Vastly Underrated Predictor of Success

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Will Robbins had a banger tweet several years ago:

“Vastly underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status. Everyone drones on about stuff like hard work, but so many of the top people I’ve met were uniquely willing to spend years looking like they’re working on something silly or insignificant.”

I should clarify, this “willingness to be low-status” is not the same thing as “willingness to work with no result”.

You need to be getting some traction making progress towards your goals.

But it doesn’t need to look impressive to other people who are not “in the know” in the same nerdhole.

And if you are really innovating, then it probably won’t look broadly impressive for quite a while, not until well after you’re stable.

Basically, if you can tell you’re on a serious growth curve, then you should have faith that you’ll eventually get to where you want to go if you just keep at it.

Sometimes people describe this like “embrace being uncool.”

It’s less about being “uncool” and more about being so early on something cool that few people understand it’s cool.

Embrace being on the early side of a serious growth curve.

But don’t delude yourself into believing it’s a growth curve if it’s actually flat. That’s uncool in the bad way.

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