How to Get Ahead of 99% of People (Starting Today)

it's simple if you want to get ahead of 99 of people in the world then you need to be willing to do something that 99 of people are not willing to do you are a Marvel my now I know that sounds obvious but there's been a bit of a meme with a bunch of videos coming out claiming that they make you more successful than 99 of people in the world and it turns out it's all the same [ __ ] you hear in every other video have goals be more disciplined remove distractions something called monk mode are we [ __ ] serious right now guys goals guys goals that's what Bill Gates goals that's what got him there right he had some goals my mailman has goals my housekeeper is disciplined everybody's trying to remove distractions these things are not something that 99 of people don't do and monk mode by the way have you looked at the most successful people in the world there is nothing resembling Monkish Behavior among them because let's be real if an action is common I.E if you can literally get on YouTube and find hundreds of videos telling you to do it then it's not gonna make you more successful than 99 of people by definition to be more successful than everybody else you need to do whatever everybody else does not do here's a harsh truth for you when it comes to success the productivity hacks the morning routines most of this [ __ ] doesn't matter and to prove my point I'm going to share with you some of the basic habits of some of the world's most successful people throughout history starting obviously with myself see when I started my business every morning I would wake up at about 11 A.M and I'd get myself a Red Bull and some Reese's cups and then I would stay in bed for another two hours sitting on my laptop hmm tastes like ambition I did this for three years and I built a six-figure business in my mid-20s doing it in the first half of this video I'm actually going to break down what makes somebody more successful than 99 of the people on this planet but before you get all excited and start rubbing your nipples no not gonna do that I'm not gonna go there the second half of this video is going to explain to you why you might not actually want to be more successful than 99 of the people on this planet because like most important things in life Success is Not simple it's actually pretty [ __ ] complicated so let's get into it if you actually want to be more successful than 99 of people you have to one have a contrarian idea to be correct about that idea and three execute on it massively let's start with number one most people don't ever have a contrarian idea in their life let's be honest most people just kind of go with the flow and agree with whatever their friends tell them is cool that week but there is a significant minority of people in society that will think for themselves and come up with some contrarian ideas or buy into some batshit crazy theories which brings us to number two of all the people that have contrarian ideas the vast majority of those contrarian ideas are not going to be correct they're going to be horribly wrong they're gonna be embarrassingly wrong this is actually the most difficult part of achieving insane amounts of success you have to disagree with everybody and then be right and even if you happen to disagree with everybody and be right about it you have to be willing to execute you have to put your ass on the line now when we look at super successful people we tend to focus on that last part what's his morning routine what sort of supplements did she take execution gets discussed most of the time because it's easy to observe it's also easy to replicate so while execution is incredibly important it is not the thing that determines the magnitude of a person's success Steve Jobs was not Steve Jobs because he woke up early and ate an ass load of fruit Steve Jobs was Steve Jobs because he believed a full decade before anybody else that one day a computer would sit on every desk and be in every office in the entire world and he was correct about it Warren Buffett every morning goes to the McDonald's drive-through and gets the same piece of [ __ ] breakfast that you and I look down on [Music] Warren Buffett Buffett is Warren Buffett because consistently he has identified companies that were extremely valuable that most other people thought sucked and then he bought them and then he sat around [ __ ] McDonald's and drinking Coca-Cola and waited a few decades which by the way is another thing most people are not willing to do and now he's the greatest investor of all time execution is overrated if I can do one thing that will 100x my results then the other 99 things don't really matter but people don't like hearing this because it is unbelievably hard to find that one thing that is gonna hundred extra results they almost don't exist anywhere so instead we make videos about you know morning routines and [ __ ] to eat as if like eating the same meal that Kobe Bryant ate before basketball games is gonna make you play basketball like Kobe Bryant which by the way I actually have what Kobe Bryant ate before each of his basketball games orange or grape soda and a pepperoni pizza Kobe Bryant fan look execution is necessary it's just not sufficient and 99 of the advice that you're going to get out in the world is about execution the hardest part about achieving extreme success isn't the work anyone can put in the work it's being a correct contrarian it's the willingness to question widely held assumptions it's the ability to look at Alternatives or opportunities that most people can't be bothered with it's the ability to adopt unpopular beliefs and then stick to them when people start making fun of you we forget that Steve Jobs had Legions of haters throughout the 80s and 90s hell he even got kicked out of his own company for being a [ __ ] psycho seriously I just want to like stop this video and appreciate this pizza breakthroughs throughout human history they were all correct contrarian ideas at one point every single one of these ideas sounded ridiculous and at every Point somebody very very famous said that's not ridiculous I think I can do it if I'm being honest about my career I have worked very hard over the last 15 years I've sold millions of books thousands of courses I've toured the world multiple times speaking in a dozen countries or more ninety percent of the results really came down to two maybe three correct contrarian ideas I had at the right time the biggest and most obvious of which was writing subtle art of not giving a [ __ ] I mean at the time the conventional wisdom was that Millennials actually weren't interested in self-help that men weren't interested in self-help but I had discovered over the course of multiple years blogging that this wasn't true you just had to communicate with these new audiences in a different way everything else I've done is either footnote or just a continuation of that or one or two other correct contrarian decisions I've made throughout my career and I believe this is true for most people who have achieved extreme success whatever field that they're in for example Warren Buffett recently wrote in the 58 years of Berkshire management most of my Capital allocation decisions have been no better than so-so our results have been the product of about a dozen truly good decisions that's [ __ ] mind-blowing this dude has been doing this for 60 years and he says I made about a dozen good decisions as a successful person there's a temptation to believe that you know your doing much more than you actually do it's not intuitive that one simple decision can have such an outsized impact on a person's career so you start convincing yourself that yeah I do know the secret to getting up early and working hard in the gym or I do know how to run meetings better than everybody else when actually you're probably slightly above average because it doesn't matter if you put butter in your coffee or if you have a standing desk or you use Evernote instead of Google docs it's like moving around the furniture in a house and claiming it's a better house if you don't believe me go out and meet a hundred successful entrepreneurs I guarantee they are not in the gym at 4 30 in the morning they are not meditating two hours a day because the real world is much Messier it's also a lot more fun Winston Churchill basically won World War II sitting in a bathtub drinking Scotch all day it's true go look it up or like Thomas Edison he would famously work for multiple days straight he would sleep in his lap one hour a night you want to know what his secret was cocaine not [ __ ] you that's why we have a light bulb [Music] oh oh yeah speaking of cocaine let's talk about the downsides of extreme success or why you might not actually want to get ahead of 99 of people now the first and most obvious reason is nobody likes contrarians I think a lot of people fantasize about extreme success Because deep down they believe it's gonna bring them the validation and approval that they've always craved but sadly it's often the opposite that happens I remember when I quit my day job in 2008 to work on my online business full-time everybody thought I was [ __ ] nuts like half of my friends in the corporate world basically stopped hanging out with me I'm also pretty sure that a bunch of my family became convinced that I was like a drug dealer or something wonder where they got that idea see back then nobody understood what digital marketing was all the people in my life knew is that I was broke for a long time and then one day I showed up with internet money I could see why they were skeptical you have to understand that when you go from an incorrect contrarian to a correct contrarian it kind of [ __ ] with everybody's heads extreme success is only meaningful if the thing that you are correctly contrarian about is also meaningful and ironically extreme success only improves the relationships that didn't need to be improved in the first place the second reason you might not actually want to be more successful than 99 of people is that to be correctly contrarian you have to be incorrectly contrarian a lot the truth is that most contrarian beliefs are contrarian for a very good reason because they're [ __ ] wrong people have tried them failed horrendously and had spent the rest of their life wondering what the [ __ ] they were thinking if you're young this is especially hard because you're probably not aware of how many of your your contrarian ideas were actually held by older people at one point but they tried them failed miserably and then moved on spoiler it's probably most of them and finally I guess this is the most important point of this video is that extreme Success is Not Gonna Make You Happy in fact success amplifies who you already are and how you already feel so people who are angry and depressed the success makes them angrier and more depressed the people who have great relationships the success makes their relationships even better ultimately extreme success should not be the point you should be motivated to pursue your correct contrarian idea because it's so important you can't imagine doing otherwise if you just want to like get enough money to buy a nice car and spray a bottle of champagne on a girl in a bikini that could be arranged I know a guy because that's not 99 successful that's like 80 successful maybe instead of asking how to become more successful than 99 of people you should be asking yourself why do I want to become more successful than 99 of people because that is the question that is actually going to yield more useful answers for you before you run off and try to become some obscenely successful badass maybe you should slow down for a minute and make sure that you're setting the right definition of success for yourself in the first place that way you'll get a lot further [Music] thank you

Channel: Mark Manson

Views: 3,603,208

Keywords: mark manson, markmanson, self improvement, how to change your life, better ideas, self improvement tips, self improvement books, self improvement podcast, self improvement motivation, how to change your life in a year, making money in 2023, success, how to be successful in life, success tips life hacks, contrarian thinking, mark manson jordan peterson, mark manson confidence, success motivation, personal development, monk mode 2023

Id: _ZJpU43NA0c

Length: 12min 8sec (728 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 19 2023