The best students and the worst students share one thing in common: They don’t understand the strength of their hand.
This results in the best students frequently getting exploited in white collar professions like law, banking, consulting or accounting.
Or feeling like they have to work when their net worth says otherwise.
And it also results in the worst students ending up broke, in jail, or on occasion, fabulously successful.
Being surrounded by “elite students” at Google made it hard for many to set their sights higher than that next $30K raise, because everyone else who held similar cards seemed to think aiming for promotion was the only logical choice to make.
Many didn’t realize that their resume would command far more interest from competitors or smaller companies.
Being surrounded by peers with “fuck you money” has also resulted in some of my clients and friends thinking they *need* to keep working, just because they don’t realize that they can truly sit back and say “fuck you” to it all.
Most people have peers whose cards appear to be very similar to their own. And for this reason they don’t understand how unique the cards they are holding are, for better or worse.
And when you don’t know the true value of your cards, you can’t possibly employ your most intelligent strategy
To better understand the cards, surround yourself with people who have different backgrounds from you. They will make it easy for you to see what you cannot.