Today’s technology is constantly evolving and improving. What seemed impossible fifteen years ago, is now completely known world-wide and a basic part of life.
You have the tools to run a business today that the CEO’s of the world’s largest companies didn’t have ten years ago. You have an iPhone in your hand that has more computing power than the computers used to land a man on the moon. You have access to knowledge and tools that the greatest minds of history not only didn’t have, but didn’t dream of having. You need to use these tools. Know them. Own them, and once you can, you can grow and make your business do anything. That is what the starting of these business experiments is all about. There is a huge potential in on line business, it truly has just started, and starting a simple business on line taught me the basics so that I began to learn what questions to ask and what to do next. The best way to learn is to decide to do a project and then find a way to make it happen, learn those specific skills you need to make it happen. Join the mailing list, give us siome ideas, and let us show you what we have learned to make you and your business better. I plan on running different Business experiments, basing them off what I havwe read or learned, and letting you find out what I find out. In between the notes and the reading, let's also learn by doing. If you want to make your business better, you need to make yourself better. Let's go. D These gentlemen are much smarter than I am, and certainly far more successful than I am, so perhaps my opinion matters a little less to you, but I am concerned that they are pushing a message that is wildly popular now, and it is one that is being misunderstood and I believe is dangerous to the individual and also our future.
Their simple message is, "it makes no sense to go to college, and instead you should just start a business." This is simply wrong. Their intentions are good, and I understand what they are trying to do, but I believe their message is at best, being misunderstood, or maybe it just isn't valid. This viewpoint on college will not make the world a better place nor will it make a person's life as rich as it could be if they follow that advice. Also each one of these men graduated college. We tend to undervalue what we have, and each of these men have a college education, and they are not thinking that each step they took built the path that lead them to make themselves succeed. Each of these men use the tools they learned in college, and probably they still know and work with some of the people they met there. Today, we do not need more people selling ebooks. That will not build growth or opportunity. The Internet is full of opportunity, and squandering it by promoting the latest lifestyle guide just isn't going to do it. You have to build something, you need to create. We do not need to reinvent the wheel each day. We all stand on the work and thoughts of the people born before us. To know those ideas, you need to learn them. I have made a career out of applying history to today's problems, because whatever problem you have, someone has had it before. Find out how they solved it. We need more people creating value and less people consuming mindlessly. The engine that drives the future and the economy is creativity and imagination, smart people taking risks. The elite group above are all stating that today you shouldn't even consider college but I believe that message serves no value. If you do not have a better opportunity, you should go to college, and stay in college until you find a better way to leverage your skills and learn. We don't need more ebook marketers. We need people to solve the world's problems and make this a better world. You are bigger than that and I think some balance in your life is important. I am sure they do not mean it this way, these are very smart men who have shown that they are curious and love to learn, but the message generally being copied and reported over and over on the internet, through blog posts and twitter, is that it is smart to reject education and start a business. The real goal is to get as much education as possible, to reject debt and to remember to always go with the best opportunity at hand that has the best opportunity cost for you. Here is why you should consider going to college. 1. The issue isn't that education is bad, or that you shouldn't go to college, it is that you shouldn't go into debt to get it. You should learn as much as you can, from anywhere you can. If you didn't know what you wanted to do, and I said I know a place where you can try many different disciplines and things and experiences, where you can meet people from all over the world, would you go? 2. Right now in all the other countries of the world, people in those other countries are getting as much education as they can. You are competing in a global market, and there are Phd's in India ready to do anything to succeed. Ignorance is not a competitive tool. Get as much education as you can afford. Always keep learning. Learn new skills constantly. Competition in China is brutal, and today we are in the same global market as they are. Are we ready to hustle as much as they are? 3. Take the "college is bad" thought to its extreme. Is the United State's biggest problem today is that we are too educated? No. We certainly do not suffer from over education. If anything, we need more education. Knowledgable people would not have thought that when the housing market was hot, that every house everywhere, was worth a fortune. They would know history and know about the tulip boom and bust. We need more knowledge not less. The biggest problem today is that we need better education regarding debt, something education can fix. You go in to debt because you are uneducated. I know this very well, as this is a lesson I learned the hard way. 4. If you don't know what you want to do, going to school is a great place to see the options and meet people. Don't quit school until you have better options. It is all about opportunity costs. 5. Most entrepreneurs went to school, maybe didn't finish, but went to school, including those in the subject line. They found the resources or met the people who would help them succeed at school. 6. Business is an art. Just like a writer, or film maker, and if you have nothing to say, you can have all the skills and talent in the world but in the end you say or accomplish nothing. Life is an art, and if you have a passion, a belief, and you are a well rounded person, you will always be more adaptable than some single minded individual. Survival is about adaption. 7. The world is more than just business. Business brings opportunity, but the world also has art, philosophy, and science. The more of the world you know, the better you will be at what you do. Going to school opens up doors that you don't know exist today, that you don't even think to look for, that you don't even know you want, until it is there. 8. View schools like stocks, look at the ROI on what you estimate that you think it will return. If you want to be a teacher, and start at $40,000 don't spend $200,000 going to Stanford, pay $20,000 at a smaller school, who will probably get you a more personalized education and help ou pay for it. Pick stocks that matter to you and will make you and your life better. Pick a school or program that makes your life better and gives you a good return on your money. 9. Colleges, all schools for that matter, allow the young in rural areas to see thoughts and ideas and other people that starting a business in their area wold never get them. The world is not all urban centers, most of the United States is not, and colleges allow young people a first glimpse of a world that is bigger than just Chickasha, Oklahoma. 10. You need to be careful about insulating yourself. In a world where you pick your reading, from your twitter feed, to Facebook, you pick what you search in Google which edits results based on what you previously liked, it is important to get information and other viewpoints you did not select. Most successful business people I know always have one advisor that is the opposite of them, to give them a viewpoint that counters their own. 11. The educational process needs to be improved, not ignored or rejected. Where there is a need to improve, there is business opportunity, and to find that opportunity, you need to know what needs to be changed, and how better than seeing first hand what needs to be changed. Get in it, see what needs to change, and then start your business to fix it. Each one of these men graduated college. So did I. D The Flinch by Julien Smith
This book, free on Amazon for the kindle, is one of those books that even though it is short, makes you pause and stop reading as you go. It made me understand that you need to lean into things. It’s about an instinct—the flinch—and why mastering it is vital. This book is about how to stop flinching. It’s about facing pain. It is about using the fear and pain to improve. Behind the flinch is pain avoidance, and dealing with pain demands strength you may not think you have, but you do. We all do, inside, it just needs to be unleashed. Facing the flinch is hard. It means seeing the lies you tell yourself, facing the fear behind them, and handling the pain that your journey demands—all without hesitation. The flinch is there to support the status quo. You treat mistakes as final, but they almost never are. Pain and scars are a part of the path, but so is getting back up, and getting up is easier than ever. You don’t need adrenaline to get through those things—you just need to do them. Crossing these obstacles will put the flinch in its place. The lessons you learn best are those you get burned by. Without the scar, there’s no evidence or strong memory. Firsthand knowledge, however, is visceral, painful, and necessary. It uses the conscious and the unconscious to process the lesson, and it uses all your senses. When you fall down, your whole motor system is involved. You can’t learn this from books. It just doesn’t work, because you didn’t really fall. You need to feel it in your gut—and on your scraped hands and shins—for the lesson to take effect. You can’t settle for reaching other people’s limits. You have to reach yours. If you don’t test yourself, you don’t actually grow to your own limits. For you to map out this new world, you need to test it, and test what you’re capable of inside it. You need to make mistakes, resist the flinch, and feel the lessons that come with this process. The anxiety of the flinch is almost always worse than the pain itself. You’ve forgotten that. You need to learn it again. You need more scars. You need to live. Ask yourself this: would your childhood self be proud of you, or embarrassed? Love this line. Who ever wanted to grow up and be working in a cubicle? Start doing the opposite of your habits. It builds up your tolerance to the flinch and its power. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” The truth is that judgment and fear will never stop, but they don’t actually do anything. There are no negative consequences for breaking the habit of flinching. Nothing will actually happen if you stop being afraid. You’re free. The ability to withstand the flinch comes with the knowledge that the future will be better than the past. You believe that you can come through challenges and be just as good as you were before them. The more positive you are, the easier it is for you to believe this. You move forward and accept tough situations, so no matter the breakup, the job loss, or the injury, you believe you’ll recover and end up fine. If you believe this, you’re right. Krishnamurti, a great Indian sage, once said: “You can take a piece of wood that you brought back from your garden, and each day present it with a flower. At the end of a month you will adore it, and the idea of not giving it an offering will be a sin.” In other words, everything that you are used to, once done long enough, starts to seem natural, even though it might not be. In times of stress, whatever pattern you’re used to taking emerges. If you’re used to running, you run. If you’re used to getting defensive, the same thing happens. It’s how you act under pressure. So you need to start recognizing your fight-or-flight response. Every alternative you develop is highly valuable because it opens your options dramatically. You can train yourself into new patterns, and you’re not the first to do so. The first step is to stop seeing everything as a threat. You can’t will this to happen—it requires wider exposure. If you’ve been punched in the face, you won’t worry as much about a mugger, for example. If you face the flinch in meditation, you don’t worry about a long line at the bank. Build your base of confidence by having a vaster set of experiences to call upon, and you’ll realize you can handle more than you used to. Doing the uncomfortable is key. It widens your circle of comfort. Second, rework the pattern of threat response. Learn habits that move you out of a fight-or-flight choice and into another pattern that’s more effective. But the real trick is to do what the professionals do. They use the speed of the flinch—they use its intensity—to their advantage. Instead of flinching back, they flinch forward—toward their opponent, and toward the threat. When you flinch forward, you’re using the speed of your instincts, but you don’t back off. Instead, you move forward so fast—without thinking—that your opponent can’t react. You use your upraised hands as weapons instead of shields. You use your fear to gain an advantage. Train yourself to flinch forward, and your world changes radically. The Flinch You go on offense instead of defense. Any fight you want to win, a habit of pushing past the flinch can make it happen. Most people rarely get in the ring for what matters. Instead, the fight gets fought by other people, elsewhere. Everyone talks about it like they want to be involved, but it’s just talk. The truth is that they can’t handle the pressure. They’re not in the ring because they aren’t ready to do what’s necessary to win. Today, right now, eliminate all excuses from your vocabulary. Refuse to mince words or actions. Refuse a scar-free life. The ring is different for everyone, but it’s always made of places, people, and projects that are worth the flinch. Habits obscure it. Set fire to your old self. It’s not needed here. It’s too busy shopping, gossiping about others, and watching days go by and asking why you haven’t gotten as far as you’d like. This old self will die and be forgotten by all but family, and replaced by someone who makes a difference. But wiping out the fear isn’t what’s important—facing it is. This pressure you feel—this flinch you encounter every day—there is no end to it. After you deal with one, another will come your way. The pressure increases as you go on. Whatever tension you can handle, the ring will provide just a little bit more than that. Adjust to it. You will never be entirely comfortable. This is the truth behind the champion—he is always fighting something. To do otherwise is to settle. THE FLINCH, A CHECKLIST 1. Challenge yourself by doing things that hurt, on purpose. Have a willpower practice, such as very hard exercise, meditation, endurance, or cold showers. Choose something that makes your brain scream with how hard it is, and try to tolerate it. The goal isn’t just to get used to it. It’s to understand that pain is something you can survive. 2. Remember things that are easy to forget. Upgrade your current relationships. Create un-birthdays for your friends and stick to them. Go through old text messages to rekindle dormant friendships. 3. Read more. Not just current blog posts and tweets and Facebook updates online, but other sources that take more consideration than blog posts or news. 4. Get some scars by working with your hands. Try to understand how things in your world work, like your car, your stereo system, or even your kitchen. 5. Turn your mobile phone off for a few hours each day. Having nothing to do while you’re waiting for a bus can be boring, but it’s only when you’re bored that the scary thoughts come to the surface. 6. Find new friends who make you feel uncomfortable, either because they have done more than you or because they have done nothing that you have. 7. Renegotiate your work. If you achieve X, then will your employer do Y? 8. Start dressing as if you had a very important job or meeting, or as if you were twenty years old again and thought you were the coolest person on Earth. 9. Imagine that you have to leave a legacy, and everyone in the world will see the work you’ve done. Volunteer. Create something that lasts and that can exist outside of you, something that makes people wonder and gasp. 10. Make something amazing, something that’s terrifying to you. Stay uncomfortable. Fight the flinch wherever you see it. Leave no stone unturned. The Flinch Be ruthless towards your business.
