Started From the Bottom Now I’m Here

If you were my boss, I was constantly trying to kiss your ass.

I would try to impress you every day. I was not me anymore. I was a reflection of what you wanted me to be. 

This was when I hated myself the most.

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“Why don’t you just write the truth! Your boring life growing up in the suburbs!” she wrote to me.

Ok.

I grew up in a suburb made up of mostly Jews and Indians. The Jews were mostly low-level executives who commuted to New York. The Indians were mostly doctors.

There was one Italian. He ran MTV.

Everyone was obsessed with money all of the time. But despite this obsession (because of it?) nobody ever had enough.

I wanted a computer. My dad said, “Next month. I have a big deal happening then.”

We had that conversation every month for ten years in a row until he went broke and only listened to music on his headphones for the rest of his life.

My hebrew school carpool was me and three other kids. Those three kids are now dead – two suicides and a disappearance.

Hebrew school is no place to fuck around. They are all dead. I am still alive.

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Some people say being “authentic” means to share everything. This is bullshit.

Just be honest about everything you say. And say something unique.

To be authentic, tell us when you hit bottom. And only then – what did you do to get out of it?

Then I can decide whether or not to listen to you.

Good advice is good autobiography.

Bad advice is just another idiot trying to be a gatekeeper.

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Drake has a song “started from the bottom”. The main chorus is “Started from the bottom now I’m here.”

The first shot in the video is a bunch of kids playing soccer in their soccer uniforms. Middle class or upper middle class kids. Just like Drake was.

Then there’s a shot of Drake in cheesy hip hop clothes dancing awkwardly while he raps.

Guess what? He’s being authentic. He’s a suburban middle class kid from Toronto.

The rest of the song is a tongue in cheek, almost parody, gangster rap song.

Many people were critical of Drake because they felt he wasn’t authentic because he came from a suburb.

They had a perception of authenticity that was wrong and they prefer pseudo-authenticity to actually listening to the music.

Even worse, here’s what most people don’t know. He’s Jewish. His mom was white and Jewish and Drake went to Hebrew School and is Bar Mitzvahed.

Being authentic means find a pain inside of you. Tease it out somehow. Solve that pain with writing. With story-telling. With starting a business. With not living someone else’s definition of what you should be.

Inauthentic is kissing ass to a boss. Placating to an audience that won’t like you if you were your real self.

Working on something you hate because you are afraid to do something you love.

Nassim Taleb once told me the best job a person can get is “Night watchman.” Because then nobody is around, you don’t really have to do anything, and you can pursue what you love.

I love writing. I love describing how I hit my own personal bottom many times because I’m such a loser and how I climbed out of it each time.

BS self-help gurus teach the Law of Distraction to make you think that bad things won’t happen to you. This is inauthentic.

What makes me happy is that whenever the shit hits the fan, the same things always help me climb out. I write about them. They work for me but maybe not for anyone else.

I always make sure every day I check the box on AM I DOING SOMETHING FOR:

• my physical health
• my emotional health (new friends, improving my relationships (or pruning them), loving my kids).
• creativity – because every human is made to pursue their frontier and over past it. I like to write ten ideas a day. Every day. To exercise my idea muscle.
• gratitude – because fear and gratitude can’t exist in the brain at the same time. I like to do “difficult gratitude” – find reasons to be grateful for painful situations. This stretches the gratitude muscle.

In the past six months I’ve started from the bottom and now I’m here because of these four things. Again.

For me, this is being authentic.

One of my favorite writers told me, “if you don’t write about this, you will DIE as an artist.”

It takes awhile to process so you can speak about something with honesty, creativity, and gratitude – no matter how bad the situation.

Everyone has their opinion. But your life is the unique fingerprint you leave on this planet. The shitstain left over when death flushes you away.

Don’t live someone else’s opinion of what your life should be. Else you are constipated (really stretching this metaphor here).

Anyway.

Drake also says in the song to his detractors: “I’mma worry about me, give a f**k about you.”

