How To Find Your Calling (or…what I learned by accident because of AirBnB)

He died. He was giving a speech, sat down, and the next thing… he was dead.

They called an ambulance. They got paramedics. They did that thing. They brought him back to life. But his body didn’t like living.

He died again. Eight more times they used machines to convince the machine in his body that we call a heart, to come back to life.

Please come back to life, the machines said to his heart. And finally his heart decided to stay.

After that, things changed. Like they often do when we die at the age of 47.

“There are three things,” Chip Conley, now the head of hospitality for AirBnB, told me, “a job, a career, and a calling.”

“I had been building and running hotels for 20 years. It was my calling to be in the hospitality business. I built over 50 hotels. But it was starting to feel like a job.”

“When I died, I realized I couldn’t do it anymore. I had to go back to my calling.”

Within a few years he had sold his business. He had nothing left to do.

“I had faith in my calling, though,” Chip said. “Something would happen.”

And it did. It did.

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Adam wrote me. He was my Airbnb host. I’ve been in 4 different Airbnbs that Adam owns over the past three years.

So we knew each other. I only live in Airbnbs and I know many of the regular hosts in New York City.

“I’m having a special guest in the apartment right downstairs from you,” Adam wrote me. “He’s the head of all hospitality for Airbnb. Would you like to meet?’

Yes, very much so. I had spent 90% of my life in Airbnbs over the prior three years and just about 100% in the prior year. In 2014 I even wrote an article, “10 Ways to Improve Airbnb.”

Adam made the introduction. Chip Conley, the man who had died a few years earlier and sold his hotel business, responded.

“Should I bring a bottle of wine?” he said. He came upstairs and we started to talk.

“Brian Chesky, the founder of Airbnb, called me and asked me if I wanted to be the head of hospitality. Airbnb was a tech company, it wasn’t used to being a hospitality company.”

“When I ran 50 hotels, hospitality was my main focus.”

“For each hotel, I had the hotel managers come up with five adjectives for what that hotel would be.”

“Maybe the adjectives might be: funky, hip, modern, clean, rock & roll.”

“Every employee, even the housekeepers, would keep those adjectives in mind in whatever they did. And, if possible, we even made sure the five senses the customers would experience in the hotels would match the five adjectives.”

“This is a great idea,” I said, “You can even apply ideas like this to writing a book. Or even building a career for yourself. What five adjectives do you want your life, or the objects you create, or your relationships, be used to describe it.”

“Absolutely,” Chip said.

So he went to Airbnb to start creating an atmosphere of hospitality among the hosts. He had found his way back to his life’s calling.

I had felt it. Since 2013, Now I live in them. Now they are home.

All because Chip died.

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“How do you find your life’s calling?” I asked him.

“What did you love doing when you were 6, 8, 10 years old,” he said.

“Like I had one friend who even at 6 was making mudpies as if they were real pies. Then she became a lawyer but was always unhappy.”

“So she quit being a lawyer and is now one of the biggest pastry chefs in the world.”

“For me, I was always pretending to run a restaurant in my house. I always wanted to be in the hospitality business.”

I thought back to when I was ten years old. I was writing short stories. And when I was 12 I even wrote an article in the newspaper interviewing politicians.

You find your interests from back then and see how they age into the current day.

“Find the thing you did where you lost all sense of time while you are doing it,” Chip told me.

“Remember the equation from Victor Frankl’s ‘Man’s Search for Meaning‘,” he said.

“Despair = Suffering – Meaning.”

“Find the things that bring you meaning. Suffering is always there in this world. But if you have meaning, you will have less despair.

“You will find your calling.”

Sometimes even now I find myself doing things where I feel more ‘job’ than ‘calling’. I try to adjust where I can but it can be difficult. I guess a little bit at a time and eventually you can move your life into that calling.

I said to him. “This is too good. Do you mind if I record the conversation?”

He said, “Sure.” So I did. I’ve been recording conversations with people ever since I was ten years old.

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When I was 26, he said, I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I found my first little motel and called it The Phoenix.

“I knew that whatever I did, I wanted to be creative and to have freedom. I tell everyone to write down the two most important qualities about their calling and check back with it over the years.

“Eventually I felt like what I was doing was the opposite of creativity and freedom.”

“And that’s when I had that experience of flatlining. That was my body’s way of telling me I had to change. So I got rid of my hotels.”

“What if you are sitting in a cubicle and listening to this and wondering how you can find that creativity and freedom for yourself – it all sounds good BUT – kids, responsibilities, age, etc. you feel are blocking you?”

“Then get back to what you loved when you were younger. Start to brainstorm how you can bring that even a little bit into your life now. And a little bit more the next day. And so on.”

“Try many things,” he said, “One thing I realized is that quantity = quality. People think it’s one or the other but it’s not. When you have a lot of quantity of ideas and things you are trying, you will find quality.”

This reminded me of my approach to exercising my idea muscle. If you write down ten ideas a day, you have 3,650 ideas in a year. And maybe one or two will be good.

I got excited about my ideas to improve Airbnb. I said, “Can I show you the ideas?” I had written the list in 2014 but maybe they would still apply.

“Of course!” he said.

We went through each one. For some of them he said, “Hold on! Wait for the announcement coming soon.”

We lost track of time while doing the interview and eventually he had to go.

“You know,” he said, “I saw something about you a few weeks ago and thought you would be a great speaker for our event in November – the Airbnb Open.”

“And then Adam told me yesterday, by coincidence, you were staying in the apartment right above me.”

“That’s funny,” I said.

“I love it when serendipity happens,” he said, as he was getting ready to go. “You have to speak at the conference.”

“I will!”

After he left I thought about what I most wanted to do when I was a kid.

I wanted to be a spy.

On what? I don’t know. I just wanted to look at other people and follow them without them knowing. To observe and learn all of their secrets and then report back to “HQ”.

It would be a little dangerous, I always thought. But I would survive. And save the world.

Bit by bit I’m doing it. My calling.

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Related reading: How to be THE LUCKIEST GUY ON THE PLANET in 4 Easy Steps

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The One Thing You Really Do Need

I’m feeling sick. I think I need to vomit all the facts stuffed down my face by a bogus educational system.

We spend our lives thinking facts are important. Facts change. Facts are often wrong. Facts have often killed us.

Anyway, I forget most facts I’ve ever learned.

Like, “What is RNA?” I have no idea. When did Rome fall? No clue.

I’ve outsourced boring facts to Google. Google can tell me what happened and when. And how to get there. And when an unknown phone number calls me, Google can usually show me who it is.

I’m afraid of unknown phone numbers. Google: please protect me!

People say, “Google is making us stupid because we don’t use that part of our brain anymore.”

I don’t really want to use that part of my brain. I’m fine with it.

I don’t need anything. Well, I take it back: Curiosity.

And here’s why:

– Happiness.

Dopamine is being released because I am in anticipation of the reward of curiosity getting satisfied.

Higher dopamine equals greater happiness, better brain and heart health. Live longer.

– Trip to wonderland.

The other day I passed a clothing store. There was a book in the window. I got curious. I researched the book, the author, his biography, his quotes.

I became a better person as a result. Future post.

– Creative.

It makes me more creative.

I recently read a book about the life of Agatha Christie. She didn’t say, “OK, the plot of my next book is A, B, and C.”

She viewed a book as a set of problems. “How do I make X seem like the killer when Y might really be the killer?”

This led to 500,000,000 books sold and enormous financial success. Questions and not facts. Curiosity and not knowledge.

Andy Warhol asked, “How can I take a soup can and make it art?”

Steve Jobs asked, “How can I take a phone and make it amazing?”

– Community.

I was curious once about “The blue books.” A publisher of tiny blue books in the 1920s that sold 100s of millions of copies.

Turns out there’s an entire community on Facebook dedicated to the research and collection of these books. They answered my questions.

I studied the entire model of success behind those books. I used that model to help build my own success in self-publishing.

– Go beyond comfort zone.

Our comfort zone is where we are safe in the womb of life. Our real self is everything beyond that.

The Curiosity Zone is bigger than the Comfort Zone.

Every time you are curious, you punch another hole in that comfort zone.

– Keeps us alive.

The entire reason the species exists is because we roamed beyond the plains of East Africa and explored.

We’re the only species to explore the entire world. Why? Because our brain adapted the ability to be curious.

Specifically, the prefrontal cortex (the most recently evolved part of our brain) is responsible for the dopamine rewards of curiosity.

Cultivating the curiosity muscle is actually the muscle that has given this species life for the past 200,000 years.

