3. People are fucking weird. With people are weird in general as your foundational principle, you avoid falling for the assumptions your mind takes for granted, as well as first impressions. You stop seeing them as impressive, perfect, special beings. They are not. Nobody is. Instead, your outlook is slight uncertainty. You invite caution in your life and a healthy level of scepticism. You keep your trust in the back-pocket, but at the same time you aren’t judgemental, negative or dismissive of people. Like we said before, I am not going to judge them based on rumours, nor am I going to buy into the hype around them. I simply don’t know.
4. We live in a world of marketing, advertising and sales. Anybody can sell you anything—having no real data creates that opportunity. The first impression is bullshit because it comes from a lack of data. Why not entertain the possibility that it is salesmanship until proven otherwise! You don’t, because thinking along those lines might feel unkind and unfair. You want to give the other person a chance because you like them from your first impressions. Another reason why you don’t consider that somebody might be selling bullshit to you is because of our very ignorant perception of bad people, which comes from an oversimplified division of good and bad.
A bad person, in your mind, is one who is manipulative, calculative, lying, scheming, Machiavellian, sociopathic, or a criminal mastermind, basically somebody who has the word ‘bad’ written all over them. That’s what watching fucking movies and TV shows have taught you. So, you avoid considering that with a person who is making you feel good. What you need to realise is that ‘bad’ people, basically those who are going to screw you over, unlike in movies and TV shows, don’t announce to the world that they are bad. People who are going to be good to you as well as people with self-serving motives or ‘bad’ motives, both know a single unbendable fact: there is only one route to gaining your trust and coming into your life—by being nice to you and making you feel good. In the beginning, they were great. Therefore, until you have real data, the perception ‘they are weird’, which essentially means, I don’t know them at all, helps you avoid falling into traps that take years of your life away and teach you nothing new.
The next time you meet someone who forms a great first impression in your eyes, never forget, people are fucking weird. So screw the first impression no matter what they do professionally. Accept that we live in a world of marketing, so screw what they are selling—charm, looks, profundity, it doesn’t matter. And always keep an eye out for real data. That is what will end the practice of you thinking that any person who makes you feel good in the beginning is special.
CHAPTER FIVE
DO FAILURES MESS YOU UP?
Side note: If you are an achiever in life, this chapter is not for you. The second chapter about specialness was more than enough. This is strictly for those who are confused, battling the fear of failure, and those who have yet to achieve something. In this chapter, we will expand on the foundational principle Rejections are normal in the direction of failure, the fear of failure, and how winning is done.
HOW NOT TO DEAL WITH FAILURE
Rejections are normal. Without a foundational principle on how to see failure and rejection, whenever you don’t succeed in something you care about, the first thoughts are: I am a fucking idiot, I am nothing, I am a loser, I don’t deserve anything, I deserve to die. In many cases, these feelings are accompanied by fear of your parents’ wrath, friends’ judgement, people’s disappointment. How am I going to tell my parents? Everybody is going to think I am a loser. I am good for nothing because my friends got through. Everybody is going to move on, and I will be stuck here forever.
Some of the worst outcomes are:
You become so afraid of failing again that you find excuses to back out and not sign up for any competition, challenge or opportunity with the same risk involved.
You stick to one place. You don’t change your job, as if you have married the workplace. Changing jobs feels like a new challenge; it involves a new environment, new people, new tasks, and the word ‘new’ brings a strong feeling of uncertainty to you. It’s a maybe to you—maybe I will fail there, maybe I will not perform well there, maybe I will have to act differently there, maybe I will have to learn different things there. And the focus in all those maybes is on the worst possibility: It won’t work out.
You convince yourself that you are mediocre. Your mind looks only for safe options now, and your part-time job is to scare other people into looking at the world like you do. Mediocrity is safe.
As a coping mechanism, you treat it as if it’s a matter of choice. I am a cool guy who never studies and always fails in exams, that’s my thing. You think people are laughing with you, when in reality, they are laughing at you, which you only realise once they have all moved on in their lives, and you are left with limited options considering the consistent track record in failing.
This chain of self-harm needs to be broken with the knowledge that failures, losses and rejections are normal, and a solution that directs all those highly powerful negative emotions into something useful. To understand that, you need to first understand how winning is done the right way.
HOW WINNING IS DONE MENTALLY
It starts with a question: You wanna do this, right?
This may seem like a very simple question, but, my friend, there is a difference between wanting to do something and having to do something. Most people in this world are doing what they do not because they want to, but because they have to. Having to do something becomes a duty you have to fulfil. Wanting to do something is a choice. Therefore, to win, the very first thing you need to clarify in your mind is, do you really wanna do this?
