3 Common Pieces of Life Advice that Do More Harm Than Good
- So there is a lot of advice floating around
on the internet and not all of it is good.
So what we're gonna do today
is get away from the productivity tips
and the self-improvement advice that I think
is actually good and should be implemented into your life
and talk about three pieces of advice
that I took very seriously, in some cases,
tried to follow for quite a long period of time,
before realizing that they were ultimately bad advice
or at least I interpreted them in a bad way
and ended up doing something more destructive
than positive in my life.
And we're just gonna jump into with one
that I get emailed about all the time
which is the common saying that you are the product
of the five people you spend the most time around.
Now, on the surface, there isn't a whole lot to object to
with this quotation, or this aphorism
or whatever it is you want to call it,
because we are influenced by the people
we spend the most time around.
It's obvious, people are the products of their friends,
their family, the people that they tend to hang out with
or at least, they're very much influenced by those people,
but where they start going down the wrong path, I think,
is when they take that piece of advice
and they draw the conclusion
that if I'm an ambitious person, if I have a lot of goals,
if I'm really high-energy and I want to be successful,
then I have to ditch everyone in my life
who doesn't operate in the same way that I do.
If I'm friends with somebody
but they're a little bit more chill,
or they don't want to be working 24/7,
I need to stop being friends with those people immediately
and go find new friends
who are going to be a lot more ambitious.
And I really don't like this piece of advice
because it leads people to think these things.
And in fact, when I was younger and I think more foolish,
I thought this as well.
Now, luckily, I didn't end up following through with it
and actually ditching my friends,
but there were times when I was thinking to myself,
man, maybe I need to go find a different friend group
because I seem to be interested in different things,
I seem to be wanting to work on
my entrepreneurial projects all the time,
while my friends kinda don't do the same thing.
And what I realized later on is that you don't have to be
on the same ambitional wavelength as your friends
to be friends with them
because friendships are separate from your work
and your goals and ambitions,
but what you do need to make sure you are doing
is spending some of your time surrounding yourself
with people who do build you up
and who do motivate you and encourage and challenge you.
So a better way to put this,
in the way that I would prefer it be communicated
to people in the future,
is don't worry about the time breakdown.
Don't try to list out the five people you hang out with
the most often and then rank them and give them qualities
because number one, friendships don't have to be based on
having the exact same ambitions
or even the same level of ambition.
You could be friends with somebody just because
you like them and enjoy spending time with them,
but make sure that you are spending time
with people who do challenge you.
So a practical example of this would be if you're in college
and you're hanging out with your friends
in the dorms playing video games,
playing board games, whatever it is,
also make sure that you have some time during the week
that you go and participate in a club
or you go to networking events,
just do something where you are
regularly exposed to people who do challenge you.
And this could be really simple.
It could even be a once a week mastermind group
through Skype or Discord or any other online chat platform,
just make sure you get that regular exposure.
And when you go about it in this way,
you're also not ditching people who quite honestly,
probably need you.
Remember that if you're an ambitious person,
if you have a lot of goals
if you're kinda going somewhere in life,
or you feel like you are,
then you're probably an inspiration
and a source of motivation and strength for somebody else.
And if we all took this literally,
if we all said, I have to be around the five people
who are most inspiring who are gonna challenge me the most,
we would all only look upwards.
We would constantly be ignoring the people
who probably need us and trying to chase people
who we think we need.
And instead, we should be thinking in both directions.
We should be pursuing relationships with people
who do challenge us and who we can learn from,
but we should also make sure that we keep cultivating
relationships with people who we can help.
All right, the second piece of advice
that I want to talk about here is simple.
Be everywhere.
And again, this is another one that on the surface
seems like a really good piece of advice,
especially if you want to get your name out into the world.
Now, when I heard this piece of advice,
it was in the context of how to build a successful blog,
how to build a successful online following.
And again, it seems like a really good piece of advice,
because if you are everywhere,
if you're on LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook and YouTube
and commenting on other blogs and all kinds of stuff,
then there are so many different opportunities
for people to find out who you are.
But again, it's the way in which you interpret this advice
that really makes the difference.
And the way that I interpreted it,
was actually destructive, because I took be everywhere
as a call for me to be active
on every platform all the time.
So I was on LinkedIn and I was writing articles on LinkedIn
and I was commenting on other people's articles.
I was on twitter and I had a habit in my habit tracker
at one point to tweet five articles a day
and a certain amount of quotes per day.
I had Facebook pages.
I was even on app.net for a while
and probably nobody watching this video even remembers
what app.net was 'cause it died a pretty quick death.
