Secrets of Greatness: What it Takes to be Great

Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work
By Geoffrey Colvin

What makes Tiger Woods great? What made Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett the world’s premier investor? We think we know: Each was a natural who came into the world with a gift for doing exactly what he ended up doing. As Buffett told Fortune not long ago, he was “wired at birth to allocate capital.” It’s a one-in-a-million thing. You’ve got it - or you don’t.

Well, folks, it’s not so simple. For one thing, you do not possess a natural gift for a certain job, because targeted natural gifts don’t exist. (Sorry, Warren.) You are not a born CEO or investor or chess grandmaster. You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years. And not just any hard work, but work of a particular type that’s demanding and painful.

Buffett, for instance, is famed for his discipline and the hours he spends studying financial statements of potential investment targets. The good news is that your lack of a natural gift is irrelevant - talent has little or nothing to do with greatness. You can make yourself into any number of things, and you can even make yourself great.

Scientific experts are producing remarkably consistent findings across a wide array of fields. Understand that talent doesn’t mean intelligence, motivation or personality traits. It’s an innate ability to do some specific activity especially well. British-based researchers Michael J. Howe, Jane W. Davidson and John A. Sluboda conclude in an extensive study, “The evidence we have surveyed … does not support the [notion that] excelling is a consequence of possessing innate gifts.”

To see how the researchers could reach such a conclusion, consider the problem they were trying to solve. In virtually every field of endeavor, most people learn quickly at first, then more slowly and then stop developing completely. Yet a few do improve for years and even decades, and go on to greatness.

The irresistible question - the “fundamental challenge” for researchers in this field, says the most prominent of them, professor K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University - is, Why? How are certain people able to go on improving? The answers begin with consistent observations about great performers in many fields.
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How to Kill your Blog, and Bring it Back to Life!

Oh man, the past 2 months or so have been an interesting ride for Cultivate Greatness. Someone with ill intentions had exploited a hole in Wordpress and attached some porn to my RSS feed, which thankfully, was incorrect code, so my RSS feeders didn’t see it, but Google did. They in turn stopped sending ads to the site, and they took me out of all of the Google Search Engine Results Pages.

Now, this is a very tough thing to have occur. The Adsense coin can come in quite handy, and mine dried up mid-November. At first, I had NO idea why. Then someone told me that my feed wasn’t showing up in their feed reader and that I needed to look into it. Well, come to find out, there was pretty nasty text links to some sites showing up when I went to do a feed validation on feedburner.com.

This was very tricky to pinpoint where the information was. What the hacker did was go into wp-blog-header.php file and attach another file via php. It listed something to the effect of eval(base64_decode(”CiBwcmludCAiPHUgc3…”) at the bottom of the wp-blog-header file. This linked to the file that had the porn links. This file would precede my rss feed. It was a file named text.php and it had all the porn links that linked back to an education site, called Newman.edu/moodledata. There were no pictures on each page that links went to, only vulgar text.
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According to Jung, Which Type of Person are You?

I came across this great site that goes over the Myers Briggs Personality test. This is a very powerful test that will give you valuable insight into your personality and what makes you tick. This will also tell you some of the people throughout history that also have the same characteristics as you.

So, please feel free to spend 10 minutes on the test, and leave a comment describing your personality type, and how this information might affect you moving forward.

Here is the Carl Jung test

For me, I am an ENTP (Extroverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving) is one of the sixteen personality types from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), and the Keirsey Temperament Sorter.

The ENTP has been described variously as the innovator,[1] the originator,[2] the lawyer,[3] the inventor,[4] the explorer,[5] and the visionary.[3] They also fall into the general categories of thinkers, rationals, and engineers.[6] Through their primary function-attitude of extraverted intuition (Ne), ENTPs are quick to see complex interrelationships between people, things, and ideas. These interrelationships are analyzed in profound detail through the ENTPs auxiliary function, introverted thinking (Ti). The result is an in-depth understanding of the way things and relationships work, and how they can be improved.

The following blockquote describes me pretty accurately. It is interesting to me to find out that the following people share the characteristics with me. Walt Disney, Benjamin Franklin, Ray Kurtzweil, Buckminster Fuller, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Alexander the Great, Lewis Carrol, George Carlin, Weird Al Yankovic, Alfred Hitchcock, Tom Hanks, and Steve Jobs.

I can deal with that. Read more

Fail Your Way to Success

by Travis Wright

The road to success isn’t without bumps. There are many times where you will not be as successful as you would like. But it is a reason to give up? No. You must move forward with positive anticipation and believe in your end goal.

Many people once they fail move back into their comfort zones and get off the road. This is the wrong approach. You must persevere. The most successful people are the one with the most failures. This is true, however, they are wise, as they have LEARNED from their failures.

Learn from your failures, and don’t allow the fear of failure to draw you in and make you wither. You need to embrace failure, as it will show you which road NOT to go down. Just make sure not to recreate the same failure over and over again. Fail once, learn, and try a new approach. This is the ONLY way to true success.

You can’t win the race, if you stand behind the starting line. You all have greatness within you. So go fail your way to the top. YOU WILL WIN, IF YOU DON’T QUIT.

Much Love!

Travis Wright

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