☕ saturday mornings #28
getting what you want, kindness & being authentic
Happy Saturday all,
I hope you’re having a lovely start to your weekend.
We’re nearing the holiday season and, in my opinion, it’s the “most wonderful time of the year”.
Below is your edition of “saturday mornings”, a weekly recap of what I’ve been testing, learning and exploring over the past few days.
Pour yourself a hot beverage and enjoy. So glad you’re here to start your weekend. Let’s dive in.
✍️Quote I’ve been thinking about:
"If you don’t get everything you want, think of the things you don’t get that you don’t want."
― Oscar Wilde
📖Book passage I loved:
Always take the time to acknowledge people - and not just when you have something to gain. If you show interest in them, they will be interested in you. People react to kindness with kindness, to respect with respect.
Relationships - even brief ones - are doorways to opportunity.
— Tribe of Mentors, Tim Ferriss
💡Idea I’m exploring:
Escape competition through authenticity
In today’s world, where people’s successes are displayed for everyone to see, it’s easy to feel inadequate. Like you should be more than you currently are.
And a common solution people resort to is to try to copy someone else.
The logic is there. “This person is more successful than me and I want to be like this person. Therefore if I do everything they’ve done, I’ll get to where they are and be equally successful and happy”.
However, there’s one problem. Well, actually a few.
First and foremost, you’re not that person.
Operating under this state of mind is unpleasant. You feel constant competition with others for scarce resources. Life becomes a race to the top where it’s “me vs them”. You obsess on what other people are doing and if it’s better than what you’re doing. It’s hard on the psyche.
Further, replicating someone’s success is impossible, as luck and chance often play a massive role in the events that unfold. (Malcolm Gladwell wrote an entire book, called the Outliers, about how the successful people we celebrate have plenty of talent and skill but also had multiple low-probability events all occur in perfect order for them to get where they ended up). If you choose to copy someone, odds are things will never turn out exactly as planned, and you’ll be left feeling dejected and unlucky.
Finally, you have to question your definition of success. Sure, someone might excel in one area that’s very impressive but surely that level of one-dimensionality comes with a lot of weak spots you know nothing about. Is what they’re doing really “success”? I’ve seen firsthand people who society would characterize as “successful” on paper, who were quite unhappy.
What’s the solution? Escape competition through authenticity. Through being yourself.
Your main competitive advantage is that you have a unique combination of skills and interests that no one else has. You can offer value to the world that no one else can. And that operates on a touchy feely level but also on pure logic.
I’d argue that you’re limiting your success by trying to copy someone else. You’re trying to compete with them on their strengths when you have a different set of skills. You’re fighting off your back foot when you shouldn’t be fighting at all.
Naval Ravikant believes when you’re competing with people it’s because you’re copying them. You’re trying to do the same thing. But every human is different.
“You can escape competition through authenticity when you realize that no one can compete with you on being you. It’s that simple… And so the more authentic you are to who you are, and what you love to do, the less competition you’re gonna have.”
In a similar vein, Tim Ferriss writes:
“It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor. The choice is between multiplication of results using strengths or incremental improvement fixing weaknesses that will, at best, become mediocre.”
This idea can also be seen in business. Every successful disruptive company doesn’t try to compete head to head with the strengths of the biggest players in a market. They’d lose every time. Start-ups pick one thing they know they can excel in and just focus on being the best in that.
If you can agree that one’s highest potential is realized if they are to follow their own passion and leverage the things they are best at, the argument for copying doesn’t stand up.
This all circles back to the idea of self acceptance. Accepting your authentic self and making the most out of the cards you are dealt. And if Naval and Tim are right, you’ll end up much more successful this way.
The best communication of this idea I’ve come across is in Brené Brown’s writing on owning your story. In her book “The Gifts of Imperfection” she writes “owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it.”
And for a lot of people, that’s a challenge. Owning your story and loving the life you’ve been given instead of trying to be something else.
That’s all for this week’s edition of “saturday mornings”.
If you have any feedback or thoughts, I’d love to hear from you.
Have a restful weekend.
Much love to you and yours,
Thomas