To Be Better Than 99% Of People, You Need To Meet 3 Conditions

Having a Contrarian Idea

If you want to be better than 99% of people in a field, you must hold a contrarian belief that opposes the consensus of the majority. You need to believe that something is true while most others think it isn’t. For instance, those who became wealthy from Bitcoin were the ones who, long before everyone else, believed that cryptocurrencies had intrinsic value. In 2008, at the dawn of Bitcoin, very few people were willing to invest in virtual currencies. Only those who held that contrarian belief ended up making a fortune.

Holding a contrarian belief allows you to accumulate experience and expertise before everyone else, making you the best in that field. Those who started a YouTube channel in 2012, believing they could earn a living from it a few years later, had a contrarian idea that eventually proved to be true. Consequently, they claimed the largest share of opportunities in the market and became leading YouTubers.

Being Right About the Contrarian Idea

The second essential condition is to be right about this contrarian belief. The majority is often correct, and that’s why holding a contrarian belief is risky—most of the time, it proves to be wrong. You could say that in 99% of cases, 99% of people are right. Only 1% of the time is the majority wrong, making it incredibly challenging to identify those rare, correct contrarian beliefs before everyone else.

It isn’t enough to simply hold a contrarian belief; it must be proven accurate. You could decide to believe the Earth is flat and structure your life around that idea, but you’d quickly crash into the harsh realities of truth.

Being Persistent and Acting on the Idea

It’s not enough to have a contrarian idea and be right about it. You also need to work hard to make it a reality. You’ve probably heard someone say they had the idea for something before it became popular. Maybe someone told you they thought of creating Airbnb or Uber before those platforms emerged.

But having ideas isn’t enough—you need to translate those beliefs into action. You must take the risk of living in alignment with those beliefs and work to bring them to life.

Living Your Ideas: Skin in the Game

To win big, you have to risk big. If you wanted to become a billionaire through Bitcoin, you would’ve needed to sell your house in 2009 and invest everything in that cryptocurrency. Of course, doing so would have risked leaving you penniless and homeless. That’s the price of aiming for greatness.

For example, if you listen to an Elon Musk interview, he’ll tell you that he was on the verge of bankruptcy several times before Tesla achieved the level of success it enjoys today.

A Complementary Idea for Materializing Your Contrarian Belief

Micro Speed – Macro Patience

When starting a business, people are often obsessed with short-term spectacular results. Their focus is on the microscopic—micro—short-term objectives, rather than the macroscopic—macro—scale of long-term outcomes. Yet, what matters most is succeeding over a sufficiently long timescale, not in the days or weeks immediately ahead.

Adjusting Our Time Scale

To succeed in entrepreneurship, you need to learn to be aggressively patient: work as hard as possible to succeed while maintaining the patience to wait a long time for significant results to materialize.

The Boat and the Course

A slow-moving boat that never changes its course will always reach its destination better than a fast boat that constantly changes direction. “Macro speed” is far more essential than “micro speed.”

The Value of Accumulating Failures

One essential element is to simply begin, even if it means failing. In entrepreneurship, failure is like a battle scar—some might even call it a medal. It thickens your skin, makes you more experienced, and strengthens your ability to persist. If you have a strong contrarian belief, test it against reality. The sooner you fail, the better it will be for you.

By failing early, you validate—or invalidate—your idea. You confront it with reality, you “thicken your skin,” and you emerge stronger to tackle the challenges of entrepreneurship.