Of all the friends I have had, the one who got the furthest with the least was a Zulu called Bheki Mkhize. From a humble family, with hardly any education, he was born in a South African village in the fifties with everything against him, not excluding having been black during times of apartheid. Bheki was a winner.
He ended up being elected president of a large national union and then a deputy in his country's first democratic Parliament. I have it as my reference for what becomes more evident to me every day, that we give an exaggerated value to formal education. Good grades in school, university degrees, master's degrees, doctorates: everything is highly recommended – an important help, for sure – but no guarantee of success, or not as much, or even close, as energy, a raw material whose possession depends more on fortune than dedication.
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 of them submissive to his will. He had people around him much more prepared than him, such as Reinhard Heydrich or Albert Speer, but even for them Hitler's word was the word of God. Energy was what made the difference, just as 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 management positions are not usually those who were the smartest at school, but rather those who have had the most desire. The same with employees who don't reach 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 hear him. He exuded more energy, by far, than everyone else. I know that he was key in the launch of Al Fresco, the restaurant in Sitges where I met him. I also know that he stopped being a waiter and started a small wine company.
In addition to Pocholo and Bheki, I have another reference who has achieved enormous success, a Spanish friend who has taken over the United States. I'm talking about chef José Andrés. Thirty-something years ago he arrived in New York as just another young dreamer who barely spoke English, moved to Washington, opened a restaurant, then another, and today he has more than thirty throughout the country. He runs an NGO that he has fed millions of people in suffering places on Earth like Ukraine and Haiti, he personally knows 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 perhaps twenty, television programs, and then having accompanied him to the airport where he was going to catch a flight to Chicago, a city where that same night he was going to give a talk at a crowded gala. He was fresh like one of the lettuces he sold at his fabulous vegetarian restaurant in Washington.
It's not that José hadn't studied or isn't a talented cook. On the contrary. He had learned alongside 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 that were unimaginable for him when he left Catalonia for New York as a young man.
Until now 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. One 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 help determine the success of a marriage or the relationship one has with one's 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 totality of my ambition… everything else was a flame for her to warm her hands.” But energy was necessary for the flame to burn. As Chandler also said: “A marriage is like a diary: you have to redo it every day of every year.”
For those who don't know, keeping a journal 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 most brilliant journalist I've ever met, a former colleague at The Times and The Independent in London called Robert Fisk. Not only was he an earthquake when you sat with him in a pub, he wrote at a keyboard with the fluidity and vigor of a pianist playing a Tchaikovsky concerto. Based almost all of his professional life in Beirut, today his interpretation of the Israeli invasion of Gaza would be a Gernika in his words.
Another way of saying energy could be enthusiasm, a quality that a famous English footballer who played until he was 50, Stanley Matthews, identified as the secret of football “and of life.” But the energy comes first. It is the engine of enthusiasm. The opposite is tiredness, which leads to satiety. Look at the case of Jürgen Klopp, who, as I am writing this column, has just announced the bombshell that he is retiring. Klopp is the most charismatic football coach in the world and, along with Pep Guardiola, the most successful of the last decade. He said that he was not only leaving his beloved Liverpool but perhaps also football. His reason for it? “I'm running out of energy.”
Going a little further, the same thing happened to Alexander the Great, perhaps the most successful person, or at least the soldier, in history. But he cried and soon after he died when he had no more worlds left to conquer. Of course, Alexander the Great was clearly 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. It's clear: he combines both things and an absolute guarantee that the world will be yours. But, I insist, energy comes first.
