The video opens with an intriguing anecdote about meeting an unconventional individual who defies societal expectations by living a leisurely lifestyle devoid of financial worries. Unlike the initial conjecture of the narrator, this person is not a reckless spender but a smart investor and successful entrepreneur. Despite not being exceptionally intelligent according to conventional standards, this individual exemplifies how financial success does not strictly correlate with innate intelligence, as supported by research.

The video challenges the common perception that intelligence is necessary for financial success. It identifies four limiting beliefs that hold "smart" individuals back: not caring about money, fear of looking stupid, overestimating risk, and not knowing what they don't know. These misconceptions often prevent many from achieving their potential. The narrative also explores how "dumb" people benefit by being underestimated, allowing them to take risks more freely and sometimes unexpectedly find success due to a lack of over-analysis.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. smack dab [smæk dæb] - (adverb) - Precisely in a specific spot or place. - Synonyms: (exactly, precisely, directly)

In fact, on like the bell curve of intelligence, he was probably smack dab in the middle.

2. perennial [pəˈrɛniəl] - (adjective) - Enduring or continually recurring. - Synonyms: (everlasting, perpetual, enduring)

The ability to run simulations in our mind to predict what may or may not happen in the future and then plan accordingly. This is the perennial superpower that separates humans from literally every other animal on the planet.

3. savannah [səˈvænə] - (noun) - A grassy plain in tropical and subtropical regions, with few trees. - Synonyms: (grassland, prairie, plain)

One of the great survival mechanisms when you’re out on the savannah is just to assume pretty much everything is trying to kill you.

4. maestro [ˈmaɪstroʊ] - (noun) - A distinguished musician or conductor. - Synonyms: (virtuoso, conductor, master)

You can't just turn off your brain and execute like a true maestro can.

5. misconception [ˌmɪskənˈsɛpʃən] - (noun) - A view or opinion that is incorrect due to faulty thinking or understanding. - Synonyms: (misunderstanding, fallacy, delusion)

It identifies four limiting beliefs that hold "smart" individuals back from wealth due to misconceptions about intelligence and wealth.

6. domain [doʊˈmeɪn] - (noun) - A specified sphere of activity or knowledge. - Synonyms: (field, area, specialty)

People with low competence in a particular domain tend to overestimate their abilities.

7. competence [ˈkɑːmpɪtəns] - (noun) - The ability to do something successfully or efficiently. - Synonyms: (capability, ability, expertise)

First, people with low competence in a particular domain tend to overestimate their abilities.

8. pessimism [ˈpɛsɪˌmɪzəm] - (noun) - A tendency to see the worst aspects of things or believe that the worst will happen. - Synonyms: (negativity, cynicism, gloom)

But there’s a problem with this superpower. It tends to skew toward pessimism.

9. catastrophic [ˌkætəˈstrɑːfɪk] - (adjective) - Involving or causing sudden great damage or suffering. - Synonyms: (disastrous, calamitous, terrible)

Taking risks to make money, assuming you’re not doing anything illegal, is unlikely to end in any type of catastrophic ruin that you can't recover from.

10. irony [ˈaɪrəni] - (noun) - A state of affairs or events that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects. - Synonyms: (paradox, contradiction, incongruity)

One of the greatest ironies in the world is something called the Dunning Kruger effect.

People Dumber Than You Are Making Millions

So, twelve years ago, I'm working at a climbing gym, making minimum wage, when one day this guy walks in. He's dressed head to toe in black, every inch of exposed skin is covered in tattoos, and he's got this gigantic beard. So we get to chat and he tells me about his life, how he dropped out of school, hasn't had a job in years, and he just spends all of his time traveling the world on one random ass adventure after another, like hiking the John Muir trail or biking across the country or surfing down in Bali.

And I'm sitting here scratching my head. Cause at this point, I'm 28 and I'm living in a van because I got $80,000 of debt. And I'm just trying to figure out, how is this guy affording this crazy, carefree lifestyle? And my initial reaction was to think he was either a drug dealer or doing something stupid by just financing his life with a credit card and racking up massive debt. But turns out, on both accounts, I was dead wrong. This dude owned five apartment buildings. He ran a shop where he would fix up old Harley's that he would buy off Craigslist, and he built a recording studio for musicians in his garage. He was the first true bread entrepreneur I ever met. And I remember thinking, what the hell is this guy's secret? Like, what makes him so special? Because, as he himself was quick to point out, he really wasn't particularly smart. In fact, on like the bell curve of intelligence, he was probably smack dab in the middle.

And it just kind of threw me, because my whole worldview, I guess, in the back of my mind, I always thought that you had to be smart to make big money. The truth is, the richest people in the world, they're not necessarily any smarter than you or me. In fact, a study out of Sweden called the plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners confirms this. Found that there's actually a drop in cognitive abilities corresponding to the top 5% of earners. So in this video, I'm going to break down why exactly. That is why people like me, who are most likely dumber than you, are, making millions. And to do that, we're going to unpack four limiting beliefs that keep smart people from getting rich. And then at the end of the video, I'm going to share with you the secret of success that I learned after having lunch with a billionaire. Let's dive in.