It teaches us how to adapt, how to learn what to be wary of, how to learn what is good for us.

– Better relationships.

I can’t google why a loved one is upset at me. I have to be curious about it. Wonder. Maybe ask. Observe. Look for clues.

I may not know the answer. But when someone is crying or sad, I can sit down next to them. I can be there. Curiosity leads to empathy.

– All achievement in the world.

Orville and Wilbur Wright, owners of a small bike store, were up against a massive multi-million dollar plan by the government to create an airplane.

All of the government planes kept crashing. Despite all the known facts in the world.

Instead of giving up and saying, “We can’t beat the government – they have more money, people, scientists, resources” they simply asked, “what would happen if we made a bicycle with wings?”

Curiosity is the leap into the unknown. What you find there will change your life forever. Will make you fly.

– Prevent Alzheimer’s.

I mention that I keep forgetting things. And my 23andMe DNA results show that I have twice the risk of early-onset Alzheimer’s.

Fine.

But…it’s not facts that prevents Alzheimer’s. It’s being curious.

A crossword puzzle is not about memory. It starts first with asking questions: “What five letters fit these squares?”

Crossword puzzles and other similar games that start with curiosity have been shown to delay Alzheimers.

– Explore.

All I want to do is explore. I don’t want to sit behind a cubicle all my life wondering what life could have been like. I don’t want to feel bad about my life. I want to feel hopeful.

When I was younger I liked to write. I loved to read. I liked computers. I didn’t know anything about anything.

But I wanted to learn so I asked the questions. Sometimes that led me to crash and burn. But it always saved me in the end.

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Six months ago to the day I threw out all of my possessions except for three outfits, a computer, an iPad, and a phone.

These are still the only things I own. But I kept my curiosity. I try to exercise it every day.

It’s the only possession that lets me wake up in the morning and look forward to the new day. I have nothing left but curiosity.

What will happen today? I have no clue. Maybe I will hit the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button on my life.

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Related reading: 10 Things You Need to Know To Become a Great Leader

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Why I Once Bought A House…

OK, I admit it: I bought a house because of a psychic.

It started in 2006. I was feeling strange and lonely about not only my circumstances but my entire way of life.

I was in the financial industry. Which is way to watch people make fools of themselves while making or losing vast amounts of money.

My father had just passed away and I felt like it was my fault. In fact, I wanted him to die at the end and it was a stress in my family. His brain wasn’t there anymore.

I couldn’t get over the regret of losing money that would have not only fed my children, saved my dad, bought me freedom, but would also have fed all the poor in the world.

Just kidding. I didn’t really care then about that last part.

So an astrologer recommended a psychic in Connecticut who said, “for this, I think you need to see someone special.”

I took a plane to New Mexico from New York. I visited Santa Fe for a few days. I drove to Albuquerque to visit a friend of mine there.

And then I stayed for four days in a motel where the special psychic would pick me up at 8am each morning, drive me to her house in the suburbs and we would spend all day talking about me.

Maybe you and I can relate on this. Maybe we all do crazy things when stress turns to chronic stress turns to, “I’m at the end of my rope.” Maybe we all take planes thousands of miles to see a psychic.

I don’t know. But I find I’m embarrassed to admit all of this. I don’t even think I told my business partner I was going to see this woman and disappear for half a week.

She had a bag of white chocolate next to my seat each day. I ate the whole bag every day. And we would talk.

“Everyone’s life is changed by her,” the original psychic said to me. “She’s the real deal,” said the astrologer about the Connecticut psychic.

As for the astrologer. I met her because a date 20 years earlier wanted to know if we were compatible.

So that’s the way things happen. That’s how dots often connect. And then suddenly I’m in a suburb in the middle of the desert 2,000 miles away with an elderly woman and a bag of white chocolate.

“You won’t feel settled in life until you find roots,” she told me. “You need to buy a house.”

“It’s against everything I stand for,” I told her. “The last time I bought a house, I lost it and I went broke.”

“You have to break the pattern,” she said. “The universe is waiting for you to break the pattern. You have to trust the universe.”

I can’t remember what else we talked about. But it was four days. At the end of each day she’d drive me back to my little motel. Finally I took a plane home.

A year later my then-wife and I walked into a house that we heard was for sale. It was empty except for one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever seen sitting there. She was the seller.

There was another house on the property. A Putlizer Prize winning journalist was living there. We became great friends although I think now she doesn’t like me because of my stance on college. But friends come and go.

I bought the house.

Two months after moving in, my wife and I separated. I moved to NYC. The day after I moved to New York was Thanksgiving.

I ate a turkey sandwich by myself in a diner. Because I was in a dark mood and maybe I knew I would later write, “I ate a turkey sandwich on Thanksgiving.”

I put an ad on Craigslist claiming, of all things, that I was a psychic. I was 40 years old and sometimes I’m always a pimply and awkward 13 year old.

I responded to a lot of emails that day. And at least two of the people who responded to my ad remain my friends to this day.

I went broke again. We put the house for sale. We lost it.

And on and on. I started to date a girl who would ask me every day what my net worth was. Then she’d break up with me and leave. Then she’d come back later that day. We went out for four months.

I lost my one source of income. I stopped getting calls from anyone. I had no opportunities.

“Why don’t you introduce me to your friends ever,” I asked the girl who always broke up with me.

“Because you’re crazy,” she said.

I would wake up in the morning and look out the window of the Chelsea Hotel. Men and women in suits rushing to their jobs. Going left and right according to their path in the maze.

I didn’t know where to go. I had nothing to do. Nobody liked me and they were all right. I didn’t like me.

I started writing every day.

2,000 blog posts later everything is different for me. Maybe everything is better. But does it matter? Will people 100 years from now think it matters?

She was right. The psychic was right. I bought a house and my entire life changed almost immediately.

Before we moved into the house I had a bit of a breakdown. Which means bad things happened while drunk in the middle of the night.

My then-wife was scared for me and called 911. It was about 2 or 3 in the morning and I hope my kids were asleep.

I pretended to be asleep and then I pretended I was fine. But the police took me away.

They dropped me off at one of those one floor motels in the middle of the highway. “Don’t let him leave until morning,” they told the manager.

In the morning the room was spinning. If I just lay still, I felt like I was on a roller coaster going up and down at high speed. Where am I?

I walked outside. The morning sky was bloodshot with sun. I couldn’t find the manager and the main office door was locked. There were no people around at all. I felt all alone and lost.

An hour later my wife and two kids picked me up while I was walking on the highway. “Why were you there?” my youngest wanted to know.

The only reason I write this is because I bought a bar of white chocolate today. Suddenly I remembered.

The psychic. The desert. The white chocolate.

And the entire airplane ride back from New Mexico, looking out the window, excited for the day when everything would change.

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Related Reading: It’s Financial Suicide To Own A House

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Politics Has Nothing To Do With Politics

Here’s a conspiracy that wasn’t just a theory.

From 1942-1945, 130,000 people worked on this project without telling anyone else.

When “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – that’s when the rest of the world found out.

Harry Truman said, “We made a $2 billion scientific gamble…and we won!”

250,000 civilians were killed. That was the metric for winning.

65,000 civilians were killed within three seconds of the bomb dropping on Hiroshima.

Harry Truman was re-elected, then retired. His daughter wrote mystery novels.

That’s politics.

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Politics mixed with bureaucracy creates death. Creates delay. Creates debt.

Politics mixed with television creates ratings. Creates advertising dollars. Newspaper stories. Water cooler conversation. Twitter memes.

Each election has to up the ante for entertainment.

People say to me, “Why don’t you vote?”

The role of politics is to help those less fortunate who might not be able to help themselves. This is a very small part of the population

The role of government can be extended to say: don’t murder people or rob from people.

Since 1992, across three presidents, average salary for people ages 18-40 has gone DOWN from $36,000 to $33,000 while student loan debt has gone straight up, inflation has gone up, healthcare costs has gone up, housing costs have gone up.

Who are we doing all of this work for? Who is making the money off of the value you work hard to create?

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Gingko Bilboa trees are a species that has been around for 270,000,000 years.

They were the only things that didn’t die during the Hiroshima bombing. They are flourishing in Hiroshima today. Politics didn’t destroy them.

Humans have been around 200,000 years. Maybe we have a few more years to go, give or take. We had an OK run.

Voting won’t stop the tidal wave of politics destroying our species. There are only two gifts you can give that will help society.

Love is the gift you give yourself. Kindness is the gift you give others.

That’s how I try to vote each day. But it’s really difficult and I’m just one vote.

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Related reading: Is Donald Trump a Socialist?

