Can We Map Success?

Unreasonable Success and How To Achieve It: Successful people typically don’t plan their success. Instead, they develop a unique philosophy or attitude that works for them. They stumble across strategies that are shortcuts to success and latch onto them. Events hand them opportunities they could not have anticipated. Often their peers with equal or greater talent fail while they succeed. It is too easy to attribute success to inherent, unstoppable genius.

Bestselling author and serial entrepreneur Richard Koch chart a map of success, identifying the nine key attitudes and strategies can propel anyone to new heights of accomplishment:

Richard Koch 9 Landmarks of Successful People

1. Self-belief 
2. Olympian expectations
3. transforming experiences
4. One breakthrough achievement 
5. Make your own trail
6. Find and drive your personal vehicle
7. Thrive on setbacks
8. Acquire unique intuition
9. Distort reality

 

The “Players”

Jeff Bezos, Bill Bain, Otto Von Bismarck, Winston Churchill, Marie Curie, Leonardo Da Vinci, Walt Disney, Bob Dylan, Albert Einstein, Viktor Frankl, Bruce Henderson, Steve Jobs, John Maynard Keynes, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Madonna, Nelson Mandela, J.K. Rowling, Helena Rubinstein, Paul of Tarsus, Margaret Thatcher

Any individual’s life contains countless unique particularities. Everyone’s story is different. But underneath the blur of local circumstances and personal idiosyncrasies, is there a common map that successful people followed which shows the way forward? It took me a long time to find it, but I think it exists.

 

• Successful people typically don’t plan their success. Instead, they develop a unique philosophy or attitude that works for them. They stumble across strategies that are short-cuts to success and latch onto them. Events hand them opportunities they could not have anticipated. Often their peers with equal or greater talent fail while they succeed. It is too easy to attribute success to inherent, unstoppable genius. Usually, this is an illusion; sometimes, a travesty of the truth.
• Their extraordinary success is not entirely ‘deserved’ in a conventional sense; they win by a fortuitous combination of experiences, personal characteristics, and judgment 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.
• 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. Improving our performance is far less likely to produce the results we want than having the appropriate attitudes and strategies.
• If we don’t have strong self-belief, it’s almost impossible to become unreasonably successful. But by tracing how self-belief developed for our players, we can work out how to acquire it.
• Another landmark is transforming experiences. Our players typically had one or two such experiences, and without them would not have achieved success and notoriety. If you know this and have not had such an experience, it becomes important to engineer one. 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.

 

Landmark 1: Self-belief 

Of course, I am an egotist. What do you get if you aren’t? —WINSTON CHURCHILL 

Magic is believing in yourself. If you can do that, you can make anything happen. 

—JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE 

 What is self-belief? 

• 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.
• 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. 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.
• 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. 

 

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). 
• Search for transforming experiences 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. 
• Attract well-deserved praise 
• Positive feedback of some kind is nearly always essential for humans to thrive. If you doubt this, look at the way famous people from Churchill to Einstein remembered the few teachers who praised them. We are all far more brittle and dependent on approval than we realize or admit. Self-belief is hard if you get little applause. Today children get too much and adults too little. 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. 
• Plaudits feed self-belief, which itself leads 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. For generations educators and parents have lavished praise on children indiscriminately, believing it would raise self-esteem and motivation. 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 becomes a trap.
• Narrow your focus until your work is unique 
• A third key to unlocking self-belief is to realize that it is generated within narrow corridors. As with Walt Disney or Margaret Thatcher, as with everyone who achieves marked success, they come to believe either that they can do specific things better than their rivals, or that they can do things that nobody else has thought of doing. 
• For unusual success, wide experimentation is followed sooner or later by extreme focus, and then by blazing a wholly original trail. 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. 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 be- come belief in the self. 

 

The value of self-doubt 

• Self-doubt does not preclude self-belief; nor the other way round. Whereas some characters in this book do not appear to have suffered – or benefitted –from self-doubt, many others did. 
• Self-doubt voices the question, ‘Am I really on the right road to my destination? Will I find my way?’ Self-doubt is typically constructive.

