How to Get Ahead of 99% of Students (Without Studying)

so why say that grades are not always correlated with success in life sometimes you see someone who went to like a top university they got tons of good grades for high school but they're struggling to find a job whereas someone else who didn't even go to university or probably even failed University or like most of their exams in high school is having all these opportunities at their doorstep they're starting businesses they're going to events they're going to different conferences and it just seems that grades are not always correlated with success in life and I think one pretty big component of this is agency basically agency is the ability to shape your own life and control and respond to external events and most people who go through life they just kind of live life letting things happen to them and they just kind of respond in like the minimum man way whereas people who are agentic or have a lot of agency they kind of make their own path so I'll give you an example when I was in university there was a s program that I really wanted to go to and I went on the website and it had been delayed because of covid and it said like it was closed applications were completely closed and I was like man I still really want to go because it looks like a really good s program so what I did is I found the uh like manager the person running the program on Facebook sent her a message being like hey my name is such and such I'm like interested in these things which is related to what are you're interested in do you want to chat sometime and then we ended up hopping on a call and like I think like a couple days later and we started chatting and it seemed we really clicked and basically I expressed my interest in the program like towards the end and she was like oh we actually had like a couple people who dropped out of the program like they're not going to be attending anymore do you want to like join or like replace them and I was like yeah and it turned out that she hadn't had the time to like reopen up applications and I had the agency to like find her on Facebook and then just ask her and then I got on to this program whereas someone else who really wanted to go in the same program maybe they were better suited for the pr program or they had better grades or they were more qualified if they just kept like refreshing the page and waiting for applications to open again basically I just be that person to get to the program and the same thing happened in University when I was applying for internships basically all the internships that I applied for and all the jobs that I got as well were usually from like messaging people or like I knew one person who like connected me to another person I never end up getting an opportunity a job whatever from filling out like a job application form because firstly I feel like at that point it's more of a numbers game so like how many ones you can fill out whereas if you're connecting through people or you're messaging people directly then you already like beat most of the numbers because most people don't have the agency to do what you're doing so for example like I intend for Ali abdal and I think around the time when I intend for him he had like a million subscribers at the time and I just sent him an email being like hey like I have my own channel I do this that and that like can I work for you over the summer and he replied in like 5 10 minutes and was like yeah like let's do this um basically he gave me his phone number and he was like yeah call me like closer to Summertime or like when your Su vacationist might stop yeah basically within one email in 10 minutes like I didn't have to fill out this long application form I ended up getting a some intership for that and I could have like used that opportunity to get a job afterwards or like more some internships or basically anything else but I think what sets people apart who end up becoming really successful and those people who kind of like achieve some kind of mediocre success is the people who become really successful have taken agency to like do something so I'll give you some examples like on Twitter friend of a friend didn't get into MIT exchange by his German University booked a one-way ticket to Boston where MIT is um knocked on doors till he got r a random Professor to sign him off stayed there and was like literally just a visiting researcher in underground you can literally just do things and there's another example where this guy's saying back in high school I sent over 200 C emails to Stanford Labs seeking a research internship until one finally worked out never give up cold Outreach is a superpower and I think in these cases the reason why they're having success is that just taking the effort to do things that most people aren't doing so most of these Stanford Labs some of them may not be offering some internships but you can just ask anyway like you don't need to go on the website and then keep refreshing the page hoping that you'll find one the same thing happened to one of my friends which I think I mentioned in previous video when he was like 17 or 18 in sepm which is like the UK equivalent of like high school the latest stages of high school he really wanted to like be involved in the music industry because he was going to be studying music at University and what he did is he ended up doing a some intership for Elton John who's a like world famous musician and how he got that was actually he noticed a lot of like artists and big singers during Co this was during Co time weren't touring so that means they were going to be at that home and he found Elon John's home

