Gurus online say “everyone can make it” are trying to sell you a dream.
If everyone can make it, then everyone’s a customer.
This is just mathematically false and idiotic.
If you read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, the main point isn’t the famed 10,000 hour rule: anyone can do that. Most of the book is about how lucky the biggest winners are.
But let’s take a look at the math closer.
In the US, top 1% of earners make at least $561K AGI. To be top 1%, it is like walking into a big college class and coming out #1.
The top 0.1% earns 3 million annually. We all want that. It’s like being in a 1,000 company and being the other 999 for the highest earning job. Or maybe easier comparison: it’s like winning The Squid Game, except instead of 455 other players, there’s 999 other players. It would be like winning all 6 games, and then still have 1 more final game to win against the other stiff competitor.
Everyone can make it?#
I hope you can see the math here that not everyone can make it.
And by definition, if “everyone” is the top 1%, nobody is the top 1%. That’s how math works.
I saw this Tik Tok clip where Ashton Hall was talking about ’everyone can make it as a content creator’–not big but at least good enough to make a good income.
Wrong.
If everyone can make it, then there would be so much content on YouTube nobody would stand out. YouTube wouldn’t have enough money to pay everyone an income. And the reason’s simple: everyone would be too busy making better content to beat each other (so they can earn a modest income) to watch any videos. With nobody to watch ads, nobody would win.
“Everyone” can make it if they “just put in the effort” is an absurd notion.
You need 3 things to win#
You need 3 things to win:
- Execution: You need to work like the top 0.1 to 1%. To do so you must use leverage. Hire people, or use automation. Short-term, that’s probably good enough. Longer-term, neither will be good enough. You’ll probably need to hire people and force them all to be 10-100X’ers to be the top 1% as that will be standard.
- Analysis: If you want to be top 1% you need a top 1% insight. That means not looking at Twitter or WSB for dumbass stock ideas and thinking by yourself. If everyone’s copying an idea, by definition it cannot be top 1%. So, you’ll need an edge there. This can come with a lot of experience, obsession, and experimentation.
- MOST IMPORTANT, luck: you can nail the first 2, but none of us can know the future. Luck needs to be on your side in some way for the future to work out just the way you envisioned. If lady luck is not on your side, you can be the smartest, hardest working person and you will absolutely still fail.
Luck? That’s so hopeless!#
Yes but if you’re lucky enough to have internet to read this you are already lucky. So maybe lady luck is on your side.
And while luck is a requirement, and you may only have 5-10% of winning big even if you are the top 1% smartest and work top 1% hardest…
…if you don’t go all in, you have 0% chance of winning.
So what’s it gonna be?
You give up entirely, or you do go all in for a shot at glory that the other 99.9% people won’t ever know?
When you know the answer to that, you’ll know if luck’s really on your side.