Richard Koch - Unreasonable Success and How to Achieve It

Richard Koch is the author of The 80/20 Principle, which has sold more than a million copies, and been published in approximately forty languages. He is also a successful entrepreneur and investor whose ventures have included Filofax, Plymouth Gin, Belgo restaurants and Betfair, the worlds largest betting exchange. He was formerly a partner of Bain & Company, and co-founder of LEK Consulting. He has written more than twenty acclaimed books on business and ideas.

Unreasonable Success

And How To Achieve It

Unlocking the Nine Secrets of People Who Changed the World

RICHARD KOCH

Entrepreneur Press

Entrepreneur Press, Publisher

Cover Design: Andrew Welyczko

2020 by Entrepreneur Media, Inc.

All rights reserved.

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First published in the United Kingdom by Piatkus, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group.

Richard Koch has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work.

Entrepreneur Press is a registered trademark of Entrepreneur Media, Inc.

ISBN 978-1-61308-449-6

For Jamie R, Jamie S, John, Marx, Matthew, Nicholas and Pedro, friends and principal co-conspirators on this book

Contents

PART ONE:
THE MAP OF UNREASONABLE SUCCESS

PART TWO:
THE SECRET MAP

PART THREE:
LESSONS LEARNED MY JOURNEY AND HOW YOU TOO CAN REACH UNREASONABLE SUCCESS

Bill Bain photo Boston Globe/Getty Images

Jeff Bezos photo Michael Reynold/EPS-EFE/Shutterstock

Otto von Bismarck photo BAO/imageBROKER/Shutterstock

Winston Churchill photo David Cole/Alamy Stock Photo

Marie Curie photo Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo

Leonardo Da Vinci photo Chris Hellier/Alamy Stock Photo

Walt Disney photo Glasshouse Images/Alamy Stock Photo

Bob Dylan photo Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo

Albert Einstein photo AP/Shutterstock

Viktor Frankl photo Ronald Zak/AP/Shutterstock

J K Rowling photo Greg Allen/Invision/AP/Shutterstock

Steve Jobs photo Kpa/ZUMA/Shutterstock

John Maynard Keynes photo AP/Shutterstock

Valdimir Lenin photo GL Archive/Alamy Stock Photo

Madonna photo Gregory Pace/Shutterstock

Nelson Mandela photo Gallo Images/Shutterstock

Paul of Tarsus painting Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo

Helena Rubenstein photo ANL/Shutterstock

Margaret Thatcher photo Jim Hollander/EPA/Shutterstock

The future is a land of which there are no maps.

A. J. P. TAYLOR

Man cannot create the current of events. He can only float with it and steer.

OTTO VON BISMARCK

The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

Apple Think Different commercial, 1997

unreasonable success n.

such success in changing the world, that it might seem unreasonable for any individual to have so much impact

success that is unexpected, and was not predicted when the individual was young or early in their career

success that goes well beyond what the individuals skills and performance seem to warrant

4. success based on leaps of intuition rather than on logic and reason

PART ONE

The Map of Unreasonable Success

Can We Map Success?

I n his dazzling book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell presents a theory of outstanding success based around the early accumulation of skills the famous 10,000 hours in developing new areas of expertise. This is how Bill Gates happened to gain vast experience of computer programming long before almost anyone else. He was able to do this not just because he was obsessed with the new field, but also because privileged access to computers at school gave him a head start over his peers. The Beatles were just a mediocre high-school band in 1960 what transformed them was playing eight hours a day, seven days a week, in the strip clubs of Hamburg. We got better and got more confidence, said John Lennon. We couldnt help it, with all the experience playing all night long.

And so on. Raw talent is one thing, but circumstances enable rapid accumulation of experience; without these particular circumstances we might never have heard of The Beatles.

The trouble with this theory is not that it is wrong for the people that Gladwell cites, but that there are many more cases of extraordinary success which dont fit the template of early accumulation of experience. While I was rereading his book recently, the thought struck me what if we could map success in a way that isolates the causes of their remarkable success for almost any high achiever?

Would it be possible to construct a map of success that works for almost any eminent person in any field, at any time? Something that applies to Leonardo da Vinci, Marie Curie and Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan and Madonna, Helena Rubinstein and Steve Jobs, Paul of Tarsus and Walt Disney, John Maynard Keynes and Jeff Bezos, J. K. Rowling and Walt Disney, and even to Vladimir Lenin, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Nelson Mandela?

Preposterous.

But this is where the idea of a map comes in. Any individuals life contains countless unique particularities. Everyones story is different. But underneath the blur of local circumstances and personal idiosyncrasies, is there a common map that successful people followed which shows the way forward? It took me a long time to find it, but I think it exists.

I started with around fifty possible landmarks experiences or reasons for success for the map, and then tried them out one by one on a small number of cases of high achievers whose life stories I knew intimately. If the explanation didnt work in nearly all cases, I discarded it.

I was surprised to find although in retrospect I should have expected this that there were a few landmarks which were so powerful that they were almost universally present. But they were not all present from the start, nor were they mainly to do with the inherent personal characteristics of the successful people. Anyone who has studied history knows well that the way individuals react to the strange, unexpected crosscurrents of events in their life greatly affects success or failure.

Successful people typically dont 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.

So what excites me is this: if we can construct a useful map of success one that is based on a theory and structure and can be tested historically it becomes possible for