Transcripts

Leonard Mlodinow:
In love, in business - if you look back on your life you'll find that minor unrelated events have as much or more impact as the ones you worked so hard to make happen.

Leonard Mlodinow, author of the book The Drunkard's Walk - How Randomness Rules our Lives, says when you realize the power or randomness you begin to understand how important persistence is in everything you do.

Persistence is an underrated and extremely important factor in life. And psychologists have also found that if you look at people who are very successful, in whatever field they're in; the number one trait they share is persistence - even greater than talent.

Because the more you persist the more random events and people will play into what you're doing and that can change the outcome.

Let me give you an example: the first Harry Potter book was rejected by nine publishers. Now if you wrote a book and you get three rejections, four, five, you might be discouraged by the time you get nine and yet good thing that she wasn't. Over twenty publishers rejected John Grisham's first book.

We like to think that we have control over where we're headed and so often…

We over-think and over-plan. We all work very hard to make our dreams come true and what happens in life is a result of both our ability, our talent and our hard work and of random factors and our reaction to those random factors. And what's more important is focusing on taking advantage of the random factors that come into play.

At somethingyoushouldknow.net I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.