Dec

What Determines Your Success? The Story of Outliers

Filed Under (Tips) by admin on 23-12-2009

I’ve been reading this fascinating book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell where he’s done research and compiled his findings telling the story of what makes people mega successful.

You may have heard some of the other big marketers talk about it. It’s a good read and more importantly gives you some good insights on things you can do to tip the “success scales” in your favor.

He talks about the inputs and the reasons why some people achieve mega-success and why others don’t. These things inlcude:

- concerted effort vs. passiveness (concerted effort obviously gets more results)
- wealthy vs. poor (wealthy have advantages mainly in the attitudes and way they view the world)
- standing up for self (asserting yourself is critical to getting what you want)

After doing my own research I agree with much of what Gladwell says. There are many different individual factors which determine whether you’re successful or not.

And within those factors are some factors which determine the level of success you will achieve anywhere from billionaire to millionaire on down to comfortably making six figures and multiple six figures.

One of the biggest things Gladwell presents is evidence that the environment and the culture you grow up in has a huge effect on both your childhood and adult success.

Some of the main factors required for success are:

– intelligence

– dedication

– faith and belief in your own abilities to achieve (this is instilled and reinforced by your parents and other important people in your life early on in your development. You can develop in yourself as an adult.)

– the cultural heritage and legacy of your ancestry

– opportunity - giving your child opportunities at the youngest age in activities they show skill or interest in (do you have the opportunities and the timing in the world’s history which make capitalizing on those opportunities hugely profitable)

The most important thing for you to realize is just how major an impact the culture you come from and grew up in as well as the environment you now surround yourself in and with affects your “success psyche”.

There is simply no way around this. Your environment has a huge affect on your attitudes, willpower, beliefs and your overall drive and determination to achieve whatever goals you set out for yourself.

So what kind of environment are you living in? Is your spouse and family supportive? Or negative?

If the main five to six people you spend most of your time socializing with are negative it’s not necessarily a death knell to your success.

You just need to lessen your exposure to them and crank up your exposure to people who are going in the same direction as you and are going to be a positive influence spurring you on to achieve what you want to.

Regardless of which group you fit in having an experienced and quality mastermind is of utmost importance to your achievement.

This is one of the biggest revelations I got from the book. I always knew environment had an effect on the kind of results you get I just never had the concrete evidence nor fully understood just how powerful the effect of your environment is.

Your mastermind group will be a big factor in what level of confidence, faith and belief you have in your self to achieve.

No man is an island and what Malcolm Gladwell proved is that your parenting and the patronage of your ancestry make a huge difference in how you view the world and the success you have.

He also talks a lot about having opportunities as well as the timing of those opportunities including when you are bored.

He talks about the founder of Sun Microsystems as well as Bill Gates being born in the mid-1950s and how they had opportunities during their schooling for access to computers which used a shared time system instead of the old punch cards allowing them to work much faster when doing code.

Had these two guys been born 10 years earlier or 10 years later they may not have the same success they do today. And if they’d not had access to those shared computer terminals which could process the code much faster they may have gone into different fields as their chosen profession.

So timing is important but is in a lot of ways out of your control.

What is in your control is what Gladwell calls the 10,000 hour rule.

Through his research he found this is about how long it takes to become a master of any skill.

By the time you have 10,000 hours of working in a field, getting that experience doing stuff, as well as learning and reading up about it you get to that point of critical mass where you’re now a master of that skill.

Both of those guys had more than that amount of time on the computers and many late nights.

So what have you been doing for quite a long time where you’ve got your 10,000 hours in?

And if you’re starting on something new spend every spare moment you can working on that new skills so you’ll get to your 10,000 hours faster.

I know it sounds like a lot but she can get their relatively quickly and you can be making money on the way to getting there.

Outliers is a great read and will open your mind to achieving more success in your life.

Leave me any comments if you’ve read this book and/or some of the things you’ve done in your life which have allowed more success.

Originally posted 2009-02-10 09:13:22. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Related Posts

$Facebook\'s Email about my account$ How I Got My Facebook Account Reinstated I'll start by saying my disabled Facebook account is back live and in action. It was officially reinstated on January 27th, roughly 5 days ago. And for thoroughness I have logged in today and my account is back to normal. In Facebook's typically cryptic way they gave me very sketchy......
Power of Local Mastermind Meetup Business Networking Groups I wanted to write a bit and add a new but related dimension to this blog. So far it's been about breaking news stories and software which can really help your marketing and grow your business as well as training articles from my own experiences and learnings. Ever since the......
Power of Tribes In Your Business I've been reading Seth Godin's powerful book tribes and have come away with a number of takeaways and am going to go through five of those with you here. This is not intended to be a book review but more a way to help you improve and make your business......
Lack of Focus Destroys Productivity In my last article on the power of local business networking mastermind groups I promised to talk to you about some of the lessons learned from my local Austin, Texas business networking meet up group. In particular one of the ladies in the group made a comment about how it......
The Damn Internet is Down! What do you do when your internet goes down? Today I remembered a valuable lesson because my cable broadband internet connection was down. As much as I (and most people, probably even you) depend on the internet in today's society this can be incredibly frustrating. And I felt like this:......