When it’s a choice, there is an ownership of doing that thing. You want to do it. You are not doing it because somebody else is on your ass, you will get fired if you don’t, you will have a bad report as an employee—all of these mean you don’t care much. You don’t mind having fun and stalling the work, because you have the idea that you can do it at the last minute.
Here’s a very simple thing, if you don’t care, if you don’t take what you do seriously, then forget about winning, ever. So, decide right now in your mind, do you wanna fucking do this or not? That’s the first step.
One might ask, and quite reasonably so, Why don’t you wait until you have figured out what you want to do, and do that?
The problem with this question is, it comes with the privilege of being able to afford to wait, which a large part of this world can’t. The laws that govern their circumstances simply state: you have to do something right now.
So, the three possible answers to the question Do you wanna do this?, are: yes, no, I don’t know. The answers, no, and I don’t know, occupy a great many people. The argument they make is, we are not successful because of our lack of interest in the thing. I have no interest in what I do. It doesn’t motivate me. In short, you are not successful because you don’t know what to do. This is a highly misplaced argument because it assumes that everybody who is successful must be deeply in love with what they do. That is a quarter of the truth, which means it is 75 per cent bullshit. People are successful for a number of reasons:
A hunger for money, status, power;
A hunger to avoid poverty, desperation and conditions you wouldn’t want to go back to ever again;
A hunger to prove in your own eyes that you are capable (which would be the concept of being special);
A hunger to provide for those whom you love and are dependent on you.
Success is a matter of choice—it doesn’t matter what the hunger is. Once you have made that choice, once you have made it a want, we enter the second step: how you see winning.
There are two types of winning that we see in this world: the traditional winning and the real winning.
What traditional winning looks like: this is basically how society crowns a winner. The results of any competition declare a winner and the losers. Society celebrates the winner and ignores the losers—that’
s the common practice you grew up seeing. Nobody gives a fuck about the loser, so losing becomes a thing to be sad about. The winner is loved and appreciated by all, therefore winning becomes a certification of potential.
How real winning works: one wins after having failed time after time. The essence behind real winning is not giving up, no matter what badges and medals society is handing out. When it comes to your ‘heroes’ and those who define success and hard work for you, you see them the same way. These people are your heroes because they display an impressive standard of consistent hard work, and through that hard work have achieved expertise in their fields. And that is why you love to fixate on and romanticise how many times they failed, lost and were rejected. You are hugely understanding and forgiving of their failures and mistakes. You believe in them because you know they are not the type to give up.
So, in your story, the traditional sense of winning applies. In the stories of those you admire, winning has everything to do with a never-give-up spirit, excelling in a skill, and doing so by hard work. Why don’t you apply the same to your story as well?
The only reason why you are still stuck with traditional winning is because you grew up seeing it, and because society treats it as the most important thing. But you won’t make it very far with the traditional sense of winning because:
It’s short sighted. It’s focused only on an event, the results of an exam, a competition. It appeals to the need for instant gratification. I won this, I won something, now I am important, a winner, and special. Winning is not a single event, it’s a continuing process. There are plenty of people scratching their heads, wondering, I used to be at the top of my class and now I am nowhere, what happened! You got happy with those wins and lost track of what comes after and what happened before.
As long as you feel insanely happy about winning, you’re going to feel intolerably miserable with losses. As a result, it might become hard to avoid being permanently afraid and unsure after failure, or become cocky and overconfident after a win.
HOW WINNING IS DONE PRACTICALLY
You want to be special. This specialness is not about being superficial, it is about being capable. Earn specialness by becoming capable. Once you have decided to become capable, start seeing whatever you are doing as a challenge. The mindset of looking at things as challenges appeals directly to your ego. Whether you feel you are interested in it or not becomes unimportant. Your hunger to become capable is far greater than how the challenges make you feel. Once you have understood and accepted the concept of specialness, your focus deviates from traditional winning.
Real winning requires your focus on neither winning nor losing, but upon learning. You start seeing whatever you are learning from the point of view of utility, opportunity and ability. Take whatever you are learning right now, whatever you are currently doing with your life, and ask the questions below from these three points of view.
Utility asks you: what’s the use of what you are learning? In how many areas, fields of study and practices can it be implemented? How much self-belief does this learning generate in you? How much self-value does it provide? Does it have value in the long term, in the market? And lastly, at what point does whatever you are learning start to have real utility in terms of success? Basically, where do you stand right now? Thinking in terms of utility makes you realise that there is a real world out there, away from your frog-well, with real competition, and the trophies you may be collecting are mere indicators that you are on the right path, but you haven’t actually won.
