This Mindset Shift Will Instantly Make You More Successful Than 90% of People

This Mindset Shift Will Instantly Make You More Successful Than 90% of People

March 07, 2025 28m

What does success mean to you?

What’s one habit you think successful people have?

Today, Jay unpacks the hidden habits and mindset shifts that set the most successful people apart. Many of us believe that highly successful people are somehow different, that they possess unique talents or advantages we don’t. But it's actually about recognizing and mastering key patterns that most people overlook.

Jay also uncovers the hidden patterns and psychological principles that shape success, revealing how small mindset shifts can create massive impact. He explores the power of belief, the influence of focus, and the importance of letting go to make room for growth. With practical insights and thought-provoking perspectives, this episode will challenge the way you approach success and help you unlock new possibilities in your journey.

In this episode, you'll learn:

How to Recognize and Leverage Patterns for Success

How to Stop Wasting Time on the Wrong Things

How to Build Confidence by Observing Success Strategies

How to Reprogram Your Mindset for Growth and Achievement

Success isn’t reserved for a select few—it’s within your reach if you’re willing to shift your mindset, recognize patterns, and take intentional action. 

With Love and Gratitude,

Jay Shetty

What We Discuss:

00:00 Intro

01:10 How to Become More Successful in Life?

03:50 Tip #1: Understand the Patterns

11:14 Tip #2: You’re Doing All the Wrong Things

17:24 Tip #3: Get Support from Someone Who Believes in You

21:39 Tip #4: The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon

25:20 Tip #5:  Stop Measuring Your Success By Others' Timelines  

26:23 Tip #6: You Don’t Need Everyone to Like You

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Listen and Follow Along

Full Transcript

We were getting where we couldn't pay the bill.

PG&E asked customers about their biggest concerns so we could address them one by one.

That's terrifying.

That's fair.

Joe, Regional Vice President, PG&E.

We have to run the business in a way that keeps people safe, but it starts driving costs down.

I would love to see that.

We're on our way.

I hope so.

PG&E electricity rates are now lower than they were last year.

Hear what other customers have to say and what PG&E is doing about it at pge.com slash open dash lines. The Unshakeables podcast is kicking off season two with an episode you won't want to miss.
Join host Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business, as he welcomes a very special guest, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon. Hear about the challenges facing small businesses and some of the uh-oh moments Jamie has overcome.
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Subject to change. Hey everyone, it's Jay Shetty and I'm thrilled to announce my podcast tour.
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The number one health and wellness podcast. Jay Shetty.
Jay Shetty. The one, the only Jay Shetty.
Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose. I'm your host Jay Shetty and I'm so grateful that you're back here to listen,

learn, and grow. Now today, I'm going to talk to you about how you can become more successful than 90% of people.
Most of us believe that the people who achieve greatness, the people who do amazing things are special, that in some way they're

different from us. And here's the reality.
They're different in their consistency. They're different

in their creativity. They're different in their work ethic.
But at the core, they're not different.

I believed this myself for years. I used to always think, I'm not made for more.
I don't think I can achieve that. I don't think I'm good enough.
Things like that never happened to me. And I'm guessing that you've said similar things to yourself multiple times.
How many times have you actually had an amazing opportunity? You get invited to a potential client's dinner and you don't even show up because you're so scared of ruining it, you don't even try. Or what about this? Someone says to you, you know what, I know you're trying to get good at website design, I'll actually pay you to do it.
And you say, no, no, no, I'll just do it for free because I'm not that experienced. We sabotage ourselves, we sell ourselves short and we don't build even when opportunities are coming.
This is why I truly believe that all of us have had opportunities. We've had moments where we could have been better, performed better, had opportunities to grow, but we weren't ready for them.
And it's because we're not doing what the 10%, what the 5%, what the 1% are doing. And that's what today's all about.
I want to walk you through the tools, through the ideas, through the insights that you may miss, that you may not notice. Maybe you didn't grow up around an entrepreneur.
Maybe you didn't grow up around a high achiever and you didn't get the opportunity to learn this from them. I believe that productivity, effectiveness, and achievement are all possible for you and for me.
And here's what I want you do. I want you to get your notebook out.
And if you're walking, if you're running, if you're at the gym, don't worry. Just take a screenshot of the moments I mentioned things that you know you need to come back to.
And this is one of those episodes that you're going to want to send to a friend, a family member, because I want you to share the insights so you get better at practicing them. Here's the first one.
If I told you that to become more successful than 90% of people, you had to focus on one thing. And that one thing was patterns.
Would you believe me? Would you get it? I mean, I've even wanted to write a book

