Unreasonable Success and How to Achieve It: Unlocking the 9 Secrets of People Who Changed the World

If you asked a bunch of people what Richard Koch’s Superpower is, most would say:-Worth 3/4 of a billon dollars-Original Grand Imperial Poobah of 80/20-Investment track record rivals Warren Buffett-Written a bunch of great business books-His incisive, no-nonsense, get-to-the-core shakedown…stuff like that.All true, but none of those are IT.You know what I think “IT” is?It’s his ability to examine a million situations, each of which has 10,000 “factors”, and distill them down to THE ten factors that all million have in common… and which of the other 9990 are just “noise.”In other words…He’s not the 80/20 guy. He’s the 99.9/0.1 guy!Richard simplifies things to their irreducible essence. That’s what 80/20 Principle did; it’s what Star Principle did. It’s what SIMPLIFY did.And Richard’s new book Unreasonable Success says:“There are exactly nine factors that nearly ALL uber-successful people share in common, from St Paul to Madonna, from Winston Churchill to Bob Dylan, from Vladimir Lennon to Steve Jobs.”Richard’s nine factors, profiling of titans of history, are fascinating and highly instructive. This book is so good I gifted copies to all my Roundtable and AMN members.If all you want is to make an extra $5000 a month… don’t read this book. If you want to change the world… if you wanna put a big dent in the universe… you must read this book.I’ve only had it for a month or two but my underlines and dog-ears are everywhere.P.S.: This book is NOT just about financial success or stardom. Bezos is there, as is Bill Bain. But it also includes revolutionaries like scientist Marie Curie, Leonardo da Vinci and Nelson Mandela. Richard studied history in school, and it really shows in the thoroughness and depth which which he treats this material.

The wisest person I ever met says, "Human beings respond far more to inspiration, than to information."And while Richard Koch's "Unreasonable Success & How To Achieve It" is exquisitely informative, the depths to which it inspired me are indeed what I cherish most.I am not going to write a structural overview; you can read that in Koch's own summary, or many of the other fine reviews on this page.Instead, I will pay it the finest compliment I can pay anyone or anything: it made me look deeper. It gave me a new way to look at the world. And, on a visceral and personal level, a grander sense of what a human being can achieve.Like all Richard's books, it is wildly multidisciplinary and focused on universal truths. Unlike many how-to-succeed books, which reduce the lives of legends to aphorisms or simplistic rules, Richard dove deep into grainy reality.Page after page, you get not simplistic "do's and don'ts" extracted from cursory observation, but a rich sense of who people like Albert Einstein, Jeff Bezos, J.K. Rowling, Walt Disney, and Margaret Thatcher, and Paul of Tarsus REALLY were. Their quirks, the worlds they lived in, the way they saw themselves, the lucky breaks they never saw coming, and the unflattering sides of their pathological drives.An illustrative example that I loved:"Einstein's overwhelming faith and self-assurance came from his faith that the universe was rational; it's secrets could be discovered through mathematics and thought experiments, which only the most intuitive and unconventional scientists might uncover. He never doubted he was one of that elect. He read everything that might be relevant to his investigations, and he loved to debate concepts and throw around ideas with the very best brains in quantum mechanics; but he never needed their patronage or agreement to arrive at his insights. "Yet this is no hagiography of the ultra-successful. It is Richard's incisive and honest examination, warts and all. By humanizing the high achievers he talked about, he made high achievement feel realistically attainable. These were all highly imperfect people. Yet they still succeeded magnificently. Beyond most people's wildest dreams!I greatly appreciated Richard's examination of his own rise as strategy consultant and fabulously wealthy investor. I don't believe he's gone into as much detail on this in any of his other books as he did in this one.While "Unreasonable Success" is a very biographical book, it differs from standard biographies in an interesting way.Up-front, and throughout, Richard synthesizes the patterns in the lives of his subjects into what he sees as the governing laws of high achievement. Not merely the tactics for winning a given prize, but the very mechanics of achievement itself. The forces deciding how far anyone goes, in any endeavor, in any era, anywhere. And how to put them in your favor.Has he done it? Is he right? I don't know. That's my honest answer. Many of his conclusions ring home with me, though, and even if he is off-base here or there, the *very question this book asks* is more valuable than any "answer" one could give. It's the kind of question you could spend a lifetime exploring.It gave me the exact sort of joy I felt upon reading another of Richard's books, "The Natural Laws of Business." The feeling of standing upon a new peak, where things you never understood (or partially understood) suddenly make sense. Entirely new paths and possibilities awaken in your mind. You start "seeing" the book in the world around you.No matter who you are, there are forces you can align yourself with that will take you somewhere great. You can literally and truly raise your odds of changing the world.That's what I walked away from "Unreasonable Success" with a much clearer grasp of.It was a joy to read, you can clearly tell it was a joy for Richard to write. It's the third book he's written that I remember exactly where I was when I read it. His classic "The 80/20 Principle" and the tragically-less-known "Natural Laws of Business" are the others. I would recommend reading this book first.

