Lessons from the Top 1% of the 1% (That'll Make You Successful)
Install these ideas in your brain to divorce yourself from mediocrity forever (guaranteed)
The worst mistake you can ever make is to learn from an amateur.
The internet is full of them. TikTokers, Youtubers, podcasters. They’re everywhere. In 2010, Tony Robbins taught me a mental model:
Don’t learn from anyone. Don’t learn from the top 1%. No. Learn from the top 1% of the 1% of people.
It doesn’t mean you need to become one of these uber-successful people, but there sure is a lot you can learn from elite performers. And even if you take only 1% of their wisdom away and use it, you’ll get further than learning from wannabes.
Having studied elite performers for the last 10 years, here are the best ideas you can use to massively get better in your field.
Being realistic is never going to work
Pharrell Williams is one of the greatest musicians of all time.
He says we need half a cup of delusion with every goal we set out to conquer. People filled with reality and being realistic can’t see opportunities. They don’t push the boundaries. They get stuck planning, overthinking, and trying to be perfect.
Being realistic is just fear in disguise. It’s an unhealthy craving for certainty.
The top 1% of 1% break all the rules. They’re unreasonable enough to think they can achieve the impossible even if they don’t have the data, experience, expert status, degrees, or facts to back it up.
F*ck being realistic.
A+ grades are the biggest destroyer of success
Online writer David Perell is in the top 1% of the 1% of creators on Twitter.
He says getting A’s in college and crafting an unblemished resume in your career is a huge hindrance (and this is what most people do by default).
It’s a sign of someone obsessed with perfection. They’re afraid to make a mistake or experience a huge failure. So they reject all risks that are hidden opportunities.
Keeping the gatekeepers happy is how you follow the traditional path to nowhere that has the worst rewards in history. Stop following the perfect sheep off a cliff. Don’t follow the rules. Reject conventional career paths.
Take a risk or you’ll be stuck in the same cubicle nightmare until you die.
5-year gaps with no progress are common
There’s a little known fact about actor Arnold Schwarzenegger that most people don’t know. After he stopped doing Mr Olympia bodybuilding competitions and started the transition to acting, he got no results for 5 years.
99% of people wouldn’t be able to pursue a goal like that and get no results or dopamine hits. But mastery takes longer than we expect.
You can’t learn to act by asking for advice. Or by having a 30-minute coffee with Tom Cruise at Starbucks. Lessons must be learned through experience, the hard way.
Keep going when your competitors start to give up.
The longer it takes to be successful in your field, the hungrier you get. And the better success feels when you finally experience it.
Equality is a dangerous myth
Sherry a.k.a. SchrodingrsBrat runs a top 1% newsletter.
Her views on success are wild. They piss people off. She says we all have an unfair advantage, such as we might be:
Better looking than normal
From a rich birthplace
From a wealthy family
Better at thinking
Better at learning
Sherry says that means “competition is always unfair even when opportunities are equal.” What a smack in the face!
A lot of success is just using your unfair advantages to get ahead, instead of focusing on what you don’t have and becoming a victim full of jealousy and calling strangers on the internet “privileged.”
Even the score in your favor by being relentless.
The simple way to unlock hidden potential
This lesson breaks the rules (preaching what I teach).
I said in the headline that all the lessons shared here come from the top 1% of the 1%. But this lesson comes from a reader of mine named Chris Johnson. It’s so good it sounds like it came from one of the biggest heroes in history.
Chris says people get stuck in a poverty mindset because they can’t see their own value. Not just the value we might have right now, but our potential future value.
Wow.
We all have value. The difference is the top 1% of 1% are unreasonable enough to see their value. And they’re crazy enough to believe their future value will be exponentially larger than it is right now.
All of us have a million dollars worth of information sitting in our heads. Only a few of us will unlock it. The rest will just overlook their value and think their 9-5 skills can only be sold to their current employer for less than the market value.
Don’t overthink what value is. Helping people ten steps behind where you are is easily a million-dollar online business.
To unlock potential value you must make learning something new every day part of your operating system.
You’ll never meet an elite performer who thinks they know everything. But you will meet a Twitter troll in the comments who does, and sits on their ass watching Netflix and making minimum wage.
The value you assign yourself determines your future value. Once you see your value, others will begin to see it too.
Getting comfortable with boring things is what most are unprepared to do
When you study success, like I have, it’s underwhelming.
You repeatedly see average people doing boring things consistently, even when they don’t feel like it. That last part is key.
Most of us don’t feel like coming home from work with no energy and working on our dream. But those who become the top 1% of the 1% do the work no matter what.
Success is less glamorous than you might think.
