Gordon Ryan & John Danaher: NEVER Lie To Yourself About Your Skillset

at some point you want to overtake your mentors you want to get to a level where you're better than the previous people and a good Mentor wants that for you yes to give you an example right here now I

believe I'm currently 55 years old Gordon is in his mid-20s Gordon already knows at least as much about Judit 2 as

I do plus he has his own elements in his game where he knows more than I do so I would have no problem saying at this point he knows more than I do about Jitsu he knows everything I know and he

has stuff that he's invented himself that I don't know um and speaking to this compounding effect that you guys were talking about before um you know the first few years of training with John it was just John showing me moves

okay and now I have to learn each individual move each system and I have to try to chain them together and you know beat the best guys uh whereas now it's John gives a general idea to me I

come back two days later or 3 Days Later a week later and now I have like a whole different system developed and along the way I'm bouncing ideas off him he's giving me his opinions we kind of bounce

ideas off one another so he gives a general idea and then 3 weeks later we have a whole new system developed around this general idea that he gave me a few weeks ago if you don't have a million dollars

yet you're living a much lesser life than what could be easily available to you with the right guidance my head coach has freed up a few spots in his calendar to hold one-on-one strategy calls with the highest quality applicants if you're doing well already

and you're looking to accelerate your momentum and do even better click the link in the description now and apply for your strategy session more at the end of this video today I'm chatting with John danaher John's one of the most

respected I don't think you'll disagree if I say perhaps the most respected uh coach in Brazilian jiu-jitsu is numerous world champions in his team the ones

that I know best are Gordon Ryan um Gary tonin and probably a few others that I'm unaware of but um I really look forward to chatting with you I look at your Instagram and I

seen the way that uh that you write and my friend Jake Jake Shields is my main you know MMA coach Jiu-Jitsu coach and I I started looking at your Instagram

influenced by him and I'd see the the little excerpts or comments that you make and before I ever looked you up at all I thought that's interesting this guy's like a like a philosopher of

Jiu-Jitsu and my brain kind of picked that up that I had uh I had a minor in philosophy and then I kind of just kept going and uh was two class as a away I could have had a second bachelor's degree you don't get paid anything for

your bachelor's degree in philosophy so you're absolutely correct about that as you know but then I looked you up later on when I did interviews with Gary and and Gordon and I uh I seen that you

were going to Columbia that uh you were teaching there at one time yeah yes teaching philosophy yeah it's um uh I've always believed that I I've made many

foolish errors in my life but the one wise decision that I made was to study philosophy in school yeah was one thing that I have absolutely no regrets about

yeah what were some of your uh bigger takeaways that maybe from a person or a general thought that that helped you in your um your other planning in life the most important two things that I would

say uh are very basic in nature and didn't even require going to school to to learn these are the ideas that first the most important thing that philosophy teaches you is not answers because the

truth is that philosophy doesn't really give you a set of answers which can be empirically proven there's there's no proof to the ansers of philosophy what

it does though is it shifts the emphasis on the questions you ask and I've always believe that that the measure of a of a person's intellect is much more wrapped

up in the questions that they ask than the answers they provide um the second big element is the idea that if you are going to give answers you have to be able to give rational justifications for

them at every level and the question will become what kind of answers count as rational in the physical sciences obviously there's a whole experimental

method um in the case of philosophy it's done mostly through rational argument adhering to uh uh laws of of logic etc

etc and so this idea that you measure people by the quality of the questions they ask and in a world without definitive answers there has to at least

be a rational basis for any answers you give in life and those two things follow me into Jitsu and um so I've always prided myself on someone who asks a

different set of questions than most people do in the area that I've chosen to work in in jetsu and who looks hard for rational provable answers uh to the

various questions that I ask I I was reading um I took all sorts of classes but I remember eventually I came across Bertrand Russell's pap

uh on the problems with philosophy yes and he made a a comment in there or at least as I remember it it might be a paraphrase not a direct quote but he he made a comment that was in alignment

with where my head was growing after you know spending countless hours with fcta and Shel and Hegel and a bunch of people that no one ever heard of if there weren't a philosophy nerd and I thought what are these [ __ ] talking about

the you know the the ey's experience of the eye from the ey's perspective and you know sometimes people would write 200 pages is for something you could kind of say in a sentence or two you know yes and Bertrand got to the thought

that um you know a lot of philosophy isn't worth the paper that it's written on now I read 15 page 15,000 Pages maybe before I read that but but my head was going that way and and I learned some

things that were so immensely valuable of you know you learn how to think and I think that's the the main point that you were getting to that a person learns how to think and deconstruct arguments and

properly reason or construct you know AR sound basic but you'd be shocked how few people actually adhere to those in their in their daily living less than 1% Yeah

it's you're probably correct about that um but there's there's just something incredibly valuable about the idea of asking a different set of questions than

your predecessors in a given area and looking at things from a different perspective and then pushing yourself on your own answers okay these are the answers I've

given what justification can I give for these answers and different kinds of questions allow for different kinds of justifications as I said in the physical sciences they're mostly empirical um in

mathematics they're they're mostly logical but there has to be some kind of rigorous testing process for answers that you give so often we just give answers to questions to a set of

questions that our forefathers asked and then we trust the answers they give and when you when you do that you'll get this the same outcomes in life as your

forefathers got if you want to go on and make progress ask the questions differently and subject yourself to a harsh process of testing every answer

given something I think very valuable that you and I were discussing off camera was related to the the value of of mentors and uh the compounded learning that comes from that and I

thought that I had related to philosophy that uh again you know this conversation will be for you know 2% of my audience are going to love this and they're going to watch it several times and 90% are

the are part of the 99% that we were discussing that are incapable of logic or reason and you know was offended by their own stupidity perhaps but

um when I I thought about the the value of mentorship we I made a comment to you earlier that when I wanted a boxing coach I found a multi-time world champion boxing coach and when I wanted

to learn a bit about Jiu-Jitsu I found a multi-time world champion you know MMA fighter There Was You Know many people said the best jiujitsu guy at UFC at the time and you of his career and when you

do that when you're learning from Masters who learned from the Masters before them and learned from the Masters before them uh the compounding effect of that is dramatic and maybe an example

that uh related to our our philosophy discussion I think of the the interplay or the relationship from the you know Socrates to Plato and Plato to Aristotle

and Aristotle to Alexander and you know that might sound old and dull and boring but you know Socrates passed on I mean maybe the wisest person in the world at the time there's little

fuzziness there from Plato's writings and Socrates lack of writing it's hard to argue that Aristotle wasn't quite a brilliant person that you know Aristotelian logic we still use today as a foundation for computer science

advanced mathematics Etc and when you think about pragmatic results that I don't know that this was the intention of the Three core philosoph opers that nurtured this but Alexander conquered

all of the modern world and more and more than anyone knew there was it's not possible that he does that without the influence of those three men before him

yeah yeah it's um uh it's a strange thing about uh learning that most people are happy just

to win their way through life and say oh my experiences will teach me um but when you take on someone as a as a mentor uh and you've made an investigation okay

what are their qualifications are they are they someone who uh is qualified to become a mentor or a coach to me uh for example in my life I had the tremendous

benefit of having a great coach myself my coach was henzo Gracie in Jitsu and he himself was coached by uh uh people

like Halls Gracie and and Hixon Gracie who were outstanding Jitsu players of their gen generation and uh and they came from a lineage of their fathers who

were also outstanding Jitsu competitors and those forefathers were themselves taught by one of the greatest Judo players from Japan who was himself a student

of arguably the greatest Judo master of them all Koo and so you see this kind of lineage so that on my first day in Jitsu

