You can't be whatever you want in life... Here's why
Tai Lopez Aug 01, 2023
I. Introduction

Ever wondered what it takes to be great? How many of us aspire to reach the pinnacle of success, to etch our names on the pillars of history?

This is probably the most problematic question that humans ask themselves. What does it take to be great?

Striving to be great isn’t as good of a goal as it sounds. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Denial of Death”, Ernest becker suggests that “the root of humanly caused evil is not man's animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image. Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst.”

So, striving for greatness might be the opposite of what the world needs, and the opposite of what will actually make you feel happy and fulfilled.

II. The Problematic Nature of Striving for Greatness

Do you need to be great to be fulfilled? Do you need to be great to be happy? Is being great the end all be all?

Wanting to grow is healthy, having ambition is healthy, but getting caught in the never ending struggle to rise above the rest, to leave a “legacy” can push you into the world of mental instability.

Not only that, but if you look at people considered “great” throughout history, their lives ended tragically.

People in history books like Alexander the Great, Julius Cesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte tried to be great throughout their lives, but they didn’t die peacefully.

I wonder if you could say that they were actually happy.

People also forget to think about what qualities the “greats” had, and how much of them was genetics.

Success gurus will try to have you believe that anyone can be anything they want to be, but the truth is that our genes play an enormous role in our lives.

That’s not a popular message, but it’s the truth, and the faster you can accept the truth, the faster you can actually focus and strive for things that will matter in your life.

Remember what my mentor Joel Salatin said: “there’s nothing worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you got good at the wrong thing.”

III. What Should We Strive For?
Should we keep on aiming for greatness or shift our goals?

Maybe we should strive for balance. We should try to live a life that brings us joy, satisfaction, and peace.

Or even better, we should strive to be of service to others, to contribute to humanity’s advancement as a whole.

Trying to be great is narcissistic because we’re thinking about ourselves, and how good are compared to others.

But, if you actually try to be useful to other people, if you try to use your talents and skills to make people’s lives better, you will probably lead a more fulfilled life.

Remember what Peter Drucker says, though: “A person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weakness, let alone on something one cannot do at all.”

Not everyone can become anything they want to be… and that’s a good thing, because it limits your choices and helps preven analysis paralysis, or the paradox of choice.

When humans can choose from too many things, they tend to not choose any of them, because they can’t decide what they want.

So, with your talents, with your strengths, strive to be of service to others.

IV. Strive for Goodness and Cooperation

It's time to balance personal growth with the greater good. Strive not just for individual success, but for the betterment of your tribe.

As the saying goes “let every man sweep their front proch and the world will be clean”.

Choose cooperation over competition. Sure, some competition is healthy, but don’t you think society would be a little better if people cooperated with each other?

Transcript
So what does it take to be great? Eight steps to greatness. I'm walking in Sweden here. What's the question you just asked me? What it takes to be great? All right, I'm going to give you an answer you probably never heard before, especially on motivational YouTube videos. The question is, why is that an important question?

In fact, isn't that maybe the most problematic question of all time? What it takes to be great? Why do we have to be great? Do you ask if your dog or your cat needs to be great? There's a Pulitzer Prize winning book called The Denial of Death from the 1970s. It's probably the deepest book you'll ever read.

And the basic point by the psychiatrist, psychologist, was the root of all evil is the striving. for individuals to be great. Sigmund Freud said it other way. Do you ask about your pets? What the purpose of their life is? Why do we have to have one? Humans are such a narcissistic species that we can't understand why we're not happy.

Why does there have to be eight steps to greatness? In fact, there are eight steps to greatness. I can go through them, but they may be the eight steps that make you less happy. The striving may create the opposite. Like my mentor said, be careful what you ask for, because the worst thing in life is to get what you wanted and realize it's the wrong thing.

Imagine striving your whole life, and then you grow old and realize, I got good at the wrong thing. I saw one of the basketball players, Jokic, he won the NBA finals, and I said, how does it feel? And he was like, I don't know, like a normal day, maybe slightly better. He was basically saying, Why is it important, so important that I won, that I'm the greatest basketball player of this year?

Now you might say this is nihilistic, and that we should strive for greatness. How about strive for balance? How about strive for other things? And the denial of death from the famous scientist basically broke down all the people who strive for greatness. People like Adolf Hitler. Now you might say, oh no, Adolf Hitler was just a mentally ill person.

Well obviously. But what would, in his own mind, he thought he was doing what was great for the world and bringing in the new empire. Now you might say, Ty, that's such an extreme example. The people that I follow and admire, their sense of greatness is so noble. Is it? Can you look behind the curtain? Are you able to think deeper than most people?

