NotitiesUnreasonable Success and How to Achieve It
Richard Koch
Het boek "Unreasonable Success and How to Achieve It" van Richard Koch onderzoekt de kenmerken van onredelijke succes en hoe dit kan worden bereikt. Het benadrukt de rol van zelfvertrouwen, unieke strategieën en de kracht van persoonlijke ervaringen in het bereiken van opmerkelijke resultaten, en stelt dat succes vaak voortkomt uit intuïtie en het benutten van kansen.
The trouble with this theory is not that it is wrong for the people that Gladwell cites, but that there are many more cases of extraordinary success which don’t fit the template of ‘early accumulation of experience’. While I was rereading his book recently, the thought struck me – what if we could map success in a way that isolates the causes of their remarkable success for almost any high achiever? (Location 101)
Successful people typically don’t plan their success. Instead they develop a unique philosophy or attitude that works for them. They stumble across strategies which are short-cuts to success, and latch onto them. Events hand them opportunities they could not have anticipated. (Location 116)
But what is unreasonable success? I define it by four characteristics:
- It is a very high degree of success in changing the world the way an individual wants to, so that it might seem remarkable or even unreasonable for one person to have such impact.
- It goes well beyond what their skills and performance seem to warrant.
- It is unreasonable in the sense that the person’s success appears to stem not so much from the use of logic and reason as from inexplicable leaps of intuition. What unreasonably successful people do happens to mesh well with the strange ways the world works – the people in this book were successful not so much because they were fabulously talented or productive, but because their approach produced astounding results. Their extraordinary success is not entirely ‘deserved’ in a conventional sense; they win by a fortuitous combination of experiences, personal characteristics and judgement which leverages their actions enormously, giving enormous impact for a mere mortal.
- Unreasonable success has an element of surprise, out of all proportion to what would have been predicted from the person when they were young, or, sometimes, well into their career. Failure, whether early or late, is often the precursor to unreasonable success. (Location 132)
Yet, if success is a continuum, it is also ‘fractal’. Fractal means that the pattern is endlessly varied but endlessly similar; the small scale is a miniature version of the big scale. (Location 151)
Human nature, too, is the same. The way the universe treats you can be terrific or terrible but is always subject to reversals of fortune. This book exists to reveal the few universal landmarks we can look out for to help us on the way. (Location 157)
Life’s caprice limits our ability to plan the future. This may sound discouraging, but there’s another way of looking at it. If we understand how success and failure are meted out, and if we adjust our minds to be alert to impending failure or absent opportunities, we can greatly improve our chances. (Location 175)
The landmarks fall into two broad categories – ‘attitude’ and ‘strategy’. ‘Attitude’ encompasses the main psychological characteristics likely to facilitate unreasonable success. These characteristics are not immutable. The players can and did adjust some of their attitudes in the quest for great results. (Location 177)
‘Strategy’ comprises the experiences, personal philosophies and objectives pursued by the players, as well as the assistance they contrived to garner from their own organisations and collaborators. (Location 180)
One of the most exciting and encouraging findings of this book is that the way we position ourselves for success is far more important than our talent or competence. (Location 181)
The first landmark is self-belief. If we don’t have strong self-belief, it’s almost impossible to become unreasonably successful. (Location 184)
There are multiple sources of ineradicable self-belief, but you must realise how vital it is for your success, and look out for events which will fully create or cement that self-belief. (Location 188)
Another landmark is transforming experiences. Our players typically had one or two such experiences, and without them would not have achieved success and notoriety. (Location 190)
One breakthrough achievement is another landmark. Our players mostly had one achievement which changed the world around them, propelling them to high fortune. Not several achievements; just one. If you know that, you must decide what your breakthrough achievement is, or could be, and how to hone it. Knowing you only need one such achievement – and the type of achievement that can work wonders – saves a lot of time, effort and frustration. (Location 192)
A word of warning: nobody can guarantee high achievement. The odds are always against huge success. Only a fool would dare to say how it might happen. (Location 197)
He combined iron strategic objectives with extreme tactical flexibility. His strategy – which I have copied – was to wait patiently until events played into his hands, and then pounce decisively. A great person to mimic for unreasonable success in any field. (Location 221)
Note: Bismarck
Friendly and gentle, beautiful, graceful and strong as a young man, and homosexual, da Vinci was said to be good company but also dark and troubled at times with hints of a manic-depressive streak, when he would retreat into introspection in his notebooks. (Location 246)
Note: Manic depression
German, Swiss, and later American physicist who, with little academic background or support, formulated the theory of relativity, which along with quantum mechanics (on which relativity was partly based) revolutionised physics and led to nuclear power, nuclear bombs and many other inventions. (Location 265)
Note: Little academic background
An amiable loner who made his breakthroughs from imagination and thought experiments, not from intensive data-mining or practical experiments, his academic record was mediocre and he was relatively weak in mathematics. It didn’t matter – his intuition and insight into the nature of the universe were unparalleled. (Location 267)
Note: Thought experiments
He invented the virgin territory of ‘strategy consulting’, a beautiful blend of marketing and financial theory, distilled into a simple, practical chart – the ‘Boston box’ of cows, dogs, question marks and, most valuable of all, stars. (Location 280)
He was a romantic and self-obsessed drop-out whose self-belief and totally unreasonable demands on colleagues moved mountains. His technical skills were weak but his artistic flair, imagination and ability to mesmerise and inspire followers who were stronger than him in many respects was unparalleled. (Location 290)
Note: Jobs
By the age of twenty-six, Madonna had sold a million records. Singer, songwriter, film star, video and record producer, model, fashion merchandiser, author and businesswoman, Madonna’s career in her sixties continues unabated, buoyed up by a constant stream of publicity and controversy. Her talents may be ordinary, but she knows her audience, and the results she has achieved are quite extraordinary – unreasonable success indeed. (Location 304)
She felt herself receiving a kind of ‘download’ of his character and story. (Location 318)
Note: Rowling
After years of reflection, and fuelled by the power of Jesus within him, Paul emerged throughout Roman cities in Europe and the near East as a missionary-exorcist-healer-magician. Without Paul, what eventually emerged as Christianity would neither have achieved lift-off, nor transcended its Jewish roots. Paul’s exotic yet sublimely romantic and liberating vision largely defined early Christianity – thrusting Jesus, God and mankind into a new light. (Location 338)
The essential starting-point for success – the first landmark – is self-belief. All our case studies of great success manifested – sooner or later – a firm base of self-belief. (Location 360)
Self-belief is the courage to get going on your quest for unreasonable success. Self-belief means starting the journey, conjuring up the confidence that you will find your way to success, even if you don’t yet know the route or the destination. (Location 361)
Self-belief can start – as it did in about half the people I studied – with a vague general belief in their ‘star’ or destiny. This sense was emotional and not rational – many of the people in this book felt it early in life, before they could have any reasonable basis for that belief. (Location 363)
Today we think we live in a democracy, yet we have quasi-hereditary presidents, prime ministers, politicians, writers, broadcasters and even pop stars, whose self-belief often flows from familial osmosis. (Location 395)
For whatever reason, the young Maynard Keynes was an exceptional believer in his own capabilities. (Location 399)
There is nothing more conducive to self-belief than belonging to a homogeneous elite. Yet self-belief can also arise from having a parent, as Keynes did, or another mentor, as an example of how to succeed. (Location 405)
Dylan knew all this from an early age. ‘There were a lot of better singers and better musicians around these places,’ he wrote in Chronicles, ‘but there wasn’t anybody close in nature to what I was doing. Folk songs were the way I explored the universe, they were pictures and the pictures were worth more than anything I could say. I knew the inner substance of the thing. I could easily connect the pieces.’ (Location 428)
Today we tend to think of a mentor relationship as something well-defined and almost contractual. This may be too precise. It may be better to define a mentor as someone who has a deep impact on one’s life and served as either a role model or an instructor – whether the mentor was fully, partly or not at all aware of their influence on us. What we might call a ‘fantasy mentor’ can be more useful – and certainly easier to arrange – than a real one. (Location 440)
So, select a mentor much as Bob Dylan did, by conscious choice and without necessarily asking their permission. The most important thing a mentor can do is to galvanise and infuse us with their spirit, so that our self-belief is enhanced and focused on what similar or greater ends we can attain. (Location 447)
Here we can see Einstein’s self-belief shining through; he was admitted to the Polytechnic. Nevertheless, he graduated close to the bottom of his cohort. Four years later, having failed to find a permanent teaching job, he became a substitute teacher, and then had to settle for a low-paid job evaluating inventions in the Swiss patent office at Bern. Still, he was able to complete his duties there in two or three hours each day, spending the rest of the day utterly engrossed in the new ideas in physics which would lead to the topsy-turvy revolution of quantum mechanics. (Location 467)
Despite lack of academic success, the young Einstein had supreme faith in his own intuitive judgement. (Location 481)
One of his Zurich Polytechnic professors told him, ‘You’re a very clever boy, Einstein. An extremely clever boy. But you have one great fault – you’ll never let yourself be told anything.’ (Location 484)
Einstein’s overwhelming self-assurance came from his faith that the universe was rational; its secrets could be discovered through mathematics and thought experiments, which only the most intuitive and unconventional scientists might uncover. (Location 486)
He read everything that might be relevant to his investigations, and he loved to debate concepts and throw around ideas with the very best brains in quantum mechanics; but he never needed their patronage or agreement to arrive at his insights. (Location 488)
Note: Einstein
There are two other categories in our case studies. One is where self-belief builds gradually, grounded in a general sense of being special, but becomes increasingly pronounced, as positive feedback accumulates in an increasingly focused way. (Location 491)
To sum up: self-belief is essential for unreasonable success. All the people in this book not only had, or came to have, self-belief; they also had a particularly potent dose of it. (Location 538)
What do you do if your self-belief is not strong? The stories in this book suggest three possible remedies: • Search for transforming experiences (see Chapter 6). • Attract well-deserved praise; develop a breakthrough achievement (Chapter 7). • Narrow your focus until your work is unique and you’ve defined your destination (Chapter 8). (Location 540)
