September 6, 2024 • 17 mins
In this episode, we explore the importance of questioning conventional wisdom and the potential benefits of taking unconventional paths in life. Our host delves into personal anecdotes and the experiences of renowned figures like Zuckerberg and Gates to highlight how breaking away from the norm can lead to exceptional outcomes.
We discuss the balance between following standard advice in areas like investing, where minimizing risk is crucial, and recognizing opportunities where taking a different route can result in unique and fulfilling experiences. Through stories of career shifts and bold decisions, our host illustrates how evaluating the risks and rewards of unconventional choices can shape a richer, more meaningful life.
Join us as we encourage you to identify where you want to be average and where you aspire to achieve something extraordinary. Learn how to critically assess advice, understand the potential downsides, and make informed decisions that align with your personal goals and aspirations.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
So here's the thing. If everybody followed the standard advice,
yeah, they might be safe, but they would definitely be average.
Everyone would be the same.
So there has to be a time in your life, in the life of anybody that you admire,
that you watch who have had exceptional results.
There must be some point in time where they did something that was against the
(00:23):
conventional wisdom, where they listened to the standard advice,
but they said, nah, it's not for me.
I'm going to do something different because I want to achieve something that's not standard.
And I'm okay with the risks that are associated with doing things that are against
the conventional wisdom.
You look at some of the biggest founders in the world, Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, others.
(00:45):
Conventional wisdom says, go to school, finish your degree. If you finish a
college degree, a four-year degree, you are statistically more likely to earn
a better living for the rest of your life than someone who didn't.
And they said, yeah, I'm going to drop out.
I'm going to do something different because I believe in what I'm doing.
Maybe they even looked at the risks and said, well, I may have to come back to school.
(01:08):
Maybe it won't work out and I'll come back to school two or three or four years
later. And yeah, I'll be the old guy graduating, but it's not going to set me back the rest of my life.
So that's an opportunity for them and an opportunity for you.
I'm not telling you to drop out of school. I should frame this again.
This isn't a video that says drop out of school and you will be successful.
It's one that says, you should look at every opportunity, you should challenge
(01:30):
every decision and the status quo and say, what's the risk of doing something different here?
Is it potentially life altering in a negative way?
If so, maybe that's too big of a risk and I want to follow the standard advice.
But there's other times you're gonna look at it and say, well,
there's really no downside at all.
I'm just gonna end up in a different location. I'm gonna take this path on the
(01:51):
hike. I don't think I'm going to die.
It might take me longer. Maybe I'll end up in a lost area. Maybe even have to
turn back and come back to the standard path.
That's an okay risk. I might have the opportunity to see something new,
to experience something that most people haven't.
And that's what thinking about and questioning conventional wisdom can do for you.
(02:13):
Now, I'm someone that has questioned it maybe too many times in life,
and I've seen the good and the bad results of it.
So I wanted to share some of my experiences, some of the ways that I look at
situations and opportunities,
how I evaluate it, so that you can see both the good and the bad that happens
when you go against the grain over and over and over again.
(02:37):
So let's start with where I want
to be average. There's some times where I absolutely want to be average.
I don't want to be exceptional because the risk is too big.
The easiest example for this is in investing. There's times where I've made
investments in myself, in the stock market, in crypto and other areas because
I want to achieve exceptional results.
I want to see if I can double my money in a month or a year.
(02:59):
But there's other times where I invest and I say, I do not want some crazy amount
of risk. I wanna make sure that I'm protecting the money that I'm saving.
I use my kids' education fund as a perfect example. I've been putting money
away for my kids since they were born so that I can help them with college.
Because my parents didn't have a ton to help me with.
So it's a source of pride for me to be able to know that there's some money put aside for them.
(03:22):
And when they come to me at 18 and say, I got into this great school,
it's really expensive though.
I want to be able to say, well, I've been saving for 18 years.
Here's how I can help you.
And so when I think about the investments that I do with their money,
it's really about mitigating risk. I'm okay with standard results.
So I follow the standard advice.
(03:43):
I take their money and I put it in the low cost index fund.
And now I know that it's not going to double every year. I could have put it
in Bitcoin and right now it would be booming, be great.
