Why Being Dumb Is My Best Strategy
[Music]
um
um
you know
this whole past week i had this single
question on my mind
and that question is
why should y’all listen to me i mean
what one big idea do i have to share
with you that you haven’t heard already
and so
because i’m not a crypto mega
billionaire sadly
i’m not the most popular youtube blog in
lithuania
fortunately
um i haven’t done any internships at
nasa or studied at harvard
and so i’m not that smart in talking
about you know smart things
but i am pretty good at generating dumb
ideas
and in fact i always think that was my
super strength in life
in fact when i was in 10th grade
i decided that it is more important to
cook secret sandwiches and sell them in
school than studies that would dictate
the rest of my life
and when it came time in 11th grade to
choose the lessons that you’re going to
study for the rest of your life and
you’re going to hone in
i decided to pick the minimal amount of
lessons so that i could focus on
building a business in a garage that
rented out
um
and so i’m not the best role model in
terms of textbooks you know i finished
my math exam by one point if it was one
point below i would fail
um and uh but i am super grateful that
throughout i always have people around
me that would support my dumb ideas it
would support me being the dumb idea
generator that i am you know
like that one time
uh when we dressed our friend with a
fake mustache
and then we sent him off to buy alcohol
when he was 16 years old and the legal
agent at that time was 20.
and we thought this is the dumbest idea
ever this this is never going to work
right
and then we made a video about it
because it worked
uh
so yeah uh dumb idea but it actually
worked
um but the most shocking one of them all
was when i was 16 years old and i
remember this vividly i would go every
morning to school and i would see this
old abandoned volvo just standing there
and one monday evening
i decided why
what would happen if i would actually
buy it you know
um and i mean again the dumbest idea
ever the owner’s probably dead there’s
something with the documents you know
but it was a monday morning and it was
dark outside i decided just to screw it
and so
i knocked on the door
and this old man exits out the door and
he’s standing there and i’m standing
here and we’re just both looking at each
other and turns out it was actually his
car
and so
things escalate from there i get his
phone number wink wink
uh and uh we go there on a saturday so
it was me my brother and my brother’s
friend and we try to start it up
and after a couple of tries we actually
managed to get it running and so i’m all
sleazy and you know i’m ready to ask the
question okay so how much do you want
for this car and he says nothing and i’m
like what do you mean by nothing what
nothing and he says
one
euro yeah i bought this car for one euro
i swear to god that’s a true story now
totally expected totally planned
absolutely knew it
now
what am i trying to tell you with all
these stories um you know these stories
have a single underlying theme in all of
them
uh and
you know now i’m super grateful to be in
a position where i’m at right now i’m 19
i can travel the world you know we’re
building this fabulous agency called
candy with two other fabulous
co-founders we have a great team we have
great products we have great clients um
now to give you some context so what we
do is we actually take ecommerce brands
and then we scale them with paid social
media ads and optimization work and
obviously during this whole time we had
a lot of failures a lot of mistakes but
i think all of those mistakes have
actually set us on the right path to
where we are right now and our goal is
to actually help people by bringing
great products to the market
and obviously during this whole process
i worked my ass off right i mean i never
had any fun never had any weird looks
never had any crazy parties
never
bought inflatable unicorns just to go
down slopes on a tuesday absolutely
never never you know even our website’s
hiring page says that we’re looking for
people to join our illuminati master
plan so you can really tell that we’re
really serious people
um really serious people so anyway
that’s the theme that i want to touch on
in this talk but in order for me to do
that let’s go back in time to a time
when i was nine years old and when i was
nine years old me and my parents
actually traveled to italy
and when we got back home i decided that
i want to make movies and i made my
first ever real movie
are you ready to see it
really yeah okay
let’s see it
yeah so you could really tell i was a
talent
in the making you know almost some cans
film festival material anyway but that
was just my hobby you know
my real business ventures actually
started out when i made my first ever
real digital business
and it was a minecraft server
and so i made ads for my server i built
custom lobbies i programmed games they
even went into the code and like set up
plugins and i even had product market
fit
uh five people came
so anyway i dropped minecraft because it
was it was clearly not working and i
pursued filmmaking instead
and when i was in school i was