 

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, a 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. 
• The early belief in one’s star can take someone a long way. Yet our case studies also show that it is never too late to develop robust self-belief. Self-belief must ultimately become specific to the field in which you will ultimately triumph. Belief in your destiny will fizzle and fade without a clear idea of the stage on which your success will be played out. Nobody reaches a target without defining it and believing – sometimes naively and to almost universal ridicule – that it is attainable. 
• Self-doubt is usually an asset – it does not cancel out self-belief, but rather purifies and distills it. Self-doubt and self-belief comprise a rhythm of yin and yang, a dialectic where self-doubt crystallizes, reinforces, refines, or completely changes the doubter’s mission, and paradoxically leads to high confidence that it can be achieved. Self-doubt is only damaging if it is repressed or permanently swamps the mind. 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. 
• 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. The players in this book were, in this respect above all, quite different.

 

Landmark 2: Olympian Expectations 

High standards are contagious. Bring a new person onto a high standards team, and they’ll quickly adapt. The opposite is also true. —JEFF BEZOS 

• The second common factor amongst our players is that they all had sky-high expectations of themselves and the people they chose to work with. Since we’ve just dealt with self-belief, you may be wondering how Olympian expectations are different. 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. 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. 

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 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 de- manding 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 the national decline. 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. The higher we set our expectations, the more likely we are to reach the top. There are limits, of course – we cannot become Napoleon or Jesus by imagining that we are. There is a fine balance between optimism and delusion. But if some students can gain thirty points of IQ through the operation of a teacher’s expectations, we can make quite unexpected progress by lifting our own expectations a notch. And once this notch has been reached, we can continue this ‘uplifting’ process. One notch at a time, followed by success, can lead us on to another notch, and then another … This is what seems to have happened to our players. Not only were they able to ratchet up their expectations of themselves, but they also became more powerful by ratcheting up the expectations of their followers: expectations of what both they, and their leader, could do. The cases of Lenin, Winston Churchill, and Steve Jobs show that there is a very fine line between collective delusion and collective achievement through ‘unrealistically’ high expectations, and we could say the same about many other charismatic but sociopathic leaders, such as Adolf Hitler and Mao Zedong, who chose to act beyond the constraints and restrictions of civilized behavior.
  • My emphasis on great leaps forward goes against the grain of current educational psychology, where the prevailing view is that the surest way to achievement is through a series of ‘baby steps’ – a small conquest is followed by greater confidence and another small step, and so all the way up. This works well enough, especially for people who initially lack confidence. Yet a great truth can be compatible with its opposite. We are looking at people of unreasonable attainment, who start with the vision of their personal greatness and then work backward to fill in the necessary intermediate steps. Because of their unusual self-confidence and aspiration to greatness, the higher the standards they set, the greater the possible achievement. This does not work for everyone; but conversely, I found no examples of unreasonable success which did not involve great leaps forward based on quite outsized expectations. Most likely these step functions in growth only occur due to years of toiling away at the small skills necessary 
  • If you can visualize yourself as a great achiever, this does not guarantee great success – far from it – but it makes it hugely more likely. 

Summary and conclusion 

• • 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 realized. 

• 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. 

 

Landmark 3: Transforming Experiences 

The goal is … the transformation of your mind and character … choose places of work and positions that offer the greatest possibilities for learning. —ROBERT GREENE, Mastery (2012) 

• 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 might never have heard of them. There are profound and hopeful implications for how to drive forward your own career.

 

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. 
• 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. The players in this book did not consciously engineer their own transforming experiences. You are more fortunate. By learning from their experiences, you can plot a transforming experience that may catapult you to unreasonable success.

 

Three patterns of transforming experiences in business 

• 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 personalization – your personalization – of a validated prototype. The new venture can be relatively low-risk, yet still high-return, both financially and, more important, psychically. 
  • 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 use that special knowledge in a different way, just as Bezos did. Then reach for the stars.

Summary and conclusion 

• All our players had a personal transformation – an event that 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 
• The personal transformations explored in this chapter were all unique.
• In business, personal transformation is more typically associated with working for or creating a most unusual company. With very few exceptions, our players did not know they were heading for transformation, nor consciously choose their transforming experiences.

