The 5 Traits of Wildly Successful People

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.

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How to Differentiate Great Leaders from Good Leaders

Recently, I attended a memorial service for Dennis Dammerman, a retired GE executive and one of the very first people I interviewed with at GE 30 years ago. He was a mentor and friend to me and a great leader for GE.

Dennis was proof of the power of GE’s meritocracy. He started at the bottom and worked his way to the top, ultimately becoming CFO and a vice chairman. He was tough-minded but fair; a great coach. He had excellent judgment and displayed calmness during crisis. He was loyal, and he loved his work. Simply put, he was representative of the best from GE.

GE is a company that takes great pride in developing leaders, like Dennis; and it is something I’m asked about often. People want to not only know about our philosophy for cultivating the next generation of leaders but also sometimes the more difficult question of how we differentiate among senior executives. How do you evaluate the talent at the very top of GE, or any other organization?

I always ask five questions about our top leaders:

1) Is the leader self-aware?

Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. We can all improve, and we should embrace cultures of continuous learning. But top leaders cannot allow weak spots to be blind spots. We all need an accurate perspective of what we do well and where we need work. You can’t lead credibly without it.

2) Is the leader committed to the company/organization; do they drive change?

Senior leadership positions are tough jobs and we live in hyper-competitive times. Success requires real effort, and at the senior levels of a company like GE the ability to drive change distinguishes you. It’s not easy and you have to be stubborn; you have to be resilient. After all, every idea begins with a constituency of one. There’s probably one or two times a year that I turn to our very top leaders and say, “we’re going to do it my way.” Do that too often and good people will leave. But if you never do it, nothing ever happens. Trust your instinct (and make sure you have the right instincts).

3) Is the leader a "giver or a taker?"

Just as the best leaders need to go with their gut, they must also be responsive to those around them. They realize that open, respectful, transparent conflict is a hallmark of great companies. Top leaders must also give back to the culture to make it meaningful and lasting. Build a WE not a ME organization. You have to inspire people. An idea or initiative may start with that constituency of one, but eventually you need buy-in from a company of many (about 300,000, in fact, at GE).

4) Is the leader a critical thinker?

It is easy to follow the crowd and allow the status quo. It is also the way companies and organizations get in trouble. The very best leaders avoid “group think.” Instead, they look at challenges through different lenses and from different perspectives. They understand context and have a strategic sense of how to put things where they fit both within the organization and in the world. As a matter of imperative, the top leaders know how to simplify. This might be the most important leadership trait of our time. The very best leaders cut through the complexity. Every process drives speed and accountability. They get results.

5) Lastly, does the leader have a dream for themselves and the company?

Good leaders have passion. They have a vision. They think and dream big.

At GE, we view leadership development as integral to our culture and our future. We try to create global leaders, people who can navigate the complexity of our times with clarity, courage and integrity. I believe we have a pretty good track record. Dennis Dammerman was proof of that. But I also know we don’t have all the answers.

What attributes do you look for in a top leader?

Jeff Immelt

Chairman and CEO at GE

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