Is the innate striving for greatness also the opposite of the world needs? How about cooperation? Obviously, there will be difference in talent. The universe has not read the Declaration of Independence or the French Rights of Men. So there will be people born genetically with greater attributes. But at the same time, should they strive to be great or should they strive to be servants of those people who have less?

Isn't that a more noble goal? Where's that question? Eight steps to serve humanity. How about that? And I've gone through many phases, I'm not saying that I've been the noble example of this, maybe far from it at times, but my one compass and my kind of message was that good information from great people, and that's why I've talked about books for so many years, this is something important, the spreading of good ideas, because one bad idea, and I think What we're seeing in the modern self help movement is in many ways rooted in its own demise and destruction of humanity.

The thought that how do I become great in and of itself Begs the question why and if you got that would it be what you wanted and would be good for anybody else? including your bloodline You know, what is great? Anyway, who is great? Can you name one person from? The 900s. Talk about a fleeting goal to be great.

You know, strive for greatness. Like, move on. You know, I've been through that stage. And boy, I was surprised. I should have listened to Joel Salatin, my mentor. Be careful what you want. I've achieved different things. Not everything. Some people have achieved more. Some people have achieved less. But on certain things I've achieved maybe a little more than average.

And I look back and go, Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. Now, that's not to say that the expression and use of your talent for the greater good of your tribe, forget the world, but the greater good of your tribe. Doesn't have inherent positive attributes. You should do that. It's natural. You'll do it anyway.

But the thought of striving for greatness is oftentimes striving for mental illness. Most of what we call great is literally the entertaining, because social media is very entertaining, and those videos that go viral in self help or other areas are often just fascinating and interesting. Uh, mentally unstable takes on things.

You know why you'll never have a good president in the United States? Because people can run for the, uh, run for president. Do you think that attracts a high quality person? Do you really think so? Or does it attract a mentally unstable person? Who's been that president in the United States that's been this amazing person?

Can you name one? Because if you can, if you think you can, you are A. not a student of history, B. you don't know how to look behind the curtain. All those people you admire, they're the ones... Using CIA ops to set up the dictator that they then had to go back to war against. It's probably happening again right now as we speak.

There's no, there's no virtuous person who strived to be the most powerful person on earth. You think so? I'll tell you what the Amish do, which actually works, is to be a bishop in the Amish Christian church. They throw, uh, dice or straws. Meaning, the most ambitious person doesn't win. Whereas in the U. S.

or other countries where we use a highly ambitious model of campaigning, you're getting people who are good at lying, good at deceiving, who almost always have tremendous senses of narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, dark triad traits. You know? So, the Amish just go, the community nominates people that are pillars of the community, that are standout.

Then... They are, dice are thrown or straws are drawn, a random selection. into an unpaid position. Do you think that attracts people who are quote unquote great? Well, it does inadvertently. It attracts people who are actually great, not just people who think they're great or want to be great. You can't have the current, you know, police officers.

People are like, there's a lot of police brutality in the U. S. What kind of person do you think, on average, applies to be a police person? Super gentle person? You think so? So, the process of allowing people to apply for things inherently creates what's called a self selected group of the wrong people.

You'd be better off to just have a random selection. People have to be policemen. They do this in some countries with the military. Everybody has to go. So you get a wider swath of personality types, not just people who are a gung ho to go shoot people. And by the way, I have no... Nothing against police. I think you should have police.

I think you should have a military. I'm not a pacifist like that. But I also know there's better ways to select. As Groucho Marx said, I didn't want to have, I didn't want to join any country club that would have me as a member. You know what he was saying? This process of applying, I mean that was a joke version, but, you know.

This process of applying for things is inherently problematic. Do you think the most mentally stable people? Become social media influencers, yet they have a voice to speak to billions of people. Inherently, you have a problem. And there will be good from social media influencers, don't get me wrong. But, I mean, I've been one of them.

But as I look across the broad industry, you'll have inherent problems.
The people who get ahead, in general, will be the people who are more extreme. And so you have the rise of extremism here in Sweden, in the United States, you know. Man, it's warm today. In Sweden, I'm getting my vitamin D. If you're in my 150 body program, you need 150 minutes of sun that, that's actually, you gotta do it at the right time of the day so that the vitamin D is actually there when the sun's too low in the sky.

But here in Sweden, in June, the sun, uh, basically doesn't set. But anyway, back to what I was saying. So what are the actual eight tips to greatness? I can give them to you, but I don't know if people should have them. You know, one is high levels of energy. I'm giving you actual scientific ones. I've talked about this with some of the great scientists on this planet, and when I say great, these are often quiet introverted people like Dr.