about this and I don't because I just think everyone's going to look at me and think, Jay, patterns, what do you even mean? Well, here's the point. If you look at anyone who's had success in any industry, it's because they understand patterns.
If you look at people who are brilliant at investing, whether it's property or stocks, they know when to get involved. They've followed the pattern long enough to know when to get in and when to get out.
It's a pattern that they've analyzed and observed and learned. If you look at people like Mr.
Beast, who've had incredible success on YouTube, why does that happen? Because he's understood the pattern. He's understood the algorithm, which is just another word for pattern, and he's observed that pattern, mastered that pattern, and then delivered to it.
He knows what to do in the first three seconds. He knows what to do in the last nine seconds.
He knows what to do in the middle to keep your attention. He's mastered a pattern.
If you look at your favorite movie, you look at your favorite TV shows, there's a rhythm to the script. There's a pattern.
And here's what's true. The most successful people in the world are either pattern observers, pattern makers, pattern disruptors, but they're definitely not one thing, pattern followers.
See, what's really interesting about the 10% is that they're pattern observers, pattern makers, pattern disruptors, but most of us are pattern followers. We're the

consumer. We follow the pattern.
We follow pages. We use what we're given and we use it to consume.
We don't use it to create. We don't use it to build.
We don't use it to think. We use it to consume.
We use it to consume our time. We use it to pass time.
We use it to pass waste energy. We don't use it to create, build, disrupt, or observe.
If you think about the amount of creators there are in the world that are social media creators versus the number of social media consumers, we have the numbers in front of us.

The majority of people in the world, the 90% of the world are consumers. They're watching, liking, commenting, sharing.
Now there's nothing wrong with that. I too am a consumer.
And sometimes to be a good disruptor, maker, or observer, you have to be a follower.

You have to be a consumer.

But then you have to do more with it. Once you have followed, once you've lived in the established patterns, systems, or structures, you have to get good at observing them.
A pattern observer or a pattern seer is great at recognizing existing patterns, trends, or connections. They can observe and identify relationships, often excelling in analysis and foresight.
They have the ability to strategize based on their findings. So for example, if a social media creator sees, oh, when I start a video that says, hey, did you know? They realize that people click five times is more times.
And when they put a call to action at the end, they realize people share the video more than three times. If I observe that, I can now apply that when I create.
If you see that some of the biggest brands in the world today, before they launch, they start a mailing list. Something exciting is coming soon.
Be the first to find out. Everyone subscribes to the mailing list.
They discover how many people are interested. If you observe that pattern, you too can use it for your business.
Too often, we're trying to reinvent the wheel. We're trying to start from scratch.
We're trying to build from the beginning, from the bottom. The reality is someone else has figured it out.
Can you watch that pattern? Can you notice that pattern? And if you can, you become a pattern observer and then ideally you apply it. Now, if you get good at observing patterns, you might have the ability to become a pattern maker.
These individuals create new patterns, systems or frameworks.

They're innovators who build solutions, processes or artistic work that didn't exist before. And they've studied the pattern so well that they know how to build for it.
They know how to create for it. But now, there's one more person, the pattern disruptor, the rarest of them all.
These people challenge or break existing patterns. Take someone like Steve Jobs, who invents the smartphone at a time when everyone still had buttons on their phone and small screens.
When you think about the origination of Spotify by Daniel Eck, when you think about the rise of computers, when people didn't think everyone needed a personal computer, they just believed that there'd be a few for the whole world. These people are rebels or revolutionaries.
If you think about the founders of social media apps who created an online universe that didn't exist before, but even disrupted the patterns. So you can see that anyone who is successful is obsessed with patterns.
And I want to ask you, whatever industry you're in, whatever place you're in, have you understood the pattern of the industry? What's the pattern of the person who gets promoted? What's the pattern of the person who gets selected? Now, our mind will try and say things like, oh, it's just because they've been sucking up. Oh, it's just because they're the ones who's, you know, they've just been around the longest.

