3 Common Pieces of Life Advice that Do More Harm Than Good

- So there is a lot of advice floating around

on the internet and not all of it is good.

So what we're gonna do today

is get away from the productivity tips

and the self-improvement advice that I think

is actually good and should be implemented into your life

and talk about three pieces of advice

that I took very seriously, in some cases,

tried to follow for quite a long period of time,

before realizing that they were ultimately bad advice

or at least I interpreted them in a bad way

and ended up doing something more destructive

than positive in my life.

And we're just gonna jump into with one

that I get emailed about all the time

which is the common saying that you are the product

of the five people you spend the most time around.

Now, on the surface, there isn't a whole lot to object to

with this quotation, or this aphorism

or whatever it is you want to call it,

because we are influenced by the people

we spend the most time around.

It's obvious, people are the products of their friends,

their family, the people that they tend to hang out with

or at least, they're very much influenced by those people,

but where they start going down the wrong path, I think,

is when they take that piece of advice

and they draw the conclusion

that if I'm an ambitious person, if I have a lot of goals,

if I'm really high-energy and I want to be successful,

then I have to ditch everyone in my life

who doesn't operate in the same way that I do.

If I'm friends with somebody

but they're a little bit more chill,

or they don't want to be working 24/7,

I need to stop being friends with those people immediately

and go find new friends

who are going to be a lot more ambitious.

And I really don't like this piece of advice

because it leads people to think these things.

And in fact, when I was younger and I think more foolish,

I thought this as well.

Now, luckily, I didn't end up following through with it

and actually ditching my friends,

but there were times when I was thinking to myself,

man, maybe I need to go find a different friend group

because I seem to be interested in different things,

I seem to be wanting to work on

my entrepreneurial projects all the time,

while my friends kinda don't do the same thing.

And what I realized later on is that you don't have to be

on the same ambitional wavelength as your friends

to be friends with them

because friendships are separate from your work

and your goals and ambitions,

but what you do need to make sure you are doing

is spending some of your time surrounding yourself

with people who do build you up

and who do motivate you and encourage and challenge you.

So a better way to put this,

in the way that I would prefer it be communicated

to people in the future,

is don't worry about the time breakdown.

Don't try to list out the five people you hang out with

the most often and then rank them and give them qualities

because number one, friendships don't have to be based on

having the exact same ambitions

or even the same level of ambition.

You could be friends with somebody just because

you like them and enjoy spending time with them,

but make sure that you are spending time

with people who do challenge you.

So a practical example of this would be if you're in college

and you're hanging out with your friends

in the dorms playing video games,

playing board games, whatever it is,

also make sure that you have some time during the week

that you go and participate in a club

or you go to networking events,

just do something where you are

regularly exposed to people who do challenge you.

And this could be really simple.

It could even be a once a week mastermind group

through Skype or Discord or any other online chat platform,

just make sure you get that regular exposure.

And when you go about it in this way,

you're also not ditching people who quite honestly,

probably need you.

Remember that if you're an ambitious person,

if you have a lot of goals

if you're kinda going somewhere in life,

or you feel like you are,

then you're probably an inspiration

and a source of motivation and strength for somebody else.

And if we all took this literally,

if we all said, I have to be around the five people

who are most inspiring who are gonna challenge me the most,

we would all only look upwards.

We would constantly be ignoring the people

who probably need us and trying to chase people

who we think we need.

And instead, we should be thinking in both directions.

We should be pursuing relationships with people

who do challenge us and who we can learn from,

but we should also make sure that we keep cultivating

relationships with people who we can help.

All right, the second piece of advice

that I want to talk about here is simple.

Be everywhere.

And again, this is another one that on the surface

seems like a really good piece of advice,

especially if you want to get your name out into the world.

Now, when I heard this piece of advice,

it was in the context of how to build a successful blog,

how to build a successful online following.

And again, it seems like a really good piece of advice,

because if you are everywhere,

if you're on LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook and YouTube

and commenting on other blogs and all kinds of stuff,

then there are so many different opportunities

for people to find out who you are.

But again, it's the way in which you interpret this advice

that really makes the difference.

And the way that I interpreted it,

was actually destructive, because I took be everywhere

as a call for me to be active

on every platform all the time.

So I was on LinkedIn and I was writing articles on LinkedIn

and I was commenting on other people's articles.

I was on twitter and I had a habit in my habit tracker

at one point to tweet five articles a day

and a certain amount of quotes per day.

I had Facebook pages.

