Tuesday, February 27, 2018

10 Reasons You Have To Quit Your Day Job

Then he said, “Don’t quit your day job”.

This is supposed to be a funny way of saying, “You shouldn’t get out of your comfort zone. You shouldn’t try to better yourself. You shouldn’t strive for more. Don’t try to be rich.”

This is supposed to be a cruel way of saying, “Let other people be great. You stick with your job.”

So many people simmer with chronic despair, stuck in a job for five years, 20, 30, and they think they are too late.

But you aren’t. You never were. And you aren’t now.

We are here to explore. We are here to be curious. Not to argue at a 9:15 meeting. Not to cry in your cubicle.

This is what a job really is:

You are being paid MONEY in exchange for your UNHAPPINESS.

It’s a price on your unhappiness. Not your services. You decide what that price is.

Or you can take the red pill.

Some things I realized about a day job:

A) MONEY IS NOT A REWARD.

Money is a ceiling. It’s a bribe to stop you before you reach your potential as a human.

“Take this money so you can do what we want you to do and not what you want to do. Money is compensation for less happiness.”

And then they put in a false rewards system. A promotion. A raise. The false praise of a boss who has been a veteran prisoner only a few years more than you’ve been.

I get it. We need money. I need money. But…

The money is there to delay you from living your life’s potential.

B) FRIENDS DON’T LIKE YOU

I had a cubicle at my job. Depending on how close your cubicle was to mine, that usually meant you were a better friend.

Cubicle mates are forced friends. When cubicles are moved, I’d often lose touch. And when I left the job, I lost touch with everyone.

Now I had new friends.

If a friend got promoted, I’d get jealous. Maybe they got an office instead of a cubicle. Often that was the end of the friendship.

And where were my real friends? I don’t know. I was too busy with my forced friends to find real ones.

C) YOU SOLD YOUR DREAM

Nine to Five is a myth. It doesn’t start at 9. It doesn’t end at 5.

It’s 6am wake up. Shower, clean, breakfast, then commute. Then quick stop at the coffee cart. Then work by 8:45. First meeting of the day at 9:15.

Counting down the minutes to five. Commute (watching the men and women looking down to the muddy floor on a subway).

I want to tell stories. I want to create. I want to make stuff up.

The subway is the underground animal kingdom. A shadow of what hell might be like. Filled with mysterious strangers all inches from dangerous intimacy.

I would wonder almost every day: what if the Apocalypse happened right now, outside of the subway car, everyone dead except us travelers through this one cave of hell. What a coincidence we were here!

Now I’d have to spend the rest of my life only knowing them. Would that woman be my new wife? Would that man try to kill me or eat me? Suddenly the homeless man, practicing for this new reality for the prior 12 years, just went from the Omega male on the subway to the Alpha male.

I’d better be his friend.

Fantasy over, commute over, get dinner, now I have to relax and de-stress. Because the 9-5 is chronic stress on a “low simmer”. Nothing can quite get cooked but everything is hotter than comfortable. And it never stops.

Now it’s 8, or 9. My favorite show. Read a few pages of a book. Fall asleep.

Where did the time go? The time I had set aside to play. Where did I leave the sandbox? When?

D) THE MONEY IS FAKE

On one side is the money. On the other side is this month’s bills.

Like a junior high school dance, the boys and girls start on their own side of the gym. Then by middle of month they rush to meet each other. Hoping for one dance, maybe a feel, or a kiss, by the end.

And then it’s over. By the end of the month (because the US savings rate is 0) the dance begins again, the money and bills still anxious to meet. Afraid to touch.

For every dollar you make, 40% goes to taxes. At least 16% of those taxes goes to support wars. Or…somewhere…a bridge to nowhere.

30% on average goes to rent or mortgage. Some percentage might go towards student loans or credit card debt (100 million workers, $5 trillion in student loan debt or credit card debt equals a big % of monthly salary in interest payments).

Now: a tiny bit left for a few books. A Netflix subscription and Verizon payment plan. Maybe a few date nights. A suit. A car payment. One night of poker where you lose a little too much, too early in the evening. Throw some in the 401k which may go up or down. And if you live to 65 (or 59), you might get some of it back.

Nothing left over. The dream postponed one more month.

E) YOU’RE BEING HYPNOTIZED AND ROBBED

The “lowest rung” on the corporate ladder is actually the person who creates the product that is sent to the customer.

The lowest rungs do the work. The guy who makes the fries, makes all of McDonald’s profits.

I was the lowest rung at my first big corporate job. I had a boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss. Who then reported to a board of directors who reported to shareholders.

The shareholders have to make most of the money or they fire the CEO. The CEO makes a lot of money. And all the bosses in between me and him all made A LOT more than me.

But I’m the one who created value.

Out of every one dollar of value I created, I estimated I made about 1/10 of a penny in salary.

I call my mom and my dad. Did you enjoy your day at work?

Yes, I did, I say. I loved it.

Because I hated myself.

F) MILLIONAIRES DON’T HAVE JOBS

I’ve been rich and I’ve been broke.

Some years I’ve made my money from having a job. Some years from being an entrepreneur. Some years from being an investor. And some years I made no money at all (or lost it).

According the IRS, the average millionaire in the United States has at least five different sources of income.