I was being influenced by a lineage of people who had dedic ated their lives to the study of a given subject so that gave me a massive head start even though

in many ways my conditions for beginning the study of jsy were unfavorable I have a a crippled body and I was 28 years old which is extremely late to be staring jiujitsu

but uh I can claim no credit for choosing who my Sensei was he was the only sensei in New York I just have to be very lucky um but when I look back on

it uh this idea of compounded learning I didn't just learn from my own errors I had the benefit of however many countless hours all of

those teachers who had themselves across Generations spent in the art in the subject matter they had investigated and so even in my first few years in Jitsu I

was a beneficiary of all of that experience if you just go through life figuring things out by yourself you're limited to however many hours you you put into that subject you might be a

brilliant person you might be absolutely brilliant but there's only so many hours you have in a given day and over the years that you can devote to a given

subject moreover you will tend to see everything through the prism of your own experience when you bring in generational learning you have multiple

people working in the same subject area you get all of their thousands of hours of expertise plus the benefit of outside

viewpoints which expand your horizons there's simply no comparison a person of very moderate intelligence who's trained through

compounded learning or have a massive advantage over someone of outstanding intelligence who only works with their own experience not in terms of intelligence levels that's irrelevant

it's just the sheer numbers and number of perspective number of hours through multiple generations and the number of perspectives that all of

those linked earlier teachers bring to the table and um and that's why I believe it's so important for people to seek out mentors uh as you pointed out

earlier in a conversation before we began filming you can be done wrong by choosing the wrong mentors uh so it's very important you look for

qualifications in my case it was very very easy My Teacher henzo Gracie was a uh a brilliant world champion so it was easy for me to to make uh uh the

assessment maybe we'll bring in uh a guest for a cameo for a few minutes here get his his perspective on that and how maybe that's helped his life a bit can

we adjust these in so he has a place to sit or else we have to bring a third one um for for those that have any familiarity with uh you know Jiu-Jitsu today you're probably familiar with uh

believe he humbly calls himself King Gordon Ryan that that is correct and uh you know what are the benefits that you've you know accured

from you know finding top mentors training with other world champions and top level people like why didn't you just figure everything out by yourself bro like you're a smart guy you're pretty dedicated why didn't you just do

it yourself um Believe It or Not uh before I met John when I was you know 16 17 years old when I met him uh I was basically just like a meat head bro and uh if some if a move didn't work in

Jiu-Jitsu uh I would just try it harder I would try it faster and i' be like oh if I just go a little bit harder maybe it'll work um and then I met John and I came to henzo and I was already beating

brown and black belts in competition when I was a blue belt and uh I came into henzo and I was just getting heel hooked every single round like 27 times a round and for like six months I tried

to go harder and harder and harder and it just wasn't working so eventually I'm like man like if I don't learn how to do this correct way I'm just never going to be able to beat these guys and I was

getting beat up by guys that were much smaller than me um much much less physically intimidating and uh I was like okay I have to I have to change the way I think about the sport and then um

ever since I met John and I started training in that room uh I just thought about the sport in a completely different way than I could ever imagine that I would think about it um that's

that's uh you know greatly due to to the room in henzo and JN as a coach uh you know just just being like okay well these are based everything on on mechanics instead of just trying to do everything's harder everything harder

and faster getting stronger things like that um base things around mechanics and biomechanics and everything will be easy Once you understand that the the difference between learning going back to that compounding

conversation the difference from learning from you know Masters who trained with Masters who trained with Masters versus trying to do anything by

yourself it'd be akin to you know in finance or real estate like you know in inventing statistics or inventing calculus or trying to figure it out by

yourself is uh you know to to your point Gordon you can you can work very very hard at something but and to your point John if you if you have you only have

limited hours in your life you know and you know a human lifetime is 28,200 days when I think about you know I'm currently 43 John said he started

with 28 which was extremely old I was 42 so I'm quite fresh but you know in six months time I trained uh Jake Shields was my primary coach in the last couple of weeks I've been training with Frank

mirer I've been training with you know Jake was over a few days with Frank few days with um uh Gilbert Burns uh hoist Gracie is coming over um next week next

week so I I found a few guys that are pretty good that uh helped cut my my learning curve and I had good IQ and I had good work ethic exitting was sharing

with Gordon last night we had a chat uh after the fights that I'll have a blue belt in about uh I don't know less than seven months from from day one on the

mats uh and you know I've tested for that with um with Frank Mir with Gilbert burns with Derek Brunson and all of them say you yeah yeah that's legit you know that

my Jake is my main coach and I have my official test coming in up in a couple weeks so if he bust my balls and says no Then we'll see but that's not official

yet but um you know I mentioned this to Gordon last night I'm like well I could have done that even quicker you know the first couple months I kind of fumbled around I didn't spend that much time I didn't take it too seriously and you know I have this terrible habit of

competing with myself that I don't do leisurely things very well I tend to anything tends to turn into a competition but you know a lot of people spend years to do that or you know most people never

do you know that and uh it's not possible to to you're only alive for so long if you're 43 I'd be lucky if I have 300,000 hours left in my life people think they have millions of

hours you know that's decades and they're not good at judging that I'm like no about 300,000 hours and probably I should sleep six hours a night so and then you know other the mundane things

of life so how many you know useful hours does a person have in their life and not nearly as many as we wish for yeah and if you try to figure everything out by yourself you're you're going to be a lifetime fumbler you're going to be

a master of nothing you're not even going to be very good at anything I think that's um it's sad to see people underperform their real potential by having that stubbornness of all figure

it out by myself this I think it's a very common thought that that a lot of people have even um uh even if you were absolutely brilliant

and you just refused any kind of interaction with outside learning think about the terrible situations you could get into let's say for example we had a

hypothetical person who was just absolute genius level intelligence and from childhood remains in relative isolation and purely through the

Brilliance of his mind in 200 and 22 figures out calculus I mean that would be an

intellectual act that would put him in the top top echelons of of uh human knowledge but of course the tragedy is

it was already invented 300 years ago and so no one sees any value in it so you've done this remarkably difficult intellectual act and it has no value

just because no one had ever you'd never interacted with someone and they told you hey you know newtin and liers 300 years ago figured this out already so

you could just learn it in 6 months and work on some new subject area which does need people working on it um and so in

this sense uh if you're not continually interacting with The Cutting Edge of Any Given subject you could just be Reinventing stuff that people already

know just literally just spinning tires just wasting time so not only is it a sad thing for um average people to uh to go through life without mentors because

they don't make the the level that they they could even the most brilliant people among us us would still be massively disadvantaged by refusing

to engage in this compounded or social or generational learning where they they're taking the benefits of working with other people um so yeah one of the first things I think people should

always do whenever they go into any new Enterprises ask themselves a set of simple questions what is the current state of the area that I'm working in what are the big problems that people are working on what are the emerging

trends so that they're working in the areas where growth is occurring secondly who are the people best qualified to give me a solid start now at some point

you want to overtake your mentors you want to get to a level where you're better than the previous people and a good Mentor wants that for you yes for example I to give you an example right

here now I believe I'm currently 55 years old Gordon is in his mid-20s Gordon already knows at least as

much about Jitsu as I do plus he has his own elements in his game where he knows more than I do so I I would have no problem saying at this point he knows more than I do about Jitsu he knows

