The No-nonsense Kick-Butt Plan for Changing Your Life in 2020 Real Help by Ayodeji Awosika

Hello 2020!

We are in a new decade, and the self-improvement gurus are happy as clams, running around telling people what they should or should not eat/watch/drink/do/think/be/etc.

But if you’re tired of sugary sycophantic self-help advice, and you want to hear from someone with real experience who will talk straight about the true, non-fairy-dusted nature of personal development…

Someone who can show you how you can survive and even thrive in a society that (let’s face it) is NOT  designed to help you succeed…

Then you have to check this out:

Real Help by Ayodeji Awoskia is different from other personal development books.

It pulls no punches. It tells no lies. The reality is, improving your life is freakishly HARD, and Awosika knows that.

He isn’t here to tell you that he has the magical formula to transform your life. He’s not here to hypnotize you into an emotional high that brings no real change.

Instead, Real Help reveals the underlying principles of how life, business, and success work in the real world.

You will learn:

• Why Society is out to get you (It’s not personal, but still, they are)
• Hard work does not always result in success, even if you work REALLY HARD.
• And how, in spite of all that, you can still create and own your own little piece of sky (or pie, but “sky” has a nicer ring to it, dontcha think? :D)

And with that knowledge, you can change everything.

Don’t believe me? You don’t have to. Read it for yourself, and you’ll see:

About Real Help

Hello 2020! We are in a new decade, and the self-improvement gurus are happy as clams, running around telling people what they should or should not eat/watch/drink/do/think.

Real Help by Ayodeji Awoskia is different. It pulls no punches. It tells no lies. The reality is, improving yourself is HARD, and Awosika knows that. He isn’t here to tell you that he has the magical formula to transform your life. Rather, he reveals the underlying true principles of how life, business, and success work in the real world.

And with that knowledge, you can change everything. Don’t believe me? You don’t have to. Read it for yourself, and you’ll see:

Most Important Lessons I Learned From This Book

1. Society is really out to get you. The people around you, the marketing messages, etc. It’s not personal, but it’s true. So be aware, and keep your projects to yourself when you’re just starting out, and keep working.
2. If you were to run a billion simulations, Bill Gates would only be a successful as he is today in one of those possibile realities.
3. Stay in your lane. Success is closer rather than farther. So look at what natural inclinations you have.

INTRODUCTION

• Before we talk about how to become successful, it’s important to define the word.

Success isn’t about money and fame. It’s about getting good at something, earning confidence, having mental/spiritual/physical health and the ability to think for yourself.

Ayo has written 3 books, hundreds of posts, and made a 6-figure income.

Self-Help vs. Real Help

Self help gets you inspired but only for a time. It gives an unrealistic view of the world.

• Real help: You’ll never get 100% better…but you don’t need to.
• Most of us don’t live freely because we’re terrified of deviating from the rules. Rules that were arbitrary in the first place.

You Will Experience Trauma, Tragedy, Unfairness, and Failure

• If you try to succeed, you’ll breed envy, and people will try to pull you back into the barrel.
• Life is hard. Pretending like it’s not won’t help you. Being prepared for it will.

PART 1: The Brutally Honest Truth About Success

• The number one problem that keeps most people from building the life they want is almost always the same. They don’t understand how the world works.

Chapter 1 Why Society Doesn’t Want You to Succeed

• On the whole, society will continue to be a bottom-heavy machine, but you as the individual can escape.

Employers and companies are incentivized to keep you down. They don’t mean to but it’s an emergent property of human nature. And there are no easy answers.

Your friends and family will also try to keep the status quo. So keep your mouth shut, act normal around others, and don’t take shit personally.

The media wants you to be depressed, sad, angry, because it helps them make money. Food companies want you to be obese, Big Pharma wants you sick.

Chapter 2 Nobody is Coming to Save You

Robert Kiyosaki: Instead of saying “I can’t afford it,” say, “How can I afford it?”

Awosika started off by reading books for free in the library and writing posts because he was broke.

The internet has democratized things more than ever. Lambda school teaches coding for free and takes a portion of your salary if you make a $50K income after you graduate, for a time.

Your subconscious always wants to lie to yourself. So you need to analyze yourself. Journal, develop real and accurate self-awareness.

• When you have a more accurate sense of self, you’ll play games you can win, make decisions that suit your specific needs, and stop worrying about things outside of your control.
• The ease of life path comes with the unease of regret.

Chapter 3 Faustian Bargains: How to Avoid Trading Your True Life Away for Even Worse Outcomes

• The best way to make someone believe a lie is to assert it repeatedly.