But I didn't want the risk that it tanked. And they came to me at 18.
I said, man, I took a shot. I almost had enough money to
pay for you to go to any school in the world and to be able to
(04:03):
get advanced degrees and stay there till you're 30 or
40 and it will all be covered but it didn't
work out so good luck with your student loans i didn't want that so in that
case i follow the standard advice and i'm ecstatic about seeing standard results
but there's other times where i have said well that doesn't make sense i don't
want to do it the standard way people say the standard way as i said before
(04:26):
is to get your four-year degree.
But just like Zuckerberg and
Gates and others, I was in university and I had an idea for a business.
And I evaluated the risk and the reward. I said, if I go and do this,
I'm gonna learn a ton about myself, about resilience, about business.
There's an upside where maybe my business thrives and I become rich beyond my wildest dreams.
(04:50):
Or I jump several levels in my career so that I end up being acquired or the
business doesn't succeed, but I end up in a job afterwards where I'm already
a manager. That's a worthwhile risk for me.
So just like some of those people before me, I took that risk and I knew that
there was ways I could recover from it.
(05:11):
There's other times where I've done the same thing over and over again as a
founder, in my career, in jobs, where I've taken risks that were not traditional
in hopes of achieving some goal that was exceptional.
And I look back on some of them and I look at some of my peers and friends who
followed the traditional results.
And I realize that they've had a steady increase towards their end state.
(05:35):
They wanted to do well in life, provide for their families, have an early retirement.
And I chased it by doing the unconventional at every step.
And it's worked out for me, but it hasn't worked out so dramatically greater
than some of the people that really followed standard advice.
You know, they went on and became executives and worked for large organizations
(05:55):
with pensions and stock plans and executive bonuses.
And yeah, mine have come in crazy wild lumps and swings, but theirs has been
steadily growing. going.
And so there's a risk that by always doing the unconventional or chasing an
outcome, and that's a little different than just questioning the activities
(06:16):
you're going to do. I was chasing outcomes for a while.
And by chasing outcomes, I was sometimes having these huge setbacks.
I was recovering from them, then I was having a huge win, then taking another
risk on top of that win and having another setback that it wasn't always achieving
that goal that I had for myself.
So And if you're doing it in pursuit of a specific outcome, you may have been
(06:40):
better off, but you have to be okay with that.
And I by all means am, because again, I've lived an unconventional life.
Yeah, our results may be similar financially, but I've been around the world.
I have started things. I've employed people.
Brand new things that I can look back on for the rest of my life and say,
(07:01):
I created that. I've spoken at events.
I've had lunches with people from backgrounds that I would have never imagined.
So the financial results may be similar, maybe better, maybe worse, doesn't matter.
But the life I got to live by doing the unconventional is so much richer to me.
It fills my bucket, as my kids would say, more so than if I had just done the
(07:26):
standard things things to pursue that one particular outcome.
There's other times where doing things in an unconventional way have blown up right in my face.
And that's okay, because again, the risk was not that big.
Now I can easily recover from it. The one that I laugh at all the time was that
in my 20s, I was a founder.
And I was a founder, and then things went pretty well. I lived a great 20s.
(07:48):
But eventually, that business kind of came to its natural end,
and I had to go find a new job. but I really never worked somewhere before.
So I applied somewhere. I got the interview. I did a very unconventional application
letter where I made jokes about how close I lived to the office and how I'd
probably never be more than 20 minutes late or how I would be able to rent my
(08:09):
couch out to people that wanted to sneak away from work.
A very unconventional way to get the interview, but it worked.
And I remember actually people telling me, don't write that as your cover letter.
That's not how you do it. But I said, what's the risk? The worst that happens
is I don't get the interview.
The best that happens is exactly what happened. They called me and said,
we just had to meet the person that wrote this letter because we've never seen anything like it.
(08:31):
So that was a win when it came to doing things just a little bit differently with no real downside.
I got offered that job and i saw on
their website a few days later that they were hiring for
the manager of that role so i gave him a call up and i
said hey remember me i'm the guy with the crazy letter you've met
me you've offered me the job i just saw there's a new posting and
(08:53):
i've decided that i'll take that job instead of the one that you offered me
it pays more it's got more leadership roles and you know i've been a founder
so i've done a lot so let me have that one and that didn't pay off they said
we've never had to do this before but we're going to rescind the offer we made
to you because you can't just come in and start demanding a promotion before
you've even started working.
