The Difference Between People Who Succeed and Those Who Don't
(Part One, Edited)
Ric Thompson interviews Kevin Hogan
Page 2
How Important are Random Events?
Square one? It turns out there is some randomness involved.
You can actually go to the dice table in Vegas, throw seven passes
in a row, and "believe" you're doing really well, that you're amazing
all by yourself.
The fact is that the eighth roll could just as easily be a loser as it
is a winner.
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The incredibly important question to ask is,
"Do you have all your money on that bet, or did you have a small
percentage?"
Realize there's some randomness in life. That's a really good thing
to know. Here, I'll recommend somebody else's book because I want
you to learn about the things that go wrong in life.
It's a really important thing to know. There is The Black Swan by
Nicholas Taleb.
Pick up that book; that's a really cool book. It sort of gives you
cause to understand that you aren't in total control of everything.
When you do everything right, there's still stuff that can go wrong.
That's number one.
Number two is that just because you have somebody's success formula
doesn't mean you've got their recipe for success. I don't know if
you've had this experience, but my mom made a couple of great dishes
when I was a kid.
She used to make this great potato salad; it had this right flavor,
mustardy and all that. It was perfect. It was the perfect food.
She would tell other people how to make it. It's not like mom held
anything back, but it didn't taste the same when anybody else made it.
The fact is that it tasted downright bad sometimes with almost the
same exact recipe, if not the what APPEARS TO BE THE exact same
recipe. How can that be?
The short and first answer is that food tastes different cooked
in a microwave vs. on the stove vs. on the grill. Same exact
recipe, very, very different taste, and perhaps very different
nutritional value as well.
We leave the metaphor...
What Don't You Want?
The deal is that we always talk about the things that we want in
life, "I want to be successful,"; "I want to be earning $100,000 a
year,"; and "I want to be helping 500 people a month." If you're in
relationships, "I want a gal, and I want her to be really
pretty, sweet, nice, and not yell at me," and all those good things.
We have all these things, but we don't specifically itemize the
things that we don't want to happen.
Seems kind of silly.
Except it's not.
What the books all miss and what the gurus miss when they're
communicating is they're telling stories from their perspective
of what they did to succeed, all of which are legitimately cool
and valuable things. They're neglecting to say the things that you
should not do, the mistakes that they avoided or overcame and those
kinds of things.
In other words, what things don't you want to have happen in your
business? Those are actually some of the things that cause you to
be really successful.
If there are ladies listening, here you go. Imagine, ladies, that
you're saying, "I want the perfect husband. I want somebody who's
funny and happy and somebody who's strong and good looking."
Great! There's your model. Now that same guy could be a terrible
father. He could be completely unkind in many other ways to your
children or maybe your relatives.
You didn't say you wanted him to be kind to your relatives; you
only said you wanted him to be nice, seemingly to you as if that
would generalize to the world.
There are all kinds of other terrible things that this person will
do in life, and this is what happens in everyday life. We don't
itemize the things that we don't want to happen.
We don't create ways to get over the obstacles that are going to come
up in life, so what happens is people accidentally get out of a
success path.
It's very easy to do this in any business: real estate, investing,
anything. They fall apart and they don't succeed because they
don't know what they don't want.
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