 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

 

Landmark 4: One Breakthrough Achievement 

Churchill led Britain into total war without much thought for the morrow: he said he had ‘only one single purpose – the destruction of Hitler – and that his life was much simplified thereby’. —ROBERT TOMBS 

 What is a breakthrough achievement? 

• It’s one that changes the world, for good or ill. It is the difference the players made in their life – what important things they made happen which wouldn’t have happened without them. 

There are four cardinal characteristics of a breakthrough achievement: 

• No one has done it before. 
• It encapsulates why each player left a permanent mark on the world. 
• Most of the players’ breakthrough achievements were forms of the invention. 
• The achievements were highly personal and part and parcel of the individual’s character and idiosyncrasies. Perhaps their greatest achievement was to express themselves in a way that could not be ignored. 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.

Summary and conclusion 

• 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. Your breakthrough achievement awaits. 

But how do you find it? 

• 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. Yet the how is also vital. The first three chapters described three ‘hows’, and the next five will outline the other hows’. With the end of this chapter, we have reached the heart and high ground of the book, and we can represent the structure of unreasonable success in this chart. 

Desire deeply. Wait. Pounce.

 

Landmark 5: Make Your Own Trail 

You don’t want to be the best at what you do; you want to be the only one. —JERRY GARCIA 

• 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. 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.

Summary and conclusion 

• Mandela and the other players testify to our themes so far – self-belief, incredibly high expectations, transforming experiences, a single transforming achievement, and a solitary, imaginative and uncompromising trail. 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. 
• Our players were or are larger than life. All were profoundly original. Most were highly eccentric. 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. 

 Make your own trail 

• High ambition is often defined early or at the start of a career 
• Devise and follow own trail 
• The increasing focus over time 
• Develop unique philosophy

 

Landmark 6: Find and Drive Your Personal Vehicle 

At last, I had the 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 

• For unreasonable success, we need our personal vehicle. All our players had a vehicle that multiplied their impact hundreds or thousands of times. There are two types of vehicles that can give unreasonable success. The first type is useful; the second is indispensable. 

Type 1: Pool vehicles 

• The first type of vehicle is something that 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 launchpad?

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. Personal vehicles for business leaders 

For the business players, all three success factors were important.

Summary and conclusion 

• 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 that 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. None of our players did so. What is to be your vehicle?
• Find and drive your personal vehicle 
  • Find your ‘horse to ride’ 
  • Nothing big can happen without one or more great vehicles 
  • The vehicle may be a movement, a network, an organization, or a new positioning that strikes a chord 
  • Kick-off by adopting or opposing 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 loss of enthusiasm. —WINSTON CHURCHILL 

Politicians rise by toils and struggles. They expect to fall; they hope to rise again. —WINSTON CHURCHILL 

The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates! 

—NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB 

 It is not enough to be resilient and get over setbacks; to be unreasonably successful you must learn to positively thrive on them. This is an art that all the players perfected. 

 

Conclusion 

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. Thrive on setbacks. It is a way of thinking, a philosophy of life, and a self conceit essential for unreasonable success.

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 antifragile

 

Landmark 8: Acquire Unique Intuition 

A hunch can be trusted if it can be explained … it is information you don’t know you possess. 

—MAX GUNTHER 

A hunch is only as good as the sum of past experience that produces it. —DR NATALIE SHAINESS 

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 

• Intuition is the killer advantage  

So, where did these massive leaps come from? 

• We can call this something else ‘not-quite-knowledge’, ‘implicit knowledge, or perhaps best of all ‘hidden knowledge’. The magical way that hidden knowledge turns into incredibly valuable knowledge – the way in which dross turns into gold, the alchemy of knowledge – is through a prior process. And I am going to call this by its most simple and familiar name. It is intuition that 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. Developing unique intuition – turning your hidden knowledge into incredibly valuable knowledge – is about the most fun thing you can do in your life. But there is a catch. 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.’¹ 
• 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. 
• Good intuition is the articulation of hidden knowledge. It is a leap of imagination that captures the truth that, in a sense, you already knew. We take in vast amounts of unprocessed or semi-processed information all the time – we can’t file it all, but it doesn’t disappear. If you really need it and want it to solve a gap in your explicit knowledge, you may miraculously dredge it up from the depths of your mind. 