Now, again, the risk wasn't that big. The worst case scenario in that situation,
(09:17):
which happened was that they let me go or they didn't hire me to begin with.
And, you know, it didn't stop me from making non-traditional choices in my life.
I actually got a job shortly after.
And the lesson that I learned because of the way that I think was,
ah, I get it. You can't ask for a promotion until you've actually started.
So in that next job, I was hired as a software developer. And I think it was
(09:39):
about two weeks later when I saw that there was an opportunity for a sales engineer.
And I went to the owner of the company at the time and I said,
Hey, listen, I'll take that job.
Now I don't want to give up the software developer job. So I'll just do them
both if that's cool with you. And he was taken aback, but he was a founder.
He was the owner and founder of that business. And he said, absolutely.
(10:00):
And I went on to have an amazing career within that organization where I ended up as a VP.
And I think in that case, it was because I did the non-conventional.
I didn't ask for more money, but I said, let me take on new responsibilities.
I will be a better software developer if I'm also a sales engineer learning
what the customers actually use our software for.
So those are just a couple of quick stories about how I've taken non-traditional
(10:25):
ways through the things that I need to do.
I've made decisions where I questioned, why?
Why do I have to do it this standard way?
I don't want standard results, so can't I just do it differently?
What's the downside of doing it differently? Is it something I can recover from or not?
The other thing I want to talk about is think about standard advice and think
(10:48):
about who gives it to you.
You're probably going to the same people for advice, your parents,
your siblings, your peers, your friends, your mentors, your managers,
and they're giving you advice, but are they actually experts in the life you want to live?
Do they know exactly what it takes, or are they just giving you or repeating
(11:08):
to you the standard advice, the conventional wisdom that they've heard?
Or are they just repeating what they happen to do to get to where they are?
And I question that all the time, not because I don't trust these people,
not because I don't think that they're wonderful or successful,
but I have to realize that their advice is coming from a good place,
but it may just be average.
(11:29):
I use the example of Warren Buffett way too often. I don't know why I use him so often.
I don't really follow him. I just find him an easy example. Think about Warren
Buffett and how much wealth he's created, how successful he has been as an investor.
Now imagine that he said, I'm available to give everybody advice.
Every single person in the world, come to me and I'll give you advice.
(11:50):
What would happen if they all asked him, how do I get rich with investing?
Would he change his advice for each and every single person?
Or would he give every one of those people the exact same advice? advice.
If he did, and all billions of them followed the exact same thing that he told
each and every person, not another single Warren Buffett would be created.
(12:15):
No one would have any different results than the people around them,
than the people across the world, because they would have all done the same thing.
And so I think about that even when I go to others and ask them for advice,
this is the same advice they would give everyone.
And that means that it's not unique to me. It doesn't take into account what
I'm good at, what I'm willing to risk, what I want to achieve.
(12:38):
It's just what they happen to know. And so I don't disrespect their advice.
I don't disregard all of it just because, but I take everything in and I think about it myself.
And I encourage all of you to do the same, to ask yourself, where do I want to be average?
You might want to be average with your investment, with your career,
with your love life, with your, you know, the health of yourself or your family or your children.
(13:03):
But I bet you there's somewhere where you want to have something different,
where what your neighbors are doing is not what you want, where the results
that you're having in your career, you don't want them to be the same as everyone else around you.
So in all those situations, the key thing to do is to just really identify, what am I doing?
(13:23):
What does conventional wisdom tell me to do? And what's wrong with that conventional
wisdom? Is it 100% right?
Are there pieces of it that I just don't believe are necessary,
or that they're gonna give me the opportunity to have the best possible outcome?
And then evaluate, what's the downside?
If I don't do this, if I drop out of school.
(13:43):
Could I recover from that? Now, if I rob the bank, maybe I can't recover from that.
So if you evaluate each and every one of those big decisions that are related
to the big areas of your life that you want to be different,
you could identify areas where it's just easier to go directly to it because
the conventional wisdom is often the safe route.
