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- Real Help (Part II)
Real Help (Part II)
Matt Karamazov
October 06, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 29 minutes
“Success by my definition involves more unlearning than it does learning.”
“You also lie to yourself when you’re being overly negative.”
“Much of my improvement came from embracing and believing things I knew to be true but didn't want to believe."
“Once you realize the adventure itself, including its ups and downs, is the entire point...you're free."
“Treat fools around you as a normal part of life, like rocks or furniture.”
“The media wants you to be depressed, sad, and angry (because it helps them make money)."
“To cure yourself of the news, read last week’s news.”
"No grand conspiracy. Just simple incentives."
“When you start to see the different incentives stacked on top of one another, it's no wonder why change is so difficult. You're trying to become a sovereign and self-actualized individual when all the outside forces around you are trying to make you the exact opposite.
If you want to change, you need to understand not only how this is all happening, but why.
When you realize that much of what society does to you doesn't have much to do with you, you start to become free. They're not out to get you. You're just a cog in their machine. Fortunately, if you decide to escape, they won't even know you're missing."
“Inspiration and motivation are fine, but they pale in comparison to realism and wisdom.”
“Whatever your current situation is, I know the tips I'm going to give you are a lot to ask. But I'm going to ask anyway. Why? Because real self-improvement involves facing challenges that are going to ask a lot from you."
“Imagine you have no money. Literally zero. How could you find a way to make an income with no resources, connections, or equipment?
Well, there's this insanely useful place you can go to that gives you access to all the knowledge you'd ever need. Even better, you can go there and use these resources for free.
This magical place is called the library.
Most libraries provide computers with internet access. You could start an online business, for free, using library computers and knowledge you find from free books. Why'd I choose this story? Because it's my story."
“Resourcefulness is much more valuable than having resources.”
“I’m OK with people asking for help. We need social safety nets for those who truly can't help themselves in the moment. Before you ask for help, ask yourself whether you've really, really exhausted your resources. Then and only then would I suggest asking for assistance or quitting."
“You’re strong enough to fight for yourself. You don’t have to fold. So don’t.”
“Getting rich is easy. Staying rich is hard.”
“Never ordering the best meal on the menu sends a little signal to yourself that you can never have the best of the best. Always complaining about your job, the government, and the economy sends a signal that the world owns your life instead of the other way around. Getting caught up in petty annoyances and trivialities sends a signal that your life itself is a triviality."
“You need motion. You need something to aim at that challenges you, but doesn’t defeat you.”
“Passion does exist, but it’s a feeling you earn with experience, instead of needing it to get started.”
“Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.”
“I credit much of my success to reading.”
“Half the self-improvement battle is simply avoiding being dumb.”
“Start wherever you are! Low-hanging fruit really tastes as good as the high stuff."
“The more intellectual humility you have, the less you fuck up.”
“Soul-sucking work is what burns people out, not work itself.”
“You can hack the 10,000-hour rule by getting pretty good at many skills and becoming the best at the intersection of those skills."
“Sure, you live in the wealthiest period of human history and have access to infinite amounts of free education and resources, but you're fucked, and life is just too hard. Here, come to our meditation retreat to alleviate your anxiety. That'll be $1,997."
“If you really cared for yourself, you’d do everything in your power to live a better life.”
“How can living a life well below your potential be considered caring for yourself?”
“If the people around you aren’t thriving, you could be the example that helps them change.”
“The more you have, the more you can give.”
“Statistically, the top income earners pay the vast majority of taxes. No moral argument on that, just hard numbers.
Entrepreneurs and workers both need each other, but entrepreneurs take on 100% of the risk. If they fail, the workers can find another job. But if the entrepreneur fails, they have nothing.
It's because of this risk, backed by putting themselves first and believing they can pull it off, that they get to enjoy the reward. The entire world benefits from 'selfish' entrepreneurs."
“Wealth creates more wealth."
“People have huge emotional blind spots around things like money, success, accomplishment, effort, all of it. Often, these rationalizations curse us forever. We don't go for what we want, so we don't get what we want."