Guidelines in respect of intuition:

• Trust your intuition only in areas you know backward, or about people you’ve known very well for a long time. 
• Author and investor Max Gunther say, ‘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. 

Conclusion and summary 

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 start with intuition. Your ambition and emotion are part of the package, part of the appeal, and an integral part of the driving force. Your singular intuition will eventually arrive unexpectedly and suddenly. Will it 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.

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

 

Landmark 9: Distort Reality 

In his presence, the reality is malleable. —BUD TRIBBLE on Steve Jobs 

The spirit now wills his own will, and he who has been lost to the world now conquers the world. 

—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 

Blast medicine anyway. We’ve learned to tie into every human organ except one – the brain. The brain is what life is all about. That man can think any thought that we can, and love, and hope, dream as much as we can. —DOCTOR MCCOY in Star Trek, ‘The Menagerie’ 

 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. 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. 

Summary and conclusion 

• The players changed reality because they believed they could. They demonstrated conclusively that reality is more malleable than is commonly believed. Yet it is only possible to change your world if you sincerely believe you can. The players all exhibited extreme optimism and willpower to re-channel reality to match their philosophy and aspirations. Many of the players – probably the ones who had the most unreasonable success – also brainwashed their followers and collaborators into believing that they too could distort reality. It may be that business people, preachers, and politicians are particularly prone to mobilize reality-defying belief in their followers, whereas scientists and artists need only defy reality in their own person. 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.

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

 

Additional Insights 

Self-Belief 

• The 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. 
• 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.
• Your third lesson is to listen to self-doubt – when it is clearly right – and to change tack accordingly. Self-doubt is constructive and should not be repressed. It’s the friend of self-belief, not it’s for.
• The fourth lesson is to keep hoping, scheming and dreaming, while learning everything you can about your niche. 

 Summary 

• Define a goal to incubate self-belief. 
• Experiment to generate experiences of success. 
• Listen to self-doubt. 
• Keep dreaming and learning.

 

Olympian Expectations

• There doesn’t have to be a good reason for thinking big, but the first lesson on expectations is that you should get into the habit of doing it anyway – see the big picture and believe that you belong there; visualize what it will be like when you hit the big time. It won’t be quite like that but imagine it will help you get there. 
• Your second lesson is that you should take 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.
• 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’.
• 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? To succeed, you need a serious intent to do so. Wake up each day determined that you will do something – anything, big or small, but something specific that you target for that day – to get closer to your destiny. 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. The players put their own career above all else, and if you want unreasonable success, you must do the same. 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. 

Summary 

• Think big. 
• Take praise seriously. Compound it in your mind. 
• Set the highest possible growth targets. 
• Be explicit with high expectations of other people. Self-belief and Olympian expectations are mutually reinforcing. If you believe in yourself, it’s easier to have very high expectations of what you will achieve. If your expectations are Olympian, and you see yourself in the big 

picture, it’s easier to elevate your self-belief. What makes it easier is that self-belief and Olympian expectations stem from the same four sources: 

• Background 
• Praise 
• Self-manufactured belief 
• Transforming experiences. 

You can’t do anything about your background. But you can do something about the other three sources of belief. Praise, and basking in praise, generates self-belief. That applies to Olympian expectations too. To an important extent, the genuine positive feedback you gain is under your control – you need to deserve it! That means putting your efforts and intelligence into the one area where you can most easily excel. It’s not easy, but it’s a lot easier than trying to be a good all-rounder.

 

 

Transforming Experiences 

•  Søren Kierkegaard said, ‘Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forwards.’¹ This is true of transforming experiences. You can’t know in advance whether a particular experience will truly transform you; you will only know afterward if it has.

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. By this demanding definition, my first transforming experience was Bain & Company, and my second was LEK. I learned a great deal at BCG which was to prove useful at Bain and LEK, but I was not successful there. It was only at Bain and LEK that I sold and operated very large and effective projects for corporate chiefs. As a founder at LEK, I was able to give free rein to my ideas and theories. 

