I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers: The Story of Success“
This book really got me thinking about success and the way that it sort of comes about. I’ve always known that to be truly successful you needed to outwork or outsmart your opponent from my days of competitive sports.
However, I didn’t realize how this can apply to business life as well. It isn’t just about how hard you work, but there are some other factors that come into play when dealing with the success of one individual over another.
This sounds like some scary thing that only a few people can have success with, but that’s not the case. It’s a series of events that allow for some people to achieve massive success and others to not experience the success that they may have deserved.
Achievement is talent plus preparation.
The thing that truly distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she is willing to work and does the work that is necessary. That’s it. The thing about this is that the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. The people at the top work much, much harder.
“Researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”
Some great quotes from the book:
“Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”
“That three things-autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward-are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our work fulfills us.”
“if you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires.”
“We normally think of the expressions on our face as the reflection of an inner state. I feel happy, so I smile. I feel sad, so I frown. Emotion goes inside out. Emotional contagion, though, suggests that the opposite is also true. If I can make you smile, I can make you happy. If I can make you frown, I can make you sad. Emotion, in this sense, goes outside in.”
What I’ve taken away from the book Outliers
This book really got me thinking about how the decisions I have made through the opportunities that I have had throughout my life, have led me to who I am today. Therefore, if I want more successes, I need to be able to identify certain opportunities when they happen and then choose how I react to these situations.
There are times in each of our lives that we have things happen to us. Relationships fail, jobs are lost, and in some cases, people die. This is all part of life and it is the way that we react to these situations that truly determines where we are going to go with our life. It’s the decisions that we make that ultimately affect our outcome in life.
The cool thing about this is that if you want to become better, you can. You just need to be willing to put the time in (10,000 hours) in order to become better. Work harder than everyone else and take advantage of YOUR opportunities while you have them. There really is no better time than now to start.
Also, if you want to pick up a copy of Outliers, click the image of it below and you’ll get a great deal on it