Francis Ngannou, How to network, Russian strength training, Who to compare against?
Francis Ngannou, How to network, Russian strength training, Who to compare against?
Avthar's Weekly Wisdom #42 (02/14/2021)
Welcome to edition #42 of Avthar's Weekly Wisdom!
🔥 This newsletter is where I share practical wisdom about self-mastery, startups, health and happiness, all to help you live better. My goal is for you to discover one thing that can change your life, in a big or small way, every week.
Life-changing Links
Here's what I want to share with you this week:
🙏 A Dose of Inspiration —
Francis Ngannou’s Remarkable Journey From Cameroon to the UFC: It’s not everyday that you come across a story which fills you with gratitude, inspiration and awe at the human spirit. Francis Ngannou’s escape from Cameroon and his journey to becoming a world class MMA fighter is one such story.
During his interview on the Joe Rogan Experience, Ngannou shares the story of his childhood struggles in Cameroon: from his parents divorce at young age, to working an adult job in a sand mine from age of 10. We also learn about his dream to pursue boxing and how he journeyed across desserts, forests and oceans from Cameroon to Morocco to Europe in order to make his dream a reality, often crossing borders illegally and getting arrested 7 times along the way.
Ngannou is both a master athlete and storyteller. His vivid descriptions make you feel like you’re there with him, packed in the back of a car travelling through the desert, getting tangled in barbed wire crossing a border fence and being homeless in Paris trying to make it in boxing and eventually stumbling on MMA.
🚀 On Career Growth —
How to network your way into a job in an unfamiliar industry:
In my high school alumni group on Facebook, someone asked a question about how they could get into the acting world, despite not knowing anyone.
In response, I shared this process for how to use “targeted outreach” and LinkedIn to learn about the industry and network their way into a job:
One approach you could use (applies to non-acting jobs as well):
(1) Go to LinkedIn and search for people in acting who are UWC alumni (filter for schools in your search). Ideally they are people who are doing jobs today that you want to do in future.
(2) Get their email via your school or find a way to DM them (Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever you can find)
(3) Ask to talk over a Zoom call to get advice on your journey and path forward. Alums love helping other alums, especially those figuring out their career path.
(4) On the call, be sincere and curious about their path and how they got to where they are. This requires some research on them beforehand. You're genuinely just looking for help, not trying to finesse a job out of them.
(5) Usually they will want to help and will either open doors for you themselves, or offer to connect you to someone who can open doors for you (hiring manager, decision maker, owner, CEO etc)
(6) If they don't do (5), then ask who else they think would be good for you to talk to and get referrals to those people. Repeat until successful
Not only will you learn a ton about the industry, make connections but you'll also find out how to get to where you want to go and maybe someone might offer you a role!
All the best!
🤔A common follow up question to the process above is: “What if I don’t have a large / good school alumni network?”. Here’s my response to that:
In the method above, reaching out to school alumni is just an instance of reaching out to someone with whom you share similarities with.
Apart from going to the same school, you could leverage other points of similarity like being from the same city/ country, both being immigrants or first generation college students, being of the same race or just facing and overcoming similar obstacles in life.
For example, as an aspiring early stage investor, rather than reaching out to anyone in the field, I could look for investors who are from South Africa or even Southern African in general, investors who have immigrated from their home country, or even just other investors of South Asian descent.
The key point is this: Find someone who is doing what you want to do and build some sort of commonality with them. Chances are they want to help and will open doors for you. If not, leverage their network until you find someone who will.
Apart from leading with commonalities, you can lead with value by helping them in some way. My recommendation is to share a piece of content which demonstrates your thinking that’s relevant to their field.
📚 You can learn more about this content-first approach in my essay: The Resume is Dead. And Content Killed It.
💪 On Health —
The Master of Russian Strength Training: Pavel Tstaouline is the founder of StrongFirst and is best known for popularizing kettlebell training in the West. In this interview, he talks about benefits of kettlebell training, why you might not want to push to do “one more rep” and why building strength is more important now than ever.
🏆 On Self-Mastery —
Who should you compare yourself to?: “Don’t compare yourself to other people” is well intentioned but impractical advice. Humans are naturally comparative creatures.
So if comparison is inevitable, who should that other person be?
The best answer is: You should compare yourself to who you were yesterday.
It’s the only surefire way to improve and be more than you currently are, without getting sucked into envy and jealousy.
In this 10 minute clip, Jordan B Peterson talks about the importance of self-transcendence vs trying to best another person. He also argues for why you should set the lowest attainable goal you can (vs the most audacious goal) and why aiming up is a heroic act in itself.
“Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
Because you need to have a hierarchy of improvement, you need to be aiming for something. And that means you're going to be lesser than people who've already attained along that dimension.
So the question is, who should you defeat in the final analysis?
And the answer is you should defeat your former self, you should be constantly trying to do that. And you're the right control for yourself too because you're the one who's had all your advantages and disadvantages...
- Jordan B Peterson
👨🏽💻 What I'm up to these days:
As someone who’s striving for mastery in communication and empathy building, I joined a learning club on “Framing Complex Ideas”, led by my friend Shamay Agaron (check out his newsletter Friday Brainstorm to better understand the brain). The club is about “exploring theoretical and practical tools for distilling and transmitting complex ideas so that readers deeply internalize them.”
I also completed week 2 of Seth Godin’s Podcasting Workshop and had an insightful conversation with friend, and fellow writer, Delano Ramdas (author of the Knowhere newsletter) about content creation processes, picking a niche vs differentiating through personality and style, and if it's possible to systematize authenticity. We plan to record a podcast about these topics and more in the coming weeks.
🙏 Thank you again for reading and for your support! I wish you a week of happiness, success and peace!
Avthar
🐦 @avthars
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