Focus

Michael Simmons:

When Bill Gates first met Warren Buffett, their host, Gates’ mother, asked everyone around the table to share the single most important factor to their success. Gates and Buffett both gave the same one-word answer: “Focus.”

Rainer Zitelmann:

In the words of Bill Gates Jr.’s college roommate, Andy Braiterman, “Bill had a monomaniacal quality […] He would focus on something and really stick with it. He had a determination to master whatever it was he was doing.” One of his ex-girlfriends described him as being extremely focused and intolerant of distractions. He didn’t own a television and had even dismantled his car radio. She elaborates: “In the end, it was difficult to sustain a relationship with someone who could boast a ‘seven-hour’ turnaround—meaning that from the time he left Microsoft to the time he returned in the morning was a mere seven hours.”

And:

Warren Buffett, too, had focused on a single goal for decades. According to his biographer, Alice Schroeder, even as a child, his dream was to become rich and he had devoured a book on One Thousand Ways to Make $1,000. “Opportunity knocks,” the reader is told on the very first page of Buffett’s favorite read. “Never in the history of the United States has the time been so favorable for a man with small capital to start his own business as it is today.”

When he was 11 years old, Buffett announced that he would be a millionaire by the time he was 35. At 16, he had already saved up $5,000 from various enterprises. In today’s currency, that money would be worth about $60,000—not bad for a 16-year-old. His prediction was only off by five years. He made his first million by the time he was 30.

And:

Recent scientific research has shown that most successful musicians and athletes owe their extraordinary success not to talent as was previously thought, but to a lifetime of dedicated practice or training from early childhood. Many people who haven’t managed to achieve the success they were hoping for blame their bad luck, lack of talent or lack of connections. The truth is that some people are more successful than others mainly because they are better at focusing their mental resources.

Thomas Carlyle:

The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. The strongest, by dispensing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything.

Bruce Lee:

The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.

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Stay Hungry

Lewis Howes and Tony Robbins talk about success, hunger, and drive:

Howes: With all the tools you’ve learned, the wealth of information over 39 years … the strategies to help people overcome their challenges … if you had to strip them all away and you could only use one strategy, what would that be?

Robbins: I wouldn’t. Part of why I’m effective is cause I don’t buy that. I’m always looking for more strategies, cause one strategy will work for one person, not with another.

But philosophically… I would say that the capacity to strengthen and increase your hunger is the one common demoninator amongst the most successful people. Richard Branson’s a good friend of mine. Peter Guber, Steve Wynn… all these guys, they never lost their hunger.

Most people are hungry to achieve a certain amount, make a certain amount of money, and then they get comfortable and relax. Or to get a certain level of fitness, and then they relax. But you know, Richard is as driven today as when he was 16 years old. He’s on fire! And he’s 65 years old. Warren Buffett is 85 years old. He’s as driven today as when he began the journey.

(…)

There’s a lot of intelligent people that can’t fight their way out of a paper bag. Hunger is the ultimate driver. If you’re hungry, you can get the strategy, get the answer… if you can’t model it, you can find it.

Modeling would be the next best skill. Knowing that success leaves clues, why re-invent the wheel? … Why would I go learn by trial-and-error, and maybe take 10 or 20 years, when I could learn from somebody in a few weeks or a few months or a few hours something that could save me a decade.

That’s what it is. That’s why I read 700 books in the first seven years. If somebody takes 10 years of their life, they pour it into a book, and I can read that in an hour or two or three or four, why wouldn’t I?

Tony Robbins, on the Tim Ferriss podcast:

It’s fascinating to see that in every industry, in every sport, there are a few players that play at the highest level, and they have one thing above everyone else: hunger. It’s an unquenchable hunger. Every one of these people has that.

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