everything I know and he has stuff that he's invented himself that I don't know so at a younger

age than I even began Jitsu he knows more than I do what do you think is going to happen when he's my age when he's 55 he have literally 10 times the

knowledge that I ever had in my on my best day and so in that sense not only will he be far better at the sport of juty than I ever was he will be 10 times

the coach I ever was and Gordon will himself have students who probably start at the age of five six seven and they will go on to surpass Gordon's

accomplishments in terms of knowledge maybe not in in record that that may be difficult for them but in terms of knowledge certainly and so this idea

of of uh of constantly creating something better than yourself so the next generation is is far more knowledgeable than you are this is the

aspiration that we all need to make but for for your for your uh for your listeners when you go into a subject matter uh into any new area of business

or or sports or what have you start off by asking yourself what are the trends what are the emerging Trends in the sport who are the people best qualified to to teach me actively seek them out

and benefit from the from the learning of generations so that compounded Minds working together in previous generations now become part of your Insight and then

from there in time you will first learn from them and then at some point in the future surpass them I've heard you made this comment a couple times about

emerging trends and I'm I'm curious to to get both of your perspectives of this um a lot of people I'll get you know I have over four million followers on

Instagram so I'm plagued with questions along the lines of um you know what do you think of the new trendy thing whatever you whatever the new trendy thing happens to be that day or that week what do you think about the new

trendy thing and my common answer I don't think about it at all I couldn't care less about the new trendy thing and sort of going back to some of that that

nerd philosophy is is uh even as a child I was much more inclined to to learn something that was sort of Timeless and you know lasting principles over whatever the trendy [ __ ] of the week

is and that's worked out extremely well for me yes and the specific question I'd love to to hear from both of you is you know do you think do you think a person

would be capable of doing the new trendy thing without having that you know firm foundations that in my opinion it takes years to master those firm foundations of something then you can get quite

creative because you know which rules you can break and sort of do the new thing that violates some but if you don't understand those core principles well enough it's going to be disastrous and in the stock market it's going to be

disastrous you're going bankrupt if you think you're going to trade the new nft crypto [ __ ] you're going bankrupt uh this is a very think in your sport I I would suspect that trying to do the new

trendy thing without firm foundations how would that work out for you yeah so John actually explained this to me one time a few years ago and he said when you first start doing Jiu-Jitsu I'm a

dictator and everything that you do I'm going to tell you exactly how to do it why to do it when to do it and just listen to what I say and I I'll get you to where you need to be he's like but

then when you start to get good at the sport and you start to have your own personality and you know what's going on you know the underlying principles of of each move and each position uh then you start to put your own kind of spice your

own personality and uh you can start to get creative with the positions um and speaking to this compounding effect you guys were talking about before um you know the first few years of training with John it was just John

showing me moves okay and now I have to learn each individual move each system and I have to try to chain them together and you know beat the best guys uh whereas now it's John gives a general

idea to me I come back two days later or three days later a week later and now I have like a whole different system developed and along the way I'm bouncing ideas off him he's giving me his opinions we kind of bounce ideas off one

another so he gives a general idea and then three weeks later we have a whole new system developed around this general idea that he gave me a few weeks ago and the whole whole way along the the whole

time along the way uh I come back and I hey I'm running into this problem what do you think of this and he says okay I would do this this and this I say oh I didn't think about that or vice versa and then uh it just it just compounds so

that the the better the more time we are training together the more knowledge we're the better we're getting faster as we go along yeah yeah that makes a lot

of sense yeah um I I often say to my students when they first come in I teach them like a

school teacher but as they gain an expertise there's a shift from school teacher to research program

and at the level Gordon is at now it's not appropriate for me to talk to him like I'm a school teacher it's we're running a at that level

you're running a research program where I'll say okay here's some emerging problems um let's put our minds together and work on those emerging problems uh

we'll each give ideas that will bounce feedback off each other and so at the beginning level you start off more or less as someone who just absorbs

knowledge but there there has to be a level where you you go from absorbing knowledge to creating knowledge colge and that's where you get the shift from school to research program and that's

where any subject area starts to become really exciting and you see this in in science business almost every aspect where you get people working

together as part of a research program who bring countless hours to the table and work cooperatively to overcome problems another thought that comes up

from this is um another you know Common instrument type message or YouTube type message I would see is uh the it's a it's a branch off of the

I'll figure it out by myself as somebody think well I'm already getting good results I'm already above average well you know average is a 50th percentile you're in the 80th percenti

if if you figured it out and you got to the 80th percentile by yourself like yeah you don't want to be average in this life so I love I I I I feel like impeaching

into the choir to you but I love coaches you know I I uh I'm a high school dropout I grew up with uh my father wasn't there my father was in prison for

a lot of my childhood for drug trafficking my mother um uh just not capable of doing much you know about age 10 I realized that uh you know mom's not going to save me Dad's

not here mom's not capable and I had to start figuring a lot of things out for myself and that's not a position that that's fun to be in early in life you know I changed my life quite a lot when I

started paying attention to I wanted I wanted to find good mentors but I didn't have that so I had to do a lot of guess and check guess and check and over time you find strategies and uh ways to make yourself useful to others that are

smarter than you and they they have some sense of you know hope and pity for you some Confluence of Hope and pity and be like this poor bastard that maybe if I pointed him in the right direction you know they do better and I made it a

point to try to do that and and live up to that that hope or expectation so uh maybe they take me the next step or Point me you know a little further down the path if that makes

sense but I kind of got addicted in my 20s 30s you know I went to I had to go to Community College first I couldn't go to a proper University so I went to Community College and I I felt a bit

cocky there that I thought well I'm smarter than these people I'm better than these people and um and I thought I had to have a little talk with myself well done ass if that's true you should

have no difficulty just getting just a a a a a should be all if you're so much smarter and you're you're so [ __ ] smart and gifted you should have a a in everything shouldn't you and then I'm like but then I kind of made myself do

that so and I didn't have a and everything but I had a you know 3.83 from undergrad so I about five A's and a b five A's and a b was kind of the pattern and I built a business during that time I quit my last job when I was

19 so I did a few other things along the way too but but the point I want to get to is I kind of got addicted to the pattern of um you know Finding better coaches finding better mentors and you have to sort through that that not

everybody with a degree is is actually very smart in my opinion very true I got addicted to that idea that uh I got to find the best mentors the best coaches best teachers in any area that I want to

get good at and you know and if I'm not willing to do that then you know maybe I'm not taking it so seriously maybe I should do something else you know so I I made a point when I wanted to to learn more this was supposed to be my hobby

this MMA stuff was supposed to be my hobby and apparently I'm no good at that so anything I do is I tend to have an obsessive personality that I I do a lot of it you know and um but I found you

know great boxing coaches great you know MMA coaches um great Jiu-Jitsu coaches and um it's kind of become my my new little addiction or Obsession in my mind

of you know let us averaging about three hours a day recently which is more than I can do sustainably but I'm averaging about three hours a day on the mats with you know people that are are quite high

level it's very good I've been more committed and more committed to as I've learned over over time the value of finding top coaches learning from great mentors great teachers I've really you

know uh accelerated that commitment to you know what else could I learn from from you know other people that are fantastic in their area and who learned from Masters who learned from Masters

who learned from Masters and there's this thought that like a person you know maybe they went to University and they got their degree so they're done with that now or you know they maybe they got

