- This video was sponsored by Squarespace.
Almost every single self-improvement YouTuber,
self-improvement book, motivational speaker will tell you
how important it is to have confidence,
confidence in yourself,
confidence in everything that you do.
They'll also go on and on and on
about how important it is to have high self-esteem,
and to feel sure about yourself
and to know that no matter what you set your mind to,
you're capable of doing it.
Never accept less than what you think you're worth.
Never stay in a job that you don't like.
Don't keep doing things that you don't truly love.
And as a society, we just sort of accept this advice
as if it's gospel, as if there is no downside
to this radical self-assurance, but like any philosophy,
I think it's unwise to not question it.
And I think that this sort of
blind optimism is worth questioning.
In fact, I think it's the very reason
why so many people feel so stuck in life,
because one of the main downsides
to this unconditional self-confidence
in everything that you do, is that it can quickly turn
into an inflated sense of what we're capable of,
which blinds us from correcting our weaknesses
changing paths if something's not working.
And that can really prevent us from improving our lives
or making progress in any substantial way,
because there's a word for an inflated sense
of self-confidence, one that's beyond the realm of reality.
We call that ego.
You know, when your sense of your own capabilities
and importance in life is bigger than reality itself,
it's called having a big ego
and sometimes having a big ego is really difficult to spot.
I know for a fact it was in my own life.
I've talked a lot on this channel about how when I went
to university, it wasn't a filmmaking specific university.
So in my intro level film classes, I was the best filmmaker
in the room, or so I thought, but as soon as somebody
in the class had a film that maybe they put more effort
into than I did, I felt threatened by this,
and I was in denial.
I started looking for faults in their work
and there's no way that they know how to work a camera
or have better cinematography than I do.
And that blinded myself from my own weaknesses in my work.
You know, I was living in this sort
of fantasy land where I'm this master filmmaker
even though I'm not even close to being that.
And I knew I wasn't,
but my ego was blinding me from the reality.
It was blinding me from my weaknesses
and things that I needed to work on
which prevented me from reaching the goal
of actually becoming a masterful filmmaker,
a goal which I'm nowhere near accomplishing.
Your ego is kind of addicting.
It tells you all the nice things that you want to hear.
It tells you how good and special and talented you are,
but it doesn't really help you improve.
You know, your ego is different from confidence
because confidence stems from competence.
As you get better at things you develop a track record
of being competent at that thing.
So that you know for a fact
that you can pull this off,
you're capable of doing this, that's confidence.
You gain confidence through repetition and mastery.
Your ego tells you that you're talented
and special and you can do whatever you wanna do,
but it's not actually grounded in a track record of success.
I think one of the most common examples
of people's ego getting in the way
of their success is when they're working a job
that they feel like they're better than,
maybe it's an entry level position.
Maybe they're working at a fast food restaurant.
They're flipping burgers,
and they have an undergraduate degree,
and they're super educated in some field
yet they still find themselves stuck in entry-level jobs,
and they start thinking to themselves, what am I doing here?
I'm better than this.
I'm more educated than all of my peers.
I deserve better.
A lot of the time, that's just your ego talking.
It's blinding you from the reality that perhaps your resume
isn't that impressive to the employers
in the field that you want to go into.
Perhaps you should accept the loss
of time in whatever degree you got,
or whatever jobs you were working before.
Take a slice of humble pie and figure out
the best way forward from an objective perspective,
no matter how unflattering that path might look
on the surface level.
Our ego blinds us from reality.
And if we can't accept reality we can't improve it.
In the book Ego Is The Enemy by Ryan Holiday.
He talks about how you can aspire to be
either one of two things.
You can aspire to be somebody,
or you can aspire to do something.
And he argues that we live in a world filled with people
trying to be somebody.
In fact, you're kind of told that your whole life,
go out there and be somebody.
So naturally people want to get their lucky break.
They wanna be recognized as special.
They want to work their way up
in the company so that they can eventually sit
at the big desk with the big boys.
If you're an artist you really wanna be recognized
for your talent, you know
get your lucky break, become famous.
