Strive

How Doing The Things Most Uncomfortable Leads to Success

Scott Amyx

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119387275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Business

Has success eluded you, no matter how hard you try?

Are you frustrated by trying to achieve your dreams by copying others? Internationally-acclaimed speaker and founder of the cutting-edge venture capital Amyx Ventures, Scott Amyx reveals how you can attain real success in your life, your way. His theory of Strive is a challenge to the conventional wisdom that has held so many people back from achieving their goals and enjoying lasting happiness. Scott rose from obscure poverty to globe-trotting success, and he invites you to share in his journey by adopting a new mindset towards your personal challenges: embrace them. Scott shows you how through stories of the most unlikely individuals who embraced difficult personal change to become outrageously successful. He helps you take stock of your own habits and practices to identify how your routine and misconceptions are holding you back. Fascinating insights from throughout history up through today's cutting-edge research show how embracing discomfort fuels lasting success.

Shape your life in new, exciting ways. You can have control over your career, your outlook, your actions, and your priorities. This book helps you get a fresh start to begin building the successful life you want.

• Discover what really drives success---and how conventional wisdom is wrong
• Clearly identify your own personal challenges---and how to overcome them
• Delve into the latest research on high performance to create a better you
• Learn how high-achievers approach challenge, change, and success

Strive is an unconventional approach to attaining your dreams because it takes what makes you unique and turns it to your advantage. Have you been duped by common myths of success? Are you disappointed by the constant struggle in life? Scott reveals how only you have the power to change your trajectory. Strive is your handbook for getting comfortable with discomfort, embracing and enjoying new challenges, and achieving real, lasting success.

1
Strive

What is the real key to success that ties together the most famous winners in history? To become successful, you must pursue challenges that are tremendously uncomfortable and outside your comfort zone. Only this type of stretching beyond what you are comfortable with will allow you to achieve success.

Writers often embody the key aspects of Strive: Despite the odds, they frequently step outside of their comfort zone to become more than they dreamed possible. There are powerful risks involved with writing, and financial ruin is only one.

Take one of the most famous writers, J. K. Rowling, the mastermind behind the Harry Potter series. While growing up, Rowling exhibited a talent for storytelling, but did not pursue writing in college. She actually majored in French, since it was seen as a “safer” way to obtain gainful employment. Rowling's idea for the Harry Potter stories went unwritten for some time. As a matter of fact, when she first conceived of the idea, she had nothing to write with and was too timid to even ask for a pen. So one of the best‐selling children's series in modern memory almost went unnoticed, a passing thought on a train, left behind on the platform like so many other great ideas.

But then Rowling's life was flipped upside down. She found herself alone with a child to raise and no job. Most people would have sought out any job to pay the bills. Rowling was, after all, an educated individual with a strong drive to succeed. However, she chose the uncomfortable path instead. She accepted the stigma of obtaining government aid for herself and her child, and threw herself into finally drawing out the story that had been bubbling over in her mind for so long.

Rowling was striving for success. She embraced the uncomfortable to obtain her goal. But she still didn't have it. Simply writing the book The Philosopher's Stone was not enough to lift her from the poorhouse. Getting it published was another struggle that she tackled with a dogged determination: The publishing world is a Wild West shootout with many actors but extremely few stars. As the Internet has risen, traditional publishing venues have fallen, making the print publication of any one writer's work difficult. Rowling did not have fantastic luck—she had terrible luck. The rejections for her book piled up, one after another. Twelve publishing houses ended up rejecting her work. When she finally did find a small publishing house that accepted the manuscript, she was advised to get a day job—after all, writers don't make much. That was in 1997, when Rowling's net worth was somewhere around zero. In 2015, the Motley Fool estimated that Rowling's brand was worth an estimated $15 billion. (Her personal net worth, however, was a mere $1 billion. She is still the wealthiest writer of all time. She beats out horror monarch Stephen King, who, with all his books combined, is worth an estimated $400 million.)

Rowling is not the only writer to embody the concept of Strive. The Grand Dame of Mystery herself, Agatha Christie, knew a thing about it. Her first manuscript was rejected by many publishers, and Christie had to wait five years before her book would see print. Perhaps the king of perseverance is Louis L'Amour, who suffered 200 rejections before going on to be one of the most recognized authors in the world. Perseverance is an important part of Strive, because embracing the unknown can be challenging.

Popular Beliefs About Success Are Profoundly Wrong

Of course, there is no denying that talented, hard‐working people can become successful—but there are millions of them, and most of them do not achieve real, lasting success in their lives. Real, lasting success often occurs as a result of intentionality that often requires doing “the uncomfortable” to stretch that individual to obtain new capabilities and new opportunities.

There is nothing mystifying about this striving to get outside of your comfort zone. One look at a da Vinci painting can convince anyone that the man was an astounding student of the human form. What no one sees, however, is the profoundly uncomfortable steps da Vinci took to finally achieve those incredible results. The Renaissance brought about an increased hunger for truth, and achieving accurate depictions of the human form was highly prized. This led some artists to go well beyond sketching nude models. Artists such as Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni and Antonio Pollaiuolo were known to have used their studies of dissected cadavers to improve their own work. Da Vinci himself is thought to have dissected 30 bodies. Uncomfortable indeed.

