Most Successful People are Dark Horses

Most successful founders are not the ones who followed the standard path, they're the ones who ignored it. I love this. If you never really fit the standard path, this one is for you. So, Harvard researchers spent years studying people who achieved serious success, even though no one saw them coming. And they called them the dark horses. And here's what they rolled out first. So it wasn't raw talent, plenty of talented people stay on the wrong path forever. I know plenty, love them all. It wasn't grit or work ethic either. The dark horses simply worked harder. But so does everyone who doesn't make it. So the real answer, it surprised even the researchers. Every single dark horse succeeded by optimizing for fulfillment, not excellence. Sounds cliche, but it's true. Not passion, not prestige, and not what looks good on paper. And those are completely different things. You can be passionate about one thing, but if you'll never master it, it won't fulfill you. The dark horses found work that they could get genuinely great at, and let the success follow from that. A separate study from MIT and Northwestern analyzed 2.7 million founders and found that the average age of the most successful ones was 45, not 25. This was crazy. A 50-year-old founder is 1.8 times more likely to build a top company than a 30-year-old. The non-linear path, the pivots, the years that look like detours were all a part of the preparation, not the delay. Mel Robbins talks about this too, cause she's 57 and crushing it. The researcher behind the Dark Horse Project, Todd Rose, started this project thinking he knew what he'd find. Well, he didn't. The results changed his mind completely. So he left Harvard because he said it was hypocritical to stay in an institution built on the exact opposite of what his own research proved. So the takeaway isn't that you need to blow up your career. Y'all chill. Are you building towards what actually fulfills you or towards what you decide to look good at 22? Because those two paths lead to very different places. A few ways to figure out which one you're on: Notice what you do when no one's watching or paying you for it. And pay attention to what you keep coming back to, even when it's really hard. I've got a few of these things of my own. And stop measuring your path against someone else's timeline. Also taking notes. I love this. I invest in founders. It's hard to suss out grit and everything, but also this level of fulfillment later, who even knows? And then personally, building my own firm, loving content like, what do I keep going back to, even though it punches me in the face? Definitely my job. See if I'm good at it. Uh, but anyway, we'll see if I'm good at it. Work hard, y'all. Find fulfillment. Hope this is interesting.