14 Ways to Become More Successful
“We should just study successful people more. Like how’d they do this?…And there’s a very superficial version of that in the media all the time. But like actually trying to figure out how they did it. To me it’s one of the most interesting topics.”
-Tyler Cowen, Conversations with Tyler
So What Makes Other People Successful?
Success, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder. There are many versions of “How to be successful”, but this is my contribution to the genre.
These ideas were developed from studying various successful people.
They determine a few of their own values, principles, and/or operating-systems to help navigate life. And they write them down.
Family, culture, religion and society provide you with various values or principles you can use to live a good life.
However, the people who I studied took the search for values and principles even further. Sensing their original education not quite complete for life’s journeys, they searched for and formalized their own novel tools, theories and approaches for life.Fortunately for us, they passed their recipes down.
For example, founding father Benjamin Franklin revealed his lessons for living the good life in Poor Richard’s Almanac. Ray Dalio gave us his formula for success in life and business via Principles. George Soros, outlined his view of the boom-bust cycle in financial markets (and historic processes) with The Concept of Reflexivity.
They actively seek high-graded information with the help of certain books, videos, articles, thought leaders, etc.
“One’s view of reality is both partial and distorted.” ~ George Soros
Soros’s views sum up the key barriers to your decision-making. We rarely have every piece of information, and even when we do, our cognitive tools can easily mis-weigh the data—more on distortions later.
Even so, more information improves decision-making when used correctly. The people I studied understood this. And so, they were often good Bayseians, updating beliefs and odds with new information.
Charlie Munger’s kids call him a book with legs. Bill Gates is a reading machine, just check out his website. Warren Buffett is famous for leisurely reading all day, despite running a half-trillion dollar company.
These people are often content-machines, constantly obtaining high-graded knowledge through high-graded people and using it to update their interpretations of the world.
They are good enough at elementary math and use it often.
“One’s view of reality is both partial and distorted.” ~ George Soros
The cognitive tools we’re endowed with are both useful and misleading. Number-fying and quantifying aspect of life, when you can, offers some reprieve.
For example, losses loom larger than equivalent gains so many folks end up doing twice as much work, or pay twice as much, to avoid losses vs seeking out gains. Many insurance offerings for electronic products are based on the fact that you will mis-weigh risk.
The successful ones use grade school mental-math—math no more difficult than the kind needed for estimating restaurant tips or the cost of a gas tank as second-nature—to “straighten out” thought.
Ed Thorpe’s method for beating casinos at Blackjack, with card-counting, requires just second grade math. Warren Buffett is known for valuing businesses with mental arithmetic, in place of rigorous Excel spreadsheets, which the rest of the financial world couldn’t exist without.
They embrace randomness or noise, knowing favorable decisions can sometimes come with unfavorable outcomes—which can mislead mere mortals. When faced with a bad outcome, they avoid the common trap of misunderstanding what took place.
In relationships, investing, betting, and sports, hundreds of favorable decisions or approaches will undoubtedly produce a few losers. This comes from randomness or noise (luck and un-luck).
It’s seems intuitive—and no one would fault you—for thinking an unfavorable outcome came from unfavorable processes.
However, sometimes unfavorable outcomes, in fact, come from favorable processes or strategies. Sound back-assward?
In college football, Nick Saban football teams combat getting fooled by randomness by reorienting the team’s thinking to “The Process”, or the task at hand, knowing favorable processes maximize, yet don’t guarantee, wins.
“I think that I’ve convinced myself through the years that the process oriented approach is much, much better, and it is much better for competitors because it keeps them focused on the right things. Not the results, but what it takes to get the results.” - Nick Saban
Nicholas Taleb wrote Fooled by Randomness, in part to address how randomness in favorable strategies can both misinform and mislead our next set of decisions and strategies.
They give back ideas and knowledge.
“My sword I leave to him who can wear it." - Charlie Munger
In addition to crafting and developing their own playbooks and wisdom for life, these folks gave back their ideas for future generations to test out for themselves.
Charlie Munger, in addition to financial donations, passed along speeches and talks, with insights on mental models and business lessons. Lee Kuan Yew left behind The Singapore Story: From Third World to First to help guide other Asiatic nations looking to become First-World.
They find out for themselves.
“You’ll never look like a fool if you look like everyone else. Nor will you outperform.”
The “wisdom of crowds” says crowds are often right in their assessments than individuals—perhaps. However, occasionally the consensus gets thrown off from some underlying reality by a distortion, providing opportunities for folks willing to double-check and devote time to some analysis.
Howard Marks successfully ventured into “bad debt” (investing in the debt of failing companies) in the 1990s while his peers in finance wouldn’t touch it. Ed Thorpe came up with card counting in Blackjack, which reliably beat the house, coming after centuries of failed efforts to beat the casino (Thorpe and Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, also beat roulette).
Many successes from these individuals came from taking contemporary wisdom with a grain of salt. They followed up with their own analysis and found out for themselves.
They have a growth mindset.
