How to Be Better Than 99% of People

So, there's this guy, a world-renowned billionaire, a tech genius, inventor, and entrepreneur. He's athletic and talented and handsome with a jaw so chiseled it looks like Zeus came down from Olympus and carved the [ __ ] himself. This guy's got a small fleet of sports cars, a few yachts, and when he's not giving millions of dollars to charities, he's changing out supermodel girlfriends like other people change their socks. This guy's smile can melt the whole room. His charm is so thick you could swim in it. Half of his friends were Times man of the year and the other half don't care cuz they could just buy Time magazine if they wanted to. This man, you guessed it, his name is Bruce Wayne, also known as Batman. And well, he's a comic book character. I'm a rich kid with issues. Lots of issues.

Now, it's an interesting facet of human nature that we seem to have this need to come up with these sort of fictional heroes that embody perfection and everything that we dream of and admire. Medieval Europe had gallant knights fighting off dragons. Ancient Rome and Greece had their myths about heroes who won wars single-handedly and in some cases fought against the gods. Every other human culture is replete with such fantastical tales of utter perfection embodied in one human. And today we have our comic book superheroes. Take Superman. I mean, the guy is basically a god in a pair of red speedos. He is indestructible and unbeatable. And the only thing as sturdy as his physical fortitude is his moral fortitude. In Superman's world, justice is always black and white. And Superman never wavers from doing what's right, no matter what. People were going to die, die, die.

Now, I don't think I'm exactly shaking up the field of psychology by suggesting that as humans, we have this inherent need to conjure up these heroes to help us cope with our own feelings of powerlessness. I mean, that's essentially what Joseph Campbell's entire work is based off of. There are over 8 billion people on this planet, and really only about a thousand of those have any major worldwide influence at any given time. So that leaves 7,999,999,000 of us to come to terms with the limited scope of our lives and the fact that the vast majority of what we do will likely not matter long after we've died. This is not a fun thing to think about or to accept. You're probably here because you want to get ahead of most of those people. But today, I want to take a detour from our usual make more, buy more, [ __ ] more programming and argue for, well, coming to terms with your own mediocrity, your own averageness. This man is overcasted. Now, I know that's not super sexy or exciting, but hear me out because I think this is actually way more important.

Everything in life is a trade-off. Some of us are born with high aptitudes for academic learning. Others are born with great physical skills. Others are really athletic. Others are artistic. Others can solve a Rubik's cube in 3 seconds flat. In terms of skills and talents, humans are a wildly diverse group of smelly creatures. Sure, what we end up accomplishing in life ultimately depends on our practice and effort. But we are all born with different aptitudes and potentials. Let's imagine all those aptitudes and potentials on a graph. Here is what is called a bell curve. Now, any of you who have taken a statistics class and survived it will recognize it. A bell curve is quite simple. Take a population of people, like let's say people who play golf at least once a year. The horizontal axis represents how good they are at golf. Further to the right means that they're really good. Further to the left means that they're like me and they're [ __ ] terrible. Now, notice that it gets really thin at the far ends of the curve. That means that there are a few people who are really, really good and a few people who are really, really terrible. The majority will fall into the mediocre middle.

