Your ROADMAP

My Favorite Strategy:
Dominate the Game Being Played Around You

What do you think about these two statements? Do you agree or do you disagree? Statement
one, women are only looking for a guy who is rich, and good looking. Statement two, when
you go to a funeral, you should dress up out of respect for the deceased. What do you think?
What’s interesting is some people believe those things to be completely true, and they go
through their entire lives believing it. In fact, I believe the funeral one, because I was raised
in America, and I was taught that when you go to a funeral, you show respect by dressing
up.

Until one day, when my parents, one of their friends had passed away and they said, we
should go, we need to go. And I was younger and they said you don’t have to come in, just
wait outside. And I was uncomfortable, because I was wearing like shorts and they said, “It’s
fine, it’s fine.” And when we got there I looked around, and most of the people there were
dressed totally informally. This was an Indian funeral, and I didn’t really understand what
was going on. I was probably thirteen or fourteen-years- old, and I later asked my parents I
said, “Why didn’t anyone dress up?” Because all of the TV shows I’d seen where there was
a funeral people are wearing suits and ties. And my parents taught me that for Indian people
or at least for Punjabi people, you don’t dress up because you take away attention from the
deceased. You simply show up there out of respect. It was a radically different perspective
than what I was raised on.

And that’s when I realized that so many of the things I thought were absolutely true, were
axioms were actually not. They were assumptions and I was guided by many invisible
scripts. Now we are all guided by invisible scripts, especially for the powerful, big
institutions in our lives. Think about it, careers and business, getting jobs, applying and
getting admitted to college, relationships and of course health and fitness. What if we could
deconstruct what those invisible scripts are, and what if we could discover the game being
played around us? Think about the power in discovering the game being played around you.
If you’ve read my material you know that most people believe they have to keep a budget
and they have to cut back on lattes. Until you discover my material, and you realize that’s not
true at all, in fact, that’s totally pointless and counterproductive.

Maybe you’ve read my material on Dream Jobs and you know that most people, they rifle
their resume in indiscriminately to hundreds of companies whereas you’ve learned a totally
different approach. You learned the power of natural networking. You’ve learned how you
can actually add value to VIP’s without being sleazy or slimy or scammy, and you’ve learned
the power of personal relationships. You’ve learned the power of actually bringing someone
in and practicing your negotiation skills. It’s a totally different frame than what the vast

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majority of people believe.

So how can you discover the game being played around you, in the arena you want? Here’s
the framework that I’ve used, as I tried to rapidly learn the different games being played
around me. So what I do is I like to get a lay of the land. Let’s say that you’re trying to
research me. You’re trying to say, “Hey is this Ramit Sethi guy a weirdo? Does his stuff
work? Should I invest in one of his courses?” How would you approach that? First, I would
just start by a real broad lay of the land. I would start Googling around, Ramit Sethi, Ramit
Sethi interview, Ramit Sethi success, etc. and I would just start to collect a lot of this data,
just in a notepad or whatever you want. And I would accept everything as true, so you might
discover two competing arguments.

One might say, “Ramit Sethi, he’s a scam. His site is a total scam. Beware.” And then you
might discover people who said, “Ramit Sethi helped me get a $25,000 raise. He helped
me get fit. He helped me find a relationship, because I was able to deconstruct my invisible
scripts.” So you get these two competing interests. What do you do? Here are a couple of
different frameworks or techniques I use, as I’m going through my lay of the land exercise.
So I will actually accept both of them as true, just for the moment. And then I’ll say, “Who do I
want to become more like?” Okay?

Here’s an example. When I recently went to India I had been working out, because as you
know previously, I was just a really skinny dude and two different uncles said something
really funny to me. One uncle said, “Oh, Ramit, you’re looking very fat. What’s happened?”
Especially, because Indian people love to call you fat, or basically any foreign people love to
call you fat when you’re family. It’s just part of the culture. So my other uncle, who works
out religiously he said, “Wow, your shoulders look really good. Have you been hitting the
gym?” So if you accept both of those as true just for the moment, then I said to myself, who
do I admire? Who do I want to be more like? And it was obvious. The uncle who works out
actually knows what he’s talking about versus the other uncle who just saw me get a little bit
bigger and immediately thought, “You’re fat,” because in his world view if you’re bigger you’re
fatter. So who did I want to listen to; who did I trust? Who did I respect for this particular
situation? Of course, it’s the uncle who works out.