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10 Lessons I Learned From Jewel

Jewel was broke and homeless, but she still turned down a million dollar check when she was 19 years old.

Jewel was broke and millions in debt after selling 30,000,000 albums, and built back from scratch when she was 30.

Jewel has switched genres, written music from folk to pop to country to even children’s music. She wrote a children’s book.

I love Jewel.

Abused from the ages of 5 to 15. Moved out of the cold barn she was living in at 15 to live on her own. And three years later she was homeless.

“I didn’t want to be a statistic,” she told me she was afraid when she was 15. “I looked around at other girls who were in my circumstances and things went from bad to worse”

And yet… she ended up a statistic. She realized this when she was 18, living out of a car, and attempting to stuff a dress down her pants in a store so she could steal it.

When I was 18 I feel I was privileged. I had no real worries. I was “suburban lucky.” Luck ruined me and made me complacent. I never would have made the good decisions Jewel ended up making.

That’s why I love her. That’s why I’m glad she came on my podcast. I’m sure she’s done 100s of interviews to promote her new book, “Never Broken”, an excellent book.

But I wanted to break her down. I wanted her to laugh. She was so smart and serious. Trust me: I got her to laugh.

A) Hard wood grows slowly…

Why did a homeless girl who sang for pennies in a cafe turn down a million dollar offer?

“Hard wood grows slowly,” she said. “I saw that as a kid. The soft trees would break. The hard trees would grow and live forever.”

She said: I knew I wanted to grow for a long time in this business. I also knew we were still in the grunge era and I was not grunge.

If I took a million dollar deal, I read that I would have to pay it back. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to and I would be dropped by the label and that would be the end of my career.

In fact, my album didn’t do well the first year. But then went on to sell over 10,000,000 copies.

They didn’t drop me because I was just that girl they paid twelve dollars for. You have to think long-term instead of short-term always.

---

She was 19.

I do NOT think I would have made that decision. I think I would have made the wrong decisions.

How does one take such a long term view at such a young age. I think it was the ten years she had spent developing her skills, singing in bars all over Alaska, preparing for this moment.

Confidence is really difficult to develop. I don’t know if I have it even now. But I’m going to remember this lesson on the next business decision I have to make.

 

B) Reinvention is non-stop…

Jewel has written children’s books, gone from folk music to pop to children’s to country. She’s been a rancher. She’s been homeless.

I asked her, “You had the benefit of really cultivating your talent from ages 5 to 15. You sang with your dad at gigs every week.

“Do you think someone starting from scratch at 50 can do this?”

“Absolutely,” she said, “Reinvention never ends. It’s every day. Pursue what you enjoy and move towards it and there will be opportunities.”

I look at my own life today. I’m about to finish a children’s book. I’m looking into TV. I’m working on a novel. I have other business things.

I don’t know if any of them will work. But I know if I don’t keep trying I will slip back into whatever hole I constantly have to dig myself out of.

There are two days to start something new. When you are five years old. And today.

 

C) Create art for yourself…

I said these words: “So when you were talking to Neil Young…”

What funny words to say to someone, I thought at the time and told her.

Neil Young told her: don’t ever write for radio!

Meaning: don’t write for the masses, write for yourself.

I asked her, “Isn’t there a tension there? Like what if you write for yourself and then nobody likes it? Don’t you want to write something that people like?”

She said, “We all have common experiences. Ultimately when you write for yourself, you tap into that common cultural experience we all share.”

That was eye-opening to me.

If you put in the time to develop the skills, eventually you will burrow so deep inside yourself with your art that you will tap into that same vein of blood that runs through each of us.

The key to good art is figuring out who you are.

Writing for yourself, then, becomes the best way to write something that can be enjoyed by everyone.

 

D) Forgiveness is a gift you give yourself…

But, still, a relationship has to be earned back.

Around the time she was 30, Jewel had sold tens of millions of albums, was doing 700 shows a year, and had no money. In fact she was two million in debt.

How could that be? She had given all control to her mother and her mother had destroyed it all.

Since 2003 she hasn’t spoken to her mother.

She made back the money eventually, and has been incredibly successful since then.

“Will you ever talk to your mother again?” I asked.

I forgive her, she said. But forgiveness is the gift I had to give myself. Forgiveness is not for others.

She said: Everyone still has to earn back the relationship. Forgiveness is not the same as condoning something.

 

E) We all self-medicate…

“I saw this at 8 years old,” she said, “Singing in bars. Everyone would be unhappy, they’d drink, and they’d get more unhappy.”

“I swore to never drink or do drugs.”

“But we all need ways to cope – to ‘medicate’ our issues.”

“I started writing every day. Journaling, writing the lyrics to what became my songs.”

“I found that every time I wrote, it reduced my anxiety, even when I was living in my car.”

Writing music became the way she self-medicated. It worked.

 

F) Watch the hands…

Fears and anxieties sneak up on us. Suddenly, we don’t know from where, but we panic and feel that constriction in our stomach.

It’s hard to observe our thoughts before it’s too late.

“So I watch my hands,” she said, “I started keeping a journal of what my hands were doing.”

What do you mean?

“Was I opening doors for more people? I’d count up the times I’d open doors for people, I’d shake hands with people, I’d be open with people instead of having my arms crossed.”

Watching the hands taught Jewel when she was kind and had compassion and was less anxious.

There’s a quote in her book, “Emotions are the shadows of thoughts.”

I think also, Actions are then the shadows of those emotions.

“Starve your negative thoughts,” she said. By being aware of them in any way possible (watch the hands), you can stop them from being obsessive, then you starve them of the attention they need from your brain.

They stop growing, they disappear.

You can go from homeless, to finding a cafe to play your music, to putting flyers around town, to getting an audience, to attracting music executives, to getting a million dollar deal.

While living in your car.

 

G) Accumulate your influences…

While we were talking, Jewel mentioned: Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Loretta Lynn, June Cash.

But not just music. She quoted Brene Brown’s book, “Daring Greatly.” She quoted philosophers. She spoke about physics, about the neuroscience of sea slugs.

Getting influenced (through reading or listening) is the way to absorb another person’s entire life and learn from it.

Then you can combine it, throw in your own art and skills. And now you are on your way to world greatness.

Is it that easy? I have no idea. I hope it is.

 

H) Fame magnifies what you have…

It doesn’t add to who you are. It just magnifies it.

If you are a jerk, you will be a bigger jerk. If you are someone who wants to improve yourself, you’ll have more opportunities to improve yourself.

You have to be content with yourself first. Before fame.

I have to admit, I am probably the biggest idiot ever. And when I first made money it magnified it in every way.

I try now to like myself better. It’s not like I wake up and say, “I love you” to myself. Well, maybe sometimes.

 

I) No one can keep you captive. No one can keep you unhappy…

In 2014, she went through a divorce. “I wanted my son to have the kind of mother I wanted to be.”

At each step we have to decide if we are content with where we are. We get to choose and nobody else does. Whether it’s a spouse, or a record executive or a parent or a friend or whoever.

“We’re like a car,” she said, “And the brain is just the steering wheel. We’re outside the brain. We get to steer the car.”

Events can be good or bad. But we 100% get to choose whether or not we will be happy.

 

J) Change one thing about your life every day…

This wasn’t in the podcast. It was in her book.

I wanted to ask her about it. But I forgot. I always forget at least half the things I intend to ask about.

But I like the idea of change every day. Even a little bit of change. We always have to explore.

I was just reading that Haruki Murakami has kept the same writing routine for 24 years. Every day he wakes up at 5am, writes, runs, eats, etc.

I like that. I like routine. But I want to make sure every day I do enough change that I can learn from it. Only then do I get new things to write about and think about it and improve from

If I didn’t do these podcasts, I’d probably talk to nobody all day long. But doing them forces me out the door to meet and learn from incredible people. And hopefully, to change a tiny bit.

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I’m completely selfish. I get to call up these amazing artists and get them to come to my podcast studio and ask them whatever questions I want.

They have to answer. I feel like this brutish monster forcing them to talk to me.

But I learn from each one. And I fall in love a little bit with each guest.

They all seem so smart and accomplished and confident. I even find myself jealous that Jewel was homeless for a little bit.

What a great story!

We posed for a picture with her book, “Never Broken” between us. “I’m still broken,” I said. And she laughed.

Then the picture snapped and she left.

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This is teaser post for my upcoming podcast with Jewel, the singer-songwriter, guitarist, and author of “Never Broken.”