Despite the above line, Drake was upset enough about his detractors he felt compelled to write that line.

I don’t care what people think about me…most of the time. But when I do care, I ask “why?” What pain button is being pushed this time. Then I write about it.

Is it pain that nobody will ever like me again? Is it pain that I am being misunderstood or judged incorrectly?

It’s like that cartoon: “I can’t go to sleep yet. Someone is WRONG on the Internet!”

Then I write about it. Then I hit publish. Then sometimes the pain goes away.

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3 Things I Learned From the Ultimate Choose Yourself Story

Your dad is an alcoholic. Your mom is mentally ill from syphilis and is institutionalized when you are a child. 

You quit school at the age of 13 and, essentially, join the circus to pay the bills. And ever after, you have to make people laugh to get paid.

You move to Hollywood and after some success you ask for a raise from the movie studio you work for. They refuse you because…that’s what bosses do.

Then you go to another movie studio, make some successful movies, ask for a raise…and they hate you.

No family, no education, bosses that will consistently try to screw you.

So Charlie Chaplin chose himself. With Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and DW Griffith, they formed United Artists, which became on of the biggest movie studios in Hollywood history and also the first studio formed by actors.

They chose their own movies, they created their own success, they picked their scripts, they paid themselves out of profits, which were substantial. Nobody could stop them. They had freedom. They became the most highly paid actors in the world.

And they enjoyed doing it.

Chaplin kept increasing his competence, both as an actor and as a screenwriter, a director, a composer, a businessman, and all aspects of the movie industry.

Every day he focused on his freedom so he could never again be beholden to the people who tried to keep him down, even his fans who often hated him or doubted him.

Even the US, which often was suspicious of him and even banned him. Even the directors and industry that loved him – he never let that love entrap him.

Everyone wants the keys to your self-esteem so they can lock you in your own jail.

Success doesn’t mean money if it causes misery. Success is every day feeling contentment.

Contentment is every day:

• Improving your relationships
• Improving your competence in something you love
• Improving your freedom.

Today I spoke with old friends. I wrote and tried to be creative. I’m improving my relationships with business associates.

I don’t think this out of fear. I do this because it’s how I grow. When I fail to do this, I lose all my money. I lose all my friends. And I lose my self-respect.

I tell my friends, “if you ever see me in the gutter with a needle, please help me.”

Nobody has ever helped me. I have to pull the needle out.

I learn from Charlie Chaplin to take control of every aspect of my creativity and freedom. The jail keepers can never be trusted with my freedom. Only I can.

Charlie Chaplin left us with three great quotes that shows he had the “Choose Yourself” mentality.

Today is Charlie Chaplin’s 125th birthday if he were alive. And so I think about these three quotes that have resonated through time to land right here and how they apply in my life now:

“Nothing is permanent in this world, not even our troubles.”

Eventually if I keep increasing my well-being and competence with the three things I mentioned above, I have always gotten out of the gutter.

“I like walking in the rain, because nobody can see my tears.”

I have to give myself permission to be sad. The last time I cried was…yesterday. And it washes away and a new day begins.

“The most wasted day in life is the day in which we had not laughed.”

This has been a difficult year for me. The only thing that has saved me is laughing as much as possible. I listen to standup comedy all day long.

I’m going to publish this, close the computer, look in the mirror, and laugh at myself.

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Three Trends for the Next 50 Years

I’m not a big believer in the future. I mean, it will exist—we know that. But that’s about it.

CXO Advisory Group has analyzed the predictions of hundreds of pundits. Are the talking heads on TV right or wrong? You know, the ones who say Ebola will end the world, or the ones who said Enron was just having accounting problems.

It turns out the pundits’ predictions are right only 47% of the time. I think they are being nice to the pundits. I would say pundits are right about 12% of the time. But I pulled that number out of a hat, and they did a statistical study, so who knows?

I don’t like making predictions. They get in the way of my digestion. All of that future thinking clogs up the pipes.

But there’s a great way to evaluate whether a prediction is true or not. It involves a simple phrase we all know: “This time things will be different.” We know that phrase is always wrong. We know that things stay the same.

