When asked, most successful people will tell you a story about how they became successful, but unfortunately it won’t often be true. It will just be what they wished was true, like they worked hard, or were courageous, or broke the rules in some dashing way.

In this video series (3 parts), we’ll break down the proven strategies and tactics of success that don’t require any starting advantage and actually align with scientific studies on what makes people successful.

This 3rd video covers these strategies:

12. Have a high failure rate
13. Get the right coaches
14. Create a supportive peer circle
15. Go against the grain
16. Get reliable feedback
17. Make it smaller
18. Reduce pressure
19. Make integrity your reason
20. Make it sustainable
21. Measure yourself quantitatively

Dan’s Top Resources

The Naked Truth: Using Shameless Honesty to Enhance Your Confidence, Connections and Integrity

Get Dan Munro’s latest book to learn how to build your integrity and truly be yourself without fear.

The 3X Confidence and Authenticity Masterclass Program [Udemy course]

A complete in-depth guide on how to build your confidence by being authentic and living with integrity, following Dan Munro’s secret 3X Confidence formula.

Overcome Your Fear of Rejection… Permanently [Udemy course]

Say goodbye to fear of rejection, approach anxiety, and missing out on opportunities. This quick but thorough course will destroy your limiting beliefs around rejection.

The Legendary Life: Build the Motivation and Confidence to Create an Authentic Lifestyle [book]

Dan’s first book covers a complete blueprint for designing your life in a way that matches your core values, showing you how to overcome fear, set and achieve powerful goals, and build your confidence without needing other people to like you.

Nothing to Lose: Using Curiosity to Destroy Hesitation, Procrastination and Limiting Beliefs [book]

A philosophical examination of the confident mindset, from a scientific and practical viewpoint. This book will help you decode confidence into a set of beliefs and behaviours that you can control.

Full transcript (unedited)

welcome back to the brojo online podcast today we’re going to talk about how to win at everything