“Losses loom larger than gains.” - Daniel Kahneman
Our operating system is hardwired for channeling two times the time and energy into avoiding negative events (losses), when compared to seeking equivalent gains. Further, bonding with others over classic misfortune and shortcomings is comforting and even pleasurable, and so perpetuating negative outlooks.
For whatever reason, pessimism and negativity about the future—perhaps the default condition—occupy more than their fair share of human thought, since time immemorial. But times are better. And if we’re not careful, too many of these negative thoughts can cause worse futures than we’d otherwise get.
They counteracted a seemingly natural vision of a future riddled in negative events or failures—a pessimistic view—by staying open to futures where favorable events might routinely happen too—justifying some optimistic views. They had what Psychologist Carol Dweck labels a “growth mindset” which is a mind kept open to the opportunities fate might bring.
They borrow proven ideas from other successful people.
“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulder of giants.” -Sir Isaac Newton
Instead of wasting time compiling knowledge from scratch, these successful people tended to minimize time spent reinventing what works. They’d seek out and implement what already works, whether from books, mentors, or various corners of the globe.
When transforming Singapore from a swamp to a First-World country (within one generation) Lee Kuan Yew sent public officials to study other societies around the world and bring back the best ideas to adopt. Warren Buffett’s early ideas for investing came from mentor Benjamin Graham’s lessons on value-investing.
They intensely focus.
Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Charlie Munger have all been noted for their ability to tune out distractions. They’ve even structured parts of their lives to reduce them.
Warren Buffett’s calendar is comically free of business meetings, opening up time for thinking. In place of business meetings, he reads much of the day. Bill Gates has “Think-week”, where he retreats to a cabin on the water once a year, to just focus on reading and thinking.
They think in mental models, which are just simplified versions of reality.
Many of them used thinking tools, sometimes referred to as mental models, when thinking about real world problems. These are more robust metaphors, often with vivid imagery attached.
To offer a mental starting point for how gases behaved, Ed Thorpe visualized gases as merely balls that bounced rapidly off one another.
Ray Dalio utilizes the “Two-You’s” mental model when interacting with others—the intellectual and higher-level “you” vs the emotional and lower-level “you” we’re simultaneously dealing with. This improves understanding and communication.
Charlie Munger greatly popularized his mental models in a famous Harvard speech where he acknowledged their help as being a key tool to see a bit more clearly in business and life.
They uncover subtle patterns others missed by breaking things into smaller and smaller pieces.
Ed Thorpe found that card counting in Blackjack gave players an advantage over the casino—a strategy that lay undetected for century.
Warren Buffett realized early on that owning an insurance company would allow him access to the companies’ cash, which his genius at stock-picking could be paired with to enhance business returns.
The Golden State Warriors basketball team determined that taking more three-point shots per game, paired with the right shooter, increased their odds of winning. Moneyball uncovered similar hidden secrets for baseball by combing through every corner of baseball data, a decade before.
They have an inner scorecard.
“The best armor in old age is a life well spent preceding it.” - Charlie Munger
“Do the people you care about love you back?” - Warren Buffett
Many of them made it clear they judge themselves. They avoided becoming too caught up with outer scorecards—what others thought.
Their behavior seems partly guided by an internalized ethics—maybe a merely a helpful quote—of right and wrong.
Ed Thorpe, famous for discovering card counting in blackjack and sharing his methods for beating the casino. He believes “Character is destiny”, and he lived it too.
They’re favored by luck.
“Here lies Epictetus, a slave, maimed in body, the ultimate in poverty, and favored by the Gods.” Epictetus tombstone
Successful folks are lucky.
In the 1970s and 80s, Ray Dalio and Ed Thorpe became early adopters of computer technology that aided them in trading financial markets, well before computers were mainstream. Their prime work years luckily came as computers were finding their place in the world. Anyone who adopted the newest tech then for tedious calculations would have a comparative advantage to their competition.
In the last half of the 20th century, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger were routinely finding undervalued companies to buy. They did this for decades before massive amounts top talent finally crowded its way into finance, reducing opportunities to find undervalued companies. For years they got to “fish where the fish were” for US businesses. The prime of their careers happened to align with more US market inefficiencies than we find today.
They make the most of any luck they’re given.
"It’s not like I woke up every day wondering how to cure cancer. I woke up every morning wondering how to understand T cells...” - Nobel Prize winner Tom Allison PH.D. on Immunology
While Tom Allison’s work ended up adding another pillar to cancer treatment—cancer immunotherapy—that wasn’t what he set out for. He set out to understand the immune system’s T cells, having no idea the endgame was new cancer treatments.
Much of his early career was spent in labs trying to determine how an individuals’ T cells came to recognize and attack foreign invaders it found floating around. The future Nobel Laureate’s real secret sauce was devoting decades of his time to curiously researching and understanding the immune system’s T cells.
However opportunity knocked, with a crazy idea to manipulate our T cell behavior, instead of targeting cancer cells. Allison was ready. He went on to help unlock a 4th pillar of cancer treatment. Then there was chemo, radiation, surgery and immunotherapy.