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Monday, October 17, 2016

I Just Binge-Watched Every Bill Murray Movie and This is…

Jimmy Kimmel said to Bill Murray: It seems like you just do whatever you want. That life is spontaneous. You go with the flow and great things happen to you all the time.

Bill Murray said: Gilda Radner was rich so she would go into these auditions and not care at all whether she got them. So they were so dazzled by her lack of caring they would be dying to give her the role.

He continued: So I figured, I’m not rich but I’ll just pretend like I am so I won’t care at all and see what happens and I’ve been doing it ever since.

Harold Ramis finished college, was trying to figure out his life, and went to play golf with his friends. Bill Murray, with his high school degree, was working the hot dog stand around the 9th hole.

That’s how they met. They did Stripes, Caddyshack, Groundhog Day, Ghostbusters, and other movies together.

Ramis said, “When you find the smartest person in the room, stand next to him. I stood next to Bill Murray.”

I just binge-watched a bunch of Bill Murray movies: Stripes, Meatballs, Caddyshack, Lost in Translation, Ghostbusters, Broken Flowers.

He takes reality and translates it into truth. I want to be so broken I find meaning.

I want to be Bill Murray. Unafraid.

Here’s a little bit why (some of his quotes):

“It’s hard to be an artist. It’s hard to be anything. It’s hard to be.”

It’s hard to give that extra push. To make every day special. Every interaction important. Every thing you do have impact.

I call this “The Push.”

I know when I can’t get out of bed, when I walk around looking at the ground, when I can barely make small talk, that it’s time for the Push in my life. That I need to reach and grab more.

“You die in the improv set five times out of nine. So, once you get over your fear of dying, nothing else ever really scares you”

People always tell me, “Oh, you can’t worry about what people think.”

And then I repeat it. Because I know it sounds good. But it’s hard to not worry what people think. I guess I do it more than I admit.

How do you achieve it?

You have to actually be bad. You have to actually die. You have to actually fail over and over again, until you realize it’s not the end of the world.

Great evidence: How many people have seen “The Razor’s Edge”…the movie Bill Murray did right before he did “Ghostbusters.”

“If you make others look good, you’ll look good.”

Bill Murray says this is the secret to his success.

He started out in improv. He didn’t try to make himself stand out and look the best. He was on stage with John Belushi, Dan Akroyd, and others who went on to enormous fame.

He just tried to make them look good. And he kept moving up the ladder of success as a result.

“If I see someone who’s out cold on their feet, I’m going to try to wake that person up. It’s what I’d want someone to do for me. Wake me the hell up and come back to the planet.”

Bill Murray walks up to a man on the street who is smoking.

Bill takes the cigarette out of the man’s mouth, take a puff, and then gives it back to the man. Says, “Nobody is going to believe you when you tell them this,” and then walks away.

Bill Murray views all life as an opportunity to squeeze a bit more juice out of it by improvising on that moment.

And why not? Else it’s just like reading lines off of a script.

“The more relaxed you are, the better you are at everything: the better you are with your loved ones, the better you are with your enemies, the better you are at your job, the better you are with yourself.”

There’s an entire science around the clutch moment in sports.

If you are tense, your muscles constrict. You won’t do as well. If you are relaxed, you can play at your optimal level.

The same goes for our emotional muscles. In all of Bill Murray’s movies, he comes across as if nothing phases him.

When I go to a social event, I am nervous. When I go to give a talk, I’m nervous. Or on a date. Or to a meeting.

Now that I’ve binge-watched Bill I’m going to pretend to be him.

“I live a little bit on the seat of my pants, I try to be alert and available…for life to happen to me. We’re in this life, and if you’re not available, the sort of ordinary time goes past and you didn’t live it. But if you’re available, life gets huge. You’re really living it.”

This is about observation. Don’t look at the ground when you walk.

He takes his daily life and turns it into improv. Into art.

“I realized the more fun I had, the more relaxed I was working, the better I worked.”

How does one get relaxed? Play.

The other day I went bowling. Then air hockey. For about two hours I never even once thought about anything going on in my life.

It was great. Then I went home and paid my taxes.

“This is not a dress rehearsal, this is your life.”

One time I had a 9-5 job. I go in, do my work, go home. Wake up the next day. Repeat.

How long can you do that before real life begins?

Eventually, I had to leave the job. I’m not saying this is good or bad. But it’s what I had to do.

Things have been so volatile since then. But I love the stories I’ve collected. Makes it worth it.

“It’s hard to win an argument with a smart person, but it’s damn near impossible to win an argument with a stupid person.”

