A Field Guide to Thrive Zones
Why Some Rise So High and Others Fall So Far
“You don’t have to be a fantastic hero to do certain things — to compete. You can be just an ordinary chap, sufficiently motivated…”
— Sir Edmund Hillary
Ordinary Chaps
The Chosen Few Nobody Chose
1. John McCain
A cockpit exploded over the jungle. The pilot ejected. Darkness swallowed him. He woke with a mouth full of fetid water and a broken body. Hỏa Lò Prison in Hanoi became home for 3,000 nights. He spent two of those years in solitary confinement, his body reduced to 105 pounds. His arms were bound behind his back with ropes until his bones cracked. He signed a coerced confession. But when offered early release — he refused. Everyone rows together.
“The mission was my anchor.” — John McCain
2. Michael Phelps
He stood on a starting block in Beijing, eight gold medals waiting. He would win them all. But back home, the demons were waiting too. Months earlier, he had slipped on the ice and broken his wrist. He couldn’t swim with a flipper. “I’m not good on land,” he said later. ADHD returned. Depression too. After a DUI arrest, he sat in a cell, alone, ashamed.
“I didn’t want to be alive.” — Michael Phelps, Sports Illustrated, 2014
3. Reatha Clark King
She was born in Georgia in 1938, into the grip of Jim Crow. Her parents were sharecroppers, she was a cotton picker — her mother scrubbed floors for White families, her father left school in third grade. As a child, Reatha dreamed not of dresses or dances, but equations. At age ten, she could spell “thermodynamics.” She majored in home economics — because no one believed a Black girl should wear a white lab coat. But she didn’t stop. She got a scholarship. She studied chemistry. And when NASA needed someone who understood the effects of heat — they called her.
“I wasn’t brought up to break barriers. I was brought up to stand up to them.” — Reatha Clark King, University of Minnesota Oral History Project
4. Michael Milken
Once the Junk Bond King, Michael Milken made $550 million a year. Then came the fall — a 98-count indictment, a guilty plea, and a federal prison sentence. From the cover of Forbes to an orange jumpsuit. Prostate cancer followed him inside. Doctors told him it was terminal. He was banned from finance, labeled a felon, and exiled from the empire he built. But the letters kept coming — hundreds, then thousands. Scientists. Students. CEOs. He had made them wealthy, now he wanted to help them healthy. In the silence of his cell, he didn’t fume. He drafted a new blueprint.
“Silence didn’t kill me. It cleared the static.” — Michael Milken (1993 interview)
5. Mikhail Khodorkovsky
He was Russia’s richest man, head of Yukos Oil. Then, in 2003, he challenged Vladimir Putin to a debate — on live television. The knock came. His company was seized. Assets poof. He vanished into a Siberian prison. Ten years. No parole. Solitary confinement. Freezing winds sliced through the walls. He wrote manifestos on scraps of paper and smuggled them through his lawyers. His sons grew up seeing him through glass. Yet in that cell, something happened, he became stronger.
“They put me in a cage. Thought isolation would break me. It clarified me.” — Mikhail Khodorkovsky, post-release speech, 2014
6. Nikki Haley
She grew up in Bamberg, South Carolina — a town that demanded you be one thing or the other: Black or white. She was neither. The daughter of Indian Sikh immigrants, she checked “Other” on the school forms and learned early that different wasn’t welcome. At a beauty pageant, they told her there was no category for her skin. At school, they mocked her name. On weekends, she helped her mom run a clothing store. At their Formica kitchen table, the talk was politics, faith, and grit — like they were side dishes passed around after dinner.
“They taught me to stand my ground — without throwing a punch.” — Nikki Haley, Can’t Is Not an Option
7. David Petraeus
Baghdad, 2007. The war was spiraling. The general before him had been forced out after his subordinate called the VP Joe Bite-me. Now it was Petraeus’s war, and most thought it couldn’t be won. He rose before dawn, studied tribal maps, and rewrote the manual. He shifted the strategy from annihilation to alliance. Gave interviews in flak jackets, but more importantly, he listened. The surge wasn’t just about troops. It was about shifting doctrine. It wasn’t just policy. It now included people.