All our players had one or more ‘transforming experiences’ in their life – that is, an unusual and intense interlude, usually of a year or more, that changed them. They went into each experience as one person, and came out as another, better equipped to search out and travel the road to outstanding accomplishments. (Location 547)
We are all far more brittle and dependent on approval than we realise or admit. Self-belief is hard if you get little applause. Today children get too much and adults too little. (Location 551)
We all deserve praise to quite different extents in quite different circumstances. Therefore you must find the field where you can excel. There is one for each of us. You must find it. Experiment with a variety of surroundings – places, companies, teams, jobs, roles, projects, co-workers, and hubs with extensive links to the outside world – until you find the right one, where you receive great acclaim. (Location 553)
Note: Find where you can excel
Plaudits feed self-belief, which itself leads on to success; but praise is also a form of market feedback, a signal that our self-belief is justified. Acclaim must be genuine and merited. (Location 556)
Note: Justified self belief
But children are not stupid. They know when praise is deserved and when it is not. And praise can create expectations that they know they are not always going to meet, which become a trap. (Location 559)
‘Dad, did I just lose my talent?’18 Inflated praise is demotivating, or else it leads to delusions which sooner or later will be demolished. (Location 562)
Narrow your focus until your work is unique (Location 568)
For unusual success, wide experimentation is followed sooner or later by extreme focus, and then by blazing a wholly original trail. (Location 572)
Ultimately, self-belief needs to be specifically attached to achieving an unusual goal. You cannot reasonably believe in yourself except in the context of what you want to achieve; but if you can give yourself a unique worthwhile mission – one that plays to your strongest suit – it is much easier to come to believe in yourself. (Location 573)
Even if there is no initial generic self-belief, it is never too late to define a bold target and come to believe it is attainable. Belief in the destination can become belief in the self. (Location 575)
Self-doubt required years of reflection in Arabia. When Paul returned to urban civilisation, he had a wholly original perspective on life, the universe and everything, which gradually and wholly unexpectedly took the Roman world by storm. (Location 595)
Summary and conclusion Self-belief is the foundation of success. This is an iron rule. Nobody ever became unreasonably successful without a strong belief in themselves. Self-belief can start with a vague but deep sense of being special. This sense sometimes arises simply from being born into privilege or because of encouragement from role models around us, such as parents and relatives. Equally, however, conviction in one’s destiny can arise from defiant vulnerability or isolation in childhood, when the self is thrown back on itself and creates an imaginary future to compensate for a barren present. (Location 632)
Self-belief must ultimately become specific to the field in which you will ultimately triumph. (Location 638)
Nobody reaches a target without defining it and believing – sometimes naively and to almost-universal ridicule – that it is attainable. (Location 640)
Churchill positioned himself as the inevitable choice for leader should war with Germany eventuate. (Location 645)
Self-doubt is usually an asset – it does not cancel out self-belief, but rather purifies and distils it. (Location 648)
Consciously and unconsciously, with our reason and our emotions, strong and specific self-belief – the utter conviction that we can achieve something unique, which fuses our talents and our personality with good or bad openings provided by the universe – is the first and greatest of the landmarks. It is also the rarest. (Location 651)
The reason most people do not achieve extraordinary results is that they do not believe that they can, or do not want to enough – which comes down to the same thing. (Location 654)
Self-belief, we’ve seen, is the conviction a person has of being special, exceptional and destined to do great things, that is increasingly well defined and clear as their life unfolds. It is also the feeling, there from the start or burgeoning over a lifetime into near-certainty, that they are destined to succeed. Self-belief is essentially an emotion, a pulsing and energising sensation, which not only grips the individual but also communicates itself to other people and influences them, but in no way depends on them. (Location 678)
Olympian expectations are different. For sure, they are to do with the individual, but they are also to do with their subordinates and co-workers. Olympian expectations are more clearly defined than self-belief – they are to do with quite unusual and exceptional results expected by the person. Expectations explain how and why the individual is changing the nature of reality. (Location 682)
There are five interlinked components of Olympian expectations: • Expectations are set much higher than is normal. • Thinking big – not concerned with details but with changing the big picture. • Being unreasonably demanding of self and others – the standards had jolly well better be met, without exceptions or excuses. • Progressive escalation of expectations over time – no resting on laurels; more like an ever-expanding sliver of razored ice1 in the soul demanding ever-greater success. • The expectations are unique to the individual and can be succinctly expressed. For instance, Leonardo – ‘perfect paintings’; Churchill – ‘stop Hitler’; Thatcher – ‘reverse national decline’. (Location 685)
Expectations rig results Of all the true stories in the book, this is the most shocking, yet also the most liberating. (Location 695)
So often in life, people see what they expect to see, and this compounds the expectation, making it real. • Others’ positive expectations of us can make us perform outstandingly well. • Our expectations determine our performance as well. If we expect to succeed, we likely will. • Our self-expectations also affect people around us. Unless we have a reputation for bragging, people will be strongly influenced by our own expectations. They will take us at our own genuine, unconscious valuation. • A small lead in performance will become larger and compounded over time. Even an incorrectly perceived aura of outperformance will lead over time to a large measure of real outperformance. • Those who inherit the earth will be those who expect to. (Location 710)
The higher we set our expectations, the more likely we are to reach the top. (Location 719)
There is a fine balance between optimism and delusion. (Location 721)
Paul absorbed the view held by the ‘cognoscenti’ (a group of believers known as the Gnostics) that humans comprised both body and spirit – the body was irretrievably flawed, and the spiritual, divine side of mankind was hopelessly compromised, imprisoned within evil flesh. ‘For what the flesh [body] desires is opposed to the Spirit,’ Paul wrote, ‘and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh: for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you doing what you want.’4 The struggle of men and women to be good – the bromide of religion and philosophy throughout the ages – was entirely futile. According to Paul, Christ offered the way out of this impasse – surrender of the human will to God, and the activation of Christ within the believer, could lead to an entirely new species of humankind, living within the love of God. People who are ‘in Christ’ experience the mystical presence of Christ in their daily lives, converting badness into goodness, hate into love. The believer with ‘Christ inside’ could reach standards of behaviour well beyond human potential. Paul was wrong about many things. He did not see Christ arrive on the clouds, wind up the world, and take his followers to everlasting life. But Paul propelled his gospel throughout the Roman Empire, and a belief in Christ eventually supplanted all the gods the Romans had previously revered. (Location 740)
Right from the start of his career, Disney had ‘big dreams and outsize aspirations’.5 Even when he was twenty, he was ‘too independent-minded to think of himself as someone else’s employee’.6 A secretary who came across him said, ‘He had the drive and ambition of ten million men.’7 When he went to Hollywood, he fitted right in with the world’s biggest and best dream factory; he was always a dreamer on a grand scale. (Location 756)
Although he loved having his own studio, Disney ‘was never as interested in building an operation . . . as he was in improving the product . . . as a matter of personal pride and psychological need.’ (Location 763)
Like Dylan and Jobs, Disney saw the product as an extension of himself; and however hard up he was – in the early years he was chronically short of cash – he demanded the highest quality even at the expense of profit. (Location 765)
One key aspect of Apple products’ simplicity and ease of use was smooth scrolling – the way that you could move down between paragraphs and pages quickly and with no abrupt jumps. (Location 782)
Walt Disney was held in awe by the creative people working for him. Animators thought of themselves as gods, bringing their characters to life and determining their fortunes. But Disney was more like God Almighty – the animators spoke of him ‘in quasi-religious terms’. One of his team said: ‘When he’d come into a room, your hair would stand up on the back of your neck. He’d have that effect on you. You’d feel the presence. It was spooky.’ (Location 786)
It is a classic rule of strategy not to fight against powerful enemies on two different fronts. This was a rule Jobs disregarded – he fought both IBM and Microsoft, and later the major alternative smartphone hardware makers that were using the dominant Android software developed by Google. (Location 805)
Before Bruce, businesspeople wanted their company to be market leader so they could extract high prices and high profits from customers. Wrong, wrong, wrong, said Bruce. Market share was valuable because it lowered costs. To gain market share, therefore, leading firms should lower prices, thus further increasing market share, driving costs down further, and making life hard for competitors with smaller sales and higher costs. The eventual upshot of lowering costs and prices, Bruce promised, would be higher profits and market value. Pure heresy in Bruce’s day, but it is what Amazon has done today with amazing effect, changing the global retail scene forever. (Location 838)
What does Bezos believe? • High standards can be taught. If you start with a high-standards team, newcomers will quickly adapt. • High standards are domain-specific. ‘When I started Amazon,’ Bezos says, ‘I had high standards on inventing, customer care, and hiring. But I didn’t have high standards on operational process . . . I had to learn and develop high standards on all that (my colleagues were my tutors).’ • High standards result in better products and services for customers. But less obviously, ‘people are drawn to high standards – they help with recruiting and retention’. • ‘And finally, high standards are fun! Once you’ve tasted high standards, there’s no going back.’ (Location 863)
All the players made great demands on their followers. Yet Olympian expectations do not necessarily require an effect on followers; the expectations may be so huge that the main or exclusive impact is on the players and not on any followers. (Location 880)
In probing Einstein’s expectations, we discover a very unusual player, the archetype, not of the normal workaday scientist or thinker, but of the man or woman who is perfectly cast to make monumental breakthroughs. The necessary ingredients are insatiable curiosity, quirky intelligence, the paradoxical combination of confidence and awe which I term ‘modest arrogance’, and a particular guiding philosophy. (Location 886)
Leonardo wrote in his notebook, ‘The good painter has to paint two principal things – man, and the intention of his mind. The first is easy and the second is difficult, because it has to be represented through gestures and movements of the limbs.’ (Location 911)
Note: Zo wil ik schrijven