You know, and everybody wants to be an Instagram influencer,
or a TikTok star or a YouTuber.
They wanna have millions of people
recognizing how special they are.
They wanna be somebody.
They wanna have influence, that's the more tempting option.
The other option is to aspire to do something,
to get something done, to have a purpose
or a mission doing the best you can do in your craft.
This type of person is a lot more concerned about action
and education rather than validation and status.
The person who aspires to do something
in life is a lot more concerned with being useful
rather than appearing to be useful or looking busy.
This is especially relevant for artists and creatives.
If you're an influencer or a YouTuber
I think you really need to hear this as well.
If your video, if your art, if your craft,
whatever it is, is good enough.
It's its own marketing.
You know, if you double down
and put in 10 times more effort into your next video,
if you put in 10 times more effort into your next art piece
then the work will kind of speak for itself.
You know, there's a higher chance
that it will become extremely useful to people.
And then the word of mouth effect will start to take place.
You know, every single time that I start to get caught up
with how special I am for having
almost a million subscribers,
and how am a big YouTuber
and all my videos get lots of views.
As soon as I start thinking that way,
I start focusing on the wrong things.
My videos start to suffer, you know, the actual quality
of the videos and the message starts to suffer dramatically.
The best videos I've ever made.
The ones I'm super proud of are videos
where I was just really concerned
with telling the best story or getting my message across
in the best way possible,
in the most effective way possible.
I treated the video in and of itself as the end goal
and whether or not that video blows up
in the algorithm is kind of irrelevant,
because I became that much better
as a filmmaker and a storyteller.
And my existing audience takes notice of that,
and they really appreciate it.
And when you offer that much value to people
and you're that useful to people
everything sort of comes into alignment,
the views and the subscribers
and the comments and the likes.
They all kind of take care of themselves.
So I guess what I'm trying to get at with this video
is no matter what you're into,
no matter what your profession
or your hobby or your craft is
you need to take on the role of a student.
Every single person wants to be noticed and respected.
But I think the path forward to dramatic progress
in your life is the willingness to become a nobody
until your results put you in a different category.
You know, if you're applying for a job,
how much better would it be if your resume
was three times better than anyone else's,
not from a formatting perspective,
not from you using fluffy language to describe yourself,
but by you being three times more qualified,
experienced, educated than anybody else
applying for that same job.
Stop caring so much about what other people
think about you, how you appear in the world,
and actually be someone who is useful to people,
so useful that not having you in the room
or part of the team, or the company is such an immediate
and dramatic detriment to everyone around you,
that they have no choice but to always have you around,
because you're that useful.
I guess if I was to distill this entire video down
into just a couple of sentences, a little recap,
it would be that no matter where you are in life,
if you've experienced a lot of success,
and you're still unfulfilled,
and you feel like you're kind of a house of cards
awaiting to fall down,
or maybe you haven't experienced a lot of success
in your life at all, and you feel stuck,
pay attention to your ego,
pay attention to what this is little sinister voice
in the back of your head is telling you,
is telling you you're too good for this.
You're already the best and you can improve,
because that's all kind of bullshit.
Strip away the ego,
try to view your position with a ruthless,
objectivity and honesty,
and doing that will reveal a path forward.
And no matter how painful that path forward may seem,
no matter how embarrassing it might look,
see what happens if you take it,
because going down that unflattering path
maybe the answer to your problems.
This video was sponsored by Squarespace.
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make your presence known on the internet.
And as usual, have a great time.
If you liked this video, make sure you hit like,
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the algorithm, it blesses me,
and it shoves my bald head into other people's homepages
helping them out which also helps me out.
So it's a win-win for everybody.
If you're lurking here and this is the thousands,
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make sure you not only hit subscribe,
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It's kind of a crazy weekend.
I don't wanna get into details, but I really wanted
to put in more effort to editing it,
and actually shooting some B-roll for this video,
wasn't able to, but I guess can save it for next video.
There's two videos coming out in December.
Thank you so much for watching as usual,
and we'll catch you in the next video.
Also, yeah, I'm gonna shave this mustache off.
It's not good.