“Chaos was my canvas.” — (Paraphrased from Petraeus interviews during Iraq Surge)
8. Warren Buffett
Midwestern. Mannered. Mild. Loves McDonald’s. Not the man to clean up Wall Street — or so the hucksters believed. But in 1991, when Salomon Brothers imploded in scandal, he volunteered. He blew the lid off corrupt dealing. Then rolled up his sleeves. Drank coffee with the troops. Gave them grit and backbone. Told them to do the right thing — like it was going to be on the front page of the paper. He wasn’t a rescue boat. He was a battleship.
“You don’t need a royal flush. Just a good table.” — Warren Buffett
📜 The Matthew Effect vs. The Matthew Defect
A doctor should have written this book. At the very least, a sociologist. Someone beyond just curious about the greatest failing in adult life, the inability to find long-term, sustained success that leads to genuine happiness. That might be asking too much, given the need for confidentiality. There is also the interesting point that Warren Buffett wouldn’t likely be speaking about his success to a psychiatrist, nor would he want those conversations shared widely in public. But if a former colleague or friend, who happened to be the publisher of Forbes Magazine, someone you trust and who knows your world, asked to interview you about your life’s work and achievements, you might find that interesting. The other advantage, we speak the language of success — both in career and personal achievement. So we are learning their language without the disadvantage of a false notion of what it means to be successful. Much like learning a foreign language from a native of that language, a French woman teaching French, your accent will be natural and original.
And that is how this book came about.
Lacking clinical resources, our goal was to address the gap between the self-help guru and the inspiring biography. One tells you too much, the other too little about success in ordinary lives. We are a massage table versus the psychiatrist’s couch — looking for trigger points that improve wellness rather than a lengthy investigation into deeper mysteries.
The reason why time passage is important is that success opportunities, when they do arrive, are in short bursts. The antecedents are easy to miss. Signals abound, some false and strong, some weak and positive, that only serve to confuse the neurological wiring in our brains. They can easily get combined and confused, like streams flowing down a mountain, leading the drinker to believe they are from the same source. It is why we end up choosing the wrong profession, the wrong spouse, the wrong community, and the wrong college.
The litmus test is called regret, failure, divorce, and anxiety. Luckily for our purposes, you don’t have to separate the streams or to think too hard about referral strategies. It is only important that you know the opportunity has to feature the critical determinants of successful opportunity, stripped of its camouflage clothing (fame, wealth, acclaim). Incidentally, failure similarly gives off false positives and negatives. It is a signal to modify our approach rather than intensify it, as success does. And so a keen level of discrimination is just as important in those areas where we have not succeeded.
The search for a cure isn’t made easier when there are now 10,000 books promising to do just that. But what they all fail to do is focus on the goal, sustainable success that makes you happier. Note, happy is a state of mind, happier is an outcome based on choices. We prefer to effect that.
The chances that spark these phenomena happen, according to Warren Buffett, five or six times in a life, and when they do, be out there with a bucket, not a thimble, he instructs. Our job is to make sure you are attuned and in shape to take advantage of those moments.
Malcolm Gladwell framed his bestseller Outliers around one provocative idea. He called it the Matthew Effect, based on the verse from the Gospel of Matthew: “To those who have, more will be given. To those who have not, even what they have will be taken away.”
Gladwell interprets scripture as a law of compounding advantage, though he doesn’t label it so explicitly. Get born in the right zip code, go to the right nursery school, your early edge snowballs. You get picked first. You get the breaks. Others don’t. The rich get richer.
He stakes his claim on a bit of amusing research that Canadian hockey players born in January are larger, and therefore more likely to get picked for teams as young boys, get better coaching, and turn pro.
If true, that phenomenon plays across the board. Smart, wealthy parents get their average kids great tutors, and the same goes for sports; those kids get the travel team. The children with a silver spoon become stars. It’s tidy, logical, and bleak. Why bother being what you might be — when how you were born is what matters?