David Buss. People who became great in silence. He said, When I asked him, he's been mentoring me for 10 years. One of the great luck events of my life, you know, was running into him. He wrote the textbook at Harvard. He's probably the most esteemed evolutionary psychologist alive. And he says, you know, in his analysis, the number one thing that is a common attribute among people who achieve greatness is, uh, high levels of energy.

Tremendous levels of energy. Above average levels of energy. Okay, you see that whoever you consider great, even when we go back to presidents, which is questionable how great they were, but great leaders, quote unquote, have extremely high levels of energy. So if you're a person that struggles with energy, commit, like, uh, like, it's sanity level.

Cleaning up, diet, health, and sleep. You know, if you, if you're ignoring what I said about maybe greatness not being such an important goal, well, number one is high, they call it hypomania, which sounds worse than it is, but hypomania is extreme levels. of energy. Not bipolar, where people have manic episodes up and down.

But consistently high. So that's, that's number one. Number two that's actually associated with greatness is genes. Genes. And people hate this message. You know why people hate this message? Because it doesn't appeal to a narcissist. Because the message that appeals to a narcissist is anybody can be anything that they want.

Never in history has anybody believed this, except recently. Hey, my grandma's generation, you think anybody can be everything? I mean, anything they want and put their mind to? Why would you want that? That's called the paradox of choice. I don't, if I knew I could be the best at anything I put my mind to, you will literally lose your mind.

Great book, another mentor of mine, Barry Schwartz, from Wharton. Paradox of choice. It's better to have constrained choices. They actually call, you know what they call this? Anybody know? Of course I'm talking to myself. Do you know? Bounded rationality. You want bounded. Bounds around your rationality. You don't want to be great at everything.

So people who actually accomplish great things, do what Peter Drucker says. Most people think they know what they are good at. Most people are wrong. Even then, more people think they know what they're bad at. Even then, more people are wrong than right. Yet you can only build off strength. And it's, math, if you understand math, and what's called the CVS formula in evolution, Criteria Variance Selection, Everybody can't be equally good.

That's the next thing. Everybody can be the same height. Everybody can jump as high. Everybody can be as good as chess. No, you're born with inherent differences. So, number two is genes. Now, I got a positive message for you that's somewhat optimistic. You may say, I don't mean that you have to have the greatest genes.

I mean, look to your 10, 000 generations before you. What did your line, families and humans, go in bloodlines, okay? Genghis Khan had a bloodline. They say, you know, whatever, 1% of Asia. He's their great grandfather. That's a line in. I have a big organic farm. You, you have breeds according to lines or cultivars if they're plants, right?

And so you need to understand your genetic line for good or bad. Find out what your mom and dad were like, and your grandma and your great grandparents. Study your ancestors so you get clues to what you inherently will be strong at. Johann Sebastian Bach, the greatest, probably considered the greatest musician of all time.

He had, what, 21 kids? And some of them became some of the great, you know, the greatest, uh, musicians of all time. No coincidence. Sofegio, that famous, I don't know if I pronounced it right, I play that on the piano, that's his son. You know, the most heritable things on earth, you know, eye color, skin tone, height, but also other things.

IQ is extremely heritable. So is mental illness, by the way. So understand, I guarantee every human, myself included, you have a line of mental illness that people in your family specifically have struggled with. Okay, understand that. As the, I love that movie, Gangs of New York. Ooh, my hat's about to blow off.

Gangs of New York, where Liam Neeson says this one line to his son, who's being, you know, grows up to be Leonardo DiCaprio's character. He says, Don't look away. When there's blood on the knife, he said, don't look away. And that's some advice, when you look at your jeans, don't look away. Why look away?

Understand, admit, Oh, I had a grandpa who was an alcoholic, my dad was an alcoholic. My dad probably had NPD, Narcissistic Personality Disorder. My grandfather was a very brilliant guy on the other side, my mom's side, but he was bipolar, for sure. He had manic episodes lasting 10 to 12 years. Okay? He was kind of a child prodigy, but at the same time he had tremendous other issues.

So, I have to remember that and not look away. Can't just look to the good and say, Oh, I have all these. You got the bad with the good. So, step number three to achieve greatness, the supposed goal, is allies, form coalitions. So, humans, if you talk to a game theorist, these are mathematicians, they basically break In a stable system, they call them ESS, evolutionary stable systems, like a society, I don't know, the United States or something.

