If you want to succeed – stop trying to do your best.
Beware of bad advice that gets hidden and wrapped around good advice.
Your mind will embrace both ideas, which contradict each other, and result in not being able to progress. People can’t figure out why they can’t execute their plan, why they lack motivation, and so on.
But the problem isn’t in a lack of will power, the problem is in a lack of consistent belief.
There’s lots of conflicting advice in personal development, and you have to be diligent to spot where these opposing ideas hide themselves. For example, remember Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) said that “if you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you waited too long to launch.” We all know perfectionism is highly problematic for people getting started. But yet, look how perfectionism masks itself in a deceiving coat of make up when we hear the advice, “Always do your best!” I believe your best is probably close to perfect, and it also takes an infinite amount of time to achieve. You could always have tried a LITTLE harder, practiced a LITTLE more, and researched just a LITTLE more.
Your “best” is a target that’s the same as chasing a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I tried chasing that rainbow as a child and realized I had been duped not because there wasn’t likely a pot of gold – I was actually sure the gold was there. What made me know it was BS was because as I moved a foot closer to the rainbow, the rainbow moved a foot away from me as well.
Doing your best is like chasing a rainbow. It’s something gullible kids like me try to do. Even with reading all the motivational books in the world, meditations, visualizations, and confidence in the world will still never let me get to the end of the rainbow.
It’s not “failure” or “giving up” when you don’t get the gold – it’s the realization that some beliefs are garbage. What other beliefs do we have that are quietly conflicting with each other that are keeping us stuck?
So stop doing your best. Find your hidden conflicting beliefs. Start moving forward.
Having inaccurate beliefs can help you reach the next level.
Dan Kennedy talks about you should be interpreting all news as good news, since it’s very difficult to know if something that seems “bad” leads to something “good” later on. You never get any momentum of moving forward if you’re always assessing each thing as “good or bad” and also considering that many things are bad. Therefore, outside of clearly devastating things like short-term terminal illnesses, it’s best to go ahead and interpret all news as good news.
He cites the well known story of James McDermott, who gave stock tips to a stripper, goes to jail for sharing insider information. While in jail, James’ office in the trade towers was hit by the 9/11 planes, and his coworkers all died. Therefore, the news of going to jail was actually good. The issue of trying to determine if something is good or bad is something a lot of people do, but really has no real purpose in how you should be proceeding a lot of times on an objective level.
You can bend anything to seem like a good event. And it’s a good idea to probably do so, but down deep realize this concept of making things seem good vs bad is probably not serving you in a direct fashion.
The point being that it might ACTUALLY be bad news that you’re experiencing, but it’s better to just consider it all good, and continue to pivot / adapt and progress further. It’s a good idea to say everything is good, but it may not be accurate.
The same is true for the idea of “fault.”
Since determining who is at fault is very difficult, if not impossible, and the better idea is to simply blame yourself for everything. It’s not necessarily true that it’s your fault, since a 2 year old beaten excessively by his parents can hardly be considered “at fault.” We know Alex Becker and many others maintain that the only way you can feel like you’re in control and not be hampered by feeling like a victim is to believe everything is your fault as a blanket belief.
Indeed, there are certain things that may not be your fault, but the reality is that the entire concept of fault is worthless. People like the concept of fault to protect their ego / self when it was someone else’s fault, and to pump themselves up when things go well when it was their ‘fault’ they did so well. Those are kind of worthless objectives when it comes to your actual goals. Therefore, down deep, the concept of fault is worthless and you should be attempting to be moving forward regardless of whether you are a true victim or not, whether it was really your fault or someone else’s fault.
The point is that even though it’s a good idea to simply attribute fault to yourself, it may or may not be true, and finally, it shouldn’t matter even if you knew for sure. Know where you went wrong, what was just bad luck, and alter your strategies as needed, but don’t worry about the true ways to rationalize it into being your fault (or not your fault) and realize your next step is based on logic, and not protecting your ego.
Therefore, the next level beyond attributing fault is simply realize that fault is a worthless concept created around people that are preserving egos and making excuses for not moving forward.
The 2 precise reasons to know immediately whether to quit or not.
We already know that winners have no problem failing, but considering the difference between failing vs quitting can be illuminating.
