can't, you're not living — you're just working.
Unless you create something entirely new — which is really hard to do — your business or profession is based on fulfilling an existing need or solving a problem.
It's impossible to identify a need or a problem without the ability to put yourself in another person's shoes. That's the mark of a successful businessperson.
But exceptionally successful leaders go a step further, regularly putting themselves in the shoes of their employees. (Here's what that looks like in practice.)
Success isn't a line trending upwards. Success is a circle, because no matter how high your business— and your ego — soars, success still comes back to your employees.
5. You have something to prove — to yourself.
Many people have a burning desire to prove other people wrong. That's a great motivator.
Incredibly successful people are driven by something deeper and more personal. True drive, commitment, and dedication spring from a desire to prove something to the most important person of all.
You.
6. You ignore the 40-hour-workweek hype.
Studies show that working more than 40 hours a week decreases productivity.
OK ...
Successful people work smarter, sure, but they also outwork their competition. (Every successful entrepreneur I know who reads those stories probably thinks, "Cool. Hopefully my competitors will believe that crap.")
The author Richard North Patterson tells a great story about Robert Kennedy. Kennedy was seeking to indict Teamsters head Jimmy Hoffa (who some still believe is hanging out in Argentina with Elvis and Jim Morrison).
One night, Kennedy worked on the Hoffa case until about 2 a.m. On his way home, he passed the Teamsters building and saw the lights were still on in Hoffa's office, so he turned around and went back to work.
There will always be people who are smarter and more talented than we are. Successful people simply want it more. They're ruthless — especially with themselves.
7. You see money as a responsibility, not a reward.
Many entrepreneurial cautionary tales involve buying 17 cars, loading up on pricey antiques, importing Christmas trees, and spending $40,000 a year for a personal masseuse. (Wait — maybe that's just Adelphia founder John Rigas.)
Successful people don't see money solely as a personal reward; they see money as a way to grow a business, reward and develop employees, give back to the community ... in short, not just to make their own lives better but to improve the lives of other people, too.
And, most important, they do so without fanfare, because the true reward is always in the act, not the recognition.
8. You don't think you're special.
In a world of social media, everyone can be their own PR agent. It's incredibly easy for anyone to blow their own horn and bask in the glow of their insight and accomplishments.
Truly successful people don't. They accept their success is based on ambition, persistence, and execution ... but they also recognize that key mentors, remarkable employees, and a huge dose of luck also played a part.
Exceptionally successful people reap the rewards of humility, asking questions, seeking advice, and especially recognizing and praising others because ...
9. You realize that success is fleeting, but dignity and respect last forever.
Providing employees with higher pay, better benefits, and greater opportunities is certainly important. But no level of pay and benefits can overcome damage to self-esteem and self-worth. (Here's a heartbreaking story that illustrates the point.)
The most important thing successful people provide their employees, customers, vendors — everyone they meet — is dignity.
And so should you ... because when you do, everything else follows.
Each week, Mr. Reed will relate the stories of people whose choices and actions make them heroes. See the table of contents for previous installments.
Culture isn’t always pretty, and like almost everything else in human life, it evolves. At one time or another in every corner of the planet, almost every imaginable grouping of people has faced unfairness, unequal treatment, legal and institutional discrimination, or outright persecution. As we learn to reject the unwarranted prejudice that springs from collectivist stereotypes or primitive dogmas, we recognize that every individual is unique. He (or she) deserves to be judged by the content of his character and to pursue his dreams in the marketplace of free exchange.
America in its first century offered more liberty to more people than any other place in the world, but there was still plenty of room for improvement. It took decades, but we eventually ended the ancient evil of race-based slavery. Decades later, Jim Crow laws were abolished. Pick any immigrant group — Catholics, Irish, Chinese — and to a considerable extent, we’ve come to see that once-widespread prejudice against them prevented everyone else from enjoying the benefits of their productivity. We’ve made progress, lots of it, toward the ideal of unshackling peaceful people from the chains of injustice and intolerance.
The philosophy of liberty appeals to me because it says to all people, regardless of race, religion, place of birth, or sex, “If you want to dream, create, build, own, grow, or improve, go for it!”
FEE’s founder Leonard Read expressed the credo of a free society when he called for “no man-concocted restraints against the release of peaceful, creative energy!”
In this Real Heroes essay, I turn our attention to three pioneering women in American business. Each was born into a culture that assigned the “fairer sex” to home and family life. They couldn’t vote because they were female. They weren’t supposed to engage in business because, well, that was regarded (as it had been everywhere for centuries) as a “manly” pursuit.
These three women — Martha Coston, Hetty Green, and Madam C.J. Walker — each possessed a spirit to break barriers. They achieved success and respect in private enterprise. They opened doors for millions of other women to enter the marketplace and compete with men in the creation of wealth.