The plot unravels for Gladwell because he quotes the right verse, but misses the parable. Because the real story — the one Matthew actually tells — is about a farmer scattering seed on three kinds of soil. Some lands on rocky ground and withers. Some falls among thorns and is choked. But some seed lands on good soil and bears fruit — a hundredfold (later we’ll learn about Steve Jobs’ belief that the best engineers were 100X better because they landed on Apple’s soil).
It wasn’t the seed that made the difference. It was the ground it was planted.
Gladwell makes it sound like the starting line locks in the finish line. But what Matthew describes isn’t a formula for privilege. It’s an insight about choosing the right environment for your kind of talent, and that includes structure, opportunity, and culture — a crucible that shapes your trajectory
What Gladwell calls the Matthew Effect, we call the Matthew Defect because the ones who succeed often defect to better soil. The parable isn’t about how the rich get richer. It’s about how the ordinary become extraordinary — by hitching their wagon to the right place.
That, we believe, is the winning combo, the real key to success.
We call it a Thrive Zone.
📍 Birth deals the first card. But the next draw? That’s yours.
Over the past ten years, we’ve interviewed comeback giants and quiet legends. From the inner sanctum of Warren Buffett in the Omaha headquarters of Berkshire Hathaway, to South Africa’s president FW de Klerk in a limestone fortress on the island of Malta, a 5th Avenue hideout from Putin’s assassins where we meet his nemesis, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, to Nikki Haley’s governor’s mansion, and the Santa Monica temple of philanthropy of Michael Milken, and the aquatic center where Michael Phelps takes his laps these days.
What we found was astonishing. None of them began with royal flushes. They didn’t wait for perfect cards. They changed casinos. They packed and hitched toward environments that challenged them, focused them, most importantly, believed in them.
Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to summit Mount Everest, said it best:
“You don’t have to be a fantastic hero to do certain things. You can be just an ordinary chap — sufficiently motivated.”
Hillary should know. He was a beekeeper from New Zealand who couldn’t spell “Himalayas” as a boy. But he kept climbing. He didn’t aim for glory — he simply kept seeking higher ground. As he later reflected:
“Even the mediocre can have adventures. Even the fearful can achieve.”
Like our subjects, Hillary’s success didn’t come directly from confidence. It made a detour to a step called clarity, and from there it took him to a place he could see further than anyone in snowshoes.
But like Hillary, the transition to a Thrive Zone, a transformative place that can change your life habits, career even your social world, doesn’t come easy. It is the scourge of success in the same way exercise is the bane of fitness. These transformations can make us a bit grumpy, and for that reason, they do not always have the chance to materialize.
To enter a Thrive Zone will mean that you must change your relationship with your world, or perhaps leave your world, or change your world, as our subjects have done. None of that comes easily or quickly.
Once Upon a Terroir
This idea of location as leverage isn’t new.
What made Warren Buffett exceptional wasn’t just intellect. It was Omaha. What made David Petraeus the most decorated general in modern history wasn’t innate valor. It was breeding her learned at West Point. What made Dr. Reatha Clark King such a profound scientist, so much so that Exxon Mobil asked her to join its board, wasn’t her natural ability. It was an itinerant teacher and ‘nagging’ parents and a suburban mom in Pawling New York that indoctrinated a belief that didn’t exist — a land where Blacks had the same opportunities as Whites. Michael Phelps wasn’t a natural, at least not until he entered the NBAC community pool and met his future coach Bob Bowman.
Take any of the places from these scenarios, you do not end up with astonishing success. Buffett becomes and midwestern stockbroker liks his father. Phelps a high school swim coach. King — a chemist in a company lab.
Their success in life was borne of places that clarified the future and set the course. In a world where our daily challenges are overwhelming enough, they provided the self-assurance and serenity to quietly go for the gold ring.
The French call this concept terroir — a word that literally means dirt, but spiritually means everything that surrounds a grapevine. soil and soul. Plant the same vine a hundred yards apart, and you’ll get two different wines. One becomes a Grand Cru, priced at a thousand dollars. The other becomes “vin ordinaire,” sold under a fluorescent sign that says, “Pairs well with chicken.”
The difference wasn’t the grape. It was the ground. The elevation. The environment. The Thrive Zone.