People in general break down into something they call hawks or doves, okay? It's a classic mathematical game theory. Hawks are defectors, okay, and doves are cooperators. So, humans, this is one way to classify humans. Defectors will be the more exploitative people in your life. Maybe somebody you dated who took more than they gave.

Family member, friend. Those tend to be more defectors. Those are higher on these dark triad traits, dark dyad traits, hexico, 25, you know, sub facets of personality. And so, what happens with greatness, one of the seven sub sets of narcissism, if you look at the NPI test, the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, there's seven sub facets to narcissism.

So it goes Authority, Superiority, Exploitativeness, Exhibitionism, Uh, Vanity, which is what most people think, and then Self Sufficiency. Um, did I miss one? Authority, Superiority, Exhibitionism, Exploitativeness, Uh, Vanity, Self Sufficiency. I don't know, maybe I... Anyway, it's inconsequential. I'll remember what the seventh one...

But, when you encounter... If you're an exploitative person, a person who gives more than they take, um, you're basically experiencing, you know, non cooperation. So great people tend to not be so self sufficient. In fact, if you say, I'm going to build this on my own, you're actually probably suffering from that seventh sub facet of narcissism, which is self sufficiency.

If you look at great people, in general, for example, they had business partners. Steve Jobs had Wozniak. People achieved quote unquote greatness. Bill Gates had Paul Allen and Steve Ballmer. It was a trio of people. Warren Buffett had Charlie Munger. So, a consistent threat. Of course there are people, by the way, who didn't have allies.

But going back to the conversation about Adolf Hitler, you know, you could pretty much mathematically be an alien, come down and know Hitler was gonna lose. If you look at a Wikipedia for the Axis and the Allies, You had United States, England, France, I mean it was Russia at the end, uh, every basic country from Canada, New Zealand, Australia, against the axis, which was Adolf Hitler's Germany, you know.

I think Bulgaria, of course he annexed the Czech Republic and some of these places, but it was, and he had Japan. Norm Macdonald, the comedian, has one of those funny little bits, he's like politically incorrect. He's like, you know, he's like Hitler decided to wage war against the world! And he almost 1880s.

Pre Germany had all these regions. One of them was Prussia, which is kind of the Berlin area, and they were extremely well trained soldiers. So, self sufficiency, I mean, Adolf Hitler's Third Reich Nazis almost won, okay? It took the intervention of the U. S. and nuclear bombs at the end to really stop the Axis powers of Japan and Germany.

And the ones who won were not self sufficient narcissists. They were cooperators. The US, I mean, Stalin, the great, what was it, the Yalta, uh, meeting where you had Stalin meeting with Roosevelt, meeting with, uh, Churchill. They cooperated more. And so to be great, you're going to have to realize greatness comes in groups.

Greatness comes in trios. Greatness comes, you know, from tribes are great. And so. Don't get too far down the I can do it on my own. And if you subconsciously think you are somebody who's super much, you know, really a cooperator, do you have a business partner in any of your businesses? You know, that's a good way to think about it.

It's not what you say, it's what you do. Such a pretty part of Sweden. Sweden is a very cooperative country, by the way. They have a saying called Janteloven. Janteloven, lagom, means don't try to be greater than you are. And magically... You can say, for different reasons, Sweden has five times the billionaires per capita as the United States.

Wow! So you can be great? Now, you might break down Sweden in other ways historically, but I'm just saying, at the end of the day, Sweden is doing pretty well when it comes to wealth. Maybe they cooperated too much, maybe not. But it's not true that highly individualistic societies, like the U. S., always win.

It may be the largest GDP, but not GDP per capita. You know, places like Singapore, places like Scandinavia, Denmark, extreme wealth per capita. So cooperate, that's number three. Number four, what creates greatness is starting as early as you can. Don't just plan forever, start. So if you're watching this and you're 95, well, this is the youngest you're ever going to be.

If you're 12, start, start. Warren Buffett always says. I don't know what science he bases this on, but he's a pretty sharp dude who doesn't speak out of his ass much. And Warren Buffett said, the greatest predictor of wealth, so if we're talking about financial greatness, the greatest predictor of wealth is what?

The age at which you start. He started, he was filing taxes around age 9. That's the big advantage. That's why the school system's not inherently horrible. It just doesn't understand the science. Let people start stuff. You know, you think you want to be in the medical profession. Okay. At age eight, let kids start dissecting for all dead frogs or something.

Well, you know, I got to stick kids in a damn, you know, rote memory environment where it's like, ah, it's memorized everything, especially not now in the world of Google. Let them get interactive. So get interactive. Start. You want to start a business? You know, I launched this course recently. I'll do a little shameless plug.

