Execution is overrated.
If I can do one thing that will 100X my results, then the other 99 things don't really matter. But people don't like hearing this because it is unbelievably hard to find that one thing that is going to 100X your results. They almost don't exist anywhere. So instead, we make books about morning routines and what to eat, as if eating the same meal that Kobe Bryant ate before basketball games is going to make you play basketball like Kobe Bryant.
Look, execution is necessary—it's just not sufficient. And 99% of the advice you're going to get out in the world is about execution. The hardest part about achieving extreme success isn't the work; anyone can put in the work. It's about being a correct contrarian. It's the willingness to question widely-held assumptions. It's the ability to look at alternatives or opportunities that most people can't be bothered with. It's the ability to adopt unpopular beliefs and then stick to them when people start making fun of you (and probably trying to kill you, considering your ambitions by reading this book).
We forget that Steve Jobs had legions of haters throughout the eighties and nineties. Hell, he even got kicked out of his own company for being a fucking psycho. If you look at the biggest breakthroughs throughout human history, they were all correct contrarian ideas. At one point, every single one of these ideas sounded ridiculous. And at every point, somebody very, very famous said, "That's not ridiculous; I think I can do it." And this is true for most people who have achieved extreme success, whatever field they're in.
For example, the Oracle of Omaha (biggest investor by the way) recently wrote, "In the 58 years of Berkshire management, most of my capital allocation decisions have been no better than so-so. Our results have been the product of about a dozen truly good decisions." That's fucking mind-blowing. This dude has been doing this for 60 years, and he says, "I made about a dozen good decisions."
As a successful person, there's a temptation to believe that you know what you're doing much more than you actually do. It's not intuitive that one simple decision can have such an outsized impact on a person's career. So you start convincing yourself that, "Yeah, I do know the secret to getting up early and working hard in the gym," or "I do know how to run meetings better than everybody else," when actually, you're probably just slightly above average.
Because it doesn't matter if you put butter in your coffee, or if you have a standing desk, or if you use Evernote instead of Google Docs. It's like moving around the furniture in a house and claiming it's a better house. If you don't believe me, go out and meet a hundred successful entrepreneurs and leaders. I guarantee they are not in the gym at 4:30 in the morning. They're not meditating two hours a day because the real world is much messier. It's also a lot more fun.
Winston Churchill basically won World War II sitting in a bathtub drinking scotch all day. It's true—go look it up. Or like Thomas Edison. He would famously work for multiple days straight, sleeping in his lab for one hour a night. You want to know what his secret was? Cocaine—not kidding. That's why we have a light bulb.