Mar 04, 2021

Drive your personal vehicle

After making your own trail, you need to find and drive your own personal vehicle on that trail.

What is a vehicle? It is a resource that provides leverage, collaboration, and credibility for the trail you are blazing. It can be extrinsic (a pool vehicle) or intrinsic (a personal vehicle).

Many of the players discussed in the book used both types of vehicles but while pool vehicles are useful, your personal vehicle is essential to unreasonable success.

Steve Jobs’ personal vehicle was Apple. When he was fired from there, he worked on NeXT and Pixar but neither were sufficient personal vehicles for him to achieve his unreasonable success. It wasn’t until he was hired back to Apple and saved the company with products like the iPod and iPhone that he was considered massively successful. Apple embodied Steve’s design sensibilities and perfectionism and scaled them to a massive audience.

You may not think you need a personal vehicle but no matter how autocratic you tend to be, those who run business empires typically need collaborators with different skills to balance and cover for weak spots.

If you want to be unreasonably successful in business, your personal vehicle will most likely be a company you create or a unique business strategy that you foster.