How To Succeed When The System Is Rigged Against You - Patrick Bet-David (4K)

You say that you're useless to the world if you're not competing and you need enemies to drive you. Why?

Um, I think most people who say they don't have enemies, they probably don't want to tell others they have the enemy or they don't want to disclose it. They're great poker players. I don't know a single person that doesn't have an enemy. Uh, everybody does. Uh, we're, we're very good at concealing our insecurities, our emotions, our fears, our wildest desires, our, uh, uh, enemies or comments that rub us the wrong way, that wire us. Uh, we are very good actors, incredible actors, right? Now, if you have a long time of talking to somebody and you kind of watch them closely and the more they talk and then eventually you're going to find some leaks. You're like, "Ooh, I just found one right there. Boom, I found one contradiction right there. Boom, I found one..." And you're like, "Okay, interesting." We all have a little bit of that. But I do think that when you study the people that do something very big, I'm not talking about small, I'm talking really, really big. We're talking about some interesting people today. You and I have somebody we both respect a lot, Robert Greene. His books, you, I, I'm sure you love his books, I love his books. 33 Strategies of War, I couldn't put it down for two years straight. I listened to that book every day in my car straight every day. It was on repeat for two years straight. Why though? Because I innocently got into sales and I had a good time in sales and business after I got out of the military, and I wanted to be a body builder and then I realized I'm 6'4", it's not going to work for body building to win Mr. Olympia because everybody's 5'8", 5'9", 5'10". Maybe 5'11", Ronnie Coleman, but the 6'4" days are behind us. Even Lou Ferrigno didn't win at that height. Arnold did. And then when I got into sales and everybody was a fan, then I started competing, still a little bit a fan, but when I started the insurance company and then I started growing market share really, then a lot of those people that were fans then started undermining. And I said, "Got it. This is how it works. You can't be this naïve. You can't be this innocent." Competition's out there. If you want to kind of go out there and take market share from others and you want to get bigger, you can't expect for people to sit there and like everything you're doing. That's when I realized you got to choose your enemies wisely.

People want you to do well, they just don't want you to do better than them.

Yes. Yes.

Yeah, it's interesting. There's this story of Churchill and he's showing a young MP around the House of Lords in the UK. This is before World War II. You can imagine that they're wandering through these dusty hallways. "Over there's the toilets and over there's where we have a cigar and blah, blah, blah, blah." Anyway, they go into the chamber, they go into the, the House of Lords, right? Uh, the difference, actually the distance between the two front benches is the same distance as a long sword held out at arm's length from both sides, which is a kind of a, a funny vestige of evidently what they were worried about in the Middle Ages and they've just continued to update, but they've never changed the distance of the front benches. Anyway, got this young guy who's probably full of testosterone and, you know, he's finally, he's here with Winston Churchill. They go in and this young MP starts gesticulating at the other side and he keeps referring to them as the enemy. Churchill turns to him and he says, "That's the opposition, dear boy. The enemy's behind you." And I love that story and the reason that I love that story is that it often reminds us that symbolically we believe that the biggest obstacle we have to overcome is out there and many times the call is coming from inside of our own house. I think that the worst enemy that many people have is the voice that's inside of their own head. Now this voice has probably maybe come-