I remind myself of this every day. No one source will control my net worth. Ever.

A job, which is basically from 6am (wakeup) to 9pm every day, is only one source of income. And pays you less than 1% of the value you create.

And you have no time for anything else.

Every successful investor/entrepreneur in the world knows that diversification, taking calculated chances, and having the time necessary to be creative and unique is the key to making enormous amounts of money.

Ideas are the currency of the 21st century.

Ideas are where you have no ceiling on what amount of money you can make.

If you have a job, you have only one source of income, you’re prevented from taking risks, and you have no time.

So you don’t get the key. And the door is never opened.

G) ZERO LOYALTY

“I was at GM for 40 years,” a man told me. “I was middle management. So I wasn’t making the big bucks of upper management. And I wasn’t protected by a union like the blue collar guys.

“The company went out of business. So I had no job, little savings, no union, and too old to get a new job.”

“What will you do?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. He laughed. “Nothing wrong with bagging groceries for awhile.”

H) WHAT HAPPENED TO THE LAUGHTER?

The average child laughs 300 times a day.
The average adult…5 times a day.

I don’t know why this is. I asked a therapist who works with hundreds of people. He said…responsibilities.

But why is it sad to have a family and a home and the bills to pay for the things you enjoy? It can’t be responsibilities.

It’s because when we were kids we loved to laugh. And at a regular job, the laughter is stripped away by meetings and bosses and office politics and drudgery work.

“Can you get this spreadsheet done by 2pm?”

I guess I have to.

I) JOBS ARE GOING AWAY

I don’t know. They say jobs are going up. But I don’t believe it.

I went to NYU one day and interviewed students about their student loans. But I ran into some recent graduates. One guy said, “I wish I hadn’t gotten the degree. Now I work in an eyeglass store selling glasses to pay off over $100,000 in loans. I majored in filmmaking.”

The next generation is being stripped of it’s hustle. It’s creativity. They are crushed into round pegs to fit the meaningless holes waiting for them.

There are real jobs out there. But they are getting fewer.

I look at my friends who are happiest. They have created their own jobs. If they wanted a TV show, they started a YouTube channel and grew it.

If they loved health, they made their training business scalable with videos and online courses and scaled it.

Even worse, you have to go to the bathroom next to your boss. Nothing is more disgusting and humiliating. But we think we have to take it.

Energy is about movement, curiousity, passion, love. Use it or lose it.

I need to move, Move, MOVE!

J) DON’T QUIT YOUR DAY JOB

I quit.

I had started a company on the side.

I built it up for 18 months while I still had my full time job. I had to learn so many things. Particularly how to sell a service and how to delegate some of the work I did.

I had to learn to balance a double-life. I had to work day and night for awhile.

Maybe I was too conservative. I was so scared to quit my job.

But I had my EVIL PLAN. I started my company, I built it up slowly, and finally I quit my day job when I felt ready.

Do you have your evil plan?

I’ve been sad. I’ve been scared. I’ve gained so many millions and then lost all of those millions and more.

I’ve met so many people on this path.

People who have taken different roads all of their lives and now flourish and survive in the universes they created for themselves. They chose themselves.

Choosing yourself is not about quitting your job. It’s about choosing your life. The universe you create for yourself.

I quit my day job.

It was horrible. It was blissful.

I never looked back.

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322 [Anniversary Episode] Yuval Noah Harari: A Brief History of the Future

I remember trying to get Yuval on my podcast. He lives in Israel. “Can we do it by phone?” he asked. “No” it has to be in person.

He was coming to NY a few weeks later.

I offered to go to any location. I needed to speak to this man. Because there are some people on the planet who lived, taught brilliant lessons and died.

I want to talk to so many of them. (Einstein, Darwin, Curie and the list goes into other categories, too. Comedians, revolutionists, movie stars).

I talked to Yuval. I met one of the people bringing us answers about our evolution and our existence.

Some mysteries are smaller now that I talked to him. Some are bigger…

Here’s what I learned from Yuval Noah Harari. My article on our podcast from just one year ago:

My ancestor from 70,000 years ago was smarter than me. He knew every plant, mushroom, animal, predator, prey in a several mile radius.

He knew how to make weapons. He knew how to capture something, make it edible. I can barely order delivery. And as far as weapons, they say “the pen is mightier than the sword” but I don’t think a tweet is.

My ancestor also knew how to adapt to new terrains, how to handle strangers who could be threats, how to learn who to trust and who not to trust. I wish I had his skills.

Not only that. Archaeological evidence says his brain was bigger than mine. And bigger is better.

To make things worse, another animal made the entire human race its slave. Wheat domesticated us. It forced us to stick around for the harvest, horde up for years when the harvest might be bad, go from a life of a diverse diet to basically all carbs all the time. And it turned us from hunters to farmers.

But it’s not all bad. And the news is actually very good. Probably the books I’ve recommended most in the past five years was “Sapiens” by Yuval Harari. And not only me: it’s Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg’s top recommendation.

And now Yuval has a new book, “Homo Deus” – i.e. where are humans heading? If Sapiens explored the last 70,000 years of human history, “Homo Deus” takes the trends into the future. What will happen next?

