Eschewing Sleep, Chasing Buses Helped These 'Radically Successful People'
As a child, world champion boxer
Sugar Ray Leonard ran behind his
school bus instead of riding on it.
Helga Esteb / Shutterstock.com
Success isn’t just about hard work, according to a writer and venture capitalist who interviewed 25 of the world’s most successful people for an upcoming book.
Alex Banayan, 19, tells what he learned from a handful of the interviews with “radically successful people” in a story for VentureBeat.com published in the Washington Post. Here are lessons from three of his subjects:
• Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, was running an online sports nutrition business when he figured out his business would be killed by an industry standard that allowed payment 12 months after the product shipped. He insisted on prepayment. The lesson, according to Banayan: Be willing to stray from the norm.
• World champion boxer Sugar Ray Leonard showed his capacity to buckle down as a child when he refused to ride the school bus. Instead he ran behind the bus on the way to school. Banayan characterizes the lesson this way: “Irrational commitment leads to irrational success.”
• Qi Lu, president of online services at Microsoft, decided in college that he was spending way too much time sleeping. “Although he admits it wasn’t easy,” Banayan writes, “Lu has engineered his body to function on four hours of sleep a night thanks to an unusual regimen that ranges from timed cold showers to daily three-mile runs.”