To make sure you don’t miss the episode, subscribe to the podcast here:

• iTunes
• Google Play
• Stitcher

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Be So Stupid They Can’t Ignore You

I had an idea for a business. This was 1993. I was going to take videos of houses for sale.

I would charge a real estate agency per house I videotaped. I was going to get rich. Rich!

Customers of the agency would no longer have to go to the house. They could just go to the agency and watch the video.

I went to six real estate agencies and they actually laughed at me and said “no thanks.” That was the end of that business idea.

Here’s what i didn’t have:

• A video camera
• Any video skills whatsoever. I never had taken a video before.
• Zero sales ability. I had never tried to sell anything before.
• Zero money. I had no idea how I would buy a video camera.
• Zero knowledge. Did the real estate agency have VCRs?
• I didn’t have a car. How was I going to drive miles around to every house?

I didn’t know anything. I didn’t have anything. I had no resources.

I gave up.

Today I’m meeting with a company that does virtual reality tours of houses. They’ve signed up one of the largest real estate agencies in the world.

Does this mean I should have been persistent?

Of course not.

Ready. Fire. Aim.

That’s the ONLY way you can learn, not waste time, move on to the next experience.

Stupidity is the rungs on the ladder to success.

So then I applied for a job at a comic book store. I loved comics.

“We don’t really have enough business to hire people,” the guy at the comic book store told me.

I wrote four or five novels (I honestly forget) that never got published.

I had them printed up and I saved them for over 20 years. You never know!

Recently I threw them all out. Gone forever. Should I have been persistent?

Of course not! They were horrible.

After I left graduate school, I wanted to have an interesting experience. I tried to move into a homeless shelter.

To be honest, I was so down on myself I thought the best way to meet women would be in a homeless shelter.

It would be like a college dormitory, I thought. Only everyone would be homeless. And lovable.

The manager at the homeless shelter thought I was too crazy to live in a homeless shelter. He said, “No.”

Persistence is overrated.

If they had said, “yes”, to me working at the comic book store then I probably wouldn’t today be about to interview one of my favorite all time singers.

If the gatekeepers had published any of my novels I’d be a struggling and unhappy writer.

If I stayed in graduate school, I don’t know. I’d have spent nine years working on a useless Phd thesis instead of interviewing prostitutes at 3 in the morning for HBO.

If they said yes to me living in the homeless shelter then maybe today I’d be homeless. Come to think of it…I do have no home right now. I just stay in short-term AirBnBs.

I could have tried harder. I could have resisted all the “Nos.” I could have resisted and struggled and fought. But why?

Resistance is the opposite of persistence.

It blocks you into thinking there is only one thing that will make you happy. This is the worst disease and it’s chronic.

So many people I talk with are unhappy because someone, at some point, blocked some thing they were working on. Like a blockage in the artery that prevented the heart of success.

They get obsessed with this blockage. They can’t stop thinking about it. They get angry. They can’t forgive. They can’t forget.

They get stuck. The “No” they got ended up defining them.

Persistence in having many experiences is more important than having persistence in one experience.

The other day I saw a guy playing a piano in the middle of the street. I asked him what he was doing there.

“Living the dream,” he told me. “Living the dream.”

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Related post: What Do I Hate And What I Do About It

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Ep. 185: Cal Newport – Become So Good You Can’t Be Ignored

You’re either horrible or miserable.

Woody Allen has this joke in “Annie Hall.”

He says, “Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That’s the two categories.”

“The horrible are terminal cases. You know? And blind people, crippled… I don’t know how they get through life… It’s amazing to me.”

“And the miserable is everyone else.”

“So you should be thankful that you’re miserable. Because that’s very lucky… to be miserable.”

I guess I’m one of the lucky ones. We complain about getting older or not having a passion, etc.

“In relatively recent history—we’re talking the 1980s and later—we got convinced into believing we all have a capital P ‘Passion,’” Cal Newport said.

Cal Newport is a tenured professor at Georgetown. He majored in computer science.

So did I.

Fact: You can’t pre-test a fetus to see what its passion will be.

Passion is not in your DNA.

I wasn’t born to podcast. Or write. Or be a father. I was just born…

And I have eyes.

So I see what other people are doing.

I have ears. So I hear who’s winning. And then my brain asks, “Why am I here?”

“People believe if we look inside ourselves and discover what our passion is, we’ll be happy. I studied this question in the book and that’s not how it happens,” Cal said. “Passion comes later.”

First you have to “become so good you can’t be ignored…”

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1. Start with an interest

Steve Martin reinvented stand-up. He told jokes without punchlines. And let the tension linger. He didn’t start with a passion for comedy.

You start with an interest.

I never thought, “Interviewing prostitutes at 3 a.m. is my passion.” But I got good at it.

I was curious.

And I’m still asking questions today.

2. Build career capital

Cal did a study. He found a database developer who became too good to be ignored. And used that as leverage.

“She got into the computer industry with no background. At every stage, she said, ‘What would be valuable here?’”

Now she spends 4-6 months working in her cubicle job. And the other six 4-6 months in Thailand.

Acquire career capital. And leverage it. This is how you get autonomy in the workplace.

“It’s what lets you get a sense of mastery,” Cal said. “It’s what makes you get a sense of impact, and this is where passion actually comes from.”

3. Focus on rare and valuable skills

The first food truck was a pretzel stand. It had wheels and food.

Now Michelin-star chefs have food trucks and pop-up shops. They didn’t learn how to make pretzels. Or follow the trend. They used rare and valuable skills to innovate the market.

I built websites in the ‘90s. That was my first company. But as soon as I heard my eighth-grade sister was learning coding in school, I sold the company.

Coding was no longer rare and valuable. And competition was about to explode.

Control competition and you’ll control the market.

4. Get to the cutting edge of an industry

Mastery leads to passion, not the other way around.

You weren’t “born” to invent the next iPhone. Nobody was. Even the people inventing the next iPhone weren’t born to invent the next iPhone.

“Innovations don’t come at the very start of your journey.”

You have to get to the cutting edge, learn what’s missing, identify room for growth and innovate.

5. Do deep work

Deep work is the process of becoming great.

“It requires hard, hard focus and pushes your skill to its limit.”

It’s what you do to become the best in your field. And discover holes in your organization. Or in the planet. It’s how you create ride-sharing, social networking, Google maps underwater.

Cal says how at [16:04].

6. Or don’t…

I asked Cal, “Do you think most people actually want to be really good at something? Or do most people just want to have more time off to just do nothing?”

I don’t set goals. Or evaluate my growth.

If I can support the growth of other people, cheer them on, smile and say, “Congratulations on getting up today,” then the window gets bigger.

Maybe success isn’t “being so good you can’t be ignored.” Maybe it’s being so good you can’t ignore others.

This is what works for me. This is my deep work.

Links and Resources:

• Read “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World” by Cal Newport
• Read “So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love” by Cal Newport
• Check out his website and his study hacks blog

Also mentioned:

• “Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries” by Peter Sims

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Dolph Lundgren Is Biting My Funk…A Love Story

I visited one “guru.” It was at his falling apart rented mansion he claimed he owned.

He had his “lambo” in the garage. Everything we did was videotaped while I was there.

I put it in quotes because that’s what he said. “This is my lambo.”

I couldn’t figure out how he made his money. He was busy doing yoga, haircut, working out, eating, trying on new sneakers, while I was just waiting for him.

“Is everything in life a scam?” I asked my friend.

We walked around the rooms when nobody was following us. Chips of paint were peeling off the walls. Brown water came out of the faucets.

He was doing everything in six minute increments. Like…he’d get a haircut for six minutes, then do yoga for six minutes, then get a massage for six minutes. Then eat for six minutes.

I guess that was his “thing.” Every one of these people have a thing. Maybe I need to start doing things in six minute increments. But I think I’m too lazy.

I don’t want to make fun of this person. He seemed nice enough. Everyone is trying hard to succeed. I don’t blame anyone for wanting good things in their life.

While I was waiting, I spoke with one of his employees. Maybe she didn’t realize she was saying too much.

From what she told me, I figured that he had about $30 million in revenues per year, give or take.

Where do the revenues come from? His business was about teaching people how to set up a business. “We go for millennials,” the woman told me.

So I guess there are a lot of 24 year olds who are figuring out how to start a business. Fine. Everyone has to make a living.

What motivational thing can I say. I lost all of my money multiple times. I’ve lost two marriages. I’ve failed at 17 out of 20 businesses. I’m really bad at returning messages.

I’ve lost and lost.

But maybe I’ve got good at bouncing back. I don’t know. I’m very content this moment, which I guess is all that counts.