This book is an adventure in uncovering life’s universal truths.The raw material for the quest is an investigation of the personal stories that produced 20 icons of the modern era.Richard Koch cuts straight through mounds of information, constructing insights from history that he weaves together into actionable wisdom. His theory of ‘9 Landmarks’ delivers a framework for understanding not only the stories of others, but also that of oneself. My experience digging into this book was half intake and half introspection. I naturally found myself examining my own life through the lens Koch creates and the paragons he conjures.Koch’s curiosity is contagious and makes the book a clinic in clear thinking. His first principles approach gets the reader beyond the land of narratives that biographies are too often trapped in. Read this book if you wish to not only learn the shared eccentricities of those who made disproportionate impacts on the world, but also understand how the underlying mechanisms they leveraged are rooted in fundamental facets of nature that can be harnessed by all.The book is truly holistic, sitting at the nexus of (auto)biography, technology, political philosophy, and even spirituality. This comes as no surprise since Koch is himself one of today’s greatest practitioners of vision and courage. Richard’s ideas are perennial. 10/10 recommend.

This particular genre is very overcrowded and to have an impact in any meaningful way is going to be a hard slog. My own view of this book is that it lacks substance, the grains of gold I would have expected to find. What the author appears to have done is try to take short cut. The methodology used seems to be let’s write a book with say twenty chapters. Let each chapter be about a famous person. This is quite easy as there is lots of data sources that can be used without infringing copyright and it makes for a good read. At the end of each chapter let me add a few anecdotes, experiences of my own to round it off...In my opinion this is rather a hollow approach and does little to add to the body of knowledge the genre deserves. There are better texts. Maybe try ‘So Good they can’t Ignore You’ by Cal Newport. Available on Amazon Kindle. This is a no nonsense original approach to the real reasons some folks really do make it work for them.

DON’T BUY THIS BOOK - UNLESS YOU want to become Unreasonably Successful - FANTASTIC book - top 5 books of all time. I have read over 3,000 books, have made, and lost and made millions again. This book distills and extracts the key fundamental principles anybody can use to make themselves, not just successful, but UNREASONABLY so. It is one thing to become successful, but it is an entirely different thing to become so successful that you change the world. Whether for good or for not, it is all dependent upon you. Richard will guide you thru the steps needed to to do do that, if you so chose. Or maybe you do not want to be UNREASONABLY successful, maybe you just want to be more successful, or maybe you just want to find out how those who became so, did it. No matter your motivation to learn about How to Become Unreasonably successful, this is the book for you. WARNING - once you read this book, if you chose to do so, you will never see the world the same. Richard elegantly and entertainingly so, lifts the veil, and lets you not just peak behind the curtain, but he shows you the entire workings of how they did it, and how you can do it too, if you chose to. Richard himself has become unreasonably successful. As a recluse in 3 different parts of the world, he has gone to amass a fortune (rumored to be about 1 Billion pounds), only working 1 hour a day, and has sold more than 1M copies of his books. This book is not a book on how to invest your money (see Richards other books for that as well), but rather this is a book on how to invest you time and life. Richard is a man to listen to, or at least one who’s books are worth reading.

