What If Everyone Else Is Doing IT Wrong?
We've been sold a bill of goods when it comes to success
I'm sick of doing things "the right way"...
I'm weary of following the conventional path to success...
Hear me out... what if everyone else is doing it wrong?
One of my favorite individual success stories of the past decade is of this fellow Grant Howith, he’s a game designer… notably for his Patreon where he’s “creating one-page RPGs and tabletop games.” Successfully, I might add.
Grant’s business is what I would call “play” (and I mean that in the best sense of the word) as he creates games, nothing overly polished, just a simple game with rules that fit on a single 8 1/2” x 11” piece of paper. It’s kind of like candy.
But who does stuff like that? He was doing this before AI made it ridiculously easy.
This isn’t a “follow your passion” laden, guru bullshit posts though. In fact, those guys are part of the problem…
We all want to be told what to do…
Maybe we can map it to the education system, that we’re taught from an early age to seek approval of our teachers. We’re encouraged to get things “right” and punished for things that are “wrong.”
It could be the social dynamics we deal with as teenagers, make sure you don’t stand out, or only stand out if you’re “winning.”
But it’s definitely reinforced when we enter the working world. It’s still ‘get things right” and “get the approval of your manager” but it’s also “don’t be weird.”
We spend so much time seeking approval from the very beginning that none of us can be faulted for ending up stuck with this mindset as adults.
To be “successful” means to have a high paying job, with a family, property and the ability to look down on those with less material wealth.
Obviously, we all hate it. It’s clear that we’re trying to get away from it. The path to “freedom” is excessive wealth. You want to have “fuck you, money” that means you answer to know one.
But then…
Once you hit a certain point, once you have no one to impress, you literally go crazy. Look at the billionaires, surrounded by their sycophants. Even when they’re abusing their fans, they’re still adored.
The “ruling class” goes crazy once they have no one to tell them how to behave… and it all goes back to how they started.
The crazy billionaire asshole is a by-product of chasing material wealth to well beyond what we need to survive.
Their success could be MY success…
I’ve signed up for online courses, for Masterminds and for entrepreneurial “clubs” with the hope that a) I can learn to do what they do and b) so I can have access to them in hopes that their success will wear off.
Here’s what I learned…
the crowd inside a Mastermind is 300% better than the mind at the top.
the leader ends up believing his own bullshit.
things get repetitive really quick
We think that following the advice of others is what will make us successful. We think we can follow their path to be like them… before we even know who they are. And yes, we’re still seeking their approval on some level.
If you’re good at seeing patterns, and if you’re inclined to distrust the status quo, you will eventually see through the smoke. If you’re smart, you’ll drop out of that group, which was technically designed to make the guy at the top rich… but it leaves you alone in a lonely world again.
If you’re just reading self-help or productivity books, eventually you see it’s the same thing that’s been said elsewhere (that’s fine) in a new way (that’s fine) with more information than you actually need (that sucks.)
The problem most of us fail to ever recognize is that success is as unique to each individual as their fingerprint.
The pursuit of success is unique to each of us, and chasing other’s patterns is just forcing us to work to pick the good from the bad while defining our own version.
You’re only as effective as the systems you’ve created for yourself…
When you listen to Tony Robbins, he’ll give you a framework he’s developed and that has worked for thousands, or hundreds of thousands. At least according to him. But if you hire him to be your coach, he’s going to craft something bespoke to meet your needs. It’ll be grounded in his lessons, and valuable… and he’ll charge accordingly.
This goes from top to bottom… the ‘guru’ has a system, it’s designed to work for as many people as possible. Because the marketing all says it works, you think you should do it too, and you can be like him.
Whether you’re listening to Tony Robbins, or James Clear, Mark Manson or Ali Abdaal, you’re going to get a homogenized version of a success formula that works for most and mind work for you… and even then, the “work for you” means it will get you results that look like theirs.
Unfortunately, we all need to eat, and have a place to sleep. A pox on Abraham Maslow for creating a hierarchy of needs. I’m sure life was simpler before we needed things.
So, with needs, you must earn some money. You probably want to have enough extra that once you can’t work any longer, you’re not immediately thrown out on the street.
Now, if your life was just about getting as much money as possible, then you’re left completely dependent on that. But if you’ve created systems that let you leverage money, or systems that have you connected to people or systems, or you’ve got a system for investing the money so that it’s slowly growing… if you’ve done something with the money, then it should last longer.
But along the way, if you had to work 60-hour weeks, if your system was just “work harder” then you’ll reach a day when you can’t work, and you’ll have no identity.
No, the one thing Maslow failed to truly emphasize was the need to have systems that simplify, preserve and support you at every level of your hierarchy.
The two things we will always need (beyond the pyramid)
We need a community of like-minded peers where we can network to help each other, support each other or just be heard, felt and seen.
Join Chaos Cooperative for that. - There are free and paid levels.
We need systems that empower us to overcome our struggles (this is extra true for the ADHD brains that change their struggles regularly.)
You can hire ME to help you create a system, or framework, or crack a whip while you do it by setting up a Discovery Call to explore your options.