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Conor Neill: "Why smart people stay broke" "Took me a few years growing up to really learn this. In school, I did quite well in exams just through intelligence without having to do a lot of work. When I was young, I valued intelligence over action." He explains the trap smart people fall into: "One of the dangers for smart people, the smarter you are, the better your excuses. The more accomplished you are at talking yourself out of taking action. At proving to yourself that every action you could take is too small, too meaningless, and not worth it." Neill shares a quote from George Leonard, who brought jiu-jitsu from Japan to the US: "You cannot do everything. But you can do one thing. And another. And another. That's the way you make massive progress in life. Doing one thing and another and another." On his own YouTube channel: "Very often I sit down and think, these ideas aren't particularly deep or wise. But what makes this channel grow? What makes you come and connect? I guess the ideas aren't terrible. But I show up, and I share them. The fact that you show up and try and act, week after week, month after month, year after year, with a little bit of intelligence, you start to get better and better. You start to become more articulate." He emphasizes: "Even if the action is poor action, you're going to learn something from it. It's so easy to talk yourself out of action. But life rewards action, not intelligence. Not smarts in your brain, but action into the world." On discipline and measurement: "Until you measure something that matters, you do not know if you're disciplined." Neill shares a personal story: "My mentor would ask me to do some writing. Just write a few technical notes. Months passed. Years passed. I just wasn't making progress. So I hired a writing coach. For one year, I had a call every Wednesday. Every call would begin with him asking one question: how many words did you write this week?" The results were brutal: "He pushed me to measure how many words I wrote each day. Each week. Early on, it was very painful. It felt like I was putting a lot of energy into writing. But the actual number of words being produced. day after day, week after week, was very low." The realization: "It was only when I really got this measure, and made sure I looked at it each morning, each evening, each week, that I started to realize: so much of the effort was in my head and not turning into words on a page." Neill warns: "Be very careful in evaluating your discipline by whether you feel like you're making an effort. Because your mind will cheat you into believing you're being really busy. You're putting in a lot of effort. For me, it was brutal. The feeling in me was that I was putting a lot of time and energy into writing. But those early weeks, seeing that it resulted in so few words being written, that was the truth." He concludes: "Everything good in life happens when you're off the sofa and engaging with the world. Find a measure of something that matters. Pay attention to whether you're making progress on the actions that lead to that measure. Value action above thinking, or intending to take action."