The Guide to a Life You Never Considered Reachable! The distribution of IQs is the same whether you’re in a ghetto or a small Southern town or some suburban neighborhood. Your environment surrounds you like a capsule and limits your perspective and opportunities. Almost everyone can attain more than they realize! For 35 years, Dr. O’Grady has been studying and winning in the game of breakthrough success. These insights as well as the underlying pieces to motivate and carry you through are contained inside. – The Amazon book description of Dr. Thomas O’Grady’s new book, The Mechanics for Breakthrough Success: The Guide to a Life You Never Considered Reachable. This is an excerpt from next week’s podcast.
Joe Dager: Is confidence something that you gain and always have or do you need that constant reinforcement to maintain your confidence?
Dr. O’Grady: Continuous success, of course, maintains it. Realizing that there are things that you’re not going to do well or that you’re going to miss out on but it’s the way you approach them, and that’s part of the process there that I explained in the book. 
Here’s a very simplified example but it’s one I’ve used on a couple of occasions. I can have this great lawn around my house and what I do is I don’t bother to spend much time on it at all and hear all these other people spend a lot of time, a tremendous amount of effort and their lawns are not good. What happens is they never get to anything until they’re ready to “tackle the lawn“ and they take their entire weekend. They’ve lost a weekend. What I have is that basically there’s, almost every single task that‘s involved, like I need to put down lime, or I need to put down moss killer, or I need to mow the front or mow the back, notice I split those into two, I look at those as all separate different distinct tasks. If I run outside and just trim the tree or put down the moss killer, I’ve completed something. In a sense, that’s success.
All of these things can be done in spare time and spare moments. If you’re doing something, like you’re tackling, you’re learning a programming language, if you try to “I’m going to learn the language” rather than you’re learning, you’re looking at it, or you’re breaking it down into pieces, you have repeated successes and the things that you fail at, you get a chance to do them again tomorrow. It’s kind of like a game. Life itself is a game. If you treat it that way, you’re a lot better off.
About: Thomas F. O’Grady received his PhD in Mathematical and Statistical Economics from the University of California at Berkeley. Since the age of 12 he’s been interested in entrepreneurial activities. He rose to the top in Soviet intelligence, broke Soviet codes 3 times; extended Nobel Laureate Daniel McFadden’s work at GM Research labs; as head of Chase Automotive Division reached profitability the chairman and president insisted was not possible; to international recognition in his international consulting firm; a top trainer in Advanced Programming and Database Development, wrote Database Developer’s Guide to Microsoft SQL Server (7); completely redirected corporate initiatives into customer focus. Besides hard work, he credits his success to constant independent learning and states that he learns from each person he meets