next tip have a high failure rate if you have a low failure rate you’re playing it way too safe i think a failure rate of about 80 is probably a good indicator that you’re at the right level so if you’re a martial artist and you’re losing 80 of your fights you’re probably in the right class right because you get it right by getting it wrong the way to become really good at something is to get it wrong all the ways it can be gotten wrong so that you never get it wrong again you know you’ve got to get in your reps and and work out every single possible error so you can see the fundamental design you see the matrix underneath the thing and then you’ll be unstoppable like somebody applies this to say building a business like they’re willing to get rejected by clients more than they’ll get accepted and so on so forth they’re the person that by the time they’re successful they’re unbreakable they could rebuild their business from scratch overnight they would always be good at business for the rest of their life because they’ve gotten it wrong every way it can be and they’ll never do it again whereas people who try to get it right all the time usually just stay in a very safe little comfort bubble which means no growth and eventually it means death because things that aren’t going up or always going down so if you’re not failing a lot you’re actually going backwards you just won’t feel it straight away right now i’m doing it in chess i’ve set the settings on my online chess app to put me against people who are better than me so i quite often lose when i’m playing as people are better than me i quite often lose but when i’m playing against people same level as me i quite often win because i’m constantly practicing against people who are better than me and you can in the app you can analyze your games and i don’t analyze the ones i win very often sometimes i do just for glory but most time i’m trying to analyze the ones i lost why did i lose i want to learn all the ways you can lose all the mistakes you can make all the blunders you can make all the wrong moves so that i don’t make them when i see that i win i don’t really learn much other than the other guy made mistakes right i want to learn how to stop making mistakes because you know chess is a great representation of all life chances really you lose by making mistakes you don’t win you lose so in chess it’s always somebody lost not somebody one that’s that makes sense you’re just going to make less mistakes than the other guy and you win and that’s so often whenever i analyze my chess games whoever won is the guy who made the least mistakes that’s every time the case so make the most mistakes so you end up being the person who makes the least next tip you’ve got to get the right coaches and mentors i’ve already talked about getting coaching but these should be niche specific experts with verifiable results that can be repeated and they should be good at passing on that information all right not everyone is a good teacher you know magnus carlsen is the top chess player in the world at the moment but when i try to follow his teachings it doesn’t really help me because he’s kind of a genius even he doesn’t really know how he does stuff right but you go a couple of levels down and you get the guys who got there by learning not by being sort of talented and they can tell you exactly how they got there and they can tell you exactly what you’re doing wrong when you do your moves because they’ve made all those mistakes themselves and they had to learn it so you want to look for the person who can translate great experience and true success into practical principles that can be applied by anyone right those are the kinds of people need to be your mentors they need to be a proven success and they need to know how to translate that into a set of principles that other people can follow next tip have a supportive peer circle and connections ruthlessly eliminate anybody who doesn’t lift you up i’m talking even people are just neutral get rid of them create space for better people assume everyone has a big impact on you everyone you have any sort of interaction with they have a big impact on you whether you consider yourself to be resilient or not you can’t help them manipulating the way your brain is wired their information enters your brain pathways are created it’s all out of your control so if those negative if those are people who are discouraging pessimistic unhelpful you won’t be able to block the effect they have on you it’s literally not possible to interact with someone and block the effect that they have on you the interaction is in itself an effect so you want to make sure if you’re being affected by people it’s good effect you want to be around people who build you up all right it should feel like your quality of life improves when you’re in their presence if it doesn’t feel like that ditch him one of the greatest ways i saw this play out as i actually went to a dating coach house in vegas i was staying there uh temporarily to hang out with my publisher and he lived in a house because he was a dating coach at the time and he lived in the house with all these other dating coaches and every morning they they all have their own little side businesses and everything and every morning they sit around the kitchen table working on their laptops and like every five minutes or so like how do you do this or you just you should do that well good job with that and there’s constantly working together as like a team like [ __ ] navy seals to achieve their own individual things together as a team and i was sitting there i’m like this is a house like this is just flatmates and holy [ __ ] they’re [ __ ] like ruthlessly efficient they’re just so helpful like this is like this inner circle thing happening here like nobody stands a chance against the combined power of this group and i was looking at him like that is a friend circle that’s what you want around you right i’m not just talking about like they’re all trying to succeed in business but they went and hung out together they ate together they chased girls together whatever it is they did they were this team and being around them made you a better person next tip going against the grain i got this from uh uber successful marketer evan pagan if everyone else is doing it it’s probably wrong that’s a general business um kind of cliche that i’ve found proven to be very very true the majority of anything is usually in the wrong because they’re the majority and the majority generally is a kind of momentum of leaders and followers and most of the followers don’t really know why they’re in the majority they’re just following people who are doing what’s best always begin as outliers they’re always weird freaks