Part I
Pursue High-Leverage Opportunities

Now, a few words on looking for things. When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad. Because of all the things in the world, you’re only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good. Because of all the things in the world, you’re sure to find some of them.

—Daryl Zero, The Zero Effect

A high-leverage opportunity is a prospective situation whose value is much higher than the amount of energy or resources needed to seize it. That is, when presented with a set of opportunities, the ones that have highest value and require the lowest expenditure of resources to successfully capture are the high-leverage opportunities. The diagram on the previous page illustrates the iterative process of pursuing opportunities, mobilizing support, and seizing opportunities. The great achievers pursue this finding-and-seizing process again and again to dominate their domain. Part I of this book explains keys 1 through 4 to pursuing this process, as shown in the diagram.

It is often said that you should learn everything that you can, because it will determine your level of success. But the world’s greatest achievers have used different strategies to learn. They have concentrated their learning in areas where they have passion, advantage, and rewards. They have used techniques to find and efficiently process knowledge. They have used methods to cut to the core of what is most important to their field. They have been able to envision opportunities and maximize their achievement by concentrating only on those with the greatest chance of making them successful. And thus they have embodied the 10 keys. Their insights and methods for pursuing high-leverage opportunities are presented in keys 1 through 4.

The first great achiever we describe was a legendary genius. He is an excellent example of the importance of key 1—the gateway key— to the success of the great achievers.