Successful people typically don’t plan their success. Instead they develop a unique philosophy or attitude that works for them. They stumble across strategies which 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. I

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 operatio

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

The first landmark is self-belief. If we don’t have strong self-belief, it’s almost impossible to become unreasonably successful.