The answers are fascinating. And I had even more questions. I couldn’t believe I was finally talking to Yuval after reading “Sapiens” so many times and recommending it on every list and giving the book to all of my friends. And then finally reading “Homo Deus“.

What made humans the only animal to spread across the entire globe? What was special about us? How did we go hundreds of miles into empty water to find Australia for instance? I would never take that risk! And then survive and flourish in a completely new ecosystem, just like we did in North America.

“Fiction,” Yuval told me, and describes in his book. “We created elaborate fictions for ourselves: ‘nations’, ‘corporations’, ‘religion’, ‘crusades’, and perhaps the most successful fiction: ‘money’. So I could use a dollar and some stranger in China can use a dollar and we can trust each other enough to do a transaction.”

So what’s next? “Homo sapiens are going to evolve again.” Yuval said, “Technology is taking us there and technology is evolving much faster than we are.”

I still can’t believe I spoke to him. Five years ago I took his course on Coursera. I was thinking, “how did this guy get so smart?” And now I was talking to him.

And, like I said, the news was not bad.

Here’s what I learned:

1. The economy needs you to invest in yourself

“There’s a change in the nature of the economy from a material based economy to a knowledge-based economy. The main assets in the past were material like gold minds or wheat fields,” Yuval said. “These are the types of things you can conquer through violence.”

That’s how we got California. The US invaded and absorbed their wealth. But you can’t invade and absorb knowledge.

China isn’t going to take over Silicon Valley and absorb all the wealth. “Today, the main asset is knowledge,” he said.

The only good investment you can make for your future is the investment you make in yourself today.

Hone your idea muscle, build a network and a library of mentors, make a commitment to do one healthy thing a day. Because the health of your body impacts the health of your brain.

I try to improve 1% a day. That’s it. That’s how I invest in myself.

 

2. Explore Internal realities vs. External realities

Resources today are different. They’re abstract.

Yuval said, “The source of wealth in California today is knowledge, in the mind’s of engineers and technicians and CEOs. And you just cannot conquer it by force.”

That’s one of the reason’s why Yuval says, “You see a decline in international violence.”

The other reason: weapons are too powerful.

“Nuclear weapons have transformed war between superpowers,” he said. War today is “collective suicide, which is why we don’t have such wars since 1945.”

Terrorism is different. Their weapon is fear.  Yuval calls it “psychological menace.” But he’s really concerned about them in our future.

“Terrorists function by capturing our imagination, turning our imagination against us, and causing us to overreact,” he said.

“In a way, a terrorist is like a fly that tries to destroy a china shop. The fly is so small and weak. It cannot move even a single teacup. So how does a fly destroy a china shop? The fly finds a bull, gets into the ear of the bull and starts buzzing. The bull becomes so enraged that it loses its temper and destroys the china shop. This is what happened in the middle east over the last 15 years,” Yuval said.

“Al-Qaeda could never destroy Iraq by itself. It got into the ear of the United States and the United States went wild and destroyed the middle eastern china shop for Al-Qaeda. This is how terrorism functions. And if you want to fight terrorism you should start with your own imagination.”

For me, this means understanding that ideas are currency. Becoming an idea machine, writing ten ideas a day, so you get the new ‘weapons’ of Sapiens, is the key.

 

3. We’re going from “humanists” to “data-ists”

In 500 years we might not be dealing with humans at all.

Look at Amazon for example. They tell us what to buy. We don’t ask our friends. We ask data.

“Given the advances of bioengineering, brain-computer interfaces and so forth, I think it’s very likely that within a century or two homo sapiens will disappear and be replaced by a completely different kind of being,” Yuval said.

He says bioengineering is just one possibility. Another is we start connecting brains and computers to create cyborgs.

This isn’t science fiction. It’s already happening.

I’m sort of scared and sort of excited. We went from tribes to villages to cities to kingdoms to empires to “isms” to…data that will unite us.

The next step in our evolution. The final frontier.

 

Links and resources: 

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321: Jim Cramer – The Greatest Wealth Creator of All Time

I wrote about Jim Cramer in 2011. Here’s what I said:

The first time I met Cramer was on the set of his show “Mad Money”. The show hadn’t officially launched yet but he wanted to try out the idea of having guests on the dress rehearsals. I was the first guest. I did so poorly he immediately dashed the idea (at least initially) of having guests on the set. I wrote for thestreet.com for years. I sold a company, Stockpickr, to them. I probably did dozens of videos with Jim after that and got to know him quite a bit.

I was standing by a TV with Jim once and the ticker was running by at the bottom of the CNBC screen. He started doing a lightning round on every stock going by, telling why each stock was up or down a nickel, a penny, a whatever. He knew every earnings report, every news item that was relevant that day. He doesn’t know every stock, but he does know everything he needs to know for THAT DAY.  This doesn’t mean you should know everything about stocks. But whatever field I’ve been in I’ve always tried to know everything about the competition, the technology, the subtleties and the nuances of the field. Jim has dominated financial media for 20 years by doing this. Whenever I’ve invested in a private company, the most important criteria I have is that the CEO has the same kind of database of knowledge in their industry that Jim has in financial media (note: I say “media” and not just “stocks”).