Friends talk. Lovers kiss. Idiots argue. Nobody wins in an argument.

By the way, friends and lovers often turn into idiots.

Bill Murray is known for cutting out, immediately, any one toxic in his life.

“It’s really powerful to say ‘No’; it’s really the most powerful thing you can say.”

We live in this FOMO world – fear of missing out.

Bill Murray has turned down the starring roles for movies like Batman, Forrest Gump, Splash, Awakenings.

He was considered for the Han Solo role in Star Wars!

He was going to be the lawyer in Philadelphia (instead of Denzel Washington)!

The movies he’s said “no” to have grossed billions.

Do we care? Does he care? If you stick with the things you love, be with the people you love, and say no to the rest, everything takes care of itself.

Ignore anyone who tries to steal joy from you.

All of the quotes above are from Bill. But this next one is a line he says in Groundhog Day:

“I’ve killed myself so many times I don’t even exist anymore.”

The movie Groundhog Day changed my life. I can’t really explain why.

We do have the opportunity to live the same day over and over again but life fools us into thinking it’s a new day.

After living the same day for 30,000 days in a row, maybe one day I’ll be good at life, fall in love, save the world.

In the meantime, I just want to be good at being Bill Murray.

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Wednesday, October 12, 2016

When A Secret Band Of Bloggers Gathered To Save The World

I remember it like it was the day before yesterday or maybe even the day before that.

A band of us, a feisty group of us. A group of never-do-wells. A group.

The world was in trouble. And we decided it was time to pool our resources and together save the world.

This was in 2007, or perhaps 2009. Or somewhere in the middle.

Climate change was ripping apart the core of the planet. An election was tearing apart the emotional fabric of a nation. ATM machines only dispensed tears. Danger was like a knife lying randomly on the sidewalk and anyone could pick it up.

I was getting a divorce.

We were bloggers, all of us. And with that came a sense of moral responsibility to do something about the planet we all decided to call “HOME.”

CB, GV, TF, TM, JS, PG, GD, and a host of others. Brothers and sisters in arms.

Whether it was typepad, or blogger, or wordpress, or even the new “micro-” blogging service that was sweeping the nation.

We knew our voices, united as one, would rise above the cacophony of malaise that was creating a pool of vomit the rest of the world was swimming in.

“We need a catch phrase,” someone said. Maybe CB, maybe SG. Maybe GV. Who knows? At this point, history is written by the ones with the largest Instagram following.

How about, I said, Be the somebody that makes everybody else feel like a somebody.

Hmmm, people said in that way that people “hmmm” when they don’t really like it but they are trying to be nice.

“Pick yourself,” said another.

“Choose yourself,” said me.

“Hustle now or Muscle later,” said my good friend and lover ____

“Be the change you want to see in the world,” said Gandhi, but repeated by S or G or T, which is OK because A said to steal from the best.

WAIT!

We all turned. It was the person who now, in retrospect, had assumed the role of being our leader.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “An inspirational phrase is like 40 mg of Adderral. It has a half life of 10 hours and then wears off. It will do nothing. People don’t pay attention. They just feel good for a little while.”

“I have an idea,” said, again, my lover. “How about we all take pictures of ourselves looking at our phones and put an inspirational phrase on top of it.”

“That’s great,” said CB. “But we have to be in different places. Like looking at our phone on a private plane, on a basketball court, while shopping to bake a cake, while swimming in the Maldives.”

And we all have to do it every 24 hours. To keep the world spinning. The temperature is already one degree hotter since we started this meeting in our private bunker.

The reality is: we were in a sweat lodge. All of us were naked. Our muscles rippling from one body to the next like “The Wave” in the stadium at a college volleyball game.

Bloggers are known for being ripped. For being shredded. Sliced. Jacked. I had a prime number of abs.

I don’t agree, I said. Why can’t we just be honest

“Why can’t we all get along!!” said RK.

Seriously, I said. Life is pretty hard. It’s a cruel joke and our job is to find the punchline.

That’s a great one! someone said, jotting it down.

After that, I got dressed. I was pretty scared. In a risky move for me, I had already used my Debit Card five times that day.

Every time it said “Approved” I felt good about myself.

It was the only approval I was getting that year, but it always felt like the charge machine was taking an extra second or two and then reluctantly saying, “Just barely.”

Everyone was still arguing when I left. I don’t think they noticed I was gone. I went home to write.

Since then, the planet has gotten cooler. Happiness levels have risen higher than ever seen before. The world is incredibly wealthy. And love is in the air.

