# How to develop an unhinged amount of confidence

Channel: Alex Finn Labs
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRzKGLLhzHg
Duration: 13 min
Language: English
Words: 2458
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/xRzKGLLhzHg

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[0:00] So, I've been able to accomplish a lot over the last several years. I built really big social media platform, launched a couple really successful apps, and I truly believe it came from the confidence I gained from a gay dating app. It's not what you think, let me explain. I truly believe if you have the confidence in yourself and believe in yourself, you can accomplish anything. You can improve any part of your life you want. Now, when I was a kid, I was supremely unconfident. I did not believe I was remotely smart, interesting, good-looking, charismatic, nothing. I thought I was just the unluckiest human being to ever exist on

[0:42] planet Earth, and it wasn't even like a depressing thing. Like, it wasn't a depressing lack of confidence. Like, I wasn't sad about it. I was just like, "Okay, I'm a stupid person. It is what it is. I'm not going to accomplish anything in my life. If I'm lucky enough, I'll be able to kind of fake it for the rest of my life, pretend to be smart, and maybe people would believe me. I don't know." And it was this way for a pretty long time. I mean, I had failing grades all throughout elementary school, middle school, high school, 2.6 GPA in high school, 2.4 GPA in college,

[1:11] a college that literally anyone could get into, got fired from my first job. I mean, I accomplished so little in the first 25 years of my life, it was unbelievable. I was not happy, I had zero confidence, and I had literally nothing to show for any of it. I was like 5 ft 2, 100 lb. I was pretty much nothing. Then, something happened at 25 years old. Something happened that changed everything. Something happened

[1:40] that changed my entire lens on life. Something happened that led me to go where I am now, which I'm pretty happy with, I'm pretty satisfied with. You know, right now I'm building a venture-backed company. I'm building a piece of software I'm going to launch in a couple weeks. I think we'll be be successful. Something happened at 25 years old that changed how I viewed everything. So, I'm coming off my first job, which I got fired from. I was a software developer at a now defunct energy company in Boston. I literally had no idea what I was doing. I was like a flash developer. They fired me after 2

[2:12] years. I start my next job where I'm like a technical consultant. I was like a tech guy on a sales team. I didn't know how to talk to anybody. I'm going on these sales calls now. I don't know how to talk to anybody. I have little confidence. I'm not closing any deals. And then something big happened. I was assigned to work the Grindr account. I was working at an analytics company and we were selling analytics to Grindr and I was assigned to close the deal. But the thing Grindr asked for from me, which I was not expecting, was to demo our analytics on a real iOS app. They

[2:47] wanted me to build an iOS app and put our analytics platform on it to show it how it worked. I never had to do that up to this point. In fact, up to this point, I never built an iOS app in my entire life. And it's not like I was doing good at this job before. I was doing pretty poorly. This basically was my make or break moment. If I failed at this, I was going to lose my second job, which if you get fired from your first two jobs, you're cooked. You're You're not getting more jobs. You go to another company and say, "Yeah, here's

[3:14] my resume. First two jobs fired from." Your career is basically over. I'm going to Walmart if it doesn't work out, right? So, I'm assigned to Grindr. I got to build an iOS app for them. I go to my computer. I have a week to do it. I have never built an iOS app in my entire life. I go, "Oh my god, this is it. My back's up against the wall, gun to my head. I now have to figure out how to do this." I spent literally 7 days straight, 7 days straight, barely sleeping at all, doing absolutely nothing else, teaching myself how to build a Swift app for iOS, how to build

[3:50] an iPhone app. I'm spending night and day coding this and you know, I was a developer, but I never coded Swift before, which is the language behind iOS apps. I never done it before. I didn't know what I was doing. I wasn't even a good developer for the languages I knew how to code, right? Like I knew Java. I was not a good Java developer. That's what I paid $200,000 for college to

[4:09] learn was Java. I was not good at it. So, I'm teaching myself Swift. I'm building out this iOS app. Everything's coming down to it. A week later, I deliver the app. So, I built the app. I put the analytics on it. I present it to Grindr. They close the deal. They bought $200,000 worth of our analytics. It was a huge day. It was a huge accomplishment. And on top of that, the kind of the moment that changed everything for me was the CEO of the company I worked for sent out an email to everyone, the entire company saying, "We did it. We closed Grindr. Massive deal. And it was thanks to Alex Finn who

[4:48] built this iOS app out." They didn't know I didn't know how to code Swift, but they still thanked me for it. This changed my entire lens of like not only who I was, but just kind of how human beings worked. I realized at that moment that there's nothing in our lives that are like static, that are like fixed, right? I had this impression in my mind for the for the first 25 years of my life that everything was static, that my intelligence was fixed, that the way I looked was fixed, that how much I weighed was fixed, that everything in my life was kind of fixed, that I got dealt

[5:27] this hand of cards from God, and now I just need to spend the next 100 years figuring out what to do with this hand of cards, right? What I realized at that moment, as I'm reading this email, which is pretty much the first time in my life I got a compliment from anybody, was, "Holy crap, if I put my mind to it, I

[5:46] can change anything in my life. Right? If I take the time to learn something, I can get good at it. My intelligence isn't some fixed number of brain cells in my head. My intelligence is a reflection of the effort I put in to better myself and better the skills I have in the things I know. I really didn't know that up until this moment of time. This was like kind of a brand new