So I would say that looking back on my career,
the points at which I made the most progress
were the ones where I failed to be everywhere,
they were the times where I got one idea in my head,
one piece of content that I wanted to make,
one article, one video and I ignored everything else
for a period of days, sometimes even weeks
to make one great thing.
Now, there is a quote that I do want to share here,
which I'm going to edit a little bit
to remove a exploitative, but the quote goes,
"Self-promotion, if you don't like it,
"stay in your basement."
You do have to self-promote.
You do have to put your work out there,
but I think you need to take a majority of your time
and use it to focus on creating something
that is really worth paying attention to
or honing your skills
so you are in the top 10% or 5% of people in your field.
Once you've done that,
then you can take a little bit of time that's left over
and use it on self-promotion
and you can be everywhere to a certain extent.
You can have a presence on all these platforms,
but if you're splitting you're time up into little chunks
every single day trying to be active on all these platforms,
you don't have any time left over to do something
that's worth sharing, so focus on that first.
And speaking of focus,
that brings us to our third and final piece of bad advice,
which is the common advice to focus on your strengths
and ignore your weaknesses.
Now again, just as with the first two pieces of advice
we talked about here,
this is something that can be interpreted in a positive way,
if you know what your strengths are.
But the problem is, we give this advice
to people who are often very early in their careers
or sometimes to kids and when you're a kid
or when you're a teenager
or when you're early in your career,
you often haven't put in enough work
to know what's actually a weakness and what's just something
that you haven't put enough effort into,
something that you're just in the dip right now
and you haven't kind of come out of that initial area
of difficulty that almost nobody makes it out of.
So for example, a lot of people in the world say,
"I'm bad at math," or "I'm bad at learning languages,"
or "I'm just not cut out to play music,
"that's just a weakness of mine."
And that third one is a big one for me.
I went a lot of my life saying
that I'm just not cut out for music,
I don't have it in me to be a musician,
I should go and do something else and I've learned
in recent years that that isn't the case at all.
I just hadn't put in the work
to become a somewhat decent musician and now that I have,
I realized that no, music is actually a strength,
I have this pretty nice improvisational talent
that allows me to play music
that's pretty decent at least to my ears.
It just took me a while to develop that skill.
So I think a better way to go about this
is to follow your interests.
If you're interested in something,
be it speaking Japanese or learning calculus
or learning high-level statistics
or playing the guitar or the piano,
put ample time into the practice of whatever that thing is.
Now, you may realize down the line that
yes, this is a weakness of mine,
I'm trying to play basketball
and I'm just not tall enough to dunk the ball,
okay, maybe that's a weakness.
But I think more times than not,
you are going to discover
that what you thought was a weakness,
was just something that is inherently difficult
to learn for a lot of different people
and that just requires more work.
Now, on that note of following your interests,
one common objection to this might be
that I don't know what my interests are
or I don't have an interest that's compelling enough
to really follow right now,
and if that's the case for you,
then you might want to go expose yourself to new information
so you can develop new interests
and there are plenty different ways to do that.
You can go browse the stacks of your local library
or you can go watch a really interesting documentary
on a service like CuriosityStream.
CuriosityStream is a new streaming service
with over 2,400 high-quality documentaries
that was actually created by John Hendricks
who was the founder of the Discovery Channel,
which was the way that I discovered
a lot of my interests as a kid.
Now the great thing about CuriosityStream
is that unlike Discover Channel,
you don't have to wait for a certain thing to come on,
at any time and almost anywhere
since you'll find CuriosityStream on iOS, Android, Roku
and plenty of other devices,
you can access any documentary you want.
There are science documentaries,
history documentaries, technology documentaries,
there are even documentaries
from people like Stephen Hawking and Sigourney Weaver
and if you're looking for a place to start,
then I would like to give you a recommendation
because one of my big interests
that I don't talk about a whole lot on my channel
is the development of artificial intelligence.
This is something that I've been interested in
for probably five or six years at this point
and on CuriosityStream, you're gonna find a documentary
called the Road to the Singularity, which explores
how the development of several different technologies
including biotech and nano tech could lead to
the development of artificial intelligence
and the singularity in the intelligence explosion.
So if you want to check out that documentary
or any of the others on the platform,
then you should give CuriosityStream a try.
It's really affordable, just $2.99 per month
and if you want to give it a try for free,
you can actually get a free 30 day trial
of unlimited watching on the platform
by going over to CuriosityStream.com/Thomas
and using the code Thomas at checkout.
Huge thanks as always goes out to CuriosityStream
for sponsoring this video and being a big supporter
of my channel and the content that I create
and thank you as well for watching.
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