It’s important to periodically reiterate two ideas that can hold you back from becoming a natural Disruptor. The first is the temptation to chase money instead of attracting it, and the second is to follow your own path and not get sidetracked or misguided by someone professing to have all the answers.
We know two things unequivocally. One is that what Disruptors do is fantasize and dream up something that may or may not work. And two, that chasing money is never an absolute guarantee of success or monetary gain.
But we also know that unless you stay true to yourself and find your purpose, the alternative of chasing a pipe dream that someone else promises you will always elude you. As we all know from last week’s article, only ten percent of people who take any type of success training go on to do something that works, and the reason we take the gamble is that we hope we will be part of that ten percent.
Betting is just that… gambling on a chance to gain something you didn’t have before. We say we’re investing in ourselves and our future, but at the same time, we are doing nothing to foster and strengthen our own natural abilities.
It would be the same as a tennis pro relying on his new-fangled racket to win the tournament, not his own hard-earned skills, and abilities.
Instead, we buy into some stranger who promises to make us wealthy or successful. And we are not the only ones. Rich people do this all the time.
Remember Bernie Madoff who duped all those celebrities out of $20 billion? What about Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, who stole $4.5 billion from trusting and supposedly financially savvy people?
Bernie Madoff – Elizabeth Holmes
Then there’s Sam Bankman-Fried, Su Zhu, and Kyle Davies who basically crashed the cryptosystem, vaporized, and bilked people out of trillions of dollars.
Sam Bankman-Fried, SuZhu, Kyle Davies
Or Anthony Ritossa who claimed to be knighted, a Pulitzer nominee, and the heir of a 600-year-old olive oil empire, whose fake summits scammed millionaires and billionaires out of $2.8 billion, while getting the endorsement of Prince Albert II of Monaco.
Anthony Ritossa
And the list goes on… Jeffery Epstein, Donald Trump, and Norman Baker.
The point is that anyone can be conned. The bigger point being is that chasing money is never a guarantee of fame, fortune, or success. So why do we give our own pursuit of cultivating our dreams and desires such a bad rap?
What I’m attempting to do here is to illustrate that while someone appears to be financially savvy and successful, we really don’t know the whole story, do we? And usually, it’s too late when we do.
And secondly, why do we trust in someone else’s dream more than we trust in our own?
I’ll tell you why… it’s because most of us don’t have a proven track record for success, so, we tend to follow someone we think (and hope) knows better than we do.
And that’s why I want (and need) you to wake up. The difference (the only difference), between you and a successful Disruptor, is that they chose to stay on their own path, even when it seemed difficult, and the outcome was unknown.
You might not want to hear this, but a lot of people have been asleep most of their lives. They’ve been living under a fog of image and ego, not reality, just waiting for someone to kiss them and wake them up to the life they should have. They strive to reach something that isn’t manageable, let alone sustainable for very long. But the pressures and propaganda of society promise that if we work very hard, we’ll become rich, successful, beautiful, happy, socially dynamic, loved, or any of the other “standards” necessary to “fit in” and matter. But then, who really wants JUST to fit in?
Everyone wants a COMPELLING future
Everyone needs something that MOVES them forward
Everyone hungers to BREAK THROUGH
Most people spend their entire life chasing a dream that’s not even theirs, only to realize in their later years they really didn’t want that dream after all; and now they spend the rest of their lives working to capture their real dream; who they truly are.
It’s no one’s fault. From early on, we are taught to live up to the standards of a societal belief system that is not even our own. Ads, magazines, marketing, commercials, status, peer pressure, and the enticement of riches, all tell us we must acquire external things to make us beautiful, fulfilled, youthful, happy, loved, admired… But these supposed “roads to happiness” are fleeting, and soon we find that to sustain this feeling, we need to acquire more and more “things” to sustain these temporary moments of “happiness”. Ultimately, like useless, empty calories, we discover it leaves us unfulfilled.
Once we realize this, it takes a lot of effort to get rid of it and peel back the layers to find out who we really are (meant to be) and what we really want.
