The 5 Traits of Wildly Successful People
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?
Alex Banayan is an associate at San
Francisco-based venture capital firm Alsop Louie
http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20131011051941-80844253-the-5-traits-of-wildly-successful-people
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