Martha Coston
“We hear much of the chivalry of men towards women; but let me tell you dear reader, it vanishes like dew before the summer sun when one of us comes into competition with the manly sex.” — Martha Coston
“Extreme” describes the highs and lows in this remarkable woman’s life. Widowed with five children at the age of 32, Martha Coston was just beginning to recover from the unexpected loss of her husband when two of her children and her mother died. Depressed and penniless with three surviving children facing a bleak future, she managed to turn adversity into success through sheer pluck and willpower.
Coston was born Martha Jane Hunt in Baltimore in 1826 but moved to Philadelphia with her mother a decade later when her father died. When she was 16, she eloped with 21-year-old Benjamin Coston, a nautical engineer and promising inventor. His work in pyrotechnics and on early gas lighting earned him notable attention, but his life was cut short by a combination of pneumonia and chemical poisoning. Poring over his papers, Martha discovered drawings for a pyrotechnic signal (or “flare”) that would allow ships to communicate with the shore or with each other at night or in fog. Benjamin had labored over the idea while at the Washington Navy Yard but never progressed beyond plans on paper.
For 10 long years, Coston worked to perfect her late husband’s work, including the proper “recipe” for flares that burned red, white, and blue and then a system (a sort of “Morse code”) that would permit messaging by flare. In her own words,
It would consume too much space, and weary my readers, for me to go into all the particulars of my efforts to perfect my husband’s idea. The men I employed and dismissed, the experiments I made myself, the frauds that were practiced upon me, almost disheartened me; but despair I would not, and eagerly I treasured up each little step that was made in the right direction, the hints of naval officers, and the opinions of the different boards that gave the signals a trial.
On April 5, 1859, she presented her results to the world: a pyrotechnic signaling flare and code system. It worked beautifully. Reliable ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore communications were possible for the first time.
Inventing something useful, however, doesn’t translate into money unless the invention can be marketed, and Coston had no prior experience in business. That didn’t stop her from starting her own company, one that lasted for more than 125 years.
To the amazement of many, the widow and unexpected inventor blossomed into a successful and wealthy entrepreneur. At first, she felt the need to downplay her gender, even using a man’s name in initial communications to improve the chance that men would be willing to do business with her. In her autobiography she wrote, “We hear much of the chivalry of men towards women; but let me tell you dear reader, it vanishes like dew before the summer sun when one of us comes into competition with the manly sex.”
With the coming of the Civil War, Coston found a large and ready market by selling her signaling flares to the US Navy. She traveled around Europe, securing customers in both the government and private sectors. In the late 1860s, she struck a lucrative deal with the United States Life-Saving Service, which made her product standard equipment at its lifeboat stations.
Her biggest disappointment in business involved one of her biggest customers, one that took advantage of her good will and patriotism. To help the Lincoln administration’s war effort, Coston sold her flares and signaling system at below cost and sometimes accepted nothing more than a government IOU as payment. Washington ripped her off through its Civil War greenback inflation, eventually compensating her, in real terms, at about a quarter on the dollar. Had it not been for her skill at marketing elsewhere, she would have been bankrupt by war’s end.
When Martha Coston died in 1902, she was widely honored as a great inventor, a competent capitalist, and a model citizen. She overcame huge challenges and proved that a woman could be just as good in business as any man — and far better than those who defrauded her with their depreciating paper money.
Hetty Green
As Hetty Green’s riches grew, so did the attacks of the envious.
Martha Coston was rich by any measure, but by the late 19th century, the title of “richest woman in the world” belonged to Henrietta Howland Robinson Green, known widely as simply Hetty Green.
Born to a Quaker whaling family in 1834 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Hetty Robinson learned a lot about money long before she ever married a man whose last name was, at least for Americans, its most familiar color. By the age of six, she was regularly reading the financial papers to her father and grandfather. “In this way I came to know what stocks and bonds were, how the markets fluctuated, and the meaning of bulls and bears,” she later recalled.
When her parents died in the 1860s, Hetty inherited a fortune of about $6 million (about $120 million in 2015 dollars). What she did with it made her a legend in her own time as one of the savviest investors and independent financiers ever. Combining a conservative approach with a canny sense of timing, she bought and sold bonds, railroad stocks, and real estate and parlayed her inheritance over 30 years into what would be well over a billion dollars today. She was her own adviser, her own bank, and what one biographer would later call “a one-woman Federal Reserve.” In an arena dominated by men like J.P. Morgan, she dazzled the financial world with her golden touch.
Green loaned so much money to so many people, companies, institutions, and municipalities that headlines would announce “Hetty Cuts Rates” or “Hetty Raises Rates” with regularity. The City of New York on numerous occasions asked her for loans to keep the city from going broke. During thePanic of 1907, she wrote a check to the Big Apple for $1.1 million and took her payment in short-term revenue bonds.
Green kept debtors honest. “She would travel thousands of miles alone — in an era when few women would dare travel unescorted — to collect a debt of a few hundred dollars,” writes one observer. Her collection efforts included churches, to whom she often loaned money at below-market rates as a charitable contribution. But when the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago defaulted on a $12,000 loan and the pastor tried to shame her into forgiving the debt by publicly denouncing her as a ruthless capitalist, she told him to pay up or she would foreclose — and that’s exactly what she did. Other pastors came to her defense — one of them declaring, “To expect the holder of a church mortgage to cancel it upon the grounds of Christianity, after the money has been lent in good faith, is nothing less than a hold-up.”