The truth is, you can test different careers and businesses at low cost.

• You’re not a fool, but you’ve been fooled.

Don’t fall for these lies: security, you have more time, what will people think of me, I owe people.

• In the end, we all realize relationships are everything.
• Nothing is free in this world…You pay a price for what you spend — time, money, love, etc.

Chapter 4 The Unfair Attitudes You Must Adopt to be Successful

• Until you adopt an attitude that accounts for reality and the way the world works, not only will you not be able to succeed the way you want to, but you’ll suffer even more.
• The process of changing your life is like dying. You can’t change your life if you hold on to those old narrative. You have to kill them.
• It’s perfectly fine to be normal. Nobody is a “sheep.” We all have different worldviews and definitions of success.

Don’t get on your high horse.

• Your job is to make your life better, reach your goals, and help the people who want your help.

Success will take longer than you think, and the world’s constantly trying to throw you off balance.

Chapter 5 The Meritocracy Myth: Why “Success” is More Complicated Than You Think

No one can guarantee your success.

• This may be the most troubling truth: You can do everything right and still fail.

Survivorship bias helps us mythologizes the habits of successful people without realizing that others use the same strategies and fail.

• You want to look for habits, activities, and goals that have high odds of making your life better in general without tying them to specific outcomes.
• Complaining about your unique set of circumstances could very well be justified, but is it useful?
• Success and failure always contain a mixture of effort and luck.

Make commitments, such as writing 3 articles per week for 6 months straight.

• We don’t get to live in a fair world. I’m sorry. We just don’t. It’s impossible.

Chapter 6 How to Escape a Life of Monotony and Improve Your Life (Without Being Rich or Famous)

What was your goal when you were 14? 14 is a good age to dream.

• Thinking like a poor person is the №1 reason people stay stuck in monotonous loops.

Aim properly at the future. Visualize the immediate future.

• How many advertisements have you seen for “becoming rich overnight” that inspire you just enough to daydream but not enough to change.

Chapter 7 Mindset Inequality: The New Gap Between the Haves and Have Nots

• Both sides of any…aisle don’t “disagree with each other”; they genuinely live in different realities.

Read Will Durant’s The Lessons of History about the patterns of human nature through history.

• One less outraged and sad person in the world equals a better world.

PART 2 — Strategy: How to Build the Life of YOUR Dreams

• You want to walk through hell. When you do you’ll come out of the other side with burns, but you’ll appreciate the challenges because of the strength they’ll give you. And the burns won’t be fatal. Just enough to keep you walking forward fast.

Chapter 8 The Ultimate Guide to Discovering Your Natural Talents and Strengths

• Society is designed for you to fail by living below your standards.
• Passion does exist, but it’s a feeling you earn with experience, instead of needing it to get started.
• When you find something you’re good at, practice, and get better at it. You’ll start to feel passionate about it.
• Information is useless without action.

See the Strengths Finder 2.0 with 200+ questions to discover your 34 strengths from strongest to weakest. There’s also the Myers Briggs and Big 5.

Here, Awodeji shares his top strengths and how he’s utilized them in his business.

• People get lost trying to find their passion or purpose because they peer too far into the distance.

Chapter 9 The Art of Hustling: How to “Eat What You Kill”

• Why is it important to learn how to hustle? Because any other option puts the fate of your life in someone else’s hands.

If you want control, freedom, and safety, you can use entrepreneurship to get there.

Lies You’re Told About Entrepreneurship

The old entrepreneurship model still impacts people today, that’s why they say it’s risky when in many ways it isn’t anymore.

Entrepreneurship Is “Risky”

• Entrepreneurs don’t love risk. They hate risk.

Some cheap business hustles you can start on the side: affiliate marketing, freelancing, dropshipping, blogging, self-publishing.

• The internet has leveled the playing field. Any of us can TRY TO BE anything we want in 2020 and beyond (for the most part).

You Need to be a Genius to Start a Business

• There are two types of entrepreneurship: capital E and lowercase e.

All you need to be a lower case e entrepreneur is a computer or smartphone, a website, and skills like copywriting, marketing, basic HTML, patience, persistence. And optional: blogging and content marketing.

None of these skills are out of your reach.

• Talent always matters, but there’s not much of a talent barrier when it comes to simple online business.
• The skills that matter most are patience and persistence…I’ve seen so many people with different levels of intelligence, backgrounds, circumstances, etc. succeed in business where I know the only two variables required are patience and persistence.

