How does a person become an over-achiever in life if he is just an average joe?

Answer 1

You can work smarter instead of working harder. You'll achieve more if you learn how to build a team of people to do something, than to do it alone. Building a team of people is easier now, as you can recruit people on the net.

Read everything you can on avoiding procrastination, putting off till tomorrow what you can do today. Often procrastination is linked to perfectionism.

You can achieve more things if you have more money to pay other people to do things for you, either your main goals or chores that are stopping you working on your main goals. Don't just earn a salary, start a sideline business, sell things on eBay or look at building wealth through investing in shares or real-estate. The best book I've read on investing is 'The Buffettology Workbook'. It covers the ideas of Warren Buffett, the world's second richest man and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. It compares high profit 'fortress businesses' with ideas protected by patents, trademarks, high entry costs, etc with the also-ran 'commodity businesses' where hundreds of competitors sell the same product with low profits. This is useful advice for both investing and starting your own business.

If you want to achieve something like playing the guitar or learning spanish, concentrate on doing one thing well instead of loads of things to a low standard. The standard you achieve is mostly down to the sheer volume of practice, not the natural talent you're born with.

For school, colllege or university, read up on study-skills. Make sure you have a road-map of what is to be learnt each term for each subject. A program called supermemo is good for building drill and test learning/revision quizzes. Supermemo98 is free (see which.htm page). Its good for learning/testing foreign language vocabulary or grammar of the facts of a subject and revising for an exam. You can add questions and answers one at a time to a database or import text files full of questions and answers -

Q: I speak English
A: Hablo ingles

Something else you can do is build a huge contact list of useful people online and offline and useful websites that you maintain throughout your whole life. You can then solve any problem much quicker than other people. Even if the people on the list can't solve a problem, they may know someone who can or an information source. Often you can achieve something in 5 minutes by asking a knowledgeable person how to do it instead of spending hours or days reading stuff.

Concentrate on the achievements instead of yourself. You might want to re-phrase it as 'How do I achieve a lot', instead of 'How do I become an over-achiever'. For example 'How can my family receive $100,000 a year to live on' (by a variety of ways), not 'How can I earn $100,000 a year'.

Answer 2

He falls into a puddle of plutonium and becomes a powerful super hero?