So when you see two lives diverge, and wonder why, given their similar talents and ambition, don’t just ask who worked harder. Ask where they were when it mattered most. Don’t look to the psychologist’s couch. Look to the geographer’s compass. Because there are many kinds of people — but only two kinds of places.
- Survival Zones that burden, suppress, dull, and paralyze.
- Thrive Zones that inspire, encourage, challenge, and lift.
The spark may be the same, but the terrain determines what catches fire. And what we’ve learned, through every story we’ve studied, is this: Most people who rose didn’t start on the hilltop. They moved to one. Birth dealt the first card. They took the next draw.
🌍 The Eternal Search
Before Thrive Zones had names, they left footsteps.
Seventy thousand years ago, our ancestors didn’t leave Africa for better views. They left because something told them more was out there — more rain, more game, more chance. As Yuval Harari put it: “They left to chase potential.”
That urge never left us.
The Sámi of Norway still speak of following the herds — but really, they follow life. The Mongols crossed the steppe and sand for greener pastures. Today, it’s not forage that draws us forward but code, capital, and culture. The language has changed. The instinct hasn’t.
We move toward Thrive Zones — when we can. When we can’t, we stumble into survival zones, the waiting room of lost souls.
Yeonmi Park, who escaped North Korea, didn’t call her journey a quest for greatness. She called it a quest for breath. “In the North,” she said, “you don’t dream. You survive.”
That’s not a failure of talent. It’s a failure of terrain. And not just physical terrain, but cultural.
The kind Ibn Khaldun meant when he wrote, “Culture is destiny.” Not the museum kind. Not the mural or festival kind. But the kind that’s lived day after day. The kind that trains you in what to notice, what to measure, what to memorize — what to dream, and what to avoid.
That’s what a Thrive Zone really is: Not paradise. Not some Shangri La with weekend rates for a couple’s escape. But a place where the structure of your life supports the spark of your ambition.
Look closely at history’s hotspots: Dickens’s London. Mozart’s Vienna. Jobs’s Cupertino. Armstrong’s New Orleans. They weren’t easy to find the way. They weren’t polished. But they were alive. The conditions clicked. Grit met guidance. And something extraordinary emerged.
That’s the formula we want to show you. The one you can adapt to your own life and circumstances. Because they did, and you can too.
You’ll need a compass like in any adventure into the wilderness. Start with a mentor who points toward something real. You need teammates who pull with you, not against you. You need a method — a means of achieving a goal that seems elusive. You need mantras — stories, songs, tattoos for the brain that keep rhythm when you’re tired. And you need metrics — brutal, market based beautiful proof of progress.
These aren’t luxuries. They’re launchpads. When they align, it doesn’t feel like success. It feels like gravity reversed. It feels like the moment you finally stop paddling in circles and start moving toward something that pulls you forward.
This book isn’t a map. It’s a field guide. To help you recognize the zones that build people up — and the ones that quietly hollow them out.
Because most people aren’t failing. They’re just stuck in the wrong place.
Some seeds fell on stony ground, they withered in the sun. But some fell on good ground, and bore fruit.
🌎 Sidebar: Same People. Different Outcomes.
What divides a Thrive Zone from a Survival Zone isn’t luck. It’s design.
And design requires devotion.
Thrive Zones don’t happen by accident. They are cultivated — like vineyards, coral reefs, or cathedrals. Tended, tested, rebuilt from rubble. When the tending stops, so does the thriving.
Across the world, we see the pattern: same people, same soil, even the same DNA. But vastly different outcomes — based on whether the society in question built a Thrive Zone… or inherited a Survival Zone.
Look at Korea.
South Korea invested in export zones, global mentorship, institutional learning. But even within the peninsula, movement mattered. The most educated and entrepreneurial North Koreans fled south before the border sealed. Today, that brain drain is visible from space.
Look at Israel.
Many of its early founders were Holocaust survivors, refugees from Iraq, immigrants from Yemen — people who left behind Survival Zones to build something better. Even within Israel, the difference between Israeli Arabs and Palestinians in the Territories is stark. Same region. Different rights of movement. Different outcomes.
Even Germany tells this story.
In the years before the Berlin Wall, East Germans defected west by the thousands — through forests, tunnels, and even in a homemade hot air balloon. They weren’t chasing comfort. They were chasing conditions.