Writing about an earlier genius, Isaac Newton, Keynes praised his ‘divine intuition’ and ‘unusual powers of continuous concentrated introspection’, as well as many other qualities – ‘logical capacity, a feel for the salient facts, style, many-sidedness, theoretical and practical gifts in combination’ – Keynes claimed were vital for a great economist. (Location 931)
Note: Continuous concentrated introspection
Later, Dylan became a family man and for a time went into semi-retirement. ‘What did I owe the rest of the world? Nothing. Not a damn thing,’ he wrote defiantly. He was already sure of his place in the gallery of greatness. ‘Sometime in the past I had written and performed songs that were most original and most influential, and I didn’t know if I ever would again and I didn’t care.’ (Location 981)
It’s hard to imagine how anyone can be great without having similar reach and vision. In our own league, whether the premier division or something worthwhile but less grand, great expectations are still the midwife of great creation. (Location 989)
I found no examples of unreasonable success which did not involve great leaps forward based on quite outsized expectations. If you can visualise yourself as a great achiever, this does not guarantee great success – far from it – but it makes it hugely more likely. (Location 996)
Expectations – of others for us, of ourselves, and of our associates and followers – become self-fulfilling. This is one of the few magic tricks left in the world, perhaps the most important. Therefore, set your expectations as high as you possibly can, consistent with believing they can be realised. If you want unreasonable success, you must have completely unreasonable expectations. The ceiling on your future is the most you can imagine and expect. Although Olympian expectations are the property of a tiny minority, the funny thing is that the people holding these beliefs are often obscure and unnoticed until their presumptions come to fruition. This suggests that many more people – perhaps, dear reader, you included – could reach unsuspected heights. (Location 999)
Olympian expectations • Experiment to generate instances of success • Early experience of success • Extreme ambition: Think big; think bigger • Unreasonably demanding of self and others (Location 1009)
One of my thrilling and important discoveries in writing this book was that nearly all my players had at least one unusual experience which prepared them for unreasonable success. They were transformed by an event or episode which made a deep impression on them and equipped them with unusual insight, knowledge or convictions. Without these experiences, we (Location 1019)
‘There was no particular day on which I said, Henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my people; instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not do otherwise.’ (Location 1086)
Note: Mandela
Shaw thought the most important decision any new firm can make is the type of people it will hire. (Location 1113)
The Jeff Bezos saga is the starkest example of the most frequent pattern of transforming experiences within business – an exciting and challenging job in a high-growth venture which leads the individual to acquire rare knowledge and think that they can change the future by starting their own company. (Location 1136)
How the Falklands experience transformed Thatcher • It gave her new, transcendent self-confidence. The Falklands crisis was the time of her life, said Robert Armstrong, when ‘she lived most intensely’.37 She was sure that only she could have done it. It was the defining moment, the greatest triumph of her whole career. • She thought it proved that Britain could regain its greatness. After her Falklands triumph, she went back to Downing Street, mingling with the people, young and old, singing Rule Britannia. ‘It was their triumph,’ she said. ‘We have ceased to be a nation in retreat.’38 • As Charles Moore said, her mindset was ‘both conservative and revolutionary. She saw herself as restoring an inherent British greatness . . . At the same time, she saw herself as bringing about enormous change.’39 • She went from being on probation with her Tory colleagues to complete dominance over them.40 • The full Thatcherite agenda to save Britain from socialism was now able to emerge. • Finally, the Falklands experience made Thatcher dangerously over-confident, intransigent and unwilling to listen to close colleagues. Her success in war made her increasingly intolerant, autocratic and unable to compromise. (Location 1290)
Why a transforming experience is necessary for unreasonable success Reasonable success can follow from a linear and ordered career plan – doing all the ‘right’ things. But following a conventional path won’t lead to unreasonable success. On the other hand, unreasonable success can spring from one or more intense experiences which call forth unsuspected talents or latent character. The seeds of extraordinary personal achievement are watered and germinate during a time of extreme weather – a personal crisis or other learning and testing period which marks a profound discontinuity in your self-belief, expectations, rare knowledge, direction, certainty, focus and potential. (Location 1307)
Without a transforming experience you are unlikely to attain unreasonable success. • It is possible to engineer a transforming experience for yourself. So position yourself in the slipstream of events where the right kind of transforming experience is most likely. (Location 1313)
It was Bain’s first exposure to the giddy heights of corporate America; he discovered that he could interact smoothly with its chief executives. ‘I was fascinated by how they got there,’ he said. ‘I liked every one of those guys a lot, and they liked me. I felt very comfortable with them,’ sharing common interests such as ‘sports, women, business, competition, goals’. (Location 1326)
As Bain often did when selling business at quite unprecedented fee levels, he implied this was standard BCG practice. (Location 1348)
The Boston team came up with some hypotheses that were to change business strategy forever: • Costs for any firm are not generally similar across all their products, even if these appear to be similar (e.g. ‘small motors’ or ‘grinding wheels’). • Prices across different products and to different customers may, however, be the same. If this is true, the high-volume products and customers will be more profitable. • Market share in carefully defined business segments (e.g., not ‘grinding wheels’, but ‘grinding wheels for car-makers’) is very valuable, because higher volume of the same product means lower unit costs. • A company probably has very different costs and profit margins across different products, depending on their volume in the correctly defined product/customer segment. It may make a lot of money on a few products and lose a bundle on most. • Typically, companies’ product lines are too broad. They should focus only on the ones where they are the market leaders or have the lowest unit costs – these two are usually the same. • A small company facing a bigger rival must segment the market and focus on one area or a few where it can become the largest in that segment, having the highest volumes of the relevant products and customers, and therefore the lowest costs. • Price is a potent competitive weapon. If lower prices enable a firm to gain market share and become the largest in a segment, and therefore have lower costs than any rival at that point, it is worth selling at a loss in the short term to build volume and competitive advantage. • Companies should strive to become and remain the lowest-cost competitor. Gain market share, then constantly reduce costs and prices to force rivals out of your heartland markets because they can’t make money there. (Location 1415)
Bruce Henderson’s transforming experience was not the founding of his company, nor its delayed success. Rather, it was the evolution of the two grand tools of business strategy – the Experience Curve (1966) and Boston Box (1969) – and the beautifully elegant logic underlying and connecting them. Henderson’s transformation can therefore be dated precisely to 1966–69, when he was over fifty. (Location 1433)
Note: Over 50
All the dots, all the random insights that had been bubbling away in the recesses of his mind for… (Location 1436)
Transformations that occur in an unusual firm, before you start a new venture There was Jeff Bezos, working out the plan for Amazon while still working in that most remarkable of firms, D. E. Shaw & Co, one of the very few that knew how much the internet was going to change the world. Before Amazon was even born, Bezos was transformed, equipped, almost Messianic. There was Bill Bain, still within BCG, already transformed, already happily piloting the approach he would perfect in his own domain. This first model is the best – you can acquire ideas and authority, and start to experiment, while still employed by someone else. You become transformed on their dime. The firm you found is not really a start-up, more a continuation and… (Location 1440)
Work for a strange, singular, surprising – and surprisingly successful – company. Look for one that is growing fast; that does things differently from its larger rivals; that focuses on a special subset of customers and that knows something the rivals do not know. Attain rare knowledge and confidence from what the firm knows. Next, work out how to… (Location 1447)
Be transformed by starting your… (Location 1451)
Typically, new outfits wobble around like drunks at a party, intoxicated by their patter, yet failing to connect. They feel good. Then the hangover. (Location 1456)
Transformation after near-failure This is the most painful, prolonged and elusive kind of transformation. It can happen in the nick of time, just before the cash runs out, but more often it does not happen at all. (Location 1457)
Desperation can fuel invention. Reasonable solutions are dead. You give up, or fabricate unreasonable ones. (Location 1460)
My advice? Go for the first means of transformation. And if your first ‘fantastic’ firm doesn’t transform you, move on to the second . . . until you really are transformed by new knowledge and authority. (Location 1464)
Despite her excitement, Rowling’s transformation was not completed on her stalled train. Her first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was not published until seven years after her first dream of the boy. Rowling’s transformation is best viewed as a drama in three acts: Act One was her vision on the train. Act Two was the writing of the book, started the very evening of the train ride, but not completed until 1995, five years later. Act Three was getting published, which did not happen until 30 June 1997. Only then was J. K. Rowling’s transformation complete and secure. (Location 1485)
Einstein was transformed, and although competing demands on his time included playing enthusiastically with his three-year-old son, performing every week in a string quartet – and, oh yes, continuing to work eight hours a day, six days a week, in the Patent Office – he threw himself into a new orgy of deep thinking and learned papers. (Location 1504)
Like them all, he knew that he was privy to insights nobody else had, and that he would change the world. (Location 1509)
What transformed Frankl was finding meaning in hell. (Location 1535)
Academics claim that Madonna is ‘postmodern’.53 What they mean is that she can be taken either at face value, or as a deliberate poseur, ricocheting from persona to persona and role to role without even the tiniest bit of consistency. (Location 1552)
All our players had a personal transformation – an event which changed them profoundly, connecting them with their destiny. They acquired rare new knowledge, rare determination, rare self-confidence and certain other indefinable but omnipotent psychic gifts which made them George Bernard Shaw’s ‘unreasonable man’ or woman, in contention for unreasonable success.56 (Location 1614)
Transforming experience • Deliberately engineer possible transforming experiences • Search for defining moments – major events fuelling a sense of purpose and destiny • Become a different person because of transforming experiences (Location 1627)
A breakthrough achievement can never be totally unwound. It becomes part of history, part of the environment, part of the flow of life far into the future. (Location 1646)