•  The first lesson is that a transforming experience is a rare event, and, well … totally transforming. Ask yourself whether this has happened to you or not. How were you changed as a result? What kinds of experiences can be transforming? 
• The second benefit is that you can speculate about the kind of experience that could make you mightily more successful. Consider, for example, the following types of potentially transforming experiences: 

• Educational – go to the best college(s) for what you want to learn and do. 
• Self-defined unique expertise – become the expert in a narrow subject which you define. 
• Live in a different country and culture. 
• Work as an apprentice for an expert in your target field. 
• Finagle a job in an exceptional, innovative company, which: 

■  operates in a different market from any other firm, defined by customers, products, price, or technology (or permutations of these differences) 

■  is growing very fast – 30 percent at least, ideally doubling or better each year 

■  comprises ‘A’ people – curious, demanding, and innovating. 

• Start a company, club, or network like this. 

 

Further transformations 

Writing this book has made me ask whether I should seek a further transforming experience. It’s an inspiring and provocative question, but I don’t know the answer. To help me answer that question, however, I’ve asked myself: 

• Do I want further unreasonable success? 
• What kind of new experience could make me many times more useful to the world? 
• What would the new entity do that I care greatly about, and could have a massive impact relative to the effort and cost of starting it? What could refuel my sense of purpose and destiny in life? 

 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. 

 Summary 

• If you haven’t had a transforming experience, position yourself to make one more likely. 
• Decide what kind of experience is most likely to transform you. 
• Once you’ve had a transforming experience and success, you may want to seek another such experience.

 

One Breakthrough Achievement

• Deciding our breakthrough achievement is the hardest thing anyone in search of unreasonable success can do. Some of us are lucky and have found it, often by accident. For some of us, it may come in the next year or two. For others, it may only become apparent in the far future. We can’t hurry love, and we can’t hurry this decision. But greatness requires that we are crystal clear – at the right time – about what our breakthrough will be. 

The first lesson is that the best way to get closer to knowing your achievement is to think deeply about what you may invent or personify. It’s remarkable that at least seventeen out of twenty players were inventors. Could you invent a new concept or valuable theory; product or service; company; charity; social, political, philosophical, or religious movement; art form, or other invention? 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? 

 The second lesson is this: if your transforming achievement is not to be some form of the invention, could it arise from a mission to stop something bad or promote something good that already exists? Do you have a deep-seated, visceral passion to start something that would be great for our community or society, or to stop something? What do you believe in which makes you unusual or different? Could you evolve a unique mission out of what you love or dislike? 

 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. 

Summary 

• Could your breakthrough achievement be to start a great company, movement, school of thought or something else remarkable? 
• Or could it be to personify an advance in science, the arts or popular culture? 
• What would you like to achieve? Are you prepared to wait and listen until the quiet footsteps of providence tell you when to jump?

 

Make Your Own Trail

• The first lesson is to find a cause that is original or unpopular.
• The second lesson is: you must be different. 
• The third lesson is that in business it is not enough to be different: you must be profitably different. 

 

Find and Drive Your Personal Vehicle 

• The first lesson is to start by adapting or opposing a ‘pool vehicle’ (see Chapter 9). Put yourself into the slipstream of a movement, a crusade, or a new way of pursuing your field, and become an expert in it.
• The second lesson is to identify what your own personal vehicle should look like. If you really want the vehicle, if you know what it will look like, and if you keep your desire near the top of your unconscious mind, it will arrive.
• The third lesson is to ask yourselves similar questions to decide if you are ready: 

• Do you understand the market niche backward? 
• 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 breakeven (bearing in mind this nearly always takes longer than expected)? 
• You should only launch your new vehicle when you are sure you are ready.

• 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.
• 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 organizations, crusades, or social movements. It is why they are always fragmenting, often in a positive way. Divergence is the organizing principle of evolution and life generally.
• 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. 
• The seventh lesson is that if you give up your personal vehicle, im- mediately start searching for the next one – you owe that to yourself and the world
• The final lesson is that a good way to define your next vehicle is to extend your experience and knowledge into a new yet adjacent field, where you can be a pioneer. 

 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

 

Thrive on Setbacks

• 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 honorable.
• 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.
• 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. You may come to enjoy displaying a different side of yourself, just as I did.
• 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. 
• The final lesson is that to attain the 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. 

 Summary 

• Reframe failure in a new, more positive light. 
• You can then change your behavior 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.