The painful truth?
Floyd couldn’t move.
Not early enough. Not far enough. Not fast enough.
His scaffolding never arrived.
The hopeful truth?
Movement is still possible.
Because geography is only destiny when it stays fixed.
Your birth deals the first card. But the next draw? That’s yours.
And if the soil you’re standing on no longer feeds your roots — then do what we’ve done for 70,000 years:
Move.
📘 THRIVE ZONE FIELD GUIDE
/THrīv zōn/ noun
A place where people grow, prosper, and flourish.
— -🛠️ The Scaffolding
If you want to understand why some people rise while others stall — why certain places spark genius and others quietly extinguish it — don’t look for magic. Look for infrastructure.
Not the kind poured in concrete. The kind laid in people.
Behind every Mozart, every Musk, every Michelangelo, there’s a scaffold. Not always visible from the outside, but unmistakable once you step into it. It’s not comfort. It’s not chaos. It’s a system. A network of support and challenge. Encouragement and expectation. A structure that demands you show up — but also shows up for you.
I call it the Five Ms.
They’re not a checklist. They’re a bloodstream. They circulate — powerfully, invisibly — through every Thrive Zone I’ve studied.
🧭 The Five Ms of a Thrive Zone
Mentors: Set the compass.
→ Direction comes first.
Mates: Grab an oar.
→ No one rows alone.
Method: Name the goal.
→ Clarity creates movements.
Mantras: Sing the hymn.
→ Culture binds the crew.
Metrics: Measure true.
→ Progress needs proof.
🔥 My First Thrive Zone: Forbes on Fire
I’ve seen what a Thrive Zone looks like up close — because I found myself in one.
Before I turned 36, Malcolm Forbes made me a publisher. I didn’t have a five-year plan. I had five minutes to pitch my next idea. A high-tech magazine. A new lifestyle brand. He kept throwing me the ball. One three-pointer after another. It wasn’t me. I never had talent like that before. It wasn’t him in the sense that my success rested on his encouragement. It was the place he designed. It made extraordinary successes out of ordinary ingredients.
That’s what my Thrive Zone at Forbes Magazine gave me: confidence, initiative, urgency, and self-determination. Success comes not from hard work and ambition; it is an act of creativity that comes from being liberated.
The place wasn’t always polished — more than occasionally, chaotic.
Malcolm Forbes once paid $175,000 for a bottle of Thomas Jefferson’s wine, only to find the label was counterfeit. He didn’t care about safe. He wanted spark.
“Failure is success,” he’d say, “as long as we learn from it.”
I’ll drink to that. Malcolm backed people, not resumes. Our fitness director had a drinking problem. Malcolm didn’t terminate — sent him to rehab, kept his seat warm, and welcomed him back. He only recently retired, a millionaire several times over (the Forbes 401K was the richest in the business, and Forbes knew something about stocks). When Malcolm threw a 70th birthday party in Morocco, his secretary mistakenly sent the invite to the entire mailing list. Malcolm didn’t scold. He went bold. Chartered a plane for hundreds of unexpected guests.
Everyone has weight — in a Thrive Zone — from the janitor to the publisher. Success was treated as your kill and your skill, failure was a group experiment. He told us again and again:
“Without you, we ain’t.”
And he was generous. Every year, he hosted a birthday party at his New Jersey estate, handing out thousands of dollars for every year you’d worked. Some employees had been there thirty, forty years. They paid college tuition with that bonus. Took vacations. Bought homes.
Forbes changed their lives. And it changed my trajectory. All because I moved to a place with a mentor, with mates, with proven methods, with mantras, and judged by metrics. That was my first Thrive Zone: not a school, not a title, but a culture that lifted and lit you up.
Because someone saw more in me than I’d dared to see in myself.
That’s when I learned: Where you are determines who you become.
🧭 The Right Move
Thrive Zones don’t wait for you.
You have to move toward them.
Sometimes it’s a shift in geography. Sometimes in mindset.
But the story never changes: those who rise, move.
I did. I wasn’t born into Forbes. I moved toward it.
