How to Get Ahead of 99% of People (What it Takes to Win)
A motivational YouTube talk by Nate Tilley describing a six-step process for outperforming most people without following the conventional college → job ladder. The six steps: rewire your identity; change your environment; do what 99% aren’t doing by learning foundational, sellable skills; define and visualize the prize; exploit free and paid education (YouTube, books, courses, mentors) instead of costly degrees; and develop ruthless focus and sustained effort. The talk uses personal anecdotes (moving to London) and sports stories (Kobe/Iverson) to illustrate commitment and sacrifice.
Chapters
What if I told you that there was a way that you could get ahead of 99% of people and you don't need to go to college, get a job, work your way up the corporate ladder and you can start with absolutely nothing. Well, this is exactly the path that I traveled. And if I can do it as a kid from a small beach town, raised by a single parent mother, to going on to making $100 million, then why can't you? This is my six step process for how to get ahead of 99% of people. Step number rewiring your brain. Can you remember who you were before the world told you who to be before society indoctrinated you into their system, telling you what to do, how to act and even what to think? I remember when I was 17 and I was going into my last year of high school, the teachers announced that they were going to be bringing in this careers advisor and we had to decide what it is that we were going to do for the rest of our lives. And I remember just how overwhelmed I felt. But what nobody tells you is what you choose to do is very rarely the thing that you're going to be doing for the rest of your life. Only 27% of college grads have a job in the field to what they actually have their degree in. Heck, I thought that I wanted to be a graphic designer. The very first step is getting clear on what that dream looks like and making sure that it is something that is true to you and it isn't something that you have inherited from society. Most people go through their entire life never looking internally and looking at at their self image. Who is this person that I am or who is this person that I'm becoming? Where did I adopt these philosophies, these belief patterns? What are the things that I should actually pursue and hold value to in my life? And it is this creating of a new identity which is the foundation of getting ahead of 99% of people. Which brings us to step number two, which is breaking the habit of being yourself. Because if you want a radically different outcome, then you have to do radically different things. And the biggest hack for doing this is simply changing your environment. I remember when I finished high school, I packed my bags up, I literally traveled over to the other side of the world to live in London, while all of my friends kind of were going to university in Sydney or Melbourne. I knew that that's not what I wanted to do. And I knew that if I kept on staying in the same environment, hanging around with the Same people that my life was going to just be more of. The same people are attached to the person that you are right now. And the thing that they want you to do is become something new to be getting ahead. And I know that sounds rough, but that is the reality. So the quickest hack that you can do is just dramatically shake up the situation that you're in by uprooting yourself from that and putting yourself in a new environment. Which brings us to step number three, which is what to do. By definition, if you want to get ahead of 99% of people, then you got to do what 99% of people aren't doing. Let's look at the macro and then boil it down to the micro. We look on the macro, what are most people do? They graduate from high school, then they go to a college, they get a degree, they get a job, they go and work their way up the corporate ladder, they buy a house, doing something that typically doesn't light them up inside because it was something that was prescribed to them, rather than finding out what is it that they could do that looks like work to others but feels like play to them. Now let's look at the micro level. Most people are on their phone, they're doom scrolling, they're watching Netflix, waiting for the weekend so that they can get drunk, watch the game, just keep on repeating that cycle every week, every month and every year. And then they wake up one day and they have a midlife crisis thinking, how the fuck did I get here? And the reason that they are here is because they didn't do this difficult work throughout their life. Now we're gonna apply the mental model of inversion and just do the opposite to what everybody else is doing, so we can get the opposite output to what everybody else gets. So instead of going to college and racking up tens of thousands of dollars in college debt, what we're going to do is we're going to invest and get foundational skills that regardless of what industry that we end up in, we can apply those foundational skills for the rest of our life to continue to get compound interest and leverage from those activities. First, what you need to understand is that all money is made by selling something to someone. We want to learn how to build something or how to sell something. So what are those foundational skills that are going to help you do one of those two