Opportunity asks you: how can you use what you are learning? How many doors will it open for you? In how many ways can you capitalise on this skill? How many opportunities does it have in the marketplace? What’s the full potential of this skill if learned until you are an expert? Where is the geographic hub for opportunities for this skill? Thinking in terms of opportunity gives you ambition. Ambition gives you seriousness. With ambitious goals, the nature of its utility in your mind is revised and reset as well.
Ability asks you: how well can you do what you are learning? Do you have a natural talent for this? Are you able to learn this faster than others? Are you slower than others? If yes, then despite being slower, are you able to beat the competition or stand on par by working harder than them? Success cares about nothing but results. Are you able to think creatively, which means can you create new opportunities from the existing ones? Are you able to think cleverly? Thinking in terms of abilities makes you aware of where you stand right now and where your ambition requires you to be standing.
Once you start seeing winning from these points of view, you get clarity and a vision. Now we move to the third step: how to see failures.
HOW REAL WINNERS SEE FAILURES
Make the fact that failures, rejections and losses are normal a foundational principle upon which your brain works. Real winning is a journey. Despite knowing this, people tend to give up the entire prospect of winning at the first sight of failure. One of the big reasons is that, in your mind, you have certain qualifiers. They could be getting into this college, gaining that skill by a specific time, reaching there or becoming this at a certain age. These are deadlines and milestones in your plan that you have to achieve to give yourself enough believability that you can pull this off. And once you fail in one of those things, you give up the entire venture altogether.
The truth is, there is a huge possibility that you’re going to fail a lot, again and again, in almost all of those qualifiers. The reason why you need to stop taking them so seriously is because they are coming from your mind, which tells you how things should happen, not reality, which shows you how things actually do happen.
When the plan isn’t working, whatever negative conclusions you may draw also come from your mind. You need to understand that these failures can only change the path of the journey, not the direction. For example, if you wanted to get a degree, but you’re upset because it’s not going to be from the prestigious university you hoped to get into, then you’re still stuck with the traditional mindset of winning. Focus on learning, which would suggest that you get a degree from wherever that subject is taught. As long as you’re alive and functioning, the chance of getting back on top and amongst the greatest exists. It depends exclusively on your own dedication to build masterful skills in it. If you decide that you want it, then nobody can stop you. The only downside of failing is that your path may become longer, but you’re not dying in the next five years. You have the time, so focus on building that skill no matter where you are.
And that’s how winning is done, it’s not about which college you went to, which trophies you won at age fifteen; it’s about where you stand, what your capabilities are, and what you can show when the opportunities come. Success depends entirely on your preparation. So believe that it’s going to be a journey, and there are going to be plenty of failures, and that’s all right. But at the end, you win by becoming too good to be ignored.
FAILURES TEACH YOU HOW TO WIN THE WAR
Once you have adopted ‘failures are normal’ as the foundational principle in real winning, when you fail, you do not emotionally punch yourself. Your emotions are focused less on feeling miserable and more on conducting an investigation. You recognise that, although failures are normal, that does not mean they are nothing. Real winning requires the minimisation of losses to the best of your control.
What is the investigation?
First, you take ownership of the failure. It’s very different from acting as if you have been stung by failure. Both are similar realisations, but come from different points of view. The first makes you responsible, the other a victim. Instead of finding tendencies, people and relationships to blame, you make yourself fully responsible for that failure. This is step one of the investigation. I deserve this. Whatever impact this failure causes, I deserve and take responsibility for it. Once you take ownership, it becomes your fuck-up. You are not a victim, it didn’t happen to you, you caused it. Once you own it, eve
rything before that failure comes into scrutiny, all those people, relationships and tendencies that could have taken the blame; they all have to go under the surgeon’s knife.
After ownership begins assessment: Why did I fail? Assessment produces findings about your abilities, habits, relationships and the people in your life. For example, what was your approach going into the competition—serious or lazy? Did your approach include following a plan, routine, daily rituals backed by strict discipline? Or was it just counting the months left and convincing yourself of bullshit like you’ve still got it under control? If your approach was serious, then should you have worked for more hours a day? What state of mind did you have the entire time? Was your focus clouded by emotional entanglements? Were you busy in the consumption of short-term pleasures? Or were you desperately running after getting laid or finding true love?
Whatever your findings are, for the sake of success, you learn and incorporate them into your life as changes to be made. If you want success, there are going to be huge adjustments, and current relationships will have to go through negotiations. The findings might tell you that certain relationships aren’t even deserving of negotiations. They need to go. You need to take back control of your life. You need to recognise the mistakes and readjust your approach and mindset fully and immediately to avoid failures in the future to the best of your control. And this is why failures are important—they teach you everything you need to win the war.
CHAPTER SIX
FINDING LOVE CAN BE A PAIN IN THE ASS
The Rudest Book Ever Page 4