“If you got this far in five years with being a lesser version of what you are now, imagine what you can accomplish in another five years with all the skills you have now. The more successful you become, the easier it is to work hard because you truly know the rewards hard work can reap."
"Mastery is the continually evolving state every truly successful person goes through because there's nothing better to do."
"Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems."
Doing well in school has very little to do with how successful you become. In this new economy, the biggest factor in your success will not be abstract, academic learning but whether you develop the real-life success skills evinced by the people on these pages, and how early you do.
Sample Quotes from the Book:
“I am passionately pro-education. There are few things I care more about than reading and learning constantly. Yet, the lives of the people profiled in this book show conclusively that education is most certainly not the same thing as academic excellence. We’ve conflated them, at great cost to ourselves, our children, our economy, and our culture.”
“You are a reflection of the 20 or 30 people that give you the best advice.”
“The wealthiest people are not the ones who are hoarding the most value – they’re the ones who have the most value flowing in and out of their lives.”
Read the Full Breakdown: The Education of Millionaires, by Michael Ellsberg
This is, pound-for-pound, one of the wisest, most genuinely and authentically helpful books ever written, and it's just full of simple, profound mental models and sage advice to help guide your decisions and move you toward where you want to be in life.
Sample Quotes from the Book:
"When life or a plan feels ultimately unsatisfying, I find it's because I've forgotten to find the intersection of all three: what makes me happy, what's smart, and what's useful to others."
“We do so many things for the attention, to feel important or praised. But what if you had so much attention and so much praise that you couldn’t possibly want any more? What would you do then? What would you stop doing?”
“Empty time has the potential to be filled with great things. Time filled with little things has little potential.”
Read the Full Breakdown: Hell Yeah or No, by Derek Sivers
Every little action you take toward your Future Self enhances your level of commitment and knowing. Every little action toward your Future Self is the evidence of your faith. Every little action toward your Future Self is you more fully being your Future Self now.
Sample Quotes from the Book:
“The first and most fundamental threat to your Future Self is not having hope in your future. Without hope, the present loses meaning. Without hope, you don't have clear goals or a sense of purpose for your life. Without hope, there is no way. Without hope, you decay."
“You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain. If you treat your future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you will give up trying to master it."
“Anything that isn’t taking you toward your Future Self is a lesser goal."
Read the Full Breakdown: Be Your Future Self Now, by Dr. Benjamin Hardy
In this wise and stirring little book, Steven Pressfield, the "patron saint" of artists and creatives everywhere, lights two fires. One, he ignites underneath us to get us moving in the direction of our greatest ambitions. The second, he lights ahead of us to show us the path to get there.
Sample Quotes from the Book:
“When we say, ‘Put your ass where your heart wants to be,’ we mean station your physical body in the spot where your dream-work will and must happen. Want to write? Sit down at the keyboard. Wanna paint? Step up before the easel. Dance? Get your butt into the rehearsal studio. Dumb and obvious as it sounds, tremendous power lies in this simple physical action.”
“You too have a body of work. It exists inside you, on the Plane of Potentiality. Are you a writer? This body of work exists, like books on a bookshelf. Close your eyes. You can see them.
Are you a musician? These works exist like albums, like concerts, like performances. Listen with your inner ear. You can hear them.
These bodies of work exist as alternative futures. They are that which can be…and should be…and want to be. But they are not that which is guaranteed to be.”
“Can we put our ass where our heart wants to be if we’ve got a family, a job, a mortgage? Yes. The Muse does not count hours. She counts commitment. It is possible to be one hundred percent committed ten percent of the time. The goddess understands.”
Read the Full Breakdown: Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be, by Steven Pressfield
No one's ideas are beyond questioning. In this section, I argue the case for the opposition and raise some points you might wish to evaluate for yourself while reading this book.
#1: You Don't Have to Start an Online Business to Be Free
Much of this book goes into detail about how to start and grow your online business, which is fine, and it can certainly help you build a life of financial freedom (and time freedom as well). But you don't need to start an online business in order to start taking control of your own life.
