Dirk de Bruin (perhaps better known on the internet as Diggy) has released his Confidence Black Book, a complete 30-day guide to becoming a more confident person in all areas of life.

I had initially assumed that it was about dating, but it really has a much broader scope, covering diet, exercise, relationships, career, and other things. In short, it’s about conquering limiting beliefs that stand in the way of increased happiness, success, and goal achievement.

I appreciate that he based the book on his own personal experiences, as he spent seven years learning how to build confidence and the kind of life he wants to live. That’s how he can say for certain that his stuff works, because he used it all himself.

While I thought he had a lot of good insights in the book, I cheated by skipping the 30 daily tasks he gives. (Tip: don’t do this!) I also skipped over the bonuses (12 motivational videos and an NLP visualization method video, so there’s even more value than meets the eye.

He’s set up an opt-in page to a series of free videos with tips and insight into becoming more confident. I haven’t seen them, but if you want the secret to indestructible confidence, you know what to do.

In Want to Get Rich? Be (Moderately) Happy, Laura Rowley talks about some studies that have revealed surprising downsides to extreme happiness.

What? Surely this is heresy! Supreme happiness is the holy grail that we spend our whole lives looking for. You can never have too much of it, right?

Well, let’s just see.

People were asked to rate themselves on a happiness scale of 1 to 10. The perfect 10s had the most self-confidence, energy, close friends, and time spent dating. That’s not unexpected. Everyone likes happy people. Also, research showed that the 10s were likely to misremember things for the better, to recall being happier in retrospect than they actually reported at the time. This makes it easier for them to see the best in people.

What about the people who were happy but not too happy? The 7s and 8s did the best in terms of grades, class attendance, conscientiousness, income, education, and career. The idea is that moderately happy people receive a lot of benefits from their happiness, but they also harbor a touch of dissatisfaction that pushes them to strive for more. This may be a bit surprising, but it makes sense. If everything is perfect, you get comfortable and stop trying so hard.

It turns out that there’s an even bigger downside to excessive happiness: death. The extremely happy don’t live as long as the moderately happy.

Even the researchers were shocked by this one. They speculate that the reason may be because the super happy don’t pay enough attention to illness, or they don’t recognize the danger of the risks they take. Also, sustained euphoria takes its toll on the body, just like chronic stress. And because people aren’t genetically programmed to be extremely happy all the time, some people turn to drugs as happiness boosters.

University of Illinois psychology professor Ed Diener said, “Happiness, like spirituality, is partially a private pursuit, defined by individuals based on their personal values. Be wary when people tell you to live for the moment, to strive for an exciting life, or that you ought to be happier. Chasing super-happiness is a mistake that can lead you astray and be self-defeating.”

Yes, there’s always a downside to having too much of a good thing, even happiness.

Photo by JasonRogers

If you could achieve anything in just one year, what would you do? Clone dinosaurs? Achieve 0% body fat? Swim around the world at warp 10? Discover the lost treasure of the Knights Templar? Sneeze with your eyes open?

Nothing is off the table if you read Achieve Anything In Just One Year by Jason Harvey, a Certified Life Coach and the founder of The Limitless Institute.

OK, the title is perhaps a bit exaggerated, but you already knew that. A more accurate (though less marketable) title would be “Daily Bite-Sized Self Improvement Tips for a Whole Year: Makes a Great Holiday Gift.”

This comprehensive and inspiring book shows you how to do things such as:

• Set goals and stick with them
• Take daily action that creates a ripple effect
• Stay motivated, focused and balanced
• Feel happier every day
• Define, pursue and celebrate personal success

Yes, a lot of books cover this kind of stuff, but what sets this book apart from the pack is the way it’s organized. The page-a-day format was a fantastic idea, and I definitely think that if you read one page a day and really take the time to think about it, do the exercises, and put it into practice, then major transformation is possible.

I’ll be giving away my copy as a Christmas present, since New Year’s is the perfect time to begin the 365 day program. If you’re short on holiday gift ideas, this would make a good one for a lot of people.

