What I learned traveling for a week with a super-achiever (Stanford MBA)
The power of compounding applied to everyday choices
I met JS (he surely wouldn’t want someone to brag about himself, so I’ll keep his name confidential) when I was 17, and I went to live as an exchange student in the US.
At the time we were seniors in high school. We quickly become friends and over time I understood this guy was on a different level than everyone else. The outstanding thing about him for me was that he was incredibly well-rounded in the sense that was outperforming everyone in almost every aspect, from being highly social and well-respected to being outstanding academically.
After my exchange year, I came back home to Europe. Since then, we had the chance to meet on a few different occasions during his trips to Europe, and consequently, we were able to maintain the relationship, despite living on different continents.
Every time we saw each other, the difference in achievements between myself (as most people) and he grew larger, but nonetheless, I always loved spending time with him as a friend while admiring and learning from how he behaved, took decisions, and managed situations.
After quite a long time, two weeks ago we had a catchup call. He told me that he was going to start an MBA program (obviously from a top business school) in September, and therefore he had decided to leave his job and travel to Nord Africa and Eastern Europe for a few months before starting his studies. He suggested meeting and proposed a couple of timeslots in which he was available. A few days after we had organized a trip to Morocco.
As I’ve been to Morocco various times, one of which was last year, I had less interest in the destination than in simply catching up with him and spending time with a friend that, at the same time, is for me an inspiration. During our time there we had fun and chatted a lot. I also tried to notice what aspects make him so “outstanding” in my perception, compared to the normal people and other “high” achievers I know.
I’ve decided to write these things down to clarify them for myself and hopefully remember them better.
Actions-related learnings
Please consider the three following points in relationship with each other, rather than as standalone points.
The net result of these three things is that JS has “right” instincts on what to do and how to do it, and the capacity to do it.
1. Have great habits: self-accountability and healthy routines
The first and foremost habit of JS is self-accountability. Said differently he has a habit of being disciplined, which in turn helps him enable virtually everything else he set his mind upon.
Additionally, hearing the description of his lifestyle back home, it is clear that he has a well-thought and effective routine, where he sleeps ~8 hours per night, wakes up early, works out, avoids overconsumption of electronic devices, eats healthy, etc. While all of this is obvious, and we’ve all heard how good it is to have good habits, most people (surely me) failed to build such habits, despite having a less challenging schedule he has, and fewer responsibilities. Consequently, learning that good habits are executed every day by someone who is so busy, is a helpful reminder that creating time for good habits is possible for everyone, and is mainly a matter of accountability. There’s no excuse to take care of yourself and if you want to perform at your best you need to do it, creating time for it despite a potentially challenging schedule.
2. Get the important things right. Get the simple things right.
JS gets the important things right, all the time.
He not only recognizes what are important things themselves but also the actions whose second-order consequences will impact important things. In the context of traveling, this means quite simple things, like never snoozing the alarm if it means risking being late to the station and consequently missing the train, or deciding to exit a badly organized walking tour if staying would effectively make us waste half of the only day in which we’re in a city.
Additionally, JS always gets the simple things right. And while it seems basic that’s where I think many people fuck up the most.
For example, planning your day backward from your evening train departure time is a straightforward yet effective way to prioritize activities, ensuring you decide early on what can be omitted. Once on the train, making sure the hostel has responded to our late check-in request before checking Instagram or personal messages, allows to plan for changes if any issues arise ahead of time. Those things are in themselves quite simple and obvious yet, in my personal experience so often represent areas where mistakes are made, and over time mistakes compound.
Self-accountability undeniably plays a role in consistently making good choices, for example by creating the habit of clearing “duty” before personal pleasure.
As a result, my perception of JS is not that every decision he takes is genius in itself, but rather that he consistently gets important and simple things right all the time, and then let good decisions compound over time.
3. Seamlessly shift from planning to executing, being great at both
Planning and executing are two distinct things. Some people are bad at both, some are good at one but bad at the other, and only a few (in my experience) are good at both.
JS is great at both.
If I look at my own behavior, and that of many around me, I’d say that it is easy to “under-plan” and jump to execution too early - resulting in executing somewhat ineffectively as the plan isn’t detailed enough - or “overplanning” - hence dedicating too much time and/or creating a plan that is not flexible enough to then be changed down the line. Planning well is difficult yet crucial to then execute effectively.
Executing as well is a skill, which depends on other subskills depending on the tasks at hand. Surely, being well-rounded - being smart, knowledgable, charismatic, communicative, decisive etc - helps a lot in being a great executor, and few people I know are as well-rounded as JS.
An advantage of fully compartmentalized planning vs execution is that it makes learning easier since it is possible to see what got wrong and where.
Once the problem has been found and it’s clear where occurred, it is possible to create a plan and implement a plan to avoid the mistake to reoccur in the future.
If planning and execution mesh too much it becomes difficult to correctly evaluate when and where the problem occurred, why, and how it could be prevented in the future.
Perceptions-related learnings
He has a realistic view of his merits and flaws, paired with a realistic view of the outside world, resulting from a developed capacity to logically and correctly synthesize and structure information. As a consequence, he is able to be insightful, realistic, balanced, and grounded.
1. Self-perception: extreme confidence mixed with deep humbleness
I even mentioned this to him personally, but I find truly outstanding his self-perception. He has an almost infinite level of confidence in his own means, which I think comes in a small part from a reasonable “dogmatic” belief of self-worth, and in large part from a historical validation of his capacity to shape his actions in order to get the things he wants. In fact, rather than consider himself worthy just because of what he is - as I think most people with high confidence do - I believe that he thinks of himself like a sponge that can absorb everything he needs and consequently succeed in everything that he decides to set his mind upon.
The flip side of this extreme confidence is his deep humbleness. As a matter of fact, he is one of the least bragging people I know, which is particularly surprising as he is one who could most easily do it. Even if I find it somewhat surprising, this trait of deep humbleness is something that I’ve noticed in many of the (few) highly successful people around me.
To some level, JS's deep humbleness is reasonable for a couple of reasons: the first one is that his perception of his achievements is relative to the people he compares himself to, which are all hyper-successful people; consequently, on that scale, what he has done is not outstanding per se. Secondly, JS' perception of reality makes him understand himself and the world very effectively, allowing him to be very balanced and moderate. Consequently, he is aware that flexing will not bring him anything actually valuable, and it just might make him less likable.
2. Outstanding comprehension of reality (things, ideas, and people)
If I was to guess I’d say that JS has an above-average IQ, but is not a total savant. This brainpower was used over the years to accumulate knowledge and interpret the world, particularly in the domains of business and management. And while IQ is somewhat stable over time, the knowledge accumulated surely helps him understand the world better and better, as years go by.
Three main things in my opinion contributed to his success in understanding the world are mainly two:
being very logical - consequently, JS is always thinking in a way that is logically correct and coherent with the topic (something that I’m aware I often do not do).
being able to structure and synthesize - in part I guess this is the heritage of his consulting job. The fact of being able to structure information in a way that is MECE and synthesized it, helps simplify the world and be a good communicator.
As a consequence, JS is able to understand, summarize, remember, and later use pieces of information he gets about real things, ideas, and people around him.
Conclusion
If you read this thing and you found it quite obvious I apologize. Nonetheless, I think the single biggest lesson which I got from this trip is an obvious one: to be incredible you just need to do a bunch of normal things well, over and over and over, and let time make the outcomes compound exponentially.
While at 50 years old these insights will be obvious, at 26 I’m happy I can start to see them looking at JS. And while the lesson is obvious, seeing a friend, a real person in front of me, being an embodiment of what the article described above is a powerful reminder of the willpower I also have.