When I was a student in 1989, I backpacked around Egypt. The overnight bus from Cairo to Dahab, a settlement on the Red Sea, was exhausting; full of partying Egyptians heading to the Red Sea for vacation. I didn’t manage a minutes sleep.
Upon arriving at Dahab in the morning, I found a dollar a night room in a local Bedouin village, dropped my pack and walked down to the beach to find a place to eat breakfast. In 1989 Dahab was idyllic. There were no 5* hotels, everything was cheap and super laid back. I found a bar, lay down on the floor cushions and promptly passed out.
When I woke it was mid-afternoon. No-one had felt the need to wake me up and move me on! As I came to my senses I noticed a board game which I had seen before but never played. It was backgammon, an ancient game of strategy believed to date back over 5,000 years and originating from modern day Iraq. That bar in Dahab in 1989 is where I learnt to play backgammon.
Over the past 30+ years I have played backgammon whenever the opportunity arose and over a series of games, would normally beat my opponent. I came to the conclusion that I was quite a good player. That conclusion went up in smoke over the past month. I was introduced to a backgammon club here in Dubai that holds weekly tournaments. I’ve only made it past the first round once!
When you compare yourself to the average, then your chances of outperforming are relatively high. This leads to the mistaken conclusion that you are better than you are which while a comfortable state of mind, can have significant consequences in everything from our business to our personal life.
In any given discipline, the successful people are not the average ones. Top performing leaders surround themselves with the top performing people; people who challenge them and are experts in their respective fields, often knowing more than the leader themselves. Average leaders feel threatened by such people and built a compliant team that won’t challenge them. The results are normally average and always below potential.
Life is not equitable or fair, it is the top 10%, 5%, 1% that take 80%+ of the pie. However, the opportunity to be in the top 10% is there for the taking. The question is how.
My first piece of advice is whatever you choose to do in life, make sure it’s something you’re passionate about. That makes everything else that follows so much easier.
The 1960’s personal empowerment guru Earl Nightingale once stated that if we spend an hour per day studying something we are passionate about, within 5 years we will be national authorities. That puts us in the top 10%.
Only by benchmarking yourself against the best and challenging yourself to reach their standards can you reach that top 10%. Einstein once said that “Learning should begin at birth and only end at death”. If you enjoy what you are learning the process becomes self-fulfilling.
What does this mean for me and my backgammon ambitions? Well, I have started reading my first backgammon book and average 3 matches per day against an expert AI opponent on an app that allows me to monitor my errors. I now know my ‘PR’ or ‘Player Ranking’ and have started to reprogram how I read the board. It will be a while before I am reaching the latter rounds of any tournaments, my learning has only just begun, however as long as the passion is there, the results will follow.
The Top 10% is never out of reach for any of us.
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