You Don't Get Better Because You Keep Making This Huge Mistake
Stories, success, the greatest myth in the modern world.
I love stories.
Books, movies, songs, TV shows, social media posts, newsletters, plays — whatever. The medium of the story doesn’t matter to me too much.
If you’re reading this, you probably like stories too.
But what’s the point of a story? Why do humans like stories?
To me, the biggest reason why I like stories is that they help me learn the things about life that I need to know without actually having to experience them myself. A well-told story can spin someone onto the right path, while a bad story can send you down a treacherous path that leads to pain, suffering, and failure.
So, with that in mind, today, in the format of 4 different stories, we’re talking about greatness, mistakes, and the illusion of the “self-made man”.
Together, these stories will identify the single biggest mistake people make in terms of learning and skill development.
Let’s begin.
The first story is about fitness.
I shared this story a few weeks ago, but let’s talk about it again because it’s a great story with powerful lessons.
Arnold Schwarzenegger came to America with basically nothing.
No family, nothing in his apartment, no friends, and no household name. Before he was “Arnold” he was just a buff guy who came from a one-bedroom apartment in Austria with a really long name and barely any money to that long name.
With the help of new friends, coaches, and a lot of hard work in the proper environment, he became not just able to live in America, but also the most legendary bodybuilder the world has ever seen. Although Lee Haney won more Mr. Olympia titles, there will only ever be one “Arnold”.
But Arnold had help to reach his pinnacle, and he realized that because he had help, he must help others. Arnold’s story is also not unique.
Every highly successful person, when you really look at the makeup of their life, has had support in some way.
Even if they didn’t have a family, they had a coach, a mentor, a guide, dumb luck, a resource — something.
No one pulls greatness out of their ass.
Remember this as we go forward.
The second story is about a family.
One of my favorite movies of all time is The Godfather (parts 1 and 2).
The movie is very famous and you’ve either seen it or heard of it, but for today’s purposes, The Godfather is the story of a Sicilian mafia family that rises to power in New York and eventually all over the world.
Although it is a work of fiction, it’s based on real mob families and there are some interesting lessons that we can take from these movies.
There’s one big lesson that I always internalize after watching the movies (it’s best to watch the 2 back-to-back).
That lesson is that there are few things more powerful than a family (or a group of people) that pool its resources together to do something incredible.
No matter how great one self-made man is, he has nothing compared to that of several generations of people imparting wisdom, resources, and support for each other.
This idea is how the most powerful families in history have taken control of the world. The Rockefellers, the Waltons, the Hermes family — the list goes on. Power comes from multiplying your ideas, and these families have done it by passing on their bloodlines.
The lesson is this: if you want to do things well, you need to be a part of a community.
The final story is about failure.
In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The Story of Success, he talks about 2 geniuses.
One who you’ve heard of and one you haven’t.
The first is a man named J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was a theoretical physicist, the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory of the Manhattan Project, and today, we just think of him as “the father of the atomic bomb”.
The ethical ramifications of Oppenheimer’s work aside, he was a brilliant man who succeeded in his work.
The other man, a man named Chris Langan, was never successful in his work, except for the time when he won $250,000 on a gameshow in 2008. He didn’t have support from his family and he was stubborn and abrasive. Gladwell notes how strange it was to interact with him in the book.
Oppenheimer, on the other hand, was equally tortured with the price of genius as Langan (he tried to poison his professor in college), but he had supportive and wealthy parents who wanted him to succeed and did everything they could to make it happen.
As a result, he succeeded and left a legacy on modern science, while Chris Langan works as a horse rancher in rural Missouri.
The lesson is this: your ability to have great success is heavily predicated on where you come from.
Weaving it all together.
When I moved to Texas last year, I was stubborn and prideful about the challenges that I had to face during my move.
I told my girlfriend, a few friends, and my family about what I was dealing with, but I never really asked for help. I just tried to work out of the hole I was in by myself.
In the end, I just dug myself deeper into the hole as I flailed about trying to escape. I ended up nearly moving back home because I was struggling so much. I nearly gave up on a dream because I was too scared to ask for help to achieve it.
In addition to suffering financially, physically, and mentally, I was suffering emotionally by constantly berating myself for the inadequacy that I felt about my predicament. I was embarrassed and my pride was damaged.
I wanted to be a self-made success. I wanted to move, work hard, grind, and have opportunities fall into my lap as a result of nothing but my work alone. This was what I perceived that I had done when I was living in Chicago.
Upon further review, I was wrong about everything.
All of the things that I have achieved in my life — whether they’re Jiu-Jitsu-related, social, or writing — have come from collaboration with other people.
It’s not about working hard in silence, it’s about working hard in a community with other people. This is how you build great things.
Closing Thoughts
My girlfriend and I have been watching a Spanish drama series called Money Heist (or Le Casa De Papel in Spanish).
The series is about a gang of thieves who work together to pull off the greatest heists in the history of the world. They’re deeply flawed characters, they don’t even like each other much, and their lives would all have been easier if they just didn’t do what they did.
These tortured characters work together to pull off something incredible.
And that’s really what I want you to take from this article today.
Instead of working for a peaceful and quiet life so that you can pursue your goals, it is better to strive to be someone who can transcend the chaos of life and coexistence and achieve things anyway. You need other people to do anything worth doing.
The self-made man may exist, but he gets where he’s going a lot slower than the person who works with a team or a family.
Find your team. If you don’t have a family, create one. Even if they’re flawed and imperfect, you get farther with others than someone who goes at it alone.
Let’s make working together cool again.
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