I’m grateful today.

You’re welcome.

Related reading: How To Publish A Bestseller: Publishing 3.0

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Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Ep. 188: Doug Casey – 5 Lessons From The Most Interesting Human in The Matrix

“I know you’ve made tens of millions of dollars in various areas of life,” I said. “Tell me how you did it.”

“Hmm.”

He scanned his memory for money.

And landed in 1969. “I put all my possessions in the back of my Mustang and drove to Washington, D.C. I figured if I got $5,000, I could hitchhike my way through South America… but more importantly, Africa.”

There are about 220 countries on the planet. Doug Casey has been to 160.

“I believe in the Latin phrase, ‘Mens sana in corpore sano.’”

“Sound mind, sound body…”

“It means you actually have to go out and do this crap. You have to do it.”

“Why?”

“Because maybe you’ll find out the meaning of life.”

A) Don’t be a plant

“Unfortunately, most people are born in one place and then live in or near that place for the rest of their lives acting like plants, but I don’t think acting like a plant is a good survival strategy for a human.”

B) Create your own currency

Everybody says the Federal Reserve printed money. And devalued the dollar.

Everybody’s wrong.

I asked Doug, “What do people mean when they say the Federal Reserve printed money? I think there’s a common misconception around this.”

His answer: they buy assets and credit back the banks. They don’t physically print money. And they don’t create value.

Doug goes places, meets people, asks them to do things either with him or for him.

He values the people he’s met, the money he’s made/lost and the lessons he’s learned.

Honor your experiences.

Money isn’t the currency of life. Living is the currency of life.

C) Where do good ideas come from?

They say you need to see/hear something at least seven times to remember it. I don’t know who said that. I wish I could say it was Ogilvy.

I’ve talked about idea sex 100 times. Here’s 101.

Good ideas are like babies. Each one is new to the world. (Unless we’re living in “The Matrix”… skip to [23:00] for this part of the interview… Even Elon Musk has thought about the likelihood of “reality” actually being “base reality.” The chances are “one in billions,” he said.)

But for now, human babies come from human sex. Sex = creation.

And it’s the same for ideas.

Take two ideas. Combine them. Now you have a new idea. Repeat. This is idea sex.

“I wanted to be a paleontologist,” Doug said. “Why? Dinosaurs! Every kid likes dinosaurs, but I took it seriously.”

“So, geology background… Then I got interested in money. Put geology and money together and you’ve got the mining business (which is actually a better way to lose money than to make money) but the good news about the mining business is that they’re the most volatile stocks in the world.”

“And still are…”

D) Read science fiction

“It’s a much better predictor of the future than any of the think tanks.”

E) Try new things

I’m writing a children’s book. Doug’s hobby is nothing I’ve ever heard of before. He tried taking over a country.

“Oh yeah,” he said… as if he forgot. “How did I get started in that? Oh yeah, I know what it was.”

Doug has had 50 lives. He’s dined with presidents, made millions, gone broke, wrote books, traveled to war zones, scuba-dived, practiced martial arts, he owns his own research company. And more.

But the strange part is he seems to string them all along.

Instead of switching from experience to experience, he piles them together. It’s not clean. It’s not organized.

It’s human.

Links and Resources:

Read “Speculator (Hight Ground) [Volume 1]” by Doug Casey
Read “Totally Incorrect: Conversations with Doug Casey” by Doug Casey
Read #1 New York Times Bestseller, “Crisis Investing: Opportunities and Profits in the Coming Great Depression”
by Doug Casey
Visit his website Casey Research Group
Follow him on Facebook + Twitter

Also mentioned:

“Fail-Safe Investing: Lifelong Financial Security in 30 Minutes” by Harry Browne
“The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology” by Ray Kurzweil
Dexter

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I Passed Out Yesterday And This Is What Happened…

I passed out yesterday. We were at a ping pong place and I was talking to a friend of mine when I simply fell to the ground and went unconscious.

We were in the middle of a conversation about health (he’s a physical trainer) and I said something like, “I’m in the best health of my life!”

BOOM!

Then all I remember is vaguely trying to hold onto something. Then the next thing I know, I’ve been unconscious for two minutes and people are standing around me asking me if I’m OK.

I don’t know what was wrong. Maybe I was dehydrated or something.

But I thought to myself: man, this would be a great way to die. I wasn’t aware of anything. No pain.

Then I thought: every time I counted something in my life, was a total waste of my life. All those moments of counting and ranking add up. Your likes add up to nothing when you are dead.