If I’m up at 11pm, Jim’s on IM. If I’m up at 3am, Jim’s on IM. He’s in the office at 6. He works until his show, then he networks at dinners, etc. he doesn’t waste a moment. You can’t ask him to lunch or coffee. He’ll ignore you. He only does what he needs to do to make his show better. He’s fully aware that he is competing with everyone else in media. So if he can fit in an extra 10 hours of work a day (which is my guess on how much more he works per day than the average human) then that’s an extra 3600 hours a year he’s working more than you or me. Because he works every weekend. I know this because of all the weekends I’d be getting emails from him asking questions about different stocks he was preparing for his shows that upcoming week.  Tim Ferriss is famous for working “The Four Hour Work Week” as exemplified by his blog and book. That’s one lifestyle and many people prefer that. Jim is the opposite. He wants to be better than everyone else in his business and to not relax for 100 hours a week while everyone passes him by. I think he would go crazy if he only worked a four hour week. Jim should write a book “The 120 Hour Work Week”.

Jim figured out early on what he wanted to show up for. I think this is both a blessing and a curse. He agreed. He’s been doing this for decades. 2 decades. 20+ years.  

“Can you believe it,” he said.

He gave up the money management business, so he could write everyday.

Just like me. And he loves it. He mentions so many things he likes about his job.

“I love stocks and this is the best way to love them, what I do now,” Jim said.

The public’s interest is his interest.

“My ethos has always been the same, which is that stocks are the greatest wealth creator of all time,” he said.

I wanted to know if he was happy after all these years.

Did he still love his job as much as when he started?

I wanted to know if he was addicted to staying relevant.

He told me his wife asks him this same question day after day.

Are you always going to want to work this hard?

Jim told me about his father who died this past November.

He was 92 years old and he literally worked till the day he died.

He sold boxes and bags to retailers and doggie bags to restaurants.  

He died in November and had a huge month in October.

“And that’s me,” Jim said as he laughed to himself.

His Dad was really happy when he died. And he was happy because he worked.

Jim has this same mentality.

He told me this, “As long as I enjoy it, I’m gonna keep doing it.”

His wife asked him, “What happens when you stop enjoying it?”.

“Then I’ll pivot,” he said.

I’m going to remember this when I start to feel like I’m not happy or enjoying the work I do.

You should too.

 

Links and Resources

 

Also Mentioned

  • My podcast interview with Dr. Oz: The #1 Health Guru in America
  • “Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company” by Andrew S. Grove

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Friday, February 23, 2018

Do You Want To Have Money or Impact?

One of the most famous people on television was on my podcast. I asked him, “Are you addicted to being relevant?”

He had to think about it. He had sacrificed relationships, time with family, rest time for himself, all in the name of what he did, which helps maybe millions. Or maybe not. Who knows?

“I think so,” he said, “But I don’t know what to do about it.”

For awhile I felt sorry for him. But also scared for myself. I’m an addict. I want to be relevant. I want to have an impact.

Does it require sacrifice? Does it require money?

Am I screwed?

I tell people who want to learn to write better to check out a site called Quora.

It’s a Q&A site. Anyone can ask a question, anyone can answer. Everyone from Barak Obama to famous authors to astronauts, to super-athletes, to every day people (well…me!) have answered questions on the site.

I’ve had over 200,000,000 views on my answers (not just on the site but when I’ve syndicated those answers to other sites and even books).

200,000,000 views.

Tens of thousands of shares. Hundreds of thousands of “up votes” showing me how many people valued those questions. How much those answers helped them.

And I got paid…$0.

I’ve maybe spent a year of my life, 2%+ of my life, answering questions on Quora.

For nothing.

But also, for everything.

Impact.

Phillip Morris, or any cigarette company, makes a product that the packaging says causes cancer.

I’m not accusing any company of anything. Clearly some people love smoking. A billion people love smoking.

Phillip Morris made $10 BILLION in profits last year.

SURGEON GENERALS’S WARNING:
Cigarettes cause Lung Cancer..
Empysema…
Heart Disease…
Fetal Injury…

On and on.

I’m glad my name is not “Phillip Morris”.

I don’t need $10,000,000,000. This moment I am the happiest I’ve ever been in my life.

Money is a tool to create impact. It allows me (sometimes) to transfer value I see in my head, to value I can create.

But I can create value and impact and relevance in other ways. Money is the lowest tool. And it’s never more than a tool. It’s never the way, the method, and never necessary.

I know people who live to accumulate. And it’s a cliche to say, but they end up dead with a full bank account, not realizing they died many years earlier.

I was the walking dead for at least 15 years on my quest for money. I was dying for money. I lost friends, family, and lost my sense of self.

I got addicted to anti-anxiety medication. I destroyed my relationships with some of those closest to me. I cried. A lot.

I had to rebuild.

My misery was on simmer the entire time. I was in simmering chronic misery without realizing. Because I always felt: money is not the tool of freedom, it’s the tool that creates freedom.

I was wrong. I’m still paying for being wrong. I have trauma all over my brain and gut. I still have anxiety.

I still have to fight making fear decisions so I can make growth decisions (and every decision is one or the other).

But, as they say, one day at a time.

Another way they say it, be present right now.

And another way, with anxiety you can either
1) solve it.
2) be scared.
3) have faith that the right actions and faith, will give us the love to care for ourselves, to have the impact we desire, to attract the people we love, to create, to surrender, to succeed.

