What Really Makes Elite Entrepreneurs Successful
You know their names. You know what they’ve built.
Bezos, Gates, Musk, and Zuckerberg are just a few. The amount of their success that was due to individual merit is often interrogated; however, whatever opinions you hold, it is difficult to deny that names such as these have done impressive things. Things the average human won’t even remotely rival.
Books are written on the ‘secrets behind their success.’ YouTube videos that deconstruct their lives and daily routines are produced with excruciating detail. Social media posts noting what they eat and the philosophies they follow litter your feed.
Everyone is obsessed. Everyone wants to know: What did they do? How did they get to where they are?
I will reveal to you something you won’t hear anywhere else. The success that names such as these have achieved were not born from anything they did.
All the things they did were simply the vessel through which their success materialised into the world. Their actions, however, were not the cause — they were the effect.
They were the effect of a mind that decided. A mind that saw something and went after it.
If someone told you that learning all the ways to hold and move a paintbrush around a canvas would make you Picasso, you would clearly identity their delusion. Yet, this is precisely how people go about trying to emulate success in fields such as business.
Though it is not immediately clear how this is true in the world of entrepreneurs, athletes, and academics. You know you won’t become Picasso simply by learning how to move a paintbrush or taking art lessons because the connection between the creator’s mind and their product is so plainly clear: Picasso’s art was the product of a storied life and a mind that explored things few others ever do.
However, in the case of elite entrepreneurs, things seem more mechanical and imitable. You’ll hear about their morning routines, the books they read, and the philosophy by which they lead their company, and think: “Hey! I can also read books, follow a morning routine, and lead people by a certain philosophy!”
And so, these imitable things are what people set out to do.
And then they fail.
Even if they muster the resolve to copycat another person’s actions day after day, they will still fail (and most struggle to even do this). They will still fail because they will find that copying another’s actions or principles won’t give them the insights to create their own success.
To understand why this is the case, go back to Picasso. You know you can’t copycat yourself into becoming the next Picasso. This is equally true for elite success in any field, including entrepreneurship. Picasso’s art is Picasso’s art because Picasso’s mind went to a place that produced it.
Any big-name success becomes a big-name success because their mind enters a certain place. The actions they engage in — how they lead their employees, the products they make, etc. — are simply a follow through. They are an aftereffect of a mind that went somewhere that few minds go.
If copying actions won’t give you their success, will you now (logically) ask: How can I take my mind to rare places? How can I develop a mind that spurs such creative insights?
You can’t if this is how you seek to achieve it.
Every human is storied and powerful enough to go to those places that allows one to produce rare things.
But humans also live distracted existences.
Humans spend their lives with a cluttered mind. And, with all this clutter, they are denied access to the parts of themselves that produce incredible things.
Actions don’t create success. Success creates itself when a person enters a certain state of mind. And you can never enter that state through following someone or something else.
