Success By The Numbers: 44 Fascinating Quantifiers For Peak Performance

By A.J. Madden

The numbers have been divided into 8 essential categories, each one vitally important to your success (and happiness):

Narrow Focus
Goals and Systems
Hard Work
Model Success
The Law Of Association
One Degree
Never Stop Learning
Happiness

Let us begin.

1. Narrow Focus

Warren Buffet’s key to success in his words: Saying NO 99 times out of 100 to solicitation of his time or attention. The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.

Warren Buffet decided early in his career it would be impossible for him to make hundreds of right investment decisions, so he decided that he would invest only in the business that he was absolutely sure of, and then bet heavily on them. He owes 90% of his wealth to just ten investments.

Billionaires understand that the secret to genius is not complexity, it’s simplicity. Be monomaniacally focused at being world class at just a few things. Adopt the mindset of learned minimalism. Robin Sharma

The Law of 3 by Brian Tracy: There are 3 primary things that contribute to 90% of your success in any endeavor. Once you identify those 3 tasks, ask yourself, “If I could only perform one single task that will bring the most success, which task would it be?”. Focus on that one task, and do the other two in order of importance.

Success in any endeavor (football medicine, marriage, parenting, leadership, rocket science, etc.) always comes down to about a half-dozen fundamentals. These vital functions move the needle closer to the major goal. -Darren Hardy

The fundamentals make up 80-90% of what you need to know to succeed at anything. You will use these fundamentals the vast majority of the time. The other 10-20% is advanced tactics that will only use occasionally. Sam Ovens

For decades, I’ve studied the most successful people in many different fields, including investing, business, education, sports, medicine, and entertainment. And what I’ve found is that 80% of success is psychology and 20% is mechanics. Tony Robbins

Sturgeon’s Law: ninety percent of everything is crud.

If you never did 75% of what you do every day, it wouldn’t matter. Dan Peña

90% Rule: as you evaluate an option, think about the single most important criterion for that decision, and then simply give the option a score between zero and 100. If you rate it any lower than 90%, and change the rating to zero and simply reject it. Greg McKeown, Essentialism

98% of business owners fail because they aren’t able to focus for 3-5 hours a day, uninterrupted, on the one most important thing. Don’t worry about a bunch of business tactics, just pick one and do it every day for a few hours. Those who are able to focus the longest and also delay gratification the longest are the most successful in life. Look at pro athletes and Steve Jobs and other billionaires. They are psychopaths with this stuff. They cut everything else out and focus. Alex Becker

2. Goals and Systems

People who write down their goals are 9x (900%) more likely to achieve their goals than those who don’t. Only 20% of people have goals at all, and only 10% of them write them down. Dr. Jason Selk

90% of new small business startups fail. 90% of new franchises succeed. Why? Franchises have systems. Joe Crump

You can have anything you want in life if you’re willing to ask 1000 people. Byron Katie

According to Anders Ericsson, the best performers put in 4.5 hours of “deliberate practice” a day. Three ninety-minute sessions with recovery in between. Brian Johnson

3. Hard Work

When your mind is telling you you’re done, you’re really only about 40% done. David Goggins, retired Navy SEAL

90% of success is showing up. Get there and start working. You’re not going to feel perfect every day. Joe Rogan

20,000: the number of Tweets Joe Wicks (The Body Coach) estimates he sent out before he made any money from social media.

Successful people walk 25% faster than unsuccessful people. David Schwartz, The Magic of Thinking Big

1% better every day makes you 37 times better over the course of one year through “compound interest”.

10,000 hours of “deliberate practice” are required to become world class in any field. Malcolm Gladwell

The 10,000-hour rule is a fact. 3-4 hours a day for 10 years. This includes repetition as well as research. There is no way to get around it. Mastery is 20,000+ hours of focus. But if you are working on something you love, it doesn’t feel as long. Robert Greene

Willpower outperforms IQ in academic performance by a factor of 2. Brian Johnson

Motivation and energy levels have three times as much weight as physical resources. Napoleon Bonaparte

8:36-in a landmark study of elite performers by K. Ander’s Ericsson, the best of the elite performers slept for 8 hours and 36 minutes on average; the average American gets just 6 hours and 36 minutes per night on weeknights

4. Model Success

M.R. Kop Kopmeyer spent more than 50 years studying success. He derived more than 1,000 success principles from around 6,000 books. The most important principle of all: Use proven success methods. Learn from the experts. Successful people are those who learn from others who have gone before them. Unsuccessful people are those that try to make it all up. Successful people follow proven success principles, proven formulas, and they do them over and over again until they master them. Brian Tracy

Jeff Bezos read Sam Walton’s autobiography and it resonated with him, particularly Sam’s bias for action and his thriftiness. Jeff read the book over 100 times.