I choose the the third way.

Energy is the currency of Mastery.

A) Physical self-care. Eat/Move/Sleep. Food, exercise, and sleep is the currency of energy.

B) Emotional self-care. My friends have saved my life. Every day I have problems. I have 99 problems. I have 999 problems. I call my friends. I call people I love. They call me. We figure it out. We move forward.

Your family might be your friends. But we all share 99.999% of our DNA. We’re all family. Pick the right people to be in your SCENE. This is your family. Boundaries around the rest.

The rest will suck the oxygen out of the room. Will destroy your energy.

C) Creative self-care.

I want to be 1% better every day at being an Idea Machine.

Most ideas are bad. Most execution is worse. Most goals are useless. Most dreams should not be pursued.

Being 1% better every day at creativity, when compounded every day, is 3700% better every year.

In ONE YEAR your will be voice authentic, sincere, inspirational, and will stand out amongst the noise.

Creativity turns your vibration, that exists for such a short period of time on this planet, in this universe…turns your message from static to signal.

I want to be signal.

D) Spiritual self-care.

Our brains are the tools of apes and lizards.

Whatever you believe in doesn’t matter. But every day I try to wake up confused.

Where am I?

I pretend I’m an alien who just landed on this planet. A new planet every day. And now I have to figure out where I am. What to do. Who to help?

I have a mission. I have to figure it out. I have to execute on it.

Clear my head. Deep breath. Wiggle my toes. What is the mission?

I have to surrender to the fact that I don’t know, but that faith and surrender and ACTION will guide me to that mission.

I want to say Mission Accomplished before I close my eyes at night, ready to be transported to another galaxy, another dimension of exploration.

Abundance is doing the above. For me. I don’t know about anyone else.

Learning how to wield money as a tool that works for us instead of a source of fear and anxiety.

Learning how to use love as a tool for abundance rather than as a tool for scarcity:

(“the party is where I’m at” versus “I hope they like me”).

Not being afraid to be honest. To ask for help. To say what I mean. I AM afraid. But I get better.

Every day giving back. Giving back is how abundance is planted.

Every day I asked my daughters, “who did you help today?”

Find your “scene”. I had to find my Justice League.

Superman never needs money. He needs his friends.

Together you and I are explorers.

But this is the exploration where – all things added up and subtracted and divided and multiplied – we are equal.

Hug me.

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Thursday, February 22, 2018

320 – Steve Scott: How to Make $40K a Month Writing From Your Couch

I was looking on Amazon. Because I had just self-published a new book. I was proud.

So I “refreshed” the ratings every hour.

I kept seeing the same name hit #1 for days, then weeks, then months. Now it’s been years! He still hits #1.

So I had him on my podcast in 2014. It was episode 23 “How To Go From $0-$40,000 a Month Writing From Home”.

And the episode exploded.

This guy has written 70+ books under two names “Steve Scott” and “S.J. Scott.”

Each book brings in at least a dollar every month.

“It’s the 80/20 rule,” he said. “Where 80% of your profit comes from 20% of your product.”

He’s created a lifelong, evergreen, income machine.

I had him back on my podcast. “How much did you make last month?” I said?

“$52,000”

“Last month?”

“Last month.”

Then I jumped in with questions.

  • HOW does some actually get to the top of Amazon’s best seller list?
  • HOW can someone listening, right now, get their first idea for a successful book?
  • HOW do you write? (This one seems basic, but it’s not. What are the writing habits? How do you create discipline? Do you outline? Or not outline?)

 

We go through all of the mechanics. It’s probably the most action packed interview I’ve ever done.

Because it’s not just the philosophy of writing a good book or finding your soul.

It’s action. It’s etc. It’s how to generate income.

Scott makes 30, 40, 50 thousand dollars A MONTH!

I brought him back again to give us more help and more inspiration. Because if you didn’t act last time he came on the podcast, that’s okay. You can act now.

Links and Resources

Also Mentioned

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Wednesday, February 21, 2018

The Steve Martin Technique For Choosing Himself

Steve Martin was sick of it.

He was performing in front of sold-out stadiums. But nobody wanted him and everyone forgot him.

The reason: he was opening up for others. For The Carpenters, Toto, and others. He had to be CHOSEN BY them.

It was THEIR crowd coming to the stadiums. It was THEIR crowd waiting patiently for Martin to finish his act. And it was their crowd that quickly forgot him.

But…sold out stadiums!

Doesn’t matter. It’s good “practice”. But it didn’t do anything else for him. It didn’t build his audience (“platform” in today’s social media language).

So he “chose himself”.

He made HIMSELF the headliner instead of the opener that nobody knew.

How?

He began renting smaller venues. And filing it up with his small but growing number of fans.

His skills improved even faster, with feedback from an audience that loved him. He started getting bigger and bigger venues.

Soon HE was renting out stadiums and filling them up. And the entire audience was there for just Steve Martin.

Then he quit.

This wasn’t a new idea:

Shakespeare owned part of the theater production company that produced almost all of his plays.

Charlie Chaplin started the film company, United Artists, in 1919 to have complete control over his movies.

Lucille Ball refused CBS’s demand that she use a different actor than her husband Desi Arnaz to play her husband in “I Love Lucy”. They didn’t think Americans wanted a Cuban born main character.

