Of all the friends I’ve had the one who went the furthest with the least was a Zulu named Bheki Mkhize. From a humble family, with almost no education, he was born in a South African town in the fifties against all odds, not excluding having been black during apartheid. Bheki was a winner.
He ended up being elected president of a large national trade union and then a deputy in the first democratic Parliament of his country. I have him as my point of reference for what is becoming more obvious to me every day, that we place an exaggerated value on formal education. Good grades at school, university degrees, masters, doctorates: all highly recommended – an important help, for sure – but no guarantee of success, or not as much, or by a long shot, as energy, raw material possession on which it depends more on fortune than on eagerness.
I think of Adolf Hitler, whose success was – in every sense of the word – brutal. He transformed a cultured country into a nation of barbarians, almost all submissive to his will. He had people around him who were much more prepared than him, like Reinhard Heydrich or Albert Speer, but even for them Hitler’s word was the word of God. Energy was what made the difference, just like with less evil political leaders (well, in my opinion), who have also conquered the top, also surrounded by more educated people, like Pedro Sánchez or Donald Trump or Javier Milei or Giorgia Meloni or Margaret Thatcher.
I am not limited to the political world. In companies, those who occupy the decisive positions are not usually those who were the smartest at school, but those who have had the most desire. The same goes for employees who don’t make it to the top but advance further in their careers.
I think of the best waiter of the thousands who have served me in restaurants on six continents. I close my eyes and see Pocholo, I feel him. He radiated more energy, by far, than everyone else. I know that he was key in the take-off of Al Fresco, the restaurant in Sitges where I met him. I also know that he stopped being a bartender and started a small wine company.
Apart from Pocholo and Bheki, I have another reference who has achieved enormous success, a Spanish friend who has eaten up the United States. I’m talking about chef José Andrés. More than thirty years ago he arrived in New York as a young dreamer who barely spoke English, moved to Washington, opened one restaurant there, then another and today has more than thirty across the country. He brings a oenagé that has fed millions of people in places on Earth where suffering like Ukraine and Haiti, knows personally half of the American congressmen and senators and became friends with the Obama family.
I have never met anyone with more energy anywhere. I remember having lunch with him in Madrid after a week in which he had recorded ten, or maybe twenty, television shows, and then accompanying him to the airport where he had to catch a flight to Chicago, the city where he in the evening he would give a talk in a crowded gala. It was as fresh as one of the lettuces that came from his fabulous vegetarian restaurant in Washington.
It’s not that José hasn’t studied or isn’t a talented cook. Quite the opposite. He had learned from Ferran Adrià (another human locomotive) in El Bulli. But energy, as if the human being were a phenomenon of physics, is the factor that has led José to ascend to such a stratospheric orbit. And to earn amounts of money unimaginable for him when he left Catalonia for New York as a young man.
So far I have been talking about material success, measurable according to the conventional rules of the game. It is just as legitimate to measure it in terms of happiness. A person can be what some would define as “anyone” and have a richer life than Jeff Bezos. But the degree of energy one invests in the private sphere will also contribute to determining the success of a marriage or the relationship one has with children.
One of the great writers of the 20th century, Raymond Chandler, said when his wife died that she had been “the light of my life, the whole of my ambition… everything else was a flame because she was “He warmed his hands”. But energy was needed for the flame to burn. As Chandler also said: “A marriage is like a newspaper: you have to redo it every day of every year.”
For those who don’t know, journaling every day is a task that consumes an extraordinary amount of collective and individual energy. While we’re at it, I’ll mention the most prolific and perhaps the most brilliant journalist I’ve ever met, a former colleague at The Times and The Independent in London named Robert Fisk. Not only was he an earthquake when you sat with him in a pub, he typed on the keyboard with the fluency and vigor of a pianist playing a Tchaikovsky concerto. Based almost all his professional life in Beirut, today his interpretation of the Israeli invasion of Gaza would be a Gernika in words.
Another way of saying energy could be enthusiasm, a quality that a famous English footballer who played until the age of 50, Stanley Matthews, identified as the secret of football “and of life”. But energy comes first. It is the engine of enthusiasm. The opposite is fatigue, which leads to boredom. Look at the case of Jürgen Klopp, who, as I write this column, has just announced the bombshell that he is retiring. Klopp is the most charismatic football coach in the world and, with Pep Guardiola, the most successful of the last decade. He has said that he was not only leaving his beloved Liverpool but perhaps football as well. For what reason? “I’m running out of energy.”
Pulling a bit further, the same thing happened to Alexander the Great, perhaps the most successful person, or at least soldier, in history. But he wept and soon after died when he had no more worlds left to conquer. Clearly, Alexander the Great was undoubtedly an exceptional case who brought together in his person the perfect storm of great knowledge and colossal energy. His teacher was Aristotle and he was a disciplined student – ??of philosophy, logic, medicine and art. Of course: combine both things and absolute guarantee that the world will be yours. But, I insist, energy comes first.