Keep in mind that while this book has enough material to cover all of 2011, it can’t cover all of 2012 because of the leap year and the 366th day. (Of course, that could be a moot point, considering the end of the world in 2012.)

It’s easy to look at famous people and assume that they must have stumbled onto overnight success somehow. We think they were born with amazing talent that was immediately appreciated by the world. Unfortunately, this makes it easy to think that if you’re not successful by now, there’s no point in trying.

Of course, this isn’t true, even though it may seem that way. It’s always good to be reminded that even the biggest successes are almost always preceded by numerous failures, and that persistence is the key to eventually being a success.

Someone emailed me to say they featured my blog in their post 50 Famously Successful People Who Failed At First. I was annoyed that this turned out not to be true (apparently the email was a sloppy copy and paste job), but anyway, it’s a good list of people who reached success only after they had gotten failure out of their system.

It’s broken up into categories: business gurus, scientists and thinkers, inventors, public figures, Hollywood types, writers and artists, musicians, and athletes. But be warned that I noticed a few factual errors.

Here are some of my favorites that I hadn’t heard before, and which appear to be true:

• Walt Disney was fired from a newspaper because “he lacked imagination and had no good ideas.”
• Oprah Winfrey was fired from her job as a television reporter because she was “unfit for TV.”
• Elvis Presley was fired and told “You ain’t goin’ nowhere, son. You ought to go back to drivin’ a truck.”

Do you know any successful failures who should be added?

Photo by Hammarstrand

You’ve probably heard about Stephen Covey’s classic The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. A great book, but what could be 11 times better?* How about The 77 Traits of Highly Successful People?

This free ebook is a joint venture masterminded by Mark Foo, involving myself and 47 other personal development bloggers. The collaborative nature means a variety of different voices, but they’re all focused on one thing: how ordinary people can achieve extraordinary results.

48 top notch bloggers. 77 essential success traits. 233 captivating pages. Free with your email opt-in.

* OK, maybe not 11 times better, but you get the idea.

Everyone is talking about Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success. Many people say it’s great, and it is.

It’s filled with amazing insights into success. It took me a long time to read it because I found that reading just a few pages sometimes gave me enough to hold me over all week.

You can read the prologue here and some excerpts here. (See “The 10,000 Hour Rule,” “Harlan Kentucky,” and “Rice Paddies and Math Tests” in the sidebar. The last one was enough to make me start learning to count in Cantonese.)

Just be aware that it’s not a how-to guide with a list of steps to take. In fact, his idea that successful people are merely a product of their environment might make you go all fatalistic like the Merovingian. It’s meant to be more intriguing than practical.

My only disappointment is that I was hoping for a lot more detail about the 10,000 hour rule that he’s so well known for. It says that pretty much anyone can become successful in pretty much anything if and only if they put in 10,000 hours of practice.

But what level of granularity does that apply to? Does 10,000 hours of being creative make you successful at being creative, or is that too broad? Does it really take 10,000 hours of practice to be successful at reciting the alphabet, or is that too narrow?

In Success Is For Suckers, I wrote about whether success is worth it, in response to Glen Allsopp’s post What Malcolm Gladwell Should Have Told You In ‘Outliers’. Now having finished the book, I can better see what Glen was talking about.

Compare these two examples from the book of people who sacrificed their childhood in the name of success. One was Bill Gates. He sacrificed his childhood to become the richest man in the world doing what he loved. That’s way more than a fair tradeoff.

Another was a poor girl named Marita. She sacrificed her childhood for an 84% chance of catching up to her grade level in mathematics. It’s not mentioned whether she got there, and if she did, we’re only talking about mediocre math ability by the standards of a country that’s notoriously bad at it. The link between that and success is far from clear.

Of course, Bill Gates didn’t know things were going to work out so well for him. But he would have gladly made the sacrifice regardless, just because it was more appealing to him than anything else he could be doing. Maybe Marita feels the same way. I hope she does.