So they took their show on the road, it was a huge hit across America, and CBS relented. “I Love Lucy” is the most influential sitcom in history.

They took it one step further: They started DesilLu Productions to produce their own ideas. One of those ideas: a little known show at the time called “Star Trek”.

I lied.

I said Steve Martin quit. What I meant was: he quit doing standup-comedy. He wanted to write and act and keep learning. Like we all should.

But nobody would give him a starring role. Nobody!

So he wrote a movie, “The Jerk” , and would only let it be produced if HE played the starring role. He didn’t wait to audition for a role in someone else’s movie. HE WROTE the movie!

Paramount passed, in part, because of this. Universal picked it up, Carl Reiner directed and it’s now considered one of the funniest films ever made.

Steve Martin’s goal when writing the script: have at least one laugh on every page of the script.

He didn’t quit. He chose himself further.

I’m not Steve Martin, or Shakespeare, or anyone. Sometimes I think I’m mediocre at lots of things. But I get passionate about many ideas.

And whenever I sense there’s a gatekeeper getting in the way of something I want to do, all I obsess on is how I can get around the gatekeeper.

This doesn’t mean own your own studio (YouTube can also bypass the studios). This doesn’t mean own the venue (see below). This doesn’t mean go on the road and build an audience. Although it could mean all of these things.

I wanted to publish a book I didn’t think anyone else would publish. So I did create a publishing company to do it.

I wanted to write newsletters to educate people and the Wall St Journal said “no” in 2009. So I created my own newsletter company in 2015.

I wanted to do standup comedy 3-6 nights a week. So I… (this I’ll save for another story).

Process is art.

Getting a “TV show” or “a million dollars” or whatever, is an outcome. But the process is now critical for the art and the success. Gatekeepers can’t create your success. Only you can.

This past year has been the most pleasurable year of my life. And I hope this next year will be good for you and me both. You and I are the same.

When you and I are stuck: let’s get un-stuck.

Book recommendations:

POSTSCRIPT:

If you are reading this the day I’m writing it (Wednesday, Feb 21)

I’m taking over the event space at the bar “Ferns” on 1st Ave and 10th St tonight at 7:30pm. Drinks on me. Comedy on me. No tickets. Just fun.

It’s going to be standing room only but I plan on doing “pop up comedy” at some venue every month.

The Steve Martin Technique

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Monday, February 19, 2018

319 – Cheryl Richardson:

 

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318 – Paul Mecurio: Scary, But Not Impossible… Leaving the Job You Hate for the One You’d Love

Wait! Before I say “comedian.” Let me tell you who Paul Mecurio really is. He’s a transformer. A true reinventor.

He started out at as a lawyer on Wall Street.

Because it was logical.

And he got used to making 2, 3… 4 million dollars a year (after bonuses vested). It was hard to give it up… at first.

“I was a grown man who still wanted someone to tell me what to do,” he said.

But he still made little efforts. And those efforts add up.

Overtime Paul stopped taking notes in meetings. “I had a passworded folder on my computer,” he said. “I was making observations and writing jokes.”

And then one day he got a chance to meet Jay Leno.

“How did you distinguish yourself?” I said. “Because everyone says, ‘I’m a big fan.’ So how did you stand out?”

“There was a private function. They had this big, fancy openhouse and Jay Leno was the private entertainment. I couldn’t go. I had hours of work.”

He wasn’t going to go! He had to be convinced. He goes.

“I’m putting my coat on. I’m standing over my keyboard… and I say, ‘F— it.’ And hit print.”

15 pages of jokes stream out of his computer.

And he goes to see Jay Leno.

This is where the naivety comes in. Paul went from being near the top of one hierarchy to the bottom on another. He doesn’t know the right move. And he’s not thinking about it, either.

He hands Leno the pack of jokes. “I don’t know if you need jokes,” he said, “But I’m never going to use these. So you can have them.”

“Aren’t you going to put your name and number on this so I can reach you?” Jay Leno said.

Two days later, he gets a call… and one week later, his joke gets aired on “The Tonight Show.”

Before this, no one knew about his dream. Not even his girlfriend of 8 or 9 years (now wife).

He was living a double life. If the senior partners knew what he was doing, they wouldn’t tolerate it. He’d be out. Immediately.

This was a gamble.

But it was worth it…

“I went and bought a bottle of champagne. And Jay Leno did my joke. I popped the champagne, and my head blew off my f—ing shoulders.”

“Here’s this box that I watched my whole life since I was 4. And my words came out of that box. That was way more compelling than sitting across from T. Boone Pickens or being part of a team negotiating a merger deal worth billions of dollars that’s on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.”

He saw his dream in front of him. And now, he needed to figure out how to escape.

Then his dad died.

“I thought that was a sign from God,” he said. “I’d go run the family business.”

He kept putting God in air quotes.

“I didn’t want to make the decision. So I talked myself into believing that “God” made the decision for me and that I HAD to do this… Which I didn’t. But I was looking for a life raft and I grabbed on to that.”

It takes years and sometimes lifetimes to choose yourself. Cause no one could really say, ‘Okay, good I’m gonna drown.’

