How to outcompete everyone (realistically)

For as long as I can remember I have always felt inadequate. It started in primary school during soccer practice. It became worse once I picked up the trombone. And even more recently a decline in my innate academic ability.

No one wants to BE a loser

Id argue even less people want to FEEL like a loser

Any pursuit you touch either never gets actualized

or it is so incredibly mediocore and no one gives a fuck about it

Even writing this i feel physically agitated

If we say power is the ability to control your environment, then what is just described is the perfect antithesis

How do we turn the tables?

Here is how:

How to outcompete everyone (realistically)

1. Action - Do more and do better

Discipline is the most straightforward and generally available method of outcompeting everyone

If you do the stuff no one is willing to do, you will get the stuff no one else is able to get

There is however a problem: Everyone already knows this

If it were as simple as just stating that fact then we wouldn't have people struggling with discipline

From what I have found discipline is both unconditional

as in its an unlimited resource you can create with sheer willpower (think David Goggins),

but its also conditional → you can raise your baseline level of discipline without having to suffer (this angel is more akin to psychologists)

One major variable to increase your baseline level of discipline is this:

Focus → Directing your attention with intention

I am going to say something that will change your perspective on how you see focus

Focus is the lack of distractions

It is NOT ignoring distractions and "focusing" on the important thing

It is literally the absence of distraction

Focus is also not a binary, it's a continuum

you can be more or less focused based on how many distractions you have to deal with

So if you want to be more focused (and by extension, more "disciplined") then you have to eliminate any alternatives to the stuff you want to be doing

How does focus raise your discipline though?

Good question: It lowers the initial amount required, which means you leave more fuel in the tank for later

Another great way to leverage your existing discipline is this

Consistency → Understanding Habit Formation, Compounding and Long Term Thinking

The big thing we are looking for here is MOMENTUM and how do you build up momentum? Being constantly reinforced for what you do. The problem with this is you cannot control the reinforcement from outside. What you can do however is

1. learn how to make your pursuit of choice enjoyable in itself

2. persist long enough until you do get the results and the reinforcement form outside

You have the most control over option number 1, which boils down to you finding ways to reward yourself for your activity of choice. The thing to keep in mind here is

"The more ways you measure - The more ways you win."

Even if it is at a microscopic level, if you have a win, use it to reinforce yourself. The more creative you are the more ways you will be able to keep yourself engaged even when you don't get positive feedback from the outside

The second option I outlined is going to happen no matter what, because for you to outcompete everyone, sticking to the thing you are doing is a given.

How do we make sure we are consistent though?

We need to understand how habit formation works first:

(This is directly out of James' Clear Book Atomic habits)

Make It Obvious → Design your environment to have as many cues and triggers as possible for the stuff you want to be doing and vice versa

Make It Attractive → Make the idea in your head of it way more appealing. Some goes for bad habits, make them the worst thing imaginable

Make It Easy → Try to reduce or add friction to your given pursuit of choice to make it more or less enjoyable

Make It Satisfying → Learn to reward and punish yourself for actions you want/don't want to see. We also already covered this with "The more ways you measure - The more ways you win."

Now these principles are quickly read through, but in order to really make them stick i highly encourage you to read Atomic Habits from James Clear as it is a fundamental resource for self improvement

As an additional side note: Applying These principles takes creativity as all of these are specific to you and your environment. Always try to add or subtract one thing from your life based on these core principles.

The best way to think about it is from the perspective of a scientist trying to figure out which conditions lead to the desired outcome

Experiment

Long Term thinking

In order to base your habits and routine off of something, you need to be able to think long term.

Here are some cues:

What do I want out of life?

What do I not want out of life?

How do I want to impact the world?

How does an ideal day look like for me?

Journaling about these can already give a solid understanding of where you want to go and based off of the "vision" you create, you can derive long term goals and aspirations

you then take these BIG, LONG, HARD, goals and break them down into smaller and smaller chunks until you eventually end up on a day to day basis.

Now we know How, why and what to act on.

Now lets try and multiply our inputs so we get more out then we put in

Creativity and Knowledge - Creative Problem solving on steroids

Fundamentally what is self improvement?

Solving problems

Which means, the better you are at solving problems, the faster you progress

We know how to act and we know the direction, we can now look at how to speed up the process and that comes from connecting the dots.

and it starts with insight

Insight into different fields and topics.

Insight into how everything connects.

Insight into the specifics

Insight regarding the big picture.

When you have more insight you start to connect the dots, find the pieces of the puzzle and solve the riddle. If you increase your base knowledge you increase your creative problem solving skills, because creativity is the plant that grows on the soil that is knowledge.

And The fruit it bears is the solution to the problems you are confronted with day by day.

Broadening your spectrum is quite simple and you already mostly know how to do it:

Seek good sources of information, these are books, podcasts and any other long format medium that contain valuable information.

BE AWARE - You can easily get caught in mental masturbation and passive consumption so always be mindful if what you are consuming is actually valuable

Increase the depth of your existing knowledge

Now depth requires a little more from you and later on when we cover skill mastery you will see this pop up again.

You need critical thinking. Now that's a term you can throw around however you like, but in practice,

critical thinking is your ability to sit and decypher different trails of thought and perspectives in order to get one step closer to truth.