But not knowing the outcome in advance can make the decision very difficult. In eighth grade, I had to decide what high school I wanted to go to. I could have gone to my local high school, which was a perfectly good one. Or I could have applied to the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, which has been ranked the #1 public high school in the country by U.S. News and World Report.

Although TJ would have been an incredible experience, there was a price to be paid. If I remember correctly, I would not only be leaving for school earlier in the morning, but I’d be getting home at 7 or 8 every night instead of 3 in the afternoon like a normal kid. And that’s to say nothing of homework, or how stressful it would be during the day.

My dad made it very clear to me what the tradeoff was. He said, “If you want to learn everything you possibly can about math and science, then this would be the best thing in the world for you. But if you don’t, you would absolutely hate it.”

I went to the regular school, and to this day I’m still pretty sure I made the right choice. I think I learned plenty, and I probably would have gone to the same college anyway (the University of Virginia). And remember that there are some advantages to, you know, not sacrificing your childhood.

On the other hand, say my future self had come to me in eighth grade and said, “If you go to TJ, you’ll become interested in robotics. Because of that, you’ll go to MIT. There, you’ll meet a professor who will steer you towards nanotechnology. You’ll go on to invent a race of nanobots that can be injected into the blood stream and safely kill cancer cells. You’ll be an outlier. But if you don’t go to TJ, then none of this will happen.”

In that case, then yes, of course I’ll make the sacrifice, knowing that the payoff is coming. But no one wants to make a sacrifice when your best prediction is that it’s not worth it. And not knowing the future is what makes it so hard to make the right decision.

One of the books I’m reading now is Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. I’m just reading a little bit here and there, but I’ll definitely be reviewing it when I’m done.

So far, it’s about how success is less dependent on talent and hard work than we think. Yes, it still takes a lot of hard work (according to the 10,000 hour rule) and a good amount of talent. However, one critical factor is often ignored – the environment that made you who you are. It turns out that random factors such as your birth date can be hugely important.

But my review will come later. For now, I just want to talk about what success means.

In What Malcolm Gladwell Should Have Told You In ‘Outliers,’ Glen Allsopp says that while he’s a huge fan of Outliers, he has one problem with it. Namely, that Gladwell tends to define success as a large bank balance or some form of status. Glen says:

“While Bill Gates spent years behind a computer screen, people his age where going to parties, sunning on the beach, meeting new people and making the most of life…yet he has made it.

While kids were playing the violin for hours every week, their friends were playing in the park, running through fields and making the most of their childhood. Yet now the violinists are professional or well known…they’ve made it.”

I agree, people who are considered successful have paid an enormous price to get there. If you’re willing to accept being “average” or “good” instead of “off the charts,” you can free up massive amounts of time for other things.

Someone who’s OK with being a little overweight might be a lot happier than a gym rat who works out several hours a day. Someone who’s OK with being a little uninformed might be a lot happier than a Jeopardy champion. It’s much, much easier to be average than an outlier.

Still, the book is about success, not happiness. To learn about success, it makes sense to study Bill Gates and world class violinists. On the other hand, we don’t need to read a book to learn how to go to parties and play in the park. If you want to do those things, you’re free to just do them.

Which brings me to this question: Is success important?

That may sound like a strange question, but it has to do with how you think of success. A lot of people think success is the ultimate measure of your life. Either you’re successful and you’ve had a good life, or you’re unsuccessful and you’ve had a bad life.

I don’t see it that way. To me, success simply means what the traditional definition says. For now, let’s just use this dictionary definition: the attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence.

Is there more to life than the attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence? Of course! I’ve written about a lot of things that are important to me, but which have absolutely nothing to do with wealth, favor, or eminence.

Some people want to be successful. Some people want to be happy. Some people want to be in good shape. Some people want to travel. Some people want to learn. Some people want lots of friends. These are all different things, none of which is the be all, end all of life. We all value different things.

And guess what? It’s OK if you don’t want to be successful!