(14:04):
Sometimes you can look at it. You can look at what it's telling you to achieve
and realize that it's the longest route.
Maybe there's a a shorter path to the thing you want to achieve by just trying,
by putting yourself out there, by taking a risk.
And sometimes that's going to be the right decision for you.
So I want all of you to just do that, to think about where you want to be standard
(14:28):
or average, and that's okay.
You don't want to be exceptional in every single thing you do,
but there's somewhere where you probably want to have exceptional results.
And I don't mean Warren Buffett results.
I just mean different than the norm.
And so when you find those areas where you want to have results that are different,
(14:48):
then start questioning and challenging the assumptions, the advice,
conventional wisdom, and start saying, is there a different path here?
What would I be willing to do? do, what would I be willing to risk?
Would it be worth it if the upside was a life that was different and meaningful and above average?
(15:13):
I'd love to hear in the comments if you already do this in your life,
where you've done it, where you think you can start doing it.
And together, we can help each other. We can say, yeah, there's actually a shorter path to that.
If your goal is to have autonomy, then maybe it's not about getting promotions
and working and changing and doing these things.
(15:35):
Maybe it's about taking a risk and starting something new.
If your goal is to be exceptionally healthy, maybe there's some other way to go about that.
I don't know how to do it because again, I'm one person. I know what's been different for me.
I know the areas that I wanted the opportunity to do different exceptional things.
(15:57):
And I knew that I was not built for some of the conventional things.
That's the last thought I'll leave you with before I end this video is for me,
and this might apply to some of you, it wasn't just that I wanted to live a non-average life.
It was also that I knew I wasn't average.
And I don't mean that in some egotistical way.
(16:17):
I mean, there were some things that people were great at that I was below average
And I knew that if I had played their game, that I wouldn't thrive.
I wouldn't actually achieve the same things at the same pace as them,
because I just didn't have it in me to play the game that way.
So in those situations, I had to find a non-conventional path to my own,
(16:42):
And that's what I wanted to get off my chest today. I really believe that my
life has been fulfilling because it hasn't been standard.
Because I've been willing to challenge the standard advice maybe too often,
but because of it, I've done things that people now envy, that people ask me how to achieve.
And the best I can tell them is not do it the way I did it.
(17:04):
It's think about what you want to achieve.
Think about how everybody else is trying to get there and figure out if there's a different
way there and what the cost of doing that is going to be and if the reward is
greater than the risk if the risk is something you can recover from maybe that's the right path.
(17:24):
Music.
So here's the thing. If everybody followed the standard advice,
yeah, they might be safe, but they would definitely be average.
Everyone would be the same.
So there has to be a time in your life, in the life of anybody that you admire,
that you watch who have had exceptional results.
There must be some point in time where they did something that was against the
(00:23):
conventional wisdom, where they listened to the standard advice,
but they said, nah, it's not for me.
I'm going to do something different because I want to achieve something that's not standard.
And I'm okay with the risks that are associated with doing things that are against
the conventional wisdom.
You look at some of the biggest founders in the world, Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, others.
(00:45):
Conventional wisdom says, go to school, finish your degree. If you finish a
college degree, a four-year degree, you are statistically more likely to earn
a better living for the rest of your life than someone who didn't.
And they said, yeah, I'm going to drop out.
I'm going to do something different because I believe in what I'm doing.
Maybe they even looked at the risks and said, well, I may have to come back to school.
(01:08):
Maybe it won't work out and I'll come back to school two or three or four years
later. And yeah, I'll be the old guy graduating, but it's not going to set me back the rest of my life.
So that's an opportunity for them and an opportunity for you.
I'm not telling you to drop out of school. I should frame this again.
This isn't a video that says drop out of school and you will be successful.
It's one that says, you should look at every opportunity, you should challenge
(01:30):
every decision and the status quo and say, what's the risk of doing something different here?
Is it potentially life altering in a negative way?
If so, maybe that's too big of a risk and I want to follow the standard advice.
But there's other times you're gonna look at it and say, well,
there's really no downside at all.
I'm just gonna end up in a different location. I'm gonna take this path on the
(01:51):
hike. I don't think I'm going to die.
