There's a Chinese proverb, and I'm going to play it down, because my English is not good enough to make it pretty. 笨鸟先飞. Ben niao xian fei. Four words. Stupid. Bird. First. Fly. The stupid bird flies first.
When I came to the United States I looked at the American guys. Tall, blond, blue eyes, names that were easy for everybody to say. And I looked at myself. A little guy from East Turkistan. I didn't speak English. I didn't have a college degree. There were eight million reasons I should fail, and every one of them was an advantage somebody else had over me.
The bird is stupid. It flies first. What does it change about itself to get there first?
Nothing. It doesn't get smarter in the air. When you have disadvantages you don't get to fly better. You leave earlier, and you do more of the thing than the bird that left on time. If somebody sleeps until eight, you wake up at six, or five. That was my whole answer to the tall guys. I was like, okay. I might have to work harder.
Then I found a book. It was called The 10X Rule. I didn't have a lot of choice at the time. I saw good reviews, I bought it, I read it. You don't have to buy it, I'll save you the twenty dollars and the eight days. Assume you have all the disadvantages. You didn't graduate from Yale or MIT or Harvard. Maybe you're an immigrant. Maybe your English is broken. So to turn the disadvantage into an advantage, you don't have to be super genius. You don't have to be high IQ. You don't have to be highly educated. You only need to do one thing, and it's ten times. If your colleague calls ten customers a day, call a hundred. If he sends ten emails, send a hundred. If he learns one way to close a sale, learn ten.
So that's what I did. If the guy next to me read one book, I was going to read ten. Go back to my Amazon purchase history from twenty eleven, twelve, thirteen. It's all books. If he practiced one hour, I practiced ten. If he wrote ten methods, I wrote a hundred. Ten times more, for an extended period of time, until I reached the goal. Then another goal, and ten times on that. Period.