But wait, if you’re not successful, does that make you unsuccessful, a failure, a bad person? Not at all. I can’t play the violin, but I wouldn’t consider myself a failed violinist. The violin just isn’t important to me, so it’s not how I judge myself.

Likewise, I wouldn’t consider Barack Obama a failed dentist, or Mohandas Gandhi a failed football player. Maybe they’re not good at those particular things, but they have different objectives.

When you walk past a homeless person, your first thought probably isn’t “Wow, look how successful he is!” Because face it, success, as defined by society, means money. After all, money is what society invented as a store of value. On the other hand, no one needs to feel threatened by this, because you don’t need to make money a priority if you don’t want to.

If you want to live the life of the Mexican fisherman, fine. But don’t redefine “success” to mean “happiness” just because it’s much easier to achieve, and you have this false idea that all good people are required to be successful. It’s perfectly fine to decide that success – or if you prefer, “traditional success” – isn’t important to you.

Some people are meant to chase success, but most aren’t. Not everyone can be in the richest 1%, or the healthiest 1%, or the most educated 1%, or the happiest 1%, or the friendliest 1%, and so on. We have to decide on our priorities.

I once met a homeless woman who was doing exactly what she wanted with her life: enjoying the weather, scenery, and tourists outside the White House while protesting nuclear weapons. No sane person would consider her successful, and she wouldn’t be the subject of a book like Outliers, but she was doing what she wanted to do.

And in the end, isn’t that what we should all be striving for?

Oh, regarding the post title – is success for suckers? Yes, but only if you spend your life chasing it at the cost of things that are more important to you. However, if success is important to you, then we have something in common. There’s room for both types.

Photo by aloshbennett

The secret to success is very simple: practice. Although most people think that world class performance requires huge talent, research shows that 10 years (or 10,000 hours) of practice can make anyone a top performer in pretty much any field, from sports to music to business.

The talent myth is very easy to believe when you look at people at their peak. People forget that Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, or that Abraham Lincoln lost numerous elections, or that Barbara Blackburn failed typing in high school (she went on to become the world’s fastest typist, with a peak of 212 wpm).

The good news is that practice makes perfect, so anyone has a chance. Just put in your 10,000 hours, and you’ll make it. But I’ve heard a lot of people citing this statistic lately, and they tend to miss one critical point: not all practice counts. Fortune Magazine reveals what it takes to be great:

“So greatness isn’t handed to anyone; it requires a lot of hard work. Yet that isn’t enough, since many people work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better. What’s missing?

The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call ‘deliberate practice.’ It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.

For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don’t get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day – that’s deliberate practice.”

So before punching your time card and starting to count your 10,000 hours, make sure you’re doing the right kind of practice. Undeliberate practice doesn’t count, which is why it’s possible to work in the same office for 30 years without becoming good at anything.

At my high school graduation, one of the speakers told us what it takes to become an expert. Just read about your topic of choice for an hour a day. After a year, you’ll be a national expert. After five years, you’ll be an international expert. And I heard someone say that reading six books on any subject will make you an expert.

These feats take far less time than the 10 years or 10,000 hours mentioned about, but I guess we’re talking about different levels of expertise.

The 10,000 hour rule comes from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success. I haven’t read it yet, and I haven’t found out exactly what the 10,000 hour rule applies to.

To be a great blogger, do you really need to blog for 10,000 hours? Or do you just need 10,000 hours of writing experience? Or 10,000 hours of experience in your subject matter? To be a great programmer, do you need 10,000 hours of experience with one particular language, or does all experience count? Does 10,000 hours of reading the news make you an expert of world events, or is that too broad?

Do you know? Do you have 10,000 hours of experience in anything?

It used to be that everybody defined success as being rich. That was mainstream.

Then some people defined success as being happy. They were the minority, going against the mainstream. As more and more people sided with them, they became a bigger and bigger minority.

But now everybody defines success as being happy. Doesn’t that make it the new mainstream?

That’s bad news for people who like to be anti-mainstream. Because for some reason, mainstream is never supposed to be a good thing.