For every content creator today who makes a living playing video games or talking about how to build a successful online business, there are people who make good livings as coders, dentists, administrators, and much more besides.
Until the robots take over (ahem), we're still going to need people doing all these different types of jobs, and so I don't want to give you the impression that I believe that running an online business is the only way to break free.
Of course, I have an online business too, and I'm plenty free! It's my path to freedom, and Awosika's path to freedom, but it's not the only path, and I wanted to make that abundantly clear.
#2: You Should Read More Self-Help Books
Ayodeji Awosika advises against becoming a compulsive reader of self-help books, and yes, his idea absolutely has some merit. I like the underlying idea that he's getting at, but personally, I believe that there's virtually no limit to the number of books you can read and still gain something of value from.
What he's really saying is that instead of becoming a self-help junkie and jumping around from book to book, never actually implementing anything you learn, you should take meaningful action in the, you know, actual world. I completely agree!
That being said, I still read self-help books because that's what I love to read. And even though, yes, I encounter much of the same material over and over again in different forms, it's great to have that kind of spaced repetition, where you're being exposed to all these fantastic ideas over and over again, rather than just reading them once and moving on to the next thing.
Not only that, but even if you get just one new idea from a self-help book that was largely repetitive, and you apply that idea in a way that makes a measurable difference in your life, then reading that book wasn't actually a waste of time.
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
The quality of your questions determines the quality of your life. That's also how you get the absolute most out of any book that you decide to read:
You ask great questions the whole time - as though the book was on trial for its life.
Here in this section are a few questions that can help guide and stimulate your thinking, but try to come up with your own additional questions, especially if you decide to read this book the whole way through...
#1: "How many times in the last year have you been forced to re-evaluate a long-held belief of yours and decided to change your mind?"
#2: "Have you ever been harmed by holding a belief that you thought was true but actually wasn't? In what way?"
#3: "Who do you think has influenced your worldview the most? Have you consciously or unconsciously accepted their frame and adopted their beliefs as your own? How has this affected you?"
#4: "How much personal responsibility do you take for your current circumstances? Do you believe that you have the power to improve them? Or do you believe that if your life is going to change, then someone or something else will probably have to change first?"
#5: "What's one thing that you believe but that 99% of other people don't? Why don't they see it your way? And is there a chance that they're actually correct?"
#6: "Who stands to gain from your life remaining the same? If you don't improve your life, who benefits from that state of affairs?"
#7: "What are some concrete actions you can take that will make it more likely that you will achieve each one of your goals? Would doing even more of those things improve your chances even further?"
#8: "What's one 'negative' event in your life - something that happened to you, or something that someone said - that you can use for positive motivation? How can you use that hurtful event and turn it into fuel that will help you succeed?"
#9: "What would a 3-10% improvement to your quality of life look like? In terms of your finances? Your physique? Your relationships? Other areas that are important to you?"
#10: "Who needs you to be strong for them? Who needs you to become free?"
"Judge a man by his questions, rather than by his answers."
So you've finished reading. What do you do now?
Reading for pleasure is great, and I wholeheartedly support it. However, I am intensely practical when I'm reading for a particular purpose. I want a result. I want to take what I've learned and apply it to my one and only life to make it better!
Because that's really what the Great Books all say. They all say: "You must change your life!" So here, below, are some suggestions for how you can apply the wisdom found in this breakdown to improve your actual life.
Please commit to taking massive action on this immediately! Acting on what you've learned here today will also help you solidify it in your long-term memory. So there's a double benefit! Let's begin...
#1: Choose Someone to Be Strong For
In the Key Ideas above, we covered the fact that self-help is not self-ish. We need to be strong for others, because many people alive today desperately need our help - they need us to be strong for them. So the first Action Step here is to choose someone you are going to show up for, someone who needs you to be strong.
It doesn't have to be someone you know personally, but think of how many people there are in the world that could really use your help! If you still resist the idea of getting rich for yourself (in every sense of that term), then at least do it for them.