I try to do three things each day:

1) Be with friends. I love feeling good around other people. To make another person laugh is my orgasm.

2) Improve my creativity: I like to get more competent each day at the things I love doing.

If you improve 1% a day, then that’s 3800% per year (compounding each day). I want to get a little better at what I love each day.

3) Not worry.

I threw out everything I owned. But that is not minimalism. Minimalism is when I can throw out the thoughts in my head.

The thoughts in my head are usually anxious, paranoid, panicked, etc. But when I have fewer thoughts it’s like watching a permanent sunset.

So with each thought, I try to practice this:

Label the thought “useful”, or “not useful.” When I am good at doing this I find I bounce back from loss incredibly quickly.

When things are really bad, all I have to do is remind myself to label each thought.

That gives me more time (more than six minutes) to get good at the things I love. And to spend relaxed time with the people I love.

THERE! I don’t have to see anything. Just do those three things and you can do anything you want after that.

At the end of the interview with the guru, he asked me if I wanted to stick around.

He said, “Dolph Lundgren is coming over in ten minutes. I’m sure he’d love to meet you.”

I think the guru just wanted to have friends around.

I left, though. I only have so much energy per day.

But later that night I listened to “Eye of the Tiger.” It brought back pleasant memories. Useful.

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Related Reading: The 20 Habits of Eventual Millionaires

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The Commandments of the American Religion

I failed as a father. My 17 year old is going to visit some colleges today.

I would never force anyone to listen to my reasons. But I can say I think she is making a mistake.

We are the average of the five people around us. Be around skilled, compassionate, good, interesting, people who are trying to improve themselves and the world and this in turn will improve you.

The children at college are still stuck trying to escape the horrible “facts” they had to memorize, and then forget, in high school.

And the results of their four year degree? A job that will disappear or be demoted within years, if not seconds, of inception. And that’s if a job is the result.

100% of the people I know have changed careers once, twice, maybe even many times since the age of 23. I, for better or worse, have changed not only jobs but careers over ten times since leaving the ivory soap halls of college.

But along the way, I had to get re-educated completely on the American Religion so I could live a better life for myself. So I could choose to avoid the traps that have been set.

To live a simple life is to live a good life.

Away from the coercions of a corporate master, or a government master, or peer pressure, or death and hostility.

I am often not able to do it. And even in those moments, I have to find and be content in my personal freedom.

But awareness is the solution.

 

College (and, yes, high school):

Learning is about questioning. But this idea seemed to have died with Socrates and has been replaced by the rote memorization of facts that people forget the second the test is over.

It’s all in preparation to take a series of standardized tests that the school then takes their averages to show that they deserve funding.

What are these facts? The quadratic formula? Who is Charlemagne (nobody can remember his birthday). World War I? (Nobody can still tell me why the US was in it). And on and on.

Only later, bogged down by debt, no knowledge, no real skills, do we start to notice widening income equality and middle class malaise.

 

Home ownership:

I know that homes are “real.” And that rent is throwing money down the toilet.

I know all the cliches.

But nobody would put all of their money in a highly leveraged illiquid (it’s hard to sell) investment that costs you MORE money every year (taxes, insurance, maintenance) to keep that investment.

Imagine if a stock was like that. You would say, “That’s crazy!” And yet people do it every day with a home despite numerous alternatives to hold onto your money, live well, and put the money to better use.

I have an entire post about it here: It’s Financial Suicide To Own A House

 

Charity:

When I see a situation I want to help, I give money and I help the situation.

There are thousands of ways to put money to good use. One way, ironically, is to make more money, innovate on your ideas, and hire people that can then create their own successes in their lives.

Charity itself is a way to outsource our conscience to an organization (mostly) filled by bureaucracy, that only is required to spend a nominal amount on their proposed purpose and the rest is used to pay marketing costs, salaries, and investments.

 

Taxes:

The role of government is to help people who cannot in any other way help themselves. Money collected through taxes is the mechanism.

Fine.

Here is what is slavery: using force to take labor from someone without their permission.

Slavery has many disgusting horrible forms all through history. Particularly in pre-industrial days where slavery was directly used for labor.

But if 40% of your labor is given to a government that has an increasing army, is in more and more war zones killing innocent people, and is subsidizing an ever-increasing student debt, an ever-increasing healthcare debt (the primary cause of personal bankruptcy), an ever-increasing income gap (caused in part by the government bailouts paid by our taxes) then is this a worthwhile use of my money and hard work?

 

Wars:

One time I wrote an article, “Tell me a war that is justified?”

I sincerely want to know. I put it on a very peaceful site. A website devoted to yoga.

I got hundreds of the most vile hate comments, including at least one death threat I had to report (ironically, it came from a student at an ivy league university).

Nobody was able to give me actual justifications of any war. I won’t argue each point here.

I have two daughters. There’s no justification that would ever get me to be happy with either of them going to war. Zero.

I am not even sure I believe in international boundaries, which tend to just encourage fascism, racism, economic regulations that hurt their citizens, and on and on.

When I reminded people they could volunteer right now to join the army to help America with all of it’s military interventions that are currently around the world, all of the comments stopped.

 

Medicine:

If people have an illness, they go to the doctor.

This seems to be the accepted path to health. But it’s wrong. Medicine was always intended at the extremes.

The important thing is to live a healthy lifestyle so you don’t need to go to extremes.

If you look at the top ten killers in the United States, almost all of them can be delayed or even avoided by a healthier lifestyle.

The simplest example is if you don’t smoke you can avoid many diseases. If you have good sleeping habits you can avoid many illnesses and so on.

Instead, we have become a highly drugged society, drudging in and out of doctor’s offices to get our addictive medications refilled (and I have been guilty of this as well) to supply an ever-more bloated “healthcare” system and insurance industry that preys on the fact that people simply don’t want to better themselves and rather want to rely on the extremes.

Medicine is an emergency. Health is a lifestyle.

And, along the way, why do we have an FDA to approve all drugs. Many drugs from the 60s and 70s that ended up causing birth defects all were approved by the FDA.

Meanwhile, two toxic poisons: nicotine and alcohol, are approved by the FDA.

But a drug that could cure cancer requires $2 billion to be approved by the FDA, and five years of tests (making it unlikely to be approved – who knows how many life-saving drugs simply couldn’t’ raise the money to do the tests).

Avoiding the focus on medicine will shed light on the criminal behavior of the FDA.

 

Voting:

I know, I know. This is a critical election. Trump is a fascist. Hilary is “sick.” Everyone is a maniac. We have to vote.

I get it. But there are much better uses of my time and energy if I want to change the world, than voting. And the way the system is set up (a republic and not a democracy) my one particular vote has no say anyway.

And yet, if you say you are not voting, people really get upset. But that’s OK, I get why people want to vote. It’s again a way of thinking they are doing something.

But there are ways to do more and better.

 

The constitution is the bible of democracy:

Every single President since George Washington has disobeyed the Constitution. It’s sort of obvious with the last few but here’s one fact:

The last legally declared war (according to the Constitution) was World War II. How many wars have we been in since then.

They’ve tried to amend the Constitution repeatedly to make up for this but they can’t amend it fast enough.

And then when either conservatives or liberals, want to justify some other unethical behavior they say, “But the Constitution says!” even though they are all perfectly willing to break it as needed.

 

Green:

Al Gore is a billionaire who flies private jets that pollute the skies every day. A lot of his money came from people who care about this tiny insignificant planet.

This planet has had ice ages, warm ages, massive volcanoes, meteor strikes, and will continue to have them for billions of years. These events will wipe most species when they occur. They can occur any day.

Who knows anything? I don’t. Most don’t. When “SuperFreakonomics” came out, questioning a lot of the science, there was a massive backlash.

But they had one interesting solution. If we simply stop eating meat, there will be less massive breeding of cows, fewer cows farting, hence less methane gas polluting the environment. It would solve the whole problem.

But ultimately, people want to believe their own truths. This maybe is the only truth.

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To live a good life, I want to not want. To live a simple life where I can explore my interests with as little interference as possible. To love my family and the people around me. That’s it.

We should ask, “Why is this necessary?” on the things we hold dear. instead of saying, “I have to do this or else.”

Maybe that would’ve stopped Iraq or other wars. Maybe that would’ve stopped the financial crisis.

Maybe that would slow down the student loan crisis engulfing our children. Maybe that would stop the rising obesity in America.

Maybe that would stop the rising fear that is leading to more and more extremist and insane political candidates.

The phrase “Or else” is scary. I don’t want it.

A child laughs, on average, 300 times a day. An adult…five.