 

Acquire Unique Intuition

• 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 specialized and relatively unknown area, your intuition is unlikely to propel you forward decisively.
  • My second insight was that the incredibly powerful concepts of business strategy could be used to beat the odds of investing in new and young companies. My starting capital was small, so this took a long time to have a substantial impact. Still, my perception was right. I am encouraging other entrepreneurs and investors to follow suit so that the result affects the whole economy. 
• The second lesson is the extraordinarily high value of rare knowledge about a sector or idea that is starting to spread like wildfire. If you have an unusually deep appreciation of a high-growth area, you are halfway to success. Over the past three decades, I have increasingly enjoyed fertilizing my unconscious mind – setting imaginative puzzles before I go for a walk or bike ride, exercise in the gym, or fall asleep. 
• 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 that 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 overemphasize how important this is, to help you generate unreasonable success. . 
• One thing which has built my personal fortune is my habit of guessing outcomes of investments and events. I think in terms of probabilities and ‘expected value’. For example, if I think investing in Venture X has a 30 percent chance of making 50 times my money, I would prefer that to Venture Y, if it has an 80 percent chance of making 10 times. The expected value of Venture X is .3 × 50 = 15, which is better than Venture Y, where .8 × 10 = 8. Of course, we need to invest the money we can afford to lose, and be willing to take high risks. 
• 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. If the outcome is great enough, you only need to be right once in your life. Decision journal 

 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.

 

Distort Reality 

• The first lesson is that it is possible to change your current reality by changing yourself. This is probably best done when your personality is more angular, plastic, undefined – certainly in your twenties, though I have seen people change for the better at any age.
  • To reinvent yourself, you need to go away – away from home, away from friends, away from co-workers, away from your job, away from your state or region, and from your country. 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. It’s not a good idea to take personality change too far, but self-improvement is always possible, and easier if you move to a more positive, outgoing, dynamic place.
• 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.
• The third lesson is that if you want to defy reality – to shift it to something else – you must be very clear about what that reality is, and how to make it temporary. 

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

 

CONCLUSION 

 Positioning Yourself for Unreasonable Success 

 ‘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

• What the players all exhibited is a set of unusual and strongly effective attitudes and strategies – super-charged self-belief, elevated expectations of themselves and their collaborators, an experience that gave them rare knowledge, a single objective that would change their lives and those of myriad other people, the cussedness to carve out their own path through life, a personal vehicle that augmented their powers prodigiously, the ability to learn from failure and relish it, finely tuned intuition that they fed rather than throttled, and the confidence that they could make their own rules and defy the realities and obstacles that normal people accept as facts of life. They were unreasonable in a highly creative way, and hence unreasonably successful. 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. These attitudes are a form of intelligent determination. More than determination alone, they train you to have the kind of impact on the world that you want. 
• The world works this way – it responds to people who possess huge self-belief geared towards an important goal. It responds to the very highest expectations. It responds to the belief that failure is functional and will help you succeed. It responds to the belief that reality is malleable and that you can inspire other people to see it that way. Attitudes such as these are far more important than ability. To compete on ability is to enter a race where the prizes are small and there are many competitors. To compete on these kinds of attitude is to enter a race where the prize is huge and there are few people competing against you. 
• The success strategies are transforming experiences, making your own trail, finding and driving your personal vehicle, acquiring unique intuition, and, above all, making one breakthrough achievement. A transforming experience will make you hugely more effective because you will learn something rare and valuable. The way to find this experience is to join a company or group which is growing very fast and knows something unique. 

Your own trail must be original, different, and profitably different

• Your personal vehicle must leverage your time and abilities to a far, far greater degree than they are leveraged now. 
• Unique intuition depends on knowing more in a narrow field than anyone else. 
• 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. 

 

Positioning yourself for unreasonable success 

 Now you know that success isn’t primarily about performance, but about positioning – that is, your attitudes and strategies – you are fully equipped for the journey to unreasonable success. 

Luck always plays a huge part in success, but where there’s life, luck can change. We can’t control everything in life, but success is not mysterious either. With the right attitudes and strategies, anyone can realistically hope to be successful, even unreasonably so. You are playing with loaded dice, but now you know how they are loaded and can adjust your actions accordingly. 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?