Why seminar ending Q&As are screwing with your mind.
At the end of many seminars, they open it up for Q&A. Gary Vee is a big proponent of this allocating nearly half his speaking time for Q&A.
There’s a few valuable lessons woven in the audience’s questions.
Audience members love to give their backstory. Hopefully with you being an outside observer, and listening to Gary’s answers that can can see this:
The backstory is nearly completely useless for giving the answer and often doesn’t change the answer.
Secondly, the answers to questions that only take less than 15 seconds to explain are probably not good questions (eg. “What’s your best advice for someone getting started?!” is a great example of a question that is low value) and the answers that are limited to a very short period is also fairly useless.
Life hack: Skip the audience Q&A in seminars.
It’d be cool to have a list of questions of from the audience, have someone from Gary’s staff read them, find a few good questions and go into that with the audience member deeply on that question.
There’s the secret to having one of the most valuable seminar Q&As ever – hopefully seminar speakers are listening!
What about your back story is bogging down your mind with the ability to see the question in it’s clearest form?
What else are you listening to besides seminar Q&As that you’re wasting your time with?
Passion can be replaced with discipline.
Follow your passion is common advice. Some gurus preach it, and some gurus say it’s garbage.
Is someone that starts a million dollar sewage treatment plant passionate about sewage?
Of course not. But most people are passionate about a very limited amount of things, and most of them don’t make any money.
The reason why follow your passion is such good advice is this:
People have no discipline, no work ethic, and are exceedingly difficult to motivate.
When you introduce passion for those typical people, they actually will roll out of bed to do that one thing they enjoy. The hope is they get good enough to make money at it, and following your passion is great advice for the masses.
There’s TONS of better strategies besides following your passion.
But it’s the best strategy for the masses, because the masses simply won’t DO any other strategy.
Discipline can save you.
Discipline doesn’t care whether you like something or not. Discipline can see where success is, and go in that direction, pushing past all the laziness of the typical person.
Passion IS a choice, but it’s largely an unconscious choice. Discipline is a conscious choice.
Discipline – you control it.
Passion – it controls you.
Money doesn’t care whether you want to do the work that generates that money. If it did, everyone that hates their job would never make any money. Money only cares about you creating value – not your passion. Discipline allows you to get whatever you consciously want done, if you’re passionate about it too, doing that thing just becomes easier.
Don’t fall into the trap of figuring what your passion is for a career. Passion can be a conscious choice. Also, having discipline allows you to dominate in areas that aren’t stuffed full of competitors that are all wildly passionate about it.
Following your passion about playing video games and making a living from it is possible, but it’s hard as hell.
Paradoxically, if you follow paths that don’t have a ton of passionate people in it, things become MUCH easier.
Create discipline. Chose your passion. And find the ways of producing value that aren’t necessarily sexy (eg. a drywall manufacturing facility, parking lot paving facility, etc).
It’s easy to do what you’re passionate about, but it’s hard to make a living with it sometimes. It’s sometimes easier to just create discipline to do the things no one else wants to do.
Where are you in terms of your passion? Or in terms of your discipline?
Your dangerous subconscious quest for tragedy.
Kevin Smith recently talked in an interview with Joe Rogan that he’s “living on borrowed time.” This is because he had a heart attack and could have easily died but now is so grateful to be here for a little longer.
It’s screwed up that people only feel gratitude when things are awful.
The sooner you see this flaw in human psychology the better you can avoid it. But everyone that was captured by terriorists and let free feels so great. Perhaps you hear people talk about how great God is after the news of cancer spread but it seems to have stopped…for now.
People almost need to have these awful things happen to let their life change in a positive direction.
If you’ve already had that terrible event to make your life better, then you got off easy, because gratitude is very easy to have after that. If you haven’t had horrendous things happen, stop subconsciously looking for it to happen so you can give yourself permission to feel “blessed” when you survive that massive car accident.
You can feel gratitude today.
It’s a same concept as looking for a “sign.” You make up the meaning of everything that happens. Signs are just permission slips to feel a way that we want to feel in the form of your subconscious. But your subconscious also wants you narrowly miss a bridge collapsing to feel grateful about being alive – so be careful.
Giving gratitude everyday is magical not only because it changes your mindset positively, but because it is also programming your subconscious mind to not to manifest negative things as well.
What things is your subconscious mind seeking that you need to start to consciously avoid?
Strengths are sadly often a result of weakness.
“Find your weakness and work on it!” – Random Guru
If people followed that bad advice, a lot of success would have never happened.
I’m not saying “turn those weaknesses into strengths,” I’m pointing out that that:
Persisting weakness in one area actually creates strength in another – Truth Cake
Arnold Schwarzenegger has a weakness of his accent, but that ended up being a great thing for his movies. He also had a terrible self image and thought he was ugly and flabby even as a bodybuilder, and it pushed him to be better and better.
Externally, we were impressed, but internally Arnold was a painful mess.
Michael Jackson had a weakness of trying to be a perfectionist, and was never happy with his performances, often slinging him into dark depressions. But it’s what made him practice relentlessly.
Omar Ellatar, the popular YouTube success podcaster, was motivated by jealousy and anger towards other people that he envied. He never gave up because his hatred towards so many other people was so intense. Jordan Belfort was motivated to succeed because he was a sex addict. Edison’s competitive spirit that resulted in so many inventions also resulted in torture by electrocution of animals to prove that A/C was more dangerous than his D/C electricity.