The more truths you uncover for yourself the deeper your knowledge in any given domain gets and you can expand upon it indefinitely.

That is what makes it kind of addictive in my eyes, since, for every new thing you discover you open the door to 2 more. Just like a hydra, depth grows exponentially the deeper you go and with every head of the hydra cut off, and every observation made, two new heads grow back, and two new opportunities arise.

You can also think of it as the roots of a tree. At first you see the tree itself on the surface, once you start digging you start to see the first few bigger roots, after a while those branches of and at the end of the day when you have dug out the whole tree, you will see just how many little secrets were kept hidden in the depths.

To make the process of digging up knowledge more efficient you need to have your mind running like a machine in the background 24/7.

How does one do this?

Habitualize questioning everything and analyzing everything until there is nothing left.

Most people when they talk about something or find out about something just want to know the surface level what, but the magic happens when you go a level deeper and ask how, and if you go even deeper you ask yourself why and at the end when you reach the abyss, when you followed the roots down to their lowest point you will see the beginning of another tree.

That is how you connect the dots. You dig out one after another and soon enough you will find a web of entangled information that no one else has seen before.

That is how you find knowledge no one else has

and as a result, get outcomes no one else has

The last multiplier we need to cover now is:

Skill - How to improve your abilities holistically and broaden them

What makes you as a person valuable to the market?

Your work ethic? Sure

Your insights? Maybe

Your skillset? Absolutely

The more skilled you are the more valuable you are as a person in business

What if I don't care about business though?

The value you provide with the work you do is a direct mirror on how competent and valuable you are as a person.

This sounds harsh and we have to note this mostly applies to men as they are born with less innate value from a social standpoint.

However if you examine this for longer than 2 minutes you realize it is a blessing in disguise:

• You have full control over how valuable you are

• You can increase your value indefinitely

• Every skill you add multiplies your previous ones tenfold

Skill development is a virtuous cycle and the longer it goes on

the better it gets

Skill Development simplified→ Reps, Focus, Routine, Knowledge, etc.

How do you develop new skills or improve upon existing ones?

You learn

What is "learning" really?

It is same condition, new behaviour

Picture this:

If you suck at sales and you pick up the phone to cold call someone

"Hello?"

"Ye-Yeah, greetings. Ho-How can I help?"

you stutter like a mf

You blew the call

The next time you pick up the phone and you speak clear and concise

"This is car wash abc. How can I help you?"

"Greetings. May I introduce myself……

And so I was wondering what is your main way of acquiring customers?….."

You crushed it

Why? → You changed your behaviour

Or in other words

You learned

We know skills are valuable and we know how to acquire and improve on them

How do we get better at it?

It is a simple formula

Volume = Feedback

Feedback = Opportunity for behaviour change

Behaviour change = Learning

Learning = Improvement

Crank the volume like crazy on anything you want to get better at

Then iterate on the feedback you get

If you do this for long enough then we can start to talk about the following:

Skill Mastery → becoming exceptionally good at one thing

It is one thing to have a basic proficiency of anything

It is whole new universe if you develop mastery in a given skill

It is what makes you exceptional

Now maybe you don't want to be exceptional, but I am strongly guessing that the type of person reading this wants to be as far above average as possible

So DO what we already said → Crank volume and adapt

Just Do it for such an unreasonable amount of time that almost no one would be willing to do it

There you go

You rose above your competition

Meta Skills → Skills that translate into almost everything you do and exponentially increase your influence

If skill mastery is what sets you apart from everyone then mastering meta skills is what shoots you into the stratosphere.

Meta Skills are a big conglomeration of many skills that add up and apply to a broad spectrum of situations

Take writing as an example:

To be an effective writer you need to :

• Think clearly

• Be creative

• Communicate clearly

• Hook and retain attention of your readers

• Be persuasive with your words

• …

The list goes on

All of these are individual skills and most of them are already highly valuable by themselves

But adding them together isn't a simple addition like 1 + 1 + 1 = 3

In the context of skills it's 1 + 1 + 1 = 100

Outsize returns equal you beating your competition

Resources - How to leverage the things you have and how to get them

When i think about resources these 5 come to mind

Money → The value you can exchange

Status → Social Capital, How much impact you have on people

Network → The resources and abilities the people you know have

Knowledge → Your unique insights and strategies

Skills → How competent and capable you are

Know when and how to use these and maybe even more importantly

Be mindful of what resources you actually have

As one of my favourite Hormozi Isms goes:

“Entrepreneurship (or self improvement) is not about resources, it's about resourcefulness.”

Realize what you have and use it

Avoiding Stupidity

"If you try to just be a little less stupid one by one, you will eventually end up being smart."

A great filter mechanism of competition (and as you may have probably realized by now getting what you want out of life in general) comes from being able to avoid the obvious mistakes.

You don't need to be a one in a million genius

You don't need to always be right

You can make mistakes

I am not arguing against that

What you do need is the ability to change and persevere

You already know that

This isn't news to you

I will leave you with this:

"The magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding."

This is the first of many long form content pieces to come, so if you enjoyed this and have gotten something out of this consider following me on X @NicolasSit93982 and subscribing to this newsletter