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Defy Conventional Wisdom - VIP Audio

Hi, this is AJ. Welcome to this month’s topic. Let’s just get started right away. This is a fun topic. We’ve had some heavy topics recently. You know some kind of serious ones, so this one is a little more fun. So our topic this month is ‘Defy Conventional Wisdom’.

It’s one of my favorite topics actually, conventional wisdom.

Conventional wisdom means kind of normal opinion. ‘Conventional’ means normal.

Basically, it means normal. Conventional, what’s normal, what’s usual and ‘wisdom’, in this case, ‘wisdom’ just means belief. Wisdom has a maybe more deep meaning in other situations, but when we talk about conventional wisdom that’s a phrase. Those two words go together. That phrase ‘conventional wisdom’ just means the most common beliefs in a society, in a culture, whatever.

So every culture, every society has its conventional wisdom. You know the beliefs that most people have about how to do things and what is good and what is bad, how to be successful and how to be, I don’t know, healthy, about everything, right? We have all these ideas and increasingly now because we have such a global world with the Internet and, you know, satellite television and all this stuff, we have these kind of international beliefs now. So there’s an international conventional wisdom, these sorts of beliefs and ideas about how to do things that are true in most places now and certainly most places with Internet, television and all of that.

So what I’m telling you is to defy conventional wisdom. ‘To defy’ means to go against; to fight against; to rebel against; to reject. So I’m saying reject what most people think. I’m saying this is a very general principle because I’ve found in my life and it’s taken me many years to sort of adopt this, but I’ve found that in almost every area of life if I had to choose one basic formula for success and happiness it would be to do something different than what most people do. That’s like the real simple formula.

Whenever everybody is saying do something this way, I almost always find that doing that will not make me happy and will not get me great results. Instead, by doing the opposite or something totally different that’s the way to have success, that’s the way to be happy, that’s the way to have an interesting life, etc., etc. So if I had to make it a rule I’d say all success or most, I should say most, most success and happiness comes from defying conventional wisdom, going against conventional wisdom.

So let me give you one example of this. It’s a really very, very, very practical example of this, job hunting, job hunting. So you’re looking for a job. You need a job. I used to when I was young follow conventional wisdom. What is the conventional wisdom of finding a job? Well, in most countries there’s kind of a really basic system. You go someplace and you fill out an application and some jobs maybe you send a resume and a cover letter.

Some people call it a CV in some countries, but same idea. CV and a cover letter and then maybe an application and you send that off to the jobs you want. You answer the ads in the papers. You see the ad ‘help wanted’ and you send your letter, send your resume or go fill out the application.

Then you look in the newspaper for the next one and oh, there’s another one. Oh, that one sounds okay. You circle it and then you do the same thing. Then you sit around and you wait and if you’re lucky one of them might call you for an interview. Then you’d go there and you answer their questions. You know they ask you, what is your greatest strength and all these kind of weird questions. You try to give these answers, which are basically bullshit. ‘Bullshit’ means it’s kind of a lie. Not really a lie, but not true. It’s just marketing, right?

So, anyway, that’s the conventional wisdom and really, honestly, that’s how most job searching works and I used to do it all the time. If I needed a job I would do the same thing, I’d circle. When I was a social worker I’d do this. Oh, the hospital is hiring. I’d go and I’d fill out an application and then wait and wait and wait. If I got lucky one of them might call me for an interview and then I would go and they would ask me all these stupid questions and I would pretend like they were… Well, my greatest strength? I’m just so awesome, wow. That was it.

The problem with it is it didn’t work very well. It was a very super stressful process because I was following conventional wisdom. ‘Conventional’ means normal, right?

Well, guess what? That means that everybody else was doing exactly what I was doing.

Because it’s conventional, by the definition it means normal, it’s what everybody does, which means here’s what happens if you’re the person doing the hiring. Now that I have a company I can tell you what it’s like on the other side.

So you have a job opening and you put an ad in the paper and suddenly you get hundreds of resumes and applications. They start piling up in a big stack and they all are kind of the same because everyone is following the same formula, everyone is following the same conventional wisdom. All the resumes look the same, right? Ah, education, bachelors degree in this, whatever. Here’s kind of the list of their past jobs.

It’s no fun being on the other side either because it’s just like it’s all the same. So if you’re in that pile it’s really hard to even get an interview sometimes, even if you’re great. So I always hated looking for jobs. It was like so stressful and because I traveled all the time I would always quit my jobs, go travel and then come back and then I’d have to look for a job again. It was one of the most stressful parts of my life. I hated it.

Well, finally one day, I don’t know, after reading lots of books and thinking about it I decided I can’t just keep doing this. This is too stressful. I’m going to try a different approach. I was already starting to think about doing my own business, so I imagined what if I was like a businessperson trying to sell something how would I do it? Well, businesspeople what they do is they don’t just do like one ad, for example. If I’m selling a car, let’s say I’m a car company. I don’t just run one car ad one time and then never again, right? What do they do? No, they run ads and ads and ads all the time. It’s a campaign. ‘Campaign’ means a series of actions.

