The Viable Alternative

One of the cornerstones of The Viable Alternative is inspiration. It is to inspire people to find a way out of The Illusion that most people are stuck in and carve their own unique way to achieve and express their own unique potential. I’ve always loved to read stories of people who’ve defied the odds by stepping out of the common path taken by the majority of people and achieving or overcoming what few people expect them to and most people in their situation don’t. It’s for this reason that I decided to start a podcast series featuring people who have achieved out of the box transformations in their lives. Through stories like this, I want others in similar or worse situations to be inspired by stories like this and realize that if transformation in various areas of life was possible for them, then they themselves can achieve the same thing.

I find it interesting though that my attempts to do that have been met with criticism. One of the criticisms I’ve received was that these are “feel good” stories but I have to look at the statistics, and the statistics say that people featured in stories like these are anomalies, and that truly accomplishing what these people have in the face of statistics is like winning the lottery. Another similar criticism I’ve been told was that these stories are “anecdotal,” meaning that they don’t really represent what is really going on.

I would agree that these stories are an anomaly, and that they do defy statistics, but the problem I have with people saying this is that I feel that their adamant insistence sticking to the statistics and shunning these “anecdotal” stories is an a pathetic excuse to just keep on focusing on the problem rather than focus on finding a viable solution other than the tired ones they’ve been using that obviously haven’t been working.

It has often been said by MANY successful people that if you want to become a millionaire, then hang out with millionaires. The implication here is that if you want to get what others have, you have to get around them to learn what they did to get to where they’re at. Obviously, they’re there already, so won’t they typically be doing things that would correspond to them living at the level where they’re living?

Thus, if you find people who are an “anomaly” because they were able to defy statistics, wouldn’t it be best to take a closer look at them to find out WHY in the world they’re an anomaly?

I can almost guarantee that if you were to take all the people who were able to step out of the box and undergo amazing changes in their lives in all the different areas of life from money, to fitness, to attitude, to health, etc, you’d find commonalities in the principles they followed and mindsets that they adopted that enabled them to defy statistics and be an anomaly. Sure they may be some “luck” involved in their success, but not to such an extent that you can attribute that as the ONLY reason why these people were able to separate themselves from the masses. Solely attributing these people’s success to “luck” is an insult to these people and negating the fact that these people saw and did things differently in such a way that enabled them to take advantage of the luck that presented itself.

The fact these anomalies had similar mindsets and followed similar principles makes you think that maybe they aren’t necessarily anomalies per se, the only anomaly is that they knew what most people statistically don’t know, and subsequently were able to follow a path that most people don’t know that enabled them to achieve such a transformation.

So, if you think about the fact that a certain mindset and following certain principles made these amazing transformations that you read about in these stories possible, then they’re not necessarily anecdotal after all. They only seem anecdotal because most people walking around are completely ignorant as to what’s involved in making these stories possible and thus, they continue to be part of the statistics that people love to tout. Not only do they not know how to get out of the box, they don’t even know that there is one.

My intention for sharing these stories involving amazing transformations is to show people that there are other possibilities that exist beyond the in which they’re living. Many people, whether they were in bad marriages/relationships, or grew up poverty, or were struggling to make ends meet said the reason why they went through what they did was because they didn’t think that there was anything better. They thought what they were going through was what everyone else went through, and that the starting point of them being able to escape their situation and improve their lives was because they found out that there was a better way to live.

My sharing of stories and starting my podcast is to help in facilitating a process like this in showing people who many not be aware that there is a better way to live and it is indeed possible to overcome where they may be stuck.

Also, my goal in dong my podcast is to share by talking to these so called anomalies what mindset and insights were involved in getting them out of the place from where they were statistics to a place where they were able to become an anomaly. When I was a skinny kid just graduated from college and joining my first gym and wanted to get big, I didn’t go to all the fat, sloppy people in the gym for advice, I went to the people who had what I wanted to have and looked how I wanted to look to find out how I can get to where they were at.

In the same vein, when I was a 19 year old college kid with no game with the ladies, couldn’t even buy a date, and had a way of looking at the world that was truly eerily similar to Elliot Rodger (that’s another blog post), it was hanging out with friends of mine that were good with girls that got me to break out of my shell.

My personal opinion is that a more constructive way to deal with these grim statistics is to study those anomalies that defied them instead of merely brushing them off as anecdotal. By studying these anecdotes, we can learn more how to build a bridge that would create more anomalies to the point that they’d be so common that they will no longer be considered anomalies because their sheer number would’ve altered the statistics.

Hope this helps.

Ike Love