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The Power of Delusional Self Belief

Modern Ideas

11m 44s1,702 words~9 min read
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[0:03]Cuz I think right now if I was to quit rapping and I said, I want to go to the NBA. I would be in the NBA. No, you wouldn't. Yes. No, you wouldn't. Yes, I would. No, you wouldn't. Yes, I would. Why would you think you could make it to the NBA? Cuz I think I could do anything.

[0:21]Um, I'm an upcoming fighter and without a doubt, you will see me on the UFC in the near future, without a doubt.

[0:33]This is the first office of amazon.com. Okay, this is my desk here.

[1:01]July 1945. Gunder Hagg with a windblown hair, number 200, breaks the world record for the fastest time to run a mile. Four minutes and 1.2 seconds. And people said, well, there may be a barrier. At the time, everyone believed that four minutes was the barrier. The running a mile in under four minutes was physically impossible. You can't keep on running faster. Scientists even claimed that a human body simply isn't capable of running that fast, that if it ever did

[1:36]the heart would explode before it even got to the finish line.

[1:43]May 6, 1954. But an overconfident medical student by the name of Roger Bannister believed otherwise. And on the date of May the 6th, 1954,

[2:10]I, as a medical student, knew that there wasn't a brick wall. If you could run it in 4 minutes and 2.2 seconds, then you would be fine somebody else somewhere who trained a little better, and they could do it. And just shy of 2 months later, 22 more people had followed in Roger's footsteps. So, for 9 years, not one person could break the record. But as soon as it was done once, all of a sudden everyone was now capable. He's got a world record, 343. A record today sits at 3 minutes and 43 seconds. Pretty far off the impossible barrier of 4 minutes if you ask me.

[2:54]Hey, remember, you only get one life. Make sure you do something cool with it or don't. We don't really care.

[3:14]This is a song that I used to hear the old folks sing a long time ago. And I used to hear them tell me these words. When we were little kids, we all had big dreams. If someone asked you what you wanted to do when you grew up, it was an astronaut, an athlete, or maybe it was an actor. But then when you get to a certain age, you're expected to lower your standards. Told you can't do certain things, and I don't disagree to be honest. Most people shouldn't be chasing a dream, but there's some people out there that have it inside of them, and it makes me wonder how many of those people never got there because they were told they couldn't.

[4:20]115.8 billion dollars. That's how much money Bill Gates is currently worth. If you get rid of 99%, I'd have 1.3 billion. I'm, I'm so sorry. Just 1% of Bill's money is more than 500 times more than the average person will make throughout their entire lifetime. And I don't care what you think about him. Bill's a great guy. He's done great things. Is it true that you can leap over a chair from a standing position? It depends on the size of the chair. But I want to take a look at how. How can a single human being who wasn't handed anything by the way, make more money than 60 fucking countries combined.

[5:07]At age 12, Bill's parents send him to a private school by the name of Lakeside. One year in, the school gains access to something special. This is a teletype model 33. One of the only computers in the world at the time. And this is where Bill finds his love for programming. Alongside his classmate Paul Allen, they both begin experimenting with writing code. At the time they were discouraged from playing around with the computers. Told they were better off pursuing something real in the world. And so Bill did exactly that. After graduating, he goes off to college to study law, hopes of being a lawyer. But whilst he's there, he keeps his passion for computers. He spends most of his spare time reading about them, in books, in articles, in magazines. Fascinated by them. And on a regular night in January 1975, he stumbles across something that sparks his interest. And as he's reading, an idea comes into his mind.

[6:26]Hello, I'm Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft. That idea went on to become one of the biggest, most recognizable companies in the entire world. Just 8 months after getting the idea, Bill Gates and Paul Allen decided they would drop out of college and focus on building Microsoft. Son of a bitch. And over the course of the next 50 years they did exactly that. They built an empire.

[6:51]Just last year turning over a light 88 billion dollars in profit.

[7:10]Now Bill's story is an interesting one, because from the outside looking in, we can see how lucky he was. Born into an upper middle class family, access to one of the only computers in the world at the time, the list goes on. But you can't look at that list and blame luck alone for his success. Sure, Bill had one of the luckiest head starts a human could ever have. But he also built everything himself. Bill was an incredibly hard worker. We were hardcore about hey, if you're working on a piece of code, just get it done. Don't, don't worry about sleep. He'd been in the office 7 days a week, up to 18 hours a day. I didn't believe in weekends. I, I didn't believe in vacation. From age 20 to age 30, Bill and Paul didn't take a single weekend off. He never received a penny from his parents to fund Microsoft. In fact, the business was actually losing money for the first 5 years. Luck was involved. No doubts about it. He was in the right place at more than the right time. But he also put in more work than everyone else. The success wouldn't exist without both parts.

[8:19]I think as people, we like to think of the world as linear that things happen in a straight line, but that never seems to be the case. Most of the time, things happen very randomly, and if we're talking in terms of success, it's usually exponential. Usually there's a few lucky moments that change things forever. For example, like I said, Microsoft was losing money for the first 5 years. It was only in 1980 when they made a deal with IBM, when they got their first breakthrough. They were introduced to millions of computers overnight. People talk about, wow, you've had such success and it's just been so overnight, overnight and whatever. Well, whatever success I've got has come after like 8 years of just nothing working out.

[9:11]At a certain point, I believe with enough time, things start to become inevitable. We've already established that luck is involved and you need to be in the right place at the right time. But at least in my mind, it makes sense that within an entire lifetime, it's impossible that you don't get lucky once. Tarantino is a great example of this point I'm trying to make. As you heard him say, 8 years of just nothing working out. And when he did finally get some success, Quentin Tarantino, it all came overnight. Thanks. His first feature film did around 2.9 million dollars on a 1.2 million dollar budget. That's 1.7 million in profit. And the reason his story fits perfectly with this video, is because logically speaking, it would have made sense to quit after year 4 or 5. Clearly what he was doing wasn't working. But because he was delusional enough to believe it would work, he put himself in a position where eventually it just had to. Sure, he's a talented guy, but he wasn't born with the ability to make great films. It was the 8 years of nothing that developed him into a great filmmaker. And because he was a great filmmaker, and because he was around for so long, one day he was in the right place at the right time. I honestly don't see a way, where if you have one dream in life, and you're committed enough to continue going for it for at least a decade, eventually it doesn't work out. And I think the hardest part about it, and the reason success rates are so low, is because people struggle to believe that. And so they change directions before they ever get there. I mean, it could happen next week, or it could happen in 30 years time. You don't know. But at the end of the day, you only get one life. So you might as well go for what you actually want. And it's going to take some delusion to keep you going for that long, because most likely, nothing's going to happen for a very long time. But eventually it will, and those who stick around will find that out.

[10:57]all day long would be practicing on the elevator in my dorm. Come saying the shit. Right one clown would bring me up. My fucking head would spin. I'd forget where I was, not making any sense. I would take two jokes and then I'd be like, oh my God, I don't, I don't know what's coming next and I had that going for a while, but I still would go home at night and go, fuck, and I'm going to be so fucking good at this. I don't know what it was. Psycho. Psycho. It's funny, delusional thinking can sometimes carry you to the like once you develop some skill, Yeah, and delusional is like a little guardian. They're like keeps you protected while you actually develop talent. But that's how you make it. That's how you make it in kind of everything. Like you're, you're delusional, you know? Yes, yes.

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