Associate with winners, and you’ll learn beliefs and habits that help you win.
I think this points in the right direction, but lacks nuance. Notice the two implied assumptions:
you can recognize the winners (otherwise the advice is not actionable); and
the beliefs and habits are what made them winners (as opposed to e.g. resources or luck).
On one hand, yes it is true that beliefs and habits have a great impact on your life, and you will probably instinctively associate with people having similar beliefs and habits, which makes it difficult to see outside your bubble. Other people do not necessarily tell you about their actual beliefs, and you do not get to see all their habits in action. So it might be tremendously educational to understand how others live in a “different reality”.
I assume that for most people the self-imposed limitations caused by their own beliefs are invisible. But sometimes you get an opportunity to clearly see how someone else is limited by their beliefs.
For example, I have met a few smart people who believe that they are stupid or average. Not as a fake humility, but as a factual statement about themselves. They therefore assume that the “things that smart people do” are beyond their reach… so they do not even try, which makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy. (The cause was either having an asshole parent who was never impressed by anything, or having hobbies that were not stereotypically intellectual.) I have told a few of them to go take a Mensa test, because they were pretty sure they couldn’t make it, but they passed the test successfully. (My heuristics is that if I can talk to you about an interesting topic without getting bored, I am pretty sure your IQ is at least 130. This test has many false negatives, but few false positives.) I do not have an information about whether this update changed their lives somehow.
Another example is how I sometimes achieved seemingly unlikely things by simply asking. Once I asked a member of parliament on Facebook (via private message) to join our local LW meetup. I honestly said it was just five people meeting regularly in a pub, but “the last time we met, we discussed your recent political cause, and I thought it would be interesting if you could provide us a first-hand info”. They said yes. Another time, I happened to notice a sign saying Amnesty International on a door of some building, so I was curious and knocked. The people were friendly and happy about my curiosity, but they were busy working on something, so I offered to help. Skip five years, and I was a coordinator of the local branch. I wasn’t even interested in politics much, I just had a lot of free time back then, and was a useful sidekick; and that turned out to be enough. Once I met a queen. She happened to visit our country, one of my friends was somehow involved, they said “I can bring one extra person to the audience”, everyone else was scared because of some status-regulating instinct, I said “yeah, no problem”. -- These are things that I myself would have a problem believing, until they suddenly happened. I mean, I would believe that this is possible, but not that it can be so easy.
So, I wonder what other things, obvious from someone else’s perspective, I am missing. Sometimes it drives me crazy, the idea of all those easy missed opportunities.
On the other hand, many people who present themselves as “winners” are actually scammers. Like, all the people in multi-level marketing pyramid schemes. Five years later, almost all of them will be out of money and ashamed for their actions. If you follow them and copy their beliefs, so will you. Even outside of organized scams, many people exaggerate their achievements. If you hang out with them and observe them, you will gradually learn that they are not what they pretend to be. That’s certainly educational, but it won’t make you a winner.
Sometimes people achieve success by luck, or by having resources you don’t have. Typically, luck alone is not enough, but it could be a combination of (working hard and doing the right thing) + (having resources and luck). Merely copying their beliefs and actions is not a guarantee of success. Just having a safety net makes a huge difference: it is easy to be courageous when you know that the only consequence of failure is that you have lost some time, but also got some experience, and can immediately try again. It is easy to laugh at risk avoidance, when the “risk” only means that some number on your bank account got a bit smaller but otherwise your life continues completely unchanged.
I think this points in the right direction, but lacks nuance. Notice the two implied assumptions:
you can recognize the winners (otherwise the advice is not actionable); and
the beliefs and habits are what made them winners (as opposed to e.g. resources or luck).
On one hand, yes it is true that beliefs and habits have a great impact on your life, and you will probably instinctively associate with people having similar beliefs and habits, which makes it difficult to see outside your bubble. Other people do not necessarily tell you about their actual beliefs, and you do not get to see all their habits in action. So it might be tremendously educational to understand how others live in a “different reality”.
I assume that for most people the self-imposed limitations caused by their own beliefs are invisible. But sometimes you get an opportunity to clearly see how someone else is limited by their beliefs.
For example, I have met a few smart people who believe that they are stupid or average. Not as a fake humility, but as a factual statement about themselves. They therefore assume that the “things that smart people do” are beyond their reach… so they do not even try, which makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy. (The cause was either having an asshole parent who was never impressed by anything, or having hobbies that were not stereotypically intellectual.) I have told a few of them to go take a Mensa test, because they were pretty sure they couldn’t make it, but they passed the test successfully. (My heuristics is that if I can talk to you about an interesting topic without getting bored, I am pretty sure your IQ is at least 130. This test has many false negatives, but few false positives.) I do not have an information about whether this update changed their lives somehow.
Another example is how I sometimes achieved seemingly unlikely things by simply asking. Once I asked a member of parliament on Facebook (via private message) to join our local LW meetup. I honestly said it was just five people meeting regularly in a pub, but “the last time we met, we discussed your recent political cause, and I thought it would be interesting if you could provide us a first-hand info”. They said yes. Another time, I happened to notice a sign saying Amnesty International on a door of some building, so I was curious and knocked. The people were friendly and happy about my curiosity, but they were busy working on something, so I offered to help. Skip five years, and I was a coordinator of the local branch. I wasn’t even interested in politics much, I just had a lot of free time back then, and was a useful sidekick; and that turned out to be enough. Once I met a queen. She happened to visit our country, one of my friends was somehow involved, they said “I can bring one extra person to the audience”, everyone else was scared because of some status-regulating instinct, I said “yeah, no problem”. -- These are things that I myself would have a problem believing, until they suddenly happened. I mean, I would believe that this is possible, but not that it can be so easy.
So, I wonder what other things, obvious from someone else’s perspective, I am missing. Sometimes it drives me crazy, the idea of all those easy missed opportunities.
On the other hand, many people who present themselves as “winners” are actually scammers. Like, all the people in multi-level marketing pyramid schemes. Five years later, almost all of them will be out of money and ashamed for their actions. If you follow them and copy their beliefs, so will you. Even outside of organized scams, many people exaggerate their achievements. If you hang out with them and observe them, you will gradually learn that they are not what they pretend to be. That’s certainly educational, but it won’t make you a winner.
Sometimes people achieve success by luck, or by having resources you don’t have. Typically, luck alone is not enough, but it could be a combination of (working hard and doing the right thing) + (having resources and luck). Merely copying their beliefs and actions is not a guarantee of success. Just having a safety net makes a huge difference: it is easy to be courageous when you know that the only consequence of failure is that you have lost some time, but also got some experience, and can immediately try again. It is easy to laugh at risk avoidance, when the “risk” only means that some number on your bank account got a bit smaller but otherwise your life continues completely unchanged.