It might take me longer. Maybe I'll end up in a lost area. Maybe even have to
turn back and come back to the standard path.
That's an okay risk. I might have the opportunity to see something new,
to experience something that most people haven't.
And that's what thinking about and questioning conventional wisdom can do for you.
(02:13):
Now, I'm someone that has questioned it maybe too many times in life,
and I've seen the good and the bad results of it.
So I wanted to share some of my experiences, some of the ways that I look at
situations and opportunities,
how I evaluate it, so that you can see both the good and the bad that happens
when you go against the grain over and over and over again.
(02:37):
So let's start with where I want
to be average. There's some times where I absolutely want to be average.
I don't want to be exceptional because the risk is too big.
The easiest example for this is in investing. There's times where I've made
investments in myself, in the stock market, in crypto and other areas because
I want to achieve exceptional results.
I want to see if I can double my money in a month or a year.
(02:59):
But there's other times where I invest and I say, I do not want some crazy amount
of risk. I wanna make sure that I'm protecting the money that I'm saving.
I use my kids' education fund as a perfect example. I've been putting money
away for my kids since they were born so that I can help them with college.
Because my parents didn't have a ton to help me with.
So it's a source of pride for me to be able to know that there's some money put aside for them.
(03:22):
And when they come to me at 18 and say, I got into this great school,
it's really expensive though.
I want to be able to say, well, I've been saving for 18 years.
Here's how I can help you.
And so when I think about the investments that I do with their money,
it's really about mitigating risk. I'm okay with standard results.
So I follow the standard advice.
(03:43):
I take their money and I put it in the low cost index fund.
And now I know that it's not going to double every year. I could have put it
in Bitcoin and right now it would be booming, be great.
But I didn't want the risk that it tanked. And they came to me at 18.
I said, man, I took a shot. I almost had enough money to
pay for you to go to any school in the world and to be able to
(04:03):
get advanced degrees and stay there till you're 30 or
40 and it will all be covered but it didn't
work out so good luck with your student loans i didn't want that so in that
case i follow the standard advice and i'm ecstatic about seeing standard results
but there's other times where i have said well that doesn't make sense i don't
want to do it the standard way people say the standard way as i said before
(04:26):
is to get your four-year degree.
But just like Zuckerberg and
Gates and others, I was in university and I had an idea for a business.
And I evaluated the risk and the reward. I said, if I go and do this,
I'm gonna learn a ton about myself, about resilience, about business.
There's an upside where maybe my business thrives and I become rich beyond my wildest dreams.
(04:50):
Or I jump several levels in my career so that I end up being acquired or the
business doesn't succeed, but I end up in a job afterwards where I'm already
a manager. That's a worthwhile risk for me.
So just like some of those people before me, I took that risk and I knew that
there was ways I could recover from it.
(05:11):
There's other times where I've done the same thing over and over again as a
founder, in my career, in jobs, where I've taken risks that were not traditional
in hopes of achieving some goal that was exceptional.
And I look back on some of them and I look at some of my peers and friends who
followed the traditional results.
And I realize that they've had a steady increase towards their end state.
(05:35):
They wanted to do well in life, provide for their families, have an early retirement.
And I chased it by doing the unconventional at every step.
And it's worked out for me, but it hasn't worked out so dramatically greater
than some of the people that really followed standard advice.
You know, they went on and became executives and worked for large organizations
(05:55):
with pensions and stock plans and executive bonuses.
And yeah, mine have come in crazy wild lumps and swings, but theirs has been
steadily growing. going.
And so there's a risk that by always doing the unconventional or chasing an
outcome, and that's a little different than just questioning the activities
(06:16):
you're going to do. I was chasing outcomes for a while.
And by chasing outcomes, I was sometimes having these huge setbacks.
I was recovering from them, then I was having a huge win, then taking another
risk on top of that win and having another setback that it wasn't always achieving
that goal that I had for myself.
So And if you're doing it in pursuit of a specific outcome, you may have been
(06:40):
better off, but you have to be okay with that.
And I by all means am, because again, I've lived an unconventional life.
Yeah, our results may be similar financially, but I've been around the world.
I have started things. I've employed people.
Brand new things that I can look back on for the rest of my life and say,
(07:01):
I created that. I've spoken at events.
