You can’t make everyone happy. Really you can’t make anyone happy.
The sooner you accept this, the sooner you can let go of control, shame, or whatever your parents did to you, and start having sex. Or happiness. Whatever you’re searching for.
I’ll explain.
My guest today, a seven-time New York Times best-selling author, Neil Strauss, has written books on Motley Crue, Marilyn Manson, and pornstar Jenna Jameson before exploring the pickup artist scene.
Sex was all around him.
He was immersed in the seduction community, but Neil couldn’t find love himself. No woman would kiss him. He grew up a loser, and couldn’t get a girlfriend for most of his life.
Now he’s happily married. But between marriage and being a loser, he had a lot of “pleasure fantasy experiences.” Meaning, he learned how to pick up women and started having crazy sex orgies. One after another.
And then he just stopped, and the sex parties ended.
I wanted to know why. What made him decide he couldn’t handle it anymore? But I’ll get back to this.
Neil was so busy having sex, he didn’t have time to get back to his normal life.
Personally, I don’t think I’d like that. I would just constantly be jealous or insecure to be honest.
But back to happiness. Which I don’t even like to talk about really… We put too much pressure on ourselves to be happy. You can’t be happy all the time. And when you are happy, it should be special.
But Neil had a good friend to help him refocus. “You need someone in your life who can reflect yourself back to you so you can see yourself a little bit,” he says.
His producer and close friend, Rick Rubin, said, “Look you got everything you wanted in The Game. Why are you still not happy?”
That’s when Neil started looking for the truth.
In his book, The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships, Neil shows you how he gave up control. The book is about beliefs. ”It’s so hard to recognize your beliefs, let alone change them, because you’re living with yourself.”
But behaviors are easier to change. That’s what he teaches you in this episode. You’ll learn how to feel healthier emotionally.
When your personal life is together, you’re much more capable of achieving bigger things, accumulating wealth and feeling less stressed and worried.
Neil says, “There’s always a reason for what you’re doing, and if you don’t know the reason, then maybe you’re living an unconscious life.”
And if you’re just curious about the sex, then there’s something here for you, too. Listen here.
I’m going to visit the New York Stock Exchange today as a tourist. Last time I was there I felt like killing myself.
Last time I was there was around 2010. I used to live on 15 Broad, right across the street from the Exchange.
I moved there because before that I lived in The Chelsea Hotel. And even though I lived in the Chelsea for most of the 90s, there was a particular reason I had to move out of there.
I was dating a woman in 2008 who was a therapist. One time she came to my “home” which was essentially a run-down room in a 120 year old decrepit hotel (the Chelsea).
The Chelsea had been home to Thomas Wolfe, Dylan Thomas, Ethan Hawke, Sid & Nancy, Madonna, and maybe hundreds of others artists, writers, musicians. I loved living there.
The next day the therapist called me. She had just been to HER therapist. “My therapist says you need roots.”
“But this is my roots. I lived here for years in the 90s and now I live here again. This is my home.”
“It’s a hotel.”
So, because I am insecure and do whatever is told to me by someone I am dating, I moved and found myself living across the street from the New York Stock Exchange.
I always like to live in places that are either tourist attractions or feel, in some way, like a creative choice.
Whenever CNBC, the TV station, would call me about coming on I would say “yes”. I’d crawl out of bed, put on a tie, and go across the street to their booth at the Exchange and make important announcements about the future of the world.
Then I’d go back home and cry myself to sleep.
But one time I decided to take it one step further.
The market was crashing. The S&P had just hit an ominous low of “666” and everyone thought capitalism was dead.
In the morning I got up early and bought a bag of chocolates.
Eating chocolate triggers oxytocin in the brain, the same neurochemical triggered when you have sex. It helps you to take more risks. It makes you feel like king of the world. It makes you feel more bonded with the people around you.
It makes you pick your head up when you are looking at the ground.
I know this because I handed out the chocolates all morning to people walking into the Exchange.
I needed those traders to get back to work and start taking risks. I had looked at my bank account a few days earlier and I thought I would go crazy. I had lost so much money I couldn’t believe that “here I was again”.
Everybody I approached was looking at the ground. Everyone was scared. When I approached them with a chocolate they would take an instinctive step back.
“Here”, I said to each one of them. Like talking to dogs. I don’t mean to insult them. But I was scared also.
I’m about to take full credit for something.
Forget about “The Fed”. Forget about the economy. Blah blah blah. “Economics” is a science of imaginary numbers.
The stock market started to go up that day and the next and the next and the next and is now making all-time highs.
How come? Because traders started buying things that day instead of selling. They started taking risks again.
And I had once again practiced something I was uncomfortable with – walking up to complete strangers and getting them to do something. I like to practice this every day.
Today I’m just going to get a tour of the Exchange even though I’ve been there 100s of times before. But I was always scared there.
Now I’m not. Now I look around and think, I saved the world from this place.
When I started my first business, I was bad at dealing with partners, employees, money, expenses, and negotiation.
There’s no way to start a business without being bad at those things. People who are good, are good because they spent ten years being bad.
Note: You have to love being incompetent in order to be competent.
That’s the true test that you will be able to get better at whatever in life you love strongly enough to get better at.
I had to give myself permission to be incompetent at business, at relationships , at parenting. I’m still mostly incompetent.But maybe a little better.
When I started my first business I had one skill: people liked me. I hate to say that’s a skill but it is.
I was always so ugly as a kid (my personal opinion of myself) that I forced myself to be as likable as possible to overcompensate.
And then, when I had a job interviewing people at three in the morning, I practiced even more. Why?
Because if a couple is arguing at three in the morning on a street corner in a ghetto, how can I go up to them and say, “Hey, what are you guys arguing about?” and make them comfortable with me in three seconds.
You only have three seconds. I know this because if they are not comfortable within three seconds, then an angry, drunk couple at three in the morning in New York City will either spit on you, throw something at you, or try to hit you. All three of those things happened to me.
So I had to get better. I was really shy just walking up to people. But in a three year period I interviewed about 1000 people at 3am and learned to get good.
I can do the BS thing and say, “here are 10 ways to get people to like you in three seconds” but I don’t think there’s a shortcut. I had to find the worst, most uncomfortable situation and get people to like me in that situation over and over and over.
And over.
Later when I started a business, the main skill set I had was treating the CEO of AmericanExpress like an unfriendly prostitute at 3 in the morning and then I would get the deal.
I had other skills. But they didn’t matter. I could program a computer, for instance. But a lot of people who program computers can’t talk to people. I know this because I went to school with all of them.
I can’t think of a shortcut because I am the most scared, shy person in the world in any social situation.
When I was little, my grandfather would pick me up and carry me to another little boy and force me to introduce myself but I would start crying and he would get upset and hit me.
Later, when I was in a new camp, I literally couldn’t open my mouth. All of the other kids thought there was something wrong with me. Eventually,the camp didn’t know what to do with me and my parents just let me stay at home.
And when I started to like girls (and then women), for many years I had to play a role in order to open my mouth. I had to pretend to be something I wasn’t.
My self-esteem was such a difficult burden for me to carry around I had to constantly let others take care of it for me. That’s a bad mistake.
Sooner or later, they can’t carry your self-esteem for you and you fall apart. I try not to do that anymore.
So I knew talking to people at three in the morning would be really hard for me.
And I knew doing sales at a business would be really hard for me.
And I knew that meeting someone I loved and somehow expressing myself to them in an authentic way would be really hard for me.
And I knew that going to a party and making friends, or even talking to my own friends would be really hard for me.
And I knew having a podcast and talking to complete strangers about all the challenges life had for them would be really hard for me.
So I guess that’s the key, and now I guess I can write the bullshit.
A) Identify one thing you love that is really hard for you.
B) Do it
C) Repeat B a lot.
