- Professor Cold Takes Scott Galloway
had this bad tweet recently,
"You constantly want to be upgrading your peer group.
You want to hang out with smarter,
more successful, more interesting,
higher-character people
because you will rise or fall
to the level of your peer group."
Oh my God! That's a bad take.
You know why?
That's some real sociopath talk.
You must know what I mean, right?
And if you don't,
you probably just haven't run across
some real sociopaths in your professional life yet.
I didn't when I was really young,
and oh, trust me, you will.
Here's the thing,
sociopathy may work, but it is only a local maximum.
If you really want to change the world,
you've got to be a geek, geeks beat sociopaths.
And I'm going to tell you how.
Let's get into it.
A community of sociopaths
will never outperform a community of creators.
We've all heard the saying,
"You're the average of your closest five friends."
I think for the most part, this is true.
The law of averages says that most future events
are likely to balance any past deviation
from a presumed average,
or in other words,
a group of friends who spend time with each other
are more likely to become
like the average group member over time.
For me, this has been especially important
because I want to hang out with creators.
These are the people who have the skills and creativity
and inspiration to really create awesome things
for other people.
Here's what author David Chapman said,
he's the creator of one of my favorite websites,
meaningness.com.
"A scene is a small group of creators
who want to invent an exciting new thing,
a musical genre, a religious sect,
a film animation technique, a political theory.
Riffing off of each other,
they produce examples and variants
and share them for mutual enjoyment,
generating positive energy.
Geeks totally love the new thing.
They're fascinated with all its esoteric ins and outs,
and they spent all available time doing it
or talking about it."
Now, geeks attract fanatics who can't create,
but they do contribute money, adulation, organization,
and analysis to actually support those creators.
And that's the beginning of a subculture,
a fringe group of characters
around a fringe technology, for instance.
This is Marc Andreessen,
the creator of the web browser,
talking about how Bitcoin
mirrors that fringe of the internet
from his early days when he was making Netscape.
- I think that the critique of Bitcoin
as sort of being fringe technology
accompanied by fringe politics and fringe characters,
I don't know how you get fringe technology
without fringe politics and fringe characters.
You just have to go through a maturation process
where you come out the other end
and the fringe technology goes mainstream
and it gets widely adopted.
Along the way, the fringe characters and the fringe politics
tend to get alienated
and then tend to move on to the next fringe technology
and the cycle repeats.
- Now, after the fringe creators
and fanatics get established,
that's when things go mainstream.
And with mainstream adoption come the mainstream fans.
At this stage, you have a lot of people
who want to be in with you,
but you got to be careful.
Don't let the fandom go to your head.
Here is where some leaders go awry.
Now that you're cool and in,
people want to meet you
and you stop trying to do the things that got you here.
If you aren't thoughtful about who you spend time with,
you might lose your real friends, who you came up with.
At this point, you've got to ask yourself,
are you actively finding new people
with different, but informed viewpoints to your circle?
Do people tell you what you want to hear
or do they tell you what they really think?
The former are yes, men,
the latter are who you really want to be around.
For me, there's always something someone can teach you.
You can always learn more about yourself
and the world around you from the person across from you
no matter who they are.
Leveling up your friends
is not about stacking your deck
with the most successful people,
it's actually about pulling together the right set of people
who help the whole circle rise up,
not by how much money they have or how successful they are,
but because of who they are as human beings.
Here are legendary surfers,
Rob Machado and Kelly Slater at an event in 2015 onstage
talking about how they think about themselves,
post mega success.
- I feel like I'm just,
I could be sitting out there amongst you guys,
I'm just one of you.
I don't feel like I should be put up on a pedestal
or a podium or anything,
and I'm just blessed to be doing what I do.
And I think Kelly feels the same way.
- That just comes
from hopefully parents raising you the right way
and putting the right things in your head
and keeping your old friends around.
And we're just a normal people like anyone else, you know.
- To me, that really resonates.
When you are blessed,
that is the very moment you need to keep the best company,
the people who keep you grounded.
We aren't different, you or I, we're the same.
Okay, let's take a moment though.
Next up, we're going to talk about a big thing,
how to avoid and fight sociopaths in your journey.
But first, I wanted to share something
that's going to be truly useful
for a lot of you watching this.
Career Karma is one of my first investments
that really is in this space
and I figured that if you're leveling up your friends,
you probably want to level up your career too.
If you ever wanted to work in tech,
a Career Karma bootcamp
can have you in a six-figure flexible work from home
software engineering job, basically in a matter of months.
It's the easiest way that I've seen people break into tech.
They're already touching
more than a million people per month
and helping them find jobs.
If you're interested, click the link below to learn more.
Now, back to the video.
I love throwing parties
and one of the things that's happened
since I started seeing success as a startup investor
was that, you know, my real friends,
the people I really came up with, my childhood friends,
the people I worked with for years,
the people I like because of who they are, not what they do,
some people are in tech, others are teachers,
other people work in nonprofits,
or some of them were even musicians or artists.
At some point, a lot of them started telling me,
"Hey, Gary, I don't like to come to your parties anymore."
I asked them why.
They said increasingly the people who came to my parties
would start with the question, "So what do you do?"
And if they didn't hear something that could help them,
they turned around and looked for other people to talk to.
Don't do that! That's gross!
I realized at some point
people were literally executing against the strategy
that Professor Cold Takes was saying,
constantly upgrade your friend set, no matter what.
Ugh!
I don't know why people are doing this
because once you have mainstream acceptance,
what I realized is that's when the people
who build a movement
now have to deal with a brand new kind of person
who exists only to accumulate money, power, and fame:
the sociopaths.
They're slick, they look the part,
and they seem a lot like the creators
who help build that movement.
But they're not the same.
I'm sorry to say,
but this strategy of upgrading your friends, no matter what,
it does work, but not with me.
I know a lot of people get ahead this way,
but let me tell you, it's a micro-optimization.
First, people see through it.
Once people know you as a gross scenester,
you will never break that label.
You don't want that on you.
Second, you will repel the true creators
and that's where the principle
that you are the average of your closest friends
really hurts you.
A community of sociopaths
will never outperform a community of creators.
Like attracts like.
So don't take Galloway's advice,
otherwise you'll find yourself
in the middle of a hornet's nest.
It's about being in a community with the smartest,
most benevolent people you can be with.
That's what made our early experience
with Y Combinator communities work.
And it's the kind of vibe
that you just know when you see it.
We're actively trying to build this
in and around Initialized Capital.
Level up your friends, but in the right way.
Find the creators.
You can build this too for yourself.
Be real, be true.
So that's it for this week.
I hope this helps you
no matter what stage you are in your career.
And if you're watching this,
I wanted to thank you for making it all the way to the end.
If you aren't in tech, but you want to be,
I want to remind you to check out Career Karma.
It is the absolute best way to find a bootcamp,
but even before that, to find a community of people
to help you find the right place to learn to code
tailor-made for you.
You get a peer group,
sometimes peers from where you are from,
or your background, both peers and mentors.
If you want to break into tech and don't know how,
this is the best place to do it, careerkarma.com.
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