Give me 10 minutes, you'll get ahead of 97% of people

Here's the uncomfortable truth. Hard work alone won't make you successful. I learned this after spending years studying some of the most successful people in the world and understood exactly why some people achieve exponential results while others just seem to plateau.

In this video, we're going to go through five fundamental rules that will completely change the game. And over the next few minutes, I'm going to go through how you can implement each and every one of these five rules to swing the odds in your favor. Oh, and by the way, if you're new here, my name is Willis.

I'm a qualified accountant who also makes YouTube videos on the side about all things money, personal finance, and personal development. Let's jump into it. Rule number one is the 955 rule.

You see, most of success that we actually see is really just the highlights reel. The fancy trips, the luxurious events, the social media glamour. That's just the 5%.

What we're missing here is the other 95% of the story. You see, what we need to understand here is that real success takes place in the shadows. And in the words of Tony Robbins, people are praised in public for what they have practiced in private for years.

And ultimately, success comes from being extremely consistent with the basics over a very long period of time. Here's an example. Kobe Bryant, renowned for his work ethic.

As the story goes, he would get up at 4:00 a. m. in the morning and spend hours practicing basic drills, basic footwork before the actual official training session started.

And when he was asked years later, "Why do you focus so heavily on such basic moves when you're already the best? " and he simply responded, "Why do you think I'm the best player in the world? It's because I never get bored of the basics.

" So, for the rest of us who are not extremely successful basketball players, how could we practically implement this philosophy into our own lives? For me personally, my fitness journey has pretty much just consisted of me going to the gym four to five times every single week and focusing on the basic exercises. Nothing too fancy, just simple incin bench press, squats, deadlifts, and other basic maneuvers like this.

But the key here is just being consistent and mastering these basics. Do this week after week after week and you will see results. For YouTube, I get up first thing in the morning, outline new ideas, write scripts, design thumbnails and titles, as these are the fundamental basics that draw viewers into your videos.

And so, in the words of serial entrepreneur Dan Martell, we can use the KISS framework. Keep it super simple because simple scales and complex fails. Rule number two is to use discomfort as motivation.

You see, people only tend to change when it becomes apparent that staying the same is more painful than change. As Jim Ran said, there are two types of pain. There's the pain of discipline, and there's the pain of regret.

Discipline weighs ounces, and regret weighs tons. You don't want to have regret. Here's an example.

Eating whatever you want and lying in bed until whatever time and not exercising or not really getting outside, seeing some sunshine. That's very comfortable now. But ultimately, this can lead to being deficient in various vitamins, being overweight, and just generally being unhealthy.

And I'm pretty sure that being unhealthy in the long term is far more painful than just going to the gym or getting outside and being active regularly today. And so what we can say in this example is that the pain of the future regret of being unhealthy, being overweight, etc. is more painful than going to the gym, eating healthy, and being active today.

So how can we apply this now? Well, have a think about how your life would look if you were in the exact same position 12 months from now. Same job, same money, same relationships, same thoughts, same feelings, and same routine.

So that's a whole year of your life where you've not grown at all. Would you be satisfied with that? And as Jay Rogan says, we need to be getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Because when you're uncomfortable, that's where growth occurs. What we want to be doing is really getting used to doing hard things and pushing ourselves. And the achievement that comes from conquering hard things to achieve.

And ultimately, time will pass regardless. The next 12 months will pass. But what you need to think about is where will you be when it does?

Rule number three is being aware of the pig malian effect. So, if you've not heard of the pigalion effect before, essentially it just means that people perform in line with the expectations of themselves. Let's use an example.

The pigalion effect is effectively like a teacher who understands that an incoming student is a bit of a troublemaker. Let's call the student Jaime. The teacher will probably ask Jaime less challenging questions or give less detailed feedback on Jaime's work and won't push Jaime as hard as other people who are showing higher potential.

What happens here then is Jaime senses this lack of backing from their teacher. And so the expectations of themsel actually drop as well. And then ultimately this just becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy where Jaime's expectations are low, the teacher's expectations are low.

And so the end result is ultimately going to be disappointing. And this self-fulfilling prophecy just results in what we call confirmation bias. And what that means is where your brain essentially just looks for evidence to confirm what you already believe to be true, whether it is true or not.

For example, let's say you believe that someone is absolutely out there to get you. They hate your guts and they really don't like you. How are you going to behave towards that person?

You're probably going to be cold. You might even be hostile. And now, because you're acting in a hostile manner, that person might then act hostile back towards you.

Once you see this behavior from them, your brain then goes, "Okay, here's confirmation bias. They clearly don't like me. " When actually, it was a kind of just caused by yourself in the first place.

And this applies to various areas in life. You know, this applies to how you view wealth. This applies to how you view the world.

And most importantly, this applies to how you view yourself. If instead you choose to believe in opportunities and abundance, then your brain will search for evidence to prove your belief right. If you believe there's an abundance of money in the world, then your brain will seek out opportunities for you to earn more of that money.

