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hey this is Leo for actualised org and today I want to have a discussion about this topic of being iconoclastic and how being the exact opposite of what everyone else is being or what everyone else is doing can actually lead to some amazing results so this is an interesting idea because there's a balance to be had between being conformist and then being rebellious or iconoclastic and challenging conventions just for the sake of challenging them so when I was a kid through middle school in high school I used to be I haven't had a rebellious streak and really kind of an iconoclastic streak I would call myself a proud iconoclast but I'll give you just a quick example of how this played out so in middle school I used to remember I would walk up to people like friends in school and I would ask them this question I would tell them if someone gave you a million dollars right now to quit school forever and you could never come back you'd have to quit where you are right now and this was like eighth grade so if you quit school at eighth grade and you were never allowed to come back but you had a million dollars would you take that deal and of course most of the kids they hated school anyways they probably quit it for $100 but of course for a million dollars they all said yes and being the kind of smartass that I was I would always I would insist and I would argue with them I would say no I would never take that deal because the education is so much more important over the long run over the long run that education is going to earn me a lot more than a million dollars so in the end that's a poor deal to take because you could never come back and you could never get proper education and so yeah I was probably little bit smarter than most kids in terms of how I was thinking long term and all that kind of stuff but really I was coming up this question from a place of ego so you know I wanted to prove that I was a smartass and that I was different than everyone else and so that's kind of why I was posing the question that's that's why I was posing that answer it was almost like I was a I was I was I took the answer of the exact opposite what I assumed most kids would would take and so in that sense I wasn't really coming at it from you know from a very wise perspective it was more of an it goeth perspective but still the net result was actually was actually the same because whether I really believe that the education was was really worthwhile long term or whether I was just doing that because I thought it was different and that's what I valued didn't really matter because the net result was that I started to value education actually ended up happening was I started putting a lot of energy and investment into education into my education so through school I started getting good grades studying hard doing all that kind of stuff and I really believed it I didn't I was interesting myself but part of the reason I was doing that was because I actually thought that it was it was the cool rebellious thing to do is to be smart because most kids didn't want to be smart most kids were talking to their friends they were slacking off they hated homework all that stuff so I thought if I want to be original if I want to be unique the best way to do that is to actually go in go in against the grain so I actually thought that it was gonna be cool like cool in the uncool sense to be smart and so that's actually how I got smart and I got an amazing education which I'm grateful for to this day because of that and it all came from being a little bit iconoclastic and over the years my content has kind of gone down because it was a kind of extreme I found myself challenging stuff that that was you know solid stuff and and so you know where where else is applied that was just like a little school example well one other place where you really want to be unique and sometimes you get really rewarded for for going against the grain is in business sometimes in business is really important to do things differently because it's important for you to carve out your niche and doing so reduces your competition you don't want to be competing with a bunch of other companies within the same market that drives down prices that make that means you have to work harder it's much better to create your own little niche your a little area of the market that you can corner and just work on that and usually to do that you need to play up your business's strengths and idiosyncrasies and so there sometimes it's good to not do what everyone else is doing because if you go into that popular market that popular niche the thing that's hot right now that tends to a lot of times lead to market crashes bubbles or reduces pricing to the point where margins are driven down you don't earn a lot of money you end up working really hard and you don't get too much for it so that can be really good for business generally though the reason that you want to be iconoclastic and you want to go against the grain is because is because of mediocrity and if you think about it if you're gonna have if you want different results than everybody else and this was just a general rule that I followed since I was pretty young so times lived literally since middle school was that I tend to think that if I just do things differently I'll get different results and the way I thought about it was just simply this is that you have you have the majority of people in the world there's like 7 billion people in the world now and the majority of them are quite mediocre they live boring lives they are either poor or just above the poverty line they're struggling to get by a lot of them are emotionally unstable tons and tons of problems and just not what I think of as when when I think about myself and the way I want my life to go and the trajectory of my life to have of Awesomeness and success and financial well-being and psychological well-being all this stuff and achievement and just satisfaction with my life I don't picture most people as having that so when I think about that I start to wonder ok so what are they doing that puts them into mediocrity and if they do what most people do that puts them in mediocrity then if I do that that will put me in the same place whereas if I do something different that will put me in a different place perhaps sometimes a worse place but also perhaps a better place so it's not always that doing something different will get you to a better place it can actually put you in a worse place and we'll talk about that