Learn through questioning, with the mind of a child and yet the experience of an adult, and you recapture the beauty and contentment of a simple life. This is my only hope for myself.

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Related reading: Ten Scams You Encounter Every Day

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You Are 22 And Want To Save The World So Do This:

The anxiety of being 22. A friend wrote: “I’m 22, I want to start a business, I want to write, I want to help entrepreneurship in my country. I can’t decide.”

I’m paraphrasing. But 22 year olds have lots of things to say. And lots of things they want to do.

“What should I do?”

I responded…

You are 22 so:

A) No rush. Cut in half the speed of everything you are doing.
B) Do it all. Don’t decide anything. Decisions kill 22-year-olds.
C) Results don’t matter. Just do these things.
D) Keep writing 10 ideas a day so you can be an idea machine. Be creative every day.
E) It’s OK that some things won’t work out as you planned. If you aren’t failing at some things then you aren’t doing enough things.
F) When you are 27 you will look back at 22 and think “There is no way I could have predicted what ended up happening.”
G) It’s good to have a big vision like you do. But it’s also OK that the big vision constantly changes. Get good at having a plan. But it doesn’t have to be a good plan.
H) Make lots of friends. This is the time to make friends that turn into lasting connections. Later on it’s much harder. This is more important than saving your country. Every artistic and scientific movement in history started as a group of friends in their 20’s.
I) Don’t forget that you are just planting seeds now. A garden can’t grow if you don’t water it. Learn, listen, love.
J) Every time you want something, try also to be happy not wanting it. Nobody knows at 22 (or 48) what will make them happy at 23.
K) Live life like you are going to die in a month but also at the same time, live life like you are never going to die.

 

If you live like like you are going to die in a month, you will care for other people. If you live life like you are never going to die you will see everything as just a ripple in the vast ocean.

Most importantly, you can ignore all of this advice. Most people do their thing. It’s poor judgment to give advice.

I’m 48 and this is the advice I follow for myself right now.

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Related reading: The 100 Rules for Being an Entrepreneur

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I Got Expelled From Nursery School Because Of The Gatekeepers

I got expelled from nursery school because I sh!t on a bunch of other little boys.

We were all playing some sort of pile-up game and I was on top. One thing led to another.

They sent me home on the short bus. I was the only one on the bus because it was the middle of the day. Maybe this is my first memory.

Three years old. This is the moment I booted up.

I got out and my mom was waiting for me. My mom had polio as a tiny girl. So for her to be waiting for me, standing up, in the driveway with arms crossed, was a big deal.

“What did you do?” she said.

How does a three year old explain? I can’t remember what I said. How do I explain the urges my body had?

My need to just constantly sh!t on everything around me. Ruin everything I touch.

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I lied. I wrote about the gatekeepers. The people or institutions that block us from achieving our dreams.

Most of the time I don’t know what my dreams are. Why do we need to have a passion?

I don’t need to send a spaceship to Mars. Or a yacht. I don’t need to see the beauty of the bottom of the ocean. Or to own a football team. None of these things appeal to me.

I wrote the gatekeepers are: parents, jobs, bosses, schools, teachers, peers, government. Maybe more. For each person, it’s different.

But I left out the two most important gatekeepers. The things that are GUARANTEED to prevent my joy.

They try to make me miserable, thinking that only misery is the maze towards happiness.

The body.

Right now I can’t hear out of my right ear. I have wax in it. Maybe from using the headset too much. I should go see a doctor.

If a woman whispered, “I love you” in my right ear this moment, I would not hear her.

In my left eye I have something called “floaters.” At first I couldn’t see out of it one morning. Then it cleared up and I saw these little black squiggles.

Sometimes it looks like bugs are crawling around and I even do a double-take. But it’s just these floaters. I should go see an eye doctor. I read it’s because I should drink more water.

A few months ago I coughed wrong. Some muscle hit some nerve and my left leg went numb. There was also a lot of pain all the time.

After a week or two it got better. But now, six months later, I still feel the numbness in my toes. I should probably see a doctor.

I could go on.

We’re stuck in this garbage bag of trash we call a body. So whatever we can do to make it better is worth it.

 

The mind.

Probably every day I experience worry, stress, anger, and confusion. The four deadly horseman.

Can you list right now something you feel stress about? Anger about? Worry about? Confusion about? I can.

But these are just gatekeepers as well. The things that I am angry about prevent me from experiencing joy.

The things that I worry about are the gatekeepers for peace.

We all experienced the curse of being born. And we are all trying to struggle through the mystery of life – fooling ourselves into thinking the mystery is death.

The mind evolved to protect us. But it didn’t evolve to give us joy.

So it gets angry because it thinks the things we are angry at might hurt us.

It just doesn’t know. Poor mind. It’s just a tool.

The body and the mind are our gatekeepers. Everything outside of that is the real me.

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I’m guilty. I write about failure porn all the time. I’m a failure pornographer.

I lost X, blah blah blah.

I did A, B, and C and then Z happened. Blah blah. I’m in the gutter. I’m crying. I give all my things away. I was suicidal.

Sometimes I wish I could live life as if I knew I was going to die tomorrow. Sometimes I wish I were dead yesterday.

A failure either wounds us:

• Gives us something to blame.
• Something to complain about.
• An excuse (“I can’t do this!”)
• A reason to lie in bed and cry (speaking for myself only)

Or a failure makes us look at our actions and try to improve them. Makes us wiser.

Wounds or wisdom. I choose.

You would think all the people who are angry and stressed and scared would be very wise.

But when I’m angry I often slip into justification and then that slip turns into a dark fall that is hard to climb out of.

For a long time, and still now, I often take the things that make me most angry and scared and I view them as wounds.

I want to get past my gatekeepers. The body that imprisons me. The mind that holds the key with its angers and fears.

Give me the key! So I can fly out and see the rest of the universe. Where I suspect the real me is waiting to be happy and free.

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Related Post: Three Trends for the Next 50 Years: The Rise of the Idea Economy

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10 Things I Did During The Worst Year Ever

What an F-ed up year.

I can describe why but it doesn’t matter. We all have horrible moments.

It doesn’t matter how good life is. Bad stuff happens.

You can be healthy but homeless. You can be wealthy but sick. You can be in love but not have that love returned.

Life is a sentence of failures only briefly punctuated by successes. It’s how quickly we bounce back from failure and despair that ultimately determine our well-being, our success, and our freedom.

A) Don’t ask why

There is no “Why?” In the history of the world, nobody has ever answered truthfully to “Why did you do this?”

You can’t ask someone why they stole from a company. They won’t tell you. Or they will say they didn’t.

You can’t ask someone why they left you. Why they did X to betray you. Or Y to lie to you.

They will lie. They will accuse you. They will cry. They will say all sorts of things to throw the scent off their trail.

There is never a “Why.” There is seldom closure in life. Since the Big Bang, life is chaos.

As my 17 year old daughter somehow so eloquently put it to me the other day: “Humanity has to yield to nature’s hysteria.”

I asked her, did you just think of that? And I even googled later to make sure she really thought of it.

 

B) Adventure

The other day I was walking around. I saw a place: SohoPhoto.

I walked in and there were some decent photos but the surprise was, as it often is, in the bathroom.

I walked in and there were a 1,000 photos of families and weddings. The sign above the toilet said all the photos were picked up from yard sales and hung up in the bathroom.

I know this is not “Raiders of the Lost Ark” but, for me, that is adventure to wander around and come across something like this. Oh, and then I went to the bathroom and DESTROYED it.

Technique: walk around. Anything with an open door that seems curious: walk in. This technique is amazing.

 

C) Checklist

At the end of the day: did I eat well, move well, sleep well, CHECK. improve relationships, CHECK. write ten ideas a day, CHECK, think about things I’m grateful for. CHECK

If yes, then go to sleep knowing I did the best I could do. If no, then repeat until Yes.

 

D) Beat the sh!t out of someone

Just kidding. But I think about it a lot.

 

E) Friends

This has been maybe the most amazing thing in my life since last October. The fact that I have rediscovered friendship.

That sounds like a corny thing to say. I can’t believe how well my friends have helped pull me out of my grave.

Money doesn’t do it. Family often doesn’t do it (family often puts you in the grave). Jobs don’t do it.

I had one friend fly in from China to help me keep my life in order. I had another friend make me send photos of every meal to make sure I was eating. And on and on.

You don’t need a lot of friends and you don’t need them forever. But they work.

 

F) Throw everything out

This only worked for me. It might not work for anyone else.

And, to be honest, perhaps throwing everything out was more a response than a cure.

