How much do you want it?

Last week I had the pleasure of listening to a presentation by Rasmus Ankersen (the author of The Goldmine Effect). Rasmus has studied high performance to work out what drives high performance – to find the secret of success if you like. He studied phenomena like the athletics club in Kingston, Jamaica which trained nine of the sprint mentalists from the 2008 Olympic games (including 5 gold). Why does Kenya produce a ridiculously high number of marathon runners? Is it genetics or raw talent? Neither.

Rasmus concluded that sometimes high performance is partly due to natural talent – like Usain Bolt for example. However, that is rare. The single biggest factor that drives high performance is… wait for it… hunger. How much do you want it? Hunger is important because it leads to practice. Practising is the biggest difference between high performance and low performance.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell talks about The 10,000 Hour Rule. Malcolm suggests that greatness requires tremendous effort and you have to do something for 10,000 before you become an expert at it. He says Bill Gates accumulated 10,000 hours of programing experience by the age of 13. That is the ‘secret’. High performers start early in life and they work very hard. If you want to become good at something, practise the task for 10,000 hours.

What do you want to become better at? Better at lead generation, selling, something else? How much practise are you doing? How much do you want it?

Success is a lot of hard work but anyone can do it. So the choice is yours!