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Beating the Odds

Doing Your Homework

“One of life’s most painful moments comes when we must admit we didn’t do our homework, that we are not prepared.” ~ Hall of Fame football player Merlin Olsen

Someone once said, “Never give advice. A wise person doesn’t need it, and a fool won’t take it.”

Nevertheless, the current issue of Fortune offers a cover article titled “The Best Advice I Ever Got.”

Featured are Bill Gates, Colin Powell and Tiger Woods, among many others. Several of the profiles can apply to coaches and athletes, but none more than the one about Jim Rogers, an investor and commodities guru.

Rogers says he got the best advice of his life on an airplane, where a man told him to read everything. “If you get interested in a company and you read the annual report, he said, you will have done more than 98% of the people on Wall Street. And if you read the footnotes in the annual report you will have done more than 100% of the people on Wall Street.”

Sure enough, Rogers began to dazzle other people in his field. They thought he was SMART, when in fact he had merely WORKED harder than any of them. Rogers concluded that most people don’t bother doing the basic homework.

The same is true in our field. Many coaches and athletes don’t do that little extra that will put them ahead of the competition. They don’t even do their basic homework. If you do it, then you can be a success in your field, just as Jim Rogers was a success in his.

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