To Hell With Mediocrity, You Can Be Excellent

3 life-changing lessons that I learned from my clients around the world.

Kenny Rivaldi
5 min readOct 5, 2022
Picture by Parker Hilton on Unsplash

You might be asking yourself, “Why should I take bits of advice from a twenty-something-year-old on the internet?”. Let’s put down the ego for a while, and see what this young guy has to offer.

The most disadvantage that I have from being a young guy is the lack of experience. That’s why I’m stealing other people’s experiences — you read that right.

Two years ago, I would let my mind wander in my room, asking myself what should I do in life. Now I’m working with life coaches from Luxembourg, an entrepreneur from Netherland, and a movie director from Italy as my clients.

I’m able to taste better coffee and see better views of my life. I feel great, and I feel confident about myself.

So many things happened within just two years of time, I saw myself in the mirror every morning, and I see this beautiful confident guy who is ready to give the world its own poison — reality.

I had stopped dreaming and replaced it with actions. I had stopped caring about other people’s problems and started to work on my own problems — hell I have thousands of them, where to begin?

This new mindset that I hold in my mind, was indeed coming by just talking with my clients. So yes, more than the money I also stealing their thoughts and mindsets. More than just clients, they became friends.

My realization of lacking experience brought me here.

I’ve met amazing people, who could turn ideas into a money machine. People who could be useful to others, and create cool things in the world. Here are the 3 things that I learned from these amazing people.

#1. “Learn fast, adapt fast, and fail fast”.

One of my clients was a former executive chef from Michelin in New York. He was one of my very first clients, and we started on a social media project, I helped him to get build his digital presence.

He and his wife always had this dream to open a pastry shop on one of the famous streets in New York. With his background as a former chef in one of the most exclusives restaurants in the whole universe, he thought it’d be easy.

But being a good worker doesn’t always mean you’ll become a great entrepreneur. It took him god-only-knows sleepless nights to get his business started.

Fast-forward, he had opened his store with hundreds of customers waiting in line on his opening day.

I remember when I was on my first meeting with him, he told me.

“Kenny, I’ll tell you a secret to move high in this world. Learn fast, adapt fast, and fail fast. Because you will always have failure in this world, it’s inevitable, but just get back on your feet as fast as you can”

#2. “You can’t be a successful person by following your average Joe”.

One of my favorite clients and my dearest friend. She had been in the food and beverages business for more than 7 years. Her company had just got a contract with one of the famous supermarkets in the country and will be available nationwide.

We were having texts and started to talk about my dream for the future. “Dream big,” she said, “You can’t be a successful person by following your average Joe” as she followed.

It is true that if we want to level up and become the best version of ourselves in every aspect that we hold, we have to follow and act like those whom we wanted to be.

It has to be crazy enough, it has to be something that makes your friends couldn’t hold their breath to mock you. Because, in the end, there are no crazy things in the long term.

There is a famous saying.

“We overestimate what we can do in one day, and underestimate what we can do in one year”

Always aim for a bigger goal, and always play the long-term game, trust me, it’ll be worth it.

#3. “Kenny, it’s the law of attraction”

One fine Sunday, I saw a post on the internet, there’s someone from Italy had a project to build a movie directory. The contract was so big, it attracts more than 50+ people who submitted their proposals.

“There’s no way I could get this contract,” I told myself. But the more I look at it, the more interesting it has become. “Okay, I need to win this,” I said.

With 50 proposals, there is no way he’ll read every one of them, this guy doesn’t have that much time! So I came up with an idea to attract him, and make him click my proposal.

Instead of creating a formal opening proposal, I went crazy and just typed this.

“Buongiorno principessa!” — Life is Beautiful

Not the common greeting that you receive in the work proposal, but I just wanted to tell you that I love movies as much as you do.”

It was a gamble — but so does life is all about. It turns out that the guy was laughing about my proposal, and got me one of the biggest contracts in my life.

If you’re not an Italian like myself, ‘Buongiorno Principessa’ means “Hello, my darling”.

It turns out that he’s a movie director, so during our weekly meeting I said to him “It’s funny, I never knew at a certain point in my life that I’d be working with a real movie director”, he replied, “Kenny, it’s the law attraction. We attract people that have the same energy as we are”.

So if you want to attract better people in your life. Maybe it’s about time to cut that Doritos and Netlfix, and start focusing on yourself more, and how you can make your life better. What to fix? Ask yourself these questions, and I’m sure you’ll be grateful.

I’ve worked with amazing people in my two years career, and it’d be too long to write it here, maybe I’ll write a book about them — and maybe you have to buy it.

It has been a pleasure writing this article, and I hope you find it interesting as well.

Until next time.

--

--