Pretend it isn't personal, pretend it belongs to someone else for a moment so you can look at your work objectively. If a fighter loses a fight, he starts training for the next one. That is what you need to do, shake it off, and start training for the next one. Just because you thought something was a good idea doesn't it mean it was a good idea. If a product isn't selling, tweak, test it, but in the end, if it is not working, stop selling it and find another. The important part is the model, how it works, not what product you are pushing through it. If the product doesn't work, it doesn't mean you failed, in fact you have done something great, you tried something most people just talk about, or wish for, but never actually get off their couches to go do. You did it, you got started, took the leap/ Selling a product that didn't work just means you need to try something different, you learned something from that product that you can use on the next product, and on the next, You learned what doesn't work, you learned new skills. The only way selling a product that doesn't sell hurts you is if you are too stubborn to learn from it and move on. If it doesn't sell, pick something else. D Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance - Notes on the Book by Jonathan Fields8/11/2012
Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance by Jonathan Fields
I liked this book much better than his first one, and it also popped on my radar just as I needed it. I particularly like the idea of rituals. It’s hard to sell mastery of entrepreneurship, marketing, and lifestyle without being able to succeed at those very things in your own business and life. The interesting thing about these ratings is that they aren’t based so much on the difficulty of the entire climb as on a set of moves known as the crux. Crux moves are the most challenging moments of the entire route; they often require you to push physically, emotionally, and intellectually, to take big and often blind risks in a way no other part of the climb does. There may be multiple crux moves along a single route. The manner in which you handle the thousands of smaller moments of uncertainty and challenge along the way determines whether you get to the crux moves. But the way you handle the crux moves themselves so strongly determines whether you’ll actually reach the peak that the difficulty of the most challenging crux sequence is often used to rate the entire climb. The book begins with an in-depth exploration of the three psychic horsemen of creation: uncertainty, risk, and exposure to criticism. When you begin, nothing is certain save the drive to create something worth the effort. The more certain you are of the answer or the outcome in advance, the more likely it is to have been done already—to be derivative—and the less anyone will care, including you. Anything certain has already been done. Or you can stand up and make a conscious choice to wade back into uncertain waters, knowing you’ve now invested time, money, and energy in an endeavor that, without substantial alteration, is going to end up a dud. These are tough moments, and ones that no creator in any realm can avoid. Creators need data. They need judgment, feedback, and criticism. But the possibility of loss is also a signpost that what you’re doing really matters, that you’re vested in both the process and the outcome. Knowing that fuels a deeper commitment to action and to striving not just to create something, but to create something amazing. Risk of loss has to be there. You cannot create genius without having skin in the game. Kill the risk of loss and you destroy meaning and one of the core motivations for action. The more you’re able to tolerate ambiguity and lean into the unknown, the more likely you’ll be to dance with it long enough to come up with better solutions, ideas, and creations. The two banks, it turns out, deliberately built their core philosophies, modes of operations, and culture around radically different ideals. For her book Bullish on Uncertainty (2009), business professor Alexandra Michel conducted a three-year study of the two banks. This approach was designed to deliberately amplify uncertainty, to force bankers to constantly reexamine what they were doing and why, and to keep them from falling into a pattern in which their perception of knowledge, expertise, and prestige blinded them to seeing the needs of any given client at any given time. It wasn’t unusual for them to report feeling overwhelmed and anxious as they tried to navigate those waters with very little structure. They immediately had to abandon a sense that they could rely on their own abilities and knowledge to get any deal done. Instead, they learned to harness all the resources of the firm and respond with the freshest eyes possible to what was in front of them. The ability not only to endure but to invite, amplify, and exalt uncertainty, then reframe it as fuel is paramount to your ability to succeed as a creator. Genius always starts with a question, not an answer. Eliminate the question and you eliminate the possibility of genius. However, that’s where things get really sticky. For all but a rare few, “living in the question” hurts. It causes anxiety, fear, suffering, and pain. And people don’t like pain. Rather than lean into it, we do everything possible to snuff it out. Not because we have to, but because we can’t handle the discomfort that we assume “has to” go along with the quest. The aversion to uncertainty, it seems, is hardwired into most people. a part of the brain known as the amygdala, which is a core instigator of fear and anxiety, lights up, triggering a cascade of physiological and psychological events, sending impulses and chemicals rushing through our bodies that induce a state of hyperalertness and, for many, anywhere from mild to severe fear and anxiety. “Remarkably, eliminating the possibility of evaluation by others makes ambiguity aversion disappear entirely.... Introducing the possibility of evaluation . . . is sufficient to make ambiguity aversion reemerge as strongly as commonly found.” We’ll create with abandon, make bolder choices, lean into uncertainty, and take risks far more readily if we know that whatever comes out of that effort will never be revealed to others. The moment we introduce the element of exposure, judgment, criticism, and the potential for rejection, most people run for the certainty fences. And in doing so, they become less willing to push boundaries, take risks, and choose less-certain options that often yield the greatest opportunities. In reality, we may not be as hardwired to avoid uncertainty as we are hardwired to avoid wanting to be judged for taking the lessmainstream path and coming up empty. Fear of judgment stifles our ability to embrace uncertainty and as part of that process delivers a serious blow to our willingness to create anything that hasn’t already been done and validated. One of the biggest awakenings as you strive to build a project, a career, and a life worthy of a legacy is that, in the end, there is no there there. No resting point. No certainty. No place to hide from either the inner or outer critics. The book may be finished, the movie wrapped, the company launched, or the product revealed. But what will you do when you go to work tomorrow? You and what you create will remain, to varying degrees, in a state of constant evolution. For Winsor, it’s not about tempting fate, it’s about going to that place where magic happens. “When the risks are big,” Winsor shared with me, “it’s where I feel most alive. In a weird way, it’s almost a meditative thing. When a lot’s on the line, whether it’s a big business deal or surfing a scary wave, I get so focused. Things slow down. The tiniest of details become alive, the feeling of a pebble beneath your shoe on a rock wall or the real meaning of a sentence in a business deal.” That experience, to Winsor, is what it’s all about. Rather than deterring action, he’s figured out how to experience it as the place from which the greatest opportunities arise. Indeed, the very activities he engages in, especially outside of work, and the consistency with which he undertakes them may be at the root of his ability to experience scenarios that would paralyze others as opportunities to go deeper. Junger’s seeming ability to harness the fear that cripples so many other creators, especially writers, is something that’s been with him for as long as he can remember. In a later conversation with me, he revealed, “I just figured out how to disengage from my experience of the fear and I do that with a lot of different emotions. I can do it with anger, frustration, whatever. I start feeling it and then I could just unhook from it.... I was a climber for tree companies and I’m scared of heights, but I never got over my fear of heights. I just figured out how to not think about it. It was really simple.” FROM THE DAWN of religion, nearly every faith has been built around not just scripture, not just community, but ritual. But if you strip away the beliefs and leave only the underlying rituals, you may be surprised to discover that rituals alone still have immense power as tools to counter the anxieties of an uncertain life. A certainty anchor is a practice or process that adds something known and reliable to your life when you may otherwise feel you’re spinning off in a million different directions. For the creator, whose very existence depends on the ability to spend vast amounts of time living and operating in the ethereal sea of uncertainty and anxiety that is creation, rituals in every part of life serve as a source of psychic bedrock Joe Fig’s fascinating look at the daily routines of artists, Inside the Painter’s Studio (2009), reveals that many of them maintain a near-dogged attachment to daily routine Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance In her classic book The Creative Habit (2003), legendary choreographer Twyla Tharp shares how she would awaken at 5:30 a.m. every day, take a taxi to the gym, work out with the same trainer, shower, eat three hard-boiled egg whites and coffee, make calls for one hour, work in her studio for two hours, rehearse with her company, return home for dinner, read for a few hours, then go to bed. Every day, the same routine. “A dancer’s life,” she said, “is all about repetition.” Commenting on the role of certainty anchors in his life, Steven Pressfield, whose book The War of Art (2002) opens a window into the power of ritual in creative work, shared with me his belief that to be a writer is to live in total insecurity. You never know where your next job is coming from, you never know if the next thing you do is going to find a market. “So . . . let’s say managing my money,” he offered, “I’m the most conservative person in the world. I just give it to a friend who takes care of everything for me. The only place I take risks is in the work. And then that’s where I feel like your job is to take risks.” Creation unfolds in two fairly distinct phases: • Insight/Dot Connecting/Disruption • Refinement, Expansion, and Production. Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From (2010), REP is all about building out, testing, expanding, refining, detailing, debugging, and improving big ideas and insights. For entrepreneurs, it’s where the visionary individual generally ends up butting heads with the operations and process people charged with turning the idea into something executable and profitable. This is where ritual and routine, done right, add immense power to the process. Ritual helps train you to sit down when you most want to stand, when you’re forced to work on the part of the process that leaves you anywhere from bored to riddled with anxiety. Over time, ritual has a funny side effect. It creates momentum. It becomes a habit that builds its own head of steam, one capable of overriding the call of Twitter, Facebook, Green & Black’s Dark 85% chocolate, and trying to learn whether the rumors about Apple’s next product are true. Over time, through sheer force of practice, you begin to get better at the side of the process that empties you out. Maybe never as good as someone whose creative orientation pulls them toward it, but good enough to be better than most others who don’t work as hard at it as you do. Better than you thought you’d ever be at it. And when that happens, you begin to experience that side of the dance with greater tolerance. The distaste and anxiety diminishes just enough to make you no longer hate it. Repeated exposure to it reduces your fear of it. When writing his most recent book, Be Excellent at Anything (2010), Schwartz structured his day into three ninety-minute writing bursts that allowed him to complete the book working only four and a half hours a day for three months. Our brains, Schwartz discovered, become easily fatigued. They need breaks in order to refuel, to be able to refocus, create, and produce. In his book How We Decide (2009), Jonah Lehrer points to the part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex (PFC) as the seat of selfcontrol or willpower. The problem is, the PFC is easily fatigued. In a Wall Street Journal article, Lehrer recounts an experiment conducted by Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Baba Shiv that divided students into two groups. While walking down a hallway, the members of one group had to recall a two-digit number, the members of the other a seven-digit number. During these walks, each student was offered a slice of chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit. The students trying to remember the seven-digit number were twice as likely to choose cake. Remembering the extra five digits so increased what Shiv called the “cognitive load” on their PFCs that their brains literally lost their ability to resist the cake. Willpower, it turns out, is a depletable resource. Tasks that involve heavy thinking, working memory, concentration, and creativity tax the PFC in a major way, and as Shiv’s experiment shows, Why should you care? Two reasons. What we often experience as resistance, desire, distraction, burnout, fatigue, frustration, and anxiety in the process of creating something from nothing may, at least in part, be PFC depletion that reduces our willpower to zero and makes it near impossible to commit to the task at hand—especially if the task wars with our creative orientation. In addition, what so many creators experience as a withering ability to handle the anxiety, doubt, and uncertainty as a project nears completion may actually be self-induced rather than process-induced suffering. Certainty anchors, dropped both within the context of your broader life and the boundaries of a specific creative endeavor, can be highly effective tools to counter the pull of fear, anxiety, and resistance. Explore Your Lifestyle Ritual Look at your life outside of your primary creative endeavor and see if you can create routine around the mundane, day-to-day activities. Look at your life outside of your primary creative endeavor and see if you can create routine around the mundane, day-to-day activities. Identify Your Creative Orientation Figure out which creative orientation fills you up and which empties you out: insight and big-idea generation, or refinement, expansion, and production. You may be able to evolve your starting orientation over time, but with rare exceptions we all come to the process with certain strong preferences. Ritualize Your Creation Time and Work in Bursts and Therapeutic Pauses When building your creation rituals, limit your bursts to no more than forty-five to ninety minutes, at least in the beginning. You may be able to train yourself to stay focused longer over time. Refuel Your Brain Between Bursts Between those bursts, exercise, meditate, nap, walk, eat—do whatever helps you refuel. It’s a bit like Shambala Buddhism founder Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s famous quote: “The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is there’s no ground.” All the founders make a presentation to the group on a weekly basis. There are no secrets. Nobody gets selective protection. Everyone is exposed. Transparency is the rule. This dynamic doesn’t remove judgment, nor should it. As we’ve already noted, judgment, done well, is feedback, and feedback is manna to the creation process. But what it does is change the psychology of feedback by leveling the field. It creates a group dynamic in which each creator becomes far more open to input because that input is clearly driven by the desire to help improve the creation. The all-in nature of the feedback loop also helps lessen the blow. It’s not just your ideas that are being put on the block; everyone’s ideas are. That’s the process. And that’s a good, necessary thing, as long as it’s done right. If you can’t do it live, do it online. We saw an example of that in Scott Belsky’s creation of Behance.net and The99Percent.com. These are both huge creative communities catering to the broader set of “creatives who like to get stuff done.” Now, with millions of monthly page views, they serve as tremendous showcases and sources of feedback for the participants’ work. For Belsky, the communities also serve as gateways to the suite of wonderful creative productivity tools under his Action Method brand. So far, we’ve explored how making certain changes in behavior (certainty anchors, ritual, routine, working in bursts), environment (hives), and access to individuals (like-minded colleagues, mentors, heroes, and champions) can have a significant impact on your ability to lean into the uncertainty, exposure to judgment, and risk that come with the process of creation. WELL-CRAFTED, CONSTRUCTIVE CREATION hives, buttressed by peer feedback and guidance from mentors, heroes, and champions, can be powerful supports in the quest to embrace the uncertainty of creation. They allow us to get the information we need to move the creative ball forward while minimizing the anxiety that often comes from haphazard exposure to less tactful or even maliciously inclined colleagues and leaders A huge part of the uncertainty, fear, and anxiety that defines the typical quest to create comes from a lack of input during the process of creation from those we’d most like to appeal to with our creations. When we plan a business, book, painting, or product, we take our best guesses at what will work. Then we work to either find the sweet spot between what we are organically compelled to create and what we believe people will want or ignore those we hope will eventually love our creations in the name of staying true to our muse. The process, for many, is largely blind. And that often leads to extraordinary levels of uncertainty, fear, anxiety, and suffering. “My philosophy,” Rowse told me, “has always been just to start it and then again just start testing to see whether it’s worth spending any money on it . . . I’ve always been very conservative on that front . . . I don’t like to start things that I don’t think will work, and I don’t like to start things that other people don’t think will work.” Over time, the repeated exposure to user feedback served to diminish Rowse’s potential fear of judgment and intolerance for uncertainty. The same can happen for you: The repeated exposure to criticism becomes the functional equivalent of exposure therapy, one of the core tools in the fear arsenal of cognitive behavioral therapists. The more you act in the face of it and survive, the less you feel its stranglehold. The tenets of lean manufacturing are generally agreed to include: 1. Eliminate waste. 