Spend time with people who are 20 years ahead of you at what you want to achieve. Tai Lopez

Five minutes with a genius is more valuable than five years with a really smart guy. Environmental exposure. Expose yourself to someone who is five, ten, or twenty years ahead of you. Jason Capital

One mentor is equal to 200 books. Tai Lopez

5. The Law Of Association

You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. The closer we are to someone, the more likely we are to imitate some of their habits. A person’s risk of becoming obese increases by 57% if he or she had a friend who became obese. One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. James Clear

We earn within 20-25% of the five people we spend the most time with. If your close friend earns $100,000 a year, you will earn between $75,000 and $125,000 a year. Ed Mylett

According to a Harvard Medical School study of 5,000 people over 20 years, you are 15% more likely to be happy if a friend of yours is happy, and 10% more likely if a friend of your friend is happy, and 6% more likely if a friend of a friend of a friend is happy. Loneliness has an even more powerful effect. You are 52% more likely to feel lonely if a close friend of yours feels lonely, and 25% more likely if a friend of your friend feels lonely, and 15% more likely if a friend of a friend of a friend (someone you’ve never even met) feels lonely. The same 3 degrees of separation effect can be found among binge drinkers, smokers, and obesity. If you become obese, it triples the chances of a close friend becoming obese.

70% of your happiness comes from your relationships with other people. -1996 study by researchers Murray and Peacock

6. One Degree

At 211 degrees, water is hot.

At 212 degrees, it boils.

And with boiling water, comes steam…

And with steam, you can power a locomotive.

A beautiful, uncomplicated metaphor that ideally should feed our every endeavor, consistently pushing us to make the extra effort in every task we undertake.

It reminds us that seemingly small things can make tremendous differences.

There are no real secrets to success. Success with anything, success in anything, has one fundamental aspect: effort. To achieve exponential results requires additional effort.

-Sam Parker, 212 The Extra Degree

At 33 degrees, water falling from the sky on a Saturday is a gray, rainy day. At 32 degrees, children are building snowmen and riding sleds. A single degree can be the difference between gloom and a winter wonderland. Sam Parker, 212 Degrees

7. Never Stop Learning

Warren Buffet reads 500 pages a day. Mark Cuban reads 3 hours a day. Bill Gates reads 50 books a year. Elon Musk taught himself to build rockets by reading. Tony Robbins said he “read 700 books in seven years–all on psychology, physiology, anything that could make a difference in life.” Marissa Levin

Research shows that asking questions improves learning and performance by as much as 150 percent. Gary Keller

The 7x1x7 Rule: Reading seven days per week for one hour per day in your chosen field will make you an international expert in seven years. John Spence

One hour per day of study will put you at the top of your field within three years. Within five years you’ll be a national authority. In seven years, you can be one of the best people in the world at what you do. Earl Nightingale

8. Happiness

95% of your emotions are determined by how you talk to yourself throughout your day. Brian Tracy

Individuals who watched just three minutes of negative news in the morning were 27% more likely to report their day as unhappy six to eight hours later. Shawn Archor

Adults who volunteer between 100 and 800 hours per year are happier and more satisfied with their lives than those serving below 100 and above 800. Furthermore, adults who volunteer 100 hours reduce mortality risk; volunteering above 100 hours shows no additional benefits. Because giving has diminishing marginal returns, capping your time helps preserve personal time for self-interest. In addition, by giving primarily in areas that are interesting to you and connect to your core values. If you love animals, then 100 hours at a pet shelter will be far more energizing than 100 hours cleaning up parks. Adam Grant

Giving correlates with higher incomes. In a study of Americans, every $1 in giving increases income by $3.75. In other words, people who give more tend to earn more. Adam Grant