As Green’s riches grew, so did the attacks of the envious. Because she always wore black, she was derided as “the Witch of Wall Street.” Rumors of her miserliness circulated widely but were largely debunked in later years by her own family and by the many people and organizations that generously benefited from her quiet charity.
As she explained in a 1913 magazine profile,
One way is to give money and make a big show. That is not my way of doing. I am of the Quaker belief, and although the Quakers are about all dead, I still follow their example. An ordinary gift to be bragged about is not a gift in the eyes of the Lord.
Next to her extraordinary skill at creating wealth, Green’s personal lifestyle fascinated people then and biographers to this day. She was the opposite of ostentatious. Her frugality was astonishing in a day when her great wealth could have bought her anything. Home was never more than a small, modest flat in New York City. When she traveled, she stayed in cheap boarding houses. She lived the way she wanted to and never bent to any custom of modernity she didn’t like. She was, in every sense of the phrase, “her own woman.”
When Hetty Green died at the age of 81 in 1916, the New York Times editorialized in a way it’s tough to imagine the same “progressive” paper would today upon the death of a wealthy person:
If a man had lived as did Mrs. Hetty Green, devoting the greater part of his time and mind to the increasing of an inherited fortune that even at the start was far larger than is needed for the satisfaction of all such human needs as money can satisfy, nobody would have seen him as very peculiar — as notably out of the common. He would have done what is expected of the average man so circumscribed, and there would have been no difficulty in understanding the joys he obtained from participation in the grim conflicts of higher finance. It was the fact that Mrs. Green was a woman that made her career the subject of endless curiosity, comment and astonishment.… Probably her life was happy. At any rate, she had enough courage to live as she chose and to be as thrifty as she pleased and she observed such of the world’s conventions as seemed to her right and useful, coldly and calmly ignoring all the others.
Christ’s famous Parable of the Talents is found in Matthew 25. Three people are entrusted with significant sums of money. Later, what they each did with it is assessed. The one who invested it well and earned the greatest return is regarded in Christ’s story as the hero to be rewarded. That one could just as well have been Hetty Green.
Madam C.J. Walker
Millions of black women were inspired by her example and tens of thousands were directly empowered by working for the company she founded.
When, in December 1867, Sarah Breedlove was born the sixth child of parents who had been slaves a few years before, Martha Coston and Hetty Green were already wealthy Americans ensconced in business. But this enterprising black woman came on fast and strong as a wealth creator before she died at the young age of 51 in 1919. Biographer John Blundell, in his book Ladies For Liberty: Women Who Made a Difference in American History, says, “It is reliably claimed she was the first woman ever to make a million without an inheritance, husband or government intervention. She did it on her own.”
Orphaned at seven, married at 14, then widowed at 20 with a young daughter in tow, she was determined that her daughter A'Lelia would get a good, private education. “I got my start from giving myself a start,” she later said. Employed as a washerwoman for about a dollar a day, she worked long and hard and saved enough to actually make that dream a reality. She later took the name “Madam C.J. Walker” (derived from her second husband, Charles James Walker).
Growing up, every day was a “bad hair day” for Walker. Because of poor diet, infrequent washing and damaging hair products, her hair had thinned dramatically by the time of her second marriage. She realized at the same time that the market for quality hair products for black women was nonexistent. She decided to do something about it.
Learning everything she could about hair and its proper care, she experimented with various concoctions of her own making. In 1905, she formed the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company, selling a line of hair care products and cosmetic creams. She assigned daughter A'Lelia to run the mail order operation out of Denver while she and her husband traveled the country recruiting saleswomen.
Eventually, after a stint in Pittsburgh, Walker settled in Indianapolis in 1910, where she built her headquarters, a factory, a laboratory, a hair salon, and a beauty school to train the company’s sales agents. By this time, her business was selling products in virtually every state as well as throughout the Caribbean. Her vision was to cure scalp and hair problems and empower black women with both beauty and economic opportunity.
Walker’s most famous formula included a shampoo and a pomade that “transformed lusterless and brittle hair into soft, luxurious hair.” The women she employed wore uniforms of white shirts and black skirts and carried black satchels of product samples as they made house calls all over the United States and the islands of the Caribbean. Her name and image were well known to women both black and white. John Blundell writes,
With wealth she became an active serious philanthropist for charities from Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute to the NAACP, but her philosophy was very much self-respect through self-support, a hand-up not a hand-out. She believed in entrepreneurial, bottom-up, self-help economics. At the end of her hair care sales training lessons she showed future agents photo slides of great African-American entrepreneurs to educate and enthuse them.