their blue belt and they're done or their black belt and they're done and now that the people that I see that are at the top of something that any top performer uh world champions they always

have a bunch of coaches around them so if you were world champion why didn't you just say hey man I did it I could do it myself now you still needed a coach it would be tough it would definitely take a lot longer is

for sure what is the value of um you know Michael Jordan had about 10 coaches when he was you know already a multi-time

world champion what is the value of that Contin learning um you know after you've already accomplished a lot of your original goals uh I think it's important I mean obviously the first goal is to

find a way to get ahead of the curve because a lot of my competition specifically is are guys who have been training since they're five years old and I started at 15 and I was much younger than them they've been training

way longer they started before me and they're older um so the first thing is okay how can we get how can we get ahead of the curve and then once we are ahead of the curve then you have to you can't just be satisfied with win

you know one world title okay now you're now you're not just one world title now now you're the best guy in the world but okay now what kind of loser settles for one what what about next time what about next year what about the year after that

um so once you get once you get ahead of the curve then it's all about finding ways to stay ahead of the curve and um that's the hard part that no one talks about is it's it's easy to win a title um it's easy to become a champion but

staying a champion over the years over the decades is is the hard part because now everyone's studying you everyone's trying to get ahead of the curve um so you're your big question is once you are a champion how can I stay ahead of the

curve and and win in succession year after year after year I I know you have limited time why don't you spark up a conversation between John and I that uh would be

valuable for the listeners here before you you exit and carry on with your life today no pressure just make it

perfect um well I think the number one subject that John is good at talking about and listeners will enjoy John speaking about um and a new passion for

you is uh is your MMA and and Jiu-Jitsu uh Journey um so I think uh number one what got you interested in doing

Jiu-Jitsu and MMA um and number two what are the main things that you want to accomplish as far as short short

shortterm and long-term goals as far as technically as far as where you want to be in 3 to five years what you want to work on this year um and how you want to improve as time goes on I'm a little

disappointed Gordon I was hoping you would give us a conversation about the need for modesty and social media etiquette I I almost went into Bears versus gorillas who would win but I

decided to do that in said well Gordon's well known for his humility and humbleness and a joke that I've often had with myself or a few of

my friends that are they're also um you know they like themselves a lot is uh for for someone to understand how truly humble you are they'd also have to understand how great you are wouldn't

they yeah isn't that logically true that's fair yeah for them to understand your true humility and how many times you do bite your tongue and not not speak the full truth of your greatness

they'd also have to understand your your greatness in total yeah so it's probably very hum guy more humble than your reputation is suggests thank you very much for joining a chat with John for a

B I appreciate you coming through thank you Gordon you know I I just thought to myself about MMA I I grew up in a environment where there was plenty of violence

and if you weren't willing to fight and stick up for yourself you'd have you know a lot worse problems in life so um I wasn't shy about that I was never trying to be a bully or a tough guy or

uh but you know there was times in my life where I seen that you know somebody was trying to bully me and I seen that that was going to escalate and you know I might have hit them first or taken first action in the

situation um but yeah as an adult uh you know you hang out at a how many fights did you see at Columbia you know um not many I suppose yeah I think I can

only think of two off hand yeah you Chang your environment over time and you know the environment that I grew up in by the time I was in you know 30ish and going to graduate school you you don't see a lot of violence there and nor

anybody you would be intimidated by if there was was a bit of violence uh probably you'd be okay you know yeah also the kind of violence you witness there has has definite limits on it like

if there would be violence there it's not going to go to guns or knives it's just going to stay at a level where it's never going to be taken seriously

yeah um so you I'd say as an adult the some main motivations for me were just uh I had some of those anchors in my head earlier in life and I thought it'd be fun to explore that more and and have

a you know higher level skill set in uh in MMA uh and it's not that I'm you know stuck on Jiu-Jitsu specifically but uh I've worked with you know some kickboxing Champions boxing champions a

lot of Jiu-Jitsu and MMA guys a lot of guys are you know former current UFC you know Champions or top contenders um but the the main things in my head is I thought well you're in your

40s and you know I really I did better financially than I ever thought that I would really and and I had pretty high goals but um it was that compounding thing that you talked about and I won't

get off topic much but briefly that I was looking at numbers and thinking about financial compounding just arithmetically and you know what exponentiality looks like if you if you

keep engaging in reasonable financial decisions over time that pretty soon it starts Turing into quite a lot of money and the parts that I didn't understand the value of earlier I was doing it but I didn't understand how to calculate the

value you is if you're engaging in responsible behaviors over a period of time you know you you tend to you tend to be learning more so there there's also an intellectual compounding that helps you make better and better

decisions in the finance you know and you also tend to be associated with different sorts of people over time and there's a social compounding effect that also helps you with the finance and uh

those parts uh I didn't know how to factor that in and I don't know the math formula for it but I'm certain that it's true that if you you're surrounded yourself with intelligent people and you make a point to be one of them and learn

some new things every day go to bed a bit less ignorant than when you woke up and um you know you're the act of Behaving that way is going to get you you know be your natural appearance to

be around other people that have similar behavioral patterns so they're also interested in learning a bit more learning a bit more and being a bit better every day and you know having access to that sort of a pure group and

also having you know that compounding of information it sure helps you make better decisions with your finances as well and that turned out quite well so back to our original top I was kind of I kind of needed a new something I'm going

to continue making money and I love money and I grew up poor and um but I kind of needed a new something I was uh they took my gyms away in 2020 with the

hysteria of the time then and uh I was lifting weights for about seven years before that and I was Stronger then than I am now uh then I got fat during that time and I had to go work that fat off I

lost about 30 pounds of fat and gained about 10 pound of muscle So and I've done that since October November so that's you know and I still eat terribly so there's a lot of low hanging fruit there but you know that's pretty

dramatic that helped me from you know mostly from wrestling grappling and Jiu-Jitsu and then also I needed a new intellectual something that uh I I found this helped me think more clearly about business and you're probably one of the

few people in the world that would fully understand that that um when when I had to go learn something from like total beginner or you know very close to Total beginner uh my first formal training I

was with a bunch of Ruffians earlier in life that you have some foundations of how violence works but but you're not you know a well- trained fighter would make a mess of any of those fellas you know so uh yeah that that thinking about

that or thinking about the systems and strategy of oh I have to put myself here not there or you know uh two more inches that way or two millimeters this way sometimes you know makes a big

difference it's quite shocking when you first start off your your learning and you start to realize that the difference between WI winning and losing a fight which is a huge outcome you know the the

ramifications of winning or losing a fight can take your entire life in two different directions um and yet the reasons for

the outcome may come down to the difference between your hand being placed here or here and it's hard for someone you know we typically think about fights has been won by things like

how much heart you got how much mental toughness you have and so to to learn that the outcome is comes down to knowledge and skill and that the difference between winning and losing

might be something that seems completely innocuous and inconsequential is quite shocking and U I know it certainly was for me when I started and um uh the idea

that you know as long as I control someone from with my legs it doesn't matter whether I'm on top or bottom whereas previous to that I was at top or bottom that completely determines who wins and who loses and these seeming

small insights uh as I said Can can play a a huge role in the outcome of a fight and the outcome of the fight can play a huge

role in your life overall uh it's it's a fascinating thing sometimes those little things you know as you said seemingly inconsequential

things you go back to the compounding that if you have flawed foundations and anything um you can grow an edifice you know build a structure upon it but uh

you know reality catches up over time that you you have some voids early on it can be very painful later and I try to urge my clients to think that way when they want to do the new trendy thing and