I've had lunches with people from backgrounds that I would have never imagined.
So the financial results may be similar, maybe better, maybe worse, doesn't matter.
But the life I got to live by doing the unconventional is so much richer to me.
It fills my bucket, as my kids would say, more so than if I had just done the
(07:26):
standard things things to pursue that one particular outcome.
There's other times where doing things in an unconventional way have blown up right in my face.
And that's okay, because again, the risk was not that big.
Now I can easily recover from it. The one that I laugh at all the time was that
in my 20s, I was a founder.
And I was a founder, and then things went pretty well. I lived a great 20s.
(07:48):
But eventually, that business kind of came to its natural end,
and I had to go find a new job. but I really never worked somewhere before.
So I applied somewhere. I got the interview. I did a very unconventional application
letter where I made jokes about how close I lived to the office and how I'd
probably never be more than 20 minutes late or how I would be able to rent my
(08:09):
couch out to people that wanted to sneak away from work.
A very unconventional way to get the interview, but it worked.
And I remember actually people telling me, don't write that as your cover letter.
That's not how you do it. But I said, what's the risk? The worst that happens
is I don't get the interview.
The best that happens is exactly what happened. They called me and said,
we just had to meet the person that wrote this letter because we've never seen anything like it.
(08:31):
So that was a win when it came to doing things just a little bit differently with no real downside.
I got offered that job and i saw on
their website a few days later that they were hiring for
the manager of that role so i gave him a call up and i
said hey remember me i'm the guy with the crazy letter you've met
me you've offered me the job i just saw there's a new posting and
(08:53):
i've decided that i'll take that job instead of the one that you offered me
it pays more it's got more leadership roles and you know i've been a founder
so i've done a lot so let me have that one and that didn't pay off they said
we've never had to do this before but we're going to rescind the offer we made
to you because you can't just come in and start demanding a promotion before
you've even started working.
Now, again, the risk wasn't that big. The worst case scenario in that situation,
(09:17):
which happened was that they let me go or they didn't hire me to begin with.
And, you know, it didn't stop me from making non-traditional choices in my life.
I actually got a job shortly after.
And the lesson that I learned because of the way that I think was,
ah, I get it. You can't ask for a promotion until you've actually started.
So in that next job, I was hired as a software developer. And I think it was
(09:39):
about two weeks later when I saw that there was an opportunity for a sales engineer.
And I went to the owner of the company at the time and I said,
Hey, listen, I'll take that job.
Now I don't want to give up the software developer job. So I'll just do them
both if that's cool with you. And he was taken aback, but he was a founder.
He was the owner and founder of that business. And he said, absolutely.
(10:00):
And I went on to have an amazing career within that organization where I ended up as a VP.
And I think in that case, it was because I did the non-conventional.
I didn't ask for more money, but I said, let me take on new responsibilities.
I will be a better software developer if I'm also a sales engineer learning
what the customers actually use our software for.
So those are just a couple of quick stories about how I've taken non-traditional
(10:25):
ways through the things that I need to do.
I've made decisions where I questioned, why?
Why do I have to do it this standard way?
I don't want standard results, so can't I just do it differently?
What's the downside of doing it differently? Is it something I can recover from or not?
The other thing I want to talk about is think about standard advice and think
(10:48):
about who gives it to you.
You're probably going to the same people for advice, your parents,
your siblings, your peers, your friends, your mentors, your managers,
and they're giving you advice, but are they actually experts in the life you want to live?
Do they know exactly what it takes, or are they just giving you or repeating
(11:08):
to you the standard advice, the conventional wisdom that they've heard?
Or are they just repeating what they happen to do to get to where they are?
And I question that all the time, not because I don't trust these people,
not because I don't think that they're wonderful or successful,
but I have to realize that their advice is coming from a good place,
but it may just be average.
(11:29):
I use the example of Warren Buffett way too often. I don't know why I use him so often.
I don't really follow him. I just find him an easy example. Think about Warren
Buffett and how much wealth he's created, how successful he has been as an investor.
Now imagine that he said, I'm available to give everybody advice.
Every single person in the world, come to me and I'll give you advice.
