‘Successful’ People on YouTube Bring Out the Worst In Me
Wake up at 6, cold shower, meditate, work out — No, thank you!
Youtube is full of fake millionaires. They make money off of our gullibility.
Tell me you have a couple of zeros in your bank account and you can convince me of anything.
Tell me smacking your head in the wall every morning made you a millionaire, I’ll believe you.
Poor me.
Chances are you have also taken a Scuba-dive down this pit of shame. Welcome aboard then!
Wake up at 6, cold shower, meditate, work out — No, thank you!
I have found this advice to be rather abundant on the internet.
How to be successful is a commonly searched question.
Due to its high demand, everyone has an opinion on it. Yes, this is good, but not all the information you find is true.
There are some self-proclaimed success stories out there on Youtube sharing their morning routines with cheesy titles labelled, “The morning routine of a teenage multimillionaire.”
I used to click it all the time, thinking this is what lies between me and where I desire to be. Now I ignore it.
No, thank you, I’ll pass.
I would rather take the advice of genuine success stories.
If it is complex — there is no need to flex
If you can’t explain your idea to a primary school student, chances are it is not going to work.
The best advice is generally the simplest. People run away from it.
We like to spend the first half of our lives complicating it. Perfectly fine, but then don’t spend the other half, undoing it.
That makes no sense to me, yet I have been doing it for so long.
I love shortcuts, I click on every get-rich-quick article.
How far has that gotten me? I learnt it’s not wise to throw your bank account status to the internet so suffice it to say I am not Elon Musk.
The average Joe on the internet wants to convince me I can make $1000 an hour having no skills valuable to the market. Colour me surprised.
I recently saw an article telling people how they make $200 an hour by simply searching on Google. My guy is making $144,000 a month simply searching on Google.
You open the article and there are a million things you need to do frst.
The instant gratification monkey wants me to click such articles, the rational one tells me to ignore them. I side with the rational one now.
There is no monster under your bed
I have seen myself putting way too much pressure on myself several times.
There seems to be this imaginary clock running in the background draining faster than the speed of light. Or some monster chasing and pestering you all the time.
More often than not, the situation is exaggerated. It is never as bad or as good as it seems.
Knowing this is a good thing. It stops us from overreacting to bad situations and over celebrating the good ones.
We must master the art of focusing on our own clock.
Work with your own clock, not your friend group’s or relative’s.
The simple advice I have decided to model my life by
You don’t need to take cold showers, wake up in the morning, meditate or have fancy laminated day schedules to be successful. You just need two things.
Focus and Patience
Focus
It is no secret that successful people are focused.
Being focused means having a clear vision and not letting anything distract you from it.
I have a very short attention span and chances are that you do too. We don’t stay focused.
So what does being focused look like?
Well, it means that you don’t constantly look at other people.
When we look at other people, it is easy to get sidetracked. The reason is, we are constantly judging them.
The way this works is, when they do better than you in something, we have negative thoughts. We think what we are doing is meaningless compared to that.
While competition is very important when we look at people that don’t have anything to do with us we sabotage ourselves.
Developing focus is simple, not easy.
It involves having clearly defined goals and sticking to them whilst believing in yourself.
When you write a goal know you're why. Why do you want that particular thing?
A deep reason pishes you more than anything.
Being focused also means improving yourself in that particular field whenever you see the opportunity to and celebrating yourself for progress.
Patience
Focus without patience is like having water but being unable to drink it.
Patience is necessary. Results don’t come immediately, so it is necessary to wait while you keep trying.
This is where most people lack. This is where I lack, and probably you do too.
If you are patient for a long time, it is easy to lose focus. If you are focused for a long time and results don’t seem to come, it is easy to become impatient.
The truth is a success is a manner of waiting for more than it is of doing. You have to be very lucky to become successful, but then again, luck favours the people who work for it.
At any given moment you have more things out of your control than they are in your control. But if you keep trying, best believe the stars will align.
Takeaway
This is the recipe for success. It is as simple as it gets.
No, you don’t have to wake up at 6 am, take a cold shower, work out and meditate, or work 15 hours a day.
You just have to keep pushing on a door until it slams open.
While there is nothing wrong with doing these things they are designed only to demotivate.
‘Successful’ people want us to think it is that hard to be successful — it isn’t.
There is nothing wrong with living a healthy lifestyle, but there is everything wrong with making success out to be an unreachable thing.
All you need are focus and patience, you can be great at anything.
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