{"id":683,"date":"2009-07-28T05:00:49","date_gmt":"2009-07-28T10:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/?p=683"},"modified":"2009-07-24T09:50:26","modified_gmt":"2009-07-24T14:50:26","slug":"eighty-percent-of-success-is-showing-up%e2%80%94and-showing-up-and-showing-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/28\/eighty-percent-of-success-is-showing-up%e2%80%94and-showing-up-and-showing-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Eighty Percent of Success Is Showing Up\u2014and Showing Up, and Showing Up"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my last post, I said that addiction to ambition<\/a> is a good thing: Find your perfect pitch, a great idea, believe in yourself, and work, work, work. That\u2019s all well and good, but it can\u2019t be that simple, can it? What if you don\u2019t have that brilliant, category-killing idea? Not all of us can be business geniuses. David Rubenstein<\/strong>, who became the richest man in the nation\u2019s capital through his investments in private equity, is widely considered one of the smartest people in Washington. Not so, he told me: \u201cWhen you get older in life, you realize there are very few geniuses in this world. Most likely, you will never meet one, and Randy, you did not meet one today.\u201d Rubenstein is certainly no dummy, but just as there are brilliant successes who are less than brilliant, there are also plenty of smart, unsuccessful people. Brains is part of the equation, but it\u2019s not the determining factor in becoming an RMIT. \u201cThe reason some people get farther ahead of other people,\u201d Rubenstein told me, \u201cis because they possess persistence.\u201d
\nWoody Allen<\/strong> famously said \u201cEighty percent of success is showing up,\u201d and although he was joking, he wasn\u2019t kidding. Wayne Huizenga<\/strong>, one of the greatest serial entrepreneurs in American history, let alone Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, has a net worth in excess of $3\u00a0billion. He credits his success not to Einstein-like genius, but to his addiction to the business. \u201cI was always the first one in the office and the last one to leave,\u201d he told me. Huizenga recalled that at a celebration after his legendary sale of Blockbuster Video<\/strong>, he found out that a number of executives had played a secret game in which they took turns trying to beat him to the office each morning: \u201cI learned that one morning a colleague, Bob Garren<\/strong>, arrived at the office at 5 a.m. determined to beat me, but I had arrived at 4:30. It wasn\u2019t a competitive thing for me. It\u2019s just that every day, I couldn\u2019t wait to get to work because I enjoyed it so much. I wanted to be there all the time.\u201d Huizenga\u2019s ambition addiction and work ethic prompted a joke that circulated through the halls of Blockbuster: \u201cIf you don\u2019t show up on Saturday, don\u2019t bother coming in on Sunday.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my last post, I said that addiction to ambition<\/a> is a good thing: Find your perfect pitch, a great idea, believe in yourself, and work, work, work. That\u2019s all well and good, but it can\u2019t be that simple, can it? What if you don\u2019t have that brilliant, category-killing idea? Not all of us can be business geniuses. David Rubenstein<\/strong>, who became the richest man in the nation\u2019s capital through his investments in private equity, is widely considered one of the smartest people in Washington. Not so, he told me: \u201cWhen you get older in life, you realize there are very few geniuses in this world. Most likely, you will never meet one, and Randy, you did not meet one today.\u201d Rubenstein is certainly no dummy, but just as there are brilliant successes who are less than brilliant, there are also plenty of smart, unsuccessful people. Brains is part of the equation, but it\u2019s not the determining factor in becoming an RMIT.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[250,114,153,157],"tags":[265,263,264,258,183,220,262,267,259,257,261,260,266],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=683"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":686,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683\/revisions\/686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}