# Habits, Help, and Luck By:: [[Steven Denman]] 2023-06-27 No one focus captures the essence of making progress personally, professionally, or leading an organization. The data on book-length by genre is revealing. Besides short stories at an average of 30K words and fantasy at an average of 109K (with quite a tail!), all other genres are oddly centered around 96K words. Why? People must be willing to buy a single author's ideas at this length. Many more ideas than this are not published to a broad audience, and a vast minority of books have multiple authors! One of the results is that it is left to individuals and independent content creators (e.g., blogs) to integrate these ideas, and some do it better than others. As it turns out, many dynamics related to making progress personally or professionally are in play! Here is a smattering of recent reflections that are all important. - **Habits** - Not surprisingly, a little bit of focus and hard work every day differentiates in the long term if one can overcome the delayed reward challenge. - **Help** - Good leaders - those people who will challenge, push, and sponsor. This outside input and opportunity for more responsibility is part of the stepwise growth process. - **Luck** - So much is outside of our control. Ideally, this would lead to humility, gratitude, and watchfulness rather than neuroticism. #### Related Items [[Progress]] [[Routine]] [[Development]] [[Leadership]] [[Luck]] [[Reading]] [[Writing]] [[Ideas]]