Most Businesses Fail

• When it comes to many low-risk ventures, failure isn’t really a thing.

Learn to Become a Master of Leverage

• Leverage occurs when what you produce begins to work and produce profit for you without your additional effort.
• Leverage creates freedom. Leverage = “making money while you sleep.”
• Without leverage, your income is forever tied to your time. When your income is tied to your time, you can never be free.

The Life-Changing Magic of Compounding

Compounding can work for or against you.

Morgan Housel, “The Psychology of Money” — investing is not the study of finance, but the study of how people behave.

Why the First Six Months of Your Hustle Matter Most

• Before you’re able to compound money, you’ll need to learn how to compound your skills.
• Most people quit before they hit the tipping point where your skills compound and everything gets easier.
• Success isn’t mysterious. It’s mathematical.

One Billion X Better

If you get 1% better at something, you will get to 1 billion in about 6 years.

Fighting Through to the End

• Taking the time to get 1% better each day takes a level of commitment most of us haven’t made, or aren’t willing to make.
• The art of hustling just takes time to get good at.

How to Start a Successful Side Hustle and Make Your First $1,000/Month

• Nothing is black and white. Everything has pros and cons.

Jobs are stable but you have less control.

The Many Levels of Hustling

Real entrepreneurs give the opposite advice of Silicon Valley coaches. They don’t risk, they side hustle. They stay patient, they don’t quit their jobs until they’ve built their side hustles big.

In the rest of this chapter, Ayo gives ways to earn money through side hustling, as well as websites to get started with writing, coding, and marketing.

Build Your Talent Stack

A side hustler should have a handful of skills they’re good at, skills that amplify each other and create career capital, making you rare and indispensable.

Chapter 10 How to Achieve Massive Success Without Taking Massive Risks

Antifragile (Nassim Taleb) = something that benefits from volatility. This is what you want to learn to become.

Are You a Turkey?

Turkey = someone who thinks life is all about being comfortably fed…until one day they end up on the chopping block.

Most people are like turkeys, swamped with debt, with fragile sources of income.

Internet businesses are antifragile. There’s not much to lose.

The New American Dream

The old American Dream of being a company man for decades is over.

Ayo side hustled until he had 6 months’ cash saved and a monthly revenue of consistently (for 6 months) 2–3x his job income.

Most people can start a side business that makes an extra $1K/mo.

How to Live an Antifragile Life

Increase your options, put yourself in situations that favor chance.

Ex: pre-planned vacations are more fragile because plans come with expectations.

Go to parties, not networking conferences. They’re too pre-planned.

Read more: Nassim Taleb books, Rich Dad Poor Dad, Zero to One, The War of Art. Ayo read all of these books more than 3x.

• Some lessons don’t present themselves until you’re ready for them.
• I credit much of my success to reading.
• There’s an 80/20 principle involved with books too. Sometimes you have to wade through the dirt to find diamonds.
• When it comes to your life, you will never truly know the future. So you have two choices: Try to force the world into your cookie cutter mentality and suffer…or become antifragile and increase your odds of random magic.

The Equation That Almost Always Works in Your Favor

• Living a successful life isn’t about being over the top, bold, and daring. No, it’s about doing little experiments, having a measured view of success, and doing what you can to increase your odds of living a good life because there’s no guarantee.

Chapter 11 Play Games You Can Win

• When your parents told you that you could do WHATEVER you put your mind to, they were lying.
• Certain routes to success are going to be difficult to impossible for you, so there’s no point in trying them.
• The guiding principle for building the best possible version of YOUR LIFE is…Play games you can win.

Ayo’s written 1M+ words in 3 books and 5 years of blogging. But considers himself lazy. Because he’s never tried to succeed at anything outside his niche.

• There are so many life paths that don’t involve becoming a millionaire…a famous artist, or some other pie in the sky dream.

A Simple Strategy for Success That ANYONE Can Follow

You can’t necessarily be the best tennis player in the world, but you can be the best plumber in Bemidji.

• There are so many attainable yet awesome and even profitable dreams you can chase if only you’d stay in your wheelhouse.

Avoid new things that are well outside of your aptitude. You have intuitive skills. Use those.

• Deny your inclinations, chase status, money, or fame alone, and you will definitely fail.
• You already know what you want to do with your life, more or less, but you’re scared.
• Even with “natural talent,” it took me five years to become a full-time writer.
• A life based on your strengths is the best possible choice even if you’re not rich or world famous.
• Let’s just stop with the get rich stuff for a bit and focus on real success…It’s about building a quality life and having options.
• You only need to have 1/100th of a Steve Jobs lifestyle to be happy and still be miles ahead of everyone else.