address online uh which you can do like if you're pretty clever about it um for a lot of people and then he hand wrote like a letter and then hand delivered it to his house which is like 20 30 mil away basically then elton's manager saw the letter responded by email and then was like yeah we'd love to like give a talk at your school because the letter was asking hey Elon blah blah can you come and give a talk at my school so then he arranged the talk at his school and afterwards at the end of the he asked I think it was either him or his manager being like hey like can I do some internship for you guys and basically like the year before University so after finishing high school he did some internship at like Elon John's like management company and then got to like go on to concerts get like free backstage tickets and passes got to meet all these other interesting people became really well connected in the music industry at age 18 and that's like pretty surprising for someone who's like age 18 and it's because he had the agency to like be like hey this is this thing that I want to do how can I make this happen and since so few people are doing this kind of stuff like when I emailed Ali asking for an internship I think I was the first person who ever did that and he had a million followers at the time if so few people are doing this then you have much less competition through this approach than actually like going on a job board and applying for a job for example or applying for an internship so what this means is like let's say you want to work in a video game industry after graduating or something and you're like okay I'm going to keep refreshing these like websites and Pages hoping for like an intership to come up and then they open an internship they have like 5,000 or 10,000 applications coming they use AI to like filter through like 9,000 of the applications and then it's like a numbers game your application even if it's good might just be lost or it might just be discarded by like an AI computer system whereas your chances of getting like a video game internship at like I don't know Rockstar Games or like the guys who made candy crush for example would be much higher if let's say you took like a month during the summer before University or like during your like uh winter Christmas holidays like making a mobile game or like making a simple game and then posting about it online and then like sharing on online on like XO linked 10 and uh on the app store or whatever and then you like message like 20 30 like video game companies and you may not necessarily like get to Rockstar Games right away but you might like get a some internship at another video game company that was like hey this looks cool like this guy looks like he could do useful work for us and then you become connected for that internship then maybe the following year you're able to do like an intership at Rockstar Games and like the previous tweet showed where he emailed like 200 different Stanford Labs you can't just like message like five people or 10 people and then be like man no one responded to me or like everyone said no and then just give up because often the chances of them saying no are not necessarily to do with you not being good enough it's because like their company is not hiring anyone at that moment in time because they have like busy they're busy with other problems they're dealing with internally or like they don't have the budget to take someone on or like they capacity basically like there's a whole host of different problems that they're having internally that's nothing to do with you and even if they do reply and they say they can't take you on maybe you can ask for other connections like hey do you know anyone else who might be interested in like this kind of work that I have on offer or like another common reason is like you're often just asking the wrong person like this person you emailed doesn't have the authority to make the decision on the thing you want to do so for example like let's say I really wanted to intern at like a video game company in my previous example and then I just message like the support team does not have the authority to offer internships or like make any hiring decisions so what I should be doing is like emailing or reaching out to people on like specific teams within the company by like searching on LinkedIn or like going on their websites and finding their personal email address or like guessing their email address or something and while in some cases it can be quite repetitive or you're like sending a lot of emails or you're doing like a lot of reaching out or posting online like the return on payout is like pretty high because once you land one opportunity success of opportunities become easier because you can connect to similar people within the industry so going back to my friend's example like he's now really well connected in the music industry that if he wanted to work for even bigger musician than Elon John the following summer or their management company then he could work there or he can basically work out like anywhere in the like music industry pretty much because of that one experience that he managed to get so anyway my recommendation basically is like if you're a student and you want to be able to get ahead of most people and you're wondering like how everyone else is able to get ahead despite not having say like the best grades or like grades as good as yours it's probably because they're just making they just have more agency they're making more an effort to like make things happen in their life when they think like oh I want to do like an exchange program in Korea or whatever and then like my University doesn't offer an exchange program to Korea they

would just like message like 10 or like email like 10 15 different Korean universities International like school at the University or whatever and the international student department or what whatever it's called and they would just ask like hey do you do this thing and then they would just make it happen for themselves so basically the point is like if you want something you can just like go and make it happen like you don't need to wait for anyone to give you permission you don't need to like wait around hoping like an application for will open or a job form will open once you get your first opportunity you can find successive opportunities and much more easily free like internal networks and connections and one pretty interesting way of showing this is like many companies are quote unquote hiring or they are looking for people but they just can't be bothered to put out an application form online because like if you're a company and you open an application form then you have like thousands even tens of thousands of applications come in then you have to filter them and then you uses all these internal tools and then you have to like interview them and do everything else like that and that's like a long multi like week month process whereas you can just ask your employees and being like hey do you know of anyone who would be useful for this job and then like each employee like recommends like 10 people then you only have like 50 people to like filter through or like 100 people to filter through and most of them are too busy so now you have like 10 people to filter through instead basically if you're able to use your agency to get well connected to people either emailing or posting online or getting a background of opportunities then you can use that to get even more ones more easily in the future meanwhile the guy who got better grades than you is still busy on job forms and job application forms like applying to like two 300 jobs only to get five interviews whereas you worked internally through different networks and you got like 10 20 interviews instead and yeah it's pretty easy because 99% of people just don't do this and if you can come up with more creative ways of doing this where you're like hand delivering a letter to like a musician's house that you want to work for or like you're making like a mobile game which is like kind of a copy or like a replica or like inspired by another game just to get that company's attention then I think your odds or chances of it success are much higher and whilst it can be a lot of effort in some cases I think what separates your life from being very boring and something that can be very interesting and just having all these opportunities coming at your door is just having agency to do things that you really want like noticing this feeling inside of you of hey I really want to do this thing and then just going ahead and finding a way to make it happen