Don’t Look Up
~ 2 minute read.
In “Looking Up” I wrote about how your behaviour changes towards people you look up to that are more successful than you are. The same blog post also describes what I do to reduce this effect in myself and make me feel more “on the same level”.
I realize there is even more importance to this than I thought originally: once you see yourself as “on the same level”, you can relate to them and they expand your possibility space.
What is “possibility space”? It’s the set of things you believe are possible to achieve. You are constrained by this space, because you don’t even try to do the things you don’t believe are possible.
Five years ago I wouldn’t have tried to found my own company. The idea of doing this is not “tought” in German schools, I never knew it was an option! Seeing Gary Vaynerchuk in my facebook feed, not knowing who he was, not knowing about his past successes, I was seeing an “ordinary” man yelling at me for missing the opportunity of my lifetime shortly after leaving Gymnasium (German highschool). It probably helps that he only very rarely wears a suit.
But that made it click and my possibility space expanded exponentially since then. I see youtube videos in this space in a very weird way now compared to back then: I see all those people as my friends who are trying to help me, not “someone who is out of my reach”. I don’t use the word “friend” here in the sense of “people you hang out with”, but in the sense of “people who you trust and know and have only the best intentions towards you”. In this case, they obviously don’t know me yet.
This is a weird perspective and hence I am reluctant to share it. Maybe you are weird enough to feel the same way. The incredible benefit of this is that it helps acquire their mindset, model and mirror what they do.
Written in 20 minutes, edited in 5 minutes.