Nov. 29, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
05:24
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| So the thesis that I will seriously stand by about the biggest single difference, and tell me if I'm right or wrong in your eyes, right? | |
| We'll chew it out. | |
| But the biggest single difference between the wealthy and the poor is coachability. | |
| You cannot tell poor people anything. | |
| They are uncoachable. | |
| Don't take feedback, don't take advice, aren't self-critical, don't yearn for better things. | |
| For the most part, uncoachable. | |
| I'm not sure exactly why, I'm certainly happy to hear ideas about this, but the biggest difference Between the rich and the poor is the poor people don't take any fucking feedback literally to save their lives. | |
| You can't tell them anything. | |
| They know everything. | |
| There is nothing that you can do to instruct them. | |
| They don't take any coaching at all. | |
| In fact, they get angry at and resist all forms of coaching known to man, God, beast, or devil. | |
| 100%, that's good, I agree. | |
| It's a fair assessment, too smart. | |
| I agree, an IQ thing. | |
| Well, I mean, there certainly is an aspect to that, but I've known, I mean, I grew up, this is sort of a Malcolm Gladwell story, like I grew up in a group of some seriously bright people. | |
| In Canada. | |
| I mean, they went on to become professors, and one was an architect, and they went on to, one of them became an English professor, one of them is a very, very senior engineer. | |
| Like, just really smart people. | |
| Really smart people. | |
| Couldn't coach them at all. | |
| Now, they've become materially successful. | |
| I would not particularly argue that they were successful in love, which is the one thing that really matters, but I couldn't coach them. | |
| Couldn't say a goddamn thing. | |
| I don't know if that's vanity, arrogance, but some of the brightest people I knew would take no coaching whatsoever, because philosophy is coaching. | |
| I would say that Not being coachable by people who know better is the single biggest limiting factor in everyone's life. | |
| Everyone's life! | |
| Not taking input from people who know better is the biggest limiting factor in just about everybody's life. | |
| And I noticed this, of course, as a teenager when I got into philosophy, Through philosophy, I got into self-knowledge, studied a lot of psychology, read books on self-knowledge and the unconscious and so on, and really got into coachability, being coached. | |
| I remember when I worked in Thunder Bay, I was reading The Psychology of Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Brandon, which is a great book. | |
| I don't think he ever did as well again, but that's like Leonard Peikoff and his book, One of His Parallels, which admitted a lot, but had a lot in it that was good. | |
| So I was reading, and I remember I went to a bar and I was chatting with this girl and I gave her my number and she didn't call. | |
| And I remember when I noticed that I hadn't really thought about it a day or two later, I was like, oh, She didn't call and I felt this stab of disappointment and then I immediately just wished it away. | |
| I just make that bad feeling go away. | |
| And I, of course, had read my myth, Andrew Brandon, used to accept your emotions, accept your feelings. | |
| And that was the beginning of, I think I was maybe 18, 18 and a half, maybe a little closer to 19. But that was the beginning of my journey to accept my feelings, to respect my feelings. | |
| And it came out of that. | |
| And so, but I had to say the way I'm dealing with my emotions is not right. | |
| It's not healthy. | |
| It's not good. | |
| Just pushing the emotions away. | |
| Whenever I feel something negative, pushing. | |
| Now, it made sense when I was a kid. | |
| Right? | |
| When I was a kid, yeah, I had to push my emotions away because there was nothing I could do about it. | |
| I had no power. | |
| I had no independence. | |
| And I was just trying to survive like most of us in that situation. | |
| So there was no point experiencing negative emotions when I was a kid. | |
| But once I was in Tundra Bay and was working and had independence and I was really never going to go back home, then... | |
| It made sense to get back in touch with my feelings. | |
| That was the beginning of my resurrection, right? | |
| Right, that was the beginning of, as the great song from Pink Floyd goes, coming back to life. | |
| So, and of course, philosophy was coaching as a whole, right? | |
| I was pretty mystical. | |
| I was into socialism. | |
| I started reading the arguments and I was coached. | |
| I was coached. | |
| I took better advice, better arguments and went along with that. | |
| And when you are willing to be coached, then you avoid manipulation and you reject sophistry and you reject propaganda. |
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