Positioning Beats Performance Every Time

“It’s all about positioning yourself for success, not improving your performance The players we’ve met had unreasonable success because they ‘visited’ the nine landmarks, not, in most cases, because their performance was outstanding in other respects – indeed, in many cases, it wasn’t outstanding at all. This is very good news. If you can get the positioning right, your chances of high success rocket. You could spend enormous energy trying to become better at what you do – and still fail anyway. It takes much less effort to get your positioning right, and the results will be much more impressive. 2.  It’s not all about your abilities – it’s about having the right attitude and success strategies The nine landmarks can be reduced to two megaattributes – attitude and strategies. Attitude is my shorthand for the following qualities: self-belief, Olympian expectations, thriving on setbacks and distorting reality. These are not conventional ways of thinking and acting. Few people see the world through this lens and behave in the way that our players did. What these four attitude-based landmarks have in common, however, is that they greatly increase the chances of success. Learning to see the world in these terms and acting this way is initially not easy – it comes naturally to a few people but not to most of us. Yet, if you truly want to win, it is far from impossible to learn these traits and make them habits. These attitudes are a form of intelligent determination. More than determination alone, they train you to have the kind of impact on the world that you want. The world works this way – it responds to people who possess huge self-belief geared towards an important goal. It responds to the very highest expectations. It responds to the belief that failure is functional and will help you succeed. It responds to the belief that reality is malleable and that you can inspire other people to see it that way. Attitudes such as these are far more important than ability. To compete on ability is to enter a race where the prizes are small and there are many competitors. To compete on these kinds of attitude is to enter a race where the prize is huge and there are few people competing against you. The success strategies are transforming experiences, making your own trail, finding and driving your personal vehicle, acquiring unique intuition and, above all, making one…”

“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. It is too easy to attribute success to inherent, unstoppable genius. Usually this is an illusion; sometimes, a travesty of the truth.”