Her husband lost everything.
Right when their second child was born premature and almost didn’t survive. Her little family spent weeks in intensive care.
During this time her husband’s business partner took advantage of the situation. He commenced a hostile takeover of their real estate firm. And won.
Her husband nearly had to declare bankruptcy. He managed to escape but with almost no money to his name.
At the time, I didn’t worry. I knew their family would be okay.
In fact, I told both of them this: ‘“You’ll be stronger on the other side. This tragic event will make you both more successful than you’ve ever been.
They thought I was batsh*t crazy for saying that.
A few months ago, I got the good news. I was right. Not only did they rebuild. They ended up building a new business that takes advantage of one of the biggest technological trends right now.
Before they could do that, the husband had to learn this new business from scratch. Coincidentally, one of the biggest technology projects in Australia’s history was quietly underway behind closed doors. Most Australians had no idea.
Not only did my friend’s husband find out about it, but he managed to become the project manager.
With no experience. With no tech background. Just by being high agency.
The Australian market in which the new business venture now operates has only one supplier. He is now number two. And crushing it. It’s not blind faith either. He instantly raised $2M in investment.
What’s weird about this story is the couple started out as average. Just 5 years ago they were both working minimum wage jobs. One worked as a tradesperson and the other worked in banking.
Yet they’ve transformed.
They’re now both high achievers. They’re both in the top 1% of their field. It’s hard to believe when looking from the outside.
It didn’t happen overnight. The transformation was slow, painful, and hard to notice.
I’ve witnessed this transformation, not only with this couple, but with many other average people I’ve encountered over the years. I’ve also witnessed this same transformation in myself.
Turns out the secret isn’t talent or luck. It’s these 12 overlooked things.
1. The secret to confidence that’ll literally change your life
This sounds like clickbait. Hear me out.
The gurus talk about charisma like it’s some dating app that’ll wank you off and give you a supermodel partner. They say to “fake it until you make it.” They teach matching and mirroring people’s body language. All of this doesn’t work.
I found the secret by accident.
For the last 11 years, I’ve written online every day without ever missing a day (even when my wife gave birth).
Something bizarre happened.
Over time I’ve received 1000s of emails and comments from strangers. There’s a weird theme hidden in all the feedback. They all say some version of this:
“I love how raw and authentic your writing is. In a world of AI, your writing feels uniquely human. I feel like I know you. You make me feel things.”
I’m not saying that to brag. It’s not how I roll.
I’m telling you because I now understand the secret to confidence is just to be yourself. No fakery. No acting. No fancy logos. No polished Instagram pictures. No highlight reels. No “here’s my Lambo, bro.” Nope.
Just be yourself.
It’s hard advice to follow because the world wants to mold you into other versions of yourself. Right now, the world is actually trying to break us through polarization, division, tribalism, and programmatic algorithms.
But if you can find a way to be unapologetically yourself, you’ll have a level of unstoppable confidence that’ll attract incredible people and opportunities into your life without having to try too hard.
2. Obsess over having “proof of work”
I get pitched daily.
Many people I encounter want something from me. That’s not a sob story attached to a GoFundMe campaign. Nope. It’s just my reality.
When you achieve a small amount of success people will ask you for things. Fine. If you respond to every pitch you’ll end up having no free time. So you have to get good at knowing which pitches to entertain and which ones to ignore.
Wanna know how the top 1% vet people, opportunities, and ideas? I’ll tell ya.
It’s called proof-of-work. This phrase became popular in 2008 when a little-known currency named Bitcoin entered the financial system. The technical way transactions are validated on the network is through proof-of-work.
To mine Bitcoin and get the financial reward for doing so, you must get your computer to show the Bitcoin network proof that it did work. This work can’t be faked. It’s publicly verifiable. This idea transcends Bitcoin.
If you ask anyone for anything in life and can’t prove you already did some work, they’ll ignore you.
Everyone has hopes and dreams. Most people sit on their ass and do nothing.
There are only a small few who actually do the hard work and are worthy of opportunities. So when you ask someone for something, if you can’t show them proof of work, they’ll ignore you. In fact, they’ll just ghost you.
Here’s what proof of work is NOT:
“Can you give me an opportunity?”
“Here’s my resume. Can I have a job?”
“Will you be my first client ever?”
“Will you help me for free?”
“I’m about to start X. Will you be my mentor?”
“I have this idea. Will you help?”
“I have no money. Therefore, I can’t invest any money.”
“Will you sign this NDA? Then I’ll show you this idea.”
“One day I’m going to build X. Would you join me?”
“Right now I’m researching… Can you help me with X?”
“How about we revenue share on this opportunity?” (has no money, experience, results, or resources)
These are all low agency conversation starters.
In comparison, here’s what proof of work looks like:
“I currently have 10 customers”
“I did 15 sales calls for this new offer.”
“I sent 60 DMs and got 23 responses.”