All of that may be true, but challenge yourself. Challenge yourself to observe the pattern.
If you observe the pattern, you will master that place. If you look at good health, it's a pattern.
How much protein? How much cardio? How much strength training? If you look at anything you want to be successful at life, learn the patterns and learn the patterns from the pattern makers and observe it. And sometimes don't even listen to what they say, watch what they do.
A lot of us sit there and we listen to someone teaching us the pattern when actually if you want to be the best pattern reader, watch it. Watch the person do their art masterfully.
That's step one. Now, the second step about becoming more successful and impactful than 90% of people is asking yourself this question.
Are you busy but doing all the wrong things? Think about this for a second. Imagine this.
Two people walk into a room. One sees a handcrafted desk and thinks, that's pretty nice.
The other sees the same desk but gasps. This is a masterpiece.
Why do they have a different reaction? The second person spent two frustrating hours assembling it from flat pack pieces, cursing over missing screws, and doing the work. This is known as the IKEA effect.
It hijacks your brain and makes you believe your effort has magically transformed something ordinary into something extraordinary. And this isn't just about furniture.
It's why parents treasure their child's scribble drawing more than a piece of Picasso's art. It's why startups cling to ideas others call doomed.
It's why your half-baked project feels like a work of art. Psychologists discovered the IKEA effect through experiments where participants built simple things like Lego models or origami.
The shocking result? People were willing to pay significantly more for the creations they built, even when they looked objectively worse than a professional version. Effort plus ownership equals value.
And why is that? Our brains crave meaning and effort creates attachment. The harder we work on something, the more we feel it's part of us.
Now, that's not a bad thing.

It means we should take ownership.

We should grow.

But here's what successful people do.

They realize that the IKEA effect can blind us.