It’s scary to jump out of the safety net. He would’ve had to go from the investment banking world to dirty dive bars and open mics is hard.

So he took just the first step. And that’s the best anyone can do.

He left the “approved” path of being a lawyer for another “approved” path (running his dad’s business).

And eventually, it drove him crazy.

“I was more scared, more confused. I didn’t know where I belonged. But I couldn’t stay. So I moved.”

Back to New York.

(And part time in Boston, too. Because Boston’s good for comedy. Gary Gulman was there, Steve Sweeney, Don Gavin. A lot of the greats.)

The story of how he picks himself up is really remarkable. I’ll tell you more in a second. But it’s all in this podcast. And I think you’ll see yourself in this story, too.

I did.

I read Paul his credits.

He’s been on Jay Leno, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show. He has his own podcast. He’s interviewed Paul McCartney, Bryan Cranston, Sugar Ray Leonard, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stephen Colbert and me!

I really wanted to know what lead him to DO all this. (The podcasting, the comedy, the acting, the filmmaking). And not just think about this…

He said he didn’t know. But I don’t think that’s true.

It was just something that lived inside of him. And he acted on it little by little.

That’s the magic of doing.

 

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Thursday, February 15, 2018

318 – Annie Duke: The Fastest Way to Become an Expert at Anything

In chess there’s this saying, only the good players are lucky.

Unfortunately, you can’t always think you’re a genius just because you win.

And you can’t always blame it on luck or other people when you lose.

Yet it’s our natural evolutionary behavior.

This idea applies to EVERYTHING.

Business. Comedy. Chess. Writing.

If you want to become an expert at anything, this is important.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers” he talks about the 10,000 Hour Rule. Basically, if you want to become an expert at anything, it’s going to take 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert.

I think there’s a hack to that rule.  

Annie Duke believes it may not be sufficient enough.

For Annie, 10,000 hours is not a guarantee to becoming an expert at your field.

“When we’ve won we tend to not go back and examine,” Annie said, “I know that I did well, but could I have done even better? Could I have tweaked it? Could I have maximized a little bit more than I actually did? I think it makes us feel like we’re not getting to bask in the glow of the good feeling from ‘look how well I did, I’m so successful and smart and right.’”

I wondered why.

It’s hard to learn when you win, I think.  

It’s a hot potato whether you win or lose. You can’t hold on to either for too long.

And learning from the good moments is particularly difficult.

So how efficiently are you learning?

Think about it.

What are you doing right now to get yourself closer to being an expert?

“In order to become an expert you actually have to be a really good learner at whatever it is,” Annie said.

How do you become a good learner?

For me, I started interviewing every comedian I could find to learn the microskills of stand up. I’ve been learning from some of the best. Many who’ve been doing comedy for over 20 years.

Annie had the invaluable benefit of being plugged in with her brother’s already established poker community. She was surrounding herself with the best poker players in the world at the time.

“They had rules about how you communicated within that, that forced you to either get out or have an open mind,” Annie said.

It’s the community hack.

It’s the plus, minus, equal approach to learning.

“I was really lucky in my poker career to have all three,” Annie said.

Annie started teaching.

And her game changed dramatically.

She explained something interesting to me.

When you’re teaching someone, you have to explain. You try to help someone understand the strategies or concepts or tactics that you deem necessary to your craft.  

“If you can’t coherently describe this to another human being, it’s a really good sign that maybe what you’re doing isn’t the best,” Annie said.

Or that you don’t fully understand it, which means you probably can’t defend what you’re doing.

So we have to redefine what it means to win as to LEARN.

We need to start to embrace the uncertainty.

I challenge you to start saying I don’t know.

If you’re willing to embrace uncertainty, be more open minded and build a community, the faster you’re going to learn.

And the fewer hours you’re going to need in order to gain the expertise.

This is the 10,000 Hour Hack.

And how anyone can apply it to their lives right now.

 

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Monday, February 12, 2018

317 – Amy Koppleman: My Divorce

People kept asking me, “What happened?” My listeners asked. My readers, my friends, people I haven’t worked with or talked to in years.

I wasn’t ready to answer. And then I had Amy Koppelman on my podcast (this is 2 years ago).

She could tell… I wasn’t okay. And she helped me. “Take a picture of your food,” she said. “I want to see that you’re eating.”

I was going through the worst time of my life. I was getting divorced. And I didn’t get better for a while. Maybe some of the residue is still there.

Amy came back on my podcast. And this time, we talked about my divorce…

“You didn’t think you deserved anything,” she said.

“Why do you think that? What’s the path I was going on?” I asked.

I wanted to understand what was happening to me. I became a minimalist. I got rid of everything I owned. I was moving from Airbnb to Airbnb.

“You stopped being a human being,” she said. “And I think it’s because you didn’t think you deserved even a couch.”

I don’t know if that’s true.

It could be.

I think getting to know ourselves is a lot harder than we think. Because nothing can be rationalized. Our brains are irrational machines.

But I can’t help but wonder the same thing…

What happened?

 

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Sunday, February 11, 2018

316 – Aaron Berg:

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Monday, February 5, 2018

314: Anniversary Episode: Sara Blakely – How to Get a Billion Dollar Idea

I wrote this article exactly 1 year ago. And sometimes I re-read it… to remind myself of everything Sara Blakely taught me.