“I’ve invested $50,000 of my own money already”
“I tried X and it failed and now I’m doing Y”
“I built this thing for you to show you what I can do.”
“I launched this project 3 months ago. Here are the results so far.”
“I spent 10,000 hours doing X. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.”
“I have 10,000 followers on LinkedIn”
“I just quit my job and am now building X”
“I’m all in on…”
These are all high agency conversation starters.
Never ask someone ahead of you for help if you’ve done no work. Start projects and take lots of action to show your capability.
“You need Proof of Work to get a meeting with a busy person.”
– Naval Ravikant
3. Worship creation over consumption disguised as creation
If you break down 99% of hobbies or passions, you’ll find most of them are nothing but consumption in disguise.
The person who bought all the guitars doesn’t publish music with them. No, they just collect guitars and store them. Or the person who buys all the latest AI tools doesn’t publish software with them or solve problems.
They just collect AI tools to show off and overload their dopamine receptors.
“You won’t find God in $15k a month of skis, camera gear, or coffee machines.” – Will Manidis
Builders build stuff. They construct a house from nothing. They build a business with real customers. They make art and hang it on the bloody wall.
Quiet consumption disguised as creation makes people go insane. We’re hardwired to create using our imagination and creativity. And when we don’t, we feel like trash.
Go create.
4. Don’t play lottery life games
There are two types of opportunities: 1) Real opportunities 2) Opportunities disguised as gambling. It’s often referred to online as casino culture.
I come up against this plague daily because I work with business owners.
Some schmuck will start a conversation about business. When you get deep enough they start saying things like:
What’s the model, man?!
I don’t want to sell my time for money
I want to sell digital products
What’s not common knowledge is most opportunities online are the lottery in disguise. Statistically, the chance of success is worse than hitting the jackpot.
Lottery examples:
Selling millions in digital products
Operating a $100K/year paid Substack
Getting $35K a month in Youtube ad royalties
Anything with the phrase “passive income”
Using AI to automatically make money
TV talent shows/singing competitions
TikToker turned famous musician
Selling $20 books on Amazon
Day trading stocks/crypto/FX
SaaS (software-as-a-service)
Buying NFTs
Dropshipping
I personally don’t chase lottery-style opportunities. And I don’t help others do it either. Easy equals bullsh*t. Morons are attracted to easy – and they don’t understand statistics.
If you avoid living a life that makes you a gambler, you’ll do well. But it’s harder and harder to escape with everyone sharing success stories online (most are fake).
You’re statistically more likely to get wealthy doing boring stuff in saturated markets that help normal people solve real problems.
5. Ascend the 3 levels of living
Level 1 - Follow orders
This is the default.
The school system helps you graduate to this stage. You assume you’re on the right path. You get told what to do. You may worship an employer, and if you do, you’ll assume the dream will last until 65 (until the first layoff).
The news and politics shape your worldview. You follow the crowd. You adopt whatever mainstream narrative is popular. It’s not a conscious choice. It just happens.
Level 2 - Question everything
Normally takes some f*cked up sh*t to get to this level.
A tragedy. A death of a loved one. A breakup. A layoff. A bankruptcy. A mental breakdown.
These events act as a mental pattern break.
It’s like you’ve snapped out of the hypnosis you were caught in. Questions like “is this all there is” start to enter your mind.
Happened to me several times. First, when depression and anxiety cost me my business and landed me in therapy. Then again when I faced redundancies multiple times. As well as losing all my money on multiple occasions. The event that sealed the deal was a near-miss with cancer in 2015.
Only when you question everything can you start to believe anything new.
Beliefs run your mind, and your mind runs your life. Once beliefs shift so, too, does your mindset and worldview.
Level 3 - Make up the rules
At this level you’ve broken through.
You see the world differently. Your mind isn’t fixed anymore. You can hold two opposing views in your mind and not have a breakdown. You suddenly feel powerful. You feel like anything is possible.
You try impossible goals because it’s more about making memories than it is about being embarrassed or failing. Your worst nightmare becomes stacking up regrets from all the things you could have done but were too afraid to do.
Regret minimization is now your standard operating system.
As you keep moving forward you start to realize there are no rules. Everyone is just making stuff up as they go. Your heroes are just as scared as you. So… you create new rules. You refuse to fit in. You embrace being weird.
The best way to describe this phase is with this Marc Andreessen idea:
“The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you think.”
6. Don’t give a damn about “potential”
My dog had potential. She was going to be a famous doggy in the Baywatch tv show. But we never moved to LA and she just sat on her butt all day eating steak bones.
Harsh truth: nobody cares about potential.
We’re born with potential but it doesn’t mean we’ll use it. Most never do. What high achievers focus on is:
Pitches made
Published writing
Shipped products
Solved problems
Conversations had
Experiments conducted
Conclusions from results
7. See “being busy” as the lowest form of intelligence in existence
“Busy” means “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
It means someone has zero focus and has scatterbrain syndrome. It means they’re purposeless. They have no priorities. And they don’t value their time. They can’t even tell you how much time they have or what spot on the calendar works.