Look, should you buy an occasional lottery ticket? Sure. Should you take a training seminar that offers you newer skill sets? Of course. Should you attempt to figure out how Mark Cuban earned his wealth? Why not?
But what you shouldn’t do is do any of this without defining, shaping, and cultivating your own intuitive mindset. And you should always research and vet anything that promises easy roads to success and prosperity.
Nothing is guaranteed. But just like an athlete investing time and focus toward improving their abilities, or a writer honing their writing skills by practicing for many hours, or a designer, musical artist, painter, inventor, scientist, engineer, builder, or any other creative who spends hours upon hours improving and cultivating their own natural abilities, so should you too be investing fully in developing your own natural disruptive abilities.
Go ahead and study the already great Disruptors out there. Pay attention to what Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Larry Ellison, Stephen Hawking, JK Rowling, or Oprah Winfrey did to change the playing field. Just don’t copy them, and don’t seek out shortcuts.
Mastery takes time, patience, and trust in developing one’s own natural abilities.
Follow these suggestions if you truly want to develop your own unique Disruptive abilities:
1: Change Your Mind – You are most likely doing things partly based on a dream or desire, but partly based upon a belief system that has been with you for many years. For you to break out and tap into your bigger disruptive abilities, you need to examine and dissect if your current belief system is really working for you and not against you. Ask yourself a simple question. Where did I get my beliefs from, and do other people think this way? If the answer to the second part is no, then perhaps your beliefs are limiting you. Time to get rid of them and develop new more empowering beliefs that move you forward.
2: Know What You’re Meant to Do – Most people fail because they opt to go for security rather than what is in their hearts. The reason behind this is that the cost of living a life of security and safety is expensive these days, and we need to pay the bills in order to provide for ourselves and our loved ones. That doesn’t mean that you can’t go out there and figure out what you want to do or be. The trick is to do three things in order to figure out what that is. A) Don’t wait too long. Ten years can pass in the blink of an eye before you take any real action. Don’t wait. Start today. B) Get out of your bubble. The world you live in is marred by the comfort and safety of the things you know and are familiar with. To develop a true Disruptive mindset, you need to get out of your comfort zone and travel or visit someplace new or different than what you know. The places, people, and cultural ideas will give you new ways to look at the world. C) Don’t ever chase the shiny penny.
3: Pursue Happiness – Our forefathers actually nailed this one. The pursuit of happiness is the most important thing anyone can do to create a successful life. When you are pursuing happiness, you are growing, evolving, developing, and challenging assumptions. You are connecting to others and the world around you. You are tapping into your inner pool of adventurism and exploration. You are truly seeing what you are capable of. Happiness is tied to growth. When we are not growing, we become stuck in a rut of repeating the same routine day after day with no fulfilling purpose or desire. Pursuing happiness should be vibrant, exciting, challenging, playful, whimsical, experimental, and fun. Happiness is the core of what it means to be human.
If you MUST INVEST, then I suggest investing in yourself. I lied earlier. Investing in yourself is the only thing that IS guaranteed. A career is no guarantee. A degree is no guarantee. Marriage is no guarantee. They give you better odds, but they are no guarantee. The one thing that offers you the best options is to fully invest in yourself. Learn to develop your skills, your mind, your connections, and your curiosity. Trust in yourself and question everything you encounter. Challenge everything with a need to know and discover more. Don’t accept anything at face value. Be patient with yourself and the learning process. There will be times you will question or second-guess your choices. That’s to be expected. The unknown is a tricky place to navigate but stay the course. What’s not expected is whom you’ll become. But it is exciting to think about.
FOOTNOTES:
1: Bernie Madoff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Madoff
2: Elizabeth Holmes – U.S. v. Elizabeth Holmes, et al.: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/us-v-elizabeth-holmes-et-al
3: Federal Trade Commission – Reports Show Scammers Cashing in on Crypto Craze: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/data-visualizations/data-spotlight/2022/06/reports-show-scammers-cashing-crypto-craze
4: Anthony Ritossa – Inside Wealth-Conference Con Man: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2022/10/inside-wealth-conference-con-man-anthony-ritossas-wild-web-of-lies