Success Feelosophy

Success Feelosophy describes the combination of philosophy and scientific research applied to concerns and problems in everyday life in the 21st century, such as Learning, Success, Happiness, Love, Relationships, Employment, Leadership, Teamwork etc.

Science means "knowledge" attained through systematic study or practice, usually using careful observation, experimentation, measurement and research.

Philosophy meaning the "love of wisdom" is the study of the general and fundamental problems in life concerning matters such as learning, values, success, using a systematic approach and rational argument.

Success is everyday life in the 21st century depends on being able to overcome the difficulties commonly encountered many of which relating to their thoughts and feelings ie. 'Feelosophy',

Using the term ‘Feelosophy’ emphasises the application of the recent research in areas such as Happiness and Well Being (Quality of Life), Emotional intelligence or Social and Emotional skills and Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences.

Success Feelosophy is very unusual in that it helps EVERYONE understand why people succeed (or not) in terms of the 8 skills we need to succeed.

This diagram illustrates a number of symptoms, outcomes or concerns caused by poor learning of these 8 skills.

Outliers: The Story of Success

Outliers: The Story of Success is a non-fiction book written by Malcolm Gladwell and published by Little, Brown and Company on November 18, 2008. In Outliers, Gladwell examines the factors that contribute to high levels of success. To support his thesis, he examines the causes of why the majority of Canadian ice hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year, how Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates achieved his extreme wealth, and how two people with exceptional intelligence, Christopher Langan and J. Robert Oppenheimer, end up with such vastly different fortunes. Throughout the publication, Gladwell repeatedly mentions the "10,000-Hour Rule", claiming that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours.

The publication debuted at number one on the bestseller lists for The New York Times and The Globe and Mail, holding the position on the former for eleven consecutive weeks. Generally well-received by critics, Outliers was considered more personal than Gladwell's other works, and some reviews commented on how much Outliers felt like an autobiography. Reviews praised the connection that Gladwell draws between his own background and the rest of the publication to conclude the book. Reviewers also appreciated the questions posed by Outliers, finding it important to determine how much individual potential is ignored by society. However, the lessons learned were considered anticlimactic and dispiriting. The writing style, deemed easy to understand, was criticized for oversimplifying complex sociological phenomena.

Bounce by Matthew Syed

Toil transcends talent

Lionel Messi, Rafael Nadal, Wayne Rooney, Tiger Woods — significant riches aside, what do these men have in common? Natural sporting ability that mere mortals such as you and I can only dream about? Not so, says Matthew Syed, the Times columnist and three-time Commonwealth table tennis champion, whose book, Bounce, challenges the idea that top sportsmen — as well as experts in other fields — enjoy God-given gifts that the rest of us lack. David Beckham was not born with the ability to take a brilliant free kick, Roger Federer is not blessed with extraordinarily sharp reactions: these skills were developed as a result of hard work and practice.

The first part of Bounce demolishes the idea that talent is the key to success. The path to the top, Syed argues, is a combination of opportunity — being in the right place at the right time — and hard work. Syed uses his own experience to demonstrate the importance of opportunity: his parents, neither of whom was a table tennis player, decided to buy a tournament-specification table for Syed and his brother; both came to love the sport, spurring each other on. The head sports coach at their school was a table tennis fanatic and he invited them to join a local table tennis club. The importance of this club cannot be overstated. For a period in the 1980s, Syed’s neighbourhood produced a disproportionate number of the UK’s outstanding table tennis players — six of them lived on the Syeds’ street.

Hard work is even more important: Syed cites Anders Ericsson, the psychologist who in a study found that the only factor separating the outstanding from the very good and the mediocre in a group of violinists at the Berlin Music Academy was how much they practised. Neither the age at which they began training nor their biographical background mattered much, just the number of hours devoted to serious practice.

There are obvious objections to Syed’s view. One concerns physicality, and here he concedes that in some fields height and build are significant factors determining success or failure. If you are 5ft 4in you are never going to play basketball in the NBA. The other is the existence of child prodigies — but he argues that these, too, are made, not born. Mozart composed his first work widely regarded to be a masterpiece at 21 — by which time he had been practising for 18 years: “Child prodigies do not have unusual genes, they have unusual upbringings,” Syed concludes.

Many of Syed’s insights are not new: Thomas Edison made the point about genius being 1 per cent inspiration, 99 per cent perspiration more than 100 years ago; and Syed acknowledges his debt to Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, a book that suggests that the success of outstanding performers, from Bill Gates to the Beatles, could be explained by the “ten thousand hour rule” — the minimum time necessary for the acquisition of expertise in any complex task. But the true value of this book is found in its dissection of the dangers of the “talent myth” and its implications for individuals, parents, educators, businesses and government. Belief in the talent myth robs individuals of an incentive to improve themselves through effort and it devalues the importance of knowledge brought about by experience. People who believe that talent in a certain field is innate see failure as calamitous — it cannot be overcome.

The idea that certain people can be parachuted in to organisations and institutions by virtue of their “talent” as opposed to hard work has negative outcomes in businesses and institutions, too. In the US, one corporation above all others embraced the idea, the McKinsey-ite philosophy that put talent — pure reasoning ability — on a higher plane than domain-specific knowledge. That company was Enron.

The second part of Syed’s book deals with the psychology of performance. He shows how religion (any religion) can help to boost performance in sport (it is not what you believe, but the potency of your belief that aids you) and explains why sportsmen “choke” and how this can be avoided.

Finally, Bounce takes a look at other factors in sporting success: drugs and genetics. He explores the theory that black people are superior runners, taking a look at Kenyan distance athletes and concluding that, while there probably is a genetic element to their success, it has much more to do with living at altitude, having to run 20km to school every day, not having the money or facilities to play other sports and the motivation that comes from the success of the Kenyan athletes of the past.

Essentially this is an optimistic book with an old-fashioned message: success is possible for all of us, but it comes with hard work and self-belief rather than innate ability.

Bounce by Matthew Syed (Fourth Estate, £12.99; Buy this book; 272pp)

These video clips emphasise that scientific research over the years has calculated that probably 10,000 hours of practice usually occurs to become an expert in a particular field.

Click on this link to send you to a page showing "Success Feelosophy In Action". The true story of Liz Murray, who despite little support from her drug addicted parents or primary school, manages to develop the skills we need to succeed to eventually get a scholarship to go to Harvard University.