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 dear.

- 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 shit you hear

in every other video.

Have goals, be more disciplined, remove distractions.

Something called monk mode.

Are we fucking 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.

- Ah.

- 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 what 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 shit 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 11:00 AM

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-twenties doing it.

In the first half of this video,

I'm actually gonna 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, I'm 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 fucking 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.

Two, 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 'em 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 gonna 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 shit breakfast

that you and I look down on.

How is he not dead yet?

Warren Buffett is Warren Buffett because consistently

he has identified companies that were extremely valuable

that most other people thought sucked.

And then he bought 'em, and then he sat around

eating fucking 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 100X your results.

They almost don't exist anywhere.

So instead, we make videos about, you know,

morning routines, and shit 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.

Hmm, big Kobe Bryant fan.

Look, execution is necessary.

It's just not sufficient.

And 99% of the advice that you're gonna 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 eighties and nineties.

Hell, he even got kicked out

of his own company for being a fucking psycho.

Seriously, I just wanna like stop this video

and appreciate this pizza.

If you look at the biggest 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.

90% 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 Fuck".

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 a 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 fucking 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 what you're 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're 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 lab one hour a night.

You want to know what his secret was?

Cocaine, not shitting you.

That's why we have a light bulb.

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 fucking 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.