[6:10] concept to me. From that day, I went home from work every single day and did a couple things. One, worked out. I wasn't working out at all up to this point. I was a skinny, shriveled little boy that women wouldn't even look at in the streets. And I still I mean I I still don't think they look at me, but either way, I go I start working out. I start putting on good weight. I also go home and I keep teaching myself new things. I keep teaching I start teaching myself HTML, CSS, JavaScript. I start teaching myself database stuff. There's not a day

[6:39] that hasn't gone by since the age of 25. I'm now 35. I know I look like I'm 13. I'm 35 now that hasn't gone by that I haven't tried to advance my skills 1%. And I truly believe this awakening that I had at 25 years old, this new lens I have on my entire life has given me this supreme confidence that I literally can do and create and change any part of my life that I want. And it's just been this domino effect from 25 years old on

[7:14] where every day I'm learning new things. I'm getting kind of 1% better as cringey cliche as that saying is. 1% better every single day. By the time I went from 25 to 30, I started social media. I started tweeting. All of a sudden my Twitter account starts blowing up. I start building things with AI. All of a sudden my YouTube starts blowing up. I release Creator Buddy. All of a sudden that's

[7:36] making a bunch of money, right? Everything just keeps compounding and getting better since I realized I can control every aspect of my life, that intelligence isn't some fixed metric that God handed to us when we were born, and that we actually can improve that, that charisma, right? I used to be this dorky loser when I was a young kid. Like I was a nerd. I didn't really have any friends. And then I realized like charisma is not fixed. Charisma is not static. I really worked on my speaking skills. I took on public speaking engagements. Now all of a sudden I can turn on a camera and talk to you like I

[8:12] am now. I started a YouTube channel, and now it's 200k subscribers, right? If I try to start a YouTube channel when I was 21 years old, there's not a person in the world who would The only people who would subscribe to it would be people are making fun of me. This lens change that happened when I got that email after I closed that deal was probably the most impactful moment of my entire life. And a big reason why I create content now and I talk to people is I want other people to realize there's no part of your life that is fixed. You can change literally

[8:49] any part of your life. Now, are there people out there that are born with better cards? Yes. Victor Wembanyama, born with a couple better cards when it comes to basketball. Now, if you trained your entire life, are you ever going to be as good as Victor Wembanyama at basketball? Probably not. But most other ways, you can truly put in not even a a tremendous amount of effort. You put in just like a minimal amount of effort every day to get better, you're going to get past 99% of people. Cuz 99% of people have that lens I had when I was younger, which is everything is fixed,

[9:25] nothing can be changed, you're stuck with the intelligence level, the looks level, the charisma level, you're stuck with it. 99% of people are still stuck with that lens. So if you have that lens shift I had when I was 25 and you use this video, you use this moment to change the way you think about things, you change the way you think about your intelligence, your skill set, what you can do, what you can build, what you can accomplish. I promise anyone watching this video right now, if you really wanted to build a successful business when it comes to programming or building with AI, you can do it. If you want to

[10:02] start a successful YouTube channel, even if you have zero followers and subscribers right now, you can do it. You just need to put in that consistent effort and also be honest with yourself on what you need to improve about yourself, what skills you need to have. Maybe you're a boring ass person like I used to be. That's fine. Put work in to become more interesting. Everyone can become more interesting. That's literally like a skill in World of Warcraft that you can grind and get better, right? You just put a little time every day into improving each one of those skills, you will quickly

[10:37] accelerate faster than you can imagine. You just need to make sure you're putting in the time to improve those skills and not using your time to putz around and do nothing and not improve things. Cut out the things in your life that do not matter. If you were a television show and there was an audience watching you, at what points would the audience be going, "Man, this is boring." or "Man, this guy stinks." or he's not pushing his life forward or they'd be booing you, right? Look at your moments to moment as that and you'll quickly realize the things you can be doing to improve yourself. You'll quickly

[11:13] realize, "Oh, I could be using this time to improve my skill sets or my charisma or my intelligence or whatever it is." If you start doing that and you start treating every skill in your life as like a stat tree that you actually can improve, I promise your life is going to change more than you can possibly imagine. It happened to me. And if you're younger than 25 years old and you realize this, that means you're a thousand steps past me. You're already ahead of the game, right? And if you're older than 25, that doesn't matter either. You can do this at 40, 50, 60, 70. There's no part of your life that

[11:47] you at this moment, right now, Saturday 1:00 p.m. right now, that you can't start changing and working on and improving. And you can accomplish literally anything you want. Anything. It's even easier now with AI. With AI right now, you can just go and say, "Hey, how do I learn this? How do I do?" When I was 25, there was no AI. I had to Google it and figure it out manually on my own. Right now, you don't have to figure things out manually. Go to AI and say, "How do I get better at this? What do I do to improve this?" It's never been easier. It's never been easier to

[12:17] improve your life. The takeaway I want you to have is there is literally no aspect of your entire life that is fixed. You can change and improve any part of it. And me realizing that 10 years ago was the greatest thing to ever happen to me, and my life has never been the same. Hope you guys have a great

[12:38] rest of your weekend.

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