They’re just a zombie, taking for granted the gift of life and not realizing that one day soon they will die and they won’t even remember what they freaking did yesterday.
Busy = Low IQ
Busy = Mindless
Being busy was cool in the 90s before the internet. It was a status play. Now, with AI and a supercomputer in your pocket, busyness is just a form of brain cancer caused by brainrot and a lack of present-moment awareness.
High achievers are insanely focused on a psychopathically small list of priorities.
8. Become the most unhinged version of yourself
AI is awesome. But it’s also making everyone and everything boring.
Social media feeds look boring. TV shows all follow the same plot. Superhero movies are painfully boring. Generic quotes or success advice are done to death. Self-help has become god-help-me!
Only way to win now is to be crazy.
That means being weird, not fitting in, saying what you really think, having contrarian opinions, and occasionally being semi-controversial. Don’t hold back. Just go all out and use your right to free speech.
Neatly packaged books that sell on Amazon and contain basic ideas ChatGPT can regurgitate for free, don’t cut it anymore.
We now care more about the messenger than the message.
9. Don’t optimize for a high-paying career
Because trying to earn money doing something you don’t give a fudge about rarely turns into success. You just lose motivation and quit.
I met a guy last week via email. Former accountant. We were talking business ideas. He kept jumping from one to the next. He settled on buying some AI agent course from a guru posting pictures from luxury yachts he didn’t own.
No matter what I said, I couldn’t change his mind.
He was optimizing for passive income and lots of money. The difficult truth was he had no skills or experience in these new “passive income” fields. And worse, he had no passion for them either.
Chasing money leads to piss-weak motivation. You’ll never be able to maintain the habits needed to become a high achiever if that’s your main driver.
10. See rudeness as a massive red flag
Last month I made an offer to a guy on LinkedIn.
Seemed like a nice fellow. As I got chatting with me he unnecessarily decided to be rude to me. “Dude, I’m on my way to $100K a month. This offer is for losers.”
By the end of the conversation it turned out he made less than $5K online and didn’t even have $1000 to his name. He was just talking a big game and pretending he was smarter than everyone else.
Eventually he decided to work with me. I turned him down without giving a reason.
Not because I’m an asshole, but because he was rude for no reason. Being rude is low IQ behavior. It’s okay to disagree with someone but there’s no need to insult them.
If someone can’t resist the temptation to avoid being rude, they likely can’t avoid all sorts of other temptations like stealing, lying, cheating, bullying, and even s*xual harassment.
If you want to see how someone behaves, take them to a restaurant and pay careful attention to how they treat the waiters. If they treat them like slaves or are rude to them, you know everything you need to know and should run for your life.
11. Say yes and figure out how to make it happen later
The need for certainty holds people back.
The world is uncertain. The natural world operates on entropy. Without chaos we wouldn’t have human life.
The average person waits their entire life to get ready. Don’t worry, there is zero judgment from me. I’ve been that person many times. These sorts of thoughts used to dominate my mind:
I don’t have enough experience yet
Now isn’t the right time
I need to work on my credibility first
I need more followers first
I need to do more research
I am new to this field
The temptation is to spend weeks, months, or usually years trying to figure it all out before getting started. But as writer Nicolas Cole says, the solution is actually the opposite—you need to get started so you can start to figure things out.
High achievers take action and figure it out as they go. They don’t wait to feel ready or “research” things.
Have a bias for action. When in doubt, act. And act faster than normal.
12. Have a compelling reason to rebel
Embracing the traits of high achievers is hard.
If it were easy everyone would be doing it. The way to head in the direction of high performance is to be mission-based. It’s to have such a strong why that not taking action feels like death.
This is where average people get stuck. It’s where I got stuck too. My original reason to write online was to become famous. Embarrassing to admit but true. As I hit all the usual milestones I became bored by vanity metrics. And I preferred my privacy.
So… my worldview turned upside down.
My ‘why’ went from selfish to mission-based. I became obsessed with helping other people reach personal freedom and make their dreams online come true. Suddenly the motivation returned. Waking up early became automatic again.
If you don’t know why you want what you say you want, you’ll give up the daily habits required to be successful as soon as the first personal emergency happens in your life.
Create a mission.
Final Thought
I always felt too average to become a high achiever.
Then I realized something interesting: being a high achiever has nothing to do with an identity, privilege, or the right friends in high places. Being a high achiever is a series of traits backed up by habits and reinforced with a growth mindset.
How you think and act is all that matters.
The good news is once you become a high achiever at any level, everything gets easier. Why? Because winners keep on winning.
They can have their business stolen from them while their wife is giving birth to their premature child and bounce back within a year. It’s not luck or blessings. It’s a view of the world that can turn any problem into an opportunity.
An average person can become a high achiever if they want to.
Be honest—have you ever worried you’re too ‘average’ to succeed? Drop your answer below, I read every comment.