Quitting means you never got to the end point to know if you failed or not. If the goal is to knock out Mike Tyson, then “quitting” is going to the boxing gym for a year straight and then deciding to not go anymore. But “failure” is getting into the ring with Tyson and getting knocked out. If you quit, you never know if you would have failed or not. Failure is you gave it all your effort and didn’t achieve your goal, vs quitting where you didn’t give all your effort and didn’t achieve your goal.
This distinction is important because failure has to be an accepted possibility Also Seth Godin talks in The Dip about how winners quit the right thing at the right time. That whole “quit the right thing at the right time” is where the difficulty is in executing this strategy.
Knowing when to quit is easy: 1) If the reward is revealed to not be worth the effort, 2) When you’re not progressing in any way towards the goal.
Consider the goal to bench press 500 pounds but you’ve been stuck at a 320 lbs bench for a year without any progression.
This whole 500 lbs bench press goal likely isn’t going to happen.
Quitting for bad reasons like “it’s hard” or “I’m progressing slowly, but I want it NOW (instant gratification)” are terrible reasons to quit. Mostly people quit because of those 2 reasons. If you’ve been pursuing a goal and not progressing, it’s time to either change your strategy or quit. And if you’re discovering that to beat Mike Tyson in a fight won’t take 1 year in the gym, but 6 years instead, and it’s no longer worth it, well…it’s time to quit.
Quit because you’re not progressing or because the effort / grind isn’t worth the end reward.
The monster opportunity behind being late to the latest trend.
When I’m 1 day late to wish someone a happy birthday, I don’t wish them a belated birthday, I wish them a happy 364 day early birthday.
If you’re late to business trends, there’s usually something else that you’re inherently tremendously early for if the original trend is still going.
You may have missed the opportunity to make a bookstore online, but you’re early to the idea of selling other products through Amazon.
You may be late to cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, you may be early on selling people “bitcoin trading newsletters”
You may be late to the legalized weed boom, but you may be early on buying some of the farm land that these companies will want to use to grow weed later.
You may be late to peer-to-peer based hotel company like AirBnB, but you’re early on building a real estate portfolio rented out using AirBnB.
So cheer up there champ, you’re late to everything, but that means you’re early to the next big thing.
Taking the easy road is the only path of real progress.
In an interview with Tom Bilyeu, Michael Ovitz, a highly successful talent agency owner in Hollywood, talks about how much easier we have it now and subtly hints to the glory (and difficulty) of cranking things out from scratch as he did in the entertainment industry.
It’s worth spending a moment to consider the implications of “you have it easy, I have it hard” that’s so common in older generations. Yes, of course it’s easy to do what they did now – they’ve already done it and shown us the way. But it’s still “hard” to create new stuff, just as they did. And there’s no glory in doing the same stuff they did from the same difficult starting point they had.
There’s no glory in rediscovering America.
Are we supposed to only get credit when we have terrible tools like the prior generation? I think not, and it’s common knowledge that you shouldn’t reinvent the wheel. If you have to keep reinventing the wheel, and don’t stand on the shoulders of giants, progress isn’t going to happen. It takes a lifetime to invent the car. It takes another lifetime to invent a self driving car. It takes another lifetime to invent a way to get off of Earth.
If everyone had to reinvent the wheel, we’d never get anywhere. And people should try to find those handouts as quickly as possible. We get most progress in humanity not from patting ourselves on the back bragging about how we created something from scratch, but how we used a platform made by others. Bezos can’t make Amazon.com without someone else having built the platform of the internet itself. Someone can’t make a nice homemade craft business without having Amazon Handmade (an Etsy competitor) as a platform. We’re always standing on a platform of some sort.
So when someone says, “We didn’t have all the tools you kids have nowadays! We had to do XYZ from scratch!” In reality, they did nothing from scratch. They created something from a platform made from prior generations. And doing stuff from scratch will get you to “invent” the same stuff that’s already been invented – meaning you’ve not progressed, but patted yourself on the back real good.
It’s better to find the furthest point that humanity had trudged and then go a bit further on your own, with “everything all just handed to us,” because otherwise, you go no where.
