5 Hidden Truths on How to Be “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”

In the startup world and beyond.

Slu True

Published in

The Startup

5 min readJul 12, 2018

Actor Steve Martin is often credited for this matter-of-fact quote:

“Be so good they can’t ignore you.”

But it’s not as easy as it looks. After all, you can’t just “be good.” And you can’t just magically force people to stop ignoring you.

But I have good news for you.

Even though it’s not as easy as snapping your fingers, it’s definitely not impossible. And, with the right mentality, it can become pretty simple, too.

Hidden Truth #1: Talent doesn’t exist.

Remember this. There’s nobody on this planet that was born with a certain skill that you weren’t born with. You can learn whatever skill you want to.

If you get this into your brain, you’ll never be discouraged, scared, or hesitant ever again. You’ll have the confidence of a lion. Because you know that there is no all-powerful super-human trying to kick you down.

The only one able to kick you down is yourself.

You worry: “I can’t be a great [insert dream here] if [insert successful individual] is already the best!”

Say you want to become a great musician, but Ed Sheeran is already hogging the limelight. Even though Ed Sheeran has nothing to do with your life, you create this fake obstacle because you lack confidence.

But think for a moment. Do you think Ed Sheeran just decided to quit when Eminem was topping the charts in the 2000s?

Better yet, do you think Google’s co-founders just decided to close up shop because Yahoo! beat them to market? Of course not. And neither should you, because nobody is born with talent. Only a dream and a will to reach it.

If your dream is strong enough, you shouldn’t care what other people are doing. It’s your life and your dream.

Hidden Truth #2: Success is not proportional to effort.

Just as there’s no perfect being working against you, there’s also no such thing as a 300 hour/week workaholic demigod. We all have 24 hour-days and 168 hour-weeks.

The problem that most people have is this. They think that if they work harder than everybody else, they’ll be the most successful. But that’s not how life works.

Sure, the most successful people work hard, but that’s not all they do. They work smart. There’s no such thing as talent, and hard work isn’t the key, but there is one thing that sets the top 1% apart from the rest:

Consistency.

Hidden Truth #3: It’s all down to consistency.

Alright, now it’s time for me to spill the beans. Here’s the real reason why I’m writing this article.

I’ve been doing a bit of research on what makes a great Medium writer. Turns out, it’s as simple as hitting “Submit” once a day. Take a look at these:

It sounded easy at first. My fist-clench reaction was, “If it’s so easy, then why doesn’t everyone have thousands of followers!?” It’s because writing polished content every day is hard.

Going 100% at practice every day is hard.

Bearing the burdens of running a startup every day is hard.

Striving to improve yourself every day is really hard.

But consistency builds up a following. Consistency wins games, scores sales, and makes you the person that nobody can ignore.

You don’t need to be the smartest or most dedicated. You just need to be the most stubbornly consistent person on the whole Earth.

Hidden Truth #4: The world doesn’t have to be win-lose.

Let me tell you a quick story. Right around the turn of the century, high-tech was booming in Silicon Valley — but it was also about to bust.

Two payment technology startups, X.com and Cofinity, were competing non-stop. But their founders were smart. After all, they would later go on to found companies like Palantir, SpaceX, and Tesla. Yep, this is the PayPal story.

But there wouldn’t have been a PayPal story had the two startups kicked at each others’ feet while the .com bubble was about to crash. Instead, their level-heads and win-win attitudes allowed to buckle in and survive the crash.

Try employing a win-win attitude. If you do, you might even become apart of the next “PayPal Mafia” with your former-competitors.

Hidden Truth #5: Every success is unique. Every failure is the same.

Two takeaways here:

Don’t copy. You can do as much as you can to improve you and your career, but don’t try to become somebody you’re not.

“The next Bill Gates will not start an operating system. The next Larry Page won’t start a search engine. The next Mark Zuckerberg won’t start a social network company. If you are copying these people, you are not learning from them.”
~Peter Thiel

Be original. The most meaningful issues are the ones that nobody else is talking about. Find those problems. The common things are not only trite, but there are already a surplus of people tackling the popular issues: cancer research, virtual reality, etc.

“All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.”
~Peter Thiel, again

After all, we tell our children that there’s no point in being in the popular crowd.

So why shouldn’t our startups be like that, too?

Hey! Thanks for reading. I’m not going to ask for much down here, just that you give me a follow on Medium and on Twitter! It’d really push me to write more stuff! :)