Now, we can apply a curve in this way to pretty much anything in a population. Height, weight, emotional maturity, wages, how often people like to [ __ ] and so on and so forth. For example, this is Michael Jordan dunking a basketball. It is well known that he is one of the best to ever do it. Therefore, he is all the way on the right side of the curve, better than 99.9999% of people who have ever dunked a basketball ever. Then you have this guy. Obviously, he's no Michael Jordan. In fact, chances are many of you watching this right now could probably do better than this guy. That means he's all the way on the left side of the bell curve and extreme on the other side. Now, we stand in awe of MJ because he's more athletic than all of us combined. We laugh at the unathletic guy because he's less athletic than pretty much all of us. Both are at different extremes of the bell curve. And well, as you guessed it, most of us are part of the majority in the middle. We all have our own strengths and weaknesses, but the fact is most of us are pretty average at most things we do. Even if you're truly exceptional at one thing, say math or jump rope or making money from crypto scams, chances are you're pretty average at everything else. That's just the nature of life. That's the nature of being a human being. To become truly great at something, you have to dedicate so much time and energy to it. And because none of us have infinite time and energy, basically none of us can be truly exceptional at more than one or two things in our entire lives. Statistically, we can very confidently say that it's basically impossible for somebody to be an extraordinary performer in all areas of their life, like a Bruce Wayne. And for most of us, even more than one area of our life. I mean, it's like if you're lucky, you can be extraordinary at one thing. But if we're being honest, most of us don't even achieve that. And sure enough, you see this in the world all around you. Brilliant businessmen are often fuckups in their personal lives. Extraordinary athletes are often shallow and dumb as the [ __ ] souls of their thousand special edition shoes. Most celebrities are just as clueless about life as the people who gawk at them and follow their every move. Pick any notable online personality and follow them for long enough and it's not hard to notice all the ways in which they are average or below average. You have the health gurus whose relationships are a mess, the relationship gurus whose finances are a mess, the financial gurus have no friends or social life. Or take me, you will not meet someone with more mediocre health habits than I do. But that's only because I'm exceptionally fun at a party.

So, if you're struggling to come to terms with your mediocrity, maybe you should consider therapy or the sponsor of today's video, BetterHelp. Now, lofty terms like success and mediocrity can be difficult to wrangle and contextualize, but talking with a therapist specifically tailored to your needs and wants can hopefully make the process a bit easier. Now, through an onboarding survey, BetterHelp matches you with a therapist who can help you with your specific problems. From there, you can communicate with them in any way you wish through text, phone calls, or video. Now, the best thing is that with BetterHelp, if you ever want to switch therapists, you can do so at any time with no questions asked. Therapy has been hugely impactful for me when I was younger. It took me from being a brash, insecure, selfish young man to merely a brash and somewhat insecure older man. That's not the best sales pitch, but trust me, it was an improvement, which in hindsight was very significant for my growth. Use the link in the description below to get 10% off your first month of therapy or go to betterhelp.com/markmanson.

We are all for the most part pretty average people and it's the extremes that get all the publicity. Now, we all kind of intuitively know this, but we rarely think or talk about it. The vast majority of us will never truly be exceptional at well, pretty much anything. And that's okay. So, here's the problem. I would argue that we have this expectation or dare I say entitlement more today than any other time in history that we should be exceptional, that we should be extraordinary at everything. But our attention is limited. There is no way we can process the tidal waves of information flowing through the internet at any given time. Therefore, the only ones that break through and catch our attention are the truly exceptional pieces of information. The 99.999th percentile, the Michael Jordans of everything. All day, every day, we are flooded with the truly extraordinary, the best of the best, the worst of the worst, the greatest physical feats, the funniest jokes, the most upsetting news, the scariest threats. Non-stop. Everything is Bruce Wayne. We are a bunch of normal people living in a Bruce Wayne world where everything is expected to be extraordinary. Our lives today are filled with information coming from the extremes of the bell curve. Because in the media, that's what gets eyeballs and the eyeballs bring dollars. That's it. Yet, the vast majority of our life continues to reside in the humdrum middle. It's my belief that this flood of extreme information has conditioned us to erroneously believe that exceptional is the new normal. And since all of us are rarely exceptional, we all feel pretty damn insecure and terrible about it. Paradoxically, we think being better than 99% of people should be standard without realizing the mathematical reality. That for every hundred of us who attempt this, 99 of us will fail. There's a kind of psychological tyranny in our culture today. A sense that we must always be proving that we're special, that we're unique, that we're exceptional all the [ __ ] time. Then we watch three TikToks of other people doing something amazing and we get down on ourselves for not being as good as them. For example, take a montage like this. This doesn't even register to us as unique or incredible. To get the five seconds of incredible footage likely spent years and years and years and years practicing their craft as well as dozens of hours of recording just to get a perfect 5-second shot. Yet, we're not exposed to those years of practice. We're not exposed to the hours of failed footage. We're not exposed to all the mistakes, to all the mediocrity. We're merely exposed to the best five seconds of every single person's life all the time. Then we watch us and we forget it within minutes because we're on to the next thing and the next incredible thing and the next incredible thing.

