Intelligence is often just ego in disguise.
Anyone can become intelligent by memorizing information, but that’s no longer a skill you’ll get a standing ovation for at an award ceremony. AI robots f*cked up that cookie-cutter dream forever.
Talent isn’t much better.
Loads of people go on shows like “America’s Got Talent” and stay broke and depressed right after the experience.
Yet society’s blueprint for success is still based heavily on either talent and/or intelligence. It drives the university system and dominates the corporate world.
I’m about to blow up your worldview so you can get an advantage that will take you to the top 1% in any field. None of this is obvious, and it took me 11 years to understand. What you’re about to learn can make you stupidly wealthy and free, too.
Let’s go.
A short story to wake you the hell up
The year was 1999.
A young basketballer named Kobe Bryant had a fierce rivalry with a man named John Celestand. John sucked balls at basketball.
His average was 2 points a game. Miserable. For 80% of the games the coach left him on the bench. This made him depressed.
To change his results he decided to practice more than anyone else. His strategy was to always be the first guy in the gym.
On day one he tried. But Kobe was always at the gym before him. John got pissed off and started coming earlier. But Kobe just came even earlier. The story goes that things got way out of hand. The start times in the gym just became wild (think 3 AM).
In a game later that year, Kobe hurt his right wrist.
John was bizarrely happy.
“I am ashamed to say that I was excited the day after his injury because I knew that there was no way that Kobe would be the first to practice.”
As John walked into the gym he heard a ball bouncing.
“That’s impossible, he thought.” Kobe was at practice with a broken wrist ready for action. He instead bounced the ball with his left hand and had a cast on his right hand. He didn’t give a f*ck and there was no way he would be beaten.
Sitting at home with a broken wrist, feeling sorry for himself, felt worse than death.
This is the difference between the pursuit of success and obsession.
Talent and intelligence are the old world approaches to achieve success. But obsession has quietly existed for centuries & the top 1% of people in every field secretly know it.
Let me take this idea one step too far
Obsession doesn’t just beat talent and intelligence. No.
Talent and intelligence are two of the most dangerous lies in existence. They’ve murdered people, dreams, and potential. They should be tried for murder and face the death penalty. Thomas Sowell goes further…
“The most dangerous people in the world are intelligent people who are unsuccessful.”
When talented intelligent people don’t get the results they want, they seek to tear down other people’s dreams. We’ve seen this in the culture war since 2020. These unsuccessful intellectuals have suggested everything from banning cryptocurrencies to outlawing AI. They even want to ban books.
The scary difference between obsession versus talent/intelligence
Talented intelligent people are often lazy. Their ego tells them they are entitled to a certain level of success.
Obsessed people are relentless. They just never give up. No roadblock or failure will stop them.
When things get hard talent fades away. Obsessed people love when it gets hard. They know that’s their opportunity and a fire appears in their eyes. They know the average person won’t go the extra mile so that’s their hidden, unfair advantage.
When talented people get tired, obsessed people are able to keep going.
What makes obsession so much more powerful than smart people with talent is that obsession is fuelled by courage and grit.
Sahil Bloom says:
The worst prison in the world is having the talent and intelligence to achieve something great but lacking the courage to go out and do it.
Most people need more courage, not more information. Yet more information, planning, and thinking are the tools they use to escape their sh*tty lives.
Courage can’t be taught. There’s no permission slip. No elite gatekeeper can hand you courage and say “there you go sir, you’re one of us now.”
"The soul is oriented towards obsession: it wants to be possessed by something greater, consummated in a quest, absorbed into a vortex of devotion, and eaten by the feeling of passion. The soul wants to fall in love hard.” – Carl Jung
The deeply misunderstood idea of working hard
Ava Bookbear has an incredible perspective on talent.
“If someone’s much better than you at something, they probably try much harder. You probably underestimate how much harder they try.”
When I read this it smacked me in the mouth. The level of hard work and effort needed to succeed is unknown. So people underestimate it.
You can’t see a time tracker for how many hours Steve Jobs spent building Apple. There was no app in the 80s that could measure how much effort Bill Gates put into Microsoft. There’s no public record or app of how many failures or rejections Mark Zuckerberg may have experienced while building Facebook.