I’ll look at Twitter followers. Or money in bank. Did it go up or down. Or Instagram likes. Or Amazon ranks. Or how many times did she say, “I love you.”

We’re primates so we always put ourselves in a tribe. A tribe is measured from alpha to omega. Counting.

Humans have a huge benefit. We select which tribe we can go into.

Will we go into a corporate job (measured by job title and salary). Will we be pro baseball players? (measured by home runs or stolen bases). Will we be entrepreneurs (measured by sales or growth or whatever).

I played one game of ping pong after I passed out. It was against a much better player (thanks Noah Kagan!) so I was happy to lose but ONLY by four points (21 – 17).

Noah said, “Uh oh, you’re going to talk s**t about this forever, aren’t you.”

Yes, I am.

But still, 21-17. Numbers!

Voting, liking, loving, favoriting, selling. All numbers.

The essence of reinvention is not that that you change from one thing to another.

Reinvention is when you go from doing something disconnected from your true self, to doing something closer to what aligns with the deepest part of you.

When you can do that…counting stops. That’s why we always need to reinvent.

You can’t “think” of what that is. You just have to do it. You won’t know until you get there. Persistence + Love = Reinvention.

When I don’t need to count or rank myself, that’s the arrow that shows me I am going in the right direction.

The less I count today. The happier I will be. The less I depend on what others count, I will be happier. Count on it.

Design: Pamela Sisson

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Monday, October 10, 2016

It’s Easy To Throw Away Rock Star Opportunity

My best friend is missing. Or, at least, I haven’t been able to find him for the past 15 years.

Search engines. Facebook, linkedin. I searched obituaries. The Internet is useless.

I found his brother instead, Matt Fallon (real name: Matt Frankel). Matt was merciless with us when we were young and he was three years older.

We were scared of him all the time and he would smell our fear and punish us accordingly.

Matt was the lead singer of the multi-platinum thrash metal group Anthrax. Then he was the lead singer of the multi-platinum hair metal group Skid Row.

He barely has a social media presence now and isn’t connected at all with my friend. His brother.

Robert called me once when we were 14, “Jon Bon Jovi is over here practicing with Matt.” Everyone was hanging out near their house looking for a peak. The heights of New Jersey Metal.

Both bands pretty quickly threw Matt out right before their huge march to success. The last time I spoke with Robert he said, “Matt’s testing shampoos for J&J.”

Nothing wrong with that. Ironic that a hair metal icon was testing shampoos but things turn out for the best.

I wondered if he was upset how close he was to rock stardom and fell from the kingdom.

Matt wrote some of Anthax’s biggest hits but didn’t get credit. The songs just say, “Written by Anthrax.”

I found an interview with Sleazeroxx. “Did you have any regrets about leaving Anthrax?”

Matt said, “..I was bitter about the way everything went down, so I didn’t really follow them after I left.”

In Skid Row, he was replaced by the now well known Sebastian Bach, who is also famous for singing many of the songs Matt wrote.

Sleazeroxx asked: A little more than a year after you left Skid Row, the group released its self-titled album, which was an instant success. Do you have any regrets in that regard and/or think “that could have been me.”

Matt said: I’d have to say I was a bit jealous when I heard the album for the first time. I guess I can’t really blame the guy for stepping in when he did.

I don’t know what the moral is. Matt got a degree along the way. He’s risen up at the same job but still there 25 years later.

It’s easy to trash the gifts of youth simply because you think the future is infinite.

It’s pretentious for me to give this advice to my kids right now. I need to remember this advice for myself. I am often a mess.

The gardening of opportunity is:

be humble
over promise and over deliver
make friends with the people you work with
be careful about contracts
keep learning from every experience
show up
have fun

Your value is the sum of your humility, your integrity, and your ability to keep learning.

One of the comments on the Sleazeroxx interview was:

“His real name is Matt Frankel. The truth is that he was such an insufferable a**hole with absolutely no dedication or work ethic that no one could stand working with him.”

Anthrax and Skid Row have sold more than 30 million albums. Albums sold with Matt: zero.

Anyway…I miss my friend.

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Friday, October 7, 2016

Persuasion Techniques Saved Me $40,000 And A Year Of My Life

I was going to get thrown out of college because I didn’t have enough money and I was stupid.

Each year, I’d borrow enough to get me through another year.

Every summer I stayed at school and took 2-3 courses. This way I could skip my senior year and avoid having to take out more loans.

But I had a problem at the end of the third year. In order to skip a year, you had to maintain a 3.0 grade point average (a “B”).

The bursar’s office told me that I did not have that average so I would not be able to graduate.