freelancing on the side getting some
side gigs earning a bit of money uh
whenever anyone recommend me i mean i’m
still a kid but it was all about to
change because i felt sick i felt sick
for two weeks and it was december 22nd
of 2017 and i marked this date as the
biggest epiphany date ever in my life
ever
and so to give you some context those
prior 14 days to this date actually
consisted of me waking up
then i would watch this show called top
gear and i will go to sleep so i would
wake up
watch top gear and i would go to sleep
i would wake up
watch topger and i would go to sleep
and then i would wake up and watch time
you get the point
so anyway after 14 days of non-stop
entertaining your brain starts to become
numb
and you start asking yourself all these
philosophical questions questions like
what am i doing with my life what’s my
life’s purpose
and the answer to that would probably be
not much right i mean all of us have big
dreams and big ambitions we all want to
live in beautiful houses have beautiful
wives husbands you know dance in front
of sunsets um
but i wasn’t doing doing anything much
about it you know
and uh
you know that lambo isn’t gonna by
itself right
um and so
i had stories that i told myself the
usual stories you know like i need to
finish university i need to graduate i
need to finish school i need to find a
stable job i mean all of this is
completely required right
but then i realized
wait these are kind of the similar
stories i told myself previously and it
didn’t turn out that way
and so i thought hmm
what if
what if i’m just too dumb
i mean obviously i have all the time in
the world if i can watch tv shows all
day right so that means i’m just not
utilizing that time
and when i realized that my dumbness
actually sparked this natural curiosity
and so i became so hungry for knowledge
and i typed into youtube how to become a
millionaire
and now at 19 years old i’m proud to say
it didn’t work i’m still not a
millionaire but these videos did
actually teach me a lot that you have to
read a lot and you have to work a lot
and you have to fail a lot and these
things just kind of crossed over my head
and this was the deal breaker for me
because i realized that the more books i
read the smarter i became
and so if i read like five books five
practical books on like managing
finances i’d be five books more ahead
than the guy who didn’t read them and so
this is just like a no-brainer solution
for me so again this dumbness actually
sparked natural curiosity and i wanted
to learn so much
and so naturally i got a lot of
of ideas after learning
and i asked myself okay so now how do i
apply it all into
practice and
i wrote hundreds of emails to companies
saying that i’ll do work for them for
free because i realized that my value in
the marketplace was low
and i didn’t have any portfolio work to
back me up
and so from these emails from this free
work that i did i got my first clients
and i controlled everything you know i
could actually send emails and get
clients so that was again
a no-brainer for me and from those first
clients we actually landed our first
ever clients and and then we made our
agency in the garage
and we’ve always figured
during this whole process that if we
fail for some reason
then i would hop on a bike and i would
just deliver food and we’d figure it out
and uh you know
one of the you know we had some amazing
projects and a lot of fun doing all of
this but one of the great demo ideas
that we actually had
uh was when we realized that we’re done
at marketing because we’re a young
marketing agency you know all of us are
16 17. so what we did is we invited
industry experts to talk one-on-one and
ask them questions that were relevant to
us
and so we then called it a podcast and
uploaded to youtube and then we got our
first clients from that
so after after some years passed and
then went off and co-founded candy and
and during this growth period that we’re
experiencing right now i learned this
one thing about ads that i want to share
with you about running great ads
now in order for us to scale businesses
we have to test a lot of creatives we
have to see which one of these creatives
on social media actually performs the
best which generates the most profitable
sales uh so let’s say we create like six
different ad creatives for the same
brand for the same offer and then we
launch all of them with the same budget
so let’s say 10 bucks each and after
some time passes we actually can see
measurably and quantifiably which one of
these creatives performs the best
so let’s say it’s creative number four
and then we can actually launch this
creative with bigger budgets because we
know it works
and this process never ends we
constantly have to be innovating and
testing and watching which winners are
winners
and
you know even if we have success and the
beauty of y’all of it all
is that we can see results in real time
and we can see results measurably and
quantifiably and what matters in
business is results right
and this is the kicker
what we found after testing thousands of
creatives is that a lot of times the
dumbest and the weirdest ideas perform
the best
now why why is that
