99.5% Of Billionaires Think Like This | Tim Ferriss (You can do this too!)

being a good student is a coachable skill and I gave up on so many things in life whether that was basketball I concluded I was bad at languages and ninth-grade and so on and so forth and I think so many people run into this where they banded things and they accept the partial completeness where they're like ah my voice just isn't good I'm just not good at X and usually if you track that back it's because a parent or a teacher or some authority figure criticized you right really heavily and it turns out that if you just get a better toolkit sort of a better set of questions that you can do things that seem impossible to the untrained setting really low expectations not what a lot of people expect and what I spoke to say Rick Rubin's and he has a musician who's stuck great musician but they've developed performance anxiety about songwriting for whatever reason he will say do you think you could get me one sentence or maybe two words that you like like tomorrow that's it two words can you do that for me and he gives them a micro assignment best writing advice that I probably ever received and I've received a lot of good writing advice but I can get myself really wound up because I expect perfection to flow from my fingertips like magic and that never happens so then I beat the hell out of myself and that makes me less likely to put pen to paper in the first place and I'll procrastinate which is why if you write two crappy pages per day you've won the day that's a successful writing day and that does a few things it helps you to maintain enthusiasm because you're constantly winning and of course on many days you'll write more than two we get to two then you go to five or to ten but if you're on an off day great to copy pages even if you never use it it's a successful day and that I think for longer-term projects and extended creativity is really important but the story that this writer told me with that tip he said okay this is where this comes from did you know that IBM when it was the 800-pound gorilla it was an undefeatable sales force do you know what one of the rules was it's like no he says well what do you think their quotas were and I was like oh I'm sure it was really hot because they wanted to motivate their guys to get after it you just know their quotas were the lowest in the industry and the rationale was we don't want our salespeople to be intimidated to pick up the phone we want them to feel like they're going to pass their quota quickly which they did and then they shot well past it and clobbered the competition so the counterintuitive pairing of love expectations leading to higher performance is really odd what that is is performance anxiety that you've imposed on yourself because your expectations are too high it's like just lower your standards lower your standards till you get started you're the average of the five people you associate with most that's like a basic tenet of my life and Silicon Valley where I live and my other career is investing in early-stage startups and I've been very successful in that Twitter Facebook first free money proceeded money advisor to uber first advisor to Evernote Alibaba what you realize though when you meet these people when you sit down and talk to you the people who start those types of companies and by the way like they all start out where everyone else starts up and that's another like II hear these criticisms like oh that's easy a really big blog and it's like well I started with zero readers just like everybody else and you find that that those thinkers and doers fall into the category of examining the anomalies as opposed to dismissing them so I think that there are kind of two binary choices that you have there are probably others but when you see someone who's doing something that you think is really incredible you can you can either build yourself up or tear them down to make yourself feel better and tearing them down doesn't do anything for you it's an illusion I think it's Carlos Castaneda actually who said you know whether you make yourself happy or you make yourself miserable the amount of energy required is the same I focus on building yourself up and the way you do that is by asking better questions and the power of these questions is just incredible so Peter Thiel for instance the the first money into Facebook co-founder of PayPal co-founder of Palantir I mean a billionaire many times over one of Peters favorite questions is why can't you accomplish to your 10-year goal in the next six months and when you when you apply these ridiculous constraints your thinking has to change you can't just up shift one year you have to get an entirely new car to think about that so to speak and these guys just do not accept the shoulds and musts at all and so you want to look for the odd behaviors that produce good results and that can be replicated so for instance if you want to become a world-class learner treat reality is negotiable because ultimately what we have to do what we should do are usually a very fragile collection of just socially reinforced beliefs and just because something is said often does not make it true like it takes a lifetime to learn language complete nonsense complete adults can learn languages five to ten times faster then children period you know kids just don't have jobs and mortgages if more information were the answer we'd all be billionaires with six-pack abs it's just just absorbing not even absorbing just reading and watching and listening to more isn't enough that you have to apply it you have to use in sentence you have to have rewards and punishments set for yourself so you actually get things done timelines etcetera so that's that's one another one is don't be a donkey and the reason is there's a I want to say it might be a philosophers paradox but I don't think it is nothing it's just parable about burdens ass so burdens ask about a donkey it's about a donkey who is thirsty and hungry and there's water on one side a few feet away and hey on the other and he can't decide whether to do the hay first the hay first or the water the hay or the water and he dies of thirst at the end of it he couldn't do them sequentially in effect you can do almost everything you want in life but you can't do it at the same time and if you can just dedicate yourself to one thing for even a year and then the next thing for a year you can do those ten things but if you try to do all ten at once you're gonna be burdens s you know should do this for they do this which they focus on this person list so don't be a donkey it's so easy to sit behind screens and sit on our couches and just learn new information it feels good and it's safe there's no risk in watching a youtube video and it's so easy to create excuses for why we haven't taken our first step maybe it just seems all too big you don't know where to start well let's consider Tim Ferriss his idea today what's the smallest possible step that you can take today that will bring you that much closer to achieving your goal if you take that small step I promise you that the rest of the road will seem a whole lot less daunting comment down below that one small that you can take today