it’s only later that everyone follows them because it turns out they knew what they were doing you know when cryptocurrency first came out people were giving it away now it’s you know the amount they’ve given away is worth billions they were the freaks and now they’ve moved into the center now it’s going to become normal to have cryptocurrency it used to be having tattoos made me stand out now i walk around and it’s weird to not have tattoos right the weirdos end up becoming the leaders and the what everybody else thinks is usually either wrong or behind like if you’re reading the news to get information on the housing market you’re already too far behind the news is behind right ask any property investor they’re not looking at the news to get their information about properties they’ve got other sources they’re more up to date if i look on the internet for what’s happening in the coaching world most coaches or at least the products aimed at them talk about marketing online that’s not what the best coaches in the world do okay that’s what a few successful coaches do but the best coaches in the world you don’t even hear about they don’t have a website they charge [ __ ] 20 grand an hour to work with them and they reach out to you one to one all right you don’t even get to talk to them unless they invite you right they’re doing something different to what every other coach is trying out they’re trying to do with [ __ ] facebook advertising or whatever [ __ ] they’re trying to do that doesn’t work so in general you’ll know you’re probably doing something right if it a works and b isn’t the way everybody else is doing it next tip get lots of feedback but get it from reliable sources and dismiss feedback from unreliable sources if you’re in business get your feedback from your clients and your business mentor and no one else if someone isn’t paying you for your business their their their feedback is [ __ ] you’ll get a lot of feedback running a business from people who have not spent a dollar with you ignore it go to the person who spent the most money with you and get feedback from them that’s going to be valuable feedback social life find the people who like you and ask why do you like me what’s good about me what do you think of my strengths don’t go to people who don’t like you for feedback right if you’ve got a discouraging mom that’s always kind of secretly hated you don’t listen to a word she says about how you should be right go find the person who’s been your best friend no matter what you’ve gone through they’re the person to give you feedback on yourself you want to get healthy you go to a [ __ ] athlete who used to be fat and fix that permanently and you ask how did you do it you don’t go to the obese dude who you’ve been flatting with who spends all his time eating chips and smoking weed and go you know what do you think i should eat right go to people who are proven who know what they’re doing who have their your best interests at heart who have been through the trials and tribulations that you’re going through they understand they have empathy not the people are unsuccessful and opinionated for example like on my youtube channel i always get negative comments here and there and i quite often get them from people where if i look into the person i’m like why do i care what this person thinks they’re never going to be one of my clients whenever i look at the feedback from my clients even if it’s critical it’s very very helpful and most the time it’s positive which is also helpful helps me know what i should do more of right when someone who’s never paid me a dollar says that my stuff is [ __ ] i might as well just delete it there’s nothing for me there this person i’ll never work with them even if they like me so what’s the point of their feedback next tip if it’s too hard make it smaller i don’t know why people try to pressure themselves into doing something that they can’t do yet that doesn’t make any sense make it something you can do yet it’s what i call quantum parts if the thing you’re trying seems too big make it smaller still seems too big make it smaller again make it smaller to the point where you can do it and then move to the next small step for example when i’m learning dance tricks so a trick in dancing is like those acrobatic moves you see sometimes somebody getting flipped over the shoulders or spun around you know anytime where both feet come off the ground for one of the people that’s called a trick and some of these are really [ __ ] hard to do and you get injured a lot and stuff practicing them we used to always try and do quite extreme ones because we just like it what i found is you have to break the trick down into all these small parts and practice all the parts by themselves before you put them together if you try to do the whole trick all at once you just end up sort of cracking your partner’s head on the ground so for example if i had one where i’d my dance pattern would kind of go up around my shoulders and come back down we’d spend a whole day on her just sort of like coming up to one shoulder and back down up to one shoulder and back down because that’s all we could do successfully so we’d do that until we were bored we could do it so well and there would be up to one shoulder and up the top and then back down and so on we just broke it down into parts and cook until we could do all the parts successfully rather than trying to do the whole trick over and over again and just failing and injuring ourselves next tip pressure is resistance if you want to do well at something you have to create a pressure free environment for some reason we believe that pressure is helpful if we put pressure on ourselves to get things done that that somehow helps us get them down get them done what we don’t realize is all those things we’ve gotten done were in spite of pressure not because of it pressure slowed us down pressure created resistance pressure made our results worse getting it done shouldn’t be credited to pressure there’s so much research that shows now that if you’re having fun you are more productive than if you’re serious and under pressure so you have to find what you’re doing you have to find a way to make it fun whenever i’m working with coaches i don’t do this very often but i sometimes train other coaches the key message i try to get across to them is their building relationships and serving people has to be fun for you if you can have fun making other people’s lives better you will succeed as a coach if you do that seriously if you do it all under high pressure and make money and all that not only will it be really needy and unsuccessful but you won’t enjoy it you’ll be very unproductive so it only makes sense to try and make what you’re doing fun if