While she left her corporate headquarters and plant in Indianapolis, she finally moved to 108/110 West 136th St. in New York City where she had a salon larger than those of Helena Rubinstein or Elizabeth Arden. She had a six-figure income, 10,000 agents, new ventures in the Caribbean and Central America, and was hailed as the “World’s Richest Negress.”
Walker died of hypertension in 1919, but left behind a legacy of economic success, generous philanthropy, and political activism on behalf of equality before the law. Millions of black women were inspired by her example and tens of thousands were directly empowered by working for the company she founded.
Though widespread discrimination against both blacks and women taint stories of life in America early in the 20th century, Madam C.J. Walker’s story stands out as a remarkable testament to the spirit of the great civil rights anthem of later years, “We Shall Overcome.” She surely did, by any measure.
Most of us have grown up in a world where we are not allowed to fail. In the real world we are not given an award for participating and we do not get a trophy for finishing last. Working at Student Maid, students are responsible for their own actions and in turn learn not to be afraid of failure.
Kristen Hadeed is the founder of Student Maid; a company that only employs students with 3.5 + GPA’s. Kristen also launched a tech company that is developing scheduling apps with the potential of revolutionizing the service industry.
Do you run your emotions or do your emotions run you?
It’s a simple question that is loaded with thought-provoking, inner exploration. One that really makes us sit back and think about what really is steering course in the direction our lives are headed. Are you on track towards a collision or are you on sailing on smooth waters? are the questions you need to ask yourself.
Emotions play a major role in shaping the paths in life we take. Therefore it is crucial to be in a place of mind where we can be confident that we are letting our clear intuitive processes have the controls, rather than allowing our emotions to run the show.
Don’t get me wrong emotions are a good thing, they give us the ups and downs on the road of life. To experience joy, grief, sadness and exhilaration are what being human is all about! Yet, it’s all about sitting back and knowing that an emotion is just that: an emotion and by recognizing it, you can control how you feel and take back the seat of power in your life.
1.You’re stuck on repeat
Recreating certain scenarios in your life is a sure-fire sign that you have former emotional traumas that require healing.
You may find that you keep choosing the same partner, the same job or the same living arrangements all of which do not serve your higher good. You may find that you are prone to addictive substances and crowds of people you also are prone to this behaviour. Know that you are not weak, you just need healing.
Until you can pinpoint the root cause of your emotional turmoil, the cycle will continue to repeat itself and you will find yourself creating the same situations and circumstances in your life.
Former emotional problems that you may have thought you had conquered can come bubbling back to the surface, wreaking havoc in your current state. This can leave you blaming yourself for things that you do, without knowing why you do them.
2. Your mind is overworked
We all find it difficult to stay in the present moment. Our minds are always wandering, worrying and fantasizing about the past or the future. It seems that we do everything and anything we can not face our current reality.
We dream of the future to distract ourselves from the present, in order to forget the past and the more we use our minds to avoid our present situations the more overworked we become all in order to avoid a past that hasn’t been healed.
Be gentle with your mind, by healing the past we can live in the present moment more fully and find peace.
3. You’ve lost your intuition
When you can’t differentiate between a feeling and an emotion, we know that there are wires crossed.
Emotions are a product of thought forms and without thoughts emotions wouldn’t arise. They are the product of external and internal happenings and are reactionary. By recognizing this, you endeavor into a state of awareness, of your own emotional state.
Feelings however are your natural intuitive ability to discern a situation without providing an emotional response to it. When emotional trauma is present, one cannot discern between an emotion and a feeling and the internal compass has lost its magnetic direction. Essentially you cannot get a gage how you feel versus what you feel.
4. You’re reactive instead of proactive
As mentioned above, emotional response is reactionary to your external and internal thoughts.
Throughout your conversations with others you will find that you have triggers that you may not be aware of, as unconscious memories are hardwired to different types of thought forms coded with emotions. These then become our perceptions of the world, which become our core beliefs.
When faced with difficult situations where strong emotions come bubbling back to the surface, it is important to immediately recognize it and think before you speak. Most often, the external happening that you are perceiving is not as it seems, but merely a perception of your own belief.
When you can recognize thisunhealed emotion, you can then empower yourself to heal it before it wreaks more havoc in your life.
5. You find it difficult to trust
This will be the most obvious sign that you have unresolved emotional disturbances. The inability to trust others is a defense mechanism that we all naturally possess, as a means to protect ourselves from past emotional trauma.
Yet, finding the root of the problem is more difficult to pin down, and may not be what you think it is. Quite often we bury memories of hardships deep down into our unconscious mind where it appears to be all but forgotten. Only to manifest negatively in others aspects of our lives.
When this happens it is important to make the unconscious-conscious when you feel ready to do so. It is only by bringing our memories forward can they be appropriately healed allowing for closure and emotional progression.
“Happiness or sorrow, whatever befalls you, walk untouched and unattached.” Buddha
Watch How Doctors Heal a Tumor in Less Than 3 Minutes Using Meditation
“Mind over body,” is a somewhat overused phrase that seems to have lost its zest; zest-less or not, this phrase still holds very true.
