How to Get Ahead of 99% of People in 12 Months
This article is compiled from Tim Denning’s post. He’s an Australian creator I really enjoy following, with over 120K followers on X and earning $100K/month. I appreciate his writing - genuine, relatable, and free of fake success formulas.
Worshipping successful people is overrated.
So is reading endless Elon Musk-style biographies. The reason to join the top 1% isn’t to become successful.
It’s to avoid the life the masses live which is miserable. It’s full of disappointment, struggle, coping, stress, climbing a corporate ladder to nowhere, and addictions to help numb the pain of settling for second best.
In America:
- Most people hate their jobs
- 60%+ of people are overweight
- More than half of marriages end in divorce
- ~70% of people have less than $1000 in the bank
I heard a story recently from a friend. Their family member got unexpectedly pregnant. She gave birth. While breastfeeding she still kept drinking red wine. She just couldn’t give it up (zero judgment from me). As soon as she got home from work she had to have a wine.
She tried to drink “safely.” Now her baby has major health problems.
Doctors don’t know if it was the wine. But wine and newborn babies definitely don’t mix. This is what it’s like to be average. Even your baby’s smile isn’t enough to stop you from resisting the social pressure of “having a few quiet beverages, mate.”
You’re forced to be different if you want to survive, then later, thrive.
This short essay will contain the most powerful ideas I’ve ever discovered if you want to join the top 1%.
Screw being normal
You have one life. Don’t settle for mediocrity – Naval Ravikant
Normal people follow the rules.
They live a life someone else designed. They follow what their parents did. They get brainwashed into thinking lawyers and doctors are the only professions that make real money. They waste their disposable income on disposable luxury cars that are worth 50% less within a few years.
They’re so busy trying to look successful with luxury purchases instead of being successful. Status games are a trap.
People choose to be normal because they think if they’re weird they’ll be rejected by society.
They falsely believe the consequences of being weird are catastrophic.
Examples:
- “If I write online I will get fired by my boss or HR”
- “If I start a side hustle my 9-5 job will fire me”
- “90% of startups fail in the first 5 years so I should reject entrepreneurship.”
- “Taking a risk is too risky”
- “I need a guarantee before I can try this out.”
Alex Hormozi says, “Don’t expect to be accepted if you want to be exceptional.”
Weird is the only path forward. All you have to do is be yourself and trust your gut instincts. And ignore opinions from every single person, most of all, family and friends.
Opinions are like a**holes, everyone has one. So what.
“Life shrinks or expands according to one’s courage.” — Anais Nin, 1939
Listen to data more than gurus
People think the answer to their problems is a guru.
It’s a form of permission-seeking. Getting help from a coach, mentor, or successful people is a must (obviously). But there’s a subtle difference between getting help and blindly trusting one person to change your life.
There comes a point where you actually have to execute and learn from action, rather than obsessing over whether a guru says “choose a niche” or “you are the niche.”
Data is more accurate than fortune-telling. What does the data say?
This one is a paradox though. If you obsess over data too much, you end up A/B testing your way to running a p*rn site.
Follow obsession if you want to blow past passionate people
There is no competition. Read that again.
Go to the gym at 7 AM and you’ll see. Or show up to the gym like I did on New Year’s Day. It’s empty.
Your supposed competition believes in work-life balance. They stop every 10 minutes to check their phone. They’re lukewarm passionate which never gives them the drive to take action, face rejection, or fail. They drown themselves in entertainment at night time because they overcompensate how much they should reward themselves for a day’s hard work.
All you have to do is become obsessed.
Attack your goal with intensity. Let the daily momentum and compounding results take you to a level of greatness most can’t dream of.
Join the crazy ones. Become a madman/madwoman. Be unreasonable enough to believe it’ll work. Get so fired up people think you’ll go to prison. Work on your dream so late at night people think you’ve become a drug dealer.
Obsessed people are relentless. Every single person in the top 1% is obsessed. Make no mistake. Never delude yourself to believe this isn’t true.
Self-promote until it feels uncomfortable
The average person hates self-promotion. They think it’s salesy.
They think selling is dishonest or a bad skill to have. They see sales as manipulation rather than what it is – survival.
If you can’t sell you’re f*cked.
