Sorry about the pandemic. I was talking to my friend the other day about what we thought each of us had a chance of being the best in the world at, and he said something that shocked me. Whatever it is, I'm not the biggest fan of competition. That's the softest sh** I ever heard.
But he kept going. I like doing things for myself and always find the most success. in that rather than always trying to have the upper hand on someone else and getting judged for it.
Also you can bench way more than me. Okay he didn't exactly admit the last part but something about what he said hit me. It's this whole idea of being driven by intrinsic or extrinsic motivators. Now every study says that intrinsic motivation is better at producing long-term results across the board but I'm pretty sure most people are always relying on extrinsic motivation in a day-to-day basis.
We live in a world where 99% of what we know about people's lives is through the lens of social media. Everybody shares this glamorous, exciting highlight reel of their lives without actually showing what the day-to-day stuff looks like. And I understand why, but all it does is get us stuck in this cycle of extrinsic motivation where you're constantly chasing and getting nowhere.
It's called the rat race for a reason. There was this study where they put a rat in a tube and they measured how hard it would pull to get at the smell of cheese in front of it. And you'd think that it would give its all just to get to that cheese, but that wasn't what actually happened. It pulled pretty hard, but it wasn't until the smell of a cat was wafted in from behind it that the rat actually pulled as hard as it could. Now, aside from those researchers kind of being d***s to that rat, I find this study really fascinating.
The cheese is a perfect example of an extrinsic motivator. We're just like those rats, man. The only difference is they chase cheese and we chase bread.
But unless you're a f***ing loser, you're not running away from a cat. So what is the thing that we're running away from? What's our intrinsic drive? I think it's the same as those rats. Fear.
Now I've always been a pretty confident person, but for some reason, I keep getting into this mental tug of war between liking who I am now and striving to be better in the future. Just look at any of my other videos. But it's only just now starting to make sense to me that all of it comes from a fear of not living up to my potential. What a dumb word, potential.
Now if you're 20-something like me, you've probably heard that word thrown out there about every young star, whether it's an athlete or a singer or... Drake's newest friend, but just think about it for a second. I watched entire athletes careers pass by with everybody obsessed with potential and forgetting to appreciate what they were at that very moment.
And I get it, watching a guy like Wemby is crazy when you consider that this is probably the worst he'll ever be. But can you just stop for a second and appreciate the eight foot sharpshooting demigod with a handle that he already is? But it doesn't just stop there. We do it with ourselves every single day.
I bet you're doing it right now without even realizing it. Whenever we waste hours of our day in a trance scrolling and going from one video to the next, there's part of us that's self-aware and screaming for it to stop. That's the intrinsic motivation that knows what we could be doing with our lives instead. Our potential, if you will.
So what do we do? we suppress it with more bullshit. Just turn up the constant drip feed of dopamine and extrinsic motivation until our brain shuts up. It's not that extrinsic motivation is an entirely bad thing either, it's just that it's super easy for it to be used against you.
What happens when the thing you're chasing is in the hands of somebody who doesn't have your best interest in mind? One of the biggest tricks I've learned about marketing is that instead of selling a product, successful companies try to sell you a feeling. Any company can sell running shoes, but only Nike can sell you the feeling of being an athlete.
Lots of companies sell phones and computers, but only Apple can sell the feeling of being a true innovator. Now, I know those feelings might seem like intrinsic motivators, but I don't think that's the case. People only want to feel like athletes and innovators because society glorifies those things.
You wouldn't give your money to Nike if they were telling you to just wait until tomorrow. So that's the secret. The only way I know of to get out of the rat race is to just say f*** the cheese and f*** the cat too.
There's a quote I like that says, the person who enjoys walking will always walk further than the person who enjoys the destination. And when it comes to the things I've always enjoyed doing, like making these videos, I've realized that I've been kind of getting caught up in the destination. I've been studying the strategies of the best YouTubers, analyzing videos, reading books about storytelling, and every single one of those things kind of helped me, but they were mostly just hurting me.
I wasn't enjoying the walk anymore. See, by giving a shit about what other people say is the right or wrong way to make YouTube videos, I actually started believing that there was a right and wrong way. It's bulls**t.
With pretty much anything I can think of, sure there's moral and some legal boundaries I guess, but there are no rules. We just impose these guidelines on ourselves because it's how we all convince each other that we should stay in the rat race with everybody else. As soon as you start challenging the norms, you're indirectly challenging everybody else's comfortable idea of how the world works. People don't like that.
So you're left with no choice but to either conform or to be a social outcast. But that's where I have one last quote for you. Easy choices, hard life.
Hard choices, easy life. Now even though it might not seem like it initially, it's easier being exceptional than it is to be normal. Because once you finally stop playing that game that everybody else is playing, you realize how stupid it all is. It's easy for me to do the socially acceptable thing and limit my creativity by making videos like everybody else. But it's really hard feeling good about those videos when I know that they're just an over-refined, chewed-up version of what I'm already capable of creating.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, nobody actually gives a shit about who you are and what you do. They're all just subconsciously protecting themselves and their own perception of reality. We just blame these vague, higher powers like society when we're really probably just worried about what one friend is gonna think. But it's the being weird, doing things in a way that you like, and valuing that over anything else, that's exactly what's worth doing. By definition, in order to be exceptional, you must be the exception.
So what's stopping you?