Our bodies are a reflection of our mind, so when we get sick, it is vital that we access our conscious mind for healing, because after all, we are most likely feeling pain or sickness as a result of the thoughts we direct our focus to.
The video below features, Gregg Braden, a man who Deepak Chopra describes as, “a rare blend of scientist, visionary and scholar with the ability to speak to our minds, while touching the wisdom of our hearts.” (For those of you who don’t know who Deepak Chopra is, you must do a google search and find out, his words have been quite helpful on my spiritual journey)
Gregg explains that by applying conscious positive focus on what we want, we have the capability to manifest miracles.
He uses the story featured in the video below as an example. The story is about a woman who sought medical help from a medicine-less hospital in Beijing, after western medical doctors labelled her tumor as “inoperable.” The medicine-less doctors evaluated her by addressing the life-affirming changes she could make to better her life, thus her health. They taught her life-affirming ways to breathe and nourish her body, as well as gentle movements to stimulate the energy centres in her body. Next they performed a procedure that is non existent in western medicine. Three practitioners used energy work to expedite the healing of her bladder cancer. What happened next may be considered impossible by some.
A split-screen ultrasound monitor was used to illustrate the effects of the procedure. The first screen showed a freeze-frame of her tumor, and the second monitor showed real-time activity of the tumor. The three doctors worked with the energy in her body and with the feelings in their body, and then chanted an agreed word intended to reinforce the feeling that her cancer had already been healed; within 3 minutes, the tumor disappeared.
“For me, it was this kind of information that took lost modality of prayer out of the realm of academics and into something that was very real that we can apply in our lives.”-Gregg Braden
For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of World War II
Siberian summers do not last long. The snows linger into May, and the cold weather returns again during September, freezing the taiga into a still life awesome in its desolation: endless miles of straggly pine and birch forests scattered with sleeping bears and hungry wolves; steep-sided mountains; white-water rivers that pour in torrents through the valleys; a hundred thousand icy bogs. This forest is the last and greatest of Earth’s wildernesses. It stretches from the furthest tip of Russia’s arctic regions as far south as Mongolia, and east from the Urals to the Pacific: five million square miles of nothingness, with a population, outside a handful of towns, that amounts to only a few thousand people.
When the warm days do arrive, though, the taiga blooms, and for a few short months it can seem almost welcoming. It is then that man can see most clearly into this hidden world–not on land, for the taiga can swallow whole armies of explorers, but from the air. Siberia is the source of most of Russia’s oil and mineral resources, and, over the years, even its most distant parts have been overflown by oil prospectors and surveyors on their way to backwoods camps where the work of extracting wealth is carried on.
Karp Lykov and his daughter Agafia, wearing clothes donated by Soviet geologists not long after their family was rediscovered.
Thus it was in the remote south of the forest in the summer of 1978. A helicopter sent to find a safe spot to land a party of geologists was skimming the treeline a hundred or so miles from the Mongolian border when it dropped into the thickly wooded valley of an unnamed tributary of the Abakan, a seething ribbon of water rushing through dangerous terrain. The valley walls were narrow, with sides that were close to vertical in places, and the skinny pine and birch trees swaying in the rotors’ downdraft were so thickly clustered that there was no chance of finding a spot to set the aircraft down. But, peering intently through his windscreen in search of a landing place, the pilot saw something that should not have been there. It was a clearing, 6,000 feet up a mountainside, wedged between the pine and larch and scored with what looked like long, dark furrows. The baffled helicopter crew made several passes before reluctantly concluding that this was evidence of human habitation—a garden that, from the size and shape of the clearing, must have been there for a long time.
It was an astounding discovery. The mountain was more than 150 miles from the nearest settlement, in a spot that had never been explored. The Soviet authorities had no records of anyone living in the district.
The Lykovs lived in this hand-built log cabin, lit by a single window “the size of a backpack pocket” and warmed by a smoky wood-fired stove.
The four scientists sent into the district to prospect for iron ore were told about the pilots’ sighting, and it perplexed and worried them. “It’s less dangerous,” the writer Vasily Peskov notes of this part of the taiga, “to run across a wild animal than a stranger,” and rather than wait at their own temporary base, 10 miles away, the scientists decided to investigate. Led by a geologist named Galina Pismenskaya, they “chose a fine day and put gifts in our packs for our prospective friends”—though, just to be sure, she recalled, “I did check the pistol that hung at my side.”
As the intruders scrambled up the mountain, heading for the spot pinpointed by their pilots, they began to come across signs of human activity: a rough path, a staff, a log laid across a stream, and finally a small shed filled with birch-bark containers of cut-up dried potatoes. Then, Pismenskaya said,
beside a stream there was a dwelling. Blackened by time and rain, the hut was piled up on all sides with taiga rubbish—bark, poles, planks. If it hadn’t been for a window the size of my backpack pocket, it would have been hard to believe that people lived there. But they did, no doubt about it…. Our arrival had been noticed, as we could see.