Working out what you want to achieve in life is daunting. It's tempting to temper your expectations our of self-doubt, for fear of failure or when faced with setbacks. In this book, Richard Koch provides insight into some of the world's biggest success stories, from Walt Disney to Marie Curie, to show that with the right attitude and strategy, you too can achieve unreasonable success. And why shouldn't it be you who becomes the next great author, scientist or entrepreneur?Koch's thesis is an interesting one: to be a success, you don't necessarily have to be the smartest or the most talented, what's essential is self-belief, commitment to your goal and dazzling high expectations of yourself and those around you. I particularly enjoyed Chapter 7 about how to thrive on setbacks. Take risks and don't be dismayed if they don't work out; now there's a motto to live by!

The word that I feel truly describes this book, is important. Self help books provide so many of us with useful tools and 'landmarks' to get us through life and enable us to achieve our goals. But Richard's latest book, is a must read, especially for those with strong, yet unfulfilled potential.Why important? My reasoning is two fold.Firstly, the year 2020 is one history will not remember with too many smiles. So many of us have been severely impacted by the pandemic. But with vaccines on the way, and a light shining as we reach the end of the tunnel, the world will need to rebuild itself. The world will need the kind of success generated from the 'players' Richard writes about, and the more unreasonable success we can generate post-pandemic, the better change we can bring to the world. This book is one that encourages the right attitudes and strategies that we all should embrace, as we seek to bounce back from a tough and difficult period.Secondly, Richard's book is just...correct. So many of us assume that you need things such as naturally 'god given' skills or pure genius, to become successful. Useful as those traits may be, Richard proves to us, with real examples from both the experiences of the players in his book, and with the lessons he learnt through life, that the correct philosophy and the appropriate strategy, will position you well for unreasonable success.Further praise should go to Richard for choosing the players he did. A diverse set of successful and well known players does help emphasise his arguments. This book isn't just for the next Prime Minister, the next Jeff Bezos, or the next Madonna...it is for anyone.However, my only critique to the book is the weak emphasis (please note - i do not mean a complete disregard of) on discipline. Indeed when discussing certain landmarks (eg No. 7 - thriving on setbacks), there are suggestive points that discipline (ie show resilience despite setbacks) is important. I am curious as to what RIchard would say regarding the notion that perhaps discipline/grit might not be the most essential attribute to achieve unreasonable success, but is it needed to sustain, prolong and further it?Thank you for this important book, Richard. It was a fantastic read and I recommend this to anyone who has the ambitions, desires, and self-belief in becoming - not just successful - BUT UNREASONABLY SUCCESSFUL

In this his latest extremely generous spirited and well researchedbook, Richard Koch shows us the range of his extraordinary Intellectand analytic powers. His previous books often have had an underlyingbias towards maximising potential largely in Business and relatedendeavours. Here he does something extra, and to my knowledge, quiteunique. By taking examples of an unpredictable range of celebratedachievers from many diverse disciplines, he has tried to distil quitewhat qualities and strategies they employed to excel. It is of note,if memory serves, it’s not until page 136 that he uses the word ‘Luck’and then almost in passing. He is quite obviously a Polymath andwrites clearly and authoritatively on each person he chooses toillustrate his Thesis. As someone with a background in the Arts it’svery refreshing to see how much emphasis he puts on developingIntuition and its relationship to fostering the exploitation of thefickle nature of circumstance. It’s also immensely readable, anyonewho can jump from Paul of Tarsus to Madonna, from Viktor Frankl toBob Dylan via Leonardo, Jeff Bezos and Walt Disney and still holdtogether a coherent compelling narrative is worthy of great respect .In the process one learns many facts but without ever feeling lecturedto. He managed to get me interested in innovative business strategieswhich previously have seemed in another Galaxy from my world, yet suchnotions as informed intuition based of experience and acquiredknowledge, unique vision and self-belief, make perfect sense in theworld of creative arts where I come from.Strongly recommend.