The effort we spend on our goals lives in our heads.
When people see what I’ve done with writing, they assume I wrote for one hour a day. I actually wrote 16 hours on some days. I’m so obsessed that no book or illustration would communicate the effort I’ve put in.
What’s weird is my memory is a blur. I’m not even sure I can remember how much effort I put in every day. Some days my brain will lie and pretend I only wrote for 1-2 hours a day before work. Other days my brain will feel courageous and like it wants to brag and pretend I worked 12 hours every day for 11 years.
The truth is likely in the middle.
The point is we can’t see effort so we mistakenly think the level of effort needed is lower than reality.
Trying alone isn’t enough. You can pour 10,000 hours into a goal, but if you’re doing the wrong inputs nothing will happen.
Talent and intelligence often prevent us from getting help or having the humility to understand we don’t know what we’re doing. Instead, our talent and intelligence makes us go it alone with trial and error because we think we’re magically smart enough to figure out. People with this mindset rarely do.
Ava says “I think a lot of people want to be but they don’t want to do.
They want to have written a book, but they don’t want to write the book. They want to be fit, but they don’t want the tedium of working out. They’re ashamed of rejection and they’re ashamed of imperfection.”
Wanting a goal isn’t enough. Obsession gives you the strategy to do, and do harder and faster than everyone else.
The missing ingredient
Ava goes a step further into the abyss.
“If you’re smart/talented and hardworking you can force almost everything except creativity. I feel like creativity only appears when there’s genuine love and obsession.”
Without creativity the goal you have appears lifeless. It lacks the emotion that obsession has because being intelligent or talented doesn’t foster creativity.
If you’re not smart but you’re creative, you can overcome any hard goal or roadblock.
While the talented hardworking person attempts to smash through the boulder blocking the highway to their dreams, the creative person driven by obsession just creates a way to drive around the boulder. The first approach is exhausting, the second is effortless.
Being obsessed creates the environment creativity needs to thrive. The reason most people aren’t obsessed with the job they’ve chosen is because creativity and imagination are missing. So working hard doesn’t get them anywhere.
The curse of smart, talented, hardworking people
An old friend of mine is a genius. He has two PhDs.
But he’s always broke. He always asks for money or if he can stay at my house for free for a while. He wants to borrow my Tesla too. Why not?!
He doesn’t procrastinate on his to-do list like the productivity gurus preach while having a 3 AM cold shower. No. He procrastinates on his life.
He wants kids but doesn’t even have a girlfriend. He hasn’t even gone on some first dates. He’s always waiting for the right time. Or for a magical mentor to give him the break he deserves. Or for a university to give him another permission slip.
He wants to run every good idea by gurus. He has lots of ideas but almost no action. He wants other people to take the action for him. Why? He’s the genius. It’s hard for me to say this without getting emotional – but he’ll probably be waiting for it to be the right time forever until he dies and it’s too late.
If he was obsessed his obsession wouldn’t let him keep waiting. Waiting is the worst because it forces you to cram later in life, just like leaving all your study for an exam until the night before. That’s how the unobsessed live and it’s tragic.
The hidden traits of being obsessed are focus and discipline. You only do one thing, not 100 things. And you’re disciplined enough to show up every day and do it.
Obsession automates progress.
“Most of you are sitting on skills and talents that could change your entire life”
(Aaron Will)
Why don’t those skills and talents change people’s lives? Because they’re not obsessed. More people need to understand the hidden power of obsession.
Obsession not only beats talent and intelligence, it also beats the useless human trait known as “being passionate.”
No passionate writer has ever come close to anything I’ve done, and I don’t say that to brag. Passionate writers write when they have a spark of inspiration. If their cat gets sick then they take a load off for a few months.
They have so much work-life balance that no actual work gets done. They’re so afraid of the fake boogie monster known as burnout that they’d rather just watch their dreams burn to the ground and settle for second best as a starving artist full of romantic notions that lead them to publish another book on Amazon no one will read.
Don’t sit on obsession.
Take the romantic notion of passion and turn it into an obsession. Show the world you’re all in, balls deep on this goal. And watch people be attracted to your vision like a fat kid is to a bag of Doritos.
