Success isn't about being the smartest. Elon Musk, Sam Walton, Phil Knight, and Sara Blakely won by outlasting everyone else, willing to endure what others quit on. Endurance beats talent.
You can beat 99% of people without being smarter or luckier. But by being willing to endure pain and uncertainty for longer, people overestimate the value of intelligence and underestimate the value of being able to endure getting kicked in the nuts for a few years straight while keeping a smile on your face. A lot of magic happens after you realize that most achievements in life are just numbers games and the number of times you're willing to try again is higher than everyone else's.
Yeah, I mean, agree. Some of the most successful entrepreneurs I know just aren't that bright. But they don't know when to quit. And I'll tell you, for every Elon Musk, who's clearly a genius polymath, you know, building rockets in his spare time, you have tens of thousands of ordinary humans. People like Sam Walton and Phil Knight and Sarah Blakely, who succeeded through relentless execution, I believe. And in my experience, the key is to be extraordinary. Fortunately, what that means, if you just break down that word, what that means is it requires that you just be a little bit extra than ordinary. And fortunately, everyone else is so astoundingly ordinary that it doesn't take that much to out outlast them. It doesn't take that much to extra them. The problem is, most people, by definition, are just ordinary.