Bezos alone clung to the creed that if you provide extraordinarily low prices and high customer service, your ultimate reward will be massive. Part of Bezos’ achievement comes from being pig-headed and dictatorial – he preaches; he insists that business should be done his way. There is a cult of Jeff at Amazon, just as there was – some would say, there still is – a cult of Steve at Apple. We can understand the Bezos cult from this – in March 2000 Amazon was worth $30 billion. Not bad. But today it hovers around $800 billion – twenty-seven times as much. (Location 1653)
As with Bezos, Steve Jobs’ breakthrough achievement was to create Apple as he envisioned it, to mould its DNA, charting its mission as a revolutionary digital simplifier. (Location 1662)
There is a recognisable Madonna brand, just as there is a Leonardo brand, a Bob Dylan brand, a Walt Disney brand, a Salvador Dalí brand, a Picasso brand, a Leonard Cohen brand and a Bowie brand. They all share this paradox – they are simultaneously varied in their work and it evolved markedly over time, yet each one’s whole range of output could not be the work of anyone else. They are their work and their work is them. (Location 1698)
Breakthrough achievements do not require genius; they can be the offspring of hard thinking by the likes of Henderson; and, I make bold to assert, by you and me. (Location 1717)
Until 1936, it was generally accepted that in recessions, high unemployment was unavoidable. Keynes said it wasn’t – that government or central banks could step in to invest and create demand, and so multiply the benefit from that investment. Once the economy had picked up, government could withdraw to the sidelines, raising taxes in good times for investment in the next recession. (Location 1738)
Paul identified a new and much larger target market for what, until he changed it, was a tiny Jewish sect going nowhere. He was the first religious leader in the world to offer a message of supreme, universal optimism; and he provided the first and best written account of the new faith. (Location 1745)
His strategic opportunism – which I have emulated, and commend to you as a route to unreasonable success – combined two elements usually seen as contradictory: • Extreme determination on strategy, yoked together with • Extreme flexibility on the means and timing of action, reacting to random events and grasping any opportunity they presented to advance his strategic objectives. Bismarck did not plan events. Despite being impulsive and nervous, he forced himself to wait patiently for the right moment to seize the initiative. (Location 1779)
But the plot of history – like our own lives – is not a straight line; it zig-zags. (Location 1803)
Even before Hitler came to power, Churchill told the House of Commons the danger posed by Germany. ‘Do not delude yourselves,’ he told them on 23 November 1932, about Germany’s wish to rearm, ‘that all that Germany is asking for is equal status . . . All these bands of sturdy Teutonic youths, marching through the streets and roads of Germany, with the light of desire in their eyes to suffer for their Fatherland, are not looking for status. They are looking for weapons and, when they have the weapons, believe me they will then ask for the return of lost territories and lost colonies, and when that demand is made, it cannot fail to shake and possibly shatter to their foundations every one of the countries I have mentioned’ – France, Belgium, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia – ‘and some other countries I have not mentioned.’ (Location 1830)
It was not until Hitler had broken every promise and invaded country after country – as predicted by Churchill – and seemed poised to invade Britain, that the British political establishment suddenly woke up. In May 1940, after years of collective deafness, they most reluctantly made Churchill prime minister, simply because he had been proved right about the existential threat from Hitler, and was the only man who knew how to counter it. (Location 1850)
Churchill did not need to be an inventor; his mission was more than that. He did not need to invent a philosophy, a political party, a system, or anything else – he just had to be Churchill, the one person, probably the only person, who could rally the world to defeat Hitler. Churchill shows that a breakthrough achievement can be derived from, and can become identical to, a unique self-defined mission into which we pour our heart and soul. You may want to ask yourself: • What could I invent that would transform our lives and those of many other people? • What personal mission would energise me and transform my impact? (Location 1857)
From 1971 onwards, a small but steadily growing stream of visitors made their way to Mandela’s cell on Robben Island, mostly ‘authorities’ seeking to test out his attitude towards a possible deal between the regime and the ANC. (Location 1891)
Note: Visitors
The breakthrough achievement of each player obviously depended on their unique circumstances and aspirations. But there are three important general findings: • By far the most common type of breakthrough achievement is invention. For most of the players, all their other achievements and efforts pale into insignificance when set alongside their single decisive invention. What might you invent? • Besides invention, strategic achievements seem most likely to arise from an overwhelming sense of destiny, mission, or desire to bridge seemingly irreconcilable gulfs of ideology, attitude or vested interests. Do you have any of these strong feelings? If so, nurture them. Singular achievement comes from singular convictions. • Strategic opportunism is one attractive route to a breakthrough achievement. You must know precisely what you want to achieve, but wait for the footsteps of opportunity to be audible before you strike. • The killer combination is extreme determination coupled with extreme flexibility regarding means and timing. If you are single-minded, yet patient, you will know the perfect time to act. Until then, keep your powder dry. (Location 1902)
Note: Bridge single minded and patient
Your skills – and improving them – are not the point. Far more important is what you try to do – the originality and reach of your mission, goal, destiny, whatever you call it, and your tenacity, nay, fanaticism, and luck in seeing it through to completion. • Your objective must be new, revolutionary, imaginative and almost laughably ambitious. • It must also be incarnated within your personality – it must come from the soul. • Ultimately, the ‘what’ – in Lenin’s stirring phrase, ‘What is to be done?’ – is more vital than the ‘how’. This landmark is the what. The other eight landmarks are the how. (Location 1919)
Note: Soul what
You don’t want to be the best at what you do; you want to be the only one. —JERRY GARCIA (Location 1937)
Nobody can become unreasonably successful by doing what everyone – or anyone – else is doing. At some stage in their career, all our players left behind established paths and ploughed their own furrow. Before they did that in the real world, they did it in their own minds. They came up with the theory before putting it into practice. They developed their own unique philosophy and started to behave according to its dictates. They began to act differently. (Location 1939)
Unreasonably successful people construct their own proprietary mental map to guide their steps. They create their own segment, which reflects their personality, their objective and their way of working, all at the same time. Nobody else can enter their skin; nobody else can enter their segment; it is impenetrable, because they fill it, and nobody else can. (Location 1943)
A business philosophy is not unusual – but what is rare is dedication to a philosophy, even when it appears to conflict with commercial common sense. (Location 1948)
Companies – especially new ones, where capital is vital and costly, and the imperative is reaching cash break-even as soon as possible – almost never put their customers’ interests above those of their shareholders and employees. (Location 1949)
But the problem with pragmatism is that it rapidly becomes a habit, and short-term gratification – expressed in profits, cash and the praise which goes with them – becomes a drug that drives out long-term customer-related aspirations. (Location 1954)
And what about Bill Bain? Surely his philosophy must be too similar to Henderson’s for us to say that he truly made his own trail? Not at all. It’s true that Bain began to incubate his revolutionary approach to consulting within BCG, yet his vision was totally original and clashed with the DNA Bruce Henderson had begat. Bain’s iconoclasm had six interlocking planks: • An extremely close relationship with the client organisation, and particularly its head. • Equality of status between the client organisation and the consulting firm (Bain & Company), and between the client’s CEO and the lead partner from Bain handling the client. • A long-term and continuous relationship, completely at odds with the consulting industry norm of specific and intermittent projects. • Exclusivity between the client organisation and Bain & Company both ways – as Bain told prospective clients, ‘We won’t work with your competitors, and you won’t work with ours.’ • Focus on increasing the value of the company organisation – strategy was the means to the end, not the end in itself; conversely, to Bain, ‘strategy’ meant ‘anything that we can help with which will increase the value of the client firm’. • Bill Bain believed in a top-down, quasi-military chain of command, both within his own firm, and in the client. What the lead Bain partner and the client CEO agreed should be done, would be done, by fiat, through the client organisation and in parallel with the Bain & Company organisation. No other consulting firm on Earth worked this way. (Location 1989)
When I defected from BCG to Bain & Company, I was amazed at how utterly dissimilar the two outfits were. They used the same intellectual capital, but in totally contrasting ways. Bain & Company worked within clients in a much more intensive, expensive and remorseless way, leaving very little to chance – so achieving extraordinary results. (Location 2011)
Above all, she originated personality marketing, where she used her own legend, force of personality and reputation to publicise her business around the world. She was indefatigable and omnipresent even in her nineties. (Location 2046)
Advances in science, as in any other field, including business, seem to me to involve a common pattern of intuitive and experimental exploration. • The first stage is to take a new field – or market – which is exciting and pregnant with possibilities, because knowledge is being discovered quickly, particularly knowledge or ideas which seem to contradict established theory or procedures. Part of the apparent genius of scientific or other discoveries is the choice of broad field from which to branch out into new speculation and discovery. • The next steps are progressively to narrow the field of enquiry, by building on the discoveries of the most unconventional and creative enquirers, and applying their insights, alone or in a new permutation, to a new avenue of speculation and experimentation, that could lead to a dramatically different picture of how the world works. (Location 2124)
The third step is to take the new theoretical model and prove it experimentally and/or with new data relevant to the new model. (Location 2141)
Winston Churchill took a long time to find his destined path. He thought for decades that his speaking prowess would propel him to power. Yet his eloquence did not produce the desired results. ‘The very nature’ of Churchill’s oratory, says historian David Cannadine, ‘made it harder, not easier, for him to get to the very top in public life’. (Location 2184)
‘To speak with the tongues of men and angels,’ Asquith said of Churchill, ‘is no good if a man does not inspire trust.’ (Location 2195)
While marooned on the repulsive Robben Island, Mandela realised that the only constructive course forward for all South Africans – the only feasible path of peace and reconciliation – was to do a deal with his gaolers. (Location 2205)
Mandela had a unique blend of charm and iron resolve. Journalist Richard Stengel, who shadowed Mandela for three years, noted this extraordinary quality. ‘He is a power charmer,’ Stengel attests, ‘confident that he will charm you, by whatever means possible. He is attentive, courtly, winning, and . . . seductive . . . He will learn as much as possible about you before meeting you.’35 The charm alone would not have worked. ‘He will always stand up for what he believes is right,’ says Stengel, ‘with a stubbornness that is virtually unbending. (Location 2213)