Called 28 Income Streams. Go to 28income. com. Okay? And I just list out, it's a super low price course. There's a free version of it too. Like the forum, you can interact with the community. But it's, it's, I don't know what it's priced at, but it's crazy low. Okay? So if you want to go there, go to 28income. com slash podcast.

I'll put a special link there and 28 income is like here's 28 ways You can just start and people go which one of them is the best. I'm like there is no best Just start try one if it doesn't fail if it if it fails try try again The richest man and the greatest richest man if you go by finances in the 1800s was Thomas Edison He say, you know, he started GE Which was the only company to last a hundred years on the Dow Jones Industrial.

Just fell off recently. A tree of greatness that way. Some people say he stole from Tesla. Maybe he did. But, to come up with the lightbulb, which was the source of his original wealth, it was almost exactly his 1000th attempt at the filament. So just start, it takes many experiments, and many, you're not a, a mistake is an experiment run for too long.

Quick experiments that fail are actually successes, because they've created more bounded rationality. So now you have the answer quicker. You see what I'm saying? So, just get out the age at which you start. Today's the youngest day of your life, ladies and gentlemen. Some scientists who believe in parallel universes and all this, they think your memory might be implanted.

Meaning, this is the only time you've ever been around. All the things you think of your past were implanted by some grand video game we call Life, Humanity, God, Universe. So right now, we don't know where we are in the video game? Just start, man. What's the big deal? Start. Start and fail. Now, the next thing associated with greatness.

Actual science of greatness. Oh, we might be reaching a dead end. There's Tivoli over there. Jourgarden. We got to go back, right? Let's go back around this way. There we go back. The, the, the next thing, um, highly attributable to success, um, and let me think how to explain this. Let's try to go through here.
This looks cool. Yeah, thinking in frameworks. So, frameworks are kind of like sayings. You know, like a rolling stone gathers no moss. Okay, that means keep moving, you know. Keep moving. So, if you don't find yourself quoting other people a lot, You're not thinking in frameworks. And a lot of people, it's funny.

One of the first sets of hate I started to get was, Oh, this guy just quotes other people. That was a great compliment. Every person I've seen that's actually a great thinker quotes other people because they realize they're not self sufficient narcissists that no one person can have the worldview that applies to all scenarios, right?

So. By quoting other people and their frameworks of thought, you basically skip 20 years of mistakes. Every good thing I've ever accomplished, quote unquote great, was by applying frameworks both mine and other people's. So, do you have sayings? At one point, I memorized, I don't know, I had this when I was 16, I started writing down quotes.

Book of Proverbs in the Bible because I grew up Christian, you know, some of my upbringing and I would write down Will Durant quotes You know when I was 16, I still have these little Cards, I write them on index cards and filled up my whole bedroom I was like a 15, 16 year old. People come in and be like, yo, what the hell's in your, why do you have these note cards?

And all the great things I've ever done, great, have come from following those frameworks and all the mistakes I've had was when I Went off and skipped the frameworks. People like the book, The Art of War. Why? There's frameworks in there. Sun Tzu said something like, not exact quote, but close. He said, If you know yourself but not your enemy, for every time you win, you will lose one.

If you don't know yourself and don't know your enemy, you will almost always lose. But if you know both yourself and your enemy, you will win more, you will win. I forget what he said. So I tell people, they're like, I want to get into E-com. I have an AI eCom program. I'm like, are you on Fashion Nova? Do you know both th own strengths and the great competitors have you broken down?

On, on? I'll put a link, uh, Ty lopez.com/ 67 eComm podcast. I just broke down. Fashion Nova. If you don't, if you know yourself, but not your competitors, you'll lose more times than you win. Right? So, one of the things that people do, by having these great frameworks, that was an example of one, study your competitors, don't be afraid of your competitors, like Jeff Bezos said, he never feared his competitors, but he studied them.

Or as Picasso said, good artists copy, great artists steal, but
he stole styles and things like this, in a healthy way. That's a framework that Picasso had. So memorize many, many frameworks. I think I'm on number five now. Was that four or five? I got it. I'm doing eight.

I think it was or only seven. My bad. Um, the next thing is, Uh, and this is pretty interesting. There's a good book called The Self Made Billionaire Effect. The Self Made Billionaire Effect. And the Self Made Billionaire Effect It's kind of two CPAs broke down the actual science of what make people financially great.