The first limiting belief is I don't care about money. Listen, our society has a very problematic relationship with money. On the one hand, it's often used to signal status because we as a culture, mistakenly equate status with value. And this is why keeping up with the Joneses is such a damn problem. You might not really care about getting that new fancy car, but if the neighbors have one, then that means they have more status, and therefore they must be more valuable to society, right? Well, no, of course not. Saying it out loud just draws attention to how stupid that sounds. The truth is, it doesn't actually matter. These things, they signal status, but they don't actually make you more valuable.

And I think deep down, we all understand this. And so a lot of people just do what I did, and they decide the game is broken and stupid and they stop playing it all together. Because after all, the only people who care about making money are shallow, greedy, and materialistic, right? Well, no, it's actually wrong. But believing this gives you the permission to not even try. And the result of this mindset, for me at least, was that my life really sucked and I had no way of providing for myself, my family, or my community, which made me feel terrible about myself because I just felt like a drain on everybody around me.

It was around this time that I realized a fundamental truth. You can't actually opt out of the money game. Like it or not, you need money to survive. So the real question isn't whether or not you're going to play the money game, but how are you going to play the money game? And truly answering that question in a way that transformed my pursuit of money into something greater than my desire for status or material things, that was the key to unlocking my earning potential. So I encourage you to ask yourself, if you weren't limited by money, what impact could you have on the world? Now, the only way to not be limited by money is to win the money game for yourself. And you can define what winning looks like in whatever way you want. But for me, I define it as just getting to the point on your financial journey where money is no longer the limiting factor in any of the decisions you make.

Now, regardless of how you define winning and how you decide you're going to play the money game, one thing is universal. To win, you're going to have to put yourself out there, you're going to have to get in the arena, and you're going to have to actually try. And that might sound painfully obvious, but most people won't do it because of the second limiting belief that keeps smart people from making money, which is this. I'm afraid of looking stupid. One of the reasons dumb people have an advantage when it comes to making money is because everybody underestimates them. They think, oh, that guy's dumber than a box of rocks. He's never going to amount to anything. He'd be lucky to get a job at 711.

Now, two interesting things happen when people underestimate you. First, it puts a chip on your shoulder to prove everybody wrong, and that can be a powerful motivator. Second, it frees you up to try anything because who really cares if you fail? People have already written you off. I mean, what you got to lose? It's great to be the underdog. Nobody expects you to win. You've got nothing but potential upside. Smart people, on the other hand, well, they have the opposite problem. They have nothing but downside because everybody expects them to be wildly successful in everything they do, which is obviously impossible.

But smart people are now in a no win situation because if they try something crazy and it fails, then their very identity as a smart person is at risk. So the only smart move that protects this identity is to follow the well trodden path that everybody else is following. You go to school, you get your job, you bust your ass for 40 years, and then you retiree. And don't get me wrong, this can provide a great lifestyle, which is absolutely right for most people. But if you want to get rich, you can't follow common wisdom and expect to get uncommon results. You have to do something different.

Now, the problem with doing something different is that most people perceive it to be risky. But what even is risk? How do we define it? How do you even measure it? I mean, you might look at the guy climbing on a cliff and think he's a reckless daredevil, whereas he might look at you speeding down the freeway in traffic and think you're crazy. And the truth is, you're both crazy risk takers. We all are. There's no way of navigating this thing called life without taking risk. But something I've come to notice is that dumb people tend to underestimate risk, whereas smart people tend to overestimate it.

And this leads to the third limiting belief that holds smart people back from making millions. It's this. It's too risky. Now, don't get me wrong. The ability to run simulations in our mind to predict what may or may not happen in the future and then plan accordingly. This is the perennial superpower that separates humans from literally every other animal on the planet. But there's a problem with this superpower. It tends to skew towards pessimism, which makes sense if you think about it from an evolutionary perspective, our ancestors were the ones who survived long enough to pass on their genes. And one of the great survival mechanisms when you're out on the savannah is just to assume pretty much everything is trying to kill you.

If you hear something rustling in the weeds, you should probably assume it's a tiger and run away, because if you're wrong, you just look silly running from the breeze. But if you're right, then you ain't dead. So all that's to say, we've evolved to always assume the worst case scenario. Now, historically, intelligence was a great attribute in surviving out in the wilderness because the smartest people amongst us were the most capable of calculating all the things that could potentially go wrong. Therefore, they were more likely to survive because they were better at avoiding taking risks that could get them killed. All told, this strategy kept our species alive for millennia. So I'm not gonna knock it.

It's important to recognize that the game has changed over the past century as we've modernized as a society. And truly, the number of existential threats that you face on a daily basis is practically zero compared to your ancestors. These days, the punishment for taking risks and guessing wrong is far less severe as well. Maybe you lose some money, maybe you lose some status. You got to live in the back of a van for a while, and you start over. But ultimately, taking risks to make money, assuming you're not doing anything illegal, is unlikely to end in any type of catastrophic ruin that you can't recover from.