Recently I reviewed Napoleon Hill’s classic success book Think and Grow Rich. And I said that I’d later revisit the hidden secret that he hints at, but never reveals.

He says he got the secret from Andrew Carnegie, and it’s the key to all great financial success (for that matter, all great success of any kind). He drops many hints, saying that it will jump from the page when you’re ready for it, that if you’re ready for the secret then you already possess half of it, that you’ll recognize it at least once in every chapter, and so forth.

But out of all the millions of people who read Think and Grow Rich, I doubt many of them actually discovered the hidden secret. I thought that the secret might be, well, “The Secret!” That is, the law of attraction. But no, it’s not the law of attraction, and it’s not desire, and it’s not persistence. Basically, if you’re just making a guess, that’s not it.

Brian Kim has discovered the Carnegie secret, and reveals it in his ebook The Hidden Secret in Think and Grow Rich.

Many of you have read Think and Grow Rich, and you’ve probably been wondering what the hidden secret is. You have some idea, but you haven’t quite put your finger on it. Brian’s ebook is a very natural follow-up to Think and Grow Rich, because you need to know the hidden secret to get the full benefit from it.

I was actually disappointed at first when Brian revealed the hidden secret in the first chapter. I thought, “That’s it? That’s Andrew Carnegie’s magical secret to all great success?” But then I realized that my first impression was not consistent with what I knew about Brian. I figured there must be way more to it than that. And there was. That’s why the ebook is 122 pages!

As I kept reading, I saw that the value in his ebook is not just that he reveals the hidden secret, but that he goes into great detail about why it works, and how to execute it. Words are just words, and they don’t mean anything until you truly grasp the real meaning. Unless you understand why the secret is what it is, why it works, and exactly how to use it, you couldn’t put it into practice even if you knew what it was.

Now, is this really the secret that Napoleon Hill was referring to? Brian does an excellent job of showing how the secret he discovered meets all the criteria that Napoleon Hill described (such as appearing in every chapter). The consensus I’ve seen from other people who’ve read it is that Brian has correctly identified the hidden secret.

As for me, I fully accept Brian’s reasoning where he shows why the secret he uncovered is in fact the hidden secret. Still, I’m not certain that there’s not another possible answer that meets the same criteria. But I have no complaints about Brian’s answer, and he has a very revealing story about his process of discovering it.

Brian said that after he discovered the hidden secret, everything he had ever learned about self improvement clicked, and he saw how all the pieces fit together into a big picture. I wouldn’t quite say that, but I agree that the hidden secret ties together all the pieces of self improvement related to achieving a goal. (Self improvement is really huge and consists of more than achieving goals, in my opinion.)

His secret also ties together Napoleon Hill’s 13 steps and shows how they all work together. And perhaps the best thing is that with all the pieces in place, everything happens naturally. It becomes less about remembering specific steps to execute, and more about letting things flow. Of course, that doesn’t make everything easy, but it leads to achieving your goal naturally.

The only thing I wasn’t too keen on is that I found it a little repetitive. In one place, Brian says “I’ll say it again and again and again.” I would have preferred just one or two “agains.” But this was a choice Brian made deliberately, because he’s found that people often don’t internalize something the first or second or even the third time they hear it. Actually, doing this makes his language more consistent with Napoleon Hill’s writing!

You really need to read Think and Grow Rich first, because he references many specific details in it. He conveniently includes a copy in the download. You also need to be prepared to do some exercises that require writing things down. Avoid the temptation to do them in your head. We’re talking about achieving your one major definite purpose – take the time to write things down!

Brian’s making a special offer to my readers, including these bonuses:

• A copy of Think and Grow Rich in PDF format
• His special report The Three Biggest Mistakes People Make With The Hidden Secret, so you can avoid these mistakes
• A copy of The Hidden Secret Workbook, to help you apply the hidden secret consistently, as well as providing useful notes and summaries from the ebook

He even backs it with an 8 week money back guarantee. So go ahead, discover The Hidden Secret in Think and Grow Rich, and use it to naturally achieve your one major definite purpose.