For the second time in a week, Usain Bolt has stunned us all with another amazing, world record performance. Yet, anyone in the know in the world of athletics could have predicted this five years ago when Bolt was doing so well in the junior competitions in Jamaica. Indeed, all of this week’s world champions in Berlin have one thing in common – years and years of practice.
They are no different in approach to the alleged credit card hacker, Albert Gonzalez, who has been indicted for stealing credit card information from 170m people. Apparently he has spent the last 20 years getting inside the nitty-gritty of Internet technology. He is allegedly the most successful credit card hacker we have ever seen on the Internet – but to achieve that degree of notoriety he has needed years and years of practice.
The difference between people who reach the pinnacle in their chosen career are usually those who practice the key skills involved – usually with a close adviser, such as a trainer or coach, to help them. Usain Bolt may take the credit for actually running so fast, yet without his coaches he may well not be as successful.
So, if you are trying to run a successful online business or create a money-making blog you have to ask yourself a couple of questions. Firstly, how much practice do you get in every aspect of being successful online? And secondly, who is your coach that helps you achieve even greater Internet success?
Most online businesses don’t really practice any online skills very much – and few have anyone who coaches them in blogging or social networking or ecommerce. In other words, those very people trying to gain online success are doing the very reverse of what successful people do in other areas.
If you want to succeed online you need to practice, practice, practice everything you do on the Internet. And if you want to beat the competition you need someone to coach you and guide you. Otherwise you will be one of the millions of “also-rans” on the web.
After all, can you remember who came ninth in the world in the 100m – the person who didn’t quite make it into the final? Do you know what the ninth most successful search engine is – or do you only really know of Google, Yahoo! and Bing? Similarly, do you know the ninth best bookshop on the Internet, or is Amazon the only one you really think of?
Yet, ninth in the world is brilliantly successful – there are billions behind you in the queue…! But to be truly successful you need to be Number One – and as Bolt and Gonzalez show us, that only comes with practice and training. And research published this week shows us that such training helps your brain cope with more than one task at a time. That’s particularly important as the Internet requires more multitasking than ever.