Success, when it comes, appears completely unreasonable – or at least surprising. Yet there may, after all, be some hidden subterranean rhyme or reason in the universe. Depth of willpower, depth of belief, depth of reach, depth of experience, depth of transforming skill and depth of character – good or bad – are needed to create change. Unreasonable success requires a singular path, and a singular personality. (Location 2244)
To be ultra-successful requires the verve to be utterly different. To be unreasonably successful you need your own philosophy and deeply grounded beliefs. You need unique and authentic convictions before the world will take serious notice of you. Not only do you need to make your own trail. We are about to discover that you also need your own personal vehicle to drive towards your destination. (Location 2248)
Make your own trail • High ambition often defined early or at start of career • Devise and follow own trail • Increasing focus over time • Develop unique philosophy (Location 2253)
At last I had authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I had been walking with destiny, and that all of my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial. —WINSTON CHURCHILL (Location 2260)
This chapter presents a simple but vital finding that is often neglected – for unreasonable success, we need our personal vehicle. All our players had a vehicle which multiplied their impact hundreds or thousands of times. There are two types of vehicle which can give unreasonable success. The first type is useful; the second is indispensable. (Location 2263)
Type 1: Pool vehicles
The first type of vehicle is something which already exists in your environment, something external or extraneous to you, which you can leap on and from which you can derive great benefit. I call these ‘pool vehicles’ because I worked in an oil refinery and we had pick-up trucks to drive around its sprawling estate. Pool vehicles could be used by any manager. In your career, a pool vehicle is something in the environment that can help you. It won’t guarantee success, but it is a good start. What is there around you – knowledge, worldview, technology or other trends – which you can use as a launch pad? (Location 2266)
Jeff Bezos also used the BCG ideas to develop his philosophy for Amazon, especially dominant market share, and lowest costs and prices. Bezos also benefitted from two other pool vehicles – internet retailing and ‘Californian Venture Capital Syndrome’, which values growth above short-term profits, supporting Amazon’s losses for long years, allowing a focus on customer experience and low prices. (Location 2275)
Otto von Bismarck rode the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century. (Location 2279)
Winston Churchill’s pool vehicle was the rise of German National Socialism, Hitler’s murderous anti-Semitism, and his own opposition to them. An environmental factor does not have to be appeased or promoted; it can also be a pool vehicle when it is opposed first or most vigorously. (Location 2282)
We’ve seen how Bruce Henderson’s revolutionary ideas did not arise in a vacuum. His long years spent in Westinghouse’s purchasing department, and his discovery that rival firms did not have roughly equal costs, were the pool ideas available to any other intelligent manager with curiosity and a taste for profitable abstraction. As with Einstein, the raw material for radical new departures was floating around in the ether, accessible to anyone who could think hard about it. (Location 2293)
Type 2: Your personal vehicle
Pool vehicles are useful; but your own personal vehicle is essential. You must create something new which vastly increases your impact on the world. The players used their vehicles for three reasons:
- Leverage – using the vehicles’ power, wealth, manpower, reputation, intellectual property and influence.
- Collaboration – enabling the players to do what they couldn’t do themselves or couldn’t do well; supplying missing ingredients; building supporters.
- Credibility and publicity – helping the players to be taken seriously by backers, gatekeepers, enthusiasts, and finally the general public/customers/voters. (Location 2325)
→
Bain & Company’s credibility came in a new way. Bain created a cult of secrecy around his vehicle. For many years his firm had no brochure, no website, wrote no memos or reports, had no business cards, and shunned publicity like the plague. All his sales were made by direct pitches to chief executives, and by references from existing clients to their peers in other companies. This was greatly facilitated by the interlocking nature of US boards, whose members mainly comprise CEOs and chairmen from other big companies, who act as non-executive directors. (Location 2344)
Most basically, Bain & Company’s authority flowed from its unique positioning and intimacy with clients. (Location 2352)
The lesson? Don’t look for a new vehicle if the existing one has potential for success and can be radically reconditioned. (Location 2379)
All the business leaders used their vehicles to vastly increase their reach, power and impact, without diminishing at all their idiosyncrasies, quirks or ability to mould each vehicle’s DNA in their own likeness. Even if the player becomes a caricature of themselves, that’s a kind of validation. (Location 2385)
For the players in politics, only leverage and credibility were vital. (Location 2391)
Lenin, like his fellow Russian revolutionaries, enjoyed a comfortable bourgeois life in exile in England and Switzerland, spending happy hours drinking coffee and eating good food in cafés and restaurants; disputing the finer points of Marxist theory; walking in the countryside, hills and mountains; and, in Lenin’s case, penning newspaper articles and books. (Location 2395)
Note here the obvious point that whereas a successful war is a great political vehicle, it is also a very crude and chancy mechanism, and one probably best deployed in defence rather than attack. (Location 2440)
Collaboration is markedly less important for the statesmen than for the business leaders. Those who run business empires, however autocratic their tendencies, typically need collaborators with different skills to balance or cover for their own weak spots. Business, not politics, is the real art of the possible. Business is more complex, multifunctional, dynamic and fast-changing, and more exposed (Location 2446)
Another difference: the business leaders created their personal vehicles, whereas this was less true for the political leaders. Churchill and Thatcher inherited their most important vehicles – the Conservative Party and the British state – adding only war leadership as a vital vehicle. (Location 2450)
The most unreasonably successful political leaders were also the least typical or conventional. They crafted new sources of power in an almost entrepreneurial way. (Location 2458)
The personal vehicles of thinkers, writers and artists are different from those of both politicians and business leaders. The thinkers’ vehicles are principally books or other publications, discoveries or inventions, or works of art. Other vehicles are largely ornamental or useful for publicity. (Location 2481)
Unlike the scientists, but like the entrepreneurs, Paul needed leverage. He couldn’t start a new philosophy-religion and grow it exponentially without many followers, many new groups of believers, in many different towns around the Mediterranean. Not only did Paul need followers of Christ (and of himself); he also needed to indoctrinate them with his new message. He simplified the new way of life in his letters to the new groups of believers. Paul was like our scientists and other thinkers – he had to change a worldview and create a new one. It is hard to sell the unfamiliar; it takes unique intellect and powers of persuasion. (Location 2499)
Like the scientists, and unlike the entrepreneurs, Paul’s message and credibility had to be personal. An entrepreneur’s credibility and influence rest far more on his vehicle – his company and its products – than on his personality. (Location 2504)
The credibility that matters for entrepreneurs is not personal; it is based around the brand and the product. (Location 2507)
But perhaps Paul’s most important vehicle – which he never knew about, and without which he may have been forgotten or overshadowed – was the work of Marcion, the forgotten yet pivotal second-century evangelist. Marcion was a successful shipping magnate who went to Rome in AD 138 and who, after five years of reflection, published two books. One was a reinterpretation of Paul’s message, which contrasted the God of the Old Testament – a God of wrath – with the supreme and ‘Unknown’ God – a God of love. This God, Marcion said, first revealed himself by sending Jesus to Earth. Marcion’s other work was a canon – a compilation – of his ‘approved’ scriptures: the first ‘New Testament’. It comprised just ten of Paul’s letters and one gospel, a version of Luke.15 Although other books were later admitted to the New Testament, Paul’s predominance in its pages remained. Marcion ensured that Paul’s message, and that of Jesus, which Paul encapsulated and reinterpreted,* were the core of the new religion. Without Marcion, Christianity would have become a different religion, and most likely the Reformation and Protestantism would never have happened.16 The survival and propagation of important books – those containing the philosophy and insight of the likes of Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, as well as that of Jesus and Paul – was probably the most important single vehicle of Western civilisation as we know it today. As Churchill said, the only thing which survives for long centuries is books. (Location 2510)
A ‘pool vehicle’ which already exists is a useful start – something we can leap upon and use for our own purposes. If there is nothing in the environment which we want to use as a vehicle or anti-vehicle, we should change our environment to a more fertile one. For unreasonable success, you must have your own personal vehicle. You cannot walk to unreasonable success. (Location 2579)
Landmark 7: Thrive on Setbacks Success means going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. —WINSTON CHURCHILL (Location 2596)
The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates! —NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB (Location 2600)
It is not enough to be resilient and get over setbacks; to be unreasonably successful you must learn to positively thrive on them. (Location 2602)
Churchill, buoyed by his self-belief and gargantuan expectations, had throughout his career an intense sense of personal drama, not despite, but rather because of, his setbacks. His career mattered, and if it went up and down like a yoyo, it just fed his sense of self-importance. (Location 2669)
Churchill knew from history that life does not go in a straight line and being part of great events made every day vital. (Location 2673)
Setbacks give feedback, so that we either change course entirely – a change of strategy – or redouble the conviction that we are right but realise we must change tactics in order to triumph. (Location 2674)
Paradoxically, setbacks can validate unconventional views and contribute to a sense of greatness. If you follow the herd, you are unremarkable. If you are controversial, you are noticed. Setbacks happen more frequently to people who take large risks. Risk-takers defy the majority view – that is why it is a risk. Risks have high downsides, but high upsides. And if we can survive defeats – not just through inbuilt resilience, but also because defeats give us feedback and validation – and continue to take high risks, we preserve the possibility of remarkable future success. (Location 2678)
Surviving one defeat makes surviving the next defeat more bearable, easier and more likely. (Location 2684)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has written a fine book – in my opinion his best – which he called Anti-fragile, a term he coined. He opens the book thus: Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind . . . The mission is how to domesticate, even dominate, even conquer, the unseen, the opaque, and the inexplicable.10 (Location 2686)