One step at a time — first a meeting, then a risk, then a job, then a publisher’s chair I hadn’t dared to imagine. The soil changed. And so did I.
LeBron didn’t wait for his zip code to turn into a Thrive Zone.
His mother sent him across town to find one. A new home. A new mentor. A new mission. That wasn’t luck. That was movement.
Across history, this same pattern repeats: The ones who thrive aren’t always the ones who start in the best place. They’re the ones who leave the worst place behind.
🏀 Proof of Concept: Say Great
Take the case of LeBron James and George Floyd — two outcomes more divergent than most of us dare to imagine. LeBron, a 21-time All-Star and four-time NBA champion, is the first active NBA player to become a billionaire. George Floyd died face-down in a Minneapolis parking lot with a policeman’s knee on his back, passing counterfeit twenties for a pack of cigarettes.
But look closer.
Both were raised by single mothers in gritty, inner-city neighborhoods — Akron for James, Houston for Floyd. Both were Black boys with athletic talent. Both were drawn to basketball. Floyd even went to college on a scholarship.
So what changed?
LeBron’s mother, Gloria, sent him to live with a foster family. His new guardian, Frank Walker, introduced him to basketball and enrolled him in an all-white Catholic school. There, LeBron bonded with teammates — kids his age, his race, and his talent level — who helped elevate him. They were stars together. And every game, Frank Walker watched from the stands, calling out just one word:
“Great, LeBron.”
That mattered.
By the time LeBron played in the University of Akron stadium, a Cavaliers coach was already watching from the box seats.
“That changed everything,” LeBron later said. “He introduced me to basketball. Without that, who knows what path I take?”
Floyd dropped out of college. He reconnected with old friends from the neighborhood. The spiral was slow, then steep — drugs, petty crimes, an armed robbery conviction, seven years in prison. After release, he tried to start over, but the scaffolding was gone.
“I want to be a better man,” he once told his friend Stephen Jackson. “Somebody my daughter can look up to.”
Same seed. Different soil.
No one ever said, “Great.”
📍 What Comes Next
We’ve now seen the scaffolding — the human infrastructure that makes a Thrive Zone possible.
But scaffolding isn’t everything. What we need now is terrain.
Because not all Thrive Zones look alike. They’re not copies. They’re ecosystems. Each shaped by a different mix of values, constraints, and traditions.
Some are forged in discipline. Others in freedom. Some are built on fire. Others on kinship.
In this next section, we’ll explore five core types of Thrive Zones:
Different soil for different souls — each one a place where potential can take root.
🏛 The Citadel — Strength through order. Boundaries, hierarchy, endurance.
🎨 The Sandbox — Freedom to create. Play, prototype, reinvent.
🔨 The Forge — Pressure and fire. Discipline, sacrifice, transformation.
🔥 The Campfire — Culture as kinship. Storytelling, belief, unity.
🧬 The Bloodline — Legacy and identity. Tradition with teeth.
Each of these types produces a different kind of greatness.
And each demands a different kind of courage.
This isn’t just a map of what’s possible.
It’s a field guide to the ground where greatness grows.
Because where you are still shapes who you become.
If you want to understand why some people rise while others stall — why certain places spark genius and others quietly extinguish it — don’t look for magic. Look for infrastructure.
Not the kind poured in concrete. The kind laid in people.
Behind every Mozart, every Musk, every Michelangelo, there’s a scaffold. Not always visible from the outside, but unmistakable once you step into it. It’s not comfort. It’s not chaos. It’s a system. A network of support and challenge. Encouragement and expectation. A structure that demands you show up — but also shows up for you.
Warren Buffett has another fanciful name for this. He calls your birth the “ovarian lottery” — where you start is the first card. Some land in soil that feeds them tall as sequoias. Others claw through desert scrub, scraping for drops.
But that’s just the opening bid. The next draw’s yours. In a Thrive Zone, everyone’s got weight, and every period of your life, you get a fresh card.
This book dares you to seek the right soil, fan the flames of your soul, and set your dreams ablaze. And if the soil you’re standing on no longer feeds your roots — do as we have for 70,000 years, move.
Let’s begin the journey.
