Unreasonable Success and How to Achieve It: Unlocking the Nine Secrets of People Who Changed the World

The Jeff Bezos saga is the starkest example of the most frequent pattern of transforming experiences within business – an exciting and challenging job in a high-growth venture which leads the individual to acquire rare knowledge and think that they can change the future by starting their own company.

So often in life, people see what they expect to see, and this compounds the expectation, making it real.

Olympian expectations • Experiment to generate instances of success • Early experience of success • Extreme ambition: Think big; think bigger • Unreasonably demanding of self and others

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.

commend it to you. Breakthrough achievements do not require genius; they can be the offspring of hard thinking by the likes of Henderson; and, I make bold to assert, by you and me. Lenin created Russian communism, the first time

Bezos imbibed the necessity of hiring only super-‘A’ people and of holding everyone to very high performance standards. ‘A’ people, he realised, wanted to work with other ‘A’ people; admitting any ‘B’ people was the slippery slope to mediocrity and oblivion.

An extremely close relationship with the client organisation, and particularly its head. • Equality of status between the client organisation and the consulting firm (Bain & Company), and between the client’s CEO and the lead partner from Bain handling the client. • A long-term and continuous relationship, completely at odds with the consulting

• 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.

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.