I have a crazy idea: success
isn’t just about hard work.
We hear about hard work all the time—it’s what Olympic champions
talk about when they get to the top of the podium and it’s what the media
credits as the sole force behind billionaire entrepreneurs.
But there has to be something else in the equation of obtaining unimaginable
success. What other traits tipped the odds in favor of the world’s most
successful people?
What helped
propel their careers before they had track records?
For the past
three years I’ve been fortunate enough to research and interview some of the
world’s most successful people to find the answers to these very questions.
Below are just a few of the traits I’ve noticed that have stood out in the
personalities of people who have truly made it big:
1.
Chase the School Bus
Growing up,
Sugar Ray Leonard would wake up, get dressed for school, and walk with his
siblings to the bus stop. As the yellow bus would pull to the curb, his friends
and siblings would step up into the school bus, but young Sugar Ray Leonard,
who is now a six-time world champion boxer, would refuse to get on. As the bus
drove away, Leonard tightened up his sneakers and ran behind the bus all the
way to school.
“The other
kids thought I was crazy,” Leonard said, “because I would run in the rain,
snow—it didn’t matter. I did it because I didn’t just want to be better than
the next guy, I wanted to be better than all the guys.”
My generation
is used to instant gratification. But Sugar Ray Leonard demonstrated the
necessity to be able to buckle down for the long haul and accept that you won’t
see any return on investment for years. You have to be able to stay
passionately committed even when you can’t see the light at the end of the
tunnel. And remember, Sugar Ray Leonard, now one of the greatest boxers in history,
was running behind that yellow school bus at a time when others thought he
wasn’t “boxing material.”
Sugar Ray
Leonard kept at it, to the point that others thought was irrational. Turns out
irrational commitment leads to irrational success.
Does what you’re
working on excite you so much that it inspires an irrational sense of
commitment? Are you willing to chase the school bus for years—before seeing any
return? If so, keep running. If not, maybe it’s time to think bigger.
2.
Stray From the Pack
In his early twenties, Tim Ferriss, bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek,
was running an online sports nutrition company and realized that he would be
risking his businesses’ survival if he followed the industry standard of
accepting payment up to twelve months after the product was shipped.
“Everyone
followed those rules,” Ferriss revealed to me. “I realized I was inviting
disaster and financial ruins if I risked my cash flow that way by following the
standard protocol, so I insisted on prepayment. Nobody had ever done
prepayment. I think that is one of the reasons why my sports nutrition company
succeeded where a lot of other startups of that type failed.”
Straying from
the norm isn’t easy when you’ve spent your whole life following rules laid out
for you at school and at home. It takes a major cognitive shift to understand
that the way things are, and have been, can be challenged.
Ask yourself
what rules in your industry you accept as fact. Why do you follow them? If the
excuse is “that’s the way it’s always been,” it’s time to consider pulling a
Tim Ferriss.
3.
Create Corkboards
Peter Guber,
former CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, was in his mid-twenties as a new
hire at Columbia Pictures when he realized that the way the studio heads were
selecting directors was archaic—based on esoteric chatter instead of real data.
Guber personally took on the task of solving this industry-old problem.
He went out
and got a corkboard the size of his office wall and created a matrix: all the
directors in Hollywood listed down the side and all the relevant information
sprawled across the top—think of it as a primitive Wikipedia for the
entertainment industry.
Word spread
around town about the young guy who had this crowd-sourced wealth of data on
every director in Hollywood mounted on his wall. In addition to adding value
and helping others do their jobs more effectively, the corkboard allowed people
to take notice of Guber’s ingenuity.
“It became a
tool that allowed people to recognize that I was willing to do things differently.
It shined the light on me and it and gave me more currency to make more daring
choices,” Guber said. He explained that, “You are in the ‘problem solving’
business—always. That’s the way it works.” This was a key trait that allowed
Guber to go from being a new hire at Columbia pictures to the studio chief—in
just three years.
Although HR
reps fail to mention it on the first day on the job, it seems that taking
risks, solving other people’s problems, and creating value—even in a formal
corporate environment—could have huge payoffs for your career.
Are there any
problems, even outside your job description, that you could solve? What
opportunities can you create to add value to both help people as well as
supercharge your career?
4.
Get on "Qi Time"
Growing up in
a village outside of Shanghai with no running water or electricity, Qi Lu
(pronounced: chee loo) had no idea that one day he would have a corner office
at one of the world’s biggest technology companies. As the President of Online
Services at Microsoft, Lu has made a drastic journey to the top thanks to what
his colleagues call “Qi Time.”
“During
college, the amount of time I spent sleeping really started to bother me,” Lu
explained to me. “There are so many books I can read and so many things to learn.
It feels like, for humans, 20% of our time is wasted [during sleep] in the
sense that you’re not putting that time towards a purpose that you care about.”
Although he
admits it wasn’t easy, Lu has engineered his body to function on four hours of
sleep a night thanks to an unusual regimen that ranges from timed cold showers
to daily three-mile runs.
Driven by an
unusual hunger to do more, Lu’s sleeping schedule has added an extra day’s
worth of work time per week, which aggregates to nearly two months of
productivity latched on to every calendar year. And he did it while still in
college.
Ask yourself
how badly do you want to do more. And what are you willing to give up for it?
5.
Play the People Game
Shortly after
graduating high school, Steven Spielberg began reducing the time he spent at
college and increasing the time he spent hanging within the Hollywood inner
circle. “[Spielberg] was going off to Sonny and Cher’s place all the time,”
said Don Shull, Spielberg’s childhood friend. In a personal letter to Shull,
Spielberg revealed that he would directly approach directors and Hollywood
stars on the studio lot and ask them to lunch. And keep in mind—Spielberg was
only nineteen years old at the time.
“Spielberg
arranged his class schedule so that he could spend three days a week at
Universal, watching filmmakers at work and trying to make useful contacts,”
writes Joseph McBride in his detailed biography on Spielberg’s career. “He
frequently slept overnight in an office at the studio where he kept two suits
so he could emerge onto the bustling lot each morning looking as if he hadn’t
slept in an office.”
“Steve knew at
that early age that filmmaking is not just filming—it’s a people game. And he
played it well,” said producer William Link.
While he
definitely had talent on his side, so did handfuls of other aspiring directors.
What helped Spielberg become the youngest director signed to a long-term studio
deal was his focus on building relationships. This has nothing to do with
“networking”; this has to do with making friends and focusing on people.
What little
changes can you make in your life, starting today, to put a greater focus on
people? What investments can you make, in both time and money, to hone the way
you play the people game?
Wrapping
up
Success can
come in different fields, but the principles behind it are one. From Sugar Ray
Leonard chasing the school bus to Peter Guber’s corkboard, these stories show
the unique personality traits that tipped the scales in favor of the world’s
most successful people.
Success—while
defined by everyone on their own terms—is something that truly manifests itself
once you make that mind-set shift and tell yourself it’s go time. Are you ready
to make that shift?
Author: Alex Banayan is an associate at San Francisco-based venture
capital firm Alsop Louie Partners and the author of a highly anticipated
business book being released by Crown Publishers (Random House, Inc.). For
more, sign-up for Alex Banayan’s newsletter here.