No one is buying, therefore you’re a starving artist or a hobbyist by default. Do you really want to attend Sunday markets and see all the other losers who can’t sell trying to flog their magical Manuka honey blend they sourced from the magical Amazon rainforest a.k.a Amazon.com?
Having no one give a sh*t about what you’ve built is depressing.
And it’s totally unnecessary. Just don’t lie to yourself. No one is solving the attention/distribution problem for you.
Build-it-and-they-will-come is a scam that helped Hollywood enslave an entire generation.
Self-promotion is uncomfortable until you realize selling is just helping people.
I have to send, on average, 20 emails before someone will buy anything from me, even if it’s a 20K+ with me have been on my email list for 2+ years.
Learn how to ethically persuade to get ahead.
Turn your goals list into a single goal
Goal lists. New Year’s Resolutions. Career goals. Business plans. What a joke.
Choose one goal and obsess over it for the next decade. Eliminate everything else. Go all in. Direct all your energy and effort towards one goal to create enough movement to get results.
Too many goals are a distraction. It becomes shiny object syndrome. You end up bouncing from one goal to the next like a beach ball.
The world is designed for you to be mediocre. Get clarity by removing all the noise and having only one option.
Seek out rejection
The comfortable life hurts worse than a gunshot wound.
Easiest solution is to get rejected more often. Have people tell you NO! Or better, “F*ck off Tim you big nosed ape.”
Rejection is where your self-confidence is built. It forces you to believe. It forces you to have enough humility to consider that what you’re doing may not be helping people like you thought it would.
Incentives drive the world and all decisions. And humans act out of self-interest. Get rejected more so these truths sink in and poison your mind.
If you’re not getting rejected every week, you’re living small – and the cost is mental poverty and tiny paydays.
Disappear from public life
Unless your full-time income comes from sport, turn it off. Meaningless.
Dare to not attend work drinks. Skip weddings and anniversaries of distant friends or family, that you normally feel obligated to attend.
I had one friend in banking, Peter, who came from a Greek family. Every week he’d have these family events he couldn’t escape. He hated it. He just wanted to buy a food truck and drive around Australia selling doughnuts.
But he couldn’t. His manners kept him trapped.
He finally realized by not showing up to these social events, it was the identity of the people who invited him that made them guilt him into it if he dared tried to decline their invitation.
Normal people will do anything to keep you at their level. Your changed identity threatens theirs. So it feels like you’re trying to murder them in their sleep.
Screw them. You do you.
Public life is overrated. It’s escapism disguised as fun. One of the best ways to escape public life is to change all your social media profiles to a nickname.
With a nickname no one has power over you anymore. You live with an alter ego and you can finally be mentally free.
Fall in love with hard things
The masses love easy mode.
They want hacks and cheat codes when they should want pain, suffering, and a squat rack at the gym overloaded with 100-pound weight plates.
As soon as they face a problem they give up. They don’t expect problems. They think if they found a problem it’s a reason to give up. Or if they can’t solve the problem in 24 hours then it’s time to do something different.
Problems are opportunities.
The harder the problems you solve the more extraordinary you become.
To get ahead you must find a version of hard that feels like playing a video game on hard mode. Then keep playing until you find a way through. Hard problems never stop. You just get better at solving them and expecting them to find you.
Stop complaining you’re busy
There’s never a time in life when you won’t be busy.
The problem? You think you’re special. Life threw a curveball at you – death of a loved one, hurricane, job loss, break up, random sickness.
But we all face these difficult things in life (even me). So you’re not special. One type of person faces adversity and says, “This is the reason I need to stop for now.” That person doesn’t get started again.
The second type of person faces adversity & goes, “I’m not special. I’ll use this as motivation. Thank you. For now, I may have to reduce hours but I will maintain the habit.”
Being busy means you’re unfocused. It means you’re out of control. You don’t know where your time is going or why you have none. This should scare the crap out of you.
Average people are busy. Successful people are hyper-focused. Choose wisely.
Your goal is to protect your time even if it means making less money. Your time is all you have. How you spend it determines your future path in life. If you can’t manage time, you’ll eventually die full of regrets and what you could have done. Sad.
Start by saying no to everything. Buy back your time.