A lot of students throw away their chance at a real future because they trust themselves. They forget that they’re ignorant. They forget that they don’t know anything. They trust themselves rather than those who know better. They focus on getting instead of becoming. Transformation is slow, expensive, arduous, and frustrating who has time for that and that process is unattractive to those who are impatient. They want it now. task of becoming better. don’t focus on what would make them better, what would make them valuable to others who matter, they focus on movement, on busyness, on getting exposure, building credits, and networking. They don’t stop to think if what they are doing is actually beneficial. Driving on 1,000 go-kart tracks doesn’t qualify you for NASCAR. Working for people who have no industry clout, no standards, don’t impress those who have them. Networking with people who are on your level or beneath it isn’t going to help you get to the next level.
If you want to be a successful stockbroker you don’t become one by investing in every stock, you invest in the stocks that yield the most gain. If you want to get to France you don’t just head off in any direction, follow the advice of everyone you meet, you head in a specific direction and you listen to people who know how to get where you want to go.
Success is the result of doing the right things, with the right people, the right way, at the right times, and at the right places. It is possible to stumble onto success, just like it’s also possible to become a millionaire playing the lottery but the chances are slim, and taking that approach with your life is misguided and ill-advised.
Perhaps you did ask a more successful person how they got to where they are and they told you, “Just get out there and do stuff, hit all the shows, do everything you can.” If a successful person told you that, they told you that for one of two reasons. You were bothering them and they weren’t interested in having their precious time hijacked by giving you detailed career advice or they aren’t smart enough to realize how they succeeded but success is never the result of random behavior.
If you look at most successful people you’ll see that success is the result of deliberate and thoughtful action. Bill Gates didn’t succeed by selling any computer programs or product, McDonald’s didn’t succeed by making any kind of food. Remember the Zune, the McDLT, Mighty Wings. Plenty of examples of failure when someone followed their own or someone else’s bad advice.
When we make bad decisions we fail. What happens to a business or a product that is useless is the same thing that happens to a person who is useless. It’s ridiculed, discarded, worthless. When you don’t figure out how to meet peoples’ needs better than your competition. When you don’t do the right things, involve the right people, at the right places, and right times you lose. Your life will just be another Blockbuster, Turbo Graphix 16, Atari, DeLorean, etc.
If you want a job, you have to realize that someone already has that job. Whatever you want in life belongs to or is desired by someone else and the only way you’re ever gonna get anything is if you can take it from them. When you abandon your training, drop out of the transformation process, and focus on doing poorly run open mics and being on bad shows with no audience, or focus on being the lead in poorly written, directed, and produced independent films or plays, you’re actually doing more harm to yourself than good. You’re taking yourself off course and wasting your most precious resource, time, for attention and acceptance by people who don’t matter instead of making yourself into something that is useful to people who do.
Shortsidedness causes people to place too much emphasis on how they feel rather than what they are. Often after only training a month or two, a student will go from being a 0 to 1, they have worked hard, spent lots of money, but are frustrated by how they haven’t gotten anything yet. They focus too much on the distance between where they are and where they want to be and go to where they are rewarded. They can’t be rewarded by the real world, because the real world is dominated by 10’s, so they surround themselves with 0’s. They go to where a 1 has value, a 1 gets respect, a 1 gets recognition, a 1 is special but their lives never change because they never did.
They are like Luke Wilson’s Character Joe in Idiocracy. There is absolutely nothing remarkable about them, just like Joe, they aren’t particularly skilled they don’t have any value, they’re just surrounded by idiots and losers, and in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Do you want to be CEOs of a Fortune 500 company or do you want to be CEO of a driveway lemonade stand? If you want to be a success where it matters than you train with the best so that you can learn from them and become like them.
Before you involve yourself with anyone, look at them. What do they have? What can they do? Where are they in life? If you’re spending time around people just like you or worse, less than you, you’re handicapping yourself. Nobody can help you get something they don’t have. Nobody can help you get someplace they have never been to. We are all products of our environment and when we choose environments that are less, we become less. Losers can’t teach you how to win.
Anybody can start a podcast or a Youtube channel or a live show in a bar or restaurant that is struggling to keep its doors open and most people do because being honest with themselves about their own failures and facing the difficult uphill battle of bettering oneself is painful, difficult, uncertain, risky, expensive, and even if you do put yourself through all of that, you can still end up failing.
It’s no surprise that so many people when faced with that reality, just accept failure. They accept failure but don’t want to accept what failure does to their lives so, in order to avoid the shame, they bury their heads deep within the sand of their own delusions. They know they can’t do the job they want, so they create their own job, one they can do, and they hire themselves. They put on the charade of being something they aren’t, they pretend to achieve, they mislead themselves and others with meaningless titles and surround themselves with other pretenders, all of whom agree to uphold each other’s charade. “We’re all kings,” they shout but they have no fortune, no land, and no power. Their lives wasted, their days spent being impoverished, irrelevant, and unnecessary.
When you don’t study how can you expect to pass the test? When you don’t take the time to learn the sport, to work out, to eat right, or practice, how can you expect to win the game? You can cheat and that might work but it won’t last. There is too much competition and when you can’t actually stand on your own two feet, it’s not hard for someone to knock you off them plus the only people you can really fool are other failures. Successful people don’t get to where they are without knowing how to spot a fraud.
My friend is working on an animated pilot for Comedy Central. She didn’t get that gig cause by networking with anyone in Jacksonville. She didn’t get that gig by doing the 48 or by Filmbar challenges. She didn’t get that gig by exposure or networking with the people in this town who are worse off than her.
She spent her time getting better, developing skills, she learned how to create something good, she studied from people who were better than her, she invested thousands of dollars and thousands of hours of her life to get better. She surrounds herself with other capable successful intelligent professionals.
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