When running a business, there is a seemingly endless list of things that matter. Planning, marketing, technology, managing people, managing money. But there is one thing that stands above all of them, and most people barely give it a second thought.
It is your mindset.
Personally, I believe business is simply about luck. All the groundwork you prepare is just a stepping stone to increase the probability of luck coming your way. But no matter how hard you work, that luck might never arrive. On the flip side, there are people who achieve massive success purely by luck, without putting in much effort at all.
What I am trying to tell you is this. You do not need to take your business efforts too seriously. With a moderate amount of effort, those who are meant to succeed will succeed, and those who are meant to fail will fail. The only difference is whether luck finds them or not. And luck is not something you can acquire just because you want it.
You cannot control luck. But there is one thing you can control with absolute certainty. That is your mindset.
The Root of All Misery
Some people might ask why we are talking about philosophy instead of business. They argue that business is a battlefield won by specific technologies, brilliant planning, and killer ideas, and that mindset is not really that important.
But here is what I can tell you with complete certainty. No matter how successful those people become in business, they will all be miserable.
Today's piece might be a bit short, but I want to share exactly how to avoid that misery, based entirely on my own direct experience.
All misery stems from thinking too much about yourself. Before I started this blog and my web service, I worked as a network engineer. I always had this burning desire to start my own social media channels and build my own products. But I could never bring myself to actually do it.
It sounds like a cliché, but my mind was flooded with thoughts like: What will other people think of me? What happens to everything I have built so far? Will I even be able to make a living doing something completely different?
Then, one day, I tried looking at myself from a third-person perspective. I asked myself what people in the future would think of me hundreds of years from now.
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| Looking at yourself from a third-person perspective to let go of unnecessary worries |
That is when it hit me. In a few hundred years, I will be gone, and absolutely no one will remember my face or my name. Just like we have no idea what the faces or names of ordinary people living thousands of years ago were.
I thought to myself. The ending of this game is already set. So what on earth am I so worried about? From that exact moment, I started doing what I actually wanted to do.
Viewing Yourself as a Game Character
When you focus entirely on yourself, you lose the ability to see life from a broader perspective. Our brains are hardwired to lock onto the fear right in front of our eyes. To break free from that, as I previously explored in Why Solitude Is Your Ultimate Business Advantage In The AI Era, you have to consciously observe yourself from a third-person point of view.
I believe that all our strengths and abilities are already hardwired into our genes from birth. And to accurately read those strengths, you have to look at yourself from the outside. That is the only way to properly design your life.
There is a quote by Charlie Munger that I absolutely love and repeat like a mantra, one I have mentioned in previous articles. Munger explains life like this.
"I want to think about things where I have an edge over others. I don't want to play a game where other people have an advantage over me. I don't participate in games where other people are smart and I am stupid. I look for games where I am smart and they are stupid. And believe me, it works better. God bless our stupid competitors. They make us rich."
Whenever a successful person appears on YouTube, you will always see comments saying they only succeeded because they have talent.
I agree with that 100%. But here is the irony. While people acknowledge the existence of talent, they spend the vast majority of their lives working in fields where they have absolutely no talent. They voluntarily choose to become the stupid competitors. Rather than learning How to Win in Business Without Ever Having to Compete, they do not even try to find the game where they are the smart ones and everyone else is struggling.
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| Treating your life like a video game character to stop playing where you are meant to lose |
I believe this happens because they are so overly conscious of themselves that they fail to properly observe the battlefield of the game called life. As a result, they execute strategies they would never use if they simply viewed themselves as a video game character. This is why we need to let go of ourselves a little more.
Observe yourself objectively from the outside. Then find the game that was built for someone exactly like you.
That, I believe, is the ultimate principle that guarantees you will never be miserable, regardless of whether your business succeeds or fails.
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