Find the easy way, take the tools made by others, jump on the platforms already created for us, and go a bit further from that. It’s really about having a big subconscious “shut up!” to people that say things like, “yeah, but you have it so easy now!” – we sure do, to do the same old stuff it would be much easier to do now. But we’re not doing easy stuff. We’re pushing further than they ever could, using the tools and platforms we never would have had the time to invent if it wasn’t for them.
If you’re doing something that makes something easy for someone, or helps someone create or grow something, you’re probably doing the right thing.
There’s no glory in inventing the wheel anymore.
How to perfectly define what personal weakness to work on
Wait, didn’t I say to never work on weaknesses in another article? Yes and no.
You’d think that if you asked for a laundry list of things, and got 90%, you should be content since you got the majority. In another article I talk about whether to double down on your strengths like many guru types talk about like Gary Vee and Tai Lopez. But really, you’ve got to work on your weakness too.
The better question is what weakness should I work on?! Never fear, Truth Cake has the answer.
First, consider the ability to get what you’re looking for like following a recipe.
Obtaining health, wealth, and love tend to require you having all the ingredients to get the result you’re looking for. If you’re trying to make a bunch of cash, thinking about the business operations alone without doing the mental mindset programming like prescribed in books like Think and Grow Rich will likely result in you making money either slowly, not at all, or actually attaining money but losing it all quickly thereafter.
The Rx for wealth has lots of things – work ethic, risk taking, mindset programming, business knowledge, etc. If you don’t have all of them, you have to hope that some missing ingredient magically (and unlikely) falls into place.
Every good witch knows that magic happens when all of the stars align!
You don’t need to get one or two things right, you need them all.
Same thing for happiness – you need some blend of Health, Wealth and Love to brew up a heaping cup of happiness.
Same thing for love – you need to not only know how to find someone, but how to be someone that a mate would actually want to stick around with.
Same thing for health – you can workout everyday but if you eat like garbage, you’re not getting the body you want.
Same thing for building a car to go somewhere – you can get a frame, tires, and an engine, but if with no gas, you’re not going anywhere.
Being “close” on following recipes is only protecting your ego. “I was sooo close, I went to bake a truth cake and got ALL the ingredients just right, except I never added flour!” Whoops – you lose.
When you think of your weakness to work on, you want it to be in the SAME list of ingredients to get what you want. If you wanted to have a better physique, you’d find the weakness to work on. So you want to break down your recipe lists from general (Happiness), to one of the 3 ingredients in Happiness such as Health. Then from the Health recipe you see a list of things like Diet, Working Out, Meditation, Sleep, etc and you’d pick Working Out. Then there would be exercise lists in that recipe. If your legs weren’t developed and that was your weakness, you’d work on better leg routines. This is a great weakness to work on that helps your happiness. In contrast, a BAD weakness to work on for Happiness is “football skills” – you’re weak at that, and you’re probably not going to get so much better that it will matter, so don’t bother.
In the end consider your goal in the smallest and easiest recipe it can be, and work on weaknesses there. Because you usually need everything to get anything at all that you want to happen.
Start demanding and working towards everything, because you’re likely to get nothing otherwise.
The massive opportunity in stagnant and commoditized industries
Stagnant valuable industries that aren’t declining, are usually where we find the home runs for new businesses.
People want to enter the obvious industries – VR, High Tech, and Artificial Intelligence. Nothing wrong with that, as there’s tons of opportunity there.
But that often comes with the implicit conclusion that there’s no opportunity elsewhere. Go tell the following companies their industry isn’t “hot” and to pick something else:
Uber, the fastest growing company ever, that taxis aren’t new, hip, or exciting.
Uber Eats, the fastest growing meal delivery service, that pizza and meal delivery is old news.
Netflix, one of the fastest growing internet entertainment businesses that TV programming is piled full of competition and is stagnant.
So if you’re in an industry that’s old, but useful and valuable, there’s likely opportunity. Maybe there’s not as much low hanging fruit, but there’s certainly less competition since all the business whiz kids aren’t looking at these industries.
Providing value is always “hip” and lucrative. If you can truly provide value that’s wanted (eg. NOT a new Newspaper printing technique, as nobody wants that ‘value’), it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in.
When we don’t waste mental energy blaming everything (presidents, economy, industry), we can use that energy to see problems and consider creative ways around those obstacles to still create value.
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!
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