things? You want to look at design, copywriting, persuasion, videography, you want to build yourself like a T shape individual. You want to have a little bit of base level understanding in Each or a few of these skill sets know enough to be dangerous, but then you can also go very, very deep to become an absolute master at one discipline. And I'm going to cover exactly how to learn these skills in just a second. Which brings us to step number four, which is to define the prize. Getting very, very clear on exactly, exactly what that dream life looks like for you. Michael Jordan said that he shot more three pointers in his mind than he ever did in real life. And he used to just constantly visualize shooting three pointers, how the crowd would react, what his competitors facial reaction would be. That was playing defense on him. And he would actually feel what it was like to hit that three pointer every single time. It's not just Michael Jordan that does this. There are endless athletes that talk about the power of visualization and actually rehearsing over and over and over in their mind the outcome that it is that they're trying to achieve. Because if you don't know where it is that you're going and how you're going to get there, then the chances of you getting there are very, very slim. So you need to get clear of what is that passion and if you were to reach that pinnacle of that outcome that you're trying to reach, what would it actually feel like? And constantly rehearsing that and indoctrinating yourself against all the negativity and all the naysayers that are constantly going to be bombarding you and just banging you in and wanting you to be vanilla. This brings us to step number five, which is a free education. Not only a free education, but actually you get paid to learn. We are living in a day and age where lack of resources is no longer an excuse. You can go to YouTube and, and you can pretty much learn any single skill that you possibly want to. In addition to the free content that's out there, you want to go deep into domain expertise on books, yes, traditional books. It takes a lot of time and energy from an individual to actually think about the concept that they want to write about and then write a book. Once you graduate from those two categories of information, then courses, if you were to take two individuals and one, you were going to send them through the traditional path, 100 grand on a college degree and then you would just take half of the budget and you would have put that into online courses, hiring mentors and being a part of a paid community. The person that went down the traditional path of going and getting a degree versus the person that went and got specialized knowledge is completely, completely day and night, you build yourself as someone with a base level of competence, and then you can go out and you can get an entry level job, and you can actually get paid to have a mentor and to learn the ropes in the actual business. But you need to become somebody of value in going out and getting that education, even if it's for free, so that you can even get your foot in the door to get that role. This brings us to step number six. You need to become a savage. You need to get so ruthlessly focused on what the end outcome is that you're trying to achieve. You need to turn the blinders on, and you need to dedicate yourself to true mastery. So there's a story about Allen Iverson and Kobe Bryant. Kobe knew what it was like to become an absolute savage. He used to get two training sessions in per day because he understood that if he did this for an extended period of time, that he would simply outwork all of his rivals. Kobe picked up Iverson from the airport in la and they went and got a training session. He picked you up because he just wanted to chop it up with you. And after they'd been training and lifting weights all day, Kobe dropped off Iverson. He said, where do you want to go? And he's like, oh, I want to go to the club. I'm going to the club. He dropped into the club and Iverson, hey, why don't you come with me, dude? And it's like, no, I'm gonna go to the gym. He said, I'm going to the gym. And that's when Iverson knew that Kobe was just a completely different beast. The people, he would leave them so far behind that even if they what's Kobe doing? Like, how is he winning all these championship rings? It would be too late. But it's not something that everybody is willing to do. So all greatness comes with a cost. And you have to decide how much of that cost that you're willing to pay. And some of the biggest hacks that I can give you for increasing your focus is to really just focus by subtraction to remove all of the things that it is that are distractions for you, whether it's social media, whether it's checking your phone all the time, people hitting you up in the DMs, asking you like, yo, dude, you want to go out this weekend? Or what have you. And no, that doesn't mean that you need to live like a freaking monk in your 20s instead of. Instead, just like, you would structure your work time, you need to structure your leisure time. This is the hour that I'm going to do all this stupid shit. But then it's over. Now, this might sound like a lot of work, because it is. Winning demands a sacrifice, but regret demands an even greater one. If you like this video, like and subscribe, and I'll see you in the next one.