The same thing is true for you. If you’re deconstructing me or you’re trying to deconstruct
relationships who do you listen to? If you’re looking for a wife, or a husband, you probably
want to listen to the people who have been married for a long time. That just makes sense.

Now the game being played around you can be profound, and I want to explain one example
that I learned that was very jaw dropping for me. When my book came out in 2009 I was
going around on book tour. I went to 13 or 14 cities, and I would go to all these national TV
stations, or even local TV stations, and if you recall in 2009 the economy had really tanked.
So all they wanted to do was talk about how bad the economy is, what’s going on, what are
we going to do to save our money? And you know my book is not about doom and gloom. It’s
about how to actually live a rich life. So I was happy to talk about it for a minute, but I wanted
to spend the bulk of my time talking about how we can get ahead. Now producers in virtually
every city did not like this. They said, “Well, okay, that might make sense, but what about all
these people in debt?”

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And if you recall, we had about 10% unemployment, which means 90% employment. What
about all the people with jobs who want to actually get ahead? But that was not what the
tenor of the conversation was. In other words, if you had watched any TV, or read any
newspapers at the time, all you saw was doom and gloom, because the people controlling the
media were controlling the conversation. And yet, a few years later the S&P had climbed to
its highest numbers ever. If you had listened to the media back then, you would have taken all
your money, put it into gold, all right, locked it away in a safe deposit box, and lost out on a
tremendous, tremendous growth trajectory. So there was a huge game being played around
people, and most people had no idea it was even being played.

We all have these games being played. Some of them I’ve discovered, some of them I’ll
have no idea until later in life I’m sure, but I wanted to always figure out what will it take to
discover these games being played around me, so I can deconstruct them and then master
them.

Alright, here are your action steps. The first thing is to do your lay of the land exercise. Just
start by Googling, whether it’s relationships or health and fitness or whatever. Start to get
the general lay of the land. Typically, this will take me two to three days, and I’ll start to see
some patterns and I’m writing them down, as I go along. The second thing is find your major
arguments. Let’s say you’re doing health and fitness. Some people will say, “High fat, paleo.”
Some people will say, “Low carb,” and you kind of write down, okay, these are the major
assumptions going on. Assume that they’re true just for the sake of argument and then ask
yourself, “Who do I want to be more like? Is there an agenda that these people have?”

Now this is where you get more specific and this is where most people stop, because it’s
actually challenging. The third step is to actually find the top people in the field, and actually
talk to them. Now why do I say top people? Because there’s a massive difference between
someone who’s number one or number two in their field, and someone who’s number five.
To get to the top requires a totally different way of thinking and as you do your lay of the
land exercise, you’re going to quickly discover who’s at the top or who’s not. For example, if
you’re looking up authors on productivity, you’re going to find David Allen, from GTD or Tim
Ferriss from The 4-Hour Work Week. There are a few people who are at the absolute top
of their game and then there’s a lot of people who are good, but not at the top of their game.
It requires a qualitative and quantitative difference to get to the top. Those are the people I
encourage you to learn from first. So if possible, I like to email them. And as you know, I’ve
got word for word scripts you can use to email these VIPs. I like to ask them some really
interesting questions. They might be questions like, “What has surprised you about x?”

Another question I like to ask them is, “What’s something you would not have expected?”
How about, “What’s something that caused you to change your mental mindset 180 degrees?”
Or one of my favorites: “What are most people doing wrong?” Imagine asking someone
that is a relationship expert or a career expert, and they will talk forever, because they’ve
been wanting to share that with someone who cares for years, and you’ve finally asked the
question.

Then the final step is to come up with a solution. You’ll say, “You know what? Based on my
research, my lay of the land, my discussions with a couple of top people, I’ve discovered that

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most people when they try to change their behavior, in terms of going to the gym, they try to
use willpower.” That’s their mistake. They always say, “Oh, I’m going to try harder this week,”
and they never go. So instead I’ve discovered that I can actually use systems and that’s going
to be what gets me to go to the gym three times a week.

That is how you go from having your assumptions like, “If I just try harder, I’ll make it to the
gym and I’ll get ripped” to “There’s a whole game being played around me.” Willpower is not
the answer. These experts have done the research. I can ride on their coattails. I’ve learned
that it’s not just about willpower. It’s actually about systems and pre- commitment strategies.
Now that I know that, I have saved years of going after the wrong strategy and I can focus on
getting results with the right strategy.

Again, that is how you go from having assumptions like, “I have to dress well to go to a
funeral,” or “Girls only like guys who make a lot of money,” to actually learning the true game
being played around you.

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