But if you believe there's a scarcity of money around, then you'll be more susceptible to just holding on to the money that you have and saving it and never taking any risk with it, investing it, or trying to start your own business because you're too afraid that it might fail. And ultimately, we just need to believe there are opportunities and then go and find them. And as the famous quote goes, whether you think you can or you can't, either way, you're right.

Rule number four is the onein two out rule. So the one in two out rule is essentially the concept of spending money to save time. Now if this is a new concept to you, let me share my perspective shift.

I used to want to do every single thing myself because I thought the less money I spend, therefore the more money I save and the more financially successful I am. However, what I realized here is I was spending so much time doing things that just weren't moving the needle. They were trivial activities that really didn't do anything for me.

And then I learned primarily from Dan Martell and Alexi that poor people spend time to save their money. Whereas rich people, they spend their money to save time. And the reason for this is because time is a far more valuable resource than money.

Because you can always find a way to make more money, but you can never ever make more time. So how do we go about implementing this practically? Well, first thing we want to do is to calculate our hourly rate.

What this is is essentially just the amount of money you make per year divided by the number of hours that you work during the course of that year. So let's say you earn a gross amount of $100,000 per year working around 2,000 hours per year which works out to be around 40 hours per week. Dividing the 100,000 by the 2,000 gives you $50 per hour.

Okay, so this is your hourly rate and then essentially what the book the almanac of Navarakan says is that once we've identified our hourly rate and we have tasks that we need to do where we can outsource that task to someone or something now with AI that can do it for less than $50 per hour, then we should absolutely refuse to do it ourselves and instead outsource everything because our time is more valuable than the money that we're spending to outsource that activity. Instead, we need to be focusing our time on high value activities that actually move the needle in our lives, in our businesses, in our work, or whatever the case may be. And the way I've implemented this in my own life is pretty simple.

So, I used to drive to a grocery store around 105 minute drive away because it happened to be cheaper than the local one. But then what I realized was that the time cost of going to the shop, driving there, driving back, and actually going around the shop, and doing the shopping myself was costing me way more in terms of my hourly rate than it would be to just outsource that to somebody else and order it on Uber Eats. So what I do now is I actually just order my grocery shopping online and then have it delivered to my home.

I end up paying $10, 20, or $30 more, but I'm saving like an hour and a half of time. And using my hourly rate, that works out as a saving. Now, of course, we don't necessarily have to outsource things to people anymore.

We are now in the age of AI and I try and make use of AI tools wherever I can to try and speed up my workflow and save my own time. Some examples of AI tools could be Tanner for transcription, chat GPT and Claude for idea generation, script writing, Grammarly for fixing your grammar, Plexity for research, Gling for video editing, and Pixels for thumbnail generation if you're a YouTuber. Rule number five is all about moving from low to high accountability.

The path to getting ahead is really all about moving from positions where you're easily replaceable to positions where you provide unique value. And again, as Jim Ran said, we're not paid for time. We're paid for value.

Unfortunately, entry- level jobs are limited responsibility positions also with limited growth potential. Whereas high accountability positions come with much more responsibilities and demand much higher unique skill sets. An example of an entry-level job could be something like a bookkeeper where you're essentially just taking invoices and plugging them into the system exactly as they appear on the invoice itself.

All you're doing is taking data from one document and putting it into a system. There's very little margin for error and pretty much anyone can do it. However, if you're leading the company in a senior management position and you're responsible for some key decisions that drive the future of that company, that requires a very, very different skill set that many people don't have.

So, how can we make sure that we're making progress from a low accountability position to a higher accountability position? Well, we can look at the T-shaped skills model to have a look at this. So, the vertical bar represents deep expertise in one area.

Now, having a deep expertise in one area is great because it means you're very specialized and people can come to you and know that they can trust you in that specific area. The only problem with this deep vertical bar is that you can often get stuck here and there's not really much wiggle room if you wanted to go into a different area because you've honed your skills on one specific area so well that you might not necessarily be able to transfer those into another domain. And this is where the horizontal bar of the T-shape model comes in because the horizontal bar represents breadth across different domains.

And so it's really crucial here to develop skills that can be seen as hybrid across multiple different domains and can be used in different areas. For example, if you work in the finance team, but you also have an understanding of marketing, then you can take marketing data, analyze that with your financial skills and then make recommendations to the senior marketing team around how best to proceed to attract more customers to your company. If you can provide this kind of value to your organization, then that will lead to you gaining recognition, reputation, and hopefully moving more towards high accountability positions, which come with, of course, much higher pay.

So, success isn't always about working harder. It's about working on the right things, maintaining consistency with the basics, and developing a unique combination of hybrid skills that create high accountability positions. And the five rules that we went through in this video can help anybody get ahead in as little as 6 months, even when they're starting from zero.

I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, I know you love this one. But don't go just yet.

Please make sure to drop a like on this video and subscribe to the channel. I'll see you over there. Bye.