Okay, there's different levels of greatness. Picasso was a great painter, 60, 000 pieces of art. You know, LeBron James, a great basketball player. Um, and when you study billionaires, who are kind of like the sports athletes of money, they found, um, So, there's two things they found. One is a mental one, so this is number five.

Greatness comes from the ability to hold highly opposite opinions in your brain without melting down. So I'll give you an example. People can't be great when they're extreme. Why? Because you miss out on two sides of the truth. In America, you have Republicans and Democrats. In general. I'm not talking about the most kooky Republicans or the crazy Democrats.

I'm talking about The mainstream Republicans and Democrats who are good people, not suffering from intense mental illness. Cause there's good people on both sides. Don't be an idiot and think zero smart people are Democrats. Like give me a fucking break or do nobody smart as a Republican. In fact, it's very genetic.

Okay, religiosity and political affiliation. They're now finding actual gene sequence. So oftentimes, you think you're such a free thinker because you're Republican or Democrat, but it's because you inherited a set of genes, you know, they call it right wing extremism, or, I forget the, I mean, extreme would be left.

But anyway, what's my point about that? Billionaires, in the self made billionaire effect, what they found was, they could hold opposing ideas. So, can you hold in your brain the fact that Republicans may be right on some things and Democrats correct on others? Is it not true that in general, capitalism moves, uh, capital or allocates capital in a more efficient way than top down governmental control?

Now, on the flip side of that, so if you're a Democrat, let that sink in. For the love of God, I mean, this has been proven time without end. Now, if you're on the flip side, and you're a hardcore Republican, and you say, you know, No, don't help other people, no regulations, then you've got a problem because Scandinavia here.

I was just in Copenhagen. Consistently voted the happiest people in the world, the best quality of life. I don't know one Danish friend that wants to move to America. They like to go visit because it's entertaining, kind of the kookiness. But, they're doing great. They're doing great. And they have some social, more social help than the United States.

You could say they're more democratic. Yet, they're also capitalistic there. So the best countries in the world actually look at both sides of the truth, right wing, left wing, blend them into this new, you know, better way. I'm not saying Scandinavia is perfect either, okay, but it depends on what metrics, but if you look at the science, there's something happening here.

There's something happening here. The most capitalistic country is probably China. And you might say, no, no, no, no, they're communists. But economically, in terms of laissez faire, not allowing, not caring about regulation, pouring toxic stuff into the rivers, they're very capitalistic. America's not even that capitalistic.

It tried to blend the middle way. It's not a democracy, it's a republic. Now, what I'm saying though, that's not the point of that book. Billionaires are able to hold two thoughts in their head. For example, be conservative and be aggressive in your business growth. Isn't that a weird? Most people can't handle that.

They're like, uh, should I be aggressive or should I like be really conservative? Billionaires are able to hold those two opposing ideas and there was a great thinker in the 1800s. And he talked about this concept of, you know, thesis, antithesis, equals synthesis. Meaning the great ideas are the synthesizing of two opposite ones.

You want to know what the greatest country's, uh, governmental structure will be? Or the greatest business model for a business owner? Will be the s the Synthesis, antithesis, I mean thesis, antithesis, and then synthesizing it.

And then, and then synthesizing it into two, into a new idea. So for example, you should be both conservative and aggressive with your business. You know, I remember Bill Gates is reading when he first started. First thing he did was he wanted to get a cash reserve for Microsoft. So no matter what happened, he'd be okay.

So he built this huge cash reserve. That was him being conservative. Yet, the dude was hyper aggressive. So if you love Bill Gates or not, you can't argue he achieved financial, mathematical greatness. Which, as I said at the beginning, may not even be a noble goal. But, you know, that's for, that was what I talked about at the beginning.

So, ability to hold opposite ideas. Next, I think that was five or six. So the next one, the same book. Found. And this goes back to genetics. The number one most correlated fact with billionaires, probably causative, was they grew up in upper class or wealthy families. So you're getting two benefits. You're getting the genetics of people who are probably more mathematical, higher in conscientiousness, maybe higher in, you know, other positively, uh, positive effect type personality traits.

But they also, of course, get daddy's money. And that helps, too. The, so that's kind of, people get disconcerted with that because they're like, well, that's not fair. Well, welcome to the world, ladies and gentlemen. If you think shit's good, how could it be? I mean, what do you expect? Everybody grows up in the same socioeconomic?

I didn't, I grew up with my dad in prison. The less time I whine about it, the quicker I could focus on getting to where I wanted to go. So, that, but what this book found that's more interesting is that sales was Unattributed people attribute, uh, achieve financial greatness. So something like 60 or 70% of billionaires started in what's called direct sales.