in a bit but some of the kind of mainstream stuff that people do also tends to be very unhealthy and bad and so going against that grain can be very good that's why just living by that principle of doing things differently can sometimes just blindly put you in a good position because you start to avoid some of the problems that mainstream society has and you start getting a different mode of thinking and different level of success generally though the reason that you want to be iconoclastic also is because you know what are the common problems that keep people in mediocrity well I think some of it you know obviously lack of lack of resources and that kind of stuff in poor countries but one of the problems I think is is laziness and really not wanting to work hard you can definitely see this in like mainstream American culture where you have this uh there's just general willingness to grasp at stuff that's easy to get or that's free so people will go for free samples if there's a store opening and they give out free stuff people flock to that store if there's a you know if there's a big lottery to be won it's played on the news and people go and buy tickets and when you win the lottery that's for you to something amazing and people ask each other questions like well what if you won the lottery tomorrow what would you do oh I'd quit my job I do this I do that I'd go for a vacation so like this kind of idea that you know you can get free stuff or they can go gambling you get something for free or really another way that it's manifest online especially if you've done any sort of business research or you try to start a business or you're familiar with with online businesses in any way you've you know the get-rich-quick schemes I mean some you'll even see these advertised on TV with real estate and stuff like that basically that get-rich-quick scheme which is like a quick little business so you can start at home that will earn you tons of money with with no investment no time investment you're going to be only working four hours a week and you're going to get all the money in the world and it's going to be easy and effortless convenience of your own home you don't have to go to a boss so you know we've all heard this common story and sometimes even you're driving on the roads you see signs that are saying stuff like work from home and earn $200 an hour you know stuff like that so that is trying to appeal to that mainstream desire to get something easy with low energy but get a lot for it and so and of course you know that appeals to all of us on some level because we want to be efficient with our use of energy and resources that's just something we as as living organisms do that's kind of programmed into our DNA but also that can actually backfire and I think in mainstream society that actually does backfire more often than it doesn't because at this point human society has developed to such an extent that you know it's black is becoming easy it's almost becoming too easy it's easy to get your food it's easy to get your water it's easy to really to earn money it's easy to get a job all this stuff is really programmed as a society for you so you don't have to you don't have to risk life and limb to do that stuff you just have to put a little bit of effort forward and if you follow the rules in society generally you'll turn out fine and people even fail at that but that's mostly because they start they start taking it for granted common example is just with health like the way that people abused our health by eating junk food because it's so easy it's so convenient such so much energy so much calories in in a little bite-sized piece of candy bar or our cheeseburger or whatever it is that you eat but it's not very nutritious for you mainstream society encourages it it's easy to get it but it's almost like we're getting too lazy that's why half the country is overweight or obese is because it's too easy to get that stuff and it's like that laziness that not wanting to work hard is a is starting to backfire so that's one of the ways that you can you can become a little bit contrary and and tackle some of those problems so by by tackling that idea of not working hard and being lazy that's definitely going to help to get you out of mediocrity you know stuff like wanting easy money wanting Fame and success all this stuff is just a typical of what I'm talking about another thing that I really like to just just ponder is is this idea of herd mentality and some of the pros and cons that go along with herd mentality so really herd mentality leads to group think and some of the evils of social conformity that come with that and there are other problems so well you know what are the problems with groupthink and social conformity and herd mentality well one of it one of the things is that it kills originality and generally in the marketplace if you're doing business or you're trying to provide value to an employer originality is something that's desired especially now when most jobs are service service type jobs so no longer are we doing much manufacturing especially in America it's more about your creative output so you know how creative can you be in your business how creative can you be in your work in your career whatever it is that you're doing and how original can you be how innovative can you be to be innovative and original means you have to think differently by definition than everyone else because you need to be able to explore the regions the regions of possibility that other people haven't gotten to yet and that usually requires a different mode of thinking so in that sense if you're thinking with the herd if you're doing what everyone else is doing it's hard to be original hard to be a discover hard to be an explorer and then you don't get the benefits from being an explorer and discover in an innovator and a lot of times some of the best results and business come from doing just that so that's one way that it's good not to engage in herd mentality so a lot of times also following the herd simply makes ideas untenable or unfeasible so you know what's an idea of this well some common examples aren't like investing in stocks like if everybody invested in the same stock and everyone tried to get rich off of it it just wouldn't work in theory because to make money on a stock someone else has to be losing some money there right and it's the disparity between buyers between buying it and a low price and selling it at a higher price which means that basically you're offloading that value out to somebody else