[Mark Manson] How to Get Ahead of 99% of People (Starting Today)

It's simple. If you wanna 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, goals. My housekeeper is disciplined. 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 AM, and I'll get myself a Red Bull and some Reese's cups. And then I would stay in bed for another 2 hours sitting on my laptop.

Tastes like ambition. I did this for 3 years, and I built a 6 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 wanna be more successful than 99% of people, you have to, 1, have a contrarian idea, 2, be correct about that idea, and 3, execute on it massively. Let's start with number 1. Most people don't ever have a contrarian idea in their life. Let's be honest. Most people just kinda go with the flow and agree with whatever their friends tell them is cool that week. But there is a significant minority of people in society think for themselves and come up with some contrarian ideas or buy into some batshit crazy theories, which brings us to number 2.

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 thru 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 them. 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 100 x 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 100 x 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. 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 nineties. Hell, he even got kicked out of his own company for being a fucking psycho. Seriously, I 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 2, maybe 3 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 were 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 footnote or just a continuation of that or 1 or 2 other correct contrary 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 100 successful entrepreneurs. I guarantee they are not in the gym at 4:30 in the morning. They are not meditating 2 hours a day because the real world is much messier.

It's also a lot more fun. Winston Churchill basically won World War 2 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 1 hour a night. You wanna 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. You have to understand that when you go from an incorrect contrarian to a correct contrarian, it kind of fucks with everybody's heads. Extreme success is only meaningful if the thing that you are correctly contrarian about is also meaningful.

And ironically, extreme success only improves the relationships that didn't need to be improved in the first place. The second reason you might not actually wanna be more successful than 99% of people is that to be correctly contrarian, you have to be incorrectly contrarian a lot. The truth is that most contrarian beliefs are contrarian for a very good reason, because they're fucking wrong. People have tried them, failed horrendously, and then spent the rest of their life wondering what the fuck they were thinking. If you're young, this is especially hard because you're probably not aware of how many of your contrarian ideas were actually held by older people at one point, but they tried them, failed miserably, and then moved on. Spoiler, it's probably most of them. And finally, I guess this is the most important point of this video is that extreme success is not gonna make you happy. In fact, success amplifies who you already are and how you already feel.

Some people who are angry and depressed, the success makes them angrier and more depressed. The people who have great relationships, the success makes their relationships even better. Ultimately, extreme success should not be the point. You should be motivated to pursue your correct contrarian idea because it's so important you can't imagine doing otherwise. If you just wanna, like, get enough money to buy a nice car and spray a bottle of champagne on a girl in a bikini, that could be arranged. I know a guy because that's not 99% successful. That's like 80% successful. Maybe instead of asking how to become more successful than 99% of people, you should be asking yourself, why do I wanna become more successful than 99% of people? Because that is the question that is actually going to yield more useful answers for you.

Before you run off and try to become some obscenely successful badass, maybe you should slow down for a minute and make sure that you're setting the right definition of success for yourself in the first place. That way you'll get a lot further.