The low door creaked, and the figure of a very old man emerged into the light of day, straight out of a fairy tale. Barefoot. Wearing a patched and repatched shirt made of sacking. He wore trousers of the same material, also in patches, and had an uncombed beard. His hair was disheveled. He looked frightened and was very attentive…. We had to say something, so I began: ‘Greetings, grandfather! We’ve come to visit!’
The old man did not reply immediately…. Finally, we heard a soft, uncertain voice: ‘Well, since you have traveled this far, you might as well come in.’
The sight that greeted the geologists as they entered the cabin was like something from the middle ages. Jerry-built from whatever materials came to hand, the dwelling was not much more than a burrow—”a low, soot-blackened log kennel that was as cold as a cellar,” with a floor consisting of potato peel and pine-nut shells. Looking around in the dim light, the visitors saw that it consisted of a single room. It was cramped, musty and indescribably filthy, propped up by sagging joists—and, astonishingly, home to a family of five:
The silence was suddenly broken by sobs and lamentations. Only then did we see the silhouettes of two women. One was in hysterics, praying: ‘This is for our sins, our sins.’ The other, keeping behind a post… sank slowly to the floor. The light from the little window fell on her wide, terrified eyes, and we realized we had to get out of there as quickly as possible.
Agafia Lykova (left) with her sister, Natalia.
Led by Pismenskaya, the scientists backed hurriedly out of the hut and retreated to a spot a few yards away, where they took out some provisions and began to eat. After about half an hour, the door of the cabin creaked open, and the old man and his two daughters emerged—no longer hysterical and, though still obviously frightened, “frankly curious.” Warily, the three strange figures approached and sat down with their visitors, rejecting everything that they were offered—jam, tea, bread—with a muttered, “We are not allowed that!” When Pismenskaya asked, “Have you ever eaten bread?” the old man answered: “I have. But they have not. They have never seen it.” At least he was intelligible. The daughters spoke a language distorted by a lifetime of isolation. “When the sisters talked to each other, it sounded like a slow, blurred cooing.”
Slowly, over several visits, the full story of the family emerged. The old man’s name was Karp Lykov, and he was an Old Believer–a member of a fundamentalist Russian Orthodox sect, worshiping in a style unchanged since the 17th century. Old Believers had been persecuted since the days of Peter the Great, and Lykov talked about it as though it had happened only yesterday; for him, Peter was a personal enemy and “the anti-Christ in human form”—a point he insisted had been amply proved by Tsar’s campaign to modernize Russia by forcibly “chopping off the beards of Christians.” But these centuries-old hatreds were conflated with more recent grievances; Karp was prone to complain in the same breath about a merchant who had refused to make a gift of 26 poods of potatoes to the Old Believers sometime around 1900.
Things had only got worse for the Lykov family when the atheist Bolsheviks took power. Under the Soviets, isolated Old Believer communities that had fled to Siberia to escape persecution began to retreat ever further from civilization. During the purges of the 1930s, with Christianity itself under assault, a Communist patrol had shot Lykov’s brother on the outskirts of their village while Lykov knelt working beside him. He had responded by scooping up his family and bolting into forest.
Peter the Great’s attempts to modernize the Russia of the early 18th century found a focal point in a campaign to end the wearing of beards. Facial hair was taxed and non-payers were compulsorily shaved—anathema to Karp Lykov and the Old Believers.
That was in 1936, and there were only four Lykovs then—Karp; his wife, Akulina; a son named Savin, 9 years old, and Natalia, a daughter who was only 2. Taking their possessions and some seeds, they had retreated ever deeper into the taiga, building themselves a succession of crude dwelling places, until at last they had fetched up in this desolate spot. Two more children had been born in the wild—Dmitry in 1940 and Agafia in 1943—and neither of the youngest Lykov children had ever seen a human being who was not a member of their family. All that Agafia and Dmitry knew of the outside world they learned entirely from their parents’ stories. The family’s principal entertainment, the Russian journalist Vasily Peskov noted, “was for everyone to recount their dreams.”
The Lykov children knew there were places called cities where humans lived crammed together in tall buildings. They had heard there were countries other than Russia. But such concepts were no more than abstractions to them. Their only reading matter was prayer books and an ancient family Bible. Akulina had used the gospels to teach her children to read and write, using sharpened birch sticks dipped into honeysuckle juice as pen and ink. When Agafia was shown a picture of a horse, she recognized it from her mother’s Bible stories. “Look, papa,” she exclaimed. “A steed!”
But if the family’s isolation was hard to grasp, the unmitigated harshness of their lives was not. Traveling to the Lykov homestead on foot was astonishingly arduous, even with the help of a boat along the Abakan. On his first visit to the Lykovs, Peskov—who would appoint himself the family’s chief chronicler—noted that “we traversed 250 kilometres without seeing a single human dwelling!”
Isolation made survival in the wilderness close to impossible. Dependent solely on their own resources, the Lykovs struggled to replace the few things they had brought into the taiga with them. They fashioned birch-bark galoshes in place of shoes. Clothes were patched and repatched until they fell apart, then replaced with hemp cloth grown from seed.