It makes us cling to bad ideas, dysfunctional relationships, or failing projects

simply because we've poured so much of ourselves into them. It's a psychological trap.
The more effort you invest, the harder it becomes to let go. So the next time you find yourself obsessively defending something you've built, ask yourself, do I love this because it's great or because I made it? The most people in the world are good at being detached they're good at quitting something they're good at leaving something behind when it isn't great and they can't make it better they're not so attached to their ideas that they think there's only one way if this doesn't happen nothing else will They find another way.
They build another path. They're open to the idea.
A lot of us are too attached to the work we've put into something that we don't want to work on building something else. You've studied something for three years and graduated.
So now even though you have an amazing opportunity to do something completely different, you feel like you're wasting the three years. You feel like you're leaving something behind that's valuable rather than feeling the inspiration and excitement of the new opportunity in front of you.
You're letting what's known in economics as sunk cost bias slow you down. Sunk cost bias is where you're biased by sunk cost.
You've already invested so much time and energy into something, you need it to become meaningful to give your life meaning. Rather than recognizing this doesn't serve me anymore, this isn't valuable anymore, this isn't my goal anymore.
And that's okay. I'll give you an example where I had to practice this.
Some of you may not even know this. Originally, my community built on Facebook.
I have around 30 million followers on Facebook, which is where I first started as a creator. And at one point, I realized that it wasn't serving me.
The content I was creating, the platform was hard to grow on, and I realized I really wanted to launch a podcast. So here we are.
And if I had said to myself, no, no, no, I'm a Facebooker. That's what I'm known as.
That's what I have to do. I've put in so much effort into this.
I would never be here with you today. So much of what you'll create tomorrow is when you'll let go of what you do today.
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PG&E asked customers about their biggest concerns so we could address them one by one. That's terrifying.
That's fair. Joe, Regional Vice President, PG&E.
We have to run the business in a way that keeps people safe, but it starts driving costs down. I would love to see that.
We're on our way. I hope so.
PG&E electricity rates are now lower than they were last year. Hear what other customers have to say and what PG&E is doing about it at pge.com slash open dash lines.
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Now, step three is something called the Pygmalion effect. What if I told you that the key to your success isn't just hard work or talent, but someone else's belief in you? What if their faith in you could actually shape who you become? Imagine this, you're in a classroom and the teacher believes you're destined for greatness.
She sees your potential and without even realizing it, she starts treating you differently. More encouragement, more attention, more opportunities.
And then something incredible happens. You start to live up to her expectations.
Your grades soar, your confidence grows, and you begin to believe in yourself more. But here's the twist.
It wasn't just about your ability. It was about the belief someone else had in you.
Welcome to the Pygmalion Effect, a psychological phenomenon where higher expectations lead to better performance. And this isn't just some motivational theory.
It's scientifically proven. Researchers discovered this by conducting an experiment with students.
Teachers were told that certain students were intellectual boomers, though in reality, these students were picked at random. But by believing in their potential, those students performed significantly better by the end of the year.
The Pygmalion effect shows how our expectations shape our reality. When others believe in us, it shifts our behavior, it boosts our self-esteem, and it unlocks our abilities that we didn't even know we had.
But I know what you're thinking. Jay, no one believes in me.
Well, maybe you've had a coach, a mentor, a family member, or a friend. But I know some of you are still thinking, Jay, I don't really have people like that around me.
Well, here's the most amazing thing. The real power of the Pygmalion effect is it's about your own belief in yourself.
If you start holding yourself to a higher standard, if you expect more from yourself, you'll start to see that belief reflected in your actions. Think about someone like Kobe Bryant, who had his mamba mentality.
It was a mentality that he aspired for, that he channeled during a game. It was a belief he had in himself, a potential that existed.
You look at the alter ego of Beyonce, Sasha Fierce. She knows who she is in that moment.
It allows her to almost be acting out of her body, to be a different level of herself. What's the beast mode version of you? What's the version of you that you aspire to be like and you notice you have the potential, but you need to unleash it? I've thought about this for a long time in my own life.
When I first met my mentor who believed in me, I'd always say to him, no, I'm not an entrepreneur. I'm just a creative.
I'm just an artist. I need to work for someone.
I can't work for myself. I'm not an entrepreneur.
I would say this to him again and again and again. Today, I realize that I was wrong.
I have the ability to be an entrepreneur. I have the ability to be a business owner.
Why? Because I allowed myself to have that vision for myself. When people don't have a greater vision for you, remember to hold a greater vision for yourself.
Not that you believe you are those things now, but that you're working towards, you're aspiring towards all of those things being possible. I know you can do it.
I know it's possible. And I'm here telling you that.
If you've never had someone in your life tell you they believe in you, here I am now. I do believe in you.
I see your potential. I notice you're trying.
I acknowledge that you show up here every day, every week, and you're ready for the next level. I want you to start seeing your future self

and aspiring towards them. This next one is probably my favorite one when it comes to

the things the 10% do that the 90% don't. And I want you to think about it like this.

Imagine you just learned about a new concept. Maybe it's a word, a brand, or even a type of food.
It's on your mind, and suddenly you start seeing it everywhere. You hear it in conversation, you spot it in social media, and you even see a billboard for it.
It's like the universe is throwing this thing at you from all directions. It could be numerology.
You see 1111 everywhere. Literally while I'm recording this, it's 1222 and I just saw 222, right? Maybe it's the cyber truck, the Tesla cyber truck.
You've been talking about it. You now see it everywhere in the world.
Me and my friend were talking about the other day how we don't see a particular color of a particular car. The next thing you know, we could see it everywhere.
But here's the truth. It's not happening more.
It's just you notice it more, right? It's only 12.22 or 11.11 at, you know, certain times of the day, it's not happening more often, but you notice it more. Your brain's playing a trick.
Welcome to what's known as the Bada-Mainoff phenomenon, the mind-bending illusion where once you notice something, you suddenly think it's everywhere. Your brain filters out everything that's irrelevant, and once it's noticed something, it starts to pay attention to it more.
This makes you believe that it's

