The Less-Traveled Road To Success (Ep. 15)

Sometimes I look back on my “busy” times in college and wonder if they were really all that busy after all.

Vincent Nguyen has held three internships at the same time, while still taking classes full-time. He’s reached out to some of the most popular and successful people in the online entrepreneurship world, and has build relationships with several of them. He’s written for several huge blogs, including LifeHack.org, Marc and Angel Hack Life, and UnCollege.

He also started his own blog on personal development called Self Stairway, which is only around 10 months old but is already getting thousands of visitors and around 30 comments per post. (The first section of my blog creation tutorial shows my stats around that time if you’re curious – in short, they weren’t even close)

But here’s the craziest part: Vincent is only 19.

So, how does a 19-year-old beginning blogger a college student (well, former – but we’ll get to the details about that in the episode) do all of this? Trust me, I was just as curious as you probably are – so I asked him to talk about it on the podcast.

During the half hour I talked to Vincent, I learned that he’s incredibly wise and driven for his age. Moreover, he’s adopted practices and systems of thinking that most people take years to figure out (or never figure out at all).

Just a few of the things I learned from Vincent during our talk:

• His counter-intuitive mindset that makes it easy for him to connect with busy, important people
• How he uses a modified version of Stoicism to lessen the impact of negative events and emotions
• How he totally skipped over traditional application methods and landed internships more easily

Unlike some of my more topical episodes, this one is focused more around a mindset and specific practices that can help you no matter what you’re doing. Therefore, I highly recommend you give it a listen, regardless of your specific goals – it’ll be useful to you, whatever they are.

Some of my favorite articles from Vincent’s blog:

• 48 Variables That Make the Biggest Difference in Your Life
• How to Avoid Burnout: Getting Things Done Efficiently
• What No One Talks About – The Downsides of Success

Things you should do right after listening:

• Start building relationships with people you look up to. If Vincent can do it at 19, so can you. Don’t let self-doubt get in your way.
• Vincent talks about how he used his blog and all the articles he wrote as an extension to his resume. If you want to do the same, a great place to get started is this guide on how to build a successful blog.

At this point, exceptionally cool people should leave a review of the CIG podcast on iTunes 😉