So there’s this big long campaign again and again and again. So the person sees the ad one time ah, they ignore it. They see it 50 times they’re much more likely to say hum, maybe I’ll buy a Ford or whatever. So I thought of this and I said well, why don’t I take the same approach with job hunting? Forget the newspaper. I’m not even going to look at the help wanted ads and I just started writing.

I picked out which jobs I wanted. I called and I found out who the supervisors and managers were and then I like designed this series of 10 letters. They were basically the same letters, right? Letter number one, letter number two, up to number 10. Each letter was short and it talked about like one of my strengths and it talked about one of the needs of their company or organization that I thought I could help them with.

So I sent letter number one to all these people. I customized it. I used their names and changed things a little, but more or less it was the same letter. So letter number one went out to let’s say 10 of my top companies that I wanted to work for and nothing happened. Of course, one time nothing is gonna happen, but then I sent out letter number two and it was different. I tried to be a little bit, I won’t say entertaining, but I tried to be more emotional in my letters so it wasn’t just kind of a boring business letter.

So boom, sent out number two, nothing happened. Number three, nothing happened.

Number four, I started getting calls, number five, number six, number seven, number eight, number nine. By the time I’d sent out all 10 letters I got a lot of interviews, much, much, much better result than using the conventional way. So I did it why? Just because it was different. They’re used to getting resume, cover letter one time and that’s it.

So they started getting this series of letters. I can just imagine they get letter number five and they’re like what? This guy again. What the hell, but eventually I got their attention. The point of all this is I defied conventional wisdom. You know people who told me oh, don’t do that. You’re going to annoy them. They’re gonna get irritated and you’re not gonna get an interview, but I though well so what. I’m not getting interviews anyway so why not try it and it worked.

It’s the same with English. You already know this, right? You probably have your own story with conventional wisdom. What’s conventional wisdom for learning to speak English? I’ll go to school and learn from textbooks. Memorize tons and tons and tons, lots and lots and lots of grammar rules. Memorize individual vocabulary words and their translation. Memorize, memorize, memorize, take lots of tests, take the TOEFL exam and, as you already know, what’s the general result from that? The general result is you can read fairly well, but your speaking is not very good and your listening is pretty bad.

That’s the usual result.

Again, if you follow conventional wisdom you get conventional results. We could look at health, we could look at any area of life and it’s almost always the same. So what I’m trying to encourage you to do this month is to become a little…eccentric maybe is a good word. I like that word. ‘Eccentric’ means different in a little bit, some people will say strange way, but it means that you follow your own path. You do your own thing. It’s kind of the opposite of conventional.

It means you’re always doing things in your own little, weird, different way and I would like you to cultivate that, to develop that trait in yourself so that it becomes a habit so that any time you want to do something and accomplish something your first thought is I’m going to do it differently than everybody else does it. Say yeah, I’ll see how everybody else does it, but I know that that’s probably not the best way to do it so I’m going to look for something different.

Constantly be looking for something that’s not normal. How can you do this? Well, one way is you can look for other successful people who followed a different path. So, usually if you find someone who’s been super good at business, for example, they’ve done something different than most people or if someone is a great teacher or coach, then they’re probably doing something different, probably a lot of things differently than normal teachers and coaches. If someone is a great artist, then they probably think differently or have a different way of doing their art than most people.

The problem is that in school and in society and in our families and in so many ways we’re pressured to be normal. You know do what everyone else does, do what everyone else does and we get this kind of conformity mindset. Again, in school especially I think of middle school and high school, this kind of pressure all the time from the school and then from other kids. The problem is this can become a way of thinking so that we’re always afraid to be different because people will look at us differently and think we’re weird.

What I’m saying is that being weird and different is actually a great success strategy and, in fact, it’s probably the number one belief you should have. There are lots of other strategies you can have, but the first thing you should have is I’m going to be different.

I’m going to do it differently. You’ll only get different results if you do things differently. So how are we gonna do this?

I just want you to think of some things in your life. We’ll talk about this more in the commentary of things you want to accomplish and how can you do them differently, how can you defy conventional wisdom. So let’s say as a first step in this activity I want you to just think about what is the conventional wisdom in your country, in your culture. Pick two or three areas in your life. It might be something with education, health, relationships, social behavior. I don’t care, whatever.

Pick a few things, some area in life you want to improve and then before you think about how to improve I just want you to identify what is the conventional wisdom. What do most people say that you should do? What do most other people do? Just identify that, write it down. We’ll talk more about the next step in the commentary. All right, I’ll see you in a minute there. Bye.