you know i'm very successful and i wanted to make a quick video to explain how i became so successful i've reflected upon my life and came up with really 10 of my own rules for life that have led me to success if you've read that book by jordan peterson 12 rules on life you know that he's made the list i kind of wanted to make my own list and share with you see what you think about it and hopefully it will lead you to success in your personal or professional life as well so let's get into it quick pause this episode is brought to you by techlead.ting.com tink mobile is a no contract

cell phone plan that is almost sure to save you money they recently refreshed a bunch of their plans so they're very inexpensive plus they have award-winning customer support they'll give you a free 25 just for trying them out so check them out over at techlead.ting.com alright so my first rule is that most people are lazy when you think about it if you just put in a little bit of work most people aren't even willing to put in say an hour of work into most projects if you just put in a little bit it will put you so far ahead and this kind of has to do with the fixed mindset versus the growth mindset if you've heard of that

so the fixed mindset just believes in innate talent you either have some ability to draw dance or sing or not and then the growth mindset believes in practice preparation and putting in the time and effort to hone your craft and become consistently good at something to bring you to the top and so i was recently reading this book called mindset by carol dweck it's highly rated but it's essentially all about the differences between these two mindsets and how essentially if you have a fixed mindset then it leads you into avoiding failure and it really has ramifications across your whole life where you just don't take risks you're

afraid of failure you essentially self-sabotage yourself from taking on new opportunities off because you don't want to prove to the world that hey maybe you're one of the untalented people potentially see the thing is i actually realized this at a very early age believe it or not i was not an a student in elementary school mostly i was a bb plus student and then somewhere along the way it just clicked in me that you know what if i just put in some additional effort compensate for my lack of genius through just putting in some extra work putting some more hours into my homework assignment then i could match the smart students in

class and eventually i started getting a's too and people thought i was one of the smart kids too when in reality i was just putting in more work and people didn't see that so as the saying goes hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard and in that book mindset carol mentioned that you know maybe telling can get you to the top quickly but it's not sufficient to sustain you there and to propel you even further up that is going to be the result of sustain the hard work and effort and time that you put in so anyways i'll link that book in the description if you want to take a read now moving on to my second rule the

timing is never perfect so this is kind of a famous quote among travelers based around the idea that if you want to travel you have to really want it because no timing is really going to be perfect there's always going to be something in your current life that you're going to think of some excuse something that's going to go wrong and then you find that you're always going to be delanes always putting something off really procrastinating a dream or a task into some day some distant future where it really at the end it never gets done until your age 60 70 and you realize you've never traveled anywhere or you haven't checked off your bucket list as you may have

wanted to you just have to understand that mistakes will be made nothing will be perfect there's going to be issues there's going to be problems that you'll encounter but at the end of the day you just have to get something done and move forward and just accept that it's not going to be a perfect result sometimes you just have to say to yourself you're going to do something it's not going to be great it's going to be okay maybe decent you know the time is going to be off but you just have to move something forward and that's going to spur you into action and eventually it will get you results and hey at the end you can always go back and iterate upon or improve a project or at the minimum

you would have learned some valuable lessons from mistakes that were made now moving on to the third lesson in life it is ruthless prioritization so this is kind of a model that i picked up on last week on facebook but it's based on the idea that 80 of the results often comes from 20 of the effort this is known as the pareto principle which is based on the idea that most effort is wasted most information is irrelevant basically that most people are just focusing on the wrong things and you need to step back sometimes and think about what you're doing and how that's going to get you to the result maybe

there's a smarter way to do things sometimes so sometimes what this translates to me when i'm working on a coding project for example is to come up with an mvp the most valuable product and to just really focus on making that core feature great and making sure the product launches instead of you know sometimes i'll see many engineers they're going around refactoring code maybe they're messing around with buttons layouts interesting api calls funny little challenges and at the end they're really not focusing on the right things and in fact i would say it may help for you to sometimes detach step away from your situation and take a look at what are you really doing

and consider if that's really conducive to the result that you want or if it's just something that maybe you want to do or if you're just procrastinating now moving on to rule number four all good things in moderation and this is kind of based on the idea that i always keep in mind that 100 years from now people in the future will look back on the way we live and laugh at us they're going to probably ridicule us about the way we live the things we believed so naively the fact is we don't know that much and we're probably pretty stupid compared to people in 100 years from now we're like cavemen standards and so anything that

you believe to be true like maybe you think that butter is bad and margarine is good like we used to believe that and then people would go all in on the certain ideology and eat a bunch of margarine when it turns out that hey maybe butter is actually pretty good for you as most modern nutritionologists will think and so in order to hedge against yourself from potentially going off some extreme end off of a cliff i like the idea of just staying in moderation you know take a little bit of everything listen to what everybody has to say maybe if you even hate what other people have to say about you about a product

maybe still just pay attention think about it consider it because hey you may be wrong and you always want to be learning and you don't want to be drowning in your own self-ignorance and so for example constantly learning reading books is one way to keep yourself open to many different ideas and perspectives and to maintain balance in your life rule number five for me is success is fun and so this is something i realized a few years ago when i was working on some of my projects and i realized that i was just happy and blessed and i would have more fun trying to get some idea or project launched than spending the day at the beach and i

realized that sometimes it's funner to try to get something done and accomplish instead of the more traditional ideas i found like spending a whole day playing video games which is also pretty fun by the way but not as productive you know after i made my first million dollar app the app basically faded out and i was left with a bunch of money in the bank but i didn't have any relevance people didn't respect me no one cared who i was anymore and i found that i wasn't really happy anymore at that time and so i think that's why you often see serial entrepreneurs or people who continue to work despite being successful actors