I’ll give a great example: my 15-year-old doesn’t have email. She doesn’t really use a computer except for homework. But she does use her phone. She texts everyone.

Email has been popular for almost 20 years. But the phone has been popular for over 100 years.

Not that new things are bad. We’re not using the phone from the year 1900. We’re using a phone that is a more powerful computer than the top supercomputers from 20 years ago, and it fits into our pocket.

Two things happen:

• what was popular in the past will be popular for at least as long in the future (expect at least another 100 years of teenage girls texting relationship advice to their friends); and

• what was popular in the past will improve.

I have two experiences as a pundit for the future. In 2007 I said on CNBC that Facebook would one day be worth $100 billion. At the time it was worth maybe $1 billion. Everyone on the show laughed. I then invested in every Facebook services provider I could find.

And in my book, Choose Yourself!, written mostly in 2012 but out in 2013, I said that we can look forward to having a “smart toilet” that will diagnose all of our illnesses in our fecal matter and urine… a mini-lab in our bathrooms.

Anyway, recently, MIT said it’s working on just such a toilet. Cost: $2,000, but it was going to bring the cost down to $100. Count me in.

But there are 10 trends from the past 100 years that I think are important to respect and will be important trends for the next 100 years. Knowing this can help us make money off of them.

Trend #1: Deflation

Most people are scared to death of inflation.

If most people are scared of something (like Ebola), it probably means it was a media or marketing-manufactured fear that will never come true.

The reality is, we live in a deflationary world.

Warren Buffett has said that deflation is much more scary than inflation. It’s scary to him because he sells stuff. It’s great for everyone else because we buy things. However, to be fair, it’s a mixed bag.

When prices go down, people wait to buy, because prices might be cheaper later. This is why some of the scariest points in our economic history were in the 1930s and in 2009 when there was deflation.

How did the government solve the problem? By printing money and going to war. That’s how scary it was. To solve the problem, we gave 18-year-old kids guns, sent them to another country, and told them to shoot other 18-year-olds.

People have all sorts of statistics about the government debt and the dollar decreasing 97% in value since 1913, etc.

I don’t care about all of that. I want to make money no matter what.

Here’s what I see: my computers are cheaper. Housing prices haven’t gone up in 10 years. And people are finally starting to realize that paying for higher education isn’t worth as much as it used to be (too much student loan debt and not enough jobs).

All electricity is cheaper. All books are cheaper. And I don’t have to go to the movies to watch a movie. All my music is basically free if I watch it on YouTube.

Don’t get me wrong: inflation exists because the government and the corporations that run it are preventing deflation. But the natural order of things is to deflate. Eventually something bad will happen, and the carpet will be pulled out from under everyone. Perhaps if we have an inflationary bubble. Then deflation will hit hard, and you have to be prepared.

In a deflationary world, ideas are more valuable than products. If you have ideas that can help people improve their businesses, then you will make a lot of money. For instance, I know one person who was sleeping on his sister’s couch until he started showing people how to give webinars to improve their businesses. Now he makes seven figures a year.

This “webinar trick” won’t always work. But then he’ll have ideas for the next way to help people.

Ideas are the currency of the 21st century, and their value is inflating, not deflating.

Trend #2: Chemistry

The last 50 years was the “IT half-century,” starting with the invention of the computer, the widespread use of home computers, and then the domination of the Internet and mobile phones.

Okay. Done.

It’s not like innovation will stop in that area. It won’t. Every year computers will get better, more apps will be useful, etc. But the greatest innovations are over for now (DNA computing will happen, but not until after what I’m about to say does).

As an example: the next versions of my laptop and my cellphone have already come out. But, for the first time ever, I have no real need to get them. And I’m an upgrade addict. But the upgrades just weren’t big enough. I don’t even think I understand the differences between the next generation of cellphones and last year’s generation (tiny changes in battery and pixel numbers, but only tiny).