The Lykovs had carried a crude spinning wheel and, incredibly, the components of a loom into the taiga with them—moving these from place to place as they gradually went further into the wilderness must have required many long and arduous journeys—but they had no technology for replacing metal. A couple of kettles served them well for many years, but when rust finally overcame them, the only replacements they could fashion came from birch bark. Since these could not be placed in a fire, it became far harder to cook. By the time the Lykovs were discovered, their staple diet was potato patties mixed with ground rye and hemp seeds.
In some respects, Peskov makes clear, the taiga did offer some abundance: “Beside the dwelling ran a clear, cold stream. Stands of larch, spruce, pine and birch yielded all that anyone could take.… Bilberries and raspberries were close to hand, firewood as well, and pine nuts fell right on the roof.”
Yet the Lykovs lived permanently on the edge of famine. It was not until the late 1950s, when Dmitry reached manhood, that they first trapped animals for their meat and skins. Lacking guns and even bows, they could hunt only by digging traps or pursuing prey across the mountains until the animals collapsed from exhaustion. Dmitry built up astonishing endurance, and could hunt barefoot in winter, sometimes returning to the hut after several days, having slept in the open in 40 degrees of frost, a young elk across his shoulders. More often than not, though, there was no meat, and their diet gradually became more monotonous. Wild animals destroyed their crop of carrots, and Agafia recalled the late 1950s as “the hungry years.” “We ate the rowanberry leaf,” she said,
roots, grass, mushrooms, potato tops, and bark. We were hungry all the time. Every year we held a council to decide whether to eat everything up or leave some for seed.
Famine was an ever-present danger in these circumstances, and in 1961 it snowed in June. The hard frost killed everything growing in their garden, and by spring the family had been reduced to eating shoes and bark. Akulina chose to see her children fed, and that year she died of starvation. The rest of the family were saved by what they regarded as a miracle: a single grain of rye sprouted in their pea patch. The Lykovs put up a fence around the shoot and guarded it zealously night and day to keep off mice and squirrels. At harvest time, the solitary spike yielded 18 grains, and from this they painstakingly rebuilt their rye crop
Dmitry (left) and Savin in the Siberian summer.
As the Soviet geologists got to know the Lykov family, they realized that they had underestimated their abilities and intelligence. Each family member had a distinct personality; old Karp was usually delighted by the latest innovations that the scientists brought up from their camp, and though he steadfastly refused to believe that man had set foot on the moon, he adapted swiftly to the idea of satellites. The Lykovs had noticed them as early as the 1950s, when “the stars began to go quickly across the sky,” and Karp himself conceived a theory to explain this: “People have thought something up and are sending out fires that are very like stars.”
“What amazed him most of all,” Peskov recorded, “was a transparent cellophane package. ‘Lord, what have they thought up—it is glass, but it crumples!’” And Karp held grimly to his status as head of the family, though he was well into his 80s. His eldest child, Savin, dealt with this by casting himself as the family’s unbending arbiter in matters of religion. “He was strong of faith, but a harsh man,” his own father said of him, and Karp seems to have worried about what would happen to his family after he died if Savin took control. Certainly the eldest son would have encountered little resistance from Natalia, who always struggled to replace her mother as cook, seamstress and nurse.
The two younger children, on the other hand, were more approachable and more open to change and innovation. “Fanaticism was not terribly marked in Agafia,” Peskov said, and in time he came to realize that the youngest of the Lykovs had a sense of irony and could poke fun at herself. Agafia’s unusual speech—she had a singsong voice and stretched simple words into polysyllables—convinced some of her visitors she was slow-witted; in fact she was markedly intelligent, and took charge of the difficult task, in a family that possessed no calendars, of keeping track of time. She thought nothing of hard work, either, excavating a new cellar by hand late in the fall and working on by moonlight when the sun had set. Asked by an astonished Peskov whether she was not frightened to be out alone in the wilderness after dark, she replied: “What would there be out here to hurt me?”
A Russian press photo of Karp Lykov (second left) with Dmitry and Agafia, accompanied by a Soviet geologist.
Of all the Lykovs, though, the geologists’ favorite was Dmitry, a consummate outdoorsman who knew all of the taiga’s moods. He was the most curious and perhaps the most forward-looking member of the family. It was he who had built the family stove, and all the birch-bark buckets that they used to store food. It was also Dmitry who spent days hand-cutting and hand-planing each log that the Lykovs felled. Perhaps it was no surprise that he was also the most enraptured by the scientists’ technology. Once relations had improved to the point that the Lykovs could be persuaded to visit the Soviets’ camp, downstream, he spent many happy hours in its little sawmill, marveling at how easily a circular saw and lathes could finish wood. “It’s not hard to figure,” Peskov wrote. “The log that took Dmitry a day or two to plane was transformed into handsome, even boards before his eyes. Dmitry felt the boards with his palm and said: ‘Fine!’”