It's clear that the greatest successes came to people who pushed themselves outside their comfort zones. This striving to be more influences our ultimate success—and leads to even greater accomplishments. As you succeed in large and small ways, you will begin to find that there simply are more opportunities and people who will help you move upward toward the next level of your goal.

Successful people do not begin as “outliers” or masters. They are people who are subject to society, health, and class, just as you and I. They also had problems and struggles that seemed impossible to surmount. Da Vinci was born out of wedlock to a mother who did not acknowledge him; it was even thought that his mother was an Arab servant that da Vinci's father eventually “gave” to another man in the village. Elizabeth I was born to one of her father's many doomed wives and feared for her life since she did not follow the teachings of the Catholic Church. Thomas Edison was told that he was “too stupid to learn anything.” Isaac Newton, whose Principia Mathematica became the foundation for all modern math and science, failed miserably as a farmer. In modern times, star actress Michele Yeoh trained hard until she was 16 to become a ballerina, when she suffered irreparable damage to her back. Young George Soros was one of the survivors of the Siege of Budapest. All these people suffered hardships just like you and I; they also show that success comes from striving to do better through uncomfortable challenges and risks. Some people may start out well, and others may have more money or talent; but what really differentiates the winners is the way they embrace change and risk to improve their lives and achieve their dreams.

Think about it: The ability to succeed is within your grasp. It doesn't depend on money, background, or even talent. (Think of how many people are famous for being…well, famous.)

You can be successful, but why stop there? Once you help yourself achieve wonderful things, just think of how you can impact the world. Imagine we can create a repeatable process for success to help all people from all walks of life. This would completely revolutionize our world. The World Bank estimated that 10% of the world's population lives in extreme poverty. (About 50% of the world is considered poor.) About half of the poor in the world are children. How many lives could be changed by lifting these people from poverty into the middle class?

Society would suddenly become less polarized. Much of the current rise in populism around the world is related to globalization and the sharply rising income inequality. Take France, for example. French farmers need government assistance to survive, because the cheap agricultural products from EU heavyweight Germany are flooding their markets. The average French farmer works extremely hard—but despite talent and drive, he cannot survive in the new global economy. It is not only in France that those who are working hard cannot make ends meet. Americans are struggling, too. The loss of well‐paying factory jobs has really been only one more nail in the middle class's coffin, destroying not only the underpinnings of the middle class, but also marriages and family structures. Tech companies large and small, once seen as the saviors of middle class jobs, are replacing existing American engineers with cheaper labor from other countries (in some cases, American engineers are actually training their offshore replacements to take their jobs), cloud services, and automation. It can feel like the situation is hopeless.

But it's not. And I am confident that by showing you that Strive works, you can not only improve your life, but help others improve theirs.

Strive for Real, Lasting Success

The secret to success is embracing uncomfortable change and risk to reach your goals. Throughout history, this principle has often been proven to be true. It accounts for the wild successes of some and the sad failures of others. The amazing thing about Strive is that anyone can do it, regardless of background, upbringing, talent, time, or education.

Those who reach outside their comfort zone are those who succeed. However, reaching outside your comfort zone does not mean just doing anything. To Strive is to pursue the right kind of risk while taking care of yourself and your loved ones. It involves a balanced approach to life that helps you focus clearly on what you want and how to achieve it. I have used the letters from STRIVE to help create a simple approach to embracing change and risk in your life.

(S)—Set a Goal

What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.

—Zig Ziglar, American author and motivational speaker, 1926–2012

The first step to achieving wild success is to know what it will look like for you. Believe it or not, one of the reasons many people fail is because they do not set a clear and achievable goal. Being rich is not a goal, and neither is being famous. These can be the natural outcomes of pursuing your goal, but they are not goals by themselves. This is because they do not follow the ideal of Strive, which is to pursue and attain success that leads to your improvement and, hopefully, the enrichment of those around you. If being rich could be a goal, you would only need to marry a rich man or woman to achieve that, but you would experience no personal growth. The same is true for fame: You can put silly videos of yourself on YouTube so the world laughs at you, but will experience no lasting, personal growth from it. (Later, we will look at how easy money and fame can actually destroy people.) A real goal is something that takes you from what you are and where you are right now to a better place and becoming a better person. Some research has shown that having a clear goal is correlated with a more positive outlook.

(T)—Think About How to Get Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Strive
• 2 Are You Passionate Enough?
• 3 Practice and Opportunity
• 4 Are You Special?
• 5 The Secret Things
• 6 Disrupt Yourself
• 7 Abandoning Your Comfort Zone
• 8 When the Going Gets Tough
• 9 Verify and Magnify Your Success
• 10 Enhance Yourself
• Epilogue
• Index
• End User License Agreement