Here’s what’s going to change: chemistry. The number of grad students in chemistry is at an all-time low versus the number of grad students in computer science or information technology.

And yet, we’re at a point where almost everything we do requires advances in chemistry rather than IT.

For instance, Elon Musk is creating a billion-dollar factory to make batteries. Well, for Elon’s sake, wouldn’t it be better if we had a more efficient way to use lithium so that batteries can last longer?

DNA computing, while it would create a great advance in computer technology, is almost 100% dependent on advances in biochemistry.

Many people call the US the “Saudi Arabia of Natural Gas.” But what good does it do us if we can’t convert the gas into liquids that fill up our car? Right now every country uses Fischer-Tropsch technology—a chemical process that is 90 years old—to turn gas into liquids. And it’s expensive to use it. Wouldn’t it be better if someone could develop a groundbreaking change here?

I can list 50 problems that chemistry can solve that would make the world better. But it’s not sexy, so people have stopped studying it. This will change. Not because it’s a futurist trend, but because for 3,000 years, changes in society were largely due to chemistry advances (e.g., harvesting wheat) rather than computer advances. I’m just taking an old trend and saying, “Hey, don’t forget about it. We still need it.”

A simple example: DuPont and Dow Chemical, the two largest chemical companies, have had 50% and 38% year-over-year earnings growth respectively compared with Apple (12%). But nobody cares.

Trend #3: Employee-free Society

Before 200 years ago, we never really had employees. Then there was the rise of corporatism, which many confused with capitalism.

I’m on the board of a $1 billion in revenue employment agency. It’s gone from $200 million in revenues to $1 billion just in the past few years. Why did we move up so fast when the economy has basically been flat?

For two reasons:

1. The Pareto principle, which says that 80% of the work is being done by 20% of the people. So a lot of people are being fired now, since 2009 gave everyone the carte blanche excuse.

2. Regulations that are too difficult to follow. It’s getting pretty difficult to figure out what you need to do with an employee. Health care is a great example, but there are 1,000 other examples.

So what’s happening, for better or worse, is a rising wave of solo-preneurs and lifestyle entrepreneurs—exactly what happened for the hundreds of years that capitalism was around before stiff and rigid corporatism (teamed with unions) became the primary but fake “stable” force in our lives.

This is why companies like Uber are flourishing. You have a workforce (the drivers), logistics software in the middle, and people willing to pay for that workforce. Our GDP and our startups are going to start to drift in the Uber direction. Uber in San Francisco last month did three times as many rides as all the cab drivers in SF combined.

Corporate life was never really stable, and now we know that.

The problem is: while we were all in our cubicles (and I’ve been guilty of this for many years as well), we stopped being creative, stopped having ideas, and just took orders from the gatekeepers: bosses, colleagues, government, education, family.

We let other people choose what was best for us instead of doing the choosing ourselves. If you let someone else do the choosing for you, the results won’t be good, and you’ll get resentful. Bad things will happen.

I don’t have a direct stock tip on this. This is not about stocks. It’s about taking an approach where you get your life back so you can have wealth and abundance over the next 50 years.

One thing to try is to write down 10 ideas a day. This exercises the idea muscle and gets you 100x more creative than the average person over time. They could be business ideas, ideas to help other businesses, book ideas, or even ideas to surprise your spouse. Another trick is to take Monday’s ideas and combine them with Tuesday’s ideas. “Idea sex” is an awesome source of creativity.

Ideas are the true currency of this next century. I don’t care about the dollar or gold or health care. Any movement in those will just create opportunities for people who know when to take advantage of them. The key is to become an idea machine.

People say “ideas are a dime a dozen” or “execution is everything.” These statements are not really true. It’s difficult to come up with 10 new ideas a day (try it), and execution ideas are just a subset of ideas.

I was going to make this 10 trends I see coming over the next 10 years. But at 1,900 words, I already shared three solid ones. Maybe I’ll do a part 2 for the rest, but these three trends are an important start. They’re already here, they’re already deeply affecting our society, and being ready for them will be the key to success in the coming years.

How To Profit Off Of Trends in the Idea Economy

I’ve spent years developing the skills that help me recognize and profit from trends and now I want to share them with you.

I’ll Tell You Everything – Click Here

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The Next Trillion Dollar Tech Business

Back in the ’90s, my dream was to go to graduate school to learn about virtual reality.

Virtual reality was just beginning then. My dream job: to build an AI-based model of emotions so that the characters you find in a virtual reality could respond to you with “real” emotions.

Whatever. I was thrown out of graduate school, so that didn’t happen. But I never stopped keeping track. I’ve watched AI build bit by bit over the past two decades.

Now it’s here. And we have to pay attention.

First there was the Internet. This was a trillion-dollar opportunity that is ongoing.

The app store was the second trillion-dollar opportunity. The entire ecosystem of smartphones and tablets and the cloud and applications moved computing into our hands.

And now the third trillion-dollar opportunity has finally arrived: virtual reality. This year for virtual reality is like 1994 for the Internet. The first commercial AI headsets will be launched. The chips are being developed. The storage is getting prepared. The entire infrastructure for the third trillion-dollar opportunity has been created in the past 20 years.

Many of the companies are private still. But some are public. Here are a few of them:

Facebook (FB):

Facebook just announced details for the Oculus Rift headset, which will go on sale March 28 for $600. Credit Suisse is predicting they’ll sell 5 million units this year, while Piper Jaffray says less than 4 million. Either way, the company is looking at at least $2 billion in sales this year, but it won’t be profitable for Facebook until 2021 at the earliest. It might be interesting in the same way that Amazon (AMZN) is interesting—it doesn’t make money, but it is the platform of the future, so the stock rises (until today).

Alphabet (GOOGL):

Alphabet is there too, with something called Google Cardboard, which is a simple cardboard viewer that wraps around a smartphone and costs around $20. Rumor is they’re using it as an entry for a $200-$400 version that will launch in the next year. For what it’s worth, the app that you use with Google Cardboard has been downloaded 15 million times. Google has also invested in Magic Leap, a start-up that’s developing augmented reality technology (AR). Unlike VR, AR projects holographic images over their current surroundings. It’s an interesting twist, like a heads-up display for regular life.

Sony (SNE):

Sony is apparently working on a VR headset for the PlayStation, and it’s interesting because it has an established user base to sell to (PlayStation owners). The company’s is on track to sell 120 million PlayStation 4s during the device’s lifetime. Piper Jaffray thinks Sony can sell 1.4 million headsets in 2016.

Apple (AAPL):

This is largely speculation, but Apple did acquire a software company called Metaio last spring for $32 million and it holds several VR patents. It also recently bought PrimeSense for $345 million. The company’s engineers are best known for designing the first motion sensors for Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect. I can’t imagine Apple won’t get in on this somehow, and the stock is beaten down, so it’s a good time.

Microsoft (MSFT):

Microsoft is going the same route as Google, with the HoloLens augmented reality device that overlays high-definition holograms in your field of vision. Its focus is new ways to teach, create, and collaborate. HoloLens devices will become available to developers in the United States and Canada in the first quarter of 2016.

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And here are some back-end plays …

Qualcomm (QCOM):

Qualcomm is building the smartphone processors that are going into these wireless VR headsets. Qualcomm also participated in the $542 million investment in Magic Leap that was led by Google.

Disney (DIS):

Disney is working with Evolution Media Partners and China Media Capital (CMC) to fund Jaunt, a cinematic VR startup that has tech to create and distribute live-action VR films.

Nvidia (NVDA):

Nvidia makes the gaming graphics processing units which power VR & AR headsets, including Oculus Rift.

The Uber Equation

Millionaire investor, James Altucher, has just released his latest publication called, The Uber Equation. A three-part formula for uncovering opportunities for profit in the Innovation Economy. With this formula under your belt, you’ll be positioned to profit from an “asset class” that is disappearing quickly.

Get the Details Here

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Why I Experiment Every Day

I forgot to tell you about something. I wrote a book as a joke.

I made a challenge to myself. I would write a book and publish it in the same weekend. And it would be fun.

So when Prince George (son of Prince William and Princess Kate) was born, I “ghost” wrote his autobiography.

I published it under a pseudonym (“John Kenneth Rowling”, get it?)

Two years later, I just re-read it. It wasn’t bad. It was kind of funny. One never knows on the day of.

It’s ok for experiments to go bad. It’s ok to not be perfect I tell myself. I have to give myself permission to accept my imperfections. Else life is too stressful.

So I wrote and published the “Autobiography of Prince George Alexander Louis Windsor” in a weekend.

Because he had just been born I ranked high on search results. I made a few thousand dollars.

I’m on a plane now and I read a few chapters. Not bad. Funny. Because I think of myself as “broken” I think “maybe one day I’ll write this well again.”

And I worry about the things that everyone worries about – are my decisions correct enough to survive me until my dealth.

After the book came out I showed a few people, including a publisher. They offered me a ten book deal. Autobiographies of babies. It would be my niche.

The next book in the series was supposed to be “North by North West” about Kanye and Kim’s baby. I didn’t do it. But maybe later. Who knows?

Don’t knock it. Talented parents like that – an excellent autobiography for a three day old was already forming in my head.

But I didn’t write it. It’s ok to experiment and move on. How many times can you experiment in this life before you die?

It is ONLY through experimenting that we start to carve out the parts of the world we don’t know about. We find out what we love and enjoy. There is no other way.

We find better and better ways to break out of the cage that constantly imprisons us.

Should I do X? Or Y? Find 50 ways to experiment answering this question.

Every day, I try to find at least ten experiments I can do. Should I write in morning? Or night? Should I eat bread today? Or fast? If I write, should I write in second person. Or should I watercolor.

Should I call someone I haven’t spoken to in years? Or not call them?

Each experiment allows me to play with my comfort zone. And to learn more about the world. And to learn more about myself. And to learn more about whatever it is I am specifically experimenting about.

Can I take up a camera today and take one good photograph. Can I interview one person and unlock a secret that will help the rest of humanity.

Can I meet someone and build a connection between him (or her) and me. One that lasts beyond the handshake.

Can I say hello to someone in such a way that they remember me.

Learning how to experiment with your life is a muscle. You have to practice it every day. But, for me, it makes my life better. Even the bad experiments.

I wrote a book. 12,578 people bought it, give or take. Some people read it. Some had fun with it. I got nothing but bad reviews.

But all of the reviewers will die one day. And so will I. And so will you. We’re all in a race to the finish line.

Life is measured not by our good deeds, or by who loved us, or by what charities we’ve done, but by the number of experiments we did.

Because some experiments fizzle out to nothing. And some experiments blow up. Blow up in our faces, Blow up and from a satellite in space looking down, created flash of light that can be seen by the entire universe.

But some experiments discover lightning. And light up the world. And some experiments make fun of the words of a little baby. Life is fun in the laboratory.

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Ep. 157 – Barbara Corcoran: Born to Be an Entrepreneur

I never thought about sex with Barbara Corcoran. I still don’t. But she brought it up.

We were talking about entrepreneurship.

And she said how old she was when she lost her virginity.

Twenty-three.

I wanted to know how she turned a thousand dollars into a five billion dollar company.

Then: $1,000.

Now: $5,000,000,000.

I wanted to know how she founded The Corcoran Group, the largest company in real estate.

And how you become the type of entrepreneur Barbara Corcoran chooses on Shark Tank.

I’m going to tell you how to get her investment.

If that’s what you want. But not everyone is meant to be an entrepreneur. According to Barbara.

“I found a real difference between the superstars and everyone else,” she says.  

And I agree. That’s why I wrote The Rich Employee. Entrepreneurship isn’t everything.

But it could be. Barbara reviews thousands of investment opportunities. And most hear “no.”

She says you have to have “a nose for entrepreneurship.” That’s how you get a “yes,” from Barbara Corcoran.

But before you start doubting yourself, take the test.

You’ll find out how in this interview. Jump to [39:25].

She says, if you weren’t born with “it,” (the nose for entrepreneurship, the “innate intelligence,”) then “you shouldn’t be an entrepreneur in the first place.”

And you need specific characteristics:

A) Handle rejection.

You can’t cry. Or feel sorry for yourself.

The top people in Barbara’s company made four million dollars a year in commissions. They took hits. Just as many as the others. Or more. “Because they were trying for more,” she says, “But the real difference was how long they took to feel sorry for themselves.”

Get over rejection. And try again.

B) Conserve energy.

Monitor yourself.

Just notice.

I feel tired. Why? I’m not motivated. I’m drained. Burnt out. Why?

Your energy leaks out. Through fear, regret, negative people, bad situations.

Conserve it. Refocus. And put it to good use.

C) You shouldn’t quit your job

I ran my side business for 18 months before quitting my full time job.

I had eleven employees.

But I’m not special. Really. Because that’s what all of Barbara’s “successful” entrepreneurs do. They keep their jobs.

D) You need to be “hungry, mean and insecure.”

“That’s been my track record with the businesses I’ve invested,” she says. You need to have something to prove.

But nice is ok for me. I’ll take nice.

E) Daydream.

“Vision is daydreaming and seeing yourself in a role and seeing what your business is going to become,” she says.

Picture it. Use your imagination. Escape into the dream.

She says, “I don’t know any entrepreneurs who don’t visualize.”

Listen to today’s episode. Are you really an entrepreneur?

Maybe you don’t know.

But after listening to today’s podcast, you will.

Resources and Links:

• Visit her website http://ift.tt/1yTTvlu
• Follow Barbara on Facebook & Twitter
• Watch her on Shark Tank
• Read her book Shark Tales: How I Turned $1,000 into a Billion Dollar Business

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Only When You Get Lost, Can You Find Yourself

My daughter turns 17 today.

Dear daughter,

I can’t give you any advice.

At 17 I knew nothing. At 21 I knew a tiny bit more. At 25 I knew less. At 40 I disappointed everyone. At 47 I was shattered. At 48 I am happy again.

What have I learned from it all? Nothing, Nothing at all.

I remember one time a company I started was presenting at a booth in Cannes. I got there early before the conference opened that day.

I decided to grab a coffee and some of those pastries that the euros are known for. Those little sandwiches everyone eats while standing up.

Walking out of the conference hall I was struck like a clock. The sun rising in Cannes. The boats locked right off shore.

I couldn’t believe the beauty. Like a postcard that god sent to me.

I sat there and sipped my coffee and couldn’t believe what story had drifted me to this shore. What a miracle.

When I got back to the booth, all of our equipment had been stolen. Computers, books, demos. I felt really bad. It was my fault. My sister and brother in law blamed me. It was awful.

Miracles turn into awful very quickly in our world, my sweet one. And, with effort, the reverse applies also.

There’s no advice. One friend of mine, says “read a lot of books”. Another friend of mine says, “travel”. Another friend of mine says, “take care of your body so you can live a long time.” Another friend says, “family first”.

Let me say, this is all good advice.

But every day you will find forks in the road. Take whatever you want. Be whoever you want.Change every day. Don’t find purpose. Don’t find a goal.

It will find you.l It will grasp you and kiss you. And sweep you in it’s arms and throw you into the air and catch you and you will smile and laugh and feel love.

It doesn’t matter what tomorrow brings. Just explore.

Always remember that in order to find yourself, first you have to get a little bit lost.

Get lost, my little 17 year old. And when I’m dead and when you’re old and sick and your grandchildren are holding your hands and crying, please tell them this message from me: get lost fast, get lost often, get lost and scared.

Get lost every single day. Lose yourself. Disappear.

Only when you are lost, can you find things; And one day you too will be old and your ancestors wil be memories. Just like you, my sweetest love.

The one person who caused me to be so lost I never found myself ever again And I hope I never will.

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