The Success Disease.

In Life 7 Mins Read

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose. – Bill Gates

Staying Hungry when you are achieving success is very hard as Bill Gates once quipped: “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” Successful people and teams always have to deal with this issue at some point in their life/career; the ability to still stay hungry when you are achieving success and not get content/complacent is a great skill needed to stay at the top.

Staying grounded in the midst of success and not getting carried away with the praise, awards, recognition and all the rewards of succeeding can be very tempting. We all want to be recognized for our initiative and success but it can get into our heads which invariably leads to complacency and laziness among other self-defeating behaviors

Never let success get to your head and never let failure get to your heart.

Darren Hardy, Author and Former publisher of SUCCESS Magazine, in his great book: The Compound Effect noted that:

“The truth is, complacency has impacted all great empires, including, but not limited to, the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English. Why? Because nothing fails like success. Once-dominant empires have failed for this very reason. People get to a certain level of success and get too comfortable.”

People get to a certain level of success and get too comfortable.

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Book Summary: Made In America by Sam Walton.

In Book Summaries 13 Mins Read

“With the possible exception of Henry Ford, Sam Walton is the entrepreneur of the century.”- TOM PETERS, co-author of In Search of Excellence

Made In America is the story of how Sam Walton built a retailing empire, “Walmart” from a humble upbringing. He started it from a single dime store in a hardscrabble cotton town (Arkansas) into the largest retailer in the world. In a story rich with anecdotes and the “rules of the road” of both Main Street and Wall Street, Sam Walton chronicles the inspiration, heart, and optimism that propelled him to lasso the American Dream.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. grew to be the world’s largest corporation by revenue and the biggest private employer in the world. For a while, Walton was the richest man in America. As of July 31, 2020, Walmart has 11,496 stores and clubs in 27 countries, operating under 56 different names.

I think it must be human nature that when somebody homegrown gets on to something, the folks around them sometimes are the last to recognize it.

The company which Sam built Walmart is the world’s largest company by revenue, with US$514.405 billion, according to the Fortune Global 500 list in 2019. It is also the largest private employer in the world, with 2.2 million employees. It is a publicly-traded family-owned business, as the Walton family controls the company. Sam Walton’s heirs own over 50 percent of Walmart by holding company Walton Enterprises and their holdings.

Sam Walton was a relentless, hands on entrepreneur who led by example. In his own words:

I don’t know that anybody else has ever done it quite like me: started out as a pure neophyte, learned his trade, swept the floor, kept the books, trimmed the windows, weighed the candy, rung the cash register, installed the fixtures, remodeled the stores, built an organization of this size and quality, and kept on doing it right up to the end because they enjoyed it so much. No one that I know of has done it that way.

Here are my favourite take aways from reading,Made In America by Sam Walton:

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Lessons Learned from Jonah Berger’s Great Courses Class: How Ideas Spread.

In Great Courses 8 Mins Read

Professor Jonah Berger is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught since 2007. He graduated with distinction from Stanford University with a B.A. in Human Judgment and Decision Making and received his Ph.D.
from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He has been a visiting faculty member at Duke University and Cornell University.

Professor Berger studies social dynamics—why products, ideas, and behaviors become popular. He examines how individual decision making and social influence among people generate collective outcomes, such as social contagion and trends. His work mixes psychology, sociology, marketing, and economics to understand human behavior and its implications for collective outcomes.

Professor Berger is the author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On, which appeared on the best-seller lists of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and translated into almost 30 languages. His other books include Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior and The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind.

Here are my favourite take aways from viewing, Jonah Berger’s Great Courses Class: How Ideas Spread:

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Someday, I’ll…

In Life 7 Mins Read

Someday – The legendary place where your hopes, dreams, goals, and aspirations all magically come to fruition.Someday is dangerous and paralyzing. It traps you in the land of…

The Psychology of Human Misjudgement by Charlie Munger.

In Speech 57 Mins Read

Charlie Munger delivered this speech at Harvard University in June 1995. Munger spoke about a framework for decision making with an emphasis on factors contributing to human misjudgments. The Psychology of Human Misjudgment is talk eleven in Poor Charlie’s Almanack, a collection of speeches and lectures by Charlie Munger, compiled by Peter D. Kaufman. The speech is based on the concepts he read from Robert Cialdini’s great book. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.

Munger was so impressed by Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, after reading the book, Munger wrote in Poor Charlie’s Almanack:

“Cialdini had made himself into a super-tenured “Regents Professor” at very young age by  devising, describing, and explaining a vast group of  clever experiments in which man manipulated man to his detriment, with all of this made possible by  man’s intrinsic thinking flaws. ”

“I immediately sent copies of Cialdini’s book to all my children. I also gave Cialdini a share of Berkshire stock [Class A] to thank him for what he had done for me and the public. Incidentally, the sale by Cialdini of hundreds of thousands of copies of a book about social psychology was a huge feat,  considering that Cialdini didn’t claim that he was going to improve your sex life or make you any money. “

I immediately sent copies of Cialdini’s book to all my children. I also gave Cialdini a share of Berkshire stock [Class A] to thank him for what he had done for me and the public.

The Psychology of Human Misjudgement Transcript

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The Rogers Cybersecure Catalyst Accelerated Cybersecurity Training Program

In Cybersecurity 4 Mins Read

Rogers Cybersecure Catalyst helps Canadians and Canadian companies seize the opportunities and tackle the challenges of cybersecurity. The Catalyst collaborates with industry, governments and academic partners, and leverages the full expertise and capabilities of Ryerson University’s staff and faculty. The Catalyst is a not-for-profit corporation owned and operated by Ryerson University and based in Brampton, ON.

 The Rogers University Cybersecure Catalyst Accelerated Cybersecurity Training Program

The Program is a 20-week intensive cybersecurity training and certification program designed to give promising learners from diverse backgrounds the skills they need to launch careers in the cybersecurity sector.

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