Karp Lykov fought a long and losing battle with himself to keep all this modernity at bay. When they first got to know the geologists, the family would accept only a single gift—salt. (Living without it for four decades, Karp said, had been “true torture.”) Over time, however, they began to take more. They welcomed the assistance of their special friend among the geologists—a driller named Yerofei Sedov, who spent much of his spare time helping them to plant and harvest crops. They took knives, forks, handles, grain and eventually even pen and paper and an electric torch. Most of these innovations were only grudgingly acknowledged, but the sin of television, which they encountered at the geologists’ camp,
proved irresistible for them…. On their rare appearances, they would invariably sit down and watch. Karp sat directly in front of the screen. Agafia watched poking her head from behind a door. She tried to pray away her transgression immediately—whispering, crossing herself…. The old man prayed afterward, diligently and in one fell swoop.
The Lykovs' homestead seen from a Soviet reconnaissance plane, 1980.
Perhaps the saddest aspect of the Lykovs’ strange story was the rapidity with which the family went into decline after they re-established contact with the outside world. In the fall of 1981, three of the four children followed their mother to the grave within a few days of one another. According to Peskov, their deaths were not, as might have been expected, the result of exposure to diseases to which they had no immunity. Both Savin and Natalia suffered from kidney failure, most likely a result of their harsh diet. But Dmitry died of pneumonia, which might have begun as an infection he acquired from his new friends.
His death shook the geologists, who tried desperately to save him. They offered to call in a helicopter and have him evacuated to a hospital. But Dmitry, in extremis, would abandon neither his family nor the religion he had practiced all his life. “We are not allowed that,” he whispered just before he died. “A man lives for howsoever God grants.”
The Lykovs' graves. Today only Agafia survives of the family of six, living alone in the taiga.
When all three Lykovs had been buried, the geologists attempted to talk Karp and Agafia into leaving the forest and returning to be with relatives who had survived the persecutions of the purge years, and who still lived on in the same old villages. But neither of the survivors would hear of it. They rebuilt their old cabin, but stayed close to their old home.
Karp Lykov died in his sleep on February 16, 1988, 27 years to the day after his wife, Akulina. Agafia buried him on the mountain slopes with the help of the geologists, then turned and headed back to her home. The Lord would provide, and she would stay, she said—as indeed she has. A quarter of a century later, now in her seventies herself, this child of the taiga lives on alone, high above the Abakan.
She will not leave. But we must leave her, seen through the eyes of Yerofei on the day of her father’s funeral:
I looked back to wave at Agafia. She was standing by the river break like a statue. She wasn’t crying. She nodded: ‘Go on, go on.’ We went another kilometer and I looked back. She was still standing there.
Sources
Anon. ‘How to live substantively in our times.’ Stranniki, 20 February 2009, accessed August 2, 2011; Georg B. Michels. At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth Century Russia. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995; Isabel Colgate. A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries and Recluses. New York: HarperCollins, 2002; ‘From taiga to Kremlin: a hermit’s gifts to Medvedev,’ rt.com, February 24, 2010, accessed August 2, 2011; G. Kramore, ‘At the taiga dead end‘. Suvenirograd , nd, accessed August 5, 2011; Irina Paert. Old Believers, Religious Dissent and Gender in Russia, 1760-1850. Manchester: MUP, 2003; Vasily Peskov. Lost in the Taiga: One Russian Family’s Fifty-Year Struggle for Survival and Religious Freedom in the Siberian Wilderness. New York: Doubleday, 1992.
A documentary on the Lykovs (in Russian) which shows something of the family’s isolation and living conditions, can be viewed here.
The actor revealed that he adheres to no religion in an interview with the UK’s Telegraph on Saturday. Pitt told the paper that he was raised in a Southern Baptist household in Missouri, “with all the Christian guilt about what you can and cannot, should and shouldn’t do.”
The Hollywood mega-star elaborated on the Christian guilt he was raised with in a 2007 interview with Parade.
“I’d go to Christian revivals and be moved by the Holy Spirit, and I’d go to rock concerts and feel the same fervor,” Pitt told the magazine. “Then I’d be told, ‘That’s the Devil’s music! Don’t partake in that!’ I wanted to experience things religion said not to experience.”
Still, Pitt said he learned the value of hard work from his father, who reportedly ran a trucking company in Missouri.
“He could be a softie,” Pitt told the Telegraph of his father. “But one thing my folks always stressed was being capable, doing things for yourself. He was really big on integrity — and that informed a lot of what [we] try to do now.”
Pitt also revealed that he and his wife and By the Sea co-star, Angelina Jolie, originally wanted double the number of children they currently have.
“Listen, Angie and I were aiming for a dozen, but we crapped out after six,” the actor said, adding: “Everyone talks about the joy of having kids — blah, blah, blah. But I never knew how much I could love something until I looked in the faces of my children.”
Pitt’s collaboration with Jolie, the moody marriage drama By the Sea, is in theaters December 11.