2. Amplify learning. 3. Decide as late as possible. 4. Deliver as fast as possible. 5. Empower the team. 6. Build in integrity. 7. See the whole. In the lean start-up, everything is done in the name not of profits but of learning. Teams build what Ries calls a minimum viable product (MVP) that represents the “least amount of work necessary to start learning.” This product is then released to potential users as a series of experiments; feedback is solicited, then folded into the next MVP. The word “pivot,” which in start-up circles means the process of making serious changes to nearly every assumption your big business idea was based on and everything that’s grown out of that idea, As the legendary Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist Randy Komisar revealed in his book Getting to Plan B (2009), the vast majority of companies, even vetted ones backed by venture capital, get serious elements of their business model, solution, and market demand completely wrong. A willingness and ability to own those mistakes as early and as often as possible has become exalted by a growing number of mentors, founders, and investors Creators of all types are tapping a very different online platform—Kickstarter.com—to fund their creations, solicit feedback, and even pre-sell their creations while they’re still in the idea stage, altering the fear and certainty dynamic in a profound way. According to the description on the company’s Web site, Kickstarter. com is “the largest funding platform for creative projects in the world. Every month, tens of thousands of amazing people pledge millions of dollars to projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields.... This is not about investment or lending. Project creators keep 100% ownership and control over their work.” In the three years preceding the book’s publication, Rubin had taken to blogging and had built a substantial, engaged community. She tapped that community on a regular basis to ask questions, share ideas, and offer hints of what was coming in the book. The blog also became fertile ground to test content and see what people were responding to. Then she went a step further and created what she called her tribe of Happiness Project “superfans,” a gathering of readers who got more access to Rubin, along with the opportunity to learn more about the book and share insights and ideas. As we saw earlier, whether you’re tapping a full-blown lean creation process—with rapid prototyping, iteration, and co-creation—or focusing more on just the co-creation aspect, it’s important to preserve your role as the leader and primary visionary in the process. While there is no way to remove uncertainty from the process of creation, technology is now opening doors that allow us to reallocate how and when we experience that uncertainty. Shift Your Focus to Learning One of the big leaps Eric Ries suggested entrepreneurs take is to focus less on traffic, sales, or profits and more on learning as much as possible as quickly as possible Explore Your MVP Ask yourself whether you can create a minimum viable product that is finished enough to be able to release so you can gather feedback that you can incorporate in the next iteration. Be Open to Collaboration with Colleagues and End Users If you are creating simply because that is why you are here, without reference to whether your output will ever earn enough to let you live well in the world, it’s easier to create in a vacuum. However, the moment you seek money in exchange for your creation, the opinions of your eventual buyers matter. Bring Out Your Leader Bringing others into the process requires a set of skills that many creators either don’t normally exercise or haven’t fully developed, the most important involving leadership. Explore Your Value Exchange If you are asking something from others, explore what type of value you can offer in exchange. “When you step into ambiguity and uncertainty, when you surround yourself essentially with uncertainty without a life jacket,” Komisar told me, “you still have to have a foundation, a core, a center. You can’t be completely relative in that environment.... Even though you may not actually have a clear objective and you certainly don’t have a path to get there, you have to have a keel that keeps you centered. Spiritual practice allowed me to find that keel.” Meditation had formed the centerpiece of her creative life for decades. She considers it the most essential thing she does in her business, Practicing and mastering that one skill—touching, then dropping your current thought pattern—is hugely important for any creator. Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance Addressing an audience of film students at Boston’s Majestic Theater, filmmaker David Lynch pointed to yet another form of AT—Transcendental Meditation—as the source of deep calm and tremendous leaps in creativity. “Anger and depression and sorrow, they’re beautiful things in a story,” he said with the audience, “but they’re like a poison to the filmmaker, they’re a poison to the painter, they’re a poison to creativity.” Through his practice, he added, “the enjoyment of life grows. Huge ideas flow more. Everybody has more fun on the set. Creativity flows.” Attentional training (AT) is a catch-all phrase for a wide variety of techniques that create certain psychological and physiological changes in your body and brain. Many of them are derived from centuries-old ideologies and philosophies; some have religious overlays, while others have always been more secular. Major approaches include: • Active AT • Guided Meditation • Transcendental Meditation • Insight meditation • Mindfulness • Zen meditation and zazen • Buddhist meditation • Mantra meditation • Chanting and prayer across many traditions • Biofeedback • Hypnosis and self-hypnosis Each approach is built around a set of relatively simple daily practices. The common element is the experience of focused awareness for a committed period of time, The point is, the right kind of physical activity can induce the AT state. And over time that psycho-physiological training filters past your physical health to your mind-set and creativity. Mindfulness is, most broadly, an approach to how you exist in the world. Sitting and walking meditation are common daily practices, but mindfulness is also about how you wash your dishes, do your work, talk to people, and engage with the world. It’s not about seeking to create change; it’s about being with what you have and where you are, in the moment, every moment. Rather than focusing and excluding, it’s about resting a smallish bit of attention on your breath, then progressively opening to anything and everything that’s happening around you Transcendental Meditation was introduced to the world by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi some fifty years ago. According to TM.org, “During the past 50 years, more than five million people have learned the Transcendental Meditation technique and . . . Maharishi has trained over 40,000 teachers, opened thousands of teaching centers, and founded hundreds of schools, colleges and universities.” It is the most widely practiced and probably the most standardized teaching and practice protocol around today. TM instruction is highly standardized into a seven-session training sequence. Everyone learns the same thing, and training is readily available in many places. Once you learn it, you practice twice a day for twenty minutes at a time. David Lynch has become a huge proponent of TM practice as a tool for creators, because it cultivates a shift in brain coherence, mood, and the ability to lean into fear and uncertainty, and allows you to tap what the TM community calls the Unified Field, a form of shared consciousness that can become a rich source of creative insight. AT drops you into a place that, as your practice deepens, increasingly inoculates you against much of the pain and suffering that accompanies scenarios that would normally bring on fear, uncertainty, and anxiety. It doesn’t change the scenario. It doesn’t alter your circumstance. It doesn’t make things more certain or less fearful or pull you out of the state you need to be in in order to create. It just changes the way you live in this place. It allows you the equanimity to lean into uncertainty, risk, and judgment with greater ease. by Professor Yi-Yuan Tang of Dalian University of Technology and Professor Michael Posner of the University of Oregon, reported that just five days of a meditation-based form of AT called Integrative Body Mind Technique (IBMT) led to “low levels of the stress hormone cortisol among Chinese students.” The experimental group also showed lower levels of anxiety, depression, anger, and fatigue than students in a group practicing a nonmeditative form of relaxation. In 1993, University of Hertfordshire professor and author of The Luck Factor (2004) Richard Wiseman conducted a fascinating experiment that demonstrated the potentially limiting impact of blind commitment to a goal and its connection to perceived good fortune and improved outcomes. Good fortune, it seems, smiles upon those who remain open to inviting possibilities and opportunities outside the rigid constructs of their immediate task, mission, or vision. The approach to visualization or mental simulation most often offered is something called outcome simulation. It asks you to create a vivid picture of a specific outcome as if it has already happened. There is, however, a different approach to visualization that has been shown in a number of published studies to be significantly more powerful than outcome visualization. It’s also an approach that is custom-built for the daily mind-set of the long-term, large-scale creator, because it bolsters your ability to better define a project and take action on it on a daily basis. It’s called process simulation, and true to its name, it focuses on visualizing not the outcome or goal but the steps and actions needed to get there. Over a one-week period, for five minutes each day, students in the processsimulation group visualized the actions and steps needed to complete a specified project The driving engine and greatest challenge in any long-term, creative endeavor is to act daily, especially in the face of great uncertainty, fear, risk, and anxiety. How do you make process simulation work for you? Emiliya Zhivotovskaya, MAPP, offers three powerful ways to put this tool to work: Define Your Daily Creation Ritual Use It to Self-regulate or Stick to Your Ritual Here’s where this practice really shines. Actions and rituals have power when you do them. If you’re a writer, visualize yourself putting your notebook or pad in your bag, walking to your favorite café, choosing your table, ordering your favorite beverage, spending a few minutes reviewing handwritten notes, then opening your current creation and writing X words or for X minutes or hours, then taking a break to do Y, then coming back for your second creation about thirty minutes later. Create a Tangible Manifestation of Your Commitment While many people are strongly visual in their thought and learning, others are not. Asking those nonvisual people to visualize even small steps can be an exercise in futility, because their brains don’t operate that way. Writing, however, can be a highly effective approach to process simulation. Rather than simply thinking and seeing the steps, rituals, and actions, take the extra step of writing them down. This changes the dynamic in a number of ways. To-do lists are perfect examples of this. Part of the reason they can be so effective (not always, for as we all know, they can be easily abused or used as crutches) is that they are effectively process simulation lists. In her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2006), she identifies what she calls the fixed and growth mind-sets. A person with a growth mind-set, on the other hand, assumes that work is the core driver of success and places less importance on genetics as a determining factor An excerpt from a 2004 interview with Murakami in The Paris Review brings home the connection between physical strength and creating extraordinary work: When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4:00 A.M. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit, and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9:00 P.M. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long—six months to a year—requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity. As Dr. John Ratey noted in his seminal work Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain (2008), exercise isn’t just about physical health and appearance. It also has a profound effect on your brain chemistry, physiology, and neuroplasticity (the ability of the brain to literally rewire itself). It affects not only your ability to think, create, and solve, but your mood and ability to lean into uncertainty, risk, judgment, and anxiety in a substantial, measurable way, even though until very recently it’s been consistently cast out as the therapeutic bastard child in lists of commonly accepted treatments for anxiety and depression. In a 2002 study, Rhode Island College professor Stephen Ramocki found a significant relationship between vigorous aerobic exercise and creativity, including an increase in creativity immediately following exercise. While higher-intensity exercise seems to be more effective in countering anxiety and elevating mood, Blanchette found that even moderate exercise yielded a significant increase in creativity that was still present two hours after the exercise was completed. And an October 2007 Newsweek article reporting on a series of studies by Professor Arthur Kramer, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, showed that daily aerobic exercise can actually grow new brain cells, especially in the hippocampus, the area that controls memory and learning, and in the frontal lobes, which are chiefly responsible for executive function—planning, abstract thinking, decision making and adaptation, processing sensory information, taking constructive action, not taking destructive action, and knowing the difference between the two. Exercise fostered improved performance on psychological tests of the subjects’ ability to answer questions more quickly and accurately. The research also seems to show there is a “use it or lose it” effect once you are well into adulthood. Stop exercising and the increases quickly fade Indeed, the demand for varied, community-driven exercise has begun to fuel an explosion in alternative forms of movement and exercise experiences and settings among adults. These activities—think martial arts, CrossFit, bootcamps, obstacle challenges, modified indoor cycling, P90X, power yoga, dancing, team sports, boxing, badminton, rock climbing—engage the mind, cultivate passion, and inspire joy. • For more information on easily accessible approaches to AT and to download complementary guided meditations in mp3 format, visit JonathanFields.com/mindset. Read her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success for detailed information about how to undertake the change First, read Dr. John Ratey’s book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. When you are called to create, the psychology of the endeavor also changes. Experiencing a calling creates a sense of deeper conviction, of purpose that often you, even as the creator or vision leader, don’t fully understand. When you are driven by a calling or a deeply personal quest and you allow that calling to inspire action, you live in the world differently. You do a thousand little things you’ve never done before. You act and interact with more confidence and vitality. Your personal energy changes. As Guy Kawasaki explains in his book Enchantment (2011), purpose and passion enchant people. They want to be around you. They want to help you. In his book Getting to Plan B, Randy Komisar suggests setting up what he calls a dashboard. You create a grid that identifies all of your major data points, assumptions, and leaps of faith on day one, then revisit it at regular intervals to assess what remains valid. Belsky’s vision is not to create the current line of Action Method products, but rather to create tools and processes that make creatives more productive. What those look like will change over time. And that allegiance to a market, rather than a specific product, gives him a lot of leeway to continue to test, build, bomb, and evolve. All too often, that’s not how start-ups or even established productdevelopment teams operate. They are wedded more to their particular solution than to the notion of serving a market. When they start to have problems with that product, ones that aren’t fixable with easy tweaks, they have a very difficult time moving through these moments. I also had a chance to sit down with Robert McKee, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the structure of storytelling. Through his international Story seminars and a book of the same name, McKee has trained tens of thousands of screenwriters, television writers, and authors, including a laundry list of people who’ve won every award possible. Genius requires craft plus insight. Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance Counterintuitive as it sounds, it’s the undoing that plants the seeds of the greatest doing. What I create in any one medium is made far richer by the fact that I spend considerable time outside that medium. It may mean my path to mastery takes longer. So be it. In the end, I create better businesses because I write. I write better books, essays, and posts because I relish my time as a dad, son, brother, husband, friend, yogi, student, and teacher. we also have an organic cap on our ability to focus. Ninety minutes is the outside window. And, honestly, that’s being quite generous. Business strategist and Be Unreasonable (2007) author Paul Lemberg shared with me that his extensive work with hundreds of C-level executives and thousands of employees yielded a number closer to twenty-five to forty-five minutes. Start by spending a few weeks really listening to and watching your rhythms to get a good sense for the parts of the day in which you’re able to (1) do great work (2) with the greatest ease. Try working at different times of the day, maybe even rising early or staying up later to test a variety of windows. Productive creation rituals let you check back into your nonwork life. They give you both the time and the mind space to drop into that life far more often, spend more time there, take better care of yourself, and remind yourself how wonderful that place and its inhabitants are. Rather than allow these things to derail her, she reframes these challenges as experiences and information that will help make next year’s event even better. In her mind, this isn’t so much a one-shot deal as it is a journey that will build and unfold for years. It’s all about learning and serving. That “reframe” doesn’t eliminate the emotions but rather gives it a different context, a different story line that allows her to lean into it and move through the uncertainty, exposure, and risk with more ease. That shift alone is pretty powerful. Reframing, in the world of psychology, is better known as an example of cognitive reappraisal, changing the story or message around fear-inducing stimuli to alter your emotional response. Reframing literally changes the way your brain processes the experience, tamping down the fear and anxiety that might come as an automatic response to uncertainty, risk, and exposure to judgment. One of the greatest fears of creators is the fear of failure. But that term is pretty fuzzy. It’s more of a catchall phrase that includes (1) fear of judgment (what happens when you crash and burn), (2) intolerance for uncertainty, and (3) fear of what most people would consider extreme loss. We’ll use “going to zero” as a shorthand phrase to describe that trilogy. What we’re really talking about here is the anxiety that sets in when you envision yourself losing a solid enough chunk of money, time, energy, prestige, respect, or reputation that the fall would, in your mind, spell disaster. For many entrepreneurs, artists, and organizational innovators, the experience of going to zero releases within them the freedom to rebuild in a way they’d never have given themselves the latitude to explore had they never been stripped of their prior success. There’s only up or down. The notion that you can just coast through life in neutral is a fallacy constructed to rationalize inaction. By no means is the “sideways is good enough” mentality limited to the fitness industry. In fact, the challenging economy is fueling a mass movement to this position. Concerned about job security, employees who built careers on the back of innovation across a wide spectrum of industries are increasingly unwilling to take bold, creative action. Nobody wants to guess wrong in a climate where money is short and jobs are shorter. The net effect—a stifling of the very risk taking, innovation, and action in the face of uncertainty that fueled earlier success—spells troubling times ahead for many companies that don’t reaffirm their commitment to a culture of innovation, and not just in words, but in actions. In art, business, and entrepreneurship, there is no coasting. There is no neutral. No sideways. It’s a myth, an illusion. There’s only up or down. Leading or trailing be sure to explore the three key questions as well: • What if fail, then recover? • What if I do nothing? • What if I succeed? When you run from uncertainty, you end up running from life. From evolution. From growth. From wisdom. From friendship. From love. From the creation of art, services, solutions, and experiences that move beyond what’s been done before to illuminate, serve, solve, and delight in a way that matters. I built certainty anchors more deliberately into my life and my work. I created more systematic routines around basic lifestyle activities, then rebuilt work-oriented creation efforts around a series of intense bursts interspersed with activities that would give both my brain and my body a chance to recover and refuel. I created and leaned on my own creation hive, an inner circle of like-minded writers, marketers, and entrepreneurs who I knew were insanely smart, compassionate, driven, and abundance oriented—meaning we each viewed the others’ successes as our own and rallied to support them. Leveraging technology, I created my own private creation tribe, which was in part a subset of my already rich online community but also included a number of new voices drawn to share in my process and journey. I shared ideas, insights, and experiences; Recommitting to a twice-a-day meditation practice has allowed me to find what Randy Komisar identified as a “keel” in the storm of life, as well as a place of stillness in which to cultivate ideas and insights and let them grow into actions and then endeavors. Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late (Portfolio) by Michael Ellsberg
An interesting book, and it is interesting more for what it points you to than what it says. The author seems very smart and very well connected, and it is to these connections that the book bring the most value, my list of books to read next has just grown much larger. This is a book on self education, and how to make the most of what and who you know. Make sure you buy a copy. Notes He had by that time spent a decade of his life in passionate pursuit of learning things that would make him successful—sales, marketing, leadership, management, finance, and accounting—within the context of owning real-world businesses, with his own money at stake. Have you ever stopped to ponder how utterly bizarre this state of affairs is? How in the world did we all get so convinced that academic rigor constituted a prerequisite, necessary, and sufficient training for success in life? Sir Ken Robinson, author of The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, has pondered this puzzling question a lot. Libertarian critic of our current educational system Charles Murray makes the point another way: “We should look at the kind of work that goes into acquiring a liberal education at the college level in the same way that we look at the grueling apprenticeship that goes into becoming a master chef: something that understandably attracts only a limited number of people.” Developing your practical intelligence will have far more impact on the quality and success of your life. According to Gladwell, the main difference is that, in addition to his rocket-high IQ, Oppenheimer also possessed exceptional practical intelligence in navigating his way through the people who could influence his success in the world, “things like knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect.” Langan in turn possessed little of this kind of intelligence, and thus was never able to gain much of a toehold in the world of practical achievement. In his book, Gladwell shows that once a person has demonstrated passable logical, analytic, and academic skills, other factors have much more influence on real-world results—specifically, creativity, innovative thinking, and practical and social intelligence. To the extent that we develop these aptitudes in our lives, we tend to do so out in the real world, not in formal institutions. I was earning money because I had become good at marketing and selling my copywriting services. There are boatloads of good freelancers who are broke, simply because they don’t know how to market and sell their services. Lifelong learning and professional development are necessities in the current career environment; this book is your guide to self-education for success in the twenty-first century. Yet, the lives of the people profiled in this book show conclusively that education is most certainly not the same thing as academic excellence. The driving theme of the stories in this book is that, even though you may learn many wonderful things in college, your success and happiness in life will have little to do with what you study there or the letters after your name once you graduate. It has to do with your drive, your initiative, your persistence, your ability to make a contribution to other people’s lives, your ability to come up with good ideas and pitch them to others effectively, your charisma, your ability to navigate gracefully through social and business networks (what some researchers call “practical intelligence”), and a total, unwavering belief in your own eventual triumph, throughout all the ups and downs, no matter what the naysayers tell you. The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late (Portfolio) First, job security is dead, as anyone who has had a job recently knows. You’re going to have many different jobs, employers, and even careers in your life. So where you get your first, entry-level one—the single thing that a BA credential really helps with—becomes less and less relevant. Building a portfolio of real-world results and impacts you’ve created, over time, becomes more and more relevant. Second, the Internet, cell phones, and virtually free longdistance calling have created new opportunities for flexible, self-created, independent careers; this trend has been helped along by the gathering storms of millions of hungry, highly educated young men and women in India, China, Eastern Europe, the Philippines, and elsewhere, happy to do the work that entry-level Organization Men would have done in years past, for a fraction of the cost. This emerging competition has encouraged many people in the West to “think outside the organization” to create careers for themselves that can’t be outsourced, offshored, or automated. More and more Americans of all ages are waking up to the reality that you don’t need a nine-to-five job to be a valuable, contributing member of society and to create wealth for yourself and others. Millions of small-business owners, entrepreneurs, computer programmers, graphic designers, independent consultants, writers, and freelancers make valuable contributions to society (creating four out of ten new jobs in the economy), outside the realm of working for a boss nine to five (or eight to eight). Daniel Pink calls it “Digital Marxism: In an age of inexpensive computers, wireless handheld devices, and ubiquitous low-cost connections to a global communications network, workers can now own the means of production.” Education is still necessary to learn how to do the great work that gets you paid. But these days, almost all of the education that ends up actually earning you money ends up being self-education in practical intelligence and skills, acquired outside of the bounds of traditional educational institutions. Here they are, the courses in The Education of Millionaires. SUCCESS SKILL #1: How to Make Your Work Meaningful and Your Meaning Work (or, How to Make a Difference in the World Without Going Broke) SUCCESS SKILL #2: How to Find Great Mentors and Teachers, Connect with Powerful and Influential People, and Build a World-Class Network SUCCESS SKILL #3: What Every Successful Person Needs to Know About Marketing, and How to Teach Yourself SUCCESS SKILL #4: What Every Successful Person Needs to Know About Sales, and How to Teach Yourself SUCCESS SKILL #5: How to Invest for Success (The Art of Bootstrapping) SUCCESS SKILL #6: Build the Brand of You (or, To Hell with Resumes!) SUCCESS SKILL #7: The Entrepreneurial Mind-set versus the Employee Mind-set: Become the Author of Your Own Life At the very least, we want to make a difference in our communities. This is what feels meaningful to us: making a difference, having an impact, living for a purpose. Yet, there’s a paradoxical aspect to “making a difference” and “having an impact.” The world doesn’t always care whether we want to make a difference or have an impact on it. In fact, it can be downright hostile to us when we try. The world doesn’t automatically open its arms to us just because we have good intentions. The bigger the impact you want to make on the world or in your chosen field—the bolder your purpose is—the greater the risks you’re going to have to take. Which means, the greater the chance that you’ll end up making no impact at all. I said, “Mom, Dad, look at all the basketball stars and football stars who go right from high school to the NBA, or the actors and musicians who don’t bother with college because their careers are already in motion. There have to be business stars, too, who don’t need to go to a four-year program to learn their field. If I go through four years of college, I’ll just be on a level playing field after four years—whereas now I have an advantage. Spending four years in school means I’ll be four years out of the business world. Everything changes like lightning in the Internet world, and they’ll have caught up to me.” These types of family dramas and arguments, in my opinion, boil down to arguments about our sense of safety versus heroism in life. Safety and heroism are almost always opposed. People tend to feel safer and more comfortable with the known over the unknown. An “impact” is a change in course, so if you want to make an impact in your field, you’re asking people to venture into the unknown. The more of a change of course your innovation or leadership represents, the more you are asking people to abandon safety and comfort, which is not usually something they’re willing to do without overcoming a great deal of resistance. There may be entrenched interests who are quite happy with the way things are now and who aren’t interested at all in your “impact,” thank you very much. In fact, they may say you can take your impact and shove it! Try to rock the boat too much, make too much of a change, and these people may try to oust you from the organization, community, or marketplace, or even try to harm your reputation or career prospects. Anyone who has dealt with office politics knows this. Any artist or entrepreneur who has tried to do anything innovative knows this. If you want to become wealthy or famous, which I presume you do if you’re buying and reading a book on success, then you’re going to need to make a difference in the lives of many people. (By definition, it’s impossible to become famous, and it’s also very difficult to become wealthy, if you impact the lives of only a few people.) Making an impact on large groups of people involves leading them in some way. Yet, seeking to be a leader is akin to seeking what economists call a “positional good.” Those who do end up leading often achieve leadership, amass wealth, fame, or support, or make an impact on the world, largely through the effects of word of mouth. Followers/customers/fans convert other people to followers/customers/fans, who convert more people to followers/customers/fans, until a big group—which business author Seth Godin calls a “tribe”—has amassed around that given leader, company, or artist. This is how most artists, musicians, actors, writers, and entrepreneurs who become famous and wealthy do so—through the viral-effects word of mouth. When word of mouth takes off, its effects are extremely rapid and dramatic (the “tipping point” that Malcolm Gladwell writes about). Yet, word of mouth is one of the least predictable things on the planet. No one really knows what the next word-of-mouth sensation will be. At any point in your career, you’ll usually be choosing between one path that is safer and one path that has the potential to feel more meaningful to you, between one path that is more certain and one that offers more of a chance for a sense of purpose and heroism. It’s hard to be a hero if there’s no risk involved. But, as Randy Komisar points out in his book The Monk and the Riddle, there are also a lot of unacknowledged risks to not following your passions, of sticking too close to the beaten path in the name of safety and predictability. These include: “[T]he risk of working with people you don’t respect; the risk of working for a company whose values are inconsistent with your own; the risk of compromising what’s important; the risk of doing something that fails to express—or even contradicts—who you are. And then there is the most dangerous risk of all—the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.” He told me that, a lot of the time, people put off taking any steps toward living a more fulfilling life, with the idea of “keeping their options open.” Yet, according to Randy, the idea of “keeping your options open” is an illusion. Randy pointed out to me that the words “decision” and “decide” stem from the roots “cise” and “cide,” to cut off and to kill, also the roots of many other words related to cutting and killing, such as “incise,” “concise” (cutting out nonessentials), and “homicide.” Thus, a decision is to cut off, or kill, other possibilities. “People feel like, unless they’re affirmatively making a decision, they’re not making a decision. They think, ‘How can you fail if you’re not making any decision, not cutting off any possibilities?’ The reality is, you’re making a decision all the time. You’re making a decision not to follow a path that might lead you to fulfillment. The real question is ‘What risks are you taking by those decisions you’re not making?’ You need to capture what you do, identify it, and codify it, so it can be taught to many, many people. First teach it to a team, and then beyond. The Art of Earning a Living is the art of finding creative ways of bringing the spheres of money and meaning together and making them overlap significantly. You’re going to have to create a solution unique to you and your circumstances. STEP 1: Get on Your Feet Financially The best way to get financially stable, once you have some kind of job—any job—is to exhibit the entrepreneurial leadership values on the job The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late (Portfolio) STEP 2: Create More Room for Experimentation This step (and all the rest) applies to groups A, B, and C mentioned above. (Presumably those in group A are already financially stable and thus have already completed Step 1.) The next step in Aligning Your Money and Your Meaning, once you’re financially on your feet, is to create more room for experimentation. Experimentation takes time. It takes money. And it takes room to fall and to fail. It’s just so different—and better—figuring out how to make a difference in the world and find meaning in your life when your bills are covered and you have a secure roof over your head. If you’re working seventy-hour weeks at a corporate job, however, there will be very little space left over for anything else but that. In this case, you should begin taking some risks at work. See if you can get buy-in from your boss to focus more on results you achieve, rather than focusing on hours logged. There are some great books on how to make this transition, including Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: No Schedules, No Meetings, No Joke, the Simple Change That Can Make Your Job Terrific by Cali Ressler and Jodi Thompson; Chapter 12 of Tim Ferriss’s The Four-Hour Workweek, titled “Disappearing Act: How to Escape the Office”; and also The Custom-Fit Workplace: Choose When, Where, and How to Work and Boost Your Bottom Line by Joan Blades and Nanette Fondas. STEP 3: With This New Space in Your Workday, Begin Experimenting! Seth Godin recommends this path for many people. He told me: “For fifty thousand years, humans did what they were passionate about, and then they did something else to eat. I don’t think there’s anything written down to say that those days are gone forever. We don’t have a poetry shortage. There’s plenty of poetry. No one gets paid to write poetry. If you want to write poetry, write poetry.” STEP 4: Striking Out on Your Own (for Those Who Want to Change Careers, Become Entrepreneurs. Whatever it may be, if you want to make a living from it and leave your current job, you’re going to have to do a deep dive into the success skills in this book, particularly marketing, sales, and networking. You’re going to have to wrap your own passions, talents, and purpose—the things you care most about and are best at—in the package of these fundamental success skills. Seth told me: “People have this idea that either you’re a cog in the machine, just working for the man, or you’re out singing onstage, making your living that way. It seems like there’s a lot in between—there are a lot of people who may not have what it takes to become the next famous musician, but who are finding ways to make money with what they care about. “Think about this restaurant right now. It’s not really like any restaurant in New York City that I’ve ever been in. Where did it come from? It’s not here because someone made chairs or china, which are available to everyone. It’s here because someone’s putting on a show. And they’re charging many times what they would get if they were selling it from a street cart. “I’m saying that’s ‘art.’ Someone didn’t just copy it. Someone had to take various components and put them together, to create something that was worth experiencing, and sharing, and talking about. On the back of that, you can build a business that makes tons of money selling food. “The art here, the experience of seeing it, that’s free. Anyone can walk in this place, look around, get it, and leave. The souvenir part—the experience part, the owning-the-table-for-two-hours part—that’s what they make money from. “McDonald’s fooled us into believing that the purpose of industry was to churn out standardized quantity at low cost. This place reminds us that, no, there’s an alternative to racing to the bottom. And that is, racing to the top.” I was developing a valuable set of skills. Not editing/writing skills, which were already fine. I’m talking about the success skills in this book, particularly sales, marketing, and networking. In his book The Monk and the Riddle, Randy Komisar advises you to ask a simple question about your current mode of income: Would you be willing to do this for the rest of your life? If the answer is no—if the thought of doing your current gig for the rest of your life makes you totally depressed—then you owe it to yourself (having only one life to live) to figure out what kind of pursuit you would be willing to live till the end. WITHOUT FAILURE, THERE IS NO LEARNING Indeed, if there’s one single trait that sets all the self-educated millionaires I interviewed for this book apart from other people, it’s their relationship to risk. And yet, I don’t believe the people I feature in this book simply took a bigger bet than everyone else and happened to get lucky and win. Rather, I’ve seen that they have systematically and intentionally developed a style of working that allows them to take lots of small bets—bet after bet after bet after bet—all the while making sure that they don’t get wiped out of the game if one or many of them go south. In other words, I believe that for most of the people featured in this book a trait even more important than luck was resilience. I believe this is a distorted view of entrepreneurialism. Most of the self-educated people featured in this book took pains to make sure that their “downside was not so exposed,” to use the parlance of investing: they made sure that a failed business would not mean total ruin; it would just mean a few scrapes, a few good lessons learned, and up they are again at a new one. No biggie. They are calm, relaxed, and cool about failure, not hysterical and terrified, because they view failure as necessary for learning. Here’s where the resilience comes in. For Mike, his failure wasn’t condemnation to perpetual ruin. He started out with the assumption that life has risk. Rather than see failure as something to be avoided at all costs (as most of us see it), he instead designed his life and mind-set around the inevitability of failure and how to cope with it. Instead of viewing his first big failure as ruin, he simply decided to view it as an opportunity for an interesting change in life plans. To be sure, they aren’t banking their entire life future on one single dream or bust (say, becoming a rock star, à la David Gilmour). But rather than never try their hand at any dream at all, and sticking to a safe-but-boring course instead, they keep trying one dream after the next, maximizing their inner and outer resilience for the inevitable failures. They fail early and often, and turn courses on a dime, until something begins to gain traction. What makes it different from, say, a gambling addiction, is that these people are masters of making sure they stay in the game when luck inevitably turns against them. Unlike a gambling addict, they have consciously cultivated a lifestyle of resilience. These people are not addicts of gambling; they are addicts of learning in the real world. And learning in the real world involves failure. Lots of it. “People who have been successful are still as likely to get it wrong as right going forward. They just try more things,” Mike told me. “That’s the difference.” Mike’s advice for young people who want to combine their passion with their money? “Start with the passion and the drive. You’ve got to have that hunger. From that passion and desire, go actually do some stuff. Try some little businesses. Get some failure under your belt. Find out what works and doesn’t work, and don’t worry about the failures, worry about learning.” One of the best ways to avoid this kind of horror-story scenario when reaching for your dreams, even if your business doesn’t end up working out, is to start a service business. Usually, overhead and start-up costs are low, you don’t need to borrow a lot (or any) to get started, and you can begin generating revenue immediately. Even if the business doesn’t work out, the consequences of failure are usually minimal, “The very best things you can do when starting a new business,” Josh told me, “are, number one, keep your overhead as low as possible, and number two, make sure you’re getting recurring revenue as quickly as possible. If your revenue is semi-predictable, you can just grow and grow based on the cash that the business is throwing off, instead of having to get investments, loans, and so forth.” The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late (Portfolio) In his book, which he presents as a business education in a book without the need for $100,000 of debt (http://www.personalmba.com), Josh talks about a concept called “iteration velocity.” He quotes Google CEO Eric Schmidt: “Our goal is to have more at bats per unit of time and money than anyone else.” “When creating a new offering, your primary goal should be to work through each iteration cycle as quickly as possible. Iteration is a structured form of learning that helps you make your offering better; the faster you learn, the more quickly you’ll be able to improve.” In a blog post entitled “One in a Million,” Seth Godin writes, “The ardent or insane pursuit of a particular [risky] goal is a good idea if the steps you take along the way also prep you for other outcomes, each almost as good (or better). If ... bending the market to your will and shipping on time and doing important and scary work are all things you need to develop along the way, then it doesn’t really matter so much if you don’t make the goal you set out to reach.” Seth continues, “Does spending your teenage years (and your twenties) in a room practicing the violin teach you anything about being a violin teacher or a concert promoter or some other job associated with music? If your happiness depends on your draft pick or a single audition, that’s giving way too much power to someone else.” I met with Elliott and the other cofounders and executives—all in their twenties—in Miami, where they were renting a group home together. The eight of them collectively choose new cities to live in every few months, all over the world, where they meet people to invite to their conferences and work remotely via laptop and cell phone. “I attribute my success so far, 100 percent, to the people I’ve met and learned from. It’s not even a question. [Motivational author, and college dropout] Jim Rohn says, ‘You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.’ And on a bigger picture, you are a reflection of the twenty or thirty people who give you the best advice. Everything is about people. It all starts with you surrounding yourself with great people who you can learn from. I view life as learning. It’s all learning for me, all the time. I’m literally nonstop learning. I read books every day. I talk to people every day. I’m always out looking for new people I can learn from.” if you want to be successful, and make a huge impact in your life, find exceptional people to learn from, and surround yourself with them. “This turned out to be the most significant decision in my business career—to find someone who is massively successful and go to work for him. Through that, I got into the world of marketing and sales. I discovered a lot of the past marketing and sales geniuses, like Claude Hopkins and Eugene Schwartz and John Caples and David Ogilvy, and read all of their books. I read Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, which was very impactful on me. Eben said, “Leadership is like a fountain. Imagine the leaders are the water near the top, ready to burst out of the fountain. The water about to burst out is being pushed up by water below it. If you want to succeed, find leaders who are doing amazing things in the world, and push them up. Find powerful people and help them reach their goals. If you’re of service to them, they will be of service back.” And, while you may hope to get something in return, you must always do it with absolutely zero expectation of getting anything in return. The vibe has to be one of giving, not taking. Some people spend their time amassing financial capital— cash, stock, bonds—and real capital such as buildings. In turn, I’ve noticed that many people I interviewed for this book spend an inordinate amount of time, effort, and money investing in the growth and maintenance of what I’ve called “connection capital.” Connection capital is anything that can help you expand your network of connections (your “tribe,” as Seth Godin calls it), and is not significantly used up in expanding this network. The two biggest forms of connection capital are (a) your already-existing connections and (b) your ability to give good advice. Being able to connect people to each other is a massive asset, which in turn helps grow the amount of people you know, which in turn grows your ability to connect people. Get the snowball rolling, and it may surprise you how fast it grows. Eben says that the three areas of life the majority of people spend most of their time worrying about are money, relationships, and health. I’m going to teach you two questions that, if you put them into use at parties, events, and conferences, will change your life forever and will grow your network faster than you ever thought possible: 1. What’s most exciting for you right now in your life/ business? 2. What’s challenging for you in your life/business right now? (If you feel you need to brush up on your own social intelligence—including your sense of tact—a great place to start is the book Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships by Daniel Goleman. I highly recommend this book: social intelligence is something we learn almost nothing about in our formal education.) Here are several areas where you can often give valuable advice: MARKETING AND SALES. I have found that most people who have built their businesses around marketing don’t know jack about sales. And most people who have built their businesses around sales don’t know jack about marketing. In particular, you should learn about direct-response marketing and copywriting, FOOD, WEIGHT, AND NUTRITION. Most people who are successful in the worlds of business and money are highly driven. And many people who are highly driven ignore their health; their success so far has come at the expense of their health. If in the course of your life and self-education you have learned to overcome your own chronic health challenges, or have achieved your ideal weight or learned a lot about nutrition, fitness, and healthy lifestyles, you’ll often know a lot more about these topics than many successful businesspeople do—particularly SPIRITUALITY, PURPOSE, AND MEANING. If you’ve thought a great deal about the more existential, philosophical aspects of life, and have come to some personal wisdom or understanding in these areas through your own life journey, providing support in these realms is often a great way to serve people who are more powerful and successful than you are. (See Success Skill #1 on connecting with your sense of purpose and meaning.) HOBBIES, PASSIONS, AND CAUSES. You can often connect with influential people through shared hobbies and passions. Of course, this knowledge has been keeping golf courses running for centuries. I happen to have no interest in golf whatsoever, so I’m not going to write to you about golf. But I’ve found that cultivating a wide range of cool, hip, discussion-worthy hobbies maximizes your chance of being able to share with and give to amazing people you meet. RELATIONSHIPS. In most cases I’ve seen, there’s not much of a correlation between success in business and money, and happiness in relationships. If anything, I’ve seen a negative correlation. You should definitely read The Trusted Advisor by David Maister, Charles Green, and Robert Galford, and Networking with the Affluent by Thomas J. Stanley, two of the best books on high-integrity, no-sleaze connecting I’ve read. Another great resource, which adapts some of these strategies for the digital and social media age, comes from David Siteman Garland (http://www.therisetothetop.com). In his article “From Tim Ferriss to Seth Godin: How to Interview and Build Relationships with the Most ‘Influential’ People in the World,” he emphasizes the same point everyone else is making in this chapter—when you find creative ways