The Ultimate Guide To Being Rich

If you haven’t achieved what you want, it’s because you’re not good enough yet, and that is okay. Now that you can admit that you suck, you can focus on conquering the next few seasons of your life and work on doing that hard shit that will cultivate your inner greatness.

If you feel like a fraud, it is because you are a student pretending to be a teacher. Choose to place your identity as the learner and the grower. Give yourself permission to suck. Give yourself permission to not achieve for a long time while you work on the doing that needs doing to actually reap the end results.

Give yourself permission to be an exception, so that you can become exceptional.

I am not worthy yet, and that is okay.

^ one of my favorite scenes over the resilience of the mind when pushed to its absolute limit - he’s forced to stand there and hold the log over his head for days and if he drops it he gets shot… true. utter. resilience. despite. everything. stacked. against. you.

Here is one of my favorite quotes from Jordan Peterson:

Someone in the audience: "The depth of my consciousness causes me to suffer. Is it a blessing or a curse to feel everything so deeply?”

Jordan Peterson: “Take more of the thing that poisons you until you turn it into a tonic that changes the world around you. The only way out is through.”

Allow yourself to be “unhappy” or to not enjoy where you’re currently at in life because you are cultivating the character to be great later on. How long are you willing to suffer? Squeeze every ounce of potential that you have every day.

How To Accept That You Suck And Do Something About It

What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people?

I think you should boldly chase outlier ideas, even if other people aren't interested in them — in fact, especially if they aren't. If you're excited about some possibility that everyone else ignores, and you have enough expertise to say precisely what they're all overlooking, then don’t worry about looking stupid while trying to achieve your mission. Great work often has a tincture of strangeness.

The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive. Sometimes they converge, and that combination is the most powerful of all.

The hardest part is that you may have to work at something for years before you know how much you like it or how good you are at it. You usually have to risk rejection and failure. So it does take a good deal of boldness and the worst case is you choose ‘wrong’ based on very incomplete information.

I think that’s fundamentally WRONG. You learn skillsets as you traverse along your journey. Great work usually entails spending what would seem to most people an unreasonable amount of time on a problem. You can't think of this time as a cost, or it will seem too high. You have to find the work sufficiently engaging as it's happening.

There may be some jobs where you have to work diligently for years at things you hate before you get to the good part. That’s because you still suck and so you feel uncomfortable in the beginning. Everything that you’re doing is causing your mind to scream at you that you’re wrong and dumb for trying new things. (The mind was not meant to help you be adventurous or bold. The mind was meant to keep you alive long enough to make babies.)

The reason we're surprised is that we underestimate the cumulative effect of work. Writing a page a day doesn't sound like much, but if you do it every day you'll write a book a year. That's the key: consistency. People who do great things don't get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing.

If you do work that compounds, you'll get exponential growth. Most people who do this do it unconsciously, but it's worth stopping to think about. Learning, for example, is an instance of this phenomenon: the more you learn about something, the easier it is to learn more. Growing an audience is another: the more fans you have, the more new fans they'll bring you.

State The Facts and Tell The Truth But Change The Message To Become More Compelling To Your Audience

Consciously cultivate your taste in the work done in your field. Until you know which is the best and what makes it so, you don't know what you're aiming for. And that is what you're aiming for, because if you don't try to be the best, you won't even be good.

If you think you are excellent, you’re most likely only good. And if you think you’re good, you’re definitely teetering on mediocre to below average at best.

Strip Naked

Strip whatever you're doing to its essence. The result will be more concentrated; you'll understand it better; and you won't be able to lie to yourself about whether there's anything real there.

Choose to portray your art or craft as discover instead of ‘creation’. Try thinking of yourself as a mere conduit through which the ideas take their natural shape. You are a mirror to reflect to others their greatness and your product is the paintbrush that actualizes their own potential.