Then you move from incompetent to competent. From competent to mastery. From mastery to virtuosity. [Thanks to my friend, Mark Ford, for breaking it for me into these four categories. It’s very true.]
I have never seen a short cut.
I’ve been writing for 25 years. Almost every day. I few weeks ago someone wrote a comment on one of my posts, “this guys seems like he needs medication but if he took it maybe he wouldn’t write like this.”
I’m glad so many medical professionals take time out of their busy day to give me a diagnosis on social media. I guess that is what the “sharing economy” is all about.
All I know is:
I walk around and sometimes wake myself up. I think: I’m from another planet and this is my first second on Earth. What do I do now? What!?
At that moment I pretend I am bad at everything and I need to look at everyone RIGHT NOW and start figuring things out.
From the point of view of an alien the world is a scary and exciting place. Something to learn.
One of these days I will move from incompetent to competent at doing this thing called life.
Weird Suits, Free Money and the True Story About How I Saved the Economy With Chocolate….oh and how I’m investing now.
Winter’s coming.
OK, not really. Winter’s already here.
But, for the investing world, things are starting to get a lot more chilly and scary. The storm clouds are rolling in.
After seven years of holding short-term interest rates at roughly 0%, with no hikes for nearly a decade, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank has officially begun to tighten up its lending policy again, slowly raising the interest rate it charges banks and other financial institutions to borrow from it.
On the surface, this is great news.
It means that the economy is finally showing signs of strength again, a full six years since the lows of the 2008 financial crisis. And it means that the unprecedented steps that the Fed took to keep us from the brink of financial ruin can finally be rolled back.
We’re on solid ground again. The economy is able to sustain itself. The Fed can get back to normal.
We should all be happy (and we are).
For the markets, though, this news comes with some dark clouds. There are reasons to be worried.
After years of life in a near-zero interest rate environment, no one is really sure what’s going to happen now that rates are rising again. Will the bull market stumble? Will lending dry up? Will the economy slip back into another recession?
(Yes, no and probably, but not for a while.)
And what about all of those investors and money managers out there who only know life with zero interest rates? What will they do with more normal policies from the Fed? Will they freak out?
There’s a lot we don’t know.
But this is happening, no matter what we think or want.
Here’s How I Made Money Last Time There Was Fear & Uncertainty…
Everyone was so scared in 2008. Even experts overlooked this simple strategy that I used to get safe and consistent returns of 12.5%. But this doesn’t just work when others are scared.
In fact, I’ve used this strategy for over 7 years now.
The Fed lends money to banks, and banks lend money to each other based on the benchmark rates that the Fed establishes. When the Fed rate is low, savings rates are low. That’s because banks aren’t paying much in interest on those savings. There are better things to do with your money.
When savings rates are low, people put more money in higher risk stocks instead of savings. Make sense, otherwise their returns will suck. (Sorry banks, but a savings account that pays you less than 1% APR sucks. It’s a waste of time, and everybody knows it. Inflation is 2%. Do the math.)
But when savings rates are high (7%+), people put money in their savings account because it’s safer (it really is).
That’s why people say, “when interest rates go up, stocks go down.”
Oh my god!
So where are we now? The Fed Rate has been near 0% for six years (actually, the target is 0%-0.25%). This is (and has been) ALMOST FREE MONEY for banks … for years. And this has been driving stock market growth ever since 2008.
The Fed’s first step in normalization was to increase the target rate from 0% to 0.25%-0.50%. Not a big move.
They SHOULD raise the rate to 0.5% or even 2%. In that case, nobody will say, “Oh, now I should move out of the stock market and get 2% savings rates.” That isn’t really worth it either.
But we don’t know how this is going to go, or what they’re going to do.
And, by the way, the Fed only raises rates when every indicator suggests that companies are growing at a fast rate. So they have a good reason to do this.
The promise of easy money
If you’ve ever watched TV in the Washington, D.C. metro area you probably know who Matthew Lesko is.
He’s the guy who dresses up in a purple suit with yellow question marks all over it (I’m still not sure why) with a bow tie and films infomercials in front of the U.S. Capitol building about how you can get free money from the Federal government to start a small business, pay your taxes, and a long list of other things.
Whatever you needed money for, the government has a program to help you out. You didn’t really have to do anything to get it, just ask.
He would stand there on the Mall, frantically waving his arms around and yelling about FREE MONEY!, listing off all of the different government programs he had found that regular people could take advantage of.
(I last saw one of his ads around 2005, but he may well still be going with them. I’m not sure. He did used to drive around in a car covered with question marks, though.)
All of this was to sell the books he wrote to help people find and apply for these grants. Now he sells access to an online database of government grant programs.
Anyway, his whole message was about free money. From the government.
What a deal!
And that’s what the Fed has been offering to the market ever since the last recession.
The stock market has been on a tear for the better part of seven years—up more than 170% since the March 2009 bottom—fueled by a lot of deep-pocketed investors as well as that promise I talked about earlier of free money from the government
When interest rates are low, companies can borrow on the cheap to build their businesses or invest in other things. Their debt costs—“cost of capital”—go way down and they’re able to focus on growing their revenues.
It’s a great deal for them, and for investors.
But when this easy money goes away, thing should naturally slow down, if not fall into the red entirely. Cheap money is an addiction. Take away the goods, and things freak out a little bit.
Or maybe not
But history tells a different story.
Let’s look at recent times the Fed raised rates. Through most of the 90s the markets went straight up. In 1999, the Nasdaq 100 went up almost 100% over the next year (and value stocks continued to go higher ever after the crash).
From 2002-2007 the Fed raised rates every chance it could get. The market went constantly up.
And none of that was from such a low base of nearly 0%.
The longest Fed rate-hiking cycle since 1950 was between 1963 and 1969, when the Fed tightened and maintained rates for 69 straight months. The economy fell into a recession in December 1969, 77 months after the Fed started tightening. Stocks dipped only slightly as a result, before recovering by 1971.
But 1980 might be an even better example.
The Fed tightened for just four months that summer, but a recession still hit in mid-1981, just 11 months later.
That’s the quickest fall to date. The stock market didn’t even notice, rising steadily into 1981.
On average, the Fed has tightened its lending policies for 22 months at a time. And the average time from the start of tightening to the next recession is 41 months.
What does all this mean for stocks?
One thing the Fed always says is that investors shouldn’t focus on when it starts raising interest rates but, rather, how aggressively it does it.
Steep hikes tend to lead to more undesirable outcomes (e.g. bear markets, recessions, fear and mayhem in the streets, etc…), while slow, steady increases are more easily absorbed by the market.
We’re on the slow and steady path so far, but who knows what they future will hold.
What does that really mean for investors? What should we expect to see from the various parts of the economy as this unfolds?
The stock market may slow down, but it will still go up.
I once wrote software that basically analyzed what’s happened to the stock market after every rate hike since World War II. The result was that when a rate hike cycle starts, the market doesn’t go up as much as normal, but it DOES still goes up.
The research says that stock prices jump a lot—as much as 14%—heading into a rate hike, flatten out for about 6-8 months after the hike, and then return to normal after a year and a half or so.
So…that’s really a non-issue.
The thing to know is that, as the Fed continues to normalize its interest rate policy, stocks will begin to trade more on their fundamentals and less on the availability of cheap, easy money from the Fed.
This will expose the real winners and losers.
Even in the last cycle, which started in 2004, the market didn’t even peak until November 2007, so that was three years of straight-up return after rates were hiked. Now, there’s more volatility, but who gives a shit? We’re long-term thinkers, so as long as stocks keep going up, that’s a good thing.
We’ll know which businesses are solid and on the right track, and which are just floating on the bubble of easy money to make themselves look like good investments.
The stocks that do well through this tightening process will be set to take off in the next couple of years.