But I threw everything out: clothes, furniture, computers, diplomas, manuscripts of books I’ve written but never published, old photos of parents, coats, TVs, games, 1000s of comic books, and on and on. Maybe 80-100 garbage bags worth I either threw out, gave away, or donated.

People ask me: did this give you a sense of freedom?

Life never changes in a lightning bolt like that.

I just simply like it that way. I feel like I’ve disappeared in plain sight. There is no object that can define me.

 

G) Get help

I see a therapist. She’s maybe the smartest person I know. She’s so smart I thought she was Jewish but it turns out she isn’t.

She takes every situation I have and says, “Imagine if this were your daughter telling you this – what would you say to her?”

Or, “Imagine if someone treated you that way in a business deal. What would your response be?”

BAM! I can see things differently.

The only problem with therapy: it’s like you have this one disease that lasts forever.

So I try to be very tactical. This is my therapy strategy:

A) I have problem X
B) She’s seen problem X 1000 times
C) Find out from her what the average good response is to problem X
D) If I have no problem X, I don’t see her.

 

H) Take huge bowel movements every day

People always want to say things like: pray to God. Or: have faith in a universal power.

I get that. We all want to trust in The Force. Me too.

But that is hypothetical.

If you have a huge bowel movement every day you are IMMEDIATELY making your life better. If you can have more than one, even better.

Google what a good a bowel movement looks like. There’s a museum in Pittsburgh I once went to that showed the difference between a good one and a bad one. So now I check: good or bad?

Try it, don’t deny it.

 

I) Make mistakes

I’ve made mistakes this year. People mistakes. Maybe my writing suffered for a little bit. Maybe my work.

I don’t know. But you won’t be at 100% of your game after an injury. I had to give myself time to recover. Which I did.

I’m a pretty open, transparent person in my writing. But i only write about myself. I never write about others. I’ll write anything bad about myself. I don’t care.

Like one mistake I’ve made: I said “yes” to speak at a bunch of conferences and then I simply didn’t show up. I got too stressed to leave NY.

I asked Stephen Dubner, who I was doing a podcast with, why he thought I was too scared to travel.

He said, “Travel is stress. And you probably don’t want to add any more stress to your life so you think you can travel but at the last minute it probably physically feels overwhelming to you.”

Well…maybe. But it was bad that I would just cancel (or not even show up) at the last minute.

So I asked my therapist. She said, “Say ‘no’ right now to all the personal travel. But say ‘yes’ and start going to all the business-related travel.”

And so I did. And now my life is better. Curate your yes-es.

 

J) Do nothing

Sometimes you can’t fix a problem.

I’ve spent maybe at least 10% of my life trying to fix problems that have no solution.

A problem should be an arrow, not a stop sign.

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BAM!

Ten things.

Oh shoot, I have one more thing that was absolutely critical. Laugh every day no matter what. Watch YouTube or do whatever. Laugh.

CHECK!

 

Related post: The One Skill I Kept Practicing To Save My Life

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Tollbooth Collector, Happiness Creator, Renaissance Man!

Dear God,

I collect money at a tollbooth on the New Jersey turnpike.

It’s one of the most popular roads in the world. It takes people from their nice homes into the most important city in the planet.

I help make it happen. They can’t get into the city without first passing me.

I can read books. I can daydream. I am outdoors all day. I can jump to conclusions. And I can be beautiful in my mirror.

I can sit and watch the sun rise. I also see the outline of the city all day long. It’s beautiful. I love being out in nature.

There are regulars who pass me. They slow down for a second or two while their EZ Pass registers with my computer and they say, “Have a great day!”

I am told “Have a great day!” almost 200 times a day. I usually smile and say, “You too!” and I wave back.

“Have a great day!” …. “You too!”

When I am home, I forget about work completely. I never think about it. I can enjoy everything I do without thinking about work. It’s great to kiss without thinking about work.

People say, “Do something with passion!”

I say, “Do everything with passion!”

At night, when I close my eyes and go to sleep, I’m happy. Nobody has to tell me to be happy or sad. I can do it on my own.

We all pay a toll every extra day we spend on this planet. Once you stop paying that toll, it’s all over. I am a tollbooth collector.

At parties, when people ask me what I do, I say the truth: I open up the world for business every single morning.

– James

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Related Reading: Why Today Is The Day You Have To Reinvent Yourself

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Ep. 184: Robert Cialdini – The 7 Techniques To Influence Anyone Of Anything

If I can tell my children to read one post of mine, it would be this post.

Influence is how they will navigate a world of uncertainty.

Robert Cialdini is the most influential person in the world. And by that I mean, he wrote the book, “Influence”, which sold 3 million copies and defines the six critical aspects of all influence.

Now he has a new book, “Pre-Suasion“, going 10x deeper into the concepts of persuasion. I got him on my podcast so I can ask the 1,000 questions I have.

Small story from the book: If you name a restaurant “Studio 97” instead of “Studio 17” people are more likely to tip higher.

If you ask a girl for her phone number outside a flower store (triggering feelings of romance), she is more likely to give it to you than if you ask her outside a motorcycle store.

And 500 other stories. The environment is just as important as what you say.

Before the podcast began, I gave him a book as a gift: “The Anxiety of Influence”, a history of poetry.

What would poetry have to do with influence and marketing?

In all art, since the beginning of time, artists have built on the work of the artists the generation before them.

Beethoven depended on a Mozart to be a Beethoven. Picasso depended on a Cezanne. Without Michelson, there would be no Einstein.

But poets, for some reason, would deny being influenced. “I never even read Ezra Pound,” shouted one poet at a critic. Poets want to be seen as original.

Nobody is 100% original. This is the anxiety of influence.

Almost all of our decisions and even creativity are outsourced to the people around us who influence us: peers, teachers, religion, parents, bosses, etc.

Our personality is our own particular mishmash of influences.

How we deal with that anxiety, how we recognize the influences, learn from them, build from them, is the birth of all of our creativity.

Let me summarize the seven aspects of influence:

1. Reciprocity – if you give someone a Christmas card they will want to return the favor
2. Likability – make yourself trustworthy. For instance, outline the negatives of dealing with you.
3. Consistency – ask someone for a favor. Now they will say to themselves, “I am the type of person who does James a favor.”
4. Social Proof – if you are trying to get someone to do X, show them that “a lot of your peers do X.” For instance, if you are at a bar and you are a guy trying to meet women, being your women friends and not your guy friends with you.
5. Authority – “four out of five dentists say..”
6. Scarcity – “only 100 iPhones left at this store!”
7. Unity – you and I are the same because: location, values, religion, etc.

I’ve used each of the above in business. They work. They will make you money.

The entire purpose of language is to influence. We are not strong animals. We are weak. The language of influence saved us.

Probably a word like, “Run!” was the first word spoken. A word of influence. And it worked. I’m still running from the things I fear.

So speak to influence. Don’t speak to call a flower yellow. Speak to breathe spirit into an idea, to be enthusiastic, to convey emotion, to influence. This is the only way to have impact with your unique creativity.

I gave Robert the book as a gift (“reciprocity”), assuming we would have a great podcast. And we did.

But then I thought later, I can’t even remember how Robert got on my podcast. I highly recommended his book in the podcast and even in this post.

As he got into his car after the podcast in order to go to his next interview, I started thinking, “Hmmm, who influenced who?”

 

Links and Resources:

• Read Robert’s new book, “Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade“
• Read his New York Times business bestseller book, “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition“
• Visit his website: influenceatwork.com
• Follow Robert on Facebook, Twitter & YouTube

 

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Ep. 183: Jenny Blake – Pivot: The Difference Between Making Millions and Failure…

I had to stop trying to get ahead.

There are 8 million people in New York City. And 7 billion in the world. That’s 875 New York Cities.

You can’t get ahead. Information is compounding. Technology is growing exponentially. Nothing is predictable—except maybe your expectations.

But not your success.

I used to complain. Now I pivot.

“There is no try,” Yoda says. Hans Solo didn’t believe he could use the force. Trying is just a form of doubt.

“Do or do not,” he said.

When I was 23, I tried figuring out how long it would take me to make a million dollars. I just bought computer. It was the first thing I bought with “hard-earned money.”

Fast forward 25 years and I’ve thrown all my stuff away.

And I’ve stopped trying to get ahead.

I want an F in effort. And an A in not giving a shit.

I’m writing because I’m writing. Not because I’m trying to write.

People make this mistake all the time. If you say, “James, what can I do to help you?” you’re doing two things right and one thing horribly wrong.