Being anti-fragile does not mean being resilient – rather, it means positively benefitting from shocks, setbacks, risks and uncertainty. To innovate, he says, first get into trouble. Setbacks are a discovery mechanism; they also release excess energy, motivation and willpower. Exposure to failure is essential for success; we need ‘the light of experience gained by disaster’.11 Through imagination, courage and action, it is possible to get, in his wonderful phrase, ‘the better half of luck’.12 (Location 2692)
Yet our players, exemplified by Churchill, were anti-fragile. It is not that they wanted, either consciously or unconsciously, to experience huge problems. Instead, they took risks which ordinary people tend not to take, and they were able to benefit from setbacks which would have knocked most people for six. They had the anti-fragile spirit. They were and are buccaneers, pirates and explorers, with a highly developed sense of their own potential and with strong anti-conventional opinions – they exhibit not just a strong ego, but also an ability to confront and confound adversity, with a curiosity about themselves and the world and a degree of stoicism which sets them apart from people who are merely big-headed and oblivious to risk and randomness. Our players sought out risks, knowing that they were risks, aware that they were swimming against the tide, confident that they could win, but aware of the possibility of failure and able not just to cope with it, but to find a way around it. They had and have the courage to benefit from adversity. (Location 2700)
The ability to thrive on setbacks, to reframe them in the most favourable and courageous light, to turn a blind eye to one’s vulnerabilities, is a necessary condition for unreasonable success. (Location 2708)
Note: Necessary
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune always operate when we travel in the hills of elevated ambition – if we want to win, we should regard them as our friends, and take the opportunity to sharpen our character and make it impervious to future setbacks. (Location 2710)
While NeXT limped on, Jobs’ obsession with digital images and computer animation pulled him ever deeper into another massive learning experience. After leaving Apple, he had become the majority investor in Pixar, whose main product was the Pixar Image Computer. (Location 2742)
You may know that Toy Story was a massive success, loved by critics, cinema-goers and Pixar’s bankers. Jobs insisted on an extravagant price for Pixar’s shares – yet they almost doubled on the first day of trading. Jobs’ stake, virtually worthless at the start of 1991, became worth $1.2 billion. (Location 2762)
Like Churchill, Jobs was a man transformed by his decade in the wilderness. He was still the visionary, still the showman, still reaching for the stars, but his failures and lucky triumphs in NeXT and Pixar had made him much more realistic and commercial. (Location 2770)
It is significant and excellent that the ability to thrive on setbacks is emphatically not the result of a lucky, sunny temperament. (Location 2777)
Completely devastated, Leonardo resolved to leave Florence and go to Milan. It was the best decision of his life, giving him new impetus and a broader definition of his talent. As Robert Greene explains, Leonardo’s huge setback drove him to devise a new strategy: ‘He would be more than an artist. He would also pursue all the crafts and sciences that interested him – architecture, military engineering, hydraulics, anatomy, sculpture.’ (Location 2804)
‘It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be able to be cheerful again,’ Rowling said later, ‘that very deadened feeling which is so very different from feeling sad.’26 And yet – the only thing that Rowling really had left, besides Jessica, the only thing besides her much-loved daughter that she really cared about, was the story of Harry Potter. And that proved magnetic enough to pull her out of hell. (Location 2828)
We know the outcome – just as Rowling’s life up to then had been unreasonably awful, it then became unreasonably successful. For the sake of others, she generously put a cheerful gloss on it: ‘The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive.’27 While this is true, we may also draw this conclusion from the prime of Miss Jo Rowling – belief in your destiny and your project can overcome even poverty, a sad personal life and serious depression, and there is no surer therapy for the dark side of life. As with Churchill, Jobs and Leonardo, horrible setbacks can be best trumped by a change of scene, and by creative activity focused on a single breakthrough achievement. (Location 2835)
His dissatisfaction bordered on depression, yet led to his greatest ever leap forward: Disneyland, which he achieved in the teeth of opposition from his brother Roy and the Disney board, and only by going into heavy personal debt and finding sources of finance from outside his original firm, Disney Productions. (Location 2844)
Bruce Henderson was fired by Westinghouse and Arthur D. Little, becoming unemployed and apparently unemployable as he approached the age of fifty. (Location 2852)
There is a template for turning repeated reverses, eventually, into supreme triumph: • Take big risks. • Do not be dismayed if they don’t work out. • After a disaster, keep going, but switch gears. • Reframe the disaster – deny that the failure was inevitable or your fault – ‘it was always high risk so it’s not surprising it failed’. • Unless you keep your original objective, immerse yourself in something different. • Setbacks give feedback. You need reverses, and are going to get them anyway. Use them to make you stronger, more robust to future failure, and to gain new experiences. The disasters also make the eventual triumph sweeter. • Never give up hope. You can’t know the future, but you must trust it. Remain fulfilled and coolly confident; jump when the big break beckons. • Feed an intense sense of personal drama. What you will achieve matters, not just personally, but to the world. • Expect catastrophes to be followed by great rejoicing, all the greater for what went before. A novel or movie that ends in failure, failure, failure, failure, failure . . . ultimate failure – is not a very good story. Reject the script – improve it, transcend it. It can be done. It must be done. The audience expects it. (Location 2870)
Thrive on setbacks • Failure is the key to future success • Reframe the disaster and use feedback • After a disaster keep going but switch gears • Immerse yourself in something different • Feed your sense of personal drama • Become anti-fragile (Location 2887)
Business thinking starts with an intuitive choice of assumptions. Its progress as analysis is intertwined with intuition. The final choice is always intuitive. If that were not true, all problems would be solved by mathematicians. —BRUCE HENDERSON (Location 2899)
Before there is knowledge, there is something else which generates knowledge. This ‘something else’ can be called many things: theories, hypotheses, imagination, intuition, curiosity, the noting of anomalies in previous theories which don’t work as well in practice as they should in theory, a new paradigm of science – and many other names. This ‘something else’ is the peculiarity and the glory of humankind. It is not knowledge, but it is related to knowledge, and it results in new and better knowledge. But there is no way that a computer, or – for all its vaunted hype – artificial intelligence, can generate this wonderful new knowledge. We can call this something else ‘not-quite-knowledge’, ‘implicit knowledge’, or perhaps best of all ‘hidden knowledge’. (Location 2912)
It is intuition which turns hidden knowledge into incredibly valuable knowledge. Unreasonable success flows from intuition. Intuition converts the hidden knowledge we’ve picked up throughout our life from our unique experiences, creating incredibly valuable knowledge. (Location 2920)
Good hunches require deep knowledge ‘A new idea,’ said Albert Einstein, ‘comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. But intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.’ (Location 2925)
Intuition is not random. The more you are an expert in a narrow field, and have deep wells of knowledge and experience in it; the more you think about it, clearly, and with curiosity, the better your hunches will be. Intuition is not the opposite of knowledge – it’s adjacent to it, underpinned by it, the extension of it. (Location 2928)
We can state some guidelines in respect of intuition: • Trust your intuition only in areas you know backwards, or about people you’ve known very well for a long time. • Author and investor Max Gunther says, ‘Never confuse a hope with a hunch . . . I’m much more inclined to trust an intuition pointing to some outcome I don’t want . . . Be especially wary of any intuitive flash that seems to promise some outcome you want badly’.2 • Hone your intuition in your areas of special focus. Your most valuable hunches will be where you have developed unique knowledge already, and are using intuition to extend it. (Location 2933)
How did Churchill get Hitler so right, when almost everyone else got him so wrong? One reason was his understanding of Germany, having seen with his own eyes the Nazi thugs with the light of fanatical devotion to Hitler and German expansion in their eyes, on his trip there in 1932. Churchill saw how popular Hitler was, how extreme he was, how the dictator marked the end of Christian civilisation in Germany and Europe, and how nothing but force could stop him. Churchill understood the dangers of placating Hitler because he had studied history, the history of peace and war, most carefully over centuries – indeed he had written hundreds of thousands of words on the subject. (Location 2988)
Coetsee and Mandela – sworn enemies – entered a competition to see which of them could be more pleasant. ‘He was a natural,’ Coetsee reported, ‘and I realized that from the moment I set eyes on him. He was a born leader. And he was affable.’ Although a prisoner, ‘he was clearly in command of his surroundings’.18 Mandela impressed his visitor by his knowledge of early Afrikaner history – the history, conveniently, of a liberation struggle. Coetsee told Botha that it opened a door ‘to talk rather than to fight’.19 Mandela later wrote that his ANC colleagues would condemn his decision to start negotiations – ‘they would kill my initiative even before it was born. There are times when a leader must move out ahead of the flock.’ (Location 3027)
Client companies could not be changed by the BCG model of ‘seagull consulting’ – swooping down from Boston, depositing a new strategy in a presentation or report, and flying back to Boston. Clients simply could not implement a strategy by exhortation, followed by desertion. The best way to make a new strategy happen was to transform the company through a personal alliance between the client chief executive and Bain & Company. Bain would only work for the top person in a company, because only he or she had the power to make the new strategy stick. To do that required the Bain consultants to work on all important strategic issues in the company, and to infiltrate the organisation so that its managers really understood the strategy and wanted to implement it. This was how to multiply the profits and value of the client company – and the billings of Bain & Company. If Bain produced huge value for the company in terms of increased profits and market value, Bain could charge millions or even tens of millions of dollars a year in fees, because these were just a small slice of the value added. (Location 3065)
Note: Only with the ceo
Bismarck’s other great intuition was to hold back until the perfect time to strike. Biographer Volker Ullrich says, ‘The ability to wait for the decisive instant, taking advantage of a uniquely favourable moment with determination – this was a skill Bismarck brought to the point of perfection.’ (Location 3101)
Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity are the perfect example of intuition, which, though based on deep and extremely powerful knowledge – the revolutionary new field of quantum mechanics from the first years of the twentieth century – nevertheless required a leap of imagination in opposition to prevailing theory. A visual image he had at the age of sixteen of himself riding a photon travelling at the speed of light was the start of long years of his thinking about relativity. On a beautiful day in Berne in 1905, Einstein was grappling with the inadequacies of existing theories of time in the universe. Then, as he told his friend Michelle Besso the following day, ‘I’ve completely solved the problem.’ It came to him suddenly, in the form of an image of moving trains. His totally original view of the universe – that there is no such thing as absolute time – came in a picture he saw in his mind. It was the fruit of intuition, not linear thinking.25 Even when he came to write up his revolutionary paper, On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, its message was mainly in the form of words and thought experiments, rather than in equations. (Location 3107)
‘High-level intuition,’ says Robert Greene, ‘involves a process that is qualitatively different from rationality, but is even more accurate and perceptive. It accesses deeper parts of reality.’ (Location 3118)
Einstein’s thought experiments also illustrate something which is common to many of our players’ intuitive breakthroughs: they featured themselves in the drama which they conjured up. (Location 3121)
Note: Play along
Bill Bain imagined himself in deep conversation with the boss of a big company before he nabbed them as a new client with an enormous budget. (Location 3126)
For our players, intuition was laced with personal longing and ambition. It was a clump of emotion, the convergence of aspiration, personal drive, homespun philosophy, understanding of the environment, and wild jumps of insight and ingenuity. (Location 3129)
This is a common experience of many highly creative people, in many different fields including poetry, writing plays or novels, mathematics, philosophy, the physical sciences and music. As we have seen, Albert Einstein gained insight into relativity from visual images which suddenly appeared to him. (Location 3155)
There are many other cases which have parallels to J. K. Rowling’s ‘download’ of Harry Potter. The early nineteenth century Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, wrote what many consider his finest poem Kubla Khan after seeing a vision of a palace in Xanadu in a dream. Over 200 lines of the poem came to him in the dream, and when he woke up, all he had to do was write them down at once. ‘All the images,’ he said, ‘rose up before me as things . . . without any sensation of conscious effort.’30 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had similar experiences. A new piece of music, he said, came to him suddenly, and he heard it the piece not in sequence, but ‘all at once’. ‘All this inventing, this producing takes place in a pleasing lively dream . . . the committing to paper is quickly done, for everything is already finished.’31 Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky, the mathematician and polymath Henri Poincaré, the chemist Friedrich Kekulé, and many others report similar sources of inspiration, all, as Tchaikovsky said, seeming to come from ‘that supernatural inexplicable force we call inspiration’. (Location 3157)
You need intuition with these qualities: • It must be important. Could it make a dent in the universe? • It must be unproven and original. Otherwise it is a fact, not an intuition. • It must be imaginative. • It must be simple. • It must contradict the experts. • Yet it must be based on deep knowledge. • You must star in the intuition. Your ambition and emotion are part of the package, part of the appeal, and an integral part of the driving force. (Location 3180)
Your singular intuition will eventually arrive unexpectedly and suddenly. Will it to come, and it will come. Do not rush it. It is the intuition of a lifetime, which will transform and immeasurably enrich your life, your world, and the whole world beyond you. It is worth willing; worth waiting for; and worth committing yourself to utterly. Your final landmark is just around the corner. It is a superbly potent compound of all the strategies and attitudes that you have already explored. (Location 3189)
Acquire unique intuition • Develop hugely important intuitions based on deep knowledge in a narrow field that is growing fast • Must be unproven and original • Imagine the unimaginable • The intuition becomes part of your personality and you are a ‘star’ in applying the intuition (Location 3194)
Visiting our final landmark, we discover that the difference between unreasonable success and its absence is simple – it rests on the self-fulfilling belief that current reality can, or cannot, be overturned. (Location 3209)
If we want unreasonable success, we must first believe we can change the world. (Location 3221)
Really believe we have our own personal reality distortion field. It won’t always work, but on important occasions it can change reality, if you believe. After all, what is extraordinary achievement but bending existing reality to your vision and your will, by persuading yourself and your key allies that it is possible? (Location 3222)
‘Steve had a way of motivating by looking at the bigger picture.’3 If something was defined as vital, it therefore became possible. Jobs didn’t have to know how to do it, just tell his people what was needed and that they could do it. They believed him, and they did it. (Location 3236)
Note: Vertel niet hie, maar wat
For sure, Jobs was a kind of bully, but a rare one – he bullied the strong, not the weak. (Location 3281)
This is an extreme version of the Matthew principle – ‘To everyone who has, will more be given, and he will have abundance.’ (Location 3282)
Step 1 – Project extreme optimism and determination to redirect reality to fit your philosophy and objectives. Do what others think is impossible, or which never occurs to them. Defeat the conventional view of what is realistic and unrealistic. Sharpen your willpower and convince yourself it could change reality. • Step 2 – Brainwash brilliant followers or collaborators into believing they can attain the impossible – because you say so, and you have a track record of being right. (Location 3288)
Reality distortion becomes progressively less impossible – I would not say ‘easier’ – the more you practise it and demonstrate your powers of will and prediction. (Location 3292)
In this almost-impossible task, Churchill was successful, which is why he is commonly accounted the best British prime minister of all time. Roy Jenkins summed it up: the national mood in 1940, he says, ‘was not so much defiant as impregnable. The prospects were awful, but people pushed the consequences of defeat out of their collective mind . . . they chose to believe that the worst would not happen.’ What Churchill did ‘was to produce a euphoria of irrational belief in ultimate victory’. (Location 3364)
Paul used the same two steps of reality distortion as our other players, or to posit that all the players’ inspiration and power, whatever their ends and means, may have come at least partly from the miracle of the human brain and its ability to connect through the unconscious mind to transcendent forces of which we have little understanding. You can, however, tap into those forces, and may need to, if you are to become unreasonably successful. To distort reality, you need to believe wholeheartedly that you can. (Location 3387)
What is clear is that if you are to change the world, you need to master the technology of reality distortion. Faith can overpower facts. It is not the meek or the powerful who shall inherit the Earth, but the unreasonable believers. (Location 3397)
Distort reality • Exhibit extreme optimism and determination to redirect reality to fit your philosophy and objectives • Inspire followers to believe they can do the impossible (Location 3401)
I now realise that nobody can really have self-belief in the abstract, except as a vague belief in their star. So your first lesson is that it can only flourish if you are motivated to reach a goal or destination. The particular goal is less important than having one, and knowing the steps necessary to get closer to it. (Location 3425)
Your second lesson – really quite obvious in retrospect – is that self-belief can grow with little experiences of success, and with experimentation, such as when I went to America. There may be many routes to reaching one’s goal – take one of them. (Location 3433)
My self-doubt was very useful, and I should have listened to it earlier. It changed the route to my destination, and if I had been less pig-headed it might usefully have changed the goal itself. (Location 3441)
Your fourth lesson is to keep hoping, scheming and dreaming, while learning everything you can about your niche. (Location 3448)
My most important feedback came with unexpected success in exams at the ages of ten, seventeen and twenty. Having been admitted to Oxford University and then having received a top degree, I persuaded myself that I was some kind of deep thinker, able to look below the surface – initially of my subject, history, and later of business and ideas – and see the few things which were significant, and the vast majority which were not. Increasingly, throughout my life, I have seen my gift as reducing things to their essence and simplifying them. (Location 3463)
Note: Essence
It is strange how expectations determine performance. Because I expected to make money in the long run, I regarded my many setbacks as aberrations and valuable feedback, not as discouragements. (Location 3469)
All of us receive some praise and positive feedback from parents, teachers and playmates from the earliest stages of our lives. Your second lesson is that you should take the encouragement seriously. Let it expand your expectations of yourself: store the praise and our emotional response to it carefully in your memory bank; revisit it and augment it, adding interest to it like money in a bank. Genuine praise opens your heart and mind, and can widen, deepen and ‘warm up’ the part of your unconscious mind that deals with expectations. (Location 3471)
Your third lesson is that whether you have a new venture or are setting personal targets, it’s a good idea to reach as high as you can just-plausibly believe. There are no guarantees, but it is surprising how often lofty expectations come to pass. Because they are more inspiring, and require more original and radical action, grand expectations can be easier to reach than modest ones. In the words of the Eagles, ‘take it to the limit one more time’. (Location 3487)
The fourth lesson is that you should be specific in your expectations of other people, whether they are friends, partners, co-workers or people working for you. And you should be clear with yourself too – what is the utmost you can aspire to and deliver? (Location 3498)
Once you have this serious intent, your chance of unreasonable success will rocket. But be advised: unless you make your high success the most vital thing in your life, the thing you think about most and most intensely, it will elude you. The players in this book either had supportive spouses, or spouses dedicated to their own success, or else difficult relationships or no significant other. (Location 3502)
I repeat: serious intent means a permanent obsession with what you can do for the world. You should think about it every day. If you do, your unconscious mind will never stop thinking about it, whatever you are doing and even when you sleep. Every player thought about their success continually. So must you. (Location 3506)
What makes a transforming experience? • It must make you a different person from who you were before the experience. • It must give you new, rare and profound knowledge which is used in your future career • It must give you an order of magnitude more authority, confidence, effectiveness and value to other people. (Location 3540)
Self-defined unique expertise – become the expert in a narrow subject which you define. (Location 3554)
Work as an apprentice for an expert in your target field. (Location 3556)
The last lesson is that most successful people are not content to rest on their laurels. When you reach your destination, it may be time to ask yourself these kinds of questions, which could lead on to yet another adventure. (Location 3572)
What could you become uniquely qualified to invent, perhaps as a result of your transforming experiences? What do your personality, experience, practical skills, intellect, rare knowledge, curiosity, contacts, opportunities, values, ambition, imagination, creativity, and all your other personal characteristics, make you fit to pioneer? (Location 3605)
What do you believe in which makes you unusual or different? Could you evolve a unique mission out of what you love or dislike? (Location 3611)