(11:50):
What would happen if they all asked him, how do I get rich with investing?
Would he change his advice for each and every single person?
Or would he give every one of those people the exact same advice? advice.
If he did, and all billions of them followed the exact same thing that he told
each and every person, not another single Warren Buffett would be created.
(12:15):
No one would have any different results than the people around them,
than the people across the world, because they would have all done the same thing.
And so I think about that even when I go to others and ask them for advice,
this is the same advice they would give everyone.
And that means that it's not unique to me. It doesn't take into account what
I'm good at, what I'm willing to risk, what I want to achieve.
(12:38):
It's just what they happen to know. And so I don't disrespect their advice.
I don't disregard all of it just because, but I take everything in and I think about it myself.
And I encourage all of you to do the same, to ask yourself, where do I want to be average?
You might want to be average with your investment, with your career,
with your love life, with your, you know, the health of yourself or your family or your children.
(13:03):
But I bet you there's somewhere where you want to have something different,
where what your neighbors are doing is not what you want, where the results
that you're having in your career, you don't want them to be the same as everyone else around you.
So in all those situations, the key thing to do is to just really identify, what am I doing?
(13:23):
What does conventional wisdom tell me to do? And what's wrong with that conventional
wisdom? Is it 100% right?
Are there pieces of it that I just don't believe are necessary,
or that they're gonna give me the opportunity to have the best possible outcome?
And then evaluate, what's the downside?
If I don't do this, if I drop out of school.
(13:43):
Could I recover from that? Now, if I rob the bank, maybe I can't recover from that.
So if you evaluate each and every one of those big decisions that are related
to the big areas of your life that you want to be different,
you could identify areas where it's just easier to go directly to it because
the conventional wisdom is often the safe route.
(14:04):
Sometimes you can look at it. You can look at what it's telling you to achieve
and realize that it's the longest route.
Maybe there's a a shorter path to the thing you want to achieve by just trying,
by putting yourself out there, by taking a risk.
And sometimes that's going to be the right decision for you.
So I want all of you to just do that, to think about where you want to be standard
(14:28):
or average, and that's okay.
You don't want to be exceptional in every single thing you do,
but there's somewhere where you probably want to have exceptional results.
And I don't mean Warren Buffett results.
I just mean different than the norm.
And so when you find those areas where you want to have results that are different,
(14:48):
then start questioning and challenging the assumptions, the advice,
conventional wisdom, and start saying, is there a different path here?
What would I be willing to do? do, what would I be willing to risk?
Would it be worth it if the upside was a life that was different and meaningful and above average?
(15:13):
I'd love to hear in the comments if you already do this in your life,
where you've done it, where you think you can start doing it.
And together, we can help each other. We can say, yeah, there's actually a shorter path to that.
If your goal is to have autonomy, then maybe it's not about getting promotions
and working and changing and doing these things.
(15:35):
Maybe it's about taking a risk and starting something new.
If your goal is to be exceptionally healthy, maybe there's some other way to go about that.
I don't know how to do it because again, I'm one person. I know what's been different for me.
I know the areas that I wanted the opportunity to do different exceptional things.
(15:57):
And I knew that I was not built for some of the conventional things.
That's the last thought I'll leave you with before I end this video is for me,
and this might apply to some of you, it wasn't just that I wanted to live a non-average life.
It was also that I knew I wasn't average.
And I don't mean that in some egotistical way.
(16:17):
I mean, there were some things that people were great at that I was below average
And I knew that if I had played their game, that I wouldn't thrive.
I wouldn't actually achieve the same things at the same pace as them,
because I just didn't have it in me to play the game that way.
So in those situations, I had to find a non-conventional path to my own,
(16:42):
And that's what I wanted to get off my chest today. I really believe that my
life has been fulfilling because it hasn't been standard.
Because I've been willing to challenge the standard advice maybe too often,
but because of it, I've done things that people now envy, that people ask me how to achieve.
And the best I can tell them is not do it the way I did it.
(17:04):
It's think about what you want to achieve.
Think about how everybody else is trying to get there and figure out if there's a different
way there and what the cost of doing that is going to be and if the reward is
greater than the risk if the risk is something you can recover from maybe that's the right path.
(17:24):
Music.
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