Goals everyone can achieve: start a side hustle, build a business and have a career that matches their talents and strengths, attaining financial freedom, not being miserable, having time, freedom, and sanity.

The Circle of Competence

Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger’s investment strategy is simple:

1. Find businesses with smart owners in industries they understand
2. Look for businesses worth more than their price
3. Buy the business or buy shares in it
4. Do nothing and let the businesses grow and prices increase

When Ayo has tried other ventures, like Facebook, etc, he’s failed.

• The more I work on my writing and the business based on it, the better I become at my craft, and the more successful I am.
• I’ve been in this circle of competence for five years, and I plan on widening it for the rest of my life.
• Don’t invest much into something until you understand it first.
• When you stay in a similar range of techniques, you start to stack them on top of one another because they’re related.
• The more intellectual humility you have, the less you f**k up.
• Often success if more a product of NOT F**KING UP than it is being really smart.

The Myths of Success Smart People Avoid

• You hear many false notions about success that you believe for one reason. Humans mistake repeated assertion for truth.

Fail Fast

The Lean Startup was a book that started the fail fast idea. But this doesn’t mean set out TRYING to fail.

Hustle Pornography

Hustling for the sake of hustling is no good.

• If you have to kill yourself to be successful in a certain route, you probably don’t have the talent.
• Just find something you enjoy, get the initial traction you need to boost your confidence, and then steadily work on that skill for a long period of time.

Work-Life Balance

• To achieve an above average level of success, you will have to spend an above average amount of time and effort on it…[but] if you like what you do, it won’t feel like work.
• When you’re working on something you enjoy…you can work for longer periods of time…without the type of burn out that comes from working 70 hours a week at a job you detest.
• I work hard…because my work doesn’t drain me. Instead it adds value to my life.

Jack of All Trades, Master of None

Books like Outliers, Mastery, and Peak argue that people need to master something (often using the 10K hour rule)

• Specialization works well, but only as long as the area you specialize in stays relevant.
• The more you acquire disparate skills, the more chances you have to succeed.

Mastery vs Generalism is a false dichotomy.

Stay In Your Lane

• People don’t want to stay in their lane. We vacillate between daydreaming about insane success and wallowing at low depths of self-esteem.
• If you know you want to be a writer, try different forms of writing, but always write.

Chapter 12 The Self Care Trap: How to Actually Care for Yourself on Your Journey to Improving

• Often, the challenges themselves don’t get in your way but rather the way you treat yourself and talk to yourself throughout the process does.

The Happiness Dichotomy

There are 2 types of happiness: memory (how has my life turned out so far?) and experiential happiness.

• By achievement, I don’t mean making a million dollars, just something that matters to you.
• The self-care movement often tricks people to feel good about themselves in the short term, which leads to forgoing better long-term goals that fuel meaning.
• People often burn out because they’re working on the WRONG THING.

Problems Self-Care Can’t Solve

• Life is hard. Inherently tragic.
• Somewhere along the line, respect for yourself became a basic human right instead of something you earned.
• Fake self-care is the classic form of “treating the symptoms without addressing the diagnosis.”
• Often times, you feel bad because your life is ACTUALLY BAD…This isn’t about the way society or other people feel about you; it’s about the way you feel about you.

The Underlying Sense of “Not Being Good Enough”

• Sometimes you feel like you’re not good enough because…you’re actually not good enough.
• When you continue to conquer goals and solve problems…You start to look yourself as a person who overcomes…This builds a new identity and true memory happiness.

The “Outward Success” Problem

• Pretending like worldly success isn’t something you’re both judged on and judge yourself on doesn’t account for the way the world works.
• My life got better when I started to use my nature to my advantage.

People sell you self-care ideas because they make money off it. The messages they peddle include: You deserve X, it’s not your fault, you’re oppressed and helpless.

• All marketers, copywriters, and persuaders know that playing to your ego is the best way to sell you, especially if they’re trying to sell you b***.
• Your ego doesn’t exist to help you self-actualize; it exists to protect you from perceived harm. It will gladly…replace the idea that you need to exert more effort with the idea that there’s nothing you can do.

What You’d do if You Really Cared for Yourself

• If you really cared for yourself, you’d do everything in your power to live a better life.
• True self-care comes from doing things that are hard.
• You don’t become healthier mentally by avoiding difficulty.
• Self-Care Should be a Reward
• You care for yourself less, because you know…your flaws, every mistake you’ve made…Since you know this, you’re harder on yourself than you are on anyone else.