I was even on app.net for a while

and probably nobody watching this video even remembers

what app.net was 'cause it died a pretty quick death.

So I would say that looking back on my career,

the points at which I made the most progress

were the ones where I failed to be everywhere,

they were the times where I got one idea in my head,

one piece of content that I wanted to make,

one article, one video and I ignored everything else

for a period of days, sometimes even weeks

to make one great thing.

Now, there is a quote that I do want to share here,

which I'm going to edit a little bit

to remove a exploitative, but the quote goes,

"Self-promotion, if you don't like it,

"stay in your basement."

You do have to self-promote.

You do have to put your work out there,

but I think you need to take a majority of your time

and use it to focus on creating something

that is really worth paying attention to

or honing your skills

so you are in the top 10% or 5% of people in your field.

Once you've done that,

then you can take a little bit of time that's left over

and use it on self-promotion

and you can be everywhere to a certain extent.

You can have a presence on all these platforms,

but if you're splitting you're time up into little chunks

every single day trying to be active on all these platforms,

you don't have any time left over to do something

that's worth sharing, so focus on that first.

And speaking of focus,

that brings us to our third and final piece of bad advice,

which is the common advice to focus on your strengths

and ignore your weaknesses.

Now again, just as with the first two pieces of advice

we talked about here,

this is something that can be interpreted in a positive way,

if you know what your strengths are.

But the problem is, we give this advice

to people who are often very early in their careers

or sometimes to kids and when you're a kid

or when you're a teenager

or when you're early in your career,

you often haven't put in enough work

to know what's actually a weakness and what's just something

that you haven't put enough effort into,

something that you're just in the dip right now

and you haven't kind of come out of that initial area

of difficulty that almost nobody makes it out of.

So for example, a lot of people in the world say,

"I'm bad at math," or "I'm bad at learning languages,"

or "I'm just not cut out to play music,

"that's just a weakness of mine."

And that third one is a big one for me.

I went a lot of my life saying

that I'm just not cut out for music,

I don't have it in me to be a musician,

I should go and do something else and I've learned

in recent years that that isn't the case at all.

I just hadn't put in the work

to become a somewhat decent musician and now that I have,

I realized that no, music is actually a strength,

I have this pretty nice improvisational talent

that allows me to play music

that's pretty decent at least to my ears.

It just took me a while to develop that skill.

So I think a better way to go about this

is to follow your interests.

If you're interested in something,

be it speaking Japanese or learning calculus

or learning high-level statistics

or playing the guitar or the piano,

put ample time into the practice of whatever that thing is.

Now, you may realize down the line that

yes, this is a weakness of mine,

I'm trying to play basketball

and I'm just not tall enough to dunk the ball,

okay, maybe that's a weakness.

But I think more times than not,

you are going to discover

that what you thought was a weakness,

was just something that is inherently difficult

to learn for a lot of different people

and that just requires more work.

Now, on that note of following your interests,

one common objection to this might be

that I don't know what my interests are

or I don't have an interest that's compelling enough

to really follow right now,

and if that's the case for you,

then you might want to go expose yourself to new information

so you can develop new interests

and there are plenty different ways to do that.

You can go browse the stacks of your local library

or you can go watch a really interesting documentary

on a service like CuriosityStream.

CuriosityStream is a new streaming service

with over 2,400 high-quality documentaries

that was actually created by John Hendricks

who was the founder of the Discovery Channel,

which was the way that I discovered

a lot of my interests as a kid.

Now the great thing about CuriosityStream

is that unlike Discover Channel,

you don't have to wait for a certain thing to come on,

at any time and almost anywhere

since you'll find CuriosityStream on iOS, Android, Roku

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you can access any documentary you want.

There are science documentaries,

history documentaries, technology documentaries,

there are even documentaries

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and if you're looking for a place to start,

then I would like to give you a recommendation

because one of my big interests

that I don't talk about a whole lot on my channel

is the development of artificial intelligence.

This is something that I've been interested in

for probably five or six years at this point

and on CuriosityStream, you're gonna find a documentary

called the Road to the Singularity, which explores

how the development of several different technologies

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the development of artificial intelligence

and the singularity in the intelligence explosion.

So if you want to check out that documentary

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It's really affordable, just $2.99 per month

and if you want to give it a try for free,

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by going over to CuriosityStream.com/Thomas

and using the code Thomas at checkout.

Huge thanks as always goes out to CuriosityStream

for sponsoring this video and being a big supporter

of my channel and the content that I create

and thank you as well for watching.

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