and then you're cashing the difference well like hedge funds for example or actually successful mutual funds succumb to this problem when a mutual fund or hedge fund becomes very successful and it starts taking on too many new investors what is it happening is that really becomes too big for its own success so it becomes unsustainable when everyone tries to be successful at the exact same thing usually it doesn't happen because you can't distribute you don't have enough resources to distribute across the whole across all the players in that game equally so you know if we wanted to make everybody in the world a billionaire well to make 7 billion people in the world billionaires it probably just wouldn't work out the math wouldn't work out right society just wouldn't work out be cut why because you know someone has to be doing the low-level grunt work like someone has to be cleaning the toilets someone has to be doing your plumbing someone has to be doing all the stuff that you would never want to do if you were a billionaire so if everyone became billionaires instantly it just it wouldn't be tenable really you'd have to devalue the money or something like that because or you need like robots to be doing all the grunt work so you can't just instantly make everyone a success there has to be some disparities you know don't make that a limiting belief on yourself but I think generally if we're talking about large numbers then that's true also that's why for example like pyramid schemes like they might start to work at first and then eventually they have to they have to die they have to collapse because it's unsustainable you need an infinite number of new players coming into the game to keep the pyramid scheme going so I find that very very germane to business because in business once too many players get into a market the market can get oversaturated and even if you can get some success there it's not the kind of success that you really want to be going after because you're working very hard for it and getting very little in return because there's too many people trying to divide the pie so the pie pieces become very very small very fast you know what's another example of where being kind of contrarian and iconoclastic is good well I think just in how you are as a person how you behave and what your personality is like it's good to be original and idiosyncratic so you know when I was a when I was younger in school I used to think and I used to look at people and I list used to evaluate them based on their mannerisms and I would look you know the mannerisms of mine festers or my teachers kids around me and I would kind of judge them for it I'd be like oh that's you know that's quirky what he does with his hands that's weird like the way he laughs his laughs is kind of funny you know his hair hairstyle is kind of funny like this kind of stuff like these things that would kind of make people stand out I would tend to poke fun of people in there in my mind about that and my ideal at that point was kind of like well I'm going to try to reduce as many manners as butt as I can within myself so I'm you know I'm I don't have those quirks and you know as I got older I started to realize that that those idiosyncrasies are actually kind of good because what they do is they they kind of build your personality and they make you stand out and they make you a little bit more magnetic because if you if you numb down and polish out all the all the mannerisms that you have everything about you that's kind of unique then you just become very vanilla you have no you have no spicy of no flavor treat to who you are and it also doesn't make you very happy because those quirks are expressing those quirks is an expression of yourself and it's usually feels good to do that and suppressing them can be kind of limiting and soul draining or at least just not you know you don't get that sense of thrill that you do with really sharing who you are with other people and it doesn't really make you very very lovable I tend I guess what happens is that if you polish out that stuff you become very homogenized so it becomes easy for somebody to for everybody to like you a little bit or at least to be just kind of agreeable with you but it's hard for people then to really love you or gravitate towards you so you're not very polarizing it's like you're good for everybody you're just very generic you're kind of the lowest common denominator that people will accept sometimes it's good to be polarizing because there's so many people in the world that you can be friends with I mean you're going to be the limit the bottleneck there is just going to be the amount of time and energy that you have so you don't need to worry about attracting thousands thousands and thousands of people to make a thousand people happy you really just need to worry about expressing yourself and having the people that love you really love you and then people that hate you if they really hate you you shouldn't really care too much about that so sometimes it's good to to put out those idiosyncrasies and those develop those mannerisms because it builds up your personality makes you more magnetic and in that sense it also makes you stand out from the herd right if you're just like everyone else you tend to blend in if there's something very unique about you then you're going to stand out and that can be very good for you also you can stand out in bad ways so don't you know everything has to be taking kind of in balance the other problem is that I mean even if you wanted to eliminate mannerisms what I found as I was trying to do this for a while is that you can't really effectively eliminate and there's still going to be quirks about you they're there and in fact not having mannerisms is somewhat of a mannerism in and of itself because most people are quirky in some ways and if you're too vanilla it's almost like you're going to be kind of cut and dry and a little boring and that will become like your like your signature your trademark and that's really not a good trademark to have so so really you don't want to be vanilla other things the reasons why conformity is bad conformity can lead to epic failures epic financial failures we've we've seen this through history so if you're a student of history you've seen this pan out in many many different ways financial failures from stock market crashes to real estate bubbles to pyramid schemes to gold rushes you know from the very real gold rushes back like in the 1850s and what not to to modern-day gold rushes like maybe the