What This Means For You

• The truth you know but don’t want to hear often provides the straightest path to a better life, if you listen.

Chapter 13 Don’t Pour From an Empty Cup

• One of the biggest lies you’re told, and probably believe, is that working on yourself to become successful is selfish. The opposite is true.

The Archetype of the Generous Scorekeeper

Generous scorekeepers are people who are helpful, but with strings attached. They focus on others becuase they can’t get a handle on their own life.

The “I Gave Up My Dream for My Kids” Lie

“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their children than the unlived life of the parent.” — Carl Jung

You responsibilities increase when you become a parent, but that doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice everything for the rest of your life.

The Life-Changing Magic of Putting Yourself First

• If the people around you aren’t thriving, you could be the example that helps them change.
• This is the cold reality of life. You are often, at your core, alone.
• You spend so much time worrying aobut yourself anyway, just in a counterproductive fashion.

The More You Have, The More You Can Give

• Just because the system is, in many ways extremely unfair, that doesn’t mean you can’t ascend in life at all.
• Trade-offs are part of life.
• We don’t go for what we want, so we don’t get what we want.
• Then we pretend we don’t want what we don’t have, but deep down we still want it, and that wanting can manifest itself in a lot of negative and counterproductive ways.
• As a self-actualized person who understands human nature, you’re going to have to learn how to “play the game.”

Chapter 14 How to Properly Navigate the World on Your Journey to Self-Actualization

• When you experience someone who’s the true antithesis of a societal drone, it’s infuriating

You can harness the deep-seated desire for adventure by becoming a hero who moves in silence.

Heroes in books are often nobodies because we relate to those people the most.

• Had I not screwed up my life so much, I wouldn’t have as many interesting stories to tell.
• Your ordinariness IS your superpower.
• Remember how the hero always begins the journey. They have no idea what the hell they’re doing.
• The challenge is often a manifestation of your inner demons. Think of the fact that Harry Potter has a piece of Voldemort, who is evil, in him.
• Whatever path you choose in life, it’s not corny to look at it as a mission. It’s imperative.
• Life is a series of cycles…Winning and becoming the hero won’t sustain you at all. You want to climb all over again.

How to Deal With the Crabs in a Bucket Mentality

• The more you succeed, the more you see how nearly all of your surroundings, especially people, are trying to drag you down hard.

The Resistance is formless, and everywhere, and if you think it’s not affecting you, it is.

Don’t talk about your dream from the start.

• Since people give up on their dreams 99% of the time, people usually brush you off when you’re beginning.

Pretend You’re Like Everyone Else

• One of the easiest ways to sour a conversation is to make someone feel dumb…[or] share an opinion that goes against their belief system, which is an extension of their identity as a human being.
• When you’re arguing about belief systems, you’re arguing against someone else’s value as a human being.

Stop Wanting People to Believe in Your Legitimacy

• Nobody can validate you…You can only perceive validation. Your interpretations of other people belong to you.
• You want to get yourself to the point where you’re genuinely amused with your life, so much so that you don’t even feel the need to share it with other people.

PART 3 Moving Forward: how to Build Your Legacy

• You don’t want to read self-help books for the rest of your life. You want to implement the advice from these books and move on to bigger and better challenges.

Chapter 15 How to Turn Your “Little Project” Into a Real Empire

• You can consider yourself to be “on your path” if you’ve spent at least 90 days working on it, preferably six months or more.

Make a Splash

• You need to do something somewhat major to realize you have the seeds for a long-term vision. (Ex: getting paid as a writer, getting your first sale, etc)
• Once you’ve put in the work, not only does everything come easier to you, but other people start to notice you…You’ll be an overnight success.

Chapter 16 The Sentence I Tell Myself Whenever I Struggle

Ayo’s sentence:

This is where I’m at, and I have to deal with it.

• The Number 1 thing holding you back from overoming obstacles is your wish for them to disappear.
• Often, stepping back and understanding the consequences of quitting can be enough to keep you from doing it.

Chapter 17 Stop Being a Self-Help Junkie (And Start Living Your Life)

• You don’t want to read self-help blog posts and books for the rest of your life…I want you to live your life…for now, maybe for the first time in your life, follow directions.
• The next time you read a personal development book…spend a week doing what the book told you to do.

Get your copy of Real Help here (and if you purchase the book before Jan 31, you can also sign up to receive free bonus courses from Ayo himself)