Winning mentality.

We often hear tales about how those sportsmen and women who excel in their chosen fields are totally focused and driven to achieve success, to the extent that nothing else matters.

Tiger Woods - golfing since he could walk and all he ever wanted to do was be the best golfer in the world. (And shag about a bit, but that came later and isn't important.)

Michael Schumacher - Started karting in nappies, won loads of F1 titles, got boring and retired. Then came back and did fuck all for Mercedes then retired again. And then head butted that rock....

Sir Steve Redgrave - Ultimate olympian, won all them gongs despite being diabetic like the wife's nan, and then retired. Until he popped up on that ski jumping thing on channel 4 last year. And then got injured and had to cry off, allowing that slightly suspect looking geordie singer who came 4th on X-Factor to win.

The point is, these people decide fairly early on that they're going to be "winners" and don't waste time doing the type of stuff that we all do on a regular basis like going for a burger and a pint or catching the new Tom Cruise flick at the pictures because they're training. Hard......

Is it worth it?

I've never won an Oscar or a gold medal, but if I'm honest, I couldn't be arsed putting the effort in and I'd rather have a normal life with actual friends and I wouldn't entertain going for a beer with any of them because they're obviously boring twats.

"Did you see Corrie last night, Tony McCoy?"

"No, I was in bed for seven 'cos I had an early start on the gallups this morning."

Wanker.......

It's not just about winning mentality. Its about right place at the right time and the 10,000 hour rule.

Ps, Breadman, read the book, "Outliers" - it has a lot of interesting insight into this subject.

Eg, was Bill Gates really a genius who came from zero to billionaire through pure hard work? Or was he in the right place at the right time? He just happened to be the right age to be interested in computers at the right time. He was into computer programming like a zillion other kids of the time but he happened to be the only one who had access to certain privileges and happened to go to the only college in the usa that had certain computers...

I've always suspected that there was summat like that involved.

I'll read that book, cheers.

You could have the best idea in the world ever, but if you're stuck up a mountain in Nepal, it's never going to happen because you haven't got the contacts.

Life really is a lottery, isn't it?

And there's no way I'm giving a thousand hours to anything.

Unless it involves regular breaks and overtime at weekends.....

Here is a little intro from somewhere on the net...

Why is Bill Gates a billionaire? He's smart, of course, and he has tremendous ambition. But he probably wouldn't have started Microsoft (MSFT) if he hadn't been born in 1955. That made Gates old enough to take advantage of the opportunities that opened up with the introduction, in 1975, of the Altair 8800, the first do-it-yourself computer kit. But he wasn't so old as to be too settled in his life to take a leap of faith.

Gates also was fortunate to attend Lakeside, a private school in Seattle with its own computer. The Lakeside machine was one of a new generation of computers that shared processing power with a much larger computer downtown. That meant he could learn programming without being slowed by the laborious punch-card process used for computers just a year or two earlier. Gates had thousands of hours of programming under his belt when the Altair became available, making him perfectly prepared to take maximum advantage of the PC revolution.

Coincidence? Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was born in 1953, Apple (AAPL) founder Steve Jobs in 1955, and Sun Microsystems (SUNW) founders Bill Joy and Scott McNealy in 1954. All of these Silicon Valley pioneers succeeded not just on their extraordinary talent but also because they had the right opportunities at exactly the right time. And there you have the premise of Malcolm Gladwell's latest guaranteed best-seller, Outliers: The Story of Success.

Just bought it on Amazon for eight quid.

Cheers, Biggie.

It's all a combination of good ideas and luck, isn't it......?