Think about this person - or this group of people - who needs your help and keep recalling them to your mind every single day. Multiple times per day! Before every one of your challenging tasks, before starting work on every difficult project, every time you're tempted to give up.
Think about who you've committed to being strong for, and allow the love you feel for that person or those people to sustain you, to keep you going.
Just like in Plato's Symposium, where he says that an army of lovers could never be defeated, when you're doing what you do for someone else, you can survive and persist through much more than you ever could if you were simply trying to succeed by yourself and for yourself.
#2: Curate Your Own Reality
The people and ideas you surround yourself with influence your worldview, for better or for worse, and their beliefs, standards, and opinions will help set the frame of your own existence.
Knowing this to be the case, consciously expand your social circle to include the kinds of winners who want similar things in life that you do. People that encourage you to become better, to rise higher.
Block out everyone who doesn't believe in the vision you've created for how you want to live your one and only life.
No, don't blind yourself to constructive criticism or other valid ways of viewing the world, but also realize that everything you see, hear, or otherwise experience is constantly informing your worldview and shaping your paradigm.
So instead of letting someone else decide what's shaping your mind and your life's trajectory, curate your own reality, and start being extremely selective about who and what you allow to own real estate inside your mind. It all matters.
#3: Line Up a Few 10% Gains
Where you start out in life doesn't have to be where you end up. Sure, there are limits to what one person can achieve in a single, finite human lifetime, but the history of humanity is the story of people selling themselves short.
As Ayodeji Awosika says in this book, realistically, everyone is capable of achieving 10% gains in their quality of life. So in this Action Step, I want you to get very clear about what, exactly, a 10% gain would look like for you. What would happen? How would your life change?
A simple example would be the case of your financial situation. What would a 10% gain look like here, and how could you make it happen?
If you earn $50,000 a year, then a 10% improvement here would be you earning $55,000 by the end of the year, which is "only" an extra $416 per month. Now the question becomes, how could you earn an extra $416 per month?
That's a question that books like this can help you determine for yourself, but what I'd like you to do for now is to start tracking your progress with respect to these 10% gains, or whatever number you come up with. Set a goal to improve your finances or your physique or whatever else by 10% a year, and then develop a plan of action to help you get there.
#4: Stack the Probabilities in Your Favor
Once you've identified some areas in your life where you'd like to make at least 10% improvements over the next year, now's the time to formulate a real plan to help you get there.
As we've discussed elsewhere in this breakdown, you need to stack the probabilities in your favor by identifying which actions are more likely to end up with you being successful.
For example, if your goal is to earn $416 more this month than you did last month, one of the highest-probability actions you can take is to make it easier for people to give you money. I know it sounds stupid to overlook something so obvious, but I'm telling you: you wouldn't believe how many people I see with websites where it's almost impossible to figure out how to pay them!
It's beyond the scope of this breakdown to go into identifying individual money-making opportunities, but with the internet, they're virtually everywhere.
There's so much money flying around online today, and you literally just have to put yourself in the way of it. Get in front of people with credit cards, and your probability of making money increases dramatically.
#5: Transform Negativity Into Fuel
It's possible to use negative motivation to achieve positive results, and I highly recommend that you do, at least in the beginning.
Some negativity is always going to be a part of life, so make sure you're using it for something positive, rather than just letting the negativity use you. Make it serve a purpose in your life, rather than have it infect you with its poison.
What you're going to do here in this Action Step is to take something awful that someone said to you or did to you and use it as motivation to get moving toward something positive.
Only you will know exactly what personal event can serve this purpose for you, but find it, let it fill you with anger and frustration and drive, and then channel that negativity into something positive, such as building your business, repairing your relationships, getting in shape, or something else that's important to you.
Never let negativity go to waste. Take the bricks that other people throw at you, and use them to build the foundation for a better life.
"The path to success is to take massive, determined action.”
Ayodeji is a three-time author, TEDx Speaker, and top writer on Medium.com with close to 100,000 followers. His words reach hundreds of thousands of readers each month and millions per year.
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Until next time…happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
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