Dark Horse: Achieving Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment

Every dark horse we interviewed followed an unorthodox route to excellence, by definition. But the question we needed to answer was this: Did Jennie and Alan and the other mold-breaking experts share anything else in common, some essential quality that explained how they achieved their improbable mastery?

Under the Standardization Covenant, it makes perfect sense that if you failed to stay the course, you should not expect the same benefits as those who exerted the sweat and toil to reach the summit.

But you know more about you than any institution does,

Recall the terms of the Standardization Covenant: Society is obligated to reward you with opportunity if and only if you abandon the pursuit of personal fulfillment for the pursuit of standardized excellence.

Paul is not primarily driven by the desire for a relationship with the artifact. He is most motivated by the thrill of detective work.

American industrialist Frederick Taylor, realized that in a system of factory production where machines were expensive and heavy but humans were cheap and malleable, it was more efficient to arrange the workers around the machines than to arrange the machines around the workers.

Instead, they focus on one move. Their next bold move. They evaluate which choice, right now, will put them in the strongest possible position to win.

He relished situations where he was accountable only to himself, taking great satisfaction when a venture’s success or failure depended solely on his own acumen.

She preferred deadlines, which inspired her to do her best work. Similarly, she enjoyed working within a budget, since the constraints fomented creative solutions.