it's clear to me that they they don't have those foundations that um or they ask me a question along the lines you know Dereck what should I buy right now and you know for my clients that are on

my mryan calls I don't mind sharing what I own in my portfolios but I also get to give them you know 200 hours of explanation of how those systems work and how to think think about them and

why and most importantly why do I own those things you under what circumstances might I buy more or you know or sell those assets and you've made a very important point on uh

several occasions during this discussion already the the idea of of the negative aspects of Trends I think it's very important to make a distinction between

fashion trends which I think are typically quite unimportant and even damaging versus research Trends which are uh usually backed up by foundational

knowledge of a of a given subject matter and uh I agree with you wholeheartedly that fashion trends either ought to be ignored or taken advantage of by people who know more and they can take

advantage of the naivity of people who follow fashion trends um don't chase fashion trends get your foundation sorted out

first and uh start to ascertain research Trends based upon foundational knowledge you can't go wrong wrong with that but it's very very important that people

learn to distinguish between Trends which are fashionable where changes occurring for the sake of change rather than for the CH for the sake of progress

and uh it's a very important distinction to make it seems to me that the human brain is so addicted to the the new thing that they have an extraordinary bias of you know what is the new shiny

thing there is a reason for that historically because human progress has been largely determined by people who successfully chose the important new

thing for example in human history um almost every major sociological change has come from some kind of technological

change whether it be in Warfare and business Commerce or or or what have you and so there's a reason why people put a disproportionate value on change because

historically it's proven to be so important but the problem is for every Epoch changing uh uh advancing technology

there's 10,000 other changes which are completely inconsequential and are mere expressions of fashion and so learning to distinguish between important changes

important fashion uh uh Trends versus the merely uh fashionable uh changes which are change for the sake of change or

valuing something just because it's new rather than because it's important and making that distinction is is is critical to uh to success it I won't disagree with that

you know one 1 to 10,000 ratio historically but I'd suspect that in the modern environment where you know on social media everything purports to be

the new big thing yeah and it might be Millions to one ratio at the moment or going forward it might be a billion to one ratio of little nonsensical Trifles

versus something that as you say might be a Epoch changing event for example the arrival of the internet was Epoch changing it changed our society into um

uh an era of of of knowledge acquisition which completely uh overcame the previous uh modology which was was

book learning and um uh we entered an information age where information could be exchanged on a level that the written word through books could never even hope

to match nonetheless it's probably fair to say that despite the the internet itself being an example of of epoch changing uh

event 99% of of the ideas and opinions expressed on the internet are anything but they're just most of them a vacuous waste of time um nonetheless it is

understandable why people put a great value on on uh change and Trends and and and the latest thing just because historically that has been the biggest

drive in in in human progress but then it's up to us to learn to distinguish between the important aspects of change and the unimportant do you imagine there might be a bias of I'll just go with

your your number of one in 10,000 with with the caveat that I expect it's it's a much lower percentage chance of that just reiterate it's it's probably one in many millions maybe one in many billions

that's going to be a an extraordinarily you know an extraordin area enough event that you would call an Epoch changing event like the Advent of the internet like uh you know gravity understanding

gravity understanding you know Einstein's thought of you know what would happen if I sat on a beam of light and how things like that have influenced you know these things happen a few times per you know century and that's

accelerated over time but I'll go with your number for one in 10,000 so it can be manageable to a viewer do you imagine that one out of 10,000 people is um you

know has has made it a a a habit or hobby to consume 50th percentile information and live the lifestyle of a fumbler or do you imagine that one out

of 10,000 person uh you know tends to have a pretty good grasp of fundamentals no that that led them to yeah there would be someone who had uh an excellent

uh education um not necessarily formal there's all kinds of different education um but uh they had engaged in the learning process that's a bit way of

saying it for an extended period of time and it made a deep study not only through their own experience but through the shared experience of many other brilliant people who had investigated

similar subject material over time and um uh that's almost always the P I think it's Newton's quote I might be mistaken I think it's Newton's quote that if if I have seen farther than others is because

I stood on the shoulders of giants that was Newton yes yeah it's a beautiful quote and it's deeply meaningful in the light of the discussion we're having and people will ask me on occasion smart

people that I respect people that you know that are you know maybe UFC people um some of the top fighters of their generation and say you know well Derek uh you know should I do this or that in

the market or this or that sometimes I tell them well you probably should do nothing right now you probably don't have enough information that that's like like me thinking like well I have a you

know an okay grasp of fighting in the sense that if I had to have a conflict with a a normal person in society I'd feel extraordin early confident that they're probably going to have a very negative outcome I also have enough

sense about me that if I had to compete against high level professionals probably I'm going to have a a very poor outcome you know almost always so in both of those I could say both of them

are factually true that almost always I would win a fight with a normal person that attacked me and also almost always I would lose a fight with a you know highly trained professional that that's

what they've done for 20 30 years um I think there's a danger to for a person to misjudge their you both of those things could be simultaneously true I think there's a danger for someone that that like well I know a little bit about

business so I'm going to be a stock market genius now yeah like well now you're competing against people that had a similar Obsession in decades of experience not a

fair fight yeah yeah and um and you don't know what you don't know for those people yeah yeah it's uh it's definitely true like um learning the limits of your

knowledge is one of the most valuable things you can you can ever do because um we have a tendency especially once be a crew knowledge in one area to assume

that that somehow carries over into other areas and often we're encouraged by the people around us who say oh you're so smart at this and therefore assume that you must be smart in other

areas um whereas in fact that is absolutely not true expertise in one area implies literally nothing about expertise in any other area I'm I'm

reasonably competent in the area that I work in but I'm almost miserably incompetent and almost every other aspect of human living and uh I'm I'm

fully aware of that so you you uh you must keep close tabs on what you're good at and what you're not what you've trained in and what you haven't it's almost Universal that someone who's a

exceptional at what they do has that sort of humility that um there might be a couple outliers but but when you talk to you know you talk

to a normal every guy thinks they're tough every guy thinks they could win a fight you know that's a strange thing isn't it I me um uh not everyone thinks for example that

they're uh good at opera singing I've never sung Opera in my life so if someone asked me to sing I would just immediately claim I'm I'm incapable of doing so and I believe most people

would make the same uh assessment of themselves but if you ask the average person can they fight they always absolutely it's say but you've literally never trained you you have no knowledge

whatsoever no physical skills and yet they all believe they can win and I I believe it's because most people go through their lives with the false assumption that the main determinant of

the outcome of the fight is your spirit okay what kind of fighting Spirit do you have within you and no one has any idea that anyone could have a better fighting

Spirit than themselves I guess it's our vanity speaking to us um but yeah we we we typically have a pretty accurate assessment of our skill level in most things like most people believe for

example they couldn't fly a plane because they can't it's a complicated thing it takes a lot of training to fly a plane and they understand that if they were locked in a cockpit and had to land a plane they would be physically

incapable of doing so but those same people if you ask them hey go fight that guy over there who's 6'6 and 300 lb they'll be like yeah I I can win that I can see myself winning and um so I don't

know what it is about fighting but people have an extremely optimistic view of their of their ability in this regard I saw a

steady once something I believe it's 94% of people believe they're in the top 50% of their driving abilities that's scary so at least six the 6% the other six%

who said no I'm probably a below average driver probably have at least an accurate assessment but you you most certainly believe those 6% to say that they're an a blow average driver there's

probably a high correlation with reality there um I I at least half of the others are I I I lived in New York for for 30

years so I I didn't drive and um so here in Austin I've recently learned to drive at the age of 55 and uh I've been driving for around 3 months and so I'm

absolutely reminded every day of how incompetent I am as a driver I couldn't even imagine judging myself to be in the top 50% of drivers for another five years I I think

