Full Transcript

Dr James:
What’s up team, welcome back to the Dendritian Invest podcast. We’re gonna talk about something interesting today, philosophical, and that is the yin and yang of success and how it is related to your life, because actually, most of us go through life with this misconception that we have to force success, we have to create success. We should be out there actively seeking the things that make us successful every single day. And actually that’s not the only philosophy. What am I referring to? The yin and yang of success? Let’s talk about the yang first of all. In the West, most of us think that we have to invert a comma as yang or way of success. What is the yang method to success? Well, for those who are interested in the philosophy of Taoism, you’ll know about yin and yang. Yang is the assertive, aggressive energy. Yin is the more passive, receptive energy. Most of us, whenever we think about successful entrepreneurs, we think about people who go out into the world and try to force things to happen. Be aggressive, crack in the deal. The early bird catches the worm. The person who sees an opportunities, creating opportunities for themselves and trying to make things happen, and being the individual who possibly alienates some people and burns some bridges along the way. That’s what we think success is. We think it’s a very sharp elbows, jostling shoulders world where we have to push people out of the way and step over others in order to get to where we wanna go. It depends on our version of success, of course, but let’s talk about the archetype of entrepreneurial success in this podcast, that being financial success. Let’s use that as our definition. I know, I know, I know that’s not the only definition For the purposes of this podcast. Let’s equate success to financial success. What we’ve just described is the yang version of success, but, just like yin and yang, there’s this whole other flip inside to it that people don’t talk about just as much, nearly as much. And actually, as you move more towards the east of this world, it’s more accepted that there’s two sides to the coin. There’s two methods to get success, but in the west we are following the misconception that the yang method is the only way, and actually there’s two ways. And here’s the interesting part, because the other way is the yin method of success. And actually, when we begin to be open and receptive to this information, we actually begin to see how this concept makes sense, because we’ve actually observed it many times in our lives. It’s just that no one’s pointed it out to us. What is the yin version of success? So remember yang is aggressive energy, yin is more passive, receptive energy. Right, yang is going out there and forcing opportunities to come away, pushing people out of the way. Sharp elbows making things happen, burning bridges, high energy, all of that stuff. The other side of the coin is the yin energy to success. What does that mean? The yin energy which leads to success is allowing ideas and opportunities to come to us, which is actually very important. Think about it like this If you have an idea or an opportunity, you can have the best idea, but in the worst environment, and it will never happen. Right? Because Mark Zuckerberg could have thought of Facebook, but he could have been living in the 15th century on a pirate ship in the Caribbean with no access to the internet, because the internet wasn’t even invented. Right? Think about it. He could have had the best idea of all time, but the environment wasn’t correct. And you can. I made that up off the top of my head. There’s a million, billion, trillion things like that, right? So really, whenever we have an idea, we have to be in the right environment for it to happen 1,000%. It’s just not gonna work otherwise. So if you have that idea, the yin energy is to keep the idea internalized and wait for the environment to change for it to happen for you okay. The yang energy is trying to find the environment. Okay Is having an idea. Maybe it not even necessarily being that great an idea, but you trying to impose it upon everybody else. The yin energy waits for that environment to change, for the circumstances to become the perfect circumstances, the circumstances to become opportune for that idea to float off right. And actually that method can be just as powerful, if not even more, because when you have the right idea and the right circumstances at the right time, then you’ve got all these other factors that are gonna propel it along and actually you don’t even need to encourage it that much because it’s just gonna happen so much more easier than it would have done otherwise if you were just trying to yang your way to success. The whole flipping life yang is not an adjective for the, actually no, sorry, yang is a verb for the purposes of this podcast, by the way the yang and the yin energy for success. Compare the yin energy to this. Imagine having an idea. Let’s use a feather as a metaphor for an idea. You have the feather, you hold it in your hand, you hold your hand out to the wind and you wait for the correct updraft of the correct intensity to come along and lift that feather up, and when the correct updraft of the correct intensity comes, guess what? It keeps it self elevated. The feather does, and what we have to do is come along and maybe just bounce it up a little bit from time to time like a balloon. Right Now, here’s the thing that might sound really philosophical and really woo-woo, but actually this whole idea that we have to force ourselves to work unbelievably hard for success is actually a little destructive, because we might be putting in level 10 effort with a level two idea. The yin version of success is a level 10 idea which only requires like level five effort to actually keep it going because it’s such a good idea and there’s both. The key thing to appreciate is that actually they’re both, whereas we’re told and we’re indoctrinated to think, and we’re presupposed to think, that actually the yang is the only way, because when we think about the archetype of an entrepreneur, we think about someone who has all those yang qualities and actually the whole yin thing is true too. Think about it Most people who are listening to this are dentists. Right, you are fully trying to yang your way to success. You would be out there doing a hard, physical, manual labor job, because that is something that requires an absolute ton of effort and it’ll happily accept that ton of effort that you’re gonna put in. But generally, most of us. The reason, part of the reason why we’re in dentistry is because we have a more comfortable level of remuneration. But we had to wait until we were 18, didn’t we? Until we could go to university, or 17 of you were in Scotland, so that your yin idea for success could manifest, because otherwise it wouldn’t have done. And actually you were trying to yang your whole way. The whole time you might have been doing that hard, physical, manual labor job, whereas if you just would have waited for the yin opportunity to come to you, then actually it took much less effort to get a way better result. Same for people who own businesses, same for people who have seen amazing opportunities and capitalized on them. They all have the same 168 hours in a week. That’s the thing. It’s not possible to work 169 hours. It’s not possible to work 178 hours, right, what’s happened is, somebody’s had an idea at some point and for the same amount of effort, or perhaps even less, that idea has flourished into something massive which has given them remuneration way beyond the level that they would have ever got if they purely tried to yang their way to success. So we, even subliminally, know