Right: you’re good-intentioned (maybe) and you’re not hurting anyone (again, maybe). But here’s where you’re wrong…

And I’ve done this before too.

I’ve tried to be a good boss, a good employee, a good investor, but for all the wrong reasons.

There’s only one good reason: you want to provide value.

If you don’t want to add value, you’re not helping. You’re hurting.

Growing up, when my family argued, I’d ask, “Can I say something?”

“Will it help?” my father would say.

I didn’t answer.

Offering ideas is not valuable. You have to give the “how.” Say what you’re going to do and list the steps. That’s where your idea list comes in.

I’ve started and ran more than 20 businesses. And I can tell you one thing for sure: when I did it for money, I failed 100% of the time.

Here’s the test… before you do anything, ask yourself this one question: “Do I want to add value?”

---

“That’s how I got Mark Cuban to come on my podcast,” I said.

Jenny Blake started a podcast. She came on my show to ask what works. And what doesn’t. It would be brilliant strategy… Except it’s not a strategy. It’s genuine.

And that’s why it works.

She asked to interview me and provide value to you. Jenny’s an ex-Googler. I wrote a blurb for her book, “Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One.”  So did Cal Newport, Seth Godin and a few people I owe return emails to.

I wrote, “To pivot well is the difference between millions and failure. Former Googler and entrepreneur Jenny Blake (one of my favorite human beings) dissects the pivot, how to do it, and how to do it right.”

I can’t tell you the right way to pivot. I’ll leave that to Jenny. I went on her podcast as a guest host.

And she came on mine to dissect my brain. Reorganize it, and give you all the milk.

Listen now to learn how I make money, keep it and grow it [12:39], how I got Mark Cuban on the podcast [41:48] and more…

• the exact steps I’m taking to pivot in my career right now [6:09]
• if and when it’s the right time to pivot [8:29]
• How I currently make money and diversify my portfolio [13:53]
• How to do what you love everyday [16:16]
• The 9 experiments I did before creating a stockpickr.com, which sold for $10 million [19:50]
• The best and worst way to network [38:38]
• What my day-to-day looks like [47:39]

 

 

 

Links and Resources:

• Read her newly released book, “Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One” by Jenny Blake
• Visit her website: pivotmethod.com
• Listen to her PIVOT podcast and her recent interview with James here.
• Follow Jenny on Facebook, Twitter, & Instagram.

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Why You Should Not Buy Most Of My Books

Books suck. I can’t believe anyone would write a book. I go in the bookstore and there are about 10,000 books. Who reads them?

I will tell you. Nobody. I have rarely seen anyone read a book. People do it in hiding. Like in the bathroom.

And then I read about the National Book Award winners. Average number of books sold per nominee: 3,000. Practically nothing for the books that people consider the best.

Let me tell you…

My first book: “Trade Like a Hedge Fund” – don’t buy it. It’s out of date. I give 20 or so techniques for trading the market.

The techniques were all modeled out via software I had written. I programmed software that let me “question” the history of the market and get answers.

Like, “What happens when Microsoft stock goes down five days in a row? Is it statistically likely to go up on the sixth day?”

What a great piece of software. I traded the market for years based on that software and it worked. It was like an ATM machine.

Then I wrote the book and all the techniques stopped working. So it’s out of date. Even the idea of writing software like that is out of date. There’s much better software out there.

---

My second book: “Trade Like Warren Buffett” – is not so bad. It’s OK. The top Wall Street Journal reporter who covered Buffett at the time told me that Buffett thought it was the best book ever written about him.

It was about how all the other books about Buffett were wrong. He’s not a value investor at all. I describe what he’s really like.

But….out of date now. The stock market has changed. Buffett evolves every few years like everyone else. So my book is historically interesting for a period of Buffett’s life but won’t do anyone any good right now.

---

My third book: “SuperCash“, should be burned. If there were book burnings, SuperCash should be on the top of the pile.

By the way, this is when I wrote about investing. I no longer write about that.

I hate all of those books.

In SuperCash, talk about “alternative” ways of investing. Like buying art. Or buying credit card debt. Holy s***t. DO NOT buy that book.

---

My fourth book was OK. I will tell you why it was OK. Because in the middle I made a crossword puzzle. Have you ever seen an investing book with a crossword puzzle in it?

I had been solving crossword puzzles for about a year at that point. So, I figured, I’d make one.

BAM! Great idea for a book. That book, “The Forever Portfolio” sold 299 copies according to Bookscan.

I begged the publisher not to release it. It was December, 2008. The middle of the worst financial crisis in 80 years.

“Nobody wants to hear about buying stocks forever when the market is being sold off EVERY SINGLE DAY.”

It’s too late, the publisher told me, it’s in the catalog.

The 300 people who bought the book are very lucky. The stocks in the book are up huge. But now it’s out of date. I mean, I know the book says “Forever” but nothing is forever.

---

My fifth book: “The Wall Street Journal Guide to the Apocalypse” is so bad I haven’t even read it. They made me get a ghost writer because my prior book sold so poorly.

But the ghostwriter, god rest his soul, took my ideas, twisted them around, and wrote a pretty standard boring investing book. At least, I think he did. Like I said, I haven’t read it. Maybe it is a classic.

---

Then something happened to me. My kids bought me a scooter for Father’s Day.

I rode it down the street and on the very first ride I hit a pothole and did a somersault in the air and landed on my head in the street.

My kids started running after me, “Daddy!” They were worried.

I felt like lying there for awhile so I didn’t at first respond. Then I peeled myself off the ground. I was scarred all over, even my face.

“I’m fine,” I said.

But when I was lying there on the ground, I decided I didn’t want to write any more books on investing.

People don’t need another investing book.

I wanted to write a book (or more) that helped me figure out how to find meaning in my life. A book I could actually use instead of just vomit out onto the page.

And I wrote some more books.

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The first three were self-published. As in, I made a file, I made a cover, and I hit publish, and I had a book.

That’s not the proper way to self-publish. And the books were OK. But not great. At the very least, they were honest.

• “How to be the Luckiest Person Alive“
• “I Was Blind But Now I See” and
• “FAQ ME” – which is a compilation of answers I extended based on questions asked me on twitter.

I like that third one. It’s the only book where I put a picture of me on the cover. Hence, it’s probably my worst-selling self-published book.

I needed to treat self-publishing as if it were not just a business, but a successful business.

So then I went BIG.

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I went out of pocket. I hired a book designer, an interior designer, three editors, a marketing company, and I had very experienced editors help me with every stop of the process.

The result, “Choose Yourself” has now sold over 600,000 copies. A few weeks ago it was #1 for all non-fiction on Amazon. This was three years after it was first published.

The book is about how to find meaning in your life so you can best help others, including yourself.

How the world has changed to not only make it possible to choose yourself (and help others to do the same) but that it is inevitable that you will have to choose yourself.

How choosing yourself is the most un-selfish thing you can do if you want to help the people around you. If you want to find meaning in your life.

I believe in that book. I love it. I read it the other day and thought, “Man, I used to be a good writer.”

I then took all the more autobiographical stories that didn’t fit into that book and made another book, “The Choose Yourself Stories“. I love that book also but it didn’t do as well.

I then focused the ‘choose yourself’ ideas on money to write “The Choose Yourself Guide to Wealth” which I like a lot.

And then so many people were confusing “choosing yourself’ with quitting your job and becoming an entrepreneur that I wrote “The Rich Employee” to describe how you can choose yourself as an entrepreneur.

Along the way I wrote a small book as an experiment, “The Autobiography of Prince George“. I signed it with the name “John Kenneth Rowling”. It’s funny. I like it.

I have two more books coming out in the next few months that I hope you will like. “Reinvent Yourself” – about how we are constantly in a process of reinvention. At least, I hope I am.

And a children’s book: “My Daddy Owns All of Outer Space” illustrated by my friend, the talented cartoonist, Molly Hahn. What I love about this book is it’s based on a true story.

Like anyone, I have to reinvent myself. Just like I did when I stopped writing BS finance books and going on BS financial TV.

I want to write different things and try out different ways to be creative. People say, “Oh, I don’t have time to be creative.”

Sometimes it feels like there is no time. I run a few businesses. I have lots of responsibilities. Sometimes too many. I feel overwhelmed by them all.

I need to be even more of a minimalist to cut down on my responsibilities.

If you keep doing things the way you’ve always been doing them, then your results will always be the same.

You have to shake things up. Which is why reinvention happens in small steps every day if done correctly.

Like today, I’ve decided to get out of my comfort zone. I’m going to sleep on the other side of the bed. To hell with it.

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