It’s the dark side of many successful people that no one talks about.
What weaknesses do you have that will actually propel you forward?
What happens when you’re passionate about being lazy?
When Tony Robbin’s talking about his passion being “to serve the greater good” and other lofty ideals that make him leap out of bed in the morning, the rest of us think about being passionate about sitting around and doing nothing.
Dan Kennedy once talked about how the idea of doing what you love doing is terrible advice. He talked about how he loves lounging around in hammocks, reading the paper, and other random “lazy” sounding things.
He’s lying to himself.
If Dan really just enjoyed those things, he could have stopped “working” decades ago. Lounging around costs nothing and entertainment is the cheapest it’s ever been for humanity.
Even Brad Gosse, the massively successful internet marketer, said he wanted to build a business so he could sit around and smoke weed all day. He knew what he wanted, knew the business type that could take him there, and then did it. Of course, that wasn’t what he TRULY wanted, else he wouldn’t be still working.
Being passionate about being lazy is (unfortunately) only true for very few people.
So if you’re passionate about doing nothing and lounging around, one of two things is happening, 1) You can do nothing and lounge around for very little money, and is very easy to achieve, so go do it, or 2) You’re lying to yourself.
One of the only ways to figure what you want is to start unraveling the web of lies you’ve told yourself for years.
Dan isn’t passionate about sitting around. He likes to work, likes the feeling of making money, and likes the status that comes with it. The type of work and way he’s making money is just the conduit to get to what he wants – seeing his bank account get fatter and doing work he’s decided to care about.
It’s some sort of profound paradoxical question: If I did nothing, what would I do?
What do you really enjoy doing and how can you engineer a life that reflects that?
Forget mastery – all you need is to get lucky!
It’s been said by people like Jordan Belfort, Meet Kevin, and a slew of others that Grant Cardone just “got lucky” in real estate because basically everyone is making a killing in commercial real estate in 2019. But when the real estate market crashes, Cardone and everyone like him are going down because they’re not “true” masters of real estate.
“You need to be successful in all environments, and all market conditions! Rely on your skill and not luck!” – Typical guru.
It’s nonsense. And it’s a game losers like to tell themselves so they feel like they’re surrounded by losers like themselves (because those other winners are actually losers, but just got “lucky”). And winners like to tell themselves this nonsense because it makes them feel like their success is even better and unique, than all the other “lucky” winners that surround them.
The reality is hard to swallow: Everything is luck.
You’re lucky to be alive. Lucky to be reading this. At what point do you decide someone’s success isn’t valid due to luck? Gates is only successful because he was lucky to be born right around the time the computer was getting big. That stock trader that made $5 mil back in 1999 is
“a garbage trader, he only got lucky because of the dot coms!”
Well, their luck made them rich enough.
It’s a myth that you have to be successful in some unrelenting, never ending fashion. It only takes 1 attempt that gets lucky for you to “make it.” Whether it be picking a life partner, picking an investment, or a career path, it doesn’t matter.
Start thinking about getting lucky just once – it’s often all you really need.
Skill helps the odds for your luck, and persevering just increases your number of lotto tickets in life. Skill and persevering doesn’t guarantee anything though – you still have to have luck.
You can’t win without luck.
We feel comfortable with being told it’s all about skill and your attitude, because it gives the illusion we’re in control. But we’re only in control of our odds (skill), and the amount of chances to take (work), but we don’t actually control the outcome. If you still disagree, you’re lucky you didn’t get struck by lightning just now, or lucky you were born with eyes to read this and be upset, and so on.
In what ways have you ignored the fact that you’re incredibly lucky?
The secret to progress: Stop finding solutions and look for more problems.
“Stay positive, and focus on solutions and not the problems!” – Random Guru.
It’s garbage advice.
It’s often bad advice since we’re often solving the wrong problem. Sometimes the better way to look at it is to consider why something is a problem to begin with.
If your business has a turnover problem, reducing turnover might not be the best answer. A better problem is, “Why is turnover a problem?” Which the answer is, “Because new people make mistakes.” If you can solve the problem with why new hires still makes mistakes, you can fix the bad training. Now, it’s fine to have turnover, because your new hires all perform like seasoned reps.
Problems are always layered. If you can only see one problem, your solution is likely a mistake.
If your problem is you’re single, getting on another dating app isn’t the solution. Your problem may be that you’re not desirable to begin with.
If your problem is that it’s cold, the solution is not likely moving to another state, but instead putting on a jacket.
Always be asking about the problem, and why is that problem a problem.
Stuck in traffic? The solution is to drive aggressively. But why is the original problem a problem? Because you’re late to work and the boss will be pissed. Maybe you need a remote job (a job problem), maybe leave earlier (a time management problem), maybe use the subway (a germ phobia problem).
Focusing on the problems in this way will help you progress much better than the stereotypical advice.
What problem are you trying to solve, but more importantly, why is it a problem?
What is this site?
Self improvement for smart people.
I follow business leaders, gurus, and philosophers and note things others missed that I’ve found valuable.
This site is my precious treasure chest of ideas on business, philosophy and life. And hopefully during your pillaging here, you get your mind blown.
My life’s goals are to help summarize the human knowledge base, dispel self improvement myths, and achieve a resultant and unrelenting state of 24/7 euphoria. I’m kidding, but we’ll still try!
Follow along on my journey!
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