that there must be some yin energy, because we had to wait for that opportunity ourselves. Here’s the thing. Remember, there’s no cap on that. There’s no cap on that whatsoever. You can have another brilliant idea, you can have the next brilliant idea that will make it even easier for you to be successful. You just have to be open and allow yourself to internalize and be receptive to that concept. Right? Because actually if you’re indoctrinated to think that you should be yanging the whole damn time, then actually you’re gonna let these yin opportunities slip you by, or you mightn’t be receptive to the opportunities when they come to you because you mightn’t have your eyes open. And once upon a time a younger version of me would have thought to myself what a load of flipping woo-woo. But actually I’m the biggest believer in that in the whole wide world now, because I really fully believe. I really fully believe that with the right opportunity in the right environment. With the same level of effort, or sometimes even less, you can even be more successful. But you have to have your eyes open to as well. Just look at mark zuckerberg, for as an example don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of yang energy in there as well. That guy worked really really, really hard, but he had to wait For his idea to be surrounded and immersed in the right environment before took off. And we must be appreciative of that, because we have to understand that actually, whenever it comes to success, there’s not just the yang version, there’s actually the inversion to, and we need both of them to be able to achieve our dreams. Remember ideas multiplied by execution equals success. Right, that’s the equation for your success, right there. Zero, zero ideas. Times one execution equals zero, zero ideas. Times a million execution also equals zero. One idea one okay idea times a million equals a million. Right. Ten ideas ten really good ideas. Times by a million equals ten million. Right, there’s two sides to the equation zero and times one is a whole lot of zero. One time zero is a whole lot of zero. We have to have both right, okay, that’s literally the equation for success. Remember the in, there’s no success. The yang version of success, there’s two. It’s a thing, trust me, and it’s very, very, very important to understand that otherwise we’re putting in a lot of effort into something that may not Even have the potential to give us the returns that were after, or we might be putting a lot of effort into something needlessly because really, if we just had the right environment and opportunity and idea, it would take much less effort to get much more results and we can do more of the things that we actually enjoy, rather than feeling like we have to yang, yang, yang, yang all the time. Another analogy that everybody’s gonna really, really, really love this actually happened In the eighties. Let’s go back to the nineteen eighties. Computers, man versus machine in the chess arena, in the, in the arena of Global chess grandmasters, the check, the game of chess, yeah. So around about that time, that seminal time in history, computers were coming of age. They were just getting to the point when, in terms of their prowess at the game of chess, they were just about beginning to match humans abilities. Prior to that point they didn’t have the hardware or the software to get even close. They used to get beat all the time. Around about the nineteen eighties, computers were close. They were close to being able to beat humans consistently, but not quite. They needed just a little bit of an edge to tip them over the edge. The humans could always win. The humans could always beat the computers. Now hardware advanced to the point where the biggest super computers in the world had more transistors in the human brain. Then the human brain had neurons. So we knew that it wasn’t a processing power thing what they did, what they knew. That part they knew. The hardware part was sorted right. What they didn’t know was how the software could be the software of the human brain. They had mastered that. The computers, the traditional computers with semi conduct, semiconductors and all of those things, the software that they had had not yet matched the software of the human brain when it came to the game of chess in the arena of the game of chess. So that was because how they used to program computers was very input, output, very linear. Move the chess piece, move the horse from this piece to this place, from this place to this place, then this thing will then after that this will happen and then this will happen and this will happen. It was almost like there was a script in the computer’s head. There was no thought. They just programmed every single possible move and the possible counter moves to it. So the computer was just reciting these lines of code that it was given. There was no internal thought, there was no mechanism for the computer to actually make decisions, it was just blindly following these instructions. Okay, so this was the level. What we’ve just described was the level of software of these computers, how they were coded around about this time to be able to play games of chess. They were being consistently beaten. There was a computer architect around about that time and he thought to himself how can we give these computers the edge over humans? What is the thing that we need to do in order for these computers to be able to beat humans consistently? Let’s try something radically different, because what we’ve tried before hasn’t worked. We’ve got to try something different. Let’s Describe in the code. Let’s place into the code a line of text that says every one percent of moves has to be completely random by the computer. Every one percent of moves, we do a completely random move and then at that point we begin to follow the code again, as we would do normally, and it goes back to the linear input output, the linear programming which describes every single possible move from every single possible point and you know, every single reaction and counter move to whatever the human player is doing. So whenever they put that text in to the code for those computers, those were the very first computers that began to be able to beat humans consistently, because every one percent of the time that they did random moves, they moved to random parts of the board. The field of play would alter so much that the exact same code that they had before, the linear code, once it kicked in it, but the field of play had changed to such a large degree that actually it through the other human player. There was many more opportunities for the computer at that point To put in exactly the same amount of effort. Yet when more games from that point forwards, all because it did something random and it put itself out there like the energy, right, the energy, which opportunities to come to it. The energy is receptive, the energy puts itself in different environments to see where it’s ideas will work, and that is exactly what the code did for these computers. These were the first computers that beat human players. Ladies and gentlemen, wow, cool is that? So another way we can interpret that is to say that actually, when we do different things not all of the time, not 99% of the time we’re doing these random, crazy things with 1% of the time we just put ourselves in different environments and try different things. Exactly the same ideas will work so much better with so much less effort. Yield amazing result. Yield amazing results, amazing success, perhaps even more success than we could have done in the first place, just like the supercomputers that first beat the humans way back in the day. Good for thought.