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Understanding Success...

Tuesday, 29 January 2013 00:10

SUNDAY, JANUARY 27, 2013

By Dan Hedgecock (http://danhedgecock.blogspot.com)

The Importance of Saying Thank You

I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success. I highly recommend it. In the book, Gladwell argues that the widely held view of great success as a result of purely individual determination and hard work is misleading and causes our society to let many potentially great successes stall and fail in their infancy. If you think this view isn't widely held just think back to the one man island rhetoric of the recent election. Through a number of very compelling examples Gladwell argues that success is a combination of individual determination and hard work meeting the right opportunities, and the importance of acknowledging those opportunities in enabling success to happen....

I know that I have worked incredibly hard to get to where I am right now. I've done things like riding my bike to work for two months during Minnesota winter, working for 6 hours and then riding to the gym in the dark to swim at 9:00 at night before riding home. But I also remember teammates from college who ran 100 miles a week and had just as much determination as I did who have fallen far short of their dreams.

With all of this in mind, I wanted to post an acknowledgment and an appreciation of a number of special circumstances in my life that have happened in such a way as to provide me with the opportunity to capitalize on my hard work. Each of these circumstances are not enough in and of themselves to produce success and are by no means inherently necessary for success as a triathlete. But what I want to acknowledge is the cumulative advantage of all these circumstances and to say thank you to those involved.

Special Circumstance #1