To Get Wealthy Just "Be Good" Consistently
Wealth increases based on your level of delusion
I’m embarrassed to admit I’m not great.
This week I got approached by one of the most famous NFL football players in America. We’re having an informal chat in 2 weeks.
I have massive imposter syndrome. He has Rolls Royces, a shoe line, a mansion, and sporting world records. I have an 8 year old Honda Civic, a shack of a house, and a screaming 1 year old who wants her mommy every 5 seconds.
Compared to him, I’m a loser.
But I’ve managed to get moderate wealth in the areas of money, business, family, relationships, writing, and health. I thought about how it happened, then it hit me: I’m not great at anything but I do know how to be good consistently.
Being good is all you need to become moderately wealthy and live the good life.
Here’s how.
Consistency reduces the feedback loop
Most people don’t know sh*t, they just think they do.
A useless degree or a fancy job title makes them think they’re smart - not really. These are the people who become obsessed with perfectionism and being an expert.
Being consistently good is the opposite. Here’s what it looks like:
The more daily action you take the more consistent feedback you get. This leads to insights that create wisdom that generates wealth.
Going from 0 to 100 is too hard.
Most of us will give up and piss our pants when we try. Consistency is a system you can build on. If you’re already writing every day for 10 minutes, then it’s easier to go to 15 minutes compared to starting at 0.
The underrated reason 99% of people can’t be consistent
Being consistent is boring.
It’s why it’s hard for a lot of people to reach mastery. Their phones have taught them to escape boredom and run for cheap dopamine the moment life gets 1% hard. They can’t wait to indulge in a distraction to numb the pain.
My secret is I’ve learned to do things when I don’t feel it.
It doesn’t seem like a big deal on the surface. When you go deeper you realize it’s everything. People think success is some complicated idea that requires a 125-step plan and Keanu Reeves to be your mentor.
It’s not.
Being consistent is about continuing your habits that lead to success even when curveballs get thrown at your head. Too many readers I meet want everything they do to be convenient and happen at the right time.
So they spend their whole life waiting. They’re stuck in a fictitious doctor’s waiting room, waiting to be told what they already know.
Being good consistently will never be convenient. You just do it anyway.
Being below-average consistently isn’t the same
There’s a difference between below-average and good.
I meet writers all the time, for example, who can be consistent, but their writing isn’t good and they’re broke.
They think if you follow the 10,000-hour rule and stay stuck in your bedroom alone for long enough, everything will just happen. They have a superiority complex. They follow what they think is a proven path that leads nowhere. Why?
Degrees teach you to follow the rules. Wealth teaches you to break them.
To go from below-average to good you MUST iterate. You must do things differently and learn from your failures. You must have an open mind. And you must be willing to learn from people smarter than you.
Through iteration you experience true learning.
Without it, all you do is do the same boring things repeatedly and expect a different result, which is the definition of insanity.
This cliche will piss you off because it’s true
Wake up early to make it easier.
Yep. Being good consistently means having time to do it. It also means having energy. Many of my former work colleagues wanted to be consistent with their side hustles but they left them until they got home.
So they never happened, or they did their side hustles on 0% battery life.
How many wake-up-early studies do I need to quote? Life is easier in the morning. It’s easier to get a headstart on the day and beat your to-do list. There are fewer distractions at 6 AM and your job or business is yet to right hook you in the face.
Work when the world is still sleeping.
Your friends form your habits
What the F***!?
James Clear says, “When you choose your friends today, you are choosing your habits tomorrow.”
If you hang around losers it’s hard to be good consistently. They’ll want to bring you down to their level. They’ll tempt you with “just one more beer” and “let’s go to the movies tonight and watch the latest Marvel movie.”
This strategy is massively overlooked.
When I quit my banking career, by default, the people I spent the most time with changed. I went from spending time with Frank in accounting eating donuts (who I was forced to work with because of an IT project) to hanging out with people like Dan Koe who makes $300K+ a month working a few hours a day.
Kieren Perkins, a famous Olympic Swimmer, once said to me, “It’s hard to not be consistently good when you’re waking up at 5 AM every day to swim, and your teammates all have 5+ Olympic gold medals to their name.”
The biggest challenge he faced was when he quit swimming and became an everyday banker. He did the reverse to me and went from being surrounded by champions to being surrounded by office workers dying to make it to the weekend.
It nearly destroyed him.
Being around other consistently good people makes it easier to get wealthy. Find them on social media or inside of masterminds.
We can’t escape habits
We either have habits that make us consistently good, or bad habits wrapped in addiction that slowly destroy us.
Whatever you repeat, you reinforce – James Clear
So you may as well choose to create habits that help you become consistently good, than stay on auto-pilot and slowly drown in cheap dopamine.
The timeframe can fast-track the outcome
It took me 10 years of being good online consistently to achieve meaningful progress.
For the first 5 years I made little progress and treaded water. For the last 5 years I learned how to iterate and network and got results 3x faster.
A friend, Dan Go, decided he would be consistently good too – but he shortened the timeframe. He decided to increase the intensity by a factor of 100.
He went from being a $70K a year personal trainer to a full-blown fitness business with millions in revenue in under a year by tweeting 300 times a day.
A few things drove Dan to go faster:
Boredom
Delusion
Obsession
Desperation
I mention Dan’s path to illustrate the timeframe can be whatever you want. It just comes down to how badly you want to experience wealth.
If you crank up the intensity you can be consistently good, faster.
Wealth increases based on your level of delusion
When you try to be consistent with a success habit, people tell you “don’t.”
When you’ve been doing it for a while they tell you it “won’t” work.
When you start to get results they say you “can’t” make this your life.
The further you go into the land of delusion and backing yourself, the more wealth you’ll generate. And the more critics you’ll piss off.
How being good consistently makes you wealthy
1. Every market has competitors
I write on Medium and in the last week I noticed three of the top earners have stopped writing after years of being consistent. As people quit, the money pool gets bigger for those who stay consistent.
2. Wealth = Mastery
The big dollars don’t get paid to amateurs.
To get wealthy you want to earn the big money and that means you need to master a skill. Skills take years to cultivate, so you better damn well love what you’ve chosen to do. Or even be obsessed with it.
3. Compounding + Leverage = Wealth
When you’re good consistently your results compound.
At the start the compounding is so small it doesn’t matter. After 1-5 years the compounding becomes so great it takes less effort.
When you have results the habit starts to get easier because you have proof of work and social proof. This leads to leverage.
You can get new skills faster and reach high performers who can further amplify your results through increased distribution (eyeballs for your ideas).
Once compounding and leverage are working in your favor, it’s almost impossible not to get moderately wealthy.
Forget trying to be great. Just be good consistently.
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Yup
Couldn't agree more!