I'm absolutely terrible as a driver but um I think most people carry fairly optimistic views of their skill level in most things there's even psychological

studies based on this um uh the Dunning effect D Krueger 2011 2012 yes very very important study and um people tend to

have wildly optimistic views of their skill level in any given area you know I'm really curious your take on that because I've I've summarized you know to make it digestible in an audience I've kind of summarized the

dunan Kruger effect that you know uh most people are too dumb to know they're dumb that they have a Preposterous overestimation of their their abilities or skills I don't know if it's a

question of being dumb they just um uh we we just tend to we we have a native optimism about us that's a good thing I I think in general optimism is a uh a

good General Outlook to have there's no harm in that but it it does have a downside where people can have very very overoptimistic views of skill sets and

where this becomes particularly problematic is where there's no acid test to to which enables you to actually assess your skills relative to the people around you now in in Jitsu it's

extremely obvious because at the end of every class you got to spar people and that gives you a very clear sense of what is your actual skill you can talk all day about how good you are on Jitsu but at the end of the class

you got to spar people and if you're telling everyone you're awesome and everyone is submitting you there's an obvious uh uh a gap between your thought

and reality there is a massive gap between your assessment of yourself and what is actually happening out there on the mat so and jitu it's pretty hard to um uh for for things that they done in

Krueger effect to take hold but there are many activities in everyday life where there is no such uh competitive aspect and and so

your opinions about yourself just don't get challenged moreover there is a rather dangerous culture starting to emerge in Western society today where

people are discouraged from entering into competitive elements where everyone is assessed as being good at an activity despite there being no rigorous testing

process and so this kind of participation trophy mentality as as harmful as it can be on some occasions to get your ass kicked in a competition and realize you're not as

good as you thought you were the consequences of that are not nearly as bad as going through life with a inaccurate assessment of what your actual skill level is um and I think this is

a a dangerous cultural direction for Western Society to be taken I I I have to correct that I misspoke on one word I said most people

are too dumb to know they're dumb and more accurate take on that study is you know there's a subset of people and maybe it's about one and six if you correlate the dunan Krueger study and

think about IQ there's a reason it's illegal in the US that if you have a IQ under 83 you're not allowed to join the military that's correct yeah and the in

the history of the IQ test you know starts in the early 1900s as a you know an entry exam of sort for who's going to be capable to be I believe it's Army study

originally um and you know most of Psychology today is is somehow linked back to IQ test that so there there's a subset of people that want to dismiss the IQ test of like oh there's you know

EQ and whatever other nonsense they want to make up um you know IQ is not everything IQ is but it's pretty damn important it's your ability to process

information and uh or you know or rapidly and accurately and um you know although it's not everything there's some some major advantages to having a higher IQ to to be able to you know

process information accurately so but you're not doing yourself a favor kind of you're bringing your point back to life here you're not doing yourself a favor that you know it's maybe it's

better to for someone to tell you or for you to find out through that testing through real life testing um you know am I as good as I think I am at certain

things and for a person who who gets that feedback that probably I could be better here or probably your internal assessment versus reality there's quite a gap it'd be good to know that you save

yourself a lot of misery in life and there's you know some people are not going to like the result and and fair enough but I think you cause great harm to a population when uh when you take

those tests or those challenges out of life you know they don't want to give grades in some schools or I won't go down this path too far with you but I imagine we're similarly minded about a lot of these things it's it's good for

for a young person to be challenged or tested and and have a more I'll say it this way I think that you pay a steep price for being detached from reality

you know whether I don't always like reality but I really try to accept it as rapidly as possible I don't always like reality but I think you pay a really steep price from being disconnected from

reality when I think there's an old and Rand quote along the lines of uh you can ignore reality for a period of time but you can't ignore the consequences of ignoring reality and those days or

months or years go by and you can't get that time back you know would it be nicer to learn earlier oh I should change course I should do something more suited for my natural abilities or goals

you know indeed when you think of the you know mentee Mentor relationship or the the interplay and how that evolves over time that you know you mentioned earlier in

Gordon mentioned that you you have a different relationship on day one and and over over time uh you know any any quality Mentor you should really wish to have in your life they want you to do

better than them occasionally somebody tries to poke at me and be like I'm going to be richer than you and like I hope you are but that's kind of the whole [ __ ] point the go I hope you are so if you're not then you're a

failure yeah yeah especially someone who's younger but how how do you think of that playing out in terms of the uh those relationship Dynamics over time or

the the burden of you know choosing the write students because that is what you do it is what I do as well that to to join a program mine they can't just go

click a button on the internet and pay a few thousand dollars that they have to you know fill out an application they have to have an interview they might have another interview Etc my own case might be a little different to most

because in in my case I I don't actually choose students I I have a open door and people come in some people like what I teach some people don't the ones that

don't leave and the ones that do stay and um uh in so far as you can talk about picking students I do have and

even though I don't physically pick out you you're going to train with me they just come in the door there is an element in my teaching where I

tend to focus on the best people in the room and this is always going to be a controversial approach because I think we live in an era where

we put a a very very heavy emphasis on on catering to the people in the room who are struggling the most um I take

the opposite approach I I tend to believe that as the best people in the room rise they will drag the level of the room overall higher whereas when you

devote most of your resources to the people who are struggling the most the truly gifted ones quickly become bored disinterested and leave and

tend to leave you with a room with less overall talent and when the the overall Talent of the room diminishes the

expectations of the people in the room as a whole tend to diminish I've always believed that a group of people will rise to a level

determined by the expectations of what they they wanted to achieve and the more role models they have in the room the greater their expectations will be even

if you don't meet your expectations if the expectations are set High even failure in a room like that will be better than success in a room where expectations are

low um so my whole thing is based around the idea of paro's principle that in a room of a 100 people somewhere between 10 and 20 will be

outstanding students then you you iterate that uh that principle so that of the top

20 among them two will be truly outstanding and put your primary emphasis on making those two and the

surrounding 20 the best people you can create a culture where the other 80 people in the room look at them as Role

Models as something to Aspire to people who are inspired will operate above themselves they will find a way to

drag whatever level they are up to something closer to that level even when they don't make it they're better than they would have been if they had started off with a low set of expectations I've

been happy with that so my whole thing is get the best people and make them the best in the world create a culture where people look up to that as an inspiration

inspired people people can do incredible things even people who you thought showed little promise when they're inspired will shock you at how good they

can get and um this has always been my Approach so even though I don't physically pick students they just come in through an Open Door over time it soon emerges that progress rates in

Jitsu are not equal not everyone in the room progresses at the same rate um a combination of physical and mental attributes that c certain people have will make them progress faster than

others and I tend to focus on that top 20% in the expectation that the better they get the higher the expectations of the

room overall will be and so something which initially sounds harsh and even immoral that's perhaps too strong of a word

but it seems questionable to say you're going to pay less attention to 80% of the people in the world room in favor of the 20 uh most talented and yet at the

end of the day that's the kindest thing you can do because that 80% will find themselves at a higher level of skill and performance than they ever would

have been if I focused only upon them I think it makes a lot of sense and we could um if if I explain what I do uh in just a bit more detail is when they

fill out an application the number one thing that want to know is like you know what is their level of commitment M why do they want to work with me instead of whoever why is it important to them that

they want to work with me you know are they sincerely committed do they have a good grasp I mean a lot of even in my marketing which is supposed to be marketing I say no you're going to work your ass off if you're not going to work