appearing all around you when in reality, your brain's just hyper-focused on it. And this

phenomenon happens because of cognitive bias. Our brains are bombarded with information every

second of the day. So to avoid being overwhelmed, they filter out things that don't seem important.
But the moment something catches your attention, maybe a new word or idea, your brain suddenly relearns to look for it. And because you're now hyper aware of it, it appears to be popping up everywhere, even though it was always there.
So how do you use this like successful people? Well, let's say you're thinking about starting a business. You read an article about entrepreneurship and boom, you start noticing entrepreneurship stories everywhere.
Podcasts, YouTube videos, friends talking about their side gigs, the Badder-Mainoff effect has kicked in. It's not that there's more entrepreneurship around you, it's that your brain is now hyper focused on it.
So whatever it is that you want to find in life, whatever it is that you want to learn about in life, plant the seed, become hyper focused on it, and you'll see it everywhere. But hey, this also works negatively.
If you think there aren't enough opportunities, you will find proof around you that there aren't enough opportunities. If you feel to yourself you're not an entrepreneur, you will see signs that you're not an entrepreneur.
Our mind will latch on to any idea that we have planted. So the next time you want to get good at something, plant the thought.
For example, if I want to launch a podcast, let me think about all the ways in which I would be a good podcast host. Let me notice those things.
Let me surround myself with them and that will develop my confidence. Whereas if I start noticing all the ways I'm not, that will also dent my confidence.
To get started, you want to use this principle to your advantage. Now I want to share a couple more with you.
This is a big one. Don't compare your chapter one to someone else's chapter 20.
Stop measuring your success by others' timelines. Everyone has their own path and success isn't linear.
Focus on your own journey without getting distracted by others' perceived achievements. Unsuccessful people look at where people are today and wonder how far they are.
Successful people look at and learn how those people started. They turn envy into study.
Instead of envying where someone is, study where they started. Instead of envying what someone has, study how they got it.
Instead of envying the life someone's living, study the parts of their life that are unseen. That's what it takes to become great.
Two more things I wanted to share with you. you don't need everyone to like you.
It's okay to be misunderstood. Successful people understand that when you're doing things that are new, fresh, innovative, exciting, it can be too overwhelming and surprising for others.
Your work ethic, your work rate, your dedication, your discipline might scare people. And when people are scared, their fear usually comes out as insecurity or noticing flaws in you.
It's not about them. It's not about you.
It's what fear does to people. You don't need everyone to like you and you will never like everyone.
That's the reality. And that's the final step to realize.
Some relationships are meant to be short chapters, not lifelong books. Not every friendship, partnership, or connection is meant to last forever and that's okay.
Some of us never grow because we're scared to outgrow the people around us. Some of us never move forward because we're held back by the people around us.
And some of us never become who we're meant to be because we think we have to be like the people we're around. It's okay to let go.
It's okay to move on and to do it respectfully, gracefully, and kindly. You don't do this because you think you're better than people.
You do this because you want to be better than who you were yesterday. I really hope that these principles, actually, I know these principles will transform your life.
Let me know when you tag me in the stories, which one resonated with you. And I can't wait for you to join in to another episode.
Thank you for listening today. I will see you on the next one.
Remember, I'm forever in your corner and I'm always rooting for you. Take care.
If you love this episode, you'll love my interview with Kobe Bryant on how to be strategic and obsessive to find your purpose. Our children have become less imaginative about how to problem solve.
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PG&E asked customers about their biggest concerns so we could address them one by one. That's terrifying.
That's fair. Joe, Regional Vice President, PG&E.
We have to run the business in a way that keeps people safe, but it starts driving costs down. I would love to see that.
We're on our way. I hope so.
PG&E electricity rates are now lower than they were last year. Hear what other customers have to say and what PG&E is doing about it at pge.com slash open dash lines.
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