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.

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.

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

• 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.

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

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

‘Throughout his career,’ says Walter Isaacson, ‘Jobs liked to see himself as an enlightened rebel, a Jedi warrior or Buddhist samurai fighting the forces of darkness’ – such as IBM.16 It was for this reason that he craved perfection in his products; he would not settle for less. This also explains his very unusual policy of insisting Apple controll

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

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.