Note: the Bursar is the office that collects the money.

Zero people involved in education called me to tell me that I didn’t have enough education. The bill collector called me to tell me I was too stupid to graduate.

I had a week left before graduation day. I had no idea how I’d get another 30 or 40,000 dollars to survive another year. I just would’ve dropped out.

So I went to the professor of my Fortran class. I loved computer science at that point more than anything.

I would get into fake fights with my girlfriend just so I could walk up a hill, unlock the computer science building, use the secret pass code to get into the lab, and just sit there and program all day.

It was a way of communicating with some undiscovered universe where all my secret friends lived.

But I was bad at Fortran, a very specific programming language. I was getting a D- in the class.

The bursar’s office called me and told me I didn’t have the 3.0 GPA, “I’m sorry, but you will not be graduating next week.”

“Well, what is my GPA?

She said, completely deadpan, “2.999”.

“Can’t you round up?”

“No, I’m sorry, sir, we cannot round up.”

Nobody has ever called me “sir” in my entire life and meant it. If the Queen of England called me “Sir!” it would probably because I stole the last deviled egg in a buffet at a royal party.

So I went to the professor of my Fortran class. His name was Nick something. I can’t even remember his last name. The man who had the power to save my life.

I said to him, “Listen. I don’t deserve it. But I love computer science. I’m leaving here to go to graduate school in computer science. I don’t know why I’m not good at Fortran. But they won’t graduate me unless you switch me from a D- to a D+. Can you please do it?”

I didn’t say I deserved the D+. I really did deserve a D-.

Here’s what I did:

I eliminated the possible counter argument (I admitted that I didn’t deserve it).
I related on common ground (we both loved computer science. I even wanted to be a professor like him so I was going to graduate school)
I gave an us-versus-them argument (“they” won’t graduate me)
I made him a possible accessory to the crime (“I don’t know why
I’m not good” might mean he’s not a good teacher).
I gave him a very specific remedy rather than give him homework to come up with one (“switch me from D- to D+)
A specific call to action (“do it”).

He did it. I stood in his office while I watched him switch my grade. I graduated a week later.

And two years later I was thrown out of graduate school.

Related reading: Don’t Send Your Kids to College

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Thursday, October 6, 2016

The One Thing I Wish I Knew In My 20’s

I was 25 and I went shopping for an engagement ring for my girlfriend.

We had been together for three years and my dad kept asking when I would marry her. My friends kept asking. Her friends kept asking. Her dad kept asking her.

We were living together. And I liked her. Maybe I loved her.

But I started to shake uncontrollably when I was looking at rings in the store. My friend who I was with took one look at me and quoted a lyric from an MC 900 Ft Jesus song: “Something’s gonna happen and it’s probably not good.”

So I didn’t buy the ring. We didn’t get married. She moved out. We moved to different cities. I called her once a few years later but now she’s not even on Facebook and we haven’t talked since.

I forgot everything about her basically.

That sums up the 20s – EVERYTHING you think is important and meaningful has absolutely no bearing on your future life.

I loved her. I had a job. I was trying to write novels. I had friends. I was a computer programmer.

Now…none of the above is true. (oh, I have friends. Just different friends – 100% different).

And everything in my 30s….nothing is true anymore (except I have two kids still. Although now they are not babies. They used to be more stupid than me. Now they are smarter.).

I’m 48 now. I know this: when I’m 68 I’ll think, “Man, nothing mattered when I was 48.”

My most recent career change occurred when I was 47. Before that, I started writing seriously (I wrote 5 or 6 very unserious books in my 30s) when I was 42.

In my 20s and 30s my average weight was about 155 – 170. Now it’s 140. I write every day. I don’t obsess on money all day long. And I make bad decisions all day long – just like I did in my 20s.

The main skill I got between my 20s and now is that I bounce back from bad things faster.

I was VERY successful in my late 20s. And then a TOTAL FAILURE after. Then VERY SUCCESSFUL. And so on.

So that didn’t change. Only my ability to bounce back from really bad things.

Horrible things. Things you wouldn’t want to wish on anyone and yet they happen, in some form or other, to everyone.

So the only thing I can with full integrity say I wish I had known is: nothing at all matters.

Oh, and since nothing matters, once you realize that you’ll start to bounce back faster.

This doesn’t mean lie in bed all day because…blah. Instead, I go all out every day. I throw myself into everything. Even when I make a fool of myself. Why not?

And since nothing matters, might as well be kind to people as much as possible.

Later, we will all laugh at the same joke at the end of this very very long day.

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