to serve people you’d like to connect with, “ask for nothing [in return].... By doing [that], you will separate yourself from 98% of the pack.” He then outlines a specific, detailed process for finding creative ways to be of service to influencers on the Web. This is required reading for anyone interested in the topic of this chapter. “The happier you are in giving,” self-made multi-entrepreneur Russell Simmons told me, “the more people are excited to be around you. You become ‘sticky.’” However, if you start out making this trade of time and elbow grease in the hope of gaining teachings, make sure you’re able to convert those teachings quickly into connection capital (i.e., into a network of connections and the experience that allows you to give valuable, high-impact advice, thereby providing more value to your network, drawing in more connections). For a simple reason. Relying on time and elbow grease and service as your main form of giving—potentially valuable as these gifts may be—severely limits your scope of giving. There are only so many hours in the day, and so many hours of elbow grease you can give before you conk out. In twenty-first-century business parlance, this form of giving is “not scalable,” or “not highly leverageable.” They reach their upper limit of scope quickly. In turn, connection capital is a highly scalable, highly leverageable form of giving. By developing connection capital—that is, your “emotional bank account” of trust and goodwill among your already-existing contacts, and your bank of experience and knowledge from which you can give valuable advice—you can decouple the impact you make on others’ lives from the time you spend making it. you can (and have to) learn on your own, educating yourself out in the real world: How to network and connect with powerful teachers and mentors (the subject of this chapter). How to start and manage a business. How to market and sell effectively (Success Skills #3 and #4). How to lead others. How to discover your sense of purpose and meaning (Success Skill #1). In other words, he invested his other forms of capital (sales skills, financial capital) into connection capital—the ability to help people massively in the space of two minutes just by making introductions within his network. You begin to see what separates him from nearly all other twentysomethings, indeed, from nearly everyone else in the working world: Elliott has decoupled his labor from his capital, and focused on building some pretty amazing capital for himself: a world-class tribe of people he helps and who help him. He has become a capitalist—a capitalist of giving and service to others. The second form of connection capital—that is, the second form of giving that can expand your network of teachers, mentors, and guides in life—is as we’ve seen, advice giving. Steve Pavlina expresses a similar theme in his book Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth. Zig Ziglar, another legendary motivational speaker, author, sales trainer, and self-made multimillionaire (who dropped out of the University of South Carolina to pursue a career in sales), has said, “You can have anything you want in life, if you will just help other people get what they want.” In Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?, which is the best book ever written on the central importance of giving within a business context, Seth Godin writes: “It’s difficult to be generous when you’re hungry. Yet being generous keeps you from going hungry.” What Simmons and Seth Godin and Run are suggesting is that affluence is perhaps better indicated by the amount of the flow. The more value that flows in and out of our lives, the more we and others benefit, and the more affluence is generated. One thing I see in common among all the successful self-educated people I’ve met—which is different from the way most other people think—is that they tend not to see a contradiction between living a comfortable life for themselves and helping others. Keith Ferrazzi (http://www.keithferrazzi.com) is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Never Eat Alone and Other Secrets to Success: One Relationship at a Time and Who’s Got Your Back: The Breakthrough Program to Build Deep, Trusting Relationships That Create Success—and Won’t Let You Fail. These two books are absolutely required reading if you’re interested in anything in this chapter—two of the best books on networking and connecting ever written. “The right way to go about it is to be generous with the person you want to connect with. And in this case, the generosity is: you tell a story. Tell a story about how you drew inspiration from their teachings and their example, how it impacted your life, and all the ways you’re passing that gift on to others now. If you move me enough with what you’ve accomplished with my teachings and how you’re serving others, then yes, of course I want to help you. I’ve helped all kinds of young people who have reached out to me with their stories of the amazing things they’ve done applying the concepts in my books. When I invest my time and effort in helping a young person, the dividend I receive in return is their gratitude, and their success.” Whether you’re a fast-food server or a cubicle jockey in a mindless corporate shit job fresh out of college, you’re not going to create anything better for yourself unless you make a fundamental shift: from viewing yourself as a passive follower of paths other people set for you, to actively taking responsibility for creating your own path toward success, however you define it. Thus, how much education you have doesn’t really matter ; what matters is whether you make this fundamental shift in mentality. “In the end, I learned more from him than in all of my schooling. He was a salesman, to the bone. He taught me the importance of sales. What I learned from my grandfather was, the key to making money was to cause something to get sold. Whether you sell it yourself, or you employ someone to sell it and you get some of the money. He would always say, ‘The only way to make money is to buy something at one cost and sell it at a higher cost. If you do that, and you hustle, you make as much money as you want.’ “I asked him to take me under his wing, and he taught me not so much a skill set, but a mind-set. The mind-set that was: ‘You can do anything you want. The people who are professing to be experts, telling you what you can and can’t do in life and how to do it, are just a bunch of fucking jackasses. The model that society teaches you to become successful is highly flawed.’ And he used his personal story as the example of that, because he had no education past eighth grade. In Kennedy’s words: “The breakthrough realization for you is that you are in the marketing business. You are not in the dry cleaning or restaurant or widget manufacturing or wedding planning or industrial chemicals business. You are in the business of marketing dry cleaning services or restaurants or widgets or wedding planning or chemicals. When you embrace this, it makes perfect sense to set your sights on marketing mastery. If you are going to make something your life’s work and chief activity and responsibility, why not do it exceptionally well?”2 Whenever Cameron Johnson has started one of his dozen-plus profitable businesses, many of which he’s sold for nice payoffs, he asks a few simple questions: “What do people in this industry need? What’s bothering them, hassling them, costing them money, keeping them from getting what they want? . . . [C]ustomers with needs come along every single day. There are always people and niches with unfulfilled needs. With this approach to business, you don’t need to rely on luck, timing, or the fickleness of fads and crazes—just on your own ability to observe and create. Choose a niche, find a need, and then see what could help those people do their job better.”3 In turn, if the product or service is designed to solve a specific unsolved problem or meet a specific unmet need, and if the message is targeted well, so that you happen to be someone with that unsolved problem or unmet need, you will be happy to hear about the product or service The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late (Portfolio) Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries by Peter Sims
Good book, I thought at first it would be like most business books, a good idea that would take fifteen minutes to explain spread over two hundred pages, but I have enjoyed it. It is made of several ideas, flow, etc, but blends them together well. Chris Rock deeply understands that ingenious ideas almost never spring into people’s minds fully formed; they emerge through a rigorous experimental discovery process. ..............most successful entrepreneurs don’t begin with brilliant ideas—they discover them. Jeff Bezos has accepted uncertainty; he knows that he cannot reliably predict which ideas for new markets will work and which won’t. He’s got to experiment. The type of creativity that is more interesting ...... is experimental innovation. These creators use experimental, iterative, trial-and-error approaches to gradually build up to breakthroughs. Experimental innovators must be persistent and willing to accept failure and setbacks as they work toward their goals. When much is known, procedural planning approaches work perfectly well. When much is unknown, they do not. These methods are decidedly not ways of just trying a lot of things to see what sticks, like throwing spaghetti against a wall. The most productive creative people and teams are rigorous, highly analytical, strategic, and pragmatic. Fundamental to the little bets approach is that we: • Experiment: Learn by doing. Fail quickly to learn fast. • Play: A playful, improvisational, and humorous atmosphere quiets our inhibitions when ideas are incubating or newly hatched, and prevents creative ideas from being snuffed out or prematurely judged. • Immerse: Take time to get out into the world to gather fresh ideas and insights, in order to understand deeper human motivations and desires, and absorb how things work from the ground up. • Define: Use insights gathered throughout the process to define specific problems and needs before solving them, just as the Google founders did when they realized that their library search algorithm could address a much larger problem. • Reorient: Be flexible in pursuit of larger goals and aspirations, making good use of small wins to make necessary pivots and chart the course to completion. • Iterate: Repeat, refine, and test frequently armed with better insights, information, and assumptions as time goes on, as Chris Rock does to perfect his act. “A lot of our most successful ideas over the years came from the bottom up, by really understanding user needs.” “illusion of rationality.” We are all vulnerable to this illusion. It happens when ideas or assumptions seem logical in a plan, spreadsheet model, PowerPoint, or memo, yet they haven’t been validated on the ground or in the real world. Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries To effectively confront the insurgent enemies of today and the future, soldiers must be able to identify and solve unfamiliar problems, rapidly adapting to the circumstances unfolding on the ground. They work from the ground up and must learn from the environment—the people and the situation in each village and town—then craft new tactics that will address the problems they discover. They must be willing and able to adapt those tactics and keep developing new ones as they go. The counterinsurgency approach is one of discovery and experimentation, a creative approach to warfare. Preconceived templates or plans are obsolete. The cornerstone of counterinsurgency operations is what Army strategists call developing the situation through action. Central to the process is acknowledging that mistakes will be made, like violating cultural norms or initially picking the wrong partners, because soldiers are operating in an arena of uncertainty. They must be willing to seize (and retain) the initiative by taking action in order to discover what to do, such as by launching frequent reconnaissance probes. In order to help soldiers become comfortable with this approach, Haskins says, “You have to catch people making mistakes and make it so that it’s cool. You have to make it undesirable to play it safe.” “Design is a methodology for applying critical and creative thinking to understand, visualize, and describe complex, ill-structured problems and develop approaches to solve them.” Two fundamental advantages of the little bets approach are highlighted in the research of Professor Saras Sarasvathy: that it enables us to focus on what we can afford to lose rather than make assumptions about how much we can expect to gain, and that it facilitates the development of means as we progress with an idea. The affordable loss principle: Seasoned entrepreneurs will tend to determine in advance what they are willing to lose, rather than calculating expected gains. Her work also shows that entrepreneurs tend to be highly aware of the importance of their means, which she defines as: Who they are: their values and tastes; What they know: their expertise, knowledge, experiences, and skills; and Who they know: their networks, friends, and allies. Of course, we should also add their monetary resources. She highlights that successful entrepreneurs are comfortable being adaptable in pursuit of their larger goals in large part because they are progressively building their means, such as by recruiting people or partners with complementary skills and experiences. the value of building means as well as an affordable losses mentality. Of course the subject of affordable losses highlights a key issue with the little bets approach—it inevitably involves failure. In almost any attempt to create, failure, and often a good deal of it, is to be expected. Ambitious (dare I employ the overused word audacious) goals are essential. A big vision provides the direction and inspiration through which to channel aspirations and ideas. But one of the most important lessons of the study of experimental innovators is that they are not rigid in pursuit of that vision, and that they persevere through failures, often many of them. When they run into problems, they accept that they must go down some unexpected paths in order to get to the ultimate goal, or maybe even redefine what that ultimate goal should be. This requires being willing to walk away from ideas that seemed great, overcoming significant challenges, as well as coping with the emotional impact of failure. One of the striking characteristics of those who have learned to practice experimental innovation is that, like Chris Rock, they understand (and come to accept) that failure, in the form of making mistakes or errors, and being imperfect is essential to their success. It’s not that they intentionally try to fail, but rather that they know that they will make important discoveries by being willing to be imperfect, especially at the initial stages of developing their ideas. By expecting to get things right at the start, we block ourselves psychologically and choke off a host of opportunities to learn. In placing so much emphasis on minimizing errors or the risk of any kind of failure, we shut off chances to identify the insights that drive creative progress. Becoming more comfortable with failure, and coming to view false starts and mistakes as opportunities opens us up creatively. Research has demonstrated that people tend to lean toward one of two general ways of thinking about learning and failure, though everyone exhibits both to some extent. Those favoring a fixed mind-set believe that abilities and intelligence are set in stone, that we have an innate set of talents, which creates an urgency to repeatedly prove those abilities. They perceive failures or setbacks as threatening their sense of worth or their identity. Every situation, therefore, gets closely evaluated: “Will I succeed or fail? Will I look smart or dumb? Will I be accepted or rejected?” Fixed mind-sets cause people to be overconcerned with seeking validation, such as grades, titles, or social recognition. Conversely, those favoring a growth mind-set believe that intelligence and abilities can be grown through effort, and tend to view failures or setbacks as opportunities for growth. They have a desire to constantly challenge and stretch themselves. “If you try to shortcut the game, then the game will shortcut you,” Jordan said. “If you put forth the effort, good things will be bestowed upon you.” Dozens of studies later, Dweck’s findings suggest that people exhibiting fixed mind-sets tend to gravitate to activities that confirm their abilities, whereas those with growth mindsets tend to seek activities that expand their abilities. Praising ability alone reduces persistence, while praising effort or the processes a person goes through to learn leads to growth mind-set behaviors. Dweck has found this to apply regardless of age. Of course, just failing is not the key; the key is to be systematically learning from failures. To be closely monitoring what’s working and what is going wrong and making good use of that information. “The measure is how we respond to the crises as they happen. We have to be comfortable being uncomfortable.” Not even Frank Gehry can inoculate himself from fears of failure. That is almost surely an integral part of the creative process for everyone to some degree, even those who have achieved the most and the most consistently. The key is that we can teach ourselves to think differently about failures and mistakes, seeing them as opportunities for learning and growth. Carol Dweck’s research has shown that not only does everyone actually have a mixture of both fixed and growth mindsets, but the growth mind-set orientation can be developed. “Changing a mind-set is not like surgery,” she says. “You can’t simply remove the fixed mind-set and replace it with a growth mind-set.” That begins when someone becomes aware of which mindset they lean toward. Simply knowing more about the growth mind-set allows them to react to situations in new ways. Next Dweck says that people can think about things in their lives that they thought they wouldn’t be good at, but eventually were. Another method that Dweck has shown can facilitate a mind-set shift is to focus people on evidence demonstrating the brain’s ability to grow its capacities. When you learn new things, these tiny connections in the brain actually multiply and get stronger. The more that you challenge your mind to learn, the more your brain cells grow. Then, things that you once found very hard or even impossible—like speaking a foreign language or doing algebra—seem to become easy. The result is a stronger, smarter brain. This is another reason why the little bets approach can be so effective: It helps us to cultivate an exploratory, growth mind-set. Redefining problems and failures as opportunities focuses our attention on insights to be gained rather than worrying about false starts or the risks we’re taking. By focusing on doing, rather than planning, learning about the risks and pitfalls of ideas rather than trying to predict them with precision up-front, an experimental approach develops growth mind-set muscles. Being rigorous about spotting flaws and continuing to push toward excellence is essential to creative achievement. Characteristics of what psychologists view as healthy perfectionism include striving for excellence and holding others to similar standards, planning ahead, and strong organizational skills. Healthy perfectionism is internally driven in the sense that it’s motivated by strong personal values for things like quality and excellence. Conversely, unhealthy perfectionism is externally driven. External concerns show up over perceived parental pressures, needing approval, a tendency to ruminate over past performances, or an intense worry about making mistakes. Healthy perfectionists exhibit a low concern for these outside factors. One of the methods that can be most helpful in achieving this balance, in order to embrace the learning potential of failure, is prototyping. What the creation of low cost, rough prototypes makes possible is failing quickly in order to learn fast. entrepreneurs push ideas into the market as quickly as possible in order to learn from mistakes and failures that will point the way forward. Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries “The only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts,” Lamott writes in Bird by Bird. Just get it down on paper, she recommends. Write like a child, whatever comes to your mind. “All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts.” This is a key reason why failing fast with low-risk prototypes the way Chris Rock does is so helpful: If we haven’t invested much in developing an idea, emotionally or in terms of time or resources, then we are more likely to be able to focus on what we can learn from that effort than on what we’ve lost in making it. Prototyping is one of the most effective ways to both jump-start our thinking and to guide, inspire, and discipline an experimental approach. They tracked everything they did with data, and moved on from what didn’t ultimately seem useful or valuable ..... but finding ways to fail quickly, to invest less emotion and less time in any particular idea or prototype or piece of work, is a consistent feature of the work methods of successful experimental innovators. Potential users of ideas are more comfortable sharing their honest reactions when it’s rough. There is less ego involved if it is unfinished and rough. As Limb hypothesized, when the performers were playing improvised jazz, activity in the prefrontal cortex, the parts of the brain associated with self-censoring or conscious self-monitoring, were deactivated. In other words, when the performers switched from structured music to improvised jazz, the part of their brain responsible for evaluating and censoring their behavior effectively switched off. Improvising unlocks a far more creative state of mind. Kids don’t have the self-censoring capacity of their brain welldeveloped, which helps explain why they will say outlandish things, and also why kids are often extremely creative. Scientists are still in the early days of understanding the functions of the brain, as well as their use of fMRI imaging. They do believe, however, that activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain right behind the eyes, is linked with self-expression. Ansari and Berkowitz found that during improvisation, the right-temporoparietal junctions of the pianists’ brains were deactivated. Neuroscientists associate this area of the brain with the ability to make judgments, particularly about differences between self and others. The experienced pianists seemed to be able to turn off a judging part of their mind, freeing them up to create novel melodies. According to Berkowitz, brain scans of nonartists do not exhibit a similar pattern, which suggests that experiencing creative processes could help to build certain creative muscles. Ansari and Berkowitz also found that portions of the brain associated with selecting between two conflicting possibilities lit up during improvisation. They were locked in, what psychology researchers might describe as a state of flow. Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi did the pioneering work about the mental state of flow. Csikszentmihalyi had defined flow as: “Being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.” Attaining a state of flow can be quite rare because there are many barriers to freeing our minds. Csikszentmihalyi identifies negative forms of perfectionism, fear, self-doubt, and self-censoring as primary obstacles to flow. Read the book Flow. Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries Part 2 Book is pretty good, very short, and it is like The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, in that it has a great insight but it could have been more simply said. Definitely a read, if no other reason than to think about it and find new books to read next. "Playing the game of saying yes to everything " is a simplified and somewhat silly example, but the point of accepting every offer is that nothing is too silly. Accepting every offer by using “yes … and” language, a cornerstone of improvisation, facilitates building up ideas. Throughout the Pixar creative process, they rely heavily on what they call plussing; it is likely the most-used concept around the company. The point of plussing is to build upon and improve ideas without using judgmental language. A host of studies indicates that humor creates positive group effects. Many focus on how humor can increase cohesiveness and act as a lubricant to facilitate more efficient communications. In order to produce positive mental effects, however, researchers Eric Romero and Anthony Pescosolido found that humor first must be considered funny to the people involved, not seen as demeaning, derogatory, or put-downs. That finding is consistent with the underlying improvisation rationale for accepting every offer and making your partner look good. Successful group humor, I am fascinated by the power of constraints - On a typical project, the constraints, what Gehry also calls “guard rails,” that define the scope of Gehry’s figurative box will include a budget, timeframe, materials, political or regulatory rules, and the nature of the building site itself. Those constraints not only help Gehry Partners to bound, focus, and measure their progress, they help begin and evolve the design. As Google’s Marissa Mayer has put it, “Constraints shape and focus problems and provide clear challenges to overcome.” productively creative people use constraints to limit their focus and isolate a set of problems that need to be solved. The key is to take a larger project or goal and break it down into smaller problems to be solved, constraining the scope of work to solving a key problem, and then another key problem. For example software development projects should be broken into small pieces, prioritized, completed, and released based on user needs. They emphasized using small collaborative teams to respond to change over determined processes or plans, and believed that working software was the best measure of progress. Smallifying processes facilitates more efficient development of code, and it promotes faster learning. Note that one of the great benefits of the agile approach is that it is also a good method for failing fast. As Vanier explains, if he can launch ten features in the same time it takes a competitor to launch one, he’ll have ten times the amount of experience to draw from in figuring out what has failed the test of customer acceptance and what has succeeded. One of his favorite examples of the importance of immersion is Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank, the lender responsible for launching the microfinance industry, and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. In 1974, Yunus was an economics professor at Chittagong University in Bangladesh. That year, a severe famine ravaged India sending starving, skeletonlike people from the countryside into cities in search of food. They started showing up in railway stations and bus stations, Yunus recalled in his autobiography, Banker to the Poor. Find this book Yunus felt shocked. He especially could not believe that Sufiya earned just two cents per day. “In my university courses, I theorized about sums in the millions of dollars, but here before my eyes the problems of life and death were posed in terms of pennies,” he recounted. “Something was wrong. Why did my university courses not reflect the reality of Sufiya’s life? I was angry, angry at myself, angry at my economics department and the thousands of intelligent professors who had not tried to address this problem and solve it.” Nothing foreseeable would break the cycle of poverty for Sufiya, or for her children. “I had never heard anyone suffering for the lack of twenty-two cents,” Yunus lamented. Yunus went back to his house where he and Professor Latifee took a walk through the garden in the late afternoon heat. “I was trying to see Sufiya’s problem from her point of view,” Yunus recalled. “She suffered because the cost of bamboo was five taka.” Sufiya could not afford to buy raw materials for the bamboo stools and she could not get a conventional loan since she did not have collateral. The middlemen allowed her just enough profit to survive from day to day. Sufiya lived as a bonded laborer, essentially enslaved. But, over the coming years, Grameen would loan over $6.5 billion, while maintaining repayment rates consistently above 98 percent. The practice became known as “microlending” or “microfinance,” and would become a global phenomenon. “All I really wanted to do was solve an immediate problem,” he said. As Yunus described in a speech years later, “At the beginning, you had no idea that something like this [microlending] would emerge, but it is so clear, so transparent, you don’t need to be a smart researcher to go find it.” The insights and ideas that were obvious to Yunus the anthropologist had been hidden from Yunus the economist. The difference: by absorbing poverty from the worm’s-eye view, asking lots of questions, and being open to changing his assumptions, he could understand what he could not from a bird’s-eye view. Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries As Steve Blank, a cofounder of the software company E.piphany, who teaches entrepreneurship at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and who routinely challenges entrepreneurs to get out into the world to challenge their own assumptions, says, “No facts exist inside the building, only opinions.” “You gotta come in with your ears open,” H. R. McMaster told George Packer inside Tal Afar during 2006, “You can’t come in and start talking. You have to really listen to people.” Research evidence suggests a strong link between inquisitiveness and creative productivity. Iinnovators closely observed details, particularly about other people’s behaviors. “In observing others, they act like anthropologists and social scientists,” “Creativity is just connecting things,” Jobs told Wired magazine. “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people … Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem.” Truth be told, most investors get their insight from traders or other investors. It’s what Chanos calls the smart-guy syndrome: When hedge-fund analysts go to a dinner in New York or London and hear someone they think is smart talk about a company. “The next day, they all go take a two percent stake in the company,” Chanos says. This is not original thinking. It’s amazing how common the smart-guy syndrome is among investors and how rare it is to find original thinking investors. In my experience, the best investors, by contrast, are contrarian thinkers. They get out into the world to find unique insights. Dell, founder and CEO, asking why a computer should cost five times as much as its parts. “I would take computers apart … and would observe that $600 worth of parts were sold for $3,000,” Dell shared. In laboring over the question, Dell’s personal-computing business model ideas emerged. “When something seems like an opportunity—it seems like you have the skills, and maybe some kind of advantage, and you think it’s a big area—you will always get asked the question, ‘Why? Why do that?’ Bezos told Harvard Business Review, then elaborated, “But ‘Why not?’ is an equally valid question. And there may be good reasons why not—maybe you don’t have the capital resources, or parts of your current business require so much focus at this key juncture that it would be irresponsible. In that case, if somebody asked, ‘Why not?’ you would say, ‘Here’s why not …’ But that question doesn’t get asked.” Chet suggested that I spend only a week or so doing market research, so that I could come up to speed on the industry and competitive landscape. His main advice was that we should just get out, talk with potential customers, and look for problems and needs before coming up with any strategies. Not surprisingly, he learned this approach through experience. “If you look at four-year-olds, they are constantly asking questions and wondering how things work,” Gregersen observed generally. “But by the time they are six and a half years old they stop asking questions because they quickly learn that teachers value the right answers more than provocative questions.” It’s a haunting finding that raises serious concern about our education system. Specifically, what is the purpose of education? The remaining pattern of action that Dyer and Gregersen found distinguished the innovators from the noninnovators that we haven’t yet covered: innovators routinely networked with people who came from different backgrounds. It’s a way to challenge one’s assumptions and gain broader A preponderance of evidence that indicates that diversity, be it of perspectives, experiences, or backgrounds, fuels creativity. We see this pattern at the individual, organizational, and societal level. Learning a little bit from a lot of people was one of the main ways Tim identified so many unique ideas and insights. He left no stone unturned and was extremely open to what could emerge from each interaction. Tim was constantly open to new information and ideas from an extremely diverse network of people. This is a critical capacity that anyone can develop. Dr. Richard Wiseman, - The Luck Factor. (he recommends the book) As the newspaper photo counting experiment illustrates, one obvious implication from Wiseman’s research is that lucky people pay more attention to what’s going on around them than unlucky people. It’s more nuanced than that. Here’s where being open to meeting, interacting with, and learning from different types of people comes in. Wiseman found that lucky people tend to be open to opportunities (or insights) that come along spontaneously, whereas unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine, fixated on certain specific outcomes. In analyzing behavior patterns at social parties, for example, unlucky people tended to talk with the same types of people, people who are like themselves. It’s a common phenomenon. On the other hand, lucky people tended to be curious and open to what can come along from chance interactions. Wiseman believed another type of behavior played an even greater role in success. Wiseman found that lucky people build and maintain what he called a strong network of luck. He wrote: Lucky people are effective at building secure, and longlasting, attachments with the people they meet. They are easy to know and most people like them. They tend to be trusting and form close relationships with others. As a result, they often keep in touch with a much larger number of friends and colleagues than unlucky people. And time and again, this network of friends helps promote opportunity in their lives. This was Wiseman’s core finding: You can create your own luck. “I discovered that being in the right place at the right time is actually all about being in the right state of mind,” he argued. Lucky people increase their odds of chance encounters or experiences by interacting with a large number of people. Wiseman took his research on luck one step further. After identifying a group of people who identified themselves as unlucky, he shared the main principles of lucky behavior, including specific techniques. As Wiseman described it, “For instance, they were taught how to be more open to opportunities around them, how to break routines, and how to deal with bad luck by imagining things being worse.” Wiseman included exercises to increase chance opportunities, such as building and maintaining a network of luck, being open to new experiences, and developing a more relaxed attitude toward life, as well as ways to listen to hunches and to visualize lucky interactions. After carrying out specific exercises for a month, participants reported back to Wiseman. “The results were dramatic: eighty percent were happier and more satisfied with their lives—and luckier,” Wiseman summed. Moynihan didn’t flinch, as Tim recalled in an interview, “And he said, ‘You have to understand: What you know, they’ll never know, and what they know, you can learn.’ And he slapped me on the back, dusted me off, and sent me on my way.” That new ideas travel along a curve of adoption from early to late adopters is now widely accepted. Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries Beginning in the 1970s, von Hippel examined where innovations come from (the original source of a later commercialized idea) across a range of industries, from scientific instruments to semiconductors to thermoplastics. In an extensive study on the sources of innovation for major scientific instruments, for instance, von Hippel found that one group, which he called active users or lead users, were responsible for developing over 75 percent of the innovations. A similar pattern ran across an array of other industries. These people not only serve as cutting-edge taste makers, they actively tinker to push and create new ideas on their own. Designers call these people extreme users, whose unique needs can foreshadow the needs of other people. The reason why designers find extreme users so valuable is because the average person isn’t actively thinking about solving problems like these. Their needs and desires are less pronounced. Chris Thoen, who leads P&G’s Global Open Innovation, describes their approach simply: “Choose a few consumers that you really feel are the early adopters, test it with them, see what they like about it and what they don’t like about it … And, if it appeals to them, use them to optimize it [the idea] further and then the laggards will follow.” Now, to adopt the von Hippel Strategy, one of the things that 3M had to figure out, and that Chris Rock must do when he sets out to develop his material, was how to find active users. Take the mountain bike. It wasn’t invented by a person or company. In the mid-1970s, dozens of avid pro-am riders in northern California started making modifications to their bikes for off-road riding on local mountains. They replaced thin tires with thicker ones, reformulated the braking systems, and modified the bike frames (I would recommend the documentary The Klunkerz, if you’re curious about the whole story.). I then identified potential agents the same way 3M identified active users: by looking at who represented authors of similar books, asking around, then sending the agents cold email introductions. I will never forget the first conversation I had with one of these agents. Though painful, it illustrates the value of the von Hippel Strategy. After sending a rough threepager, the agent and I spoke for thirty minutes. It was a long thirty minutes. As we begin to make use of these methods to develop new ideas, strategies, and projects, they combine to facilitate what organizational psychologist Karl Weick refers to as small wins. Weick defines a small win as “a concrete, complete, implemented outcome of moderate importance.” They are small successes that emerge out of our ongoing development process, and it’s important to be watching closely for them. upon. Small wins are like footholds or building blocks amid the inevitable uncertainty of moving forward, or as the case may be, laterally. They serve as what Saras Sarasvathy calls landmarks, and they can either confirm that we’re heading in the right direction or they can act as pivot points, telling us how to change course. Elaborating on the benefits of small wins, Weick writes, “Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win.” In fact, Schultz described Starbucks’s mentality as: “the value of dogmatism and flexibility.” According to Weick, “a series of wins at small but significant tasks … reveals a pattern that may attract allies, deter opponents, and lower resistance.” Another benefit of small wins is less immediately obvious: They enable the development of the means to attain goals. Entrepreneurs use their available means, such as their expertise, networks, or financial resources, to develop their ideas and access additional resources and means. As Weick explains about this benefit of small wins, “New allies bring new solutions with them and old opponents change their habits. Additional resources also flow toward winners, which means that slightly larger wins can be attempted.” One element of small wins that is particularly tricky to absorb is that very often they will not emerge in a linear fashion, so they cannot reliably be predicted or planned for and may not build on one another, one step after another. In some instances, one small win may clearly lead directly to another. One last, yet important, point about small wins is that often, rather than validating a direction we’ve been pursuing, they will provide a signal to proceed in a different way. This brings us back to the fundamental advantages of the little bets approach; it allows us to discover new ideas, strategies, or plans through an emergent process, rather than trying to fully formulate them before we begin, and it facilitates adapting our approach as we go rather than continuing on a course that may lead to failure. As Richard Wiseman’s research demonstrates, chance favors the open mind, receptivity to what cannot be predicted or imagined based on existing knowledge. With the barriers lowered, the creative mind thrives on continuous experimentation and discovery. General McMaster lists such core counterinsurgency methods as: understand, act, assess and adapt, consolidate gains, and transition missions to civilian control. General David Petraeus says about counterinsurgency operations, “The side that learns and adapts the fastest often prevails.” General McMaster frames and reframes the key problems from the bottom up before taking bold action. “Very few schools teach students how to create knowledge,” says Professor Keith Sawyer of Washington University, a leading education and innovation researcher. “Instead, students are taught that knowledge is static and complete, and they become experts at consuming knowledge rather than producing knowledge.” Change happens in small, achievable ways. Books he recommends/ look for ( most I have read) Coyle, Daniel. The Talent Code. New York: Bantam, 2009. Dweck, Carol. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Random House, 2006. Kahney, Leander. Inside Steve’s Brain. New York: Portfolio, 2009. Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1995. - Lamott describes her writing tactics, especially how to overcome the common fears and barriers writers face. Her key insights, applicable to any creative process, include the importance of writing “shitty first drafts” in the interest of getting ideas out first and worrying about perfection later, and writing only as much as she can see in a one inch by one inch picture frame. That is, chunking writing into extremely manageable pieces. Pink, Daniel. A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future. New York: Riverhead, 2006. Price, David. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Knopf, 2008. Chesborough, Henry. Open Innovation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2003. Christensen, Clayton. The Innovator’s Dilemma. New York: Collins Business, 2003, and The Innovator’s Solution, with Michael Raynor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2003. Collins, Jim. How the Mighty Fall. Jim Collins, 2009. Collins, Jim and Jerry Porras. Built to Last. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Drucker, Peter. Innovation and Entrepreneurship. New York: HarperCollins, 1985. Liker, Jeffrey. The Toyota Way. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004. University of Michigan Rogers, Everett. Diffusion of Innovations. New York: Free Press, 1995. This is the definitive research book about how ideas spread. Sawyer, Keith. Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration. New York: Basic Books, 2007. Sternberg, Robert J. Handbook of Creativity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. von Hippel, Eric. The Sources of Innovation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Von Hippel’s website provides a host of resources related to his research: http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/. Bayles, David and Ted Orland. Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking. Eugene, OR: Capra Press, 1993. Csikzentmihalyi, Mihaly. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: Harper Perennial, 1997. Professor Csikzentmihalyi de Bono, Edward. Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Galenson, David. Old Masters and Young Geniuses. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. - His central argument is that people are either conceptual innovators (like Mozart) or experimental innovators (like Beethoven) and that conceptual innovators tend to do their best work while they are young, whereas experimental innovators tend to do their best work in their later years. Critics have poked holes in Galenson’s arguments by finding exceptions to his age rules, but his general distinction is compelling. What’s less clear is what the spectrum between conceptual and experimental innovation looks like at the individual level, as well as whether people can move from conceptual to experimental or vice versa. Maeda, John. The Laws of Simplicity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Maeda, Stokes, Patricia. Creativity from Constraint. New York: Springer, 2006. Young, James Webb. A Technique for Producing Ideas. Lincolnwood, IL: NTC/Contemporary, 1988. Brown, Tim. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. New York: Harper Business, 2009. Kelley, Tom. The Art of Innovation. New York: Crown, 2007, and The Ten Faces of Innovation. New York: Crown, 2006. Martin, Roger. The Design of Business. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2009. Moggridge, Bill. Designing Interactions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Richardson, Adam. Innovation X. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010. Belsky, Scott. Making Ideas Happen. New York: Portfolio, 2010. Fried, Jason, and David Heinemeier Hansson. Rework. New York: Crown, 2010. Gianforte, Greg, and Marcus Gibson. Bootstrapping Your Business. Avon, MA: Adams Media, 2005. Professor Saras -Sarasvathy pointed me to this book. It provides a host of concrete and specific tactics for entrepreneurs who want to start businesses completely from scratch, with their own resources, including selling, managing cash, inexpensive PR tactics, and customer service. Yunas, Muhammad, and Alan Jolis. Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty. New York: Public Affairs, 1999. Johansson, Frans. The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School, 2004. Lafley, A. G., and Ram Charam. The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation. New York: Crown, 1988. McGrath, Rita Gunther, and Ian C. MacMillan. Discovery-Driven Growth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School, 2009. - McGrath and MacMillan propose thinking differently about traditional management decision-making models by building income statements up, by determining what revenues need to be achieved to support costs. Their method is similar to what Professor Saras Sarasvathy calls the principle of affordable loss. By reframing analyses from what one expects to gain (traditional expected value calculations) to what one can afford to lose, decision making more closely resembles that of expert entrepreneurs. Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan. New York: Random House, 2007. - One of the points that Taleb highlights is that, when operating within a high degree of uncertainty, one should experiment including to find what Taleb calls inadvertent discoveries. Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos - by Sarah Lacy
I started this book not sure what it was, but quickly found a very interesting study on entrepreneurs in other countries such as Brazil and India. The most interesting concept in the book is that current infrastructure prohibits innovation, and Sarah Lacy states, and correctly I believe, that countries other than the United States will prosper because there is no system to grandfather in, everything is wide open and possible. You also learn that if you want to start a business, most of us are starting with more than many of these entrepreneurs, so we should be able to do it easier, but perhaps that too is a handicap, as we avoid loss more than we do gain. Quick interesting read and made me think, which is all I ask of a book Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos Quotes The reality is that no place knows a big local market better than local entrepreneurs. The second advantage is that in today’s globalized world, money and talent don’t have boundaries; they flow where the opportunity is. And the flow has already started to the emerging world. The year 2009 was the first year that foreign-born admissions to top U.S. grad schools fell. It’s almost impossible to know what the opportunity cost would be if substantially fewer immigrants come to the United States, but it’s a clear disadvantage when it comes to entrepreneurship. One-quarter of successful Silicon Valley companies were started by immigrants. The final advantage is the hardest to quantify: These emerging markets and their entrepreneurs have nothing to lose. When a country, industry, or entrepreneur has nothing to lose, it is freed from all the normal restrictions of the way things are usually done. Having nothing to lose gives one the luxury of starting with a clean sheet of paper and far more freedom to take risk—or, as it’s called in business circles, a greenfield opportunity. (- as mentioned earlier, the less we let the current infrastructure define us the better.) The more disenfranchised a person is, the more incentive he or she has to upend the established order. The American dream is the very idea that having nothing allows you to take enough risk that you can achieve anything. Emerging markets are not for those with a weak stomach. Life and investing there is difficult. There’s a cultural, business, and ethical quandary around every corner. As many of the Western world’s businesses and investors have already realized, however, the promise is just too big to ignore, especially given the flattening growth in the West. In China, entrepreneurs have to build a company that can move incredibly fast, whereas in India, entrepreneurs have to build a company that can survive as a market moves incredibly slowly. It’s not about technology or features or acronyms—it’s a way of thinking and problem solving, coupled with the internal compass to believe in the idea and the confidence and determination to carry it out. Great entrepreneurs know an idea is just that. It’s the execution, the sleepless nights, the years living on the edge that create a billion-dollar business. Because the cost of starting a Web or software company had plummeted some 90 percent since the late 1990s, it was a lot easier to bootstrap something than in the past. Talent and capital are the two most mobile assets in the world. They’ll go to where they are welcomed and rewarded. Simply put, ideas are just that; execution is what matters. Most Chinese Internet companies win by innovating not around product, but like Tencent, around process and monetization. It’s where the Chinese entrepreneur excels, which is interesting because it’s where the typical Silicon Valley entrepreneur is the weakest. Ideas are just ideas. Process wins in China. - ideas are cheap, execution matters People in India will go without shoes or food if it means they can learn. - we should all share this trait "Business model is easy, you just build something people want.” “Money is the easiest thing in the world to make.” “Competition is nothing. The day you get a brother or sister, your competition is born.” Great entrepreneurs build from “nothing but their thoughts.” Ciputra’s seven essential entrepreneurial characteristics: Passion, Independent, Market Sensitivity, Creative & Innovative, Calculated Risk-Taker, Highly Ethical Standard, Persistent. “It’s not by our genes, it’s by discipline,” he says Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos How to Get Rich: One of the World's Greatest Entrepreneurs Shares His Secretsby Felix Dennis
Great book, funny, smart, and it will make sure you never look at the world or yourself the same way again. Go buy this book. As the American critic H. L. Mencken once wrote: “The inferior man’s reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex— because it puts an unbearable burden on his meager capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. All superstitions are such short cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious.” Mencken was right A book like this is a tool, not an artifact. I got rich my way. You might even say the old-fashioned way. By making errors, lots of errors, and learning from them. If it flies, floats or fornicates, always rent it—it’s cheaper in the long run.) Whatever qualities the rich may have, they can be acquired by anyone with the tenacity to become rich. The key, I think, is confidence. Confidence and an unshakable belief it can be done and that you are the one to do it. Tunnel vision helps. Being a bit of a shit helps. A thick skin helps. Stamina is crucial, as is a capacity to work so hard that your best friends mock you, your lovers despair and the rest of your acquaintances watch furtively from the sidelines, half in awe and half in contempt. