Don’t Buy a Home!

The worst decision I ever made was buying a home. Or two.

Not only that, but for reasons I describe below, real estate is going down. 

When I ask people why they buy a home they give me several reasons:

A) It’s a great investment. In the long run it will be your retirement savings.

B) It’s roots for your family.

C) You’re throwing away money when you rent.

Let me respond to each:

A) “IT’S A GREAT INVESTMENT!”

Imagine an investment where you put up most of your savings, if not all.

Then you borrow 400% more to pay for the rest of it

Then you spend another 50-100% to fix it.

Then every year you spend more than you thought you would on maintenance (hence the cliche “a house is a money pit”).

Unless you are an expert on house maintenance, it will always cost more per year than you thought.

Then you spend a good chunk on interest payments.

Not only that, the “investment” is not liquid. Meaning, you can’t sell it in a day like a stock, or take money out of it like a checking account.

In fact, when you MOST need the money, like in a recession, the house is unsellable.

So, the fact that it is “illiquid” means you should make more on this investment than a comparable risk investment that is “liquid” like the stock market.

These are all the qualities of a HORRIBLE investment.

But this is exactly what people do when they buy a house. EXACTLY!

You have to GET PAID for any additional risk you take.

If one investment is illiquid and another is liquid, then the illiquid investment should historically earn more.

The Case-Shiller Housing Price Index has returned 3.7% between 1928 and 2013. The stock market has returned an annualized 9.5%.

Let’s pick another time period: 1975-2013. A $100 investment in a home would have returned $100. A $100 in the stock market would have returned $1,600.

This does not include the interest rates you pay. 30 year rates right now are 4%.

If you borrow $100,000 to buy a house, you aren’t paying $100,000. Over 30 years, you’re paying an additional $234,000 in interest payments.

So your net return is probably close to zero or negative.

And, of course, this does not count maintenance, or property taxes, which could be up to another 4% per year.

This cash is “flushed” down the toilet when you BUY a house. Because you can’t use that cash for anything else for years or decades.

That is called “opportunity cost”:

• The cash you put down
• Your interest payments
• Your maintenance costs

Your property taxes.

This can be put in the stock market, or private investments, or you can take courses that can improve your skills, allowing you to make more money, etc.

Or you can have cash in the bank. Peace of mind is an investment.

B) “ROOTS!”

I lived for four years only in Airbnbs. I had no belongings. I just moved from one stranger’s place to another.

Over and over. I saw how many other people lived. I had no roots. I felt like I barely existed. I liked that feeling.

I called a friend of mine. She said, “You need to now get an apartment. Women are going to think you are creepy.” She was right. I got an apartment.

I LOVE my apartment but it’s a rental.

I have two years left on my rental agreement but eventually I might be forced to find a new place when I don’t want to. This would not happen if I owned.

I have no roots. And I now have five kids (three step-kids).

And yet… each month I pay 1/2,000th of the cost of buying (when I factor interest, taxes, maintenance). So renting is nothing compared to the cost of buying.

But I have no “roots.”

And yes, most other people don’t either.

The average ownership of a home is 11 years. As families grow, they need bigger places. And when kids are out of the house, families often downsize.

So the “roots” argument is B.S. for the average person.

C) ”THROWING MONEY AWAY ON RENT!”

1) When I rent a house I just need to pay by month.

2) To buy the same place I live now I’d have to put 3.5 years of rent payments down as a MINIMUM “down payment.”

For me, personally, I like to have cash in the bank for the inevitable ups and downs in the economic cycle.

When you absolutely NEED that money (i.e., in a recession), you can’t sell and you can’t borrow. You CAN’T get the money back.

I like to sleep at night.

3) Property taxes + maintenance + mortgage usually equals rent.

In fact, unless the owner is a housing expert (rare), it’s cheaper to rent than pay property taxes + maintenance + mortgage.

Renting = more cash in bank = more sleep.

SUMMARY: 

If you know what you’re doing, buy a home.

But you have to know A LOT to get this right as both an investment AND/OR a lifestyle choice for 20+ years.

DATA: Real estate is also about to go down.

Do this: In your area, look for a chart of “days on the market” for the average home up for sale in your state.

In almost every area of the U.S., that number had been going down for years (i.e., it was easy to sell).

Now, in 2019, it’s going up. Fast!

Meaning, it’s taking longer and longer for houses to sell.

Just like 2006.

BUT BUT BUT…

I DO BUY REAL ESTATE.

What? Didn’t you just say it’s the worst?

Yes.

I own three apartments in Panama, one in Brazil, and one in Mexico.

What the…? What about everything you just said?

I own because I GET AN UNFAIR ADVANTAGE.

The key to any investment, any entrepreneurship, any step outside the comfort zone, is to remove risk as much as possible.

The key to any investment is to ask yourself, “Why me?”

Why am I getting a deal that the other several hundred million people in the U.S. are not getting?

You have to EARN an unfair advantage.

You have to work for it. If you say, “Housing always goes up,” then you are gambling. If you say, “Demand in Chicago is going up so I’m going to buy a house here,” then you are guessing and gambling.

You have no real advantage.

For me, I have a very specific real estate strategy that I’ve worked hard for.

(Note: This is not a recommendation. This is MY strategy but might not work for you. Find your own strategy!) 

I look for:

• Countries that are growing but real estate hasn’t yet grown as fast
  
• Apartment complexes still being built so prices will go up faster than my interest payments once the project is finished
• Developers with proven track records over decades of finishing development projects, even in bad economic cycles
• Places where being an American helps (many projects want American buyers so that locals will be more enticed into buying. Usually that means I can negotiate an “American” price — i.e., cheaper than locals).

I have connections that help me find this situation. People who have worked on building their own network over decades.

For any investment, of money OR TIME, figure out your unfair advantage.

If you’re going to write a book, what unique thing do you have to say? It has to be 10x unique. Not 10% unique. Else nobody cares.

If you’re going to start a company, what about you makes this the only company in the world that does what it does?

If you buy a stock, what do you know, and why, that nobody else does?

If you want to buy a house, for instance, buy a house with one of the four Ds: Death, Debt, Disease, Divorce.

If you put in the work to find a house where someone just died so the estate wants to sell the house cheap to pay off death taxes, then you can get a good deal.

If you put in the work to look at tax rolls and see who is in debt to the government, then you can get a good deal.

That’s an example of you removing risk to get a good deal.

The only advantages are “unfair.”

—

TL;DR:

Don’t buy a house.

 

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Persuasion 101 for Fun and Profit

This is what happened. The guy got a $10 million offer for his business, which was a mental health facility for teenage drug addicts.

He had nothing in the bank. “Should I take it?” he asked me. 

Maybe I’d  own a small part of the mental health facility.

I said, “Don’t take $10 million. Let me sell your mental health facility.”

I had no idea, not the slightest clue, how I would sell a mental health business. I knew nothing about mental health.

How to run a mental health facility (for dummies): 

The key is beds. Everyone needs a bed. Buy a lot of beds.

You buy an abandoned hotel. You get it licensed so that the state government sends over teenage drug addicts to sleep in your beds.

The more beds, the more teenage kids they send over. There is an endless supply of teenage drug addicts.

It cost us $30 a night to maintain a bed. We charged the government $150 a night.

Buy another abandoned hotel. Repeat.

How do you get the licensing? Donate a lot of money to people running for governor.

You will get very busy. Buy more beds. Save more lives.

—

We called 40 companies that could be buyers.

Six of them wanted followup calls.

Three companies came over to have meetings.

One company made an offer. A big hospital chain that had lots of beds but wanted more. Beds = $$$$

$41 million in cash. Hooray!

—

“I changed my mind. I don’t want to sell,” the CEO told me a week later. “If we’re worth $41 million now, we’ll be worth $60 million next year.”

He was smoking his own crack.

“You were worth just $10 million just two months ago! I got you the $41 million.”

“I don’t want to sell,” he said.

Pigs get fat. Hogs get slaughtered.

I called his wife, who was very beautiful and 20 years younger than the CEO and worked for the company.

“What did you do today at work?”

She said, “A patient got upset and so she shat on the floor and then, with her hands, spread it all over the walls. I had to clean it.”

“You cleaned shit off walls?”

“All day,” she said.

“What if that same girl killed herself?”

“We’d probably go out of business. The state wouldn’t send us over any patients until they had done a year-long investigation.”

“Do you know your husband doesn’t want to sell for $41 million anymore? You have zero in the bank right now and you clean shit off walls. He wants to wait a year,” I said.

“You could be cleaning shit off the walls for a long time,” I said and got off the phone.

She had work to do.

—

An hour later the husband called back. “We’ll take it.”

Fast forward a month: We were in a lawyer’s conference room. We all were just sitting there joking around but everyone was nervous.

The CEO kept reloading his bank account info on the computer.

“There it is,” he said. He had $0 a few seconds earlier. Now he had $41 million cash.

Everyone laughed and high-fived. He may or may not have written me a check.

In the next few months, the new company fired him and closed down the company. Teenage addicts went to other beds.

As for me, I lost touch with the CEO and his wife.

I may or may not have lost all the money a few months later.

I was busy getting shit done.

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The Power of Terror and How You Can Use It

The woman stood up and shouted to me onstage, and to the audience, “OK, OK! Enough is enough! I am leaving.”

I was being heckled.

Nobody should do standup comedy. I don’t know why I torture myself. It’s the worst.

This particular incident was about two years ago. Maybe the first time I did standup was in 2014.

Dealing with a heckler is one skill among about 40 you have to learn.

But this is not about comedy.

Since starting to do standup:

– I have gotten better at podcasting. I have gotten better at sales. I’ve gotten better at listening.

– I’ve gotten better in high stakes moments like going on TV.

– I’ve even gotten better at making money.

One skill you develop is to look at any situation and notice what is wrong or ridiculous about it. There’s no B.S. Business has a lot of B.S. Business is FULL OF B.S.

But two years ago I was terrified to be heckled. I’m a people pleaser.

That particular evening I had made some jokes about abortion (“It’s OK for the first 27 months”).

I had made some jokes about my daughter being “slightly below average” (I’m sick of every parent who has to point out that their kid is “above average”).

And then I made a joke about Hitler.

Specifically, my daughter wanted to “find her passion.” And I started describing other people who wanted to find their passion.

Like Hitler.

His passion was to be an artist. A famous painter.

Then look what happened. He grew that “stupid, f***ing mustache and ruined it for the rest of us who maybe would’ve rocked that look.”

“OK. OK! Enough is enough! I am leaving!”.

Uh-oh. What do I do?

One thing saved me.

Airplane turbulence.

—

I had been horribly afraid of flying. PANIC!

Any turbulence and my brain would FLIP OUT!

I was going to die!

But I solved it.

Whenever turbulence starts on a plane, I close my eyes and I start to pray.

Not for safety. Not for a smooth ride.

I pray that the plane WILL CRASH. Will split in half that moment 30,000 feet in the air.

I pray that the crashed plane lands on the island from the TV show Lost.

I watched the series finale in 2009 with my friend Tim Sykes and our then-girlfriends. Everyone hated it.

You know that your country is doing well if the main news the next day is that everyone “lost their shit” over the Lost finale.

I LOVED the finale. I loved everything about the show.

I’ve watched the entire series three times. Hundreds of hours wasted. I’m fine with that. Because it completely cured me of my obsessive, irrational fear of flying.

When there’s turbulence, I pray for the plane to crash and that I will wake up on the sandy beach of the island from Lost. Just like the show started in the series premiere many years earlier.

Jack and Kate and Hurley will be my friends. I’ll have faith in the island.

I’ll experience the magic and mystery and adventure of the island.

When I pray that the plane crashes, a sort of miracle happens. I actually start to love the turbulence. I want MORE turbulence. I LOVE the turbulence.

This is now how I deal with terrifying situations when I am onstage. Or, more importantly, in business.

If I’m the one guy that INCREASES the terror on purpose, then I win.

And yes, “winning” is important.

93% of communication is non-verbal. The audience is an X-ray machine.

They can see: Is it fear? Is it confidence? Is it “I don’t care”?

Only one person at a time in any situation can “control the frame.”

The person on the stage or members of the audience. If you lose the frame, you’ve lost.

Fear — or lack of confidence — of “trying new things” or being surprised will make you lose frame.

In every argument between a married couple, it’s a battle to see who will control the frame.

Sherrod Small, a comedian, gave me the advice, “Adults don’t want to see other adults trying things.” Don’t look like you are trying.

The heckler was in the center of the room and got up. She was upset. “Enough is enough!” The room wasn’t crowded to begin with.

Everyone stopped laughing. She was ruining it for me. I should mention — she had a German accent.

—

I said, “So wait. A German is telling me, a Jew, that I can’t say something about Hitler. Didn’t we already deal with this in 1940?”

Some laughter. I was in control again. And that got enough of the frame back for me to survive for the next five minutes.

But I hated it.

And now I love it.

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When Did Social “Networks” Turn Into Social “Media”?

I miss my Facebook friends.

They used to be so nice. I’d “like” old photos of weddings I never attended. I’d think, “Wow, Dave’s got a book out,” or “Man, my old crush has seven kids.”

Now everyone’s sitting in their suburban air-conditioned homes with their Ivy League diplomas on the wall typing out, “Anyone who believes X like you should go to jail! BLOCKED!”

Every comment generates another five cents for the Facebook Mothership.

Facebook loves it when we are angry and fighting. Every Facebook argument thread can buy Mark Zuckerberg another cup of coffee.

Does Michael Jordan ever leave YouTube comments arguing on a video about “gun control”?

I don’t know. But so far twice today I had to stop myself from responding to an angry comment from a total stranger.

Where are my “Facebook friends”?

—

If a person tells me their opinion on one topic, I can guess their opinion on 50 other topics.

I know what opinion ghetto they live in. We’ve carved up society into opinion ghettos.

I try to do an exercise. I ask: Where is the gray area?

Are there questions with no answers? It’s OK to not have an answer.

Examples:

GUNS:

Guns are bad. Yes. Guns kill people. Even kids. Even babies. But if someone is attacking my kid and I have a gun, should I shoot the attacker?

WAR:

War is bad. Going to another country and killing baby civilians is horrific. Who gave the U.S. the right to be the world’s police?

But what if another country is committing genocide on its citizens? What if there are real bad guys? Should we do something?

TAXES:

Who creates more value with money: the government or an individual?

The government is known for enormous waste. And for being persuaded into corrupt behavior by lobbyists.

An individual can use extra money to start companies, invest in others, and create jobs that increase the productivity of society which, in the long run, reduces income inequality.

BUT taxes also help the government help the people who, for many many reasons, might be incapable of helping themselves.

—

This quote is from a newspaper article written in 1922 in Soviet Russia.

“We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. It is not necessary to look for evidence proving that the accused opposed the Soviets by action. The first question you should ask is what class does he belong to, what is his origin, his education and his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused.”

1922 Soviet Russa = 2019 Facebook.

In other words: “Old white guys are guilty.” (A quote I read yesterday from a smart, intelligent person I respect.)

“The patriarchy is guilty.” (Another quote.)

It doesn’t matter what charity they give to. How many jobs they create.

What inventions they produced that have helped the lives of millions. What medicines they developed in their laboratories.

It doesn’t matter who each individual person is.

They are guilty for not living in your opinion ghetto.

I am guilty.

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What Is the Correct Way to Live Your Life?

Is it bad I wanted to have sex with my real estate agent?

It was 1999. I had a ton of money for the first time in my life and I wanted to buy an amazing apartment.

Just a year earlier, I had $0. I had college debt. But I was happy with zero. Every day was an adventure.

Then I sold a company. And my troubles began.

Nancy, the real estate agent, would show me huge apartments and it would just be the two of us standing in the apartments, while she convinced me to buy Buy BUY.

What would stop us? I was getting excited. Nobody was there but us. She had the only keys.

But I didn’t. We didn’t.

She showed me all the apartments where I had previously thought all my life “only rich people live here.”

I was jealous of them. Now I was one of them.

I could live there!

I could live in a fancy apartment facing Central Park. I could live in The Dakota, just like Steve Jobs and John Lennon once did.

I could live facing Gramercy Park and have a key to the park.

I could live in a 5,000-square-foot loft in Tribeca.

If I could make it here, I could make it anywhere, I thought. And I was so wrong.

The Tribeca loft was three blocks from the World Trade Center. It had 20-foot ceilings. It was a penthouse and we had the roof.

“Location!” Nancy told me as we stood on the roof.

If I could make it here… if I could make it here… and… I made it here!

But I was nervous.

Nancy kept saying about the Tribeca apartment: “Tribeca is moving up! And Manhattan is an island. Prices will never go down.”

I was scared to spend so much money.

I actually asked Nancy, “What if a plane hits the World Trade Center? What if terrorists attacked?”

She said to me, and I will never forget it:

“James, you can’t live your life that way.”

***

Two years later I was eating at Dean & Deluca on the first floor of the World Trade Center with my business partner Dan.

Then we started walking to my home office in my new Tribeca loft.

I had bought it and built it from scratch. It took a year to build.

I built a two story bookcase with a ladder to reach the top layers of books. I built a gym. Two offices.

We were walking home on Church Street after that breakfast. Like we always did.

Dan said to me, “Is the president coming into town?”

He pointed at a plane that seemed to be coming in low and fast. “Is that Air Force One?”

Everyone on the street ducked! Even though it was 500 feet high we could feel the air swoosh above us.

We watched the plane fly right into the World Trade Center. BOOM!

For a few seconds you could see a tail sticking out of the building. A sight that was not seen on TV later.

That tail, the last part of the plane to melt, only existed a few seconds longer.

The building looked jagged right where the plane hit. Like a baby with scissors erratically cutting through a piece of paper.

As opposed to everyone who watched it later on TV, we had just seen a plane crash with our own eyes.

I was in immediate denial. Even though it was 8:45 a.m. I said right away, “Nobody died. It’s too early for anyone to be in the building.”

Dan was yelling. “What about the plane? We’re under attack!”

I said, “The plane was on remote control. Nobody was probably in it.”

Sometimes your mind has no ability to process what you saw so you make stuff up.

I made stuff up.

We watched as little birds flapped in odd ways, like bats, as they escaped off the top of the World Trade Center where they had been perched, smoke billowing around them.

Only later did we find out they were humans jumping off.

***

Fast forward. An hour? Two hours? I was standing on the roof of my apartment.

During the few months prior to this, I was very busy going broke. It takes a lot of work to spend and lose $1 million a week but I had a certain talent.

I was scared. Was the world over? The second plane had crashed. Then the Pentagon. The world was afraid at this point.

Dan and I had gone to the fire department and said, “Can we help?” And they said, “Here, get in these fire suits!”

We said, “We’re not firemen but can we help anyway?”

They said, “No! Only firemen.”

Every one from that fire station was dead within the next hour.

We went home. Many people came to the apartment and when the electricity and TV went off I climbed up to the roof to see what was going on.

There was a huge rumbling. Like a roar from a god coming to warn us.

The building was shaking. I didn’t know then if our building was crumbling but I was riveted to what I was watching.

The World Trade Center was collapsing in front of me. It just simply turned into a ball of black dust that started off in heaven and collapsed to the ground.

Then, everything still shaking, the black dust headed straight towards my building.

I went downstairs. My daughter had peed on the floor. Everyone was crying. The black dust surrounded the apartment.

We stayed up all night taking turns listening to the radio to see what other buildings near us were collapsing.

I confess, with the World Trade Center collapsing, killing thousands, I was obsessed with the value of my apartment collapsing.

It’s all over for me, I thought. I should have lived my life that way.

You can’t control where your mind would go: We’re never going to sell this huge, stupid, apartment. This excess that I never needed, never would want again.

I couldn’t help it. Now I was officially broke after working so hard for so many years. What a foolish man!

I wasn’t a hero. Or a good person. I was just pathetic and lost.

—

“James, you can’t live your life that way,” Nancy had told me two years earlier.

What if you’re paranoid and mostly right? Maybe you SHOULD live your life that way.

Or should you live your life with optimism and faith and courage?

Assume that, no matter what happens, you will figure out how to make things work out for the best.

It almost seems like a joke to me now that Nancy said that then.

We ended up losing everything on the house. And whoever lives in it now has made an enormous amount of money.

I wished then I had lived my life “that way.” I begged any god that would listen to please please turn back the clock so I could live life that way.

Lived a simple life. A small life. A predictable life. A life without challenge. A life in the comfort zone.

Now… so many stories later… I am not so sure.

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What Is the Best Writing Advice You Have Received?

I was thrown out of graduate school because I thought women would only like me if I published a novel.

So every day, starting in 1990, I wrote 3,000 words a day. I’d go up to girls in bars and ask if I could read to them. 100% of them would say no. Or laugh in my face.

I sucked.

29 years later I don’t miss a day of writing. Which is a shame because that’s a lot of time I could have spent with my kids, my ex-wives, my parents, my friends.

I was delusional and I was mostly a loser. I got 1000s of rejection letters and still do. But I’ve also published 21 books (starting after 13 years of writing), some bestsellers.

Today I’m trying to improve more than ever. The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.

I suck more than ever.

And during that time, many people gave me advice.

 

A) DON’T HIT PUBLISH UNLESS YOU ARE AFRAID

If you are not afraid of what you are about to produce in the world, then chances are it’s been said or written before.

When you take chances, even if they don’t work out, you are starting to build your real voice.

B) EVERYTHING IS CONTENT

In 2001, I lost all of my money. In 2008, I lost all of my money. In 2004. In 2012.

In 1993, I visited a friend of mine in jail. In 1995 I started a company and hated it. In 1999, I started another one and lost everyone’s money, including one of my investors, a young man named Yasser Arafat.

In 2005, Bernie Madoff rejected a business idea of mine.

Last week, I eloped.

In 2003, I was obsessively trying to figure out how to kill myself without hurting myself after I got a letter from the IRS saying I hadn’t paid taxes in 17 years and now they wanted to meet me.

Yesterday, I bought a suitcase filled with Iraqi dinars from 2000 with Saddam Hussein’s face on them, that was smuggled out of Iraq in 2007.

 

In 1989, I blacked out drunk on the sidewalk in the middle of the night and woke up to someone peeing on me.

In 2008, I blacked out in an intersection in New York City with oncoming traffic in the middle of the night while it was raining.

In 2015, I was heckled while doing standup comedy and making too many obscene jokes about my mother, sex, my kids, and Auschwitz.

In 2004, my dad had a stroke after I had hung up on him six months earlier and refused all his calls until then. He died without me ever speaking to him again.

You have to live life to write about life.

C) TELL A STORY

Victor Frankl was taken by the Nazis to Auschwitz. His wife, his parents, his siblings were taken to different concentration camps and every day he wondered what was happening to them.

He used to stare at the fence enclosing the camp, imagining he saw his wife on the other side. This kept him going each day. The hope that he would see his wife again.

He would see other prisoners so despondent, they were either going to kill themselves or get killed.

He would whisper in their ears, giving them reasons to find some meaning in their lives so they would have hope for another day.

Eventually he got out of the concentration camps. He never saw his wife again. Or his parents. They had all been killed by the Nazis.

But he wrote about the importance of finding meaning in life.

He didn’t write advice: “Find meaning in life!”

In Man’s Search for Meaning, he told his story of being in the concentration camps and how his personal search for meaning kept him alive. Kept other prisoners alive.

The book is riveting. Or, I should say, the first half is because that is where he tells his story. The second half, his theory of “logotherapy,” is so boring I stopped reading.

He told his story and that’s how he made his point.

Every time you want to rant, or pontificate, think of a story to tell first. The more personal, the better.

 

D) THE JESUS EFFECT

Jesus was preaching all around Israel and gaining followers. But when he went to his hometown of Nazareth, they all laughed. “You are just the carpenter’s son!”

He had to leave town.

Don’t take it personally.

When you start doing something, you suck, and everyone around you knows it. They are all laughing at you.

In modern life, if you grow your skills at a job, you often have to switch jobs in order to get the salary you deserve. Everyone knows you as “the mailroom guy” or however you started.

Do not bother with the people who laugh. After even ONE YEAR of improving at anything, you are 99% better than the rest of the world at that activity.

Keep improving, but replace the people who are rejecting you.

 

E) SUCCESS = SKILL + PERSISTENCE + PRIOR SUCCESS

Anne Rice was suicidal after her first book wasn’t published. Then her five-year-old daughter died of leukemia and she became even more depressed.

But leukemia made her think of diseases of the blood (“everything is content”). Within five weeks she wrote Interview with a Vampire.

It got rejected by many publishers. Then she got a small advance and it was published.

She had the skill and she learned the additional skill of persistence (not an easy skill).

Then after it became a bestseller, it was not skill that got her her next major book deals or movie deals — it was the success of her first book.

Skill alone will not get you success.

FOCUSING ON PROCESS: building skill, building persistence, notching up small successes that will lead to bigger ones, will get you bigger successes.

If you focus on outcomes, you’ll fail. Anne Rice only failed when she focused too much on that first rejection.

ONLY focus on process.

 

F) TAKE OUT THE FIRST PARAGRAPH AND THE LAST PARAGRAPH

Even knowing this rule, it will work. Write your piece. Then take out the first paragraph and last paragraph. I will guarantee you the piece is better.

G) OBVIOUS STUFF: READ EVERY DAY. WRITE EVERY DAY.

I cheated. I’d pretend to work all day but I took an easy job so I only had to work 15 minutes a week (software).

Then I would lock the door and read all day.

Read only stuff you LOVE. Then you will start to emulate those writers. They will be your virtual mentors.

At the time I read books by Denis Johnson, Charles Bukowski, Hemingway, Lorrie Moore, Mary Gaitskill, Tama Janowitz, Margaret Atwood, and hundreds more.

Then I would write 3,000 words a day.

You have to learn to put two words together. This is hard and you can only do it with practice.

It’s like a sport. Michael Jordan was shooting 1,000 baskets a day before 9 in the morning. If you are a beginner, practice. If you are the best in the world, practice.

H) ARC OF THE HERO

I was thrown out of graduate school and had no money or job prospects. All of my writing was getting rejected.

1000s of rejections but I met more and more writers.

First I was writing articles, then books. Then bestselling books.

Each step of the way, the more chances I took, the more people hated me. Articles and reviews constantly trashed me. Sometimes I felt really hurt by this. I can’t help it.

Then I found other outlets for my writing. My podcasts gave me content. Public speaking was a way to improve my writing. Even performing standup comedy improved my writing.

I don’t know if I’m giving good writing advice but this is what I experienced in the past 30 years.

I always ask myself: Am I the hero of my story?

Or did I give up? Did I quit? And I’m just a minor character in someone else’s story.

This is the arc of the hero. The hero’s journey:

• Go from the ORDINARY WORLD to the EXTRAORDINARY. I was thrown out of grad school to try for something extraordinary in my life.
• Find your mentors and your colleagues who will grow with you. I moved to NYC to work at HBO and met a whole new world of creatives.
• You have bigger and bigger problems. First I got small pieces published at HBO. Then I got paid for articles. Then I got paid for books. Then I switched categories and had even greater success.
• Fight the biggest battle of all. For me, the people who seem to hate me for no reason. This is a tough battle. Also, the gatekeepers, the people who will say no to me. I always try to figure my way around them (self-publish, publish for other journals, publish a newsletter to subscribers, write a screenplay to get more known, etc).
• Return home with the knowledge (e.g. writing this answer).

And then… REPEAT… because the hero’s journey should never end.

Every book, every article, even every paragraph should have the skeleton of the arc of the hero in it.

I) SURPRISE, VULNERABILITY, F-K SCORE

I combine these three for no real reason.

In Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel Black Orchid, the hero is trapped by the evil villain in the first page. He aims a gun at her.

At this point, EVERY READER expected her to escape.

I mean, the book is named after her! She has to escape. Right?

The villain shoots and kills her. In the first two pages.

This blew my mind. This kept me reading. Always do something to keep someone reading the next sentence.

 

Vulnerability. Don’t be afraid to make yourself look bad. My most popular articles were about how I lost all my money, and all of everyone else’s money (including Yasser Arafat) in 2000.

Or how I lost relationships by being a jerk. Or how I was heckled for telling obscene jokes one night at standup comedy.

F-K Score. Google that. It’s the grade level you are writing at.

NEVER write above a 6th grade level. Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, one of the greatest written books ever, was written at a fourth grade level.

J) NEVER USE ONE EXTRA WORD

After I write an article, or a chapter, I make sure I cut at least 30% out.

K) TAKE A SHIT BEFORE YOU WRITE.

Clear the body, clear the brain.

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10 Things You Can Do With Zero Talent Or Skill

I couldn’t get out of bed. I’d try to play with my kids. I’d try to read. To learn! Anything. Any f***ing thing. Nothing. Ugh.

“Kids always make you happier!” Everyone would lie to me. What a piece of BS that is.

When I saw my kids I would think, “They just lost their shot at happiness because I’m such a horrible dad, provider, person.”

I couldn’t go to a gym and exercise. (“But it’s a natural anti-depressant!”) I couldn’t meditate. My mind was firing off too many thoughts.

I would cancel going to parties or visiting family. I just couldn’t handle seeing anyone happy.

I had no energy to actually WORK at something. Just, please god, help me get out of this gutter because I’m sinking, sinking, sinking.

1% a day. Compounded, 3,800% a year. Which makes you so much different. So much better.

I wanted it. Give it!

If what I needed to do required skill, I’m sure I’d be dead now. If they required me to “HUSTLE AND GRIND!” I’d be dead by now.

People say, “Make your bed before you change the world.”

I couldn’t make my bed. I was simply useless. I stopped paying my mortgage. I stopped showing up to everything.

But I did these 10 things that require zero talent every day. Or, at least, I tried to.

Again, 1% a day is 3,800 TIMES BETTER IN A YEAR.

When I had money and I was on my way up, everyone was my friend. I’d go to a Christmas Party and I’d hear people say, “That’s Mark’s internet friend.”

I felt popular. I felt liked.

So when I went down and all my friends, and even my family, started to disappear, I didn’t know what to do.

Are all people fake? I don’t think so. But maybe most people are.

Around June 2002 I started to do these things. And it was like the air would kiss me when I walked around. I felt that first stirring. Something waking up.

Like I was pregnant with thoughts and ideas that were just starting to come to life.

I was scared. But less so. I still felt like I was going to be dead. That nothing could save me.

But now I am still alive.

10  Things That Require Zero Talent: 

1. Reading
2. Writing 10 bad ideas a day
3. Laughing
4. Being kind
5. Playing
6. Going outside for 20 mins
7. Deep breaths
8. Being vulnerable
9. Connecting to people
10. Eight hours of sleep

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