20 hours a week don't come it's not for you things like that that um in in the marketing I tell them you know you're you know you take these programs you're going to lose sleep you're going going

to be frustrated um you're going to curse me you're going to curse yourself and wonder why you've subjected yourself to this and you know 10 or 12 weeks later as a course is wrapping up you're

going to learn so much that you're going to thank me and most importantly you're going to thank yourself if you did the work I want to make sure that somebody who's not inclined to do the work they shouldn't come they're not going to be

they're not going to say good things about me they're not going to have good outcomes for themselves and I don't really want to spend my time with that subset of people and it's not really a win to either of us either nobody really benefits from that if somebody has

inappropriate expectations that they I don't teach people how to get rich quick I do teach them how to get very rich over time so I think that might clarify

that Gap a little bit but um I've been helping people and you know uh I've had you know public speaking companies I've been involved in for you

know almost 20 years and I I I absolutely play favorite that the people that have the you know they make the most effort might not be the smartest person but when I see somebody

making a lot of effort I'll stay late with that person I'll work more with that person if somebody's uh you know if they're lazy probably I'm not the right person for that but it's not somebody that I'm going to respect and it's not

the culture that I want to have around us that I I don't I don't care to spend time with lazy people or I can't be more dedicated to their success than they are if that makes sense so I'd rather have

somebody that I ideally you'd like to have brilliant people that are hard working and you learn things from them that's wonderful and but I'd prefer to have somebody with an average IQ and a

great work ethic over somebody who thinks he's very smart and maybe has some talent in some areas but is kind of lazy and he's going to make a lot of mistakes over time yeah and I love what you said that building a culture like

you described that uh a person who who's maybe is not going to be a world champion at something is still going to have a much higher outcome uh being in a room with world champions and being

inspired by that environment and and really looking deeply inside themselves I don't mean to put wordss in your mouth but this is how I interpreted your your comments looking deeply inside themselves to be the best that they

could be they're going to have a better outcome in that environment than if they were um you know they were better relative to the other people in the room but in a much lower skill

set room that and that might Inspire them to to carry that on to other areas of their life as well that could be very impactful yeah I I also think you know um

it's it's a mistake to say oh someone's in this room and they're not working hard so they're lazy um I've actually met only a tiny number of truly lazy

people in my life what I do find is that a lot of people are uninspired and when you're uninspired everyone's lazy I'm lazy at keeping my

room tidy because I just don't see any point in keeping one's room tidy um to me cleaning a room doesn't inspire me at all so I'm never going to be good at it so you could easily say about me hey

you're very lazy with your with your room cleanliness like you got clothes thrown all over the floor etc etc um and they would be correct in so far as I am

lazy in that regard um but I think when we call people lazy in the vast majority of cases what you really mean is that they're just uninspired in that domain

and so the idea is to to make people find okay well what are the domains that inspire you and if you can successfully push people towards a domain in which they become inspired suddenly the person

who everyone dismissed is lazy will suddenly become a very hardworking person and you almost do people a disservice by catering to them too much in an area

where they're just not inspired make it a competitive room if they if they're not inspired in that room it just means they they're in the wrong place and it's better to let them know they're in the the wrong place that they can go and

find the right place for them where they will be inspired where they will become something rather than just cater to them in in an industry where they're not even particularly interested I I don't disagree with

anything you said but when a person comes to me and they're they're inspired by smoking weed and playing video games but they'd also like to make a million dollars this week that's probably not

the right person to work they're just being straightforwardly unrealistic yeah you can make money with video games but it's not going to happen in a week and it's going to require very hard work and study so um I would encourage that

person to go elsewhere that I'm not the right person for them yeah that's not really the subset that I'm looking to help it's trickier in in in many cases uh you said that you asked some

questions I don't even do that I just look at them I look at their actions because people will say all kinds of things but um uh words lie all the time

but actions don't and uh so when someone says me you know I'm going to be your next World Champion I just don't say a thing I just nod my head and then if they're there tomorrow morning at 6:00

to train and then every subsequent day for the next 5 years okay then I take them seriously but very few people can keep

that up and very soon you'll see their actions betray what their real uh enthusiasm levels are maybe wrapping up what would you say to somebody here that uh they think

they're going to be the next world champion in in their domain maybe maybe they want to have a you know a financially abundant lifestyle maybe they want to be high level jiujitsu

player maybe they have some other high level aspiration on life for for the person here that that is serious that is willing to make a a commitment over time and not get bored with some of the

mundane things that a person must endure SL love to be great at something what would you say to that person is there's only two things you

got to invest in your skills and your character when most people go through life they obsess over

one thing that's their reputation your reputation is owned by the people around you your reputation is just the opinion of people around you that's all it is

you don't own it you have no ownership over it so it can change like the wind sometimes it's good sometimes it's bad some people are going to love you for what you say some people going to hate you for what you

say don't even pay attention to it pay attention to the two things you truly own which are your skills in your character they don't change with other people's opinions they're set in a

Bedrock they are equally important and as one grows the other will grow alongside it focus on character in terms

of building virtues and habits that Propel you towards greatness and whatever domain you you've decided to devote yourself

to and then understand that mechanical skills will be the foundation upon which your success will

depend skills take time to build they don't come overnight that's why so few people have them moreover they are unequally

distributed they tend to go to those who work longest and smartest don't think that just by slogging away putting time in you're going to gain skills it's

equal physical and mental work you have to be able to ask intelligent questions you have to constantly ask yourself the question is this really the most

efficient way of doing things or is it just the traditional way of doing things and is there a better way and constantly asking yourself these questions building

skills investing in your character building winning habits over time these are the two things you want to focus on skills and

character I love what you said and um at every frustrated moment of my life where you you have doubters or detractors I've always focused on that if you had you know had a girlfriend that was

disgruntled with me early in life teenager in my 20s and she wanted to leave I thought to myself well if if we're both here and I have it in my head

I want to go over here and I have a you some concept of you know backwards and forwards engineering that of like what would be necessary for me to to close the gap from my current reality and in a

future reality an outcome that I would like to have in the future and I've always been very happy to be like well I'm I'm going to do this and this and this because I'm going over here and

that's if that's in congruent with you know the path that you want to live then you let me help you move let me help you carry on with your life and uh not have that frustration for either of us and

I always thought it was great to find people around you that um well well a on a personal note based on what you said I I think you know I always thought about building my value of like if I got

distracted from what from going over here and addressed an ongoing series of Trifles probably getting farther away from my goals you know and I thought to

myself that if be easier to be better long term to separate from someone who has uh incompatible goals or to you know ignore some you

inconsequential detractor um and folus on well how how do I raise my value over time how do I make myself more useful to myself how do

I make myself more useful to others and I'm not the most altruistic person but I I'd say you know quite selfishly I love to make myself useful to others that I I

found their um you know human reciprocity works better yeah when you when you're useful and you're always adding value to an environment or always

adding value to relationships so I don't think there's anything insincere about that and that no no high level performer has ever been offended by me saying that you know some lowlevel performers maybe

do but um it's kind of a goal of mine that if I have sustainable friendships or relationships how could I help them with something that would be you know high value to them and low cost to me

and uh you know maybe it's I don't necessarily have something in mind that I want right now but when you have uh a lot of people like in your telephone they're happy to take your phone call you know yeah and once in a while just a

couple words from them might be very you know high value to me and low expense to them and I love finding those trade-offs that how can I make myself very useful at a low cost and how could I get

something very valuable at a low cost to those around me those trade-offs are you know whenever you see that question how can I make myself more useful to others

you will almost always see that the answer is the acquisition of skills yeah and as important as skills are they

skills need to be directed okay you can use skills for terrible ends like musolini had skills but they were used in a dreadful way um and so that's

where character becomes important and so it's the combination of skills and character character gives direction to the skills and skills provide the horsepower to get the work done and when

you ask that question which is such an important question how can I make myself someone who's valuable to those around you you will almost always see that the answer comes down to some variation of I

need to add skills I I agree with that and the character component um people that know me well I always keep my word about things especially when it's inconvenient

that's the point that's the point where it [ __ ] matters if a person keeps their word or not so particularly when it's inconvenient I'll make sure that um if I tell somebody that I'm going to do something I have to make sure that I do

that and and you know in in my internal selft talk I think well you know your your reputation's important and you make a good distinction of you know character and skills versus being concerned what

others think about you and I sort of don't give a [ __ ] with the massive people think about me if they if they like me that's nice and if they don't like me that's fine and I kind of have a thought in my head that I I shouldn't be

concerned about the opinions of others unless it's the sort of person if I wouldn't ask them for advice if it's not the sort of person that I would go to and ask them for advice that's where you need to distinguish between character and reputation yeah then why the hell do

I give a [ __ ] about their opinion if it's not somebody that I would ever ask for advice or anything anyway you know if that makes sense Point yeah but you know I I do want to be well respected by other people who I respect and I I make

sure that uh I do my part in that and I I think that's very useful for for anybody else you know if if you're if you're a super nice person and you're a Perpetual altruist and you want to behave that way that's that's nice uh

but even if you're you know quite a selfish person I'm I'm quite selfish and I don't mind saying that and I I find that most a lot of my friends are too but you know we always find time to help

each other with little things or Advance the ball a bit and uh I'm not selfish in that way I think of um you're not going to do everything in life by yourself you're going to have to have other high performing people around you if you want

to accomplish anything significant so you have to keep your word to those people you have to keep your word to yourself or um it's okay that you don't have to be concerned with the the opinions of most

people in the world but probably you should you be loyal you know loyalty consistency of Integrity Etc I think are quite important things that

um you can really spoil a whole social network by breaking your words you know you could do a thousand things right and one or two things that are kind of and

that can throw you off the rails for quite a long time yeah yeah so avoid doing those things avoid doing that you everybody has a moment in their mind where they they they think am I really

going to you know pay the price to be to have that consistency and integrity uh or character is the the word that John's using um those are the most important

times to to be consistent there to to do things that are inconvenient and costly to you um you because your your reputation with with important people or

your reputation with yourself will suffer if you don't do that and if you have that sort of character or integrity you don't have to a post I made recently on

Instagram around this idea I was talking about self-confidence I said self-confidence is not having a concern that you know oh I'll make everybody like me I'll behave in a way that everybody will like me self-confidence

is you're you're so confident in your way of life or your way of doing things you don't give a [ __ ] if somebody else likes it or not you're going to continue living that way of life and doing what

you do with your people or your subculture you know and um I think that's you know related to this conversation that you can't be a dirt bag and have high level outcomes you you

have to you have to have high level skills and you have to have relationships with other people that you're going to have a high level of character with them and with yourself to show up and do your part and I think

it's pretty difficult for someone who's got a a completely deficient character to be able to form the kinds of social networks that are necessary to develop a

high skill level in any activity yeah I think just the fact you need to work cooperatively with many people for a long period of time attests that if you've attained certain skill level in

some area you probably have at least some good aspects to your character it's also important to understand that all of us are deeply flawed characters I'm a deeply flawed character myself I have

many deficiencies of character I have many huge holes in my knowledge even in my area of specialty forget about all the other things in life and so it's important that everyone understand this

is very very much a work in progress um I'm I'm a deeply flawed character and as I said I have very big and significant gaps of knowledge even in the area of

which I'm supposed to be an expert in and so it's important to always have the sense of yourself as a work in progress over time and that whatever character failings we have here today and whatever

failings we have in skills here today can be accommodated or improved over time and that's your that's your lifelong mission to just keep improving and as you said earlier in the interview

this can be a very small incremental progress it might be 1 2% every day in a given skill area or one aspect of your character and if you do that for a year

it it counts waren Buffett made a comment around 80 age 86 he said he he thinks he understands about 2% of what there is to

know about business that's and I think that made a lot of sense that that gave me um that's about the same name is my knowledge of Judit um I thought to myself well you

know I I know I know enough things about business that I've I've done quite well I made quite a lot of money in real estate I made quite a lot of money in entrepreneurship I made quite a lot of money in stock market and I'm also

acutely aware that um there's you know I have a tremendous number of blind spots or imperfect information and if you know if Buffett knows 2% um it might be you know at that time

he was 86 I was about 36 and if he know 2% then you know it might be cocky for me to think I know 1% that might be a cocky thought and I debate that still years later I still

have that ongoing debate in my head do I know 1% yet don't that's why it's so important to have a very clear sense of what is your area of expertise because

remember in any given skill area you might uh to use Buffett's number you you might have 2% of it down well but but that can cover a

significant amount of uh of the subject area you're you're in and you can carve out a great career provided you stay within that 2% but when you start going out into other areas as your ego expands

you oh well I'm good in that area so I'm probably going to be good in this one too that's when you run into problems i' you know summary statement I'd say don't lie to yourself about your current skill sets if you I think you

said that quite eloquently as well that if you know one or two% of what there is to know about something um you might be the best in the world at that thing you you don't no one has

perfect information or perfect knowledge and anyone that tells you that they do you should be deeply concerned about about their judgment and about the where their future is heading or where your future will be heading if you couple

your life to them so people that I see are the highest performers uh tend to have some level of uh you know conscientiousness or some of them even anxiety about you know how can I get

better how can I get better and trying to fill those little holes and fill those voids and and be a bit better every day so you have to find a good coach anything that you want to get good at you're not going to be great at everything but if you want to be great

at anything you have to find someone who's done that before you achieved high level results it's obvious that they've done so and um you don't have enough hours in your life there's not enough

days there's not enough hours for you to figure out everything by yourself you have to have a great coach the best people in the world doing anything they have great coaches still after world champions I've talked to countless

people from all sorts of sports different gold medals from the Olympics different uh you know Super Bowl winners etc etc a lot of Fighters everybody that's at the top

anybody that's an existing Champion best in the world they still have a team of great coaches multiple coaches to help them fill in those voids and maintain their skill set I think it's a extraordinary

blunder um so you're you're you're really going to have a fraction of success that you could have had in your life without that compounding knowledge over time and

having those mentors so uh John I I know you've played that role for many people and you have a lot of years left and you to continue to do that so uh you I have a lot of respect to everybody that I know that knows you speaks

extraordinarily highly of you I appreciate you taking a bit of time to to chat and pass on some of your your wisdom to me thank you Derek and to the people here thank you very much thank you you watch this video all the way

through and that tells me you're dedicated to learning more and earning far above average outcomes in your life congratulations for that but now it's time to take action if you could have earned those results by yourself you

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