the dot-com bubble bursting stock market that kind of stuff you know industries that become very hot they get flooded with people and then because there's not enough resources to go around basically collapses or once the resources run out the industry collapses you definitely saw that with the real gold rushes where people would flock to a gold mining town and eventually they'd strip it dry and then people would people would keep coming and coming but there was not enough gold to sustain everyone that was there so usually only a few people made out rich and the rest work better off at all for it same thing happened with the stock market crashes you know it happens repeatedly this is not just a one-time event you can research a whole history on how conformity conformity leads to epic financial failures you know you don't want to get caught up in that in fact that can be really bad if you end up getting caught up in that blind and blindsided by it you can literally wipe out your entire savings and destroy your entire life many many documented examples of that you know on the other hand you know we've been talking about conformity and we're talking about how conformity can be bad the others the flip side of this coin is that there's a balance and so conformity can also be good groupthink does have many positive advantages one of them you know is that a lot of times the herd has some mainstream tendencies that are actually really healthy and really good so you know what's one example this well I'd say education like if you're born in America or most modern countries in the world even probably the poor countries it's like you're just expected to go to school you know groupthink just tells you to go to school you have to go to school you don't even think twice about it you don't really even have much of a choice and then even after school you're generally pressured to go to college your parents pressure to go citing pressures you to go teachers pressure you to go all all the kids in your school are going so like going to college becomes very effortless it's not a very big decision that you have to make maybe for some people it is but mostly it's like yeah it's a no-brainer to go to college and probably in the end that's a really good thing for you is that you know you don't want you don't want to to not have that solid base of Education which will allow you to be much more successful later on so like that's a good example of groupthink where you just automatically following the herd and you're actually getting some good benefit from it you know other examples are sometimes that there is there is um there are trends or fads that start off with groupthink and if you're not in tune with them a lot of times it's good to kind of see you know where is the words the herd starting to move towards so for example when the internet came online you know a lot of people started internet businesses they started making websites people started talking about it stock started started becoming hot so if you were just kind of starting to observe that trend and you were not really into the internet yet you started seeing that you started following it through herd mentality just through think because everyone else was doing it that would actually been good for you because there's so many great benefits from the internet you get so much free information a much better way to shop you can save money you can connect with friends better you can make money yourself through it so all these these positive benefits from the internet which actually turns out to be very like very huge permanent improvement to a human society which is not just a little quick fad a little blip on the radar it's here to stay and so getting getting on board with that one as early as you could would have been great so following the herd there was nice in that case also like with PCs if we go even earlier back if you were resisting to become a PC adopter nowadays like you know you need to know how to use PC you don't you know how to type like that kind of stuff following herd mentality on that is great because you start getting all the benefits of being able to use a PC and your computer makes you more efficient so you know so many different benefits you get from PC from word processing applications to sharing stuff with friends and family to you know working more efficiently having skills to get to get better at work to be more efficient at work to manage projects emails all that stuff so in those for those examples you know getting getting on board with groupthink is good and so you know I guess the way I'm gonna wrap this up is to say that there is a balance that you want to have there but in general especially if you're talking about business I think financial success and you're talking about personal success and getting the kind of results that you dream of that most people don't get and you realize that what you want is what most people don't have and will never have at least for the foreseeable future then you want to start thinking about how do I do stuff differently you know if everybody is saying that I should be starting an online business by doing XYZ in market ABC then maybe that's not the best way to go what if I kind of take some of the best lessons from that but then actually do my own thing deuce like something slightly different so at the same time I mean I guess the underlying point the bottom line is that you want to really be very conscious and use your judgment and be very aware of what the trends are how rooms think works and start thinking about how to be doing stuff differently I guess my strategy I think the ideal strategy is to do things on your own and be contrarian but not for contrarians sake do it because it makes sense to do it for you and also at the same time don't turn a blind eye completely to groupthink into trends that are happening society or even fads because those can be valuable indications of stuff that you should be paying attention to that's not on your radar so use your judgment do the stuff that you got to do to be unique be yourself don't be afraid of that don't blend in just for the sake of blending in peer pressure all that completely unnecessary and unhealthy but also pay attention to some of the trends because those can alert you to some of the good stuff and when you're using your judgment like that I think you'll find that you'll get much better results and you'll start to create that kind of life that few people have because bottom line is that you start doing things differently than most people do you