you don’t like the kind of exercise you’re doing change the kind of exercise you’re doing if you don’t like going to the gym then try rock climbing or martial arts do something that you enjoy as exercise if you don’t enjoy exercise you’re not going to keep it up and you’re probably not going to be productive now a classic example for me is i change dating into just hanging out i enjoy hanging out with people but dating was very high pressure so i eliminated dating and i just made it i’ll hang out with whoever i want to hang out with and i didn’t try to go on dates i didn’t do anything i wouldn’t normally do i’m not like let’s go out to dinner at a restaurant which i never did back then anyway oh let’s go to the pub for a drink because i was going anyway and you can come and i eventually met my wife through dancing so rather than trying to like date i just went dancing because that was a great way to socialize and now i’m with a woman that i met there i made socializing fun by making it dancing rather than making socializing this high pressure thing that i had to perform at next tip make integrity the reason why you do things this is maybe actually the most important thing outcomes are just like a fun side effect if you get what you want yay for you you’ll enjoy it for a little bit and then the feeling will fade it’s just like a little perk little taste what you really want is the reason you do things to be rewarding in and of itself if you try to make out comes the reason you do something not only will it be ineffective but often quite unenjoyable because you only get these spikes of reward when you actually get the outcome and the rest of time just feels like hard work whereas actually if the process is enjoyable you won’t even really care much about the outcomes for example like i used to chase girls with dating and that was always just high pressure unenjoyable and very rarely successful when i focused instead on practicing honesty and courage with girls so the primary reason i spoke to girls was to see how honest and bold i could be i got to enjoy all the interactions and i was actually more successful with women okay so trying to get laid didn’t work but trying to be bold as [ __ ] to impress myself really did right i get why pete davidson does so well with women all right he’s not trying to get laid he’s trying to be pete it works very well for him so if you make integrity the reason you do anything if you’re starting a business going to the gym have an integrity based reason courage honesty responsibility discipline respect whatever it is that gets you off do it for that reason and the outcomes will just be a side effect that kind of at a perk but aren’t even really necessary next one sustainability whatever you’re doing must be able to keep on working without you burning out okay if what you’re doing requires big holidays and rest periods and you can’t keep it up every day then you’re not doing it right it needs to be something you can do day in and day out over and over and over and over again without getting tired right real success comes from cumulative sustained effort it doesn’t come from a short burst followed by a big crash okay which is how most people approach things you want to be able to do it so you never need a weekend you don’t need holidays you don’t need a break you’re always living in a way that’s easily sustained i’ve got a whole podcast about how to do this i call it something to do with relaxation how you can relax by just changing the activity you’re doing so you always feel relaxed but you’re always doing some activity like something you can keep going on and on if whatever you’re doing doesn’t work like that it needs to change a great example is i work about four or five hours a day i could do more but then i need a big break if i do sort of yes three to five hours a day i can keep working like this for the rest of my life no matter whether i’m sick or anything i can do that amount but if i do 8 19 hours a day i need my weekends off i need big crashes i need to [ __ ] catch up later on eat holidays because i burn out last tip measurement if you don’t measure yourself properly you will not make good progress so most people do not measure themselves well if at all the numbers don’t lie you need to find a way where the measurement tells you exactly what’s happening no matter what you wish was happening a measurement that doesn’t lie to you you know something numerical some sort of numbers that tell you exactly what’s really going on and it’s something you need to check often you need to measure yourself as often as possible and if it doesn’t work if the measurement says this isn’t working it needs to be a system that you trust well enough to ditch whatever it is you’re doing without that kind of sunk cost fallacy where you keep going it’s something that sucks for example let’s say you’re in a marriage every day you should rate out of 10 how satisfied you feel being with your wife right how how good is it to be in this marriage now those numbers should go up and down if you’re being honest but what you find is if you’re writing a lot of twos and threes for a sustained period of months that’s a marriage that needs to end whereas if you’re kind of writing a 7 to 10 on average for many many months that’s a marriage that should keep going you know a great example for me was i used to use facebook and my blog to try and reach out to new clients i was doing a lot of posting on facebook doing a lot of blog writing and then i went and i analyzed all my clients where all my money had come from and said where does the most money come from and it was not facebook it was not blogs okay it was me reaching out to people one to one serving them it was podcasts it was videos as much as i wanted to fart around on facebook and write blog posts that wasn’t helping my business so i ditched it and now i do this stuff more often because the numbers just don’t lie most people the reason they’re unsuccessful is they don’t realize they’re unsuccessful they don’t realize that what they’re doing doesn’t work very well because they’re not measuring it properly find a way to measure that tells you the truth and then use that measurement system as a guiding book follow it if it says it’s not working stop doing it if it says it is working double up on it i’m sure there’s many more tips in wherever you’re seeing or reading this or hearing this or whatever the [ __ ] write down your comments below as other tips that you think work and we’ll share this stuff around as much as possible and of course if you want more one-to-one personal type help with this get in touch dan brojo.org my voice is running out now so i’ll see you later cheers

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