Now, I know what you're saying, but but but Mark, if I'm not going to be special or extraordinary, what's the point of doing anything? Look, let's be honest. I clickbaited you here with a title promising you how to be extraordinary, how to be better than 99% of people. And now I just crushed your soul and bored you for 10 minutes about how everyone, even the ones you look up to, are mostly average at most things. What? No. No. What? And here's the point. This idea that you can get ahead of 99% of people in life, it's kind of [ __ ] because even if you pick one domain, like let's say money, let's say you just want to make a [ __ ] ton of money to do so, you will have to give up so much in other areas of your life that you will still feel painfully hopelessly ordinary. I mean, there's a reason why the 10 richest men in the world have been divorced 13 times. A lot of people are afraid to accept mediocrity because they believe that if they accept being mediocre, then they will never actually achieve anything. Their life will never mean anything, that they'll never improve at anything, that their life won't get better. And I find this sort of thinking to be very dangerous, because once you accept the premise that life is only worthwhile if it is truly notable or great, then you basically accept the fact that most of the human population sucks and is worthless. And ethically speaking, that is like a very dark place to go. Not to mention, when you face your own inevitable mediocrity, you will not have any compassion for it. But let's put our mental health and philosophical arguments aside for a second because most people's problem with accepting mediocrity is actually more practical. They worry that if I accept being average, then I'll never achieve anything great. So, don't I have to like convince myself that I'm going to be one of the rare extraordinary ones to actually do the work to succeed? This too is totally [ __ ] ass backwards because if you actually look at the people who become truly exceptional at something, they do so not because they believe they're exceptional. On the contrary, they become amazing because they are obsessed with improvement. And that obsession with improvement stems from an unerring belief that they are in fact not great at all. That they are completely mediocre. That they are average, below average. Why should people care about Tyler the Creator? They shouldn't. I'm not [ __ ] I actually suck. It's tight. And this is the great irony about ambition. If you wish to be smarter and more successful than everybody else, then you will always feel like a failure. If you wish to be the most loved and the most popular, then you will always feel alone. If you wish to be the most powerful and admired, then you will feel weak and impotent. All of this every person can be extraordinary and achieve greatness stuff is basically just jerking off your ego. It is [ __ ] that is sold to you to make you feel good for a few minutes and to get you through the week without hanging yourself in a cubicle. It's a message that tastes good going down, but in reality is nothing more than empty calories that make you emotionally fat and bloated. It's the proverbial Big Mac for your heart and your brain. The ticket to emotional health, like physical health, is eating your veggies. That is through accepting the bland and mundane truths of life. A light salad of you're actually pretty average in the grand scheme of things and some steamed broccoli of the vast majority of your life will be unremarkable, unnotable, and unexciting. But that's totally okay because you're still a worthwhile human anyway. And this will taste very bad at first, very bad. And you will avoid eating it. But once it's ingested, your body will actually wake up feeling more potent and more alive. After all, that constant stress and pressure to always be something amazing, to do the next big thing, it will be lifted off your back. And that stress and anxiety of feeling inadequate will dissipate. And the knowledge and acceptance of your own mundane existence will actually free you to accomplish all of the amazing things that you wish for yourself without the judgment, without the expectation, and without the pressure. You will have a growing appreciation for life's basic experiences. You will learn to measure yourself through a new and healthier means, the pleasures of a simple friendship, of creating something new, of helping a person in need, of reading a good book, of laughing while eating a salad. It sounds boring, doesn't it? That's because these things are average. But maybe, maybe they're average for a reason, because they are what actually matter. Thank you for watching this video. I hope it helped. And if you liked it, you should watch this video, too. It's a different video and it's kind of it's a couple years old. My hair was very different. But if you like this one, you'll probably like that one, too. [Music]