So that means not marketing, but like door to door. Mark Cuban told me when he was at my house the first time, he's like, Ty, I sold, you know, plastic black garbage bags door to door when I was a teenager. And you see that Elon Musk did sales. Bill Gates was doing, you know, phone sales, selling the system.

Steve Jobs sold investors on it. So. Some level of verbal fluidity is what I would say is number six or seven, wherever we are on the eight steps to greatness, fluidity of speech. And how do you get there? Well, let's say you're an introvert. Don't be hiding behind this introvert, extrovert bullshit is destroying this world's potential.

I mean, first off, read the actual textbook. I've read it. Carl Jung is the one who popularized the concept of introvert or extrovert. He did not go into exactly what people now say although an introvert needs to recharge their batteries when they're out and so it's everybody repeating the same cliche shallow understanding of introvert extrovert.

That's not how the founder of that concept He classified it as introverts and extroverts respond to stimulus differently. Introverts look, create from within. Extroverts gather, use sensory perceptions to form things. Okay, so a lot of what we call introvert. First extrovert, obviously there is something, the actual scientific kind of term, they break down in the hexico score, you break down extroversion, introversion, into like four subtypes in the hexico score, um, you break down this extroversion into things like liveliness, things like that.

So don't oversimplify and say, well Ty, I'm not going to be able to be good at public speaking or sales because I'm an introvert. Get over it and move on. That's like some people genetically gain weight and don't have as good a body as others, well you go to the gym more. That's your antidote. Some people are more prone to diabetes than others.

Some people are born with great genes on that facet of life. They can eat candy all the time. When I moved to North Carolina, we lived next to Mrs. Creech. This old lady in Clayton, North Carolina, she was like 102 years old. I remember going, my dad would stop there after church. She was close to 100. And she's like, I hate vegetables.

I eat candy and drink alcohol. But she had some little milk goats. She would give us goat milk. She had great genes. So, if you are a person that says, Ty, well this book says mental fluidity, verbosity, or verbal skills, acumen, they would say, you know, is correlated with greatness. But I am super shy. Well, what about Demosthenes?

The ancient Greek speaker who was considered the greatest public speaker of all time, but he had a stuttering problem. Growing up. So you know what he did? He went down to the river, they say, the ocean, put stones in his mouth to make it even harder to speak, force him to enunciate, and he practiced, you know, 10, 000 times or 20, 000 times.

So don't say, well I don't have that, you know, genetically, so I can't achieve it. Yes, you may not be as great as somebody who was born with natural sales skills and ability to speak. Um. Who practices as much as you. But you can be better than the ones that don't practice. And you don't need to be the best in the world.

That goes back to the opening of this video. Stop striving to be the best. You know, this is fucking stupid. It's like John Wooden said. You know, he told his people. You go out, you play the best of your ability, you know you practice the best you could, and if you lose or win, it's irrelevant, because sometimes the other team's just better.

And it's okay. You live to fight another day. So, when it comes to verbal skills, public speaking, practice! If you're not naturally good at it. And if you are good at it, then listen to Peter Drucker and triple down on your natural skills. It is correlated with greatness. Great people could communicate messages, oftentimes either through public speaking or writing, in general, both.

In general, both. If you think of the greats. That doesn't mean they were all highly charismatic, but they could pass on great messages. You have to be able to be a messenger to achieve some level of greatness. Alright, we're almost done here. You hungry? I'm hungry. They got this little meatball place here.

It's called schutbolare, schutbolare, potatissmush, smash, they call smash potatoes in Sweden, not mash, smush. Um, okay, so back to, I think I'm just going to call it quits here after this one because I need my food. Um, So, that's a practical one. Public speaking is good. I was giving you some philosophical ones and some practical ones.

High energy levels I gave you, that's a practical one. You can improve your energy through lifestyle, okay? Now, the last one, and maybe the most important, is the inability to not always be doing it to become great. I see a lot of entrepreneurs and it's like, what's your motivation? Like, I want to win. Man, life's not a game like that, like what the fuck.

I know people is like, oh, life's a game, like Really? Is your dog's life a game? Sometimes to reduce narcissism, put it to your, your favorite pet. Is your dog life a game? Like what? We're organisms. Richard Dawkins, the first person I ever did a podcast, back in 2013. Somehow I got him on my first episode. He, uh, at the time was voted highest IQ human on earth.

If you re read, highly recommend. Go to tilopis. com slash books. Get my book list. I put The Selfish Gene on there. We're carriers of genes. Okay, that's what we are. Okay, so, you don't have to look at life as a game. I think that's an oversimplification. Yeah, there's attributes of a game. The way I like to think about it, is just, Ty, I'm moving through time.