We’re going up from 0% interest rates, which is unprecedented.
That’s never happened before, so it’s not like a quarter of a percent or a half of a percent really makes that big of a difference.
The reason rate hikes affect the stock market is because people start saving money instead of buying stocks. It becomes safer to save money than buying stocks. But in terms of that, a half a percent doesn’t really compete with stock market returns, so it’s sort of a moot point unless we get back to pre-crash interest rates, which the Fed has strongly signaled that they’re not going to do.
The economic reasons why rate hikes affect the stock market do not apply on this rate hike cycle.
Near-zero interest rates are unprecedented, so the rise out of those rates will be unprecedented too.
It means our economy is in good shape.
The only reason you’d ever even want to do a rate hike is because the economy is booming.
We’ve cut unemployment in half in the past few years.
via: qz.com
Earnings are at an all time high.
via qz.com
Home prices have finally rebounded.
via qz.com
When the economy is doing well, it’s a good thing, not a bad thing. So that’s the real fundamental story of why the stock market tends to go up after rate hikes.
And I wouldn’t even call this a real rate hike; we’re just getting back to some kind of normalcy.
It’ll mean a stronger dollar.
As long as people believe that the dollar is strong, then foreign money will flow into the United States.
Usually, foreign money coming into the United States is coming from people lending the money to the United States because rates are up. But in this case, more of the money that will come to the United States is going to end up somewhere. Some of it will end up in bonds, at low interest rates still, and some of it will end up in the stock market.
This will be good for stocks because it will mean more available capital to invest and, over time, higher prices.
Saving rates will go up.
This doesn’t necessarily mean anything for the stock market, but it does mean that more cash will be available for the stock market in the short term. When people put money in a savings account, they don’t necessarily put it in stocks.
Remember those sub-1% savings account rates? Consider them a thing of the past (eventually).
I remember a time years ago—and this is so hazy in my memory that I’m not even sure if it’s true anymore or not—when I was getting 5% in interest on a high-yield savings account.
That’s amazing!
(It’s so amazing that I just looked it up to confirm that it really happened, and it did!)
In an FDIC insured account! Guaranteed yield.
Wow, that was really something.
But that was a long time ago, and most savers—even of the high-yield variety—are lucky these days to break 1%. Banks can get the money they need very cheaply from the Fed, so why would they bother paying out an attractive savings rate to generate more deposits?
No more. Rates on savings accounts will—repeat: will—rise along with the Fed’s rates. Maybe not as high as that 5% (still, amazing), but a lot better than 1%, and that will be great for a lot of everyday people who hold money in savings accounts.
But again we’re confusing this rate hike with other rate hikes. This doesn’t even really count as a rate hike.
If you compare it with the 7% interest rates we had pre-crash, we’re only going to go up to like a half a percent, and I think we’re going to max out at 3%. At least that’s what Janet Yellen has signaled. It’s still much lower than historical rates; 3% would normally be after 20 rate decreases, not after a bunch of rate hikes.
So even at the peak of what we think it’s going to be after this rate hike cycle, we’re going to be in not normal rates. We’re going to still be at historically low rates.
Again, volatility will increase, but the stock market should rise as well.
Companies that outsource will become more profitable.
There’s been this huge trend in the United States with outsourcing, so companies that outsource to cheaper economies, let’s say Third World economies, will make more profits as a result of the rate hike.
That’s been flattening out lately because the dollar has been so weak since the rate decreases, but if the dollar suddenly gets a lot stronger then it will make companies that outsource much more profitable, which is ultimately good for the stock market.
The flip side of that is that companies that sell abroad, which has skewed greatly in the favor of multinationals, those companies won’t do as well with a stronger dollar because foreigners will buy cheaper foreign-made products instead of U.S.-made products. Again, it’s not just because of hiked rates.
A strong dollar isn’t a bad thing, so if you can find companies that outsource more, those stocks will likely do well as rates rise. The companies that outsource but sell domestically are the winners here.
Banks will do better
After a rate hike, at least initially, banks do well.
People look at financial institutions and they’re like, “OK, rates are going up, so they’re going to do better. They’re on the front lines of this.”
And banks are going to be more willing to part with their money with a higher federal rate. Because they’re paying out so much more, there’s less incentive for them to hold on.
For instance, right now there’s zero incentive for them to lend because they pay zero percent in savings accounts, and the Fed almost pays them to do this. So there’s really no incentive for banks to lend money.
But now there’s more incentive for banks to lend, so they’ll start making more money.
This will help not only their stocks, but also the companies that they eventually lend to.
But what about bonds?
Everyone is worried about bonds. Rate hikes ruin bond yields, they say.
True, bonds and interest rates have an inverse relationship. As rates rise, the prices on bonds actually go down, because older bonds that come with lower coupon rates (which are based on interest rates at the time they’re issued) don’t just lose value, they become completely undesirable.
Think about it. If you’re a bond investor, what would you rather do: buy a bond paying 10% today, or a bond that was issued yesterday and pays 5%?
It’s a no-brainer.
Higher rates really do drag down bond prices, and it happens fast. Much quicker than it does with stocks.
But it’s not the end of the world. For the most part, the higher rates will cause the different in yields between longer- and shorter-dated bonds to shrink, flattening the curve between the two and effectively flattening the market.
So it’s another non-issue, especially for long-term investors like us.
Possible concern
The one thing I worry, which is good for the consumer but not good for the stock market, is that I already think there’s deflation in the economy.
Whereas the reason you do a rate hike is to battle inflation. A rate hike encourages deflation. So I think there is a danger that down the road with these rate hikes we could start seeing more deflation.
I don’t know if that’s true, though. I think deflation’s happening naturally because of increases in productivity due to computers and the Internet and cheaper energy and all these other things.
But rate hikes could trigger more deflation. It happens. It’s a risk.
Really the Fed doesn’t need to do anything, we’re looking good. But they’ve signaled so much recently that they’re going to do a rate hike that it had to happen.
This isn’t 2009
In March 2009, the market hit an all-time low.
Fortunately, I ended it and saved the world.
I lived at 40 Broad Street, directly across from the New York Stock Exchange.
On March 9 I went out and bought hundreds of Hershey’s chocolate bars. Chocolate makes people feel like they are in love. And willing to take risks.
All of the traders walking into the exchange were depressed. They were all looking at the ground.
I started to approach them with my chocolates. At first the guards stood up and gripped their guns. Dogs were barking.
But then I started handing out the chocolates. Traders would look up, smile, and take the chocolate. Nobody refused me.
And yes, that day was the bottom of the market. I documented on Twitter before I started handing out and when I was done.
BUT, I can’t take all the credit.
People blame the 2009 crash on the housing crash. This is not true.
Housing prices peaked in 2006. The housing crash was only one small piece of the puzzle in the 2009 crash.
I won’t get into all the details of how banks account for mortgage debt.
But basically, the FASB (financial accounting services board) changed the rules mid-flight on how banks should account for their debt. It was a horrendously strict rule change that forced banks out of business.
When did they make this rule change? Late 2007, at the peak of the market. Then the real crash happened: the banking crisis.
Everyone begged them to change the rules back. When did they change it back? March 2009. Coincidence? The market went straight up.
Stocks are over
But who cares. Stocks aren’t how you make money these days anyway.
Really.
In 2001 and 2002 I lost all my money through bad investing. The same thing happened to me on a couple of occasions after that.
I learned a lot from that experience. The first is that the three most important three words in investing are: “I don’t know.” If someone doesn’t say that to you then they are lying.
The second: ALL OF WALL STREET IS A SCAM. There are zero exceptions.
The CXO Advisory Group polled the predictions of 500 investment strategists and pundits, and “the experts” had a 47% success rate. Good luck if you listen to any of them.
That’s the bad news. But where does that leave average, everyday investors looking to profit in the markets?
You have to be smart.
You have to be creative.
You have to think outside of the stocks-and-bonds-and-mutual funds box and look for the real opportunities in the market. Those sectors that are still well priced and offer potential for big gains. And then you have to hold those investments, for a long, long time.
The Fed raising rates isn’t going to change any of this.
For instance, if you still want a return, you’re still not going to get 2%. You still don’t want your 2% in savings accounts. You need to find an investment that will do better than that, without snagging you in Wall Street’s net of fees and rigged trades and everything else.
But here’s the truth. I used to write about money stuff a lot because I wanted investors, or I wanted to sell books, or get speaking engagements. Now I want none of that.
I HATE WRITING ABOUT FINANCE NOW. Because it’s almost all bullshit and I don’t want to be like the other BS.
But I get worried that in a world of increasing economic uncertainty that more and more people are getting “stuck” and getting lied to and are scared about what is happening.
Most people will think I am giving bad advice. That’s fine. I probably am. I am just trying to avoid the BS and I hope you are also.
Too many people I know are nervous and depressed.
There’s nothing else to know about investing your money. If your bank tries to give you any advice just say, “thanks but I’m OK.” If they want you to put your money in a savings account, even “so you can get the interest,” I would politely decline. There’s a reason they are asking you to do this and I have no idea what it is but it’s probably not good for you.
You won’t get rich investing your money but you can do very well. And if you combine that with investing in yourself, you will get wealthy.
Here’s what’s going to happen, though. Rising interest rates could change things, and they probably will drag some investments down and boost some higher.
The key for us, as long-term value investors, is to keep looking for investment opportunities that are statistically trading for much less than their net asset values. That way, no matter what rates do and no matter how the market reacts, we’ll be on solid ground.
My strategy isn’t based on any one particular interest rate goal (in fact, it will work better than ever with the volatility that comes after any rate hike increases).
You know why I wrote Choose Yourself. But you don’t know how you got here. How did you get here – on my email list, Facebook page, Twitter? Do you want to know why you’re following me? I’m going to tell you.
I’ll tell you my secrets to building an email list, a customer base, an audience. I’m going to tell you how I got you here.
There are specific tactics I use. And you can use them, too, for your business or blog or anything. But I’ll get back to that.
First you need an idea. And there needs to be a demand for that idea.
Next you should be wondering, “Is my idea any good?” Probably not. Or maybe it is. You could be much smarter than me. Most of my ideas don’t lead to anything. But a few have. Like StockPickr, the company I built and sold for millions before destroying myself and wanting to die.
If you’re an idea machine, you already know how to come up with ideas. Scaling an idea is more challenging. Results don’t just appear. You need traction. You need to grow and acquire new customers.
That’s what DuckDuckGo does. It is a search engine and it’s stealing millions of customers from Google. It takes some sort of voodoo mastermind to figure out how to beat Google at their own game. Gabriel challenges the status quo. He’s part of that rare breed of people who believe nothing is impossible.
Now Duck, Duck, Go is pretty huge. But why would anyone want to challenge Google? That’s what I wanted to find out. And I’ll tell you why in a second.
But let’s get back to my secret. In 33 minutes and 22 seconds, you can know my preferred method to scaling your business. Or you can just skip to the 33:22 mark in today’s interview. You might be surprised to find out how I scaled Choose Yourself — how I got traction.
But if you’re not looking for shortcuts, listen to the whole interview. You’ll get an all-inclusive, complete breakdown on how to sell and scale your best ideas.
Gabriel goes over every marketing tactic, nineteen to be exact. If you’re resourceful, you can use them to start building your wealth for the New Year.
And in his book, Gabriel and Justin Mares give you marketing tips from the masters, including Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Reddit founder, Alexis Ohanian, Kayak founder Paul English and more than a dozen others.
Listen today to hear Gabriel breakdown the best tactics for every stage of your business. You’ll also hear why he wasn’t happy with Google and how he started today’s superior search engine, in addition to how you and thousands of other people got here. And how you can start selling and scaling. Ready, set… (duck, duck) go.
When I first wrote “Choose Yourself” I didn’t want to write another BS self-help book that nobody would read.
I was telling a story about something bad that happened to me, about a time I wanted to kill myself because I thought my daughters would benefit more from my life insurance policy than from having a dad.
And then how I came back from that moment. How I decided to focus on my well-being instead of just trying to please everyone else, which never worked out for me.
How focusing on my own well-being made me realize the importance of improving myself so I can help others.
How the concept of “Choose Yourself” is not about entrepreneurship but discovering deep inside what makes you happy physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.
That these things allowed me to become the sort of person I always wanted to be and that, in turn allowed me to help others in such a way that it was also more aligned with my own success.
Along the way I became an entrepreneur many times. I wrote books. I gave talks. It was fun for me and it was growth for me instead of just being something I did for a paycheck or so I can get the applause of others.
When I Choose Myself in the way I described in my books, it wasn’t like I was listening to a list of “how to be a better person” written by someone who had been through nothing. I was doing the things that made me happy. The things I was passionate about. And discovering through trial and error what those things are.
I discovered that the best way for me to help ships on a foggy night is not to swim out and find each ship and drag them to shore but to simply clean the windows inside so that the beacon shows the path to all of the ships at the same time.
I gave away Choose Yourself for free. But people still had to pay for it. Then show me the proof. Then I would return whatever they spent.
Why this way? Why not just send it out for free?
I know people don’t always value what they get for free. So I wanted people to pay for it. Then I know most books don’t get read. So I asked for some way for people to prove to me that they read it.
Two years later, Choose Yourself has sold over 350,000 copies and is still in the top rankings for business and motivational books. It’s gotten over 2000 reviews with an average rating of 4.5 stars.
I’m more proud of it than anything I have ever done.
So today I wanted to figure out how to do something similar. How to get people a special version of my books.
Here is what I came up with.
I just bought 7000 copies of “Choose Yourself” as well as 7,000 hardcover versions of the best selling follow up “Choose Yourself Guide To Wealth”. It was a special order because Amazon doesn’t even sell the hardcover.
I was afraid I was going to lose my biggest client. And my job. So I let him yell at me repeatedly.
I met a friend of mine. She said, “My grandma told me there are only two types of decisions: Decisions made out of fear and decisions made out of growth.”
For instance, do you stay in your job because you are afraid you won’t get another job? Or do you stay in your job because you are excited about the growth potential there?
Do you stay in a relationship because you are afraid you won’t meet someone else, or you are afraid it will be bad for your kids, or you are afraid of hurting someone else?
Or do you stay in a relationship because you are truly grateful the other person is in your life (and hopefully, vice versa).
I thought about it. I picked all of major decisions in my life.
– Moving to NYC for HBO
– Leaving HBO to start a company
– Getting married the first time. The second time.
– Getting divorced. Having kids.
– Moving 80 miles out of NYC after losing home and money.
– Trying to sell a company before it had fully bloomed.
– Not taking business trips because I was nervous about what would happen if I left home.
And on and on. Grandma was right!
Every decision I have made has either been fear or growth.
Not just big decisions but even the smallest decisions.
And the fear-based decisions never worked out for me. When I made a fear based decision it was always because I was giving power to someone else.
I’d make a fear-based decision out of insecurity. Out of a feeling of scarcity. Out of giving too much power to others so they would control my life.
The growth-based decisions all resulted in miracles I could not have imagined.
With growth-based decisions you feel it in your body: an expansion of your chest, ideas in your mind, a feeling of competence increasing. A feeling of freedom expanding.
A growth-based decision becomes the story of your life later. A fear-based decision turns into regret.
In fear-based decisions, you feel it in your head – I better do this…OR ELSE. I listened to one of my first bosses yell at me so many times because I was afraid he would fire me if I argued.
I didn’t want to get fired because I had a company on the side and HBO (my job at the time) was the biggest client. I had no confidence in my company. So fear of losing a client prevented me from devoting all of my time to the real growth in my life
One time I was scared I was going to go broke again.
So I took a job. I tried to convince myself that it was a growth decision. Maybe I would expand at the job and create opportunities.
But the first day at the job I fell straight to the ground for no reason. Everyone laughed and said, “Are you ok?” and I got up because I was ashamed and embarrassed at all the people looking at me.
I started to limp because I hurt my leg so badly.
The second day at the job, the boss of the company told me, “Trust me on your salary. We’ll take care of you.”
And I was afraid to argue. He was the boss.
The third day at the job, I got up and walked out. I didn’t clean out my office. I left my jacket there. I took the elevator down 40 stories. I walked out into the sun.
And I never went back. They called repeatedly. Even a year later the main guy was still calling. Is still calling.
My life is better than ever. I never looked back. I left the building and walked to Grand Central. I took the train 80 miles. I watched the leaves turning from green to red along the way across the Hudson River.
I came to my house and walked the one block to the river and breathed in the air not knowing how, what, why. Not thinking about money for the first time in months.
And then I noticed. I wasn’t limping. My leg didn’t hurt.
Not everything went good for me after that decision. Some pretty awful things happened.
My heart tore open more than once. My fears about money came back again and again.
But it was a growth decision. And bit by bit, the growth decisions added up. And bit by bit, I grew to love my life more than I ever had.
I was having breakfast with one of the biggest hedge fund managers. He was telling me his latest ideas. Then he stopped chewing and said, “you know what. You’re a remora.”
I didn’t know what that was. The food was practically spitting in my face. “A remora is a fish that is a blood-sucking leech”.
But he added, “But I mean it in a good way. Some guys just follow me into stocks, don’t give me credit, and get out as soon as possible.”
I was quiet then. Because, to be frank, it’s exactly what I plan to do.
I get calls from startups every day asking me to invest money in their company.
Most of the time I don’t invest. I have a huge checklist about who I invest in. And it’s eerie: when I don’t check one of the boxes, I lose money. When I follow the checklist, I make money.
Like the time I invested in Optimal, which was acquired by Brand Networks a year later (after they also asked me to be on their board of directors).
But the average investor isn’t able to be an angel investor, or privately invest in a company before it goes public. But that’s ok. The private world of investing is flooded.
It’s the public companies now that I’m interested in. This is where the opportunity is. One of the biggest hedge fund managers in the world just announced he is going back fully into stocks. “This is the time.”
When I am investing, I like to look at what I am going to call remora companies.
These are companies that leech onto larger, household names—like Apple, Google, and GE. And, on top of it: I’m going to follow the super-hedge fund managers that are also quietly going into these smaller remora-like companies.
As these large companies (like Apple) become more popular and investors flood to invest in them, forcing the stock price up, the smaller remora companies get to enjoy the ride up as well. But until now, it’s only the big funds that have benefited.
You see, when large companies produce their products, they don’t create all of the parts that go into them. They outsource many of the pieces to other, often smaller companies.
Apple, for example, doesn’t produce the glass it uses in its iPhones; it outsources that part to another company. But that company’s earnings might go up 10x faster than Apple’s because they are where the real margins are at.
Investors are often slow to react to these remora companies, giving us an advantage for investing.
Let’s take a look at a couple of past examples:
Semiconductor providers
Skyworks Solutions (SWKS) is a company that builds semiconductors for Apple, Samsung, and other major phone makers.
Every time somebody purchases an iPhone (over 34,000 are sold an hour), SWKS profits.
If you had invested in this remora company when Apple announced they would be supplying chips for the iPhone 6, you would be up over 75% on your original investment.
If you had invested in Apple during that same time, you would only have gains of a little over 25%.
Ambarella (AMBA) is another stock that builds semiconductors. They supply them to companies like GoPro and Amazon (for their drones).
Since I recommended them back in August of 2014, their stock price has increased by over 200%.
Network Security
In late 2013 and early 2014, Target and Home Depot were hacked and hundreds of thousands of their customers’ credit card information was stolen.
Just in the last month, the “dating” website Ashley Madison was hacked, along with over 30 million of its customers’ personal and credit card information.
These hacks force every single public company to up their network security in order to keep good faith with their customers. These companies don’t build this security in-house though—they outsource it to professional network security providers.
This is where we find our next remora companies.
After the security breaches in Target and Home Depot, if you had invested in Palo Alto Networks, you would be up over 230%.
Another remora company that provides network security is Fortinet, which has risen more than 140% since the data breaches in late 2013.
You’ll often hear financial analysts telling you not to invest where everyone else is.
Even Warren Buffett said, “You can’t buy what is popular and do well.”
But, you can do well if you look closer.
Find what is popular and look towards the fringes. Look for these remora companies that will profit from the popularity of their larger buyers and you can be successful.
Bob, I’m sorry you think I’m a remora. But I’m glad you still pick up my phone calls.
What is one of the only investment strategies I recommend? Learn here.
I know a miracle worker. He’s an entrepreneur, marketing man, and film producer who gets companies like HP to say, “yes” to him.
You can learn a lot from him. I did.
One thing I learned is there’s more to choosing yourself. There’s a part two.
Part one is when you see things in your life that are absurd, decide you’re not going to stand for it anymore and quit. You decide to become physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually healthy. That’s choosing yourself.
Part two is when you see what’s wrong with the world and say, “That’s absurd. Let’s change that. Let’s hack that. Let’s modify that so it’s affordable.” That’s what Mick Ebeling does– founder of the Not Impossible Labs and the Not Impossible Foundation. Through these two entities, Mick figured out how build whatever he wants, and solve impossible problems.
Mick sees the world through his own lens. It’s the reason he’s successful.
He creates technology that solves absurd problems like having your arms blown off. No prosthetics, no solution. Or being paralyzed and unable to speak to your family ever again.
The technology to fix these problems does exist. But when you can’t afford it, you have an even bigger problem.
This is why Mick hacks. He disrupts the system, doesn’t wait for permission, and believes in impossible things. You can, too, but more on that later.
Let me tell you how he got started. Mick was just reading the paper. He read that thousands of people in the country of Sudan don’t have arms because of war injuries. And they just live with it. They can’t afford prosthetics, so they hand-feed each other, dress each other, and help each other with all the other daily necessities.
Mick decided to do something. He flew to Sudan with no plan and figured out how to create prosthetic arms using a 3D printer. This is someone with no experience in medicine or engineering. He’s just a guy with a big heart who decided nothing is impossible.
On the show, you’ll hear how he 3D printed arms for a boy named Daniel, and empowered an entire country to do this for thousands of other people missing limbs.
I wanted to know how it’s done. How can people quit their jobs and do things that really matter? Mick tells you how on the podcast.
You’ll also learn how to think like today’s most successful innovators. “We’re not trying to create the next $700 pill,” Mick says, “We’re trying to create something that totally disrupts a particular fill-in-the-blank, maybe it’s a way of communication, a way of transportation.” This is the winning mentality today: Uber, Airbnb, Not Impossible Labs.
By making technology accessible, he’s solving global problems. “Help one, help many,” that’s Not Impossible Labs’ mission.
Then Mick’s team tells the story through videos that go viral and infect everyone with this bug- the not impossible bug.
Besides a miracle worker, Mick’s a story teller. “Each of our projects tells the story of a single individual. By helping one person, how many others can we help?”
Stories bridge the gap between helping just one person and helping many. Mick’s not just choosing himself… He’s choosing the world.
“Once you start to have the awareness of something you need, you start to see it.”
So how can you get the big idea, do the impossible, and become beautifully successful
“First of all, you can just start to believe in this mentality that nothing is impossible,” Mick says.
Try it.
Second, look for absurdities. They’re everywhere – when you read or watch TV. When something bothers you, think of solutions. Be an idea machine.
Third, disrupt. Don’t wait for big government or big business to give you permission. Forget bureaucracy.
Disruption starts now. We’re hacking the system.
Listen to today’s episode. You’ll hear Mick’s miracle stories, find out where he gets his big ideas and his money, and how you too can do impossible things.
I’m Really grateful LinkedIn included me on their “Top Voices” list for 2015.
This year, both at the beginning and the end, such incredibly bad things happened to me that I thought I would get swallowed up forever.
I didn’t.
Every year of my life, really bad things have happened. That’s called “living on this planet”.
Another thing is that no matter what goals we plan, the goals never happen. What does happen could not have been predicted.
By living a good life, you can react better to the explosions in the life around you. And you can even lessen them. But they still happen because it’s out of your control.
This year started with me losing millions on a single day. Two books and a company were launched in the middle. And the end looks like its closing with some personal catastrophes.
But each year I try to react better to ride these ups and downs. To forgive myself for any chaos in my life.
For giving myself permission to create and love in the tiny needle in haystack that represents the speck of us on this planet.
Recognizing that:
– Life is unpredictable and often painful
– Paying attention to the things that try to cause us to over-react
– Replacing that over-reaction with gratitude, with love and kindness.
– And realizing that always returning to our own health, creativity, friendships, gratitude is always a way to survive even better to the next day
This sounds corny or preachy. I don’t care. It’s what I try to do. And sometimes I fail. And sometimes it works.
All other preachy BS does not work for me.
But each day is a practice to get better at the above. I hope I never forget that.
I hope I never again get swallowed up in the rabbit hole of “why is this happening to me?” when there are rarely any answers.
But I will. I will again and again get swallowed up. And then, like anyone, I hope I can use the above to climb back out.
The past two months, having good friends has saved me. I was always afraid to be a burden on my friends. I would give but be ashamed to take.
These past months I took. And took and took.
What I realized was how grateful my friends were to help.
This is more important than business or career or passions or anything.
Love and kindness between you and your friends turns out, in many cultures of above-average centenarians, to be the key to high quality of life (well-being and health) in 100+ age old people.
Almost nothing else rates on the scale. Not diet. Not money. Not even family.
Every day I practice thinking all day long what I am grateful for. Today I am grateful to my friends at LinkedIn. And all of the other people that intersected even briefly with my life these past two months.
I feel like my life is not made up of my success and failures. But all of the intersections that occur in between these events.
Those are the things I most remember later. Those are the things I hope I never forget. Those are the things that saved my life.
My dad was a miserable failure. Really the worst kind of failure there is. He tried, he failed, he gave up.
He lost in everything. HIs first marriage blew up in his face when she cheated on him and the cops had to be called when he was doing something horribly embarrassing to himself.
I don’t know what it was.
I only know it was so bad that cops were called and that the cop that showed up was his elementary school bully and he said, “Seymour, is that you?” or something equally embarrassing.
Then he tried to be an ice cream man and, of all things, the “mafia” decided they owned the monopoly on the ice cream on that corner.
Then he worked in the NY Post Office. Then he got hired to do computer stuff and because he played chess and had no other skills at all, some company hired him.
Finally he started his own company and 20 years later it went bankrupt and he spent the rest of his life depressed and listening to music until he had a stroke and died.
Ok.
But…he told me two things:
A) Always have integrity.
B) Always do the work nobody else wants to do.
As far as I can tell, he always lived his life that way. I can’t say, “that was the secret of his success” because he had none. By almost every definition he was a failure.
But I don’t care. I loved him and I miss him.
And I know what works for him works for me.
Advice is ultimately autobiography. Don’t listen to people where the advice is coming from a pedestal. That’s how snake oil is created.
Nobody is on a pedestal. We all wake up scared and lonely and try to fill the holes in our lives with competence, with relationships, with freedom.
And then we sleep again and as we wake up the loneliness and fear swoops down again and takes over. At least for me. Every day I have to start from scratch.
So I do.
I can’t give my daughters advice other than what I’ve learned. And most of the time, I hope they don’t listen to me. We each have to find our story.
But one day when I am dead from a stroke and they are missing me so badly they want to pay a zillion dollars to pick up phone and do anything to hear my voice just one last time, I hope they look back on these nine things because this is what I will tell them then.
Heck, this is what I tell myself every single morning. I never miss a morning where I don’t think about these things.
How do I know my kids will miss me? I don’t. Don’t predict the future or you set yourself up for disappointment.
Perhaps that’s the first thing I will tell them. And then they will one day die and so will their children.
It was torture. I went to see my daughter sing yesterday.
If a psychic said to me: 20 years from now you are going to drive 70 miles to see a bunch of little girls sing Christmas Carols for two hours, I would’ve fired you as my psychic.
Anyway.
I cried.
They are almost grown up. Maybe another few years. People say my daughters will need me again in their 20s. Who knows?
I gave Mollie a box of chocolates afterwards and hugged her for six seconds. A six second hug is what it takes to get all the oxytocin going.
My parents never hugged me for six seconds. So I always try to hug my kids for at least six seconds.
People ask all the time, “What is success?” They ask it on message boards. In conferences, on podcasts, on social media. They write blogs about it.
It’s as much a mystery as “dark matter”. We know it exists in the universe but we don’t know what it is.
At least, I don’t know what it is. Maybe some people do. The alien next door who is pretending to be human. Don’t think I don’t know all about you Mister X! And when the mothership comes I am going to follow you to the escape pod!
Many people think success is about money. I get it. Money disguises itself as a pathway to freedom. But it’s just a byproduct of real success.
The first time I was broke and then made a lot of money, all I could think about was how to make more money. I became obsessed.
But then I was miserable. More miserable than I had ever been. I wanted to kill myself for awhile. I wanted to freeze my brain until nobody needed money anymore.
For the past several months I’ve lived out of one bag. I’ve moved from place to place. Just to do it. Just to see how little I could live on.
Unfortunately now my clothes smell. Success would be cleaning my clothes today.
And I always want success in not wanting so much success. To not want anything other than to be kind to other people.
But I am insecure and want success for selfish reasons.
Attached is a chart of the different kinds of success.
It’s important for me now to remember that all of these are equal.
These are the boxes I try to check every day. Can I improve 1% each day in every area of success.
1% a day compounds. “Money compounding” is one thing. “Life compounding” is everything.
When Mollie was born I was very unhappy. She was a bit on the ugly side. That’s ok. She’s beautiful now.
And also I was afraid I would not love her as much as I loved her sister. But I do.
And also I was afraid I would not be able to afford her. Babies are expensive. But now she’s going to be an adult soon.
So many anxieties I had. So many worries that disappeared once the future dissolved into the present.
Now I can hug her and tell her I was proud of her. I can watch her smile when I say that. Today was a success. .
Daniel was tending sheep in Sudan when a bomb blew both his arms off.
When he heard the bombs in the distance he had hidden behind a tree but wrapped his arms around the tree. A bomb went off near the tree and his body was safe.
But the arms he had wrapped around the tree blew off. When he came to, he said he wished he were dead so he would not be a burden on his family. He was 12 years old.
I was ashamed to be talking to Mick Ebeling.
Here’s why: when I hear the story above about Daniel I think: that’s really sad. I think: I wish that hadn’t happened to him. I think: I’m glad it didn’t happen to me or anyone I know.
Mick thinks differently. Mick flew over to the Sudan without any knowledge of arms or war or prosthetics. He got together a bunch of experts on 3D printing, prosthetics, mechanics.
He 3D printed arms for Daniel in a way that had never been done before, cheaper than prosthetics had ever been made before.
Daniel now has two prosthetic arms. He can feed himself. He can help his family again.
I spoke with Mick yesterday. I told him I was ashamed to be talking to him because I would not have thought that way.
He laughed and told me his theories on helping people. His company, “Not Impossible” ignores high stakes situations where people say “It’s impossible” and figures out how to make the situations possible.
Here’s how:
A) HELP ONE. HELP MANY.
He used his experience with Daniel to come up with ideas on prosthetics that could help many people. He helped “Tempt”, a graffiti artist, use a machine Mick developed to create art again and communicate with people again.
Then he uses the experiences of helping one to create products that can help many.
B) BRING RIDICULOUS TO ACCESSIBLE
It was ridiculous to get cheap prosthetics to Daniel in the Sudan without any experience. And yet, just a little brainstorming with the right experts, gave Daniel arms. And now the same technology is accessible to anyone.
C) USE STORY
Intel sponsored Mick’s efforts. He went to Intel and told the story of Daniel and told the story of how he was already helping Daniel, with or without Intel, and Intel agreed to sponsor the rest of the journey.
For 5000 years or longer, humanity has driven forward with story-telling. Too many people forget that but the only way to really communicate effectively is through story.
D) EVERYONE HAS PERMISSION
Nobody gave Mick permission to help Daniel. He just did it. Nobody gave him permission to gather a bunch of experts to his house to help figure out how to create prosthetics that everyone said were impossible. He just did it.
Too often we apply for grants. Or we apply to a company. Or we apply to the government. And then we wait. And we wait. And we want that one special person to choose us.
I hate to use my own cliche, but the benefits of choosing yourself is that other people’s lives are saved while you avoid waiting for someone else to choose you.
E) “We’re already doing this”.
Mick didn’t wait to begin. He didn’t wait for funding. He didn’t wait to figure it all out in advance before he started.
As soon as he committed to helping Daniel he immediately:
– found the experts he needed to talk to (free)
– got them all talking (mostly free)
– started brainstorming (free)
– got materials for one set of arms to be 3D printed (mostly free)
– began experimenting (mostly free)
Then he went to intel and others and said, “We’re already doing this. Are you in?”
Too many people say, “I have an idea. Now I need funding.”
Don’t do that anymore. Stop it!
Say instead, “I’m already doing this. Here’s the ten or twenty things I’ve done so far. Here’s the results. Are you in?”
F) CHANGE THE DEFINITION OF FAILURE
People think: go go go go go fail stop.
Mick redefined failure.
“We had many failures while trying to figure this out. But each failure was simply a way to show us what we should do what we could do better. Every time we failed we knew at least one thing we could do better.”
G) OPEN SOURCE YOUR SUCCESS
For everything Mick did, even though his company is for profit, he gave away for free all of the knowledge he learned.
Then other people companies could build better prosthetics, or tools for deaf people, or tools to help people with ALS communicate.
Then Mick would be able to incorporate those new technologies back into his products.
The end result: more people helped with better and better products that were being made cheaper and cheaper.
Too many people try to hold onto ideas saying, “it’s mine!”.
But ideas, and the world, get stronger when they are allowed to share and mate and grow children and the idea babies make the world better.
H) LOOK FOR THE ‘ADJACENT POSSIBLE’
When Mick started his research, he found someone who had made a mechanical hand. Not the perfect prosthetic hand. But a cheap hand that could grasp items and be functional.
He started with that and then began brainstorming with the inventor and with others about what else is possible – given that a simple mechanical hand was possible.
Never start with a blank page. Find all the things closest to what you want to be possible and use those ideas as starting points to find the next generation of possible.
I) START SMALL
Mick didn’t help a billion people have better prosthetics. He helped one person.
“If everyone would just help ONE person today then the world will be a better place tomorrow.”
In other words, if everyone reading this article would help one person today, the world will be a better place.
Always think at the end of each day, “who did I help today?”
J) STAND NEXT TO THE SMARTEST PEOPLE
Mick didn’t know anything about prosthetics. But he knew that if he brought together the man who made the cheap, mechanical hand, with experts in 3D printing, with experts in prosthetics, then something good could happen.
Even if you aren’t an expert, give yourself permission to be a producer. Produce!
After the podcast, Mick and I took a walk and I told him stuff.
“How are you dealing with that?” he asked me.
I said, “Every day I follow my own advice.
“I try to be healthy. I spend time with friends. I’m creative every day. And I look at the most difficult part of my situation every day and find things to be grateful for.
“This has been amazing for me to see it work in action for myself. I bounce back stronger every day and I feel like life is amazing.”
“You should write about that,” he said.
I will. I said, “Selfishly, I help one (me), to help many. ”
He laughed at that. And we shook hands and then I went one direction and he went to save the world.
You can have power, but it comes with a lot of bullshit. When Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben said, “With great power comes great responsibility,” he was trying to say that power comes with a lot of BS.
It’s a good warning. We want all of the power and none of the bullshit. And then you hear everyone complaining.
It’s hard to be a good guy.
My guest today, Jane Swift, is the youngest female governor in U.S. history turned CEO of Middlebury Interactive Languages. She’s a superhero. During her campaign, she was pregnant with twins. She also already had a daughter.
But that didn’t stop her. She gives and expects nothing in return. That’s what I do.
Sometimes, you might feel like you either have energy and no resources, or resources and no energy. Jane created both. And in today’s podcast, she’ll teach you how.
I asked her what inspired her. “It’s really around the passionate belief that I could make things better,” she tells me. Her superpowers are her passion mixed with energy and focus.
She uses them to help others.
As governor, Jane was passionate about education. She says all children have gifts. And this is true for adults, too. Maybe someone failed you – the school system, or your parents.
And now you’re grown up. You’re at a point in your life where you feel you should know what you’re doing with your finances, your career, your family.
Maybe you’re feeling lost now.
If no one patted your back, told you you’re special, and helped you figure out what you’re good at, you may feel like someone is sitting on your chest. You are lying there with weight, pressure, a heaviness inside you that says, “I’m stuck here.”
But it’s not too late to find out what you’re good at.
Jane’s goal was, and still is, to give kids opportunities in life. Don’t you wish someone wanted the same for you now? I do.
Part of that is surrounding yourself with the right people. Who are the right people? Jane says, “Sometimes, depending on the issue, the right people around the table are folks who you know well and trust a great deal.”
Plainly, if you pick the wrong people, you’ll be stressed and you’ll waste energy. How you spend your energy is your choice. And that’s powerful.
The other resource we crave is money. Campaigning, Jane didn’t have that either. She hustled.
“I tend to outwork people,” she says. “As a working mother, I’ve learned to work hard and smart.” She raised $60,000 for her campaign.
Some people wrote checks to support her. Others baked brownies, and she had bake sales… That’s old school hustling.
Sometimes, to make things happen, you have to go back to the basics. You don’t become a superhero by trying to be a superhero. You become a superhero by overcoming whatever’s in your way. “I had to be really crisp and really convincing, and really think through my position on a number of issues to convince people that a 25 year old woman, a couple of years out of college, would be a better state senator than a 7 term incumbent,” she says.
Start small. Try to improve 1% a day. The people who baked brownies helped at least 1%.
That’s how you gain momentum. And that’s what you’ll learn in today’s episode. You’ll learn how to hustle, earn power, and, if you’re lucky, become a superhero, too.
The government has rules.
Schools have rules.
Society has rules.
Parents and then family have rules.
Relationships have rules.
I tried to follow all the rules. I was a good boy.
Sometimes it’s hard to keep track. The rule book is too big.
And then I got the phone calls. Why didn’t you follow that rule?
I don’t know. It didn’t make me feel good.
Well, if the only thing that is important to you is feeling good you would just kill and steal and lie to people all the time.
Why would any of that make me feel good?
Well, what does make you feel good?
Talking to you on the phone makes me feel good.
Aside from that.
Walking outside and looking at people. Feeling the last remnants of sun on my cheek before the winter comes.
Being kind to someone when they least expect it. Surprise makes me feel good.
Knowing that every now and then I can still make my teenage children laugh.
I gave a talk a few months ago and I heard my youngest laugh. That is the best feeling I’ve ever had. She laughed right after I said something that felt like it was breaking the rules (I forget the statement: I was describing either lying or stealing or saying something about my mom).
Seeing the smile of a woman up close after a first kiss. That makes me feel good.
Being with friends who love me and I love. Anybody else…and I don’t feel so good. I feel sick.
Feeling like I’m improving at something I love. Because that grounds me and let’s me enjoy the company of others with the same passions.
Feeling like I need less than I thought I needed. Because needing less allows me to float into the sky without feeling scared, without feeling burdened to the ground.
Feeling always like I’m exploring.
Writing something really really awful. Because who gives a fuck.
Like this.
—-
So many times I hear from people who say: I have to follow the career (or marry the person), my parents want.
Or someone says: I have to go to college or nobody will give me a job.
Or someone tells me: you should be around these people. They can help you succeed. (But I don’t like them so what should I do?).
Or someone says: I want to have ten million dollars to relax. And own a big home so I can feel roots.
Or someone says: You have to vote in order to have your voice heard in society.
Or someone says: I feel stuck because I can’t quit my job because I have all of my family responsibilities.
I built a prison for myself also. It had triple locks. It had lots of guards. It had solitary confinement when I was bad. I didn’t much like my fellow prisoners but they were in here with me so I figured I would be with them.
I felt ashamed when I broke the rules of the prison. When I went broke. When I didn’t take the career I was supposed to.
When I didn’t return the calls or network with the right people or when I quit without warning the job I didn’t like or lost the homes I could no longer pay for.
Or when I was thrown out of school or when I didn’t pay the IRS or when I didn’t love enough the people I was supposed to love. Or the things I have done when I was so scared about money I thought I would go broke and die.
Or when I tried to live in a homeless shelter just to meet women or when I demanded love back from the women who didn’t love me or when I cried because I was scared that my life would disappear and nothing would be left behind.
This was solitary confinement. And it was lonely and I was afraid.
The taxi driver asked what they all do, “How’s your day”.
I gave the usual response.
But then I realized I was about to enter into a long-term relationship with this man. We were going to travel 84 blocks together.
It’s bad to begin a relationship with a lie. So I told him the truth about how my day was going so far.
“Ugh,” he said. “ok!”
“You asked,” I said.
He thought for a second. Then he spoke in a thick Jamaican accent.
“That’s nothing at all,” he said. “I’m going to tell you about my worst day ever.”
This was one of those crucial decision points. I had my phone all set to Dial. I had calls to make. I always try to get business done in long cab rides.
The way I decide this type of fork in the road is by using Alzheimer’s Disease.
When I come down with eventual Alzheimers am I more likely to remember one of the phone calls I was about to make. Or would I remember his story.
I put the phone down.
Ok, tell me.
He starts:
My niece tell me she saw my wife sitting in a car in the street with another guy.
I tell her, don’t you ever f-ing tell me about my wife again. I don’t want her telling me that, see, because now it puts the thought in my head.
But I kept noticing things about my wife. So my brother gives me this app for the phone. I put it on my wife’s phone. Then I tell her I’m going over my brother’s house.
She gets a phone call and I listen.
“Wait a second,” I said. “There’s an app that lets you listen in on phone calls.”
“Let me tell you something,” he said, “there’s an app for anything.”
I got thrown out of graduate school for computer science so I like when cab drivers teach me something new about computers.
He continues:
Anyway.
I listen in and this guy calls her. Hey baby, meet me around the corner on Ocean Ave.
So I go over there. I see this car. Then I see her walking up. I drive right up and block the car from moving and I get up.
Baby, she says, what-what are you doing here?
Don’t give me that, I say.
This my family, she say.
This your family? I know your whole family. This ain’t your family.
Now I turn to the guy. I put my hand in my vest pocket. You know, like I have a gun.
Now I’m talking to him, see. So I say, what are you doing with my wife?
The cab driver looked at me in the rear view mirror. We had already gone about 30 blocks. i was afraid the drop-off was going to happen before he finished his story.
What did he do?
He ran away even though the car was still running. He really thought I had a gun.
And I grabbed my wife by the neck. I said to her, I ain’t going to do anything to you with all of these people around.
I took her home. And when I was done, there was blood coming out of her ears. Blood coming out of her eyes. I never saw so much blood.
Wait, blood?
Yeah, blood. I beat her like I never beat anyone else. I never beat a woman before. But I beat her to a pulp.
Holy shit. Why didn’t you just leave?
He looked at me in the mirror again, I was angry. I loved her.
Anyway, he said. I was already seeing this other girl, so I just moved in with her.
You were already seeing another girl.
Oh yeah, he said.
He showed me a picture.
Pretty, I said.
Thanks. We’ve been married for awhile now. Three kids.
Do you still love her?
You know, he said, it’s day by day.
—
We got to my stop. To be honest, he was taking me to see a therapist. I figured now I had some material for the therapist.
Therapists are difficult because you always need to think of something to say to them that is worth the amount you pay them.
He turned around and looked at me. You know who you look like, he said.
It won’t be the idea that causes you to quit… it’s fear.
It’s the big idea that stops us—the idea of being a Google or a Facebook, a New York Times best-selling author, a guru, a YouTube sensation, a Mark Cuban or Kevin O’Leary.
Sometimes, it seems easier to forget you even had the idea to begin with. The idea of success. But if you give in, you’ll end up quitting before you start.
It’s a trap.
Think about how many people are on Earth. There are millions of attractive people I have never met because I didn’t give myself the chance. I always thought, “She’d never have sex with me. “I didn’t even look. So I quit before I could start.
But staring at a girl is easy. And who knows what that leads to? If you want to achieve something, you need to make a move.
In today’s podcast, you’ll learn the steps you need to take to achieve anything.
My guest, Mary Karr, is an award-winning poet and best-selling memoirist with praise from Stephen King, among many other highly-esteemed writers. In the interview, Mary shares some easy techniques you can use to get started.
Number one, start with things that are easy or convenient, and build from there.
Identifying your interests is important, too. Mary started with reading. “Something about reading other people’s life stories made me less lonely,” she says.
Mary explains that it’s often “the thing that happened to you that was very dramatic that maybe nobody else would find dramatic,” that make the best stories.
These little moments give you insight. That’s what makes you capable of doing whatever you put your mind to. No one has your experiences, the order of those experiences, your relationships, your perspective, your talents, and your drive.
These pieces make you capable of doing something nobody else can. You have to work with what you have.
“I start with very convenient ideas and convenient memories in which I always appear to be doing beautiful and nimble things,” she says, “and then it turns out I was the one making a lot of the trouble.” When it’s your story, who knows what will turn out?
Your experiences shape what you’re capable of. And they shape what you’re on your way to becoming. “No one can tell me what the shape of my mind is like better than me,” Mary says.
In addition to her literary success, Mary taught creative writing in jail. Why? “All of us who write are ultimately trying to make the world less lonely,” she says.
If there’s an impact you’d like to make, make it. Even if you’re scared. “I’m never not scared,” Mary says.
When I asked what she’s scared of, I realized I’ve heard her list before. From myself. Scared of sounding like an idiot, being boring, “losing what little stature I’ve gained for myself.”
If what you have is so little, then what is there to lose? That’s how I picked myself up. I improved 1% a day. You can too.
Listen today for techniques to overcome your fear of failure. You’ll learn to look around you and discover opportunities. You’ll let yourself stare.