um you know usually in business we think
that the smartest people get the best
results but i don’t think that’s always
the case
because when you think you’re smart you
become complacent when you think you’re
smart you stop innovating because you
know it all you stop creating because
you know what works and you stop
delegating because only you can do the
work the best and so what happens is
that a lot of businesses when they’re
creating ads they’re using these brain
dead approaches that everyone else is
using they’re doing things by the
textbook and what happens is that they
look like everyone else
all of their ads look the same
and then you might ask okay well what if
all of your dumb ideas fail what do you
do then
um and the answer to that is
well that’s great that’s awesome that
means that we’re not smart enough and we
have to understand the customer better
in order to make the ads perform so
being dumb actually enables us to create
ideas that would actually break out
through all the noise
and would be actually interesting to
watch in the feed
and if we fail at that that means we
have an opportunity to improve
and so this is the paradox of being dumb
when you realize that you’re dumb you in
turn become smarter because you want to
bridge that gap you’re never satisfied
because because you always realize that
you’re dumb and i would always prefer to
be the dumb one in the group because you
never have a self-image that you have to
live up to you always ask questions
instead of being the right person
and you don’t care about your appearance
because you’re always dumb you’re the
dumb one already so it’s
really more fun but also it’s way less
stressful
you know i love
watching and reading youtube comments
especially below songs because you can
see how people interpret them
and this question and this comment
really stuck with me and it said that i
treat people like crap because i’m just
so stressed i like music like this it
helps
and this got me thinking
so why are people actually rude
you know if i was a smart ass i
immediately would say because they’re
bad people or because they’re ex or
they’re why or there’s that because i
know the right answer right but because
i realize that i’m kind of dumb
you know i don’t know the right answer
so really why is he like that
and
what i found is that a lot of times
i’m just not smart enough to understand
that person
you know i don’t know what he’s going
through i don’t know whether that person
that just yelled me suffered a divorce
or whatever so
i’m too dumb to realize that
and now let me be completely honest with
you here this talk isn’t about being
dumb or being smart this talk is more
about self-awareness
and i learned this lesson the hard way
uh
actually during one of the most
fundamental events in my childhood
and that was when i was 10 years old
and when i was 10 years old my parents
actually got a divorce it was a nasty
divorce with lawyers and everything
and at that time this 10 year old child
understood that maybe parents don’t have
it all figured out maybe those smiley
faces behind the covers of magazines has
something darker maybe that successful
business isn’t so successful because of
poor financial decisions
and maybe that new bmw x5 or that lambo
was leased out of borrowed money you
know maybe adults just aren’t that smart
you know this might sound weird but i
love watching ants i think they’re
fascinating you know they’re always like
fighting and struggling and running
uh but they’re so little like like you
could squeeze one with a finger and
they’re dead
and there’s life’s purpose is building
this ant nest which is like a two by two
and if we decide to build an industrial
complex there it’s gone completely
forever like bulldozed off the floor and
nobody cares
and all of their like thousands of ant
colonies are dead and nobody bats an eye
and they seem so stuck so brittle their
life seems so meaningless their whole
purpose is just gone
my my greatest lessons in life actually
came when i realized how insignificant i
really am
you know because i don’t know i don’t
know whether my friend lost his mother i
don’t know whether that
that child suffered a divorce i don’t
know whether
you know that friend’s business
had a bankruptcy you know i simply don’t
know
it took me 14 days to realize
of watching tv shows at age 16 to
realize that
i’m just this little tiny speck in the
universe traveling through space and
time
and one day
i too will die
and now whether i want to do something
about it or not it’s completely up to me
and i think that’s the greatest freedom
of all
and if i can i’ll like to do something
about it
but
when we transmute our importance from
ourselves and then then we realize that
our importance is just an illusion
created by our egos
and that really all of us are kind of
like these dumb ants
and
then what happens is we become more
accepted to new ideas we become more
open to give love to receive love we
become
more suggestive to new ideas
and i think we become smarter
so it took me 14 days to realize that
i’m this dumb little ant
and i hope it’ll take you less than that
and maybe you’ll even get lucky and buy
a volvo for one euro thank you