Sure, the most successful people work hard, but that’s not all they do. They work smart. There’s no such thing as talent, and hard work isn’t the key, but there is one thing that sets the top 1% apart from the rest:
Hidden Truth #3: It’s all down to consistency.
Going 100% at practice every day is hard.
Bearing the burdens of running a startup every day is hard.
Striving to improve yourself every day is really hard.
But consistency builds up a following. Consistency wins games, scores sales, and makes you the person that nobody can ignore.
You don’t need to be the smartest or most dedicated. You just need to be the most stubbornly consistent person on the whole Earth.
Hidden Truth #4: The world doesn’t have to be win-lose.
Let me tell you a quick story. Right around the turn of the century, high-tech was booming in Silicon Valley — but it was also about to bust.
Two payment technology startups, X.com and Cofinity, were competing non-stop. But their founders were smart. After all, they would later go on to found companies like Palantir, SpaceX, and Tesla. Yep, this is the PayPal story.
But there wouldn’t have been a PayPal story had the two startups kicked at each others’ feet while the .com bubble was about to crash. Instead, their level-heads and win-win attitudes allowed to buckle in and survive the crash.
Try employing a win-win attitude. If you do, you might even become apart of the next “PayPal Mafia” with your former-competitors.
Hidden Truth #5: Every success is unique. Every failure is the same.
Two takeaways here:
Don’t copy. You can do as much as you can to improve you and your career, but don’t try to become somebody you’re not.
“The next Bill Gates will not start an operating system. The next Larry Page won’t start a search engine. The next Mark Zuckerberg won’t start a social network company. If you are copying these people, you are not learning from them.”
~Peter Thiel
Be original. The most meaningful issues are the ones that nobody else is talking about. Find those problems. The common things are not only trite, but there are already a surplus of people tackling the popular issues: cancer research, virtual reality, etc.
“All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.”
~Peter Thiel, again
After all, we tell our children that there’s no point in being in the popular crowd.
So why shouldn’t our startups be like that, too?
