Being a High Performer Is Lonely as Hell
It's also the best feeling in the world
High performance often feels like elitism.
You’re either successful or a loser. No in between. That view of the world is a little harsh for my liking. As always the truth lies in the nuance.
I never used to see myself as a high performer. My younger years were full of failures. My childhood was too. We lost our family home not once but twice. Kids used to make fun of me.
In 2013 my entire world changed forever.
I went to a Tony Robbins seminar that rewired my brain. I started to think differently. That made me weird which made me feel good. For the last 11 years, I’ve been on the path of high performance and in the top 1% of my field.
High performers aren’t what they seem. You’ve been lied to.
Lie #1 – There’s a lot of competition
No there isn’t.
What I do is lonely because there isn’t any real competition. And when there is a competitor, they last about 6 months and then give up or go out of business.
When there’s no competition it feels lonely. You have no one to aspire to be like. It’s hard to find idols. What you do can even feel boring.
So the problem to solve isn’t that you’ll have so many competitors no one will pay attention to what you do. No. The problem is that you’ll discover there is no competition and feel lonely.
Learning to deal with the loneliness is not always easy, but it’s an attribute of obsessed people who chase their mission to its illogical conclusion.
Lie #2 – You’re missing some key bits of information
I’ve helped 6000+ people start writing online.
At the start I thought they were all missing some key strategy or insight that I could provide them. I’ve since learned people are drowning information.
Low performers keep acquiring more information and never implementing it because they fear failure. I came across an example yesterday.
Guy tells me he wants to build an online empire. He mentions he’s about to start his third degree (Master's) at age 40. He says the latest degree has drained his bank account and his family is struggling financially.
I politely told him if he wanted to join my inner circle he might not fit in because most of my community don’t believe in college degrees anymore. In his case he’s onto his third degree and still getting zero results while dealing with the pain of poverty.
He blew up at me when I told him this.
“Never meet your heroes. You piece of sh*t, Denning.”
An even bigger sign of a low performer is when they’re easily offended at a harmless remark like “you may not like our community.”
This example illustrates perfectly why more information isn’t the answer. Credentialism has led to people overloading their brains with more information, so they turn into adult babies who lack emotional intelligence and the ability to deal with failure or rejection.
Obsession driven by daily habits backed by systems will get you 10x further than more information from a professor.It’s lonely being a high performer because most of the world thinks they lack information. Asking for permission and following the proven path is the default, which only leads to us becoming overwhelmed and drowning in busyness.
If you can stop being an information wh0re and digitally hoarding mountains of information, you will change the world.
Lie #3 – People are fearless
When you compare yourself to people on social media, it’s easy to think everyone’s winning and you’re not. This is untrue.
People aren’t fearless.
In the surveys I’ve run for the last 5 years around writing and online business the pattern has always been the same.
We’re afraid of:
Failing
Imposter syndrome
Not feeling like an expert
Not being experienced enough
Being trolled or getting hateful comments
The average person never gets over these fears. They prevent them from ever taking action and they never learn that it’s their fear holding them back. When you have the privilege of interacting with people from all walks of life you learn the truth.
Most people are destroyed by their fears.There are very few fearless people in the world. I consider myself fearless. It makes me lonely at times. I can only name 2-3 other people who I consider to be fearless.
It makes me feel like an outlier.
As a result, I can’t comprehend how people can possibly stay in dead-end jobs when each day they’re slowly dying and their bodies are breaking down with age.
So I have to have fewer friends.
Last weekend I went to a lunch with my wife’s friends.
I sat in the corner playing with my 1 year old because I couldn’t relate to the other people. They sat there and complained about their careers.
One of them even shared how his employer missed paying his salary the week prior. The whole company didn’t get paid. Their employer is struggling to pay their bills. Salaries finally got paid 4 days later because the company won a trademark infringement court case.
All I could hear were alarm bells.
The guy heard nothing. He went back to work. “She’ll be right.” I give his employer 4 weeks before they go into liquidation. He doesn’t want to change because he’s comfortable, so he just bullsh*ts himself to keep going to the office.
If you can learn to overcome fear you can easily join the top 1%.
Lie #4 – The market is saturated
I lied. This one is true.
But the market is saturated with low quality, piss poor crap. Excellence used to be the way. Humans used to make beautiful stuff. Now we churn out billions of widgets that all look the same and can serve a function, sure, but inspire no one.
It’s most obvious with architecture. Buildings used to be beautiful. Now they’re depressing brutalist concrete blocks that are soulless and make humans feel like machines. So the market is saturated but with depressing offerings.
I operate in the online business and writing niches. What scares me isn’t the market, it’s how bad most products and services are.
There’s little to no effort. They’re slapped together in a few hours, then wrapped in sensationalist irresistible marketing that’s nothing more than broken promises. It feels lonely sometimes to see how uninspiring the market really is.
The upside is this creates an opportunity for us to build something inspiring. It doesn’t even need to be great. A 1%-better-product or service is enough to win in a saturated market.
Saturated Markets = Huge Opportunity
Being inspiring with what you do in a world full of rock-bottom creativity feels lonely. Paradoxically, it’s led to the start of a new renaissance that you can join.
Lie #5 – I’ll start in 2025
I heard this for the first time the other day.
The mediocre-middle-of-the-road love to delay goals to someday, one day. They’re going to get started. Just not right now. They’re busy. Timing isn’t right. They’re getting their ducks in a row (they probably should shoot those ducks in the head).
If not now, then f*cking when?
What’s so special about 2025 compared to 2024? It’s lonely in high performer land because we don’t delay goals. If it’s a goal it’s a priority for today. If it’s not a goal then we stop thinking about it and ma$turbating over it. There’s no in between.
Most people have too many goals. Too many bright ideas.
It’s better to have one goal and forget all the other shiny objects. But this way of thinking is uncommon. When I tell people I’m 10 years into my writing goal and have 30+ years to go, they think I’m crazy. The mission is overly simplistic. There’s no chopping and changing. It’s driven by pure obsession.
A reader emailed me yesterday. “Tim, I think you’ve lost touch with what people are going through. You’ve made too many millions of dollars.”
Maybe they’re right. That thought makes me even lonelier. I don’t understand distractions and shallow work done in a noisy office where you can’t think.
What the reader said next made more sense. They said they didn’t know how I could write online and lose all of my privacy. They didn’t get how I could play what they call the “social media game.”
But I have plenty of privacy. Most people who do what I do use a nickname. My friend Dan Koe is a great example. You didn’t think his real name was Dan Koe, did you? Lol. It’s a made up name.
Social media isn’t some Squid Game to me either. I’m online building an empire around my obsession which feels effortless. So it’s not some useless game I play to make money. Money never was the goal.
When you have clarity on what you love doing, the desire to delay it until next year or some future point when you’re dead becomes a crazy idea.
You either start the goal today or never. If you choose today it’s the most lonely path.
Closing Thought
I don’t mind being lonely.
To me, there’s nothing worse than being stuck in a crowd of people who want to fit in while simultaneously wasting their lives away achieving nothing.
Then following the crowd to a sports game to get drunk and try to forget about their lack of progress, only to wake up with a hangover on Monday morning to relive Groundhog day once more on repeat until retirement followed by death ~10 years later.
Choose the lonely path. Dare to implement high-performance habits that’ll make you weird.
Tell me which of the lies above resonated the most and why in the comments.
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#2 "Credentialism has led to people overloading their brains with more information, so they turn into adult babies who lack emotional intelligence and the ability to deal with failure or rejection."
I work with these babies daily. Spot on.
This point right here- "When you have clarity on what you love doing, the desire to delay it ... becomes a crazy idea"