This is Optimal Living Daily, episode 295, success, and the shrug effect by RemeatsAT if I'll teach you to be rich.com. Get ready to maximize your potential with Optimal Living Daily, the podcast that brings you the best in personal development and productivity every day of the week. Your Optimal Life awaits. Now here's your host, Justin Mullick.
Hello, hello, and welcome to the 295th episode of Optimal Living Daily. The podcast where I simply read blogs and sometimes books to you that will help you optimize your life. Think of it as a massive audio collection to build better habits, be more productive, be happier, and really optimize your life. And thank you for being here.
It means a lot. I'm just going to jump into the post, so let's start optimizing your life. Success, and the shrug effect by RemeatsAT about teachyoutoberich.com. Isn't it easy to point out someone really successful, listing the reasons why he's so successful, but also the reasons he made it, but you can't?
We do this all the time. We see a famous CEO and point out how, quote, he took five companies public and got a Harvard MBA, unquote. We see a successful children's book author and point out how she already knew four publishers, so her book got published immediately. We point to Donald Trump and talk about how he had billions, so of course he could buy half of Manhattan.
And we note that we're already older than Michael Dell was when he was running Dell out of his dorm room. And then we shrug. She has a Harvard MBA. They made it big, but they're different than me.
What a bunch of horsemen. I want to talk about this today and try to challenge some of the assumptions we make. When we list off the skills or resources that the successful person has and we don't, we do two things. First, we distance ourselves from that person, making them into something other than an ordinary regular person.
Second, we create an excuse for why we won't achieve the same level of accomplishment. And then in a textbook case of a self-fulfilling prophecy, we don't. But guess what? CEOs don't just magically flip a switch and start wearing a fancy suit one day, directing their staff to do this and that.
Getting to the top isn't about knowing how to execute a leveraged buyout or negotiating anti-dilution provisions or whatever. This is true for both CEOs and other successful people and other domains. It starts earlier. For that CEO, it probably started when you took a paper route in junior high or started a website in high school or designed an interesting product in college.
It started by knowing how to get in touch with the right people and learning through lots of experience and failure that senior executives are just people. The regular people who started their path to being extraordinary by taking small steps. Once you're at the top, your big successes are highlighted. But try getting into a candid discussion with anybody successful, I have, and they'll tell you about the number of bumbling small steps they took from an early age.
And that means you can start today. Not surprisingly, not everybody agrees with me. Two very different responses. Recently, there was a post about business on signals versus noise one of the blogs I read.
The topic was interesting, but what really stunned me was one of the comments. Quote, Americans are fed the same two guys in garage story from a very young age, neglecting to mention the founder's true background. We know that a Stanford grad is or will be successful no matter what type of business they are in. Unquote.
I saw this and almost fell off my chair. I absolutely completely disagree as do some of the comments below that guy. But let's go deeper. I predict that if you show that comment to any Stanford student, she would scoff at it almost immediately because it answers the wrong question.
Exceeding in life isn't about graduating from Stanford. Very few people do that. And lots of grads are not quote unquote successful in business either. The real question is this, what do those people do to get into Stanford?
Was it innate intelligence? Was it photographic memory? Probably not. Instead it was most likely taking small steps like starting a club in high school, getting good grades and being active in the community.
Sometimes superstar intelligence plays a part, there's no doubt about that, but that's rare. Most of the time, my friends at Stanford were just very accomplished because they had started a while ago and it followed through. So that's one perspective. Pointing at someone successful, I should be needed to external factors and shrugging because you don't have identical qualities.
I call this the shrug effect. As you can imagine, there's another way. I want to tell you a story about a guy named Jim English. Many of you know that I co-founded a wiki product called PB Wiki.
Well, when I started my series on personal entrepreneurship a few weeks ago, I used one of the posts to ask for interns to help make PB Wiki bigger and better. Jim English responded, and among the other applicants, he was the most passionate by far. So we brought him on board and gave him some small tasks. In just a couple of weeks, it became clear that Jim is a superstar.
He's taking high level goals like make the site better. He's achieved real, measurable goals by going step by step. Now he gets much bigger projects and increasing responsibility. Actually, he's such an asset that I plan to continue having him work with PB Wiki, and eventually I want to recruit him to other companies I'm involved with in the future.
So if you see Jim as a senior executive in the future, I suppose there are two reasons you contribute to his success. Maybe it was his connections, pedigree, luck, superlative intelligence, blah, blah, that got him so far. Or maybe it was him seeing something that interested him, stepping up, and taking a chance on an unknown project. Maybe it was curiosity.
Maybe it was a small step of sending just one email. It's easy to do the shrug effect and attribute other success to qualities you don't have, shrugging because you can't equal them. But that's simplistic, and it's an excuse to stay in your current state and do nothing differently. Be patient.
Do things with uncertain outcomes. Analyze why you haven't taken advantage of opportunities in the past. For example, why didn't you apply for the PB Wiki opportunity? Was it a fear of rejection and qualification?
Was it simply a lack of interest? And start today. When you do, soon people will wonder about you and your success. You just listened to the post-title success and the shrug effect by Rameet Sethi about teach it be a rich.com.
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But Dan's going to come on in a minute and mention it, so I'll leave it at that for now. And that's all I have for today. Tomorrow's going to be a Siver Sunday episode which I always enjoy, so I'll catch you in tomorrow show, where your optimal life awaits. Hey, this is Dan from the Optimal Finance Daily Podcast, which is a lot like this show, except more focused on personal finance.
Justin handpicks the best posts he can find from blogs and authors like Remit Satey, Mr. Money mustache, and more. And I read them to you five days a week. So if you enjoy this podcast, come on over and subscribe to Optimal Finance Daily, too.
And together, we'll optimize your financial life. Thanks for joining us. And remember, your optimal life awaits.