She’s a self-made billionaire. She’s the founder and creator of Spanx.

All of her advice (learned directly from DOING) is still impacting me today. Some people are inspirations for life. Sara is one of those people.

Sara Blakely is weird. I wish I could think like she does. I want to be weird like her.

“I look at any object and try to think of any use it has other than what people had planned for it.”

And then she acts on it. She sees a pair of pantyhose, cuts off the feet (why not?) and creates a multi-billion dollar company, Spanx.

She sees her 9 month pregnant belly and paints a basketball on it. And then inspires hundreds of other women to do the same. Creates a book out of it: The Belly Art Project, and donates the proceeds to charity.

“All my life I was taught how to deal with failure,” she told me. “My dad would ask us at the dinner table every night: how did you fail today?”

HOW DID YOU FAIL TODAY?

She got comfortable with failure at an age when every other kid wants to get an A+ at everything.

She got comfortable embarrassing herself. For two years she tried to be a standup comedian. “I wasn’t very good at it.”

Practice embarrassing yourself…

Ready. Fire. Aim.

She got a huge order from Nieman Marcus even though she didn’t have the inventory or the production ready.

She said, “YES!”. Then she figured out how to get the order filled.

Oprah listed Spanx as one of her “favorite things” of 2000. Oprah wanted to film her office. Sara had no office.

She said, “YES!”. Then she got an office and filled it up with people.

Say YES! Then make things happen. Don’t argue yourself into failure.

Excuses are easy. Saying “yes” and then executing is hard.

Get your thinking time.

“It takes me five minutes to drive to work,” she told me. “But I take 45 minutes. I use that time to think.”

It’s important to think. To be creative every day.

This is how she comes up with non-stop ideas to expand her brand, expand her products, and work on other projects.

I suspect this is the secret for how she always sees things differently. Being creative is a practice. It’s not lightening from above.

It’s taking the long route when you could’ve taken the short route.

Purpose = Infectious salesmanship.

While I was talking to Sara she used the word “empower” several times.

Spanx clothes gives women more confidence. Empowers women. The Belly Art Project empowers pregnant women.

It seems like there are three parts to a project that leads to master salesmanship.

– the higher purpose for it. This gets people excited.
– the actual product and its benefits.
– execution

Combine all three and people will get infected with your passion for your ideas. Sara was unstoppable.

Don’t volley.

Don’t engage with the people who want to argue with you. That’s time wasted when you can be creative.

Don’t invite ego in the door.

Once you’ve worked on your project, have passion for it, started it, be willing to take suggestions and listen to people.

Ego can kill a project and close the door on good opportunities.

Be aware of you mortality.

Sara was selling fax machines for five years before fully launching Spanx.

She could still be selling them if she never started.

If she listened to all the people who tried to dissuade her.

If she became afraid of the multi-billion dollar companies that could have easily squashed her. Except they didn’t. She was one person and they were billions. But they lost.

We are here only this precious small amount of time. Make every moment a work of art. Make every moment move you one step forward towards your dream and purpose.

Invent a new undergarment even if you had never made clothes in your life.

Get 100s of women to paint their pregnant bellies and then raise money for charity with the idea.

“EVERYTHING IS A CANVAS,” she told me.

Which makes everyone a potential artist. What a great way to look at life.

But I can’t!

Why not?

For anything you want to do, for anything that excites you, take the time to figure out the next step. Ready. Fire. Aim.

Just why not? Why not?

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Friday, February 2, 2018

314 – Kevin Allocca:

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313 – Dr. Oz:

Dr. Oz. He sounds like a superhero, right?

In some ways, I feel like he is actually a superhero.

I love his philosophy of connecting the patient directly with the resources to help themselves.

He’s removing the gatekeeper.

And he’s bringing us back to our roots.

I think over the past hundred years there’s been a separation between food being something we eat as opposed to food as fuel.

Food as medicine and as the way our body lives, thinks, grows and fights for our health.

I just turned 50. And I feel like I’m in the best health of my life.

And this is because I changed my nutrition and the foods I eat.

I felt lucky because when I was reading Dr. Oz’s newest book, “Food Can Fix It: The Superfood Switch to Fight Fat, Defy Aging and Eat Your Way Healthy”, I kept seeing all the same practices I do in my own life.

Some things I don’t do. But I do most of it.

I switched my diet to a lot of the things he recommends.

So I was so excited to have him on the podcast.  

This information is so valuable. And I think society has forgotten these simple steps and routines to give your body the nutrition and fuel it needs.

“Over the last decade there’s been a gargantuan advance in the ability of science to tell you why your mom was right. To underline and emphasize why certain foods make a big difference to pain, depression, mental cognition, your heart, cancer risk and all these other things including your weight that historically we thought were true, but didn’t know why,” Dr. Oz said.

Science is proving food is medicine.

Dr. Oz and I discuss better brain function, energy, sugar and daily routines.

And once you start to adopt these practices, you’ll definitely notice a difference.

But like I always say to change a habit, you need to give it 21 days.

“You begin to appreciate the majesty of the body, how spectacularly it functions when it’s given the right kinds of nutrients then you begin to appreciate the power of food to fix it.”

So let’s start fixing.

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