Opportunity knocks: How to become an outlier
Posted by Andrew
Thinking about the idea of outliers, can you be successful if you are missing key opportunities?
I believe you can, but the road is very difficult and it would take a great deal of willpower, heart, and passion to do so.
For example, say you want to be a football coach. (A recent dream of mine). If you live in a big city without high school football, haven’t played a real down of football, and don’t know any other football coaches, how are you going to succeed?
The answer is that you have to really get out of your comfort zone and think outside the box. Maybe you write some letters to the closest (geographically) football teams. You buy your own football films and run an analysis of them and include them with your letters to show what you can do.
The trick though, is that you have to be a lot more passionate about it than most other folks who get into coaching. You can’t just sit back and expect to get there, you really have to go out there and seize it and make it happen, because you weren’t given the same opportunities.
So if you want to become as successful as an outlier without the same opportunities, you have to have an extraordinary passion for your field for you to reach the same levels of success.
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October 12th, 2009 at 11:11 AM
Do you remember the “10,000 hours” Gladwell mentioned in the book? Without a true and extraordinary passion, that 10 years will just become a punishment for trying to become somebody else, not your true self, your true dream.