Which is why dumb people have an advantage when it comes to making money these days, because often they're just ignorant of all the things that could go wrong, whereas smart people can see it all so clearly in their mind and it stops them from ever even getting in the game. I call this a curse of intelligence, which I'll explain more in just a second. But before I do, it's important that you understand one thing. You are probably very good at imagining all the things that can go wrong, right? But studies show that humans are really, really terrible at calculating the probability of those events actually occurring. I mean, how much time have you ever spent thinking about worst case scenarios that never came to fruition? My guess is it's a lot, because the thing is, worst case scenario almost never actually happens.

So we spend all this time worrying about things that are unlikely to happen. But even worse, we allow our fear of those downsides to stop us from taking the actions which would in all likelihood lead to an amazing positive outcome. Now, I used to really struggle with this, but here's just a simple reframe that's helped me get out of my own head when it comes to calculating risks. It's just to remind myself that the risk of mediocrity is greater than the risk of failure. And for some reason, that just helps me get out of my own way and actually get in the game.

Okay, so this is just one aspect of the curse of intelligence. But there's another side to it which ties into the fourth, limiting belief, keeping smart people from making money. It's this. I don't know what. I don't know. Now, one of the greatest ironies in the world is something called the Dunning Kruger effect. This cognitive bias has two interesting aspects. First, people with low competence in a particular domain tend to overestimate their abilities, whereas people with high competence in a domain tend to underestimate their abilities. Understanding why this occurs is actually quite fascinating. So let's break it down real quick so we can understand and recognize this bias in ourselves and hopefully eliminate it.

One of my favorite learning models is something called the four stages of competence. It breaks down like this. The first stage of learning is unconscious incompetence, where you don't even really understand how bad you are at the thing yet because you're effectively ignorant of the majority of us. We're going to stay in this phase on most topics for our entire life and not even realize it. But if you stick with it and you continue improving, you're going to move out of that phase and you're going to go to the second stage, which is conscious incompetence, which is just another way of saying you're starting to see the full breadth and depth of the topic. Now you see enough to realize just how little you actually know.

Now, with enough time, with enough effort, you can make the jump out of this phase and make it to the next level, which is conscious of competence. Now you possess the knowledge and experience required to competently execute this skill. But the interesting thing about this phase is that it still requires your conscious intent. For instance, you might be a fantastic guitar player, but it still requires your focused attention. You can't just turn off your brain and execute like a true maestro can, because you haven't progressed to the final stage of learning, which is unconscious competence. Now, we call this level mastery because you can now execute the skill at the highest levels without even thinking about it. Now, you will likely only ascend to this level in a handful of skills over the course of your entire life, because the amount of work it requires to attain true mastery is enormous.

But the mistake a lot of us make, which gives life to the Dunning Kruger effect, is that when we're in the lower stages of learning, specifically unconscious incompetence, that is, we don't even know what we don't know. We're more likely to overestimate where we are on the spectrum because we don't have realize just how far there is still to go. Whereas once you're in the middle two phases of conscious incompetence and conscious competence, now you tend to underestimate your abilities only because now you can see the top of the mountain, you realize how damn far away it is. So let's bring this full circle.

The reason smart people struggle to make money is because they get hung up on the fact that they know they don't know everything. For instance, if you've been working as an accountant in a Fortune 500 company for the last decade, you have a breadth of domain experience that could easily be translated into starting your own profitable accounting firm. But you're likely to get hung up on the massive discrepancy between your domain experience and your general knowledge of what it takes to run a business. And therefore you decide not to take action. The dumb person, by comparison, might not have your accounting skills or experience, and so there's not as big of a gap between that and their general business knowledge, which might lead them to conclude that starting their own accounting practice will be easier than it actually will be in reality.

As a result, dumb people tend to take action and get in the game. And because things rarely play out as badly as we think they will, more often than not, they stumble onto success. And if you walk away from this video having learned only one thing, let it be this. I call it the secret of success. I stumbled upon this secret a couple years ago after meeting my very first billionaire. And for whatever reason, I guess I just had it in my head that billionaires probably had this business thing all figured out, and that they were operating on this higher level than the rest of us lowly entrepreneurs. But I remember leaving that meeting with only one thought. It was holy shit, this guy had no clue what he was doing.

He was just too stupid to quit. And when I say stupid, I mean he overestimated his abilities. He didn't fully understand all the things that could go wrong and why his plan shouldn't work. And he didn't realize that after years of hitting his head against the wall and things just weren't working out, that he should probably just pack it up, go home, and get a job that actually pays the bills. And yet he didn't give up. He didn't stop believing he could make it work, despite the fact that everybody, to his friends, to his family, he looked like an idiot. He looked like an idiot right up until the day things started to finally work.

And on that day, after years of struggle, he suddenly looked like a genius. And I share this with you because on my own personal journey, I've learned this powerful lesson. That you can't win if you don't start, and you can't lose if you don't quit. And whether you're smart or you're dumb in that simple concept, is everything you need to know about finding success in life. So I encourage you to get started. Don't stop. And I'll see you in the next video. Odd. Yeah.

Entrepreneurship, Finance, Inspiration, Risk Taking, Dunning Kruger Effect, Limiting Beliefs, Anthony Vicino