I will be forgotten, by many. But maybe I pass on my bloodline to my friends that are close as a brother, like bloodline, to my family, both that I was born with and to kids, and to those people that become allies. And that's okay. And you can be great that way. Not everybody had this hyper competitiveness.

Although I will say, you need to have decent levels of competitiveness. But don't be extreme. The people that I consider great are not the people on the Forbes list. I've met many of them. I'm in business with some of them. I consider them great out of domain specific. I don't know any of them that I would consider the balanced concept of greatness.

To me, the greats were the balanced people. Often they weren't remembered through history. Because we are entertained by mental illness. So we don't remember the people who were truly... There was farmers, your great grandparents. Raising 10 kids, making it through life, having a, you know, my favorite scene, you should watch this movie, that they did a, it's from the book, considered the greatest novel of all time, which is War and Peace, written, you know, in the 1870s, I think, it's the story of how families were affected by Napoleon, by the way, who wanted to be great, Napoleon Bonaparte, and really achieved it, richest man in the world, maybe he was a trillionaire, okay, in today's dollars, he controlled the western world, and, you know.

I don't know. In this movie, uh, they made a series on Amazon. It's called just, uh, War and Peace. You should watch it. There's this scene. For all the wealth and they have Napoleon in it and greatness and people. There's just this scene where there's a family and they're in this like log house in a Russian winter.

And all, it's all the generations together, the grandparents, great grandparents, all the way down the kids. And they're all having a big meal, this family, this tribe, there's a few friends and acquaintances there. And they're all dancing around and everybody's happy. Sometimes when I have hard times in my life, I literally have rewatched that episode and I remember like, that's greatness right there.

They did it. Happiness in their tribe. They might, that family won't be remembered because they didn't do some extreme shit like Napoleon which probably, or Adolf Hitler or American great presidents that often times did more bad than good. A. K. A. Afghanistan. We installed Osama Bin Laden trying to achieve greatness.

Okay? And then of course we know the negative repercussions of that. My point is my eighth point Is that redefine what greatness is that the family, happy family, all together, your kids, your grandkids, your best friends, your allies, your business partners, all there on Thanksgiving or Christmas, and you're all together and you're in harmony and there's no major dysfunction and people are having fun and the kids are having fun.

Joel Salatin used to say, I'll know I win in life tie when my grandkids. Or sitting at my feet competing for grandpa's attention. Well, that's, that's my first mentor. What a great definition of winning. It wasn't like, Oh, I'm on the Forbes list and I've destroyed all my competition and I've changed the world.

It's just like, I've won. In my tribe. Winning the tribe. Humans, Dunbar's number. The great sociologist. Robin Dunbar. Humans developed in groups of 150. All this anxiety we feel in the world is often because we have too lofty of goals. Redefine. What success and greatness is. That's great. Watch that scene.

Happy family, happy friends. Are you friends with your childhood friends still? Well, how are you great? Aren't you that loyal friend? That's your friend for life, unless they screw you over. Did you reach out to all your cousins? Are they in your life? You're talking to them. You know, I have to remind myself this.

I'm busy. I invited my cousin Leah. Copenhagen. I was like, hey, I paid for it. You know, she doesn't have much money. To me, that was a great moment. Be around my cousin. I've known her since I was a little kid, not my closest cousin, but to spend my life and energy on things like that. Why is that not great?

Why does everything have to be, oh, create the new Electroarch, man on the moon. Read the denial of death. Causes maybe all of the evil in the world. Comes from this over ambitious definition of greatness. Redefine it. Redefine it. Now. Subscribe to the channel if you like my rants like these people often.

You don't have to agree with anything. In fact, I'd like to ask you, what do you disagree with strongly and what do you strongly agree with? It's good to be able to have both ideas and we can have a debate down in the comments. I'll be checking. Go to TaiLopez. com Um, I launched some new really important systems.

One on dating called the 13th Thesis. My hypothesis for a man to find long term partners when you're successful. So if you plan to be successful Quote unquote, financially, you're gonna have to have, follow different rules for dating. So 13 thesis is, uh, 13 thesis.com, one three t h thesis.com, and I launched one 50 Body.

In fact, I'm doing my one 50 body walk. Try to get 15,000 steps more than 10,000, shoot for 15, and then try to get 150 minutes a week of vitamin D. I just got 45 minutes. That's about perfect. So click the link below, uh, and comment. on what you strongly agree, strongly disagree. Let's start a uh, intellectual debate below.
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