directors venture capitalists tech entrepreneurs and i think for these people they realize that success is actually pretty fun especially that road the journey to success and not necessarily once you reach some fleeting moment some peak where you get some acquisition or ipo because after that it's just downhill from there and you fade into irrelevance my sixth rule to life is home is not a place home is people and i kind of realized this in my days of nomadic traveling i still travel a lot but you know when i would travel around a lot go from country to country working from these

various places i realized that none of these places really brought me that much joy in fact i made the video about how traveling is kind of overrated you know a lot of these places you see trees rocks shopping malls starbucks mcdonald's and the same brand stores and yeah there's some culture there too some museums art local foods nature and you don't get me wrong all of this is really great but at the same time there's this real emotional connection with the people right it's the people that make your moments special i would say and so at least for me it's gotten me to understand the value of

people above places above things as well it kind of creates the sense of minimalism for you where you realize what's really important in life for example if you're preparing a meal and people are arguing but it's a delicious meal it's still not quite worth it or if you're thinking of going to a place travel in the hopes of finding fulfillment or happiness you know i think you probably won't find that in rocks and trees and gravel but probably in the relationships that you build with people or if you're going to a place to visit friends or family now rule number seven is nobody cares a lot of people out there are very

self-conscious and i find that this pride or ego often holds people back it's probably the number one thing holding a lot of people back and for me i had this experience one time i was in starbucks and i was with my brother and we were going around trying to pick up some girls and you know we just decided to do an experiment my brother just went around and started whistling walking around just acting kind of funny acting kind of strange and we thought okay this is going to cause people to look up at him and it's going to present an opening for him but nobody looked up nobody even paid attention and that really made me realize most people are so busy so

consumed with their own little lives that they have very little time to worry about you you may think there are haters people criticizing you thinking about you all the time but in reality most people just don't have the time for that maybe they'll say something in passing to you but it's nothing to really focus too much on focus on yourself don't compare yourself with other people because they're probably not comparing themselves with you or they're just too busy checking up their facebook and twitter feeds to have time to even think about you for long and to just care for yourself be your own best friend because nobody else is going to do that for you

for me rule number eight is never give someone the fish when you can teach them how to fish and this comes from the idea that anything that you give people they're not going to appreciate and in fact i think there are some people out there who just they want to even play the role of the victim they enjoy suffering it is learned helplessness and this was actually a personality type that was recently discovered because through this they acquire means to pity and therefore help from other people maybe people will give them free help with free goods and services and people just essentially make a living this way and so i've learned that you cannot help somebody who is

unwilling to help themselves and really whatever you give to somebody else they're probably going to waste that very few people will cherish the gifts that you give them my rule number nine is that failure reveals character because you know in times of success when things are good and happy of course everybody looks good everybody can play the role but it is only in the times of weakness and failure when things are going wrong that you really have a time to shine and you can see what people are truly made of at that time and really it is how you deal with your failure whether you're learning from your mistakes and whether you can pick yourself back up

time after time after each rejection or failure that really reveals the strength of your character i tend to believe in every problem there's some opportunity maybe some way to turn that weakness into strength if you can find a way to leverage that and certainly sometimes it will be tough but that's also a time for you to shine now one of my core principles in life is to save money and retain your freedom which you can accomplish at techlee.ting.com tink mobile is a no contract a cell phone service that is just a smarter way of doing things and so whether you're a low data user or need unlimited data

ting mobile has the perfect plan for you or your family get talking tax for 10 bucks a month data plans at 15 bucks a month and unlimited plans starting at 45 try comparing that with your current cell phone plan to see how much you can save and what's more if you hate dealing with customer support well then you'll be glad to know that ting mobile has award-winning unreal customer support nationwide coverage no contracts and top-notch account tools and plus you can always bring your current phone and phone number to ting with no strings attached so make it a rule today to check out think mobile get

free 25 when you try them out attack lead ting.com and then my 10th rule is to own it to own your life end to end because yes life is unfair you can complain about it but at the end you are still accountable and responsible for your own life and how it turns out and some people are going to go out there and over prepare for it and take care of every single contingency and just think about how they can cover themselves to make sure that they succeed to guarantee their own success and then other people are going to come and say you know it was their teachers thought that they couldn't succeed maybe they got stuck in traffic maybe the weather

was bad or maybe it was their parents fault or some other situation in their life maybe they broke their leg whatever it is and then people are going to go around complaining whereas you see other people maybe in the exact same scenarios they're able to succeed through learning or improving themselves we're all dealt a random hand of cards in life and yeah maybe some people are dealt a stronger hand than others but you're not the card you're the player and it depends on how you play that hand a good player would be able to play any hand whether weak or strong and yet still maximize their potential i find for me a big part

of that is over preparation because preparation is the key to success and speaking of preparation by the way if you're looking to land a job at a top-tier tech company then make sure to check out my program techinterviewpro.com where ex google x facebook software engineers will fast track your career you'll learn all the essential data structures algorithms a big old time space analysis and the tips and strategies needed to ace your coding interviews so check that out over at techinterviewpro.com so that'll do for me these were some of the core rules that i found i've lived my life by and have led me to success but let me know what did you think about these rules and

what are some of your favorite rules in your own life i'd love to see that post in the comments below i will see you there if you like the video please give it a like and subscribe really appreciate that and i'll see you in the next one thanks bye