Unreasonable Success and How to Achieve It
Richard Koch
Summary
Pretty self explanatory title. Author does a great job looking at successful people from history and charting their path.
Rating: 4/5
Notes
The way you position yourself for success is more important than talent or competence
Landmark 1: self-belief
Landmark 2: olympian expectations
- Others positive expectations of us can make us perform well
- Those who inherit the earth will be those who expect to
- If you want unreasonable success, you must have unreasonable expectations
Landmark 3: Transforming experiences
- You can acquire ideas and transformative experiences and experiment while being employed by someone else
Landmark 4: One breakthrough achievement
- Man cannot create the current of events. He can only float with it and steer - Otto von Bismarck
- Your objective must be new, revolutionary, imaginative and almost laughably ambitious
Landmark 5: Make your own trail
- You need your own philosophy and deeply grounded beliefs, unique and authentic convictions before the world will take note of you
Landmark 6: Find and drive your personal vehicle
- Pool vehicles: something in your environment that can help you as a launch pad
- Personal vehicle: create something which increases your impact on the world
- Adopt a pool vehicle then find your personal vehicle and drive it to success
Landmark 7: Thrive on setbacks
- Success means going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm - Churchill
- Setbacks validates unconventional views and contributes to a sense of greatness
- They happen more frequently to people who take large risks. High downside but high upside
- If you survive defeats, you can achieve great success
- Being anti-fragile: means benefitting from shocks, setbacks, risks and uncertainty
- Strong anti-conventional opinions and ability to confront adversity w/ a curiosity about themselves and the world
- Take big risks: after a disaster, keep going, but switch gears and never give up hope
Landmark 8: Acquire unique intuition
- Turn your hidden knowledge into incredibly valuable knowledge
- Intuition must be important, unproven, original, imaginative, simple, contradict experts, based on deep knowledge and you must be at the centre of it
Landmark 9: distort reality
- The people who are crazy enough to change the world are the ones who do
- Do what others think is impossible. Defeat the conventional view of what is realistic and unrealistic. Sharpen your willpower
- Reality distortion becomes less impossible the more you practice it and demonstrate your powers of will and prediction
- Faith can over power facts. It is not the weak or powerful who inherit the earth but the unreasonable believers
Reach as high as you can just plausibly achieve
Serious intent means a permanent obsession with what you can do for the world
Could you invent a new concept or valuable theory?
Find a personal vehicle that you alone can ride
Increase your creativity and the power of your unconscious mind
Life is a book of bets. Make astute bets at long odds.
It’s about positioning yourself for success, not improving your performance
It’s not about ability, it’s about the right attitude and success strategies
***
Buy the book here
Free E-book download here
Make Something Wonderful
Steve Jobs
Summary
The life of Steve Jobs in his own words
Rating: 5/5
Notes
Make something wonderful and put it out there
‘You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear’
When you’re a stranger in a place, you notice thing you don’t otherwise (Jobs after India trip)
Whenever you start with nothing, always shoot for the moon. You have nothing to lose.
You never achieve what you want without falling on your face a few times
Never be afraid to fail. You never achieve what you want without falling flat on your face a few times
We are never taught to listen to our intuitions, to develop and nurture them. But if you do pay attention to these subtle insights, you can make them come true
Creativity equals connecting previously unrelated experiences and insights others don’t see
Believe that some of what you follow with your heart will come back and make your life richer. And it will. And you will gain even firmer trust on your instincts and intuitions
Make your avocation your vocation. Make what you love your work.
The journey is the reward. The reward isn’t in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it’s in crossing the rainbow
To find A+ talent, if experienced, look at their track record and results
The world we know is a human creation and we can push it forward
The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do (read whole ad ‘here’s to the crazy ones)
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit - Aristotle
Hire people better than you are
You can’t plan to meet the people who will change your life
It’s impossible to connect the dots looking forward, but they make sense looking backwards so you have to trust the dots will somehow connect in your future
Everything around you that you call life was made up by people no smarter than you
***
Buy the book here
Free E-book download here