This Substack is in the top 1% of newsletters on this platform. If you saw the work I did to make it happen each week, you’d be underwhelmed.
I sit down, research, read a few books, speak with people via DMs, procrastinate heaps, and watch a lot of Youtube. Most of what I do to write this newsletter isn’t remarkable. What’s notable is that this month is my 10th year writing online.
It’s bloody hard to be a loser when you show up every day for a decade and chase your obsession to the ends of the earth.
Do the boring reps most people refuse to do.
Embarrassment is the killer of dreams
Early in my career, I ran from embarrassment.
I thought being embarrassed was the worst feeling in the world. Then I met a Toastmasters public speaking world champion, Bharat. He inspired me to try it.
I got up on stage and nearly pissed my pants. I forgot the speech I wrote up beforehand. I froze in terror. Everyone looked at me confused.
My speech ended abruptly.
Bharat encouraged me to keep getting up each week, so I did. It turned out later on that he started the same way.
He has a thick overseas accent, so many Aussies immediately dismissed him (stupidly) when he did a speech. But he became so good that no one could ignore him. He used the embarrassment as motivation.
Now he’s so phenomenal at public speaking that it’s a license to print money.
Many people kill their best ideas because of their fear of embarrassment. If you can get comfortable with being embarrassed and not giving up, you become unstoppable.
Autobiographies should be full of disgraces
When a Hollywood celebrity gets caught up in a scandal, people lose their minds.
The same happens when you hear about a successful person cheating on their partner, stealing from someone, enduring a divorce, or going bankrupt.
It makes no sense.
The top 1% of 1% are where they are because they’ve made huge mistakes. Nobody is perfect, least of all your heroes. Go on, meet your heroes. Learn their darkest secrets. Everyone you love will disappoint you.
So if you read an autobiography and there are no huge controversies all the way through it, they’re probably lying.
Your heroes are a disgrace.
You must be prepared to lose everything you have
The top 1% of 1% don’t ask for refund policies, guarantees, or for someone else to take all the risk. These are the habits of the below-average.
Success comes with risk.
People are so terrified to risk what they’ve already earned, that they never outearn last year’s income. A switch flips in your head when you realize, even if you lose everything, you can make it all back again (many times over).
The decision is either risk a little to gain a lot, or get a job and outsource all your risk to an employer and receive a peanut salary. There’s no middle.
Persuade <1% of people about <1% of things
The top 1% of 1% don’t chase fame, virality online, or millions of followers.
Why? To get wealthy you only need to sell less than 1% of people on your big idea. I know people with zero social media followers who earn 8 figures.
Chasing shiny objects is a distraction. Seeking limitless attention from strangers is an obsession with vanity more than it is a secret to success. The uber-successful see the work as the reward. Getting to do the work is all they care about.
The ideal number of people you need to reach is at least 10x less than you think.
Civilization declines exactly like this
Elon Musk is a controversial guy with a big ego.
I don’t subscribe to his church, but he is in the top 1% of multiple fields, so I don’t ignore his frameworks.
He says civilization declines when the majority of people stop taking risks. When there are fewer risk-takers, we end up with more umpires and critics instead of doers who move the world forward.
One of the biggest ways we avoid joining the top 1% is by having a little bit of career success. Once you hit a milestone it’s easy to get comfortable and lose the urge to take risks. Without new risks your results start to slowly plateau over time.
It’s what causes some of the biggest companies in history to die.
The way to avoid this tragedy is to track the number of risks you’re taking. Become an experimenter, not a collector of successes.
This one is a bigger disappointment than failure
Talking about failure is cliche as hell. No thanks.
But you can’t talk about the top 1% of 1% without at least mentioning failure once. The best in the world don’t worship failure. No. What they’re focused on is avoiding regrets. They know if they don’t try and risk failure, what they’ll get are regrets.
Getting to the end of your life, wishing you did more, is a nightmare I wouldn’t even wish on a convicted murderer.
Do hard things to lower your future regrets.
Final note before I go.
Recently I've been watching some new trends on LinkedIn…
(We’re talking moves that are getting at least one of my friends 1,000 new email subscribers… PER DAY)
I’m planning on teaching some of these new moves, but I first need to know:
What's your biggest challenge using LinkedIn?
Speaking of embarrassment, I got rejected 24 times in a row when cold-approaching ladies. I guess the first five hurt. The others didn't. And this is why I find it easy now to strike up conversations with strangers.
Well I’ll let you know. I bought a course from you last year for $800 and I have yet to fully utilise it. I love reading your stuff but often it takes a backseat to many other projects. Love long podcasts as I walk 4 to 5 hours a day, so I could process you more on those.