Winners’ Wiki: 5 Unspoken Vocabs Towards Real Success
Brushing shoulders with CEOs, summas, thought-leaders, industry-shapers, and people who found their life’s mission, I summarized five of their secrets that led them to their success.
To demystify success and the purpose of life, most of us rely on self-help nonfiction or productivity books. While they offer independent answers, there are 5 recurring core concepts that lead people to true success. These are all-encapsulating secrets we can use regardless whatever stage we are in life and whatever life mission we are pursuing.
Playbook
Novelty
Gamification
Optics
Enough
The next paragraph summarizes how these five are interconnected with each other.
Whatever you do, there must be a playbook how other winners do it. But as you blend in, morph, find your own style and bring in novelty. In pursuit, routinary things and mechanical habits become mundane, gamify it and make it frictionless to achieve your goal. You know you’re a winner, communicate it, wear it, perform it, curate the image and take care of your optics. After being in the system, zooming back as a human, it was all about defining your “enough”; happiness is actually settling down and not constantly moving the goal post, that it was here all along (The Alchemist).
To further explore these secrets and how we can apply these concepts into every day, here are multiple perspectives for each term in the 5 vocabs of winners.
Playbooks
In creating a startup, there’s a playbook for pitch deck structure, playbook for securing investors, playbook for go-to-market strategy, even playbook towards exiting as a unicorn.
In securing a career with competitive salary, there’s a playbook detailing the blend of academics and extracurriculars that employers look for. There can be nuances on such playbooks, depending on the industry or function you are applying for (e.g. the playbook to be a finance bro is different from a medical doctor or CPA lawyer).
Even those who pursue non-traditional paths, the ones who pursue time freedom, location freedom, and financial freedom, there’s always a playbook, we just need to ask the right questions, squeezing answers from the right experts.
For students, there’s a playbook to acing exams, playbook to become summa cum laude, playbook for working students, playbook for student-athletes.
In the world of sports, elite athletes have the playbook for nutrition, strength, and endurance. These playbooks have nuances even for sports that look the same (e.g. for racket sports, each one requires a different kind of training and conditioning).
Knowing that playbooks exist and finding them can make your life easier and you can even contribute meaningfully to wider society by enriching or creating playbooks.
Novelty
To achieve Nobel Peace Prize in whatever field, a large part of it is the innovation and the new perspective you are bringing to the collective body of knowledge, it’s the novelty and newness.
For real game-changing unicorn startups, real winners provide novel solutions to consumer problems. Even when startups get copy pasted from one geography to another, there will always be the localization element that provides a novel flavor to a seemingly non-innovative solution.
In competitive hackathons and case competitions, teams who bring novelty in substance and/or in form would usually stand out as a clear winner. When they brought in actual prototype (that other joiners might’ve skipped) or wrap their pitch in a great storyline, they lift themselves a notch above the rest.
In competitive writing, “novelty lead” is what truly differentiates a great news writer, feature writer, sports writer, or science writer. The hook must be convincingly creative yet it teases the reader to read more. Contrary to the traditional ‘5 Ws and 1H’, competitive writing winners usually win with novelty leads.
Having novelty at one’s system is almost synonymous with having excellence as a habit. In little conversations all the way to life-changing pitches, bringing in a novel perspective differentiates you from the rest and makes success fall into your lap more easily.
Gamify
Knowing the concept of gamification allows you to 1) make serious habits a more playful and frictionless one, 2) create great products/services that latch in this powerful insight on human behavior, and 3) understand whether you are being played or being part of a game and decide how to deal with it.
Widely watched productivity YouTuber Ali Abdaal advocates for “feel good productivity” where routine habits in pursuit of success must also give a sense of enjoyment. In essence, we can gamify the rather mechanical steps that feel like a chore.
In the world of e-commerce and food delivery apps, for startups to increase user stickiness, gamification is the answer. Suddenly, Shopee (southeast Asian e-commerce) encourages you to water a plant daily or created gold/silver/bronze tiers that encourage consumers to buy more to rank up. Airline miles, shopping points, and credit card points are also wired with gamification at the core.
The entire academic system is wired with gamification at the core, highest scores get highest-level medals, unlocking highest-ranked schools and eventually best careers. This even extends to the competitive corporate rat race. Knowing the rules of the game allow us to decide whether 1) we want to play that game, or 2) win a different kind of game, which we’ll better understand when we come to the fifth vocab called “enough“.
Optics
Perception is reality, in the corporate race, what your boss thinks of you both within and outside work can actually influence your promotion chances. I would argue that likability (more than “getting the job done”) can set you up for success.
In competitive presentations (startup pitches and case competitions), once you have a strong content the delivery solidifies your win. To manage optics, it includes great communication style, memorable visuals (slides, props, even costumes/outfits), or anything that builds the image you want to create.
In the world of show business, optics is the strongest among all these vocabs. Celebrities control their narrative with great PR; influencers put on a great facade, even aspiring politicians must manage their optics well. Often times there is a negative connotation with optics but that is only when there is a huge difference between what you show and who you truly are. Truly successful personalities are genuinely kind, respectful, and humble. They don’t even need to “manage optics” because just living their day to day lives already is a great visual spectacle while being authentic.
Enough
We look at this in the perspective of wealth, fame, and power:
Wealth. Traditional markers of success include achieving millions or billions. But once you’re there the goal post keeps on moving. I contend that truly successful people know what is “enough” for them and that true success is not in the misery of never-ending wants.
Fame. Almost everyone on social media care about followers, likes, hearts, engagements to achieve some degree of fame. For those whose livelihood depends on fame, be careful for signs of burnout and exhaustion. And even those who are popstars, global icons, they always wonder: “until when will I be relevant?”. Is there a path to achieving fame and achieving enough? I don’t know the answer, but as the first vocab suggests, there might be a playbook for that.
Power. Recognition-hungry leaders build monuments everywhere, print their faces everywhere and they never seem to be satisfied. Is there a someone super powerful who moves the needle towards the greater good? Historically, we definitely have heroes who left lasting net-positive legacies. Were they relentless in their pursuit or did they pursue what is “enough”? Again, I don’t have exact answers but I contend that at the core, they are all humans and somehow, those who found true happiness were the ones who knew that not every battle is supposed to be fought, and not all expansions are worth the struggle.
Overall. Not all productivity and self-help books will touch on the value of defining one’s “enough”, but it’s important to zoom out and ask why are we even doing this career or startup or schooling. It’s not to say that we shouldn’t dream big or that we should stop being aspirational and stay in our boxes. Rather, it’s about 1) appreciate the joys of what we have right now, 2) enough with the people pleasing, and 3) defining a life that is not whispered or shouted by others. Influential fiction book called “The Alchemist” gave us a glimpse that we’ve been searching for treasure everywhere else, only to find it back from where we started; I interpret this as a metaphor never-ending pursuit of success, only to find out that happiness comes from within.
I poured my entire life’s works into this collection of 5 secret vocabs of highly successful people. It will be a growing list as I am also still on this collective journey we call life.