The third lesson is that opportunity often comes in a disguised way. Keep your fixed objective in mind and wait for events to give you the break you need. Bismarck said, ‘Man cannot create the current of events. He can only float with it and steer.’ Desire deeply. Wait. Pounce. It may take you years or even decades. But you must be ready when the call comes. (Location 3613)
The opportunity to make my own trail came when I was the ‘K’ in LEK. We didn’t find our own trail immediately – indeed we didn’t see the need for it. We believed in the Bain way, and saw LEK as a gentler, more British–European variant of our old firm. But pale imitations never work. (Location 3628)
We succeeded when we created our own trail by inventing our own concepts and ways of raising profits. (Location 3633)
The first lesson is to find a cause which is original or unpopular. (Location 3635)
Early in my career as a strategy consultant, I decided to trademark my presentations by making them flamboyant. Though I say so myself, I became an exciting speaker. This didn’t work wholly to my advantage at BCG – they thought I was being too original and sometimes off-message – but it did at Bain and LEK. The second lesson is: you must be different. In LEK, and all my later business interests, I’ve noticed that we succeeded when the following conditions applied, and we failed when they didn’t: • When we were number one in our market or niche, and therefore had lower costs. • When we glommed onto the most profitable customers. • When we went for simplicity – when our products were easier to use, more useful, or a joy to use. The third lesson is that in business it is not enough to be different: you must be profitably different. (Location 3636)
Summary • Be original. • Be different. • Be profitably different. (Location 3646)
The third lesson is to ask yourselves similar questions to decide if you are ready: • Do you understand the market niche backwards? • Can you see a gap in the market, and what is it? • Is there a large enough market in the gap? • Have you worked for one or more major competitors at a senior level? • Can you see something your rivals can’t? • Does it excite you? • Can the new vehicle become cash-positive and profitable quickly, and do you have enough capital to reach break-even (bearing in mind this nearly always takes longer than expected)? • You should only launch your new vehicle when you are sure you are ready. (Location 3680)
Every group of founders I’ve known has similar issues and rows. They happen because founders feel passionately about their business, and after years of working for other people, they want to have it their own way. That is often not possible if the founders don’t see eye to eye. (Location 3693)
The fourth lesson is that it is better to have one driver of the vehicle, the dominant person chosen by the founders to lead it. (Location 3697)
To be honest, however, in hindsight I made a mistake in leaving LEK when I did. Vehicles are precious. I had lost mine. (Location 3700)
The fifth lesson is that if you are super-confident that your proposition is best for the vehicle, you should fight tenaciously for it, and grasp the nettle of leadership that I was too diffident to seize. If the vehicle is roadworthy and has great future potential, do not sell or surrender it too readily. I think this applies beyond business, to other organisations, crusades or social movements. It is why they are always fragmenting, often in a positive way. Divergence is the organising principle of evolution and life generally. (Location 3703)
At the time I didn’t realise how important it was for me to have a personal vehicle that could multiply my own powers. It took me a long time to find a new personal vehicle because I didn’t realise how necessary it was. (Location 3707)
The sixth lesson is that disagreements among founders are endemic and should not come as a surprise, an affront, or a cause to be stressed and break friendships. Founders are powerful and independent personalities. If disagreements are profound, they should happily and amicably go their own ways. (Location 3709)
The seventh lesson is that if you give up your personal vehicle, immediately start searching for the next one – you owe that to yourself and the world. (Location 3712)
Summary • Ride a pool vehicle – some trend in your environment – that you can adapt or oppose to gain momentum. • Find a personal vehicle that you alone can ride. • Ensure that you are ready to drive the vehicle to success. • Even if there are several founders, only one person can drive the vehicle. Choose wisely, and if it doesn’t work out, change the driver. • Expect disagreements and don’t be fazed by them. • Don’t surrender or sell your vehicle too early or easily. • When you exit your vehicle, acquire another. • A new vehicle may emerge by applying your expertise to a new area that is similar in some way to your old field, yet distinctly different from it in other ways. (Location 3720)
Until then, I had never really failed. I didn’t expect it and I felt I didn’t deserve it. One of my bosses said that I was like a volcano, working away constructively, but then exploding when least expected. He also said I made my bosses nervous because they never knew what I would say at client meetings. (Location 3738)
The first lesson is that failure can and often should be reframed – seen in a new light. Without diminishing the feedback you’ve received, which may cause you to change tack, reframing can boost your self-esteem by telling you that failure can be honourable. (Location 3742)
I was never made to be a loyal, obedient employee. Even a rather forgiving and free-wheeling outfit such as BCG had its hierarchy and its limits. The way to get ahead in any organisation is to please your bosses, not terrorise them or make them anxious. Be predictable, deliver exactly what they want (not what you think they should want), and when you can’t agree with them, keep your mouth shut. I am reminded of the boss who said, ‘I don’t want yes-men around me – I want them to speak their mind, even if it costs them their job.’ If I wanted to stay in strategy consulting, I had to behave differently. (Location 3744)
The second lesson is that after any failure you can choose to interpret it negatively, positively or neutrally; and you can decide either to change your actions and perhaps even part of your personality, or to change the context in which you deploy them. (Location 3750)
The third lesson is how easily one can sometimes adopt a different attitude and have it become second nature. If the motivation is great enough, you may be far more malleable than you might think. (Location 3767)
The fourth lesson is to keep happily busy after a setback or change of life, to resist drifting and dabbling, and to find one or two absorbing interests. (Location 3774)
The final lesson is that to attain unreasonable success you must thrive on failure. Although setbacks will come, with the right mindset you can bounce back bigger and better. If you take intelligent risks, the universe will knock you down, but will also raise you up stronger than ever. (Location 3779)
Summary • Reframe failure in a new, more positive light. • You can then change your behaviour or change the environment in which you act. • Attitudes can be altered by wilfully changing your actions in a new context. • Keep busy after a setback. • Relishing failure leads to success. (Location 3781)
The first lesson is to build up expertise in a fast-growing but small, narrow area of expertise, where few people currently operate. Without deeply understanding a specialised and relatively unknown area, your intuition is unlikely to propel you forward decisively. (Location 3792)
The third lesson is to increase your creativity and the power of your unconscious mind. Your unconscious mind is like a huge filing cabinet of everything you have learned in your life – everything! – with the ability to cross-reference anything from any file to another. It holds trillions of pieces of data which may be related to each other, thus generating an uncountable number of possible permutations, any one of which may be vital to your success. To change the metaphor, your unconscious mind is also like a bottomless well, from which, if you send the bucket down skilfully, you can dredge up endless buckets of gold. So, feed your unconscious mind every day, and learn how to tap it every day. I cannot over-emphasise how important this is, to help you generate unreasonable success. (Location 3801)
The final lesson is that, if you can afford it and can stomach the risk, you can benefit from guessing outcomes and tracking how often you are right. (Location 3812)
Summary • Build expertise in a small niche that is growing fast. • Tap your unconscious mind daily. • Life is a book of bets. Make astute bets at long odds. (Location 3814)
Personality reinvention is the ultimate in reality distortion – changing yourself is both easier and more likely to change your prospects than changing the world around you. (Location 3828)
My plan was that we should only work on the few vital issues, get to grips with them in a deep way, and have plenty of time for leisure and team-building. I believe we can always do this, if we have the right people on our side, and want a good time and high achievement. Life is generally not like this but making it so is the best way to distort reality. (Location 3835)
The second lesson is that it is not always necessary to work in the salt-mines to get ahead. Reality is often unpleasant, but you can distort and defeat the grim work ethic. (Location 3838)
Summary • Reality is there to be challenged and distorted. • Jump-start progress by making yourself better and more useful. • Work can be hugely enjoyed while changing the world (Location 3845)
‘God plays dice with the universe. But they’re loaded dice. And the main objective is to find out by what rules they were loaded and how we can use them for our own ends.’ —JOSEPH FORD (Location 3851)
We can boil down what we have learned into two points. 1. It’s all about positioning yourself for success, not improving your performance The players we’ve met had unreasonable success because they ‘visited’ the nine landmarks, not, in most cases, because their performance was outstanding in other respects – indeed, in many cases, it wasn’t outstanding at all. This is very good news. If you can get the positioning right, your chances of high success rocket. You could spend enormous energy trying to become better at what you do – and still fail anyway. It takes much less effort to get your positioning right, and the results will be much more impressive. 2. It’s not all about your abilities – it’s about having the right attitude and success strategies The nine landmarks can be reduced to two mega-attributes – attitude and strategies. Attitude is my shorthand for the following qualities: self-belief, Olympian expectations, thriving on setbacks and distorting reality. These are not conventional ways of thinking and acting. Few people see the world through this lens and behave in the way that our players did. What these four attitude-based landmarks have in common, however, is that they greatly increase the chances of success. Learning to see the world in these terms and acting this way is initially not easy – it comes naturally to a few people but not to most of us. Yet, if you truly want to win, it is far from impossible to learn these traits and make them habits. (Location 3862)
The world works this way – it responds to people who possess huge self-belief geared towards an important goal. (Location 3878)
A transforming experience will make you hugely more effective because you will learn something rare and valuable. (Location 3885)
Your personal vehicle must leverage your time and abilities to a far, far greater degree than they are leveraged now. (Location 3888)
Most vital of all – and based on all the other strategies and attitudes – is one breakthrough achievement where you invent something which profoundly changes the world, or your part of it. (Location 3891)
The lack of fairness in the game of success is a cause for rejoicing rather than regret. If you understand how the odds are rigged, and play intelligently, cheerfully and often, who knows how high and wild you may win? (Location 3916)
Bill Bain The Lords of Strategy by Walter Kiechel (Location 3924)
My Early Life by Winston Churchill. Fascinating and beautifully written. (Location 3940)