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Borrow Someone Else’s Diploma
As I mentioned earlier, one of perfectionism’s chief goals is to isolate you. It’s
easier to get you to believe lies and follow secret rules when you don’t have a
community telling you the truth and calling you out on your rules.
In order to separate you from the herd, perfectionism will tell you a very
popular secret rule: “You have to do it all on your own.”
This always reminds me of toddlers. They’d rather fall down a flight of stairs
than hold your hand, because they want to do it “all by my big self!”
We become adult toddlers when we refuse help from people and believe the
lie that seeking assistance is a sign of weakness.
Author Jessica Turner doesn’t feel that way though. When she was going to
do a Webinar for a sales team I had done a Webinar for, she called and
interviewed me. I had learned a lot and made some mistakes. For instance, if you
want people to show up at your Webinar, you have to e-mail them twice on the
day of, three hours before and then five minutes before it starts. Did you know
that? I sure didn’t, until I learned it from Lewis Howes. I tried it and it
dramatically increased attendance at the next Webinar I did. I passed that on to
Jessica. If you don’t have any information of your own, someone else does and
will give it to you if you ask the right way.
I call this “borrowing someone else’s diploma,” and it isn’t a particularly
new technique. Actor Will Smith did it decades ago, and he probably owes the
IRS a thank-you for that.
When he was nineteen years old and touring the country as a rapper, the
department asked him for $2.8 million. I don’t know if that’s done via a phone
call, letter, or a reverse Ed McMahon big check with balloons, but that’s
definitely a frightening day for a teenager.
It wasn’t a donation the IRS was looking for but back taxes. Smith didn’t
come from money. His divorced parents were middle class, with his dad working
seven days a week to run a refrigerator company and his mother employed by
the school board. A run-in with the IRS would have crippled most people, but
Smith started gathering new information in the midst of that season.

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Two years later, as he got ready to move to L.A. from West Philadelphia
born and raised for his first acting gig, his manager, James Lassiter, approached
him. “Listen, if we’re going out to L.A., we probably should have a goal.” The
transition from rapper to actor would not happen by accident. “I want to be the
biggest movie star in the world,” Smith replied.
That sentence in and of itself isn’t that unique. A thousand people riding
buses from the Midwest out to Hollywood say that every week. Smith also had
very little evidence that it would work. He wasn’t a blockbuster actor yet. He
was a twenty-one-year-old rapper whose biggest hit at the time had been a PG-
flavored rap called “Parents Just Don’t Understand.” It’s not just the goal that
separates Smith from other would-be superstars. It’s what happened next.
Lassiter did some research and came up with a list of the ten top-grossing
movies of all time. This was not difficult. Someone had already been the world’s
biggest star. “We looked at them and said, O.K., what are the patterns?” Smith
said.
“We realized that ten out of ten had special effects. Nine out of ten had
special effects with creatures. Eight out of ten had special effects with creatures
and a love story.”
That seems too simple to work, right?
There’s no way you can plan a twenty-five-year film career, in the ficklest
industry in the world, with a top-ten list that everyone has access to. That’s not
sophisticated enough. It needs to be more difficult than that. Or so we think,
until we see the list of Will Smith’s six most successful movies.
1. Independence Day: Special effects, creatures, love story; $817 million
worldwide lifetime gross.
2. Suicide Squad: Special effects, creatures, love story; $746 million
worldwide lifetime gross.
3. Hancock: Special effects. $624 million worldwide lifetime gross.
4. Men in Black 3: Special effects, creatures, love story; $624 million
worldwide lifetime gross.
5. Men in Black: Special effects, creatures, love story; $589 million lifetime
gross.
6. I Am Legend: Special effects, creatures (love story if you count the dog);
$585 million lifetime gross.

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Why does Smith believe in the power of borrowing someone else’s diploma?
He has 4 billion reasons.
Does doing this guarantee success? Nope. Wild Wild West was a Wild Wild
bust. But in most goals it’s not about winning all the time, it’s about winning
more than you lose. We’re not aiming for perfection. All you have to do is win
more today than you did yesterday and repeat the whole thing tomorrow. If six
of the twenty-four movies you star in make more than $4 billion, you get to
make more movies for a very long time, even if some of them flop.
Don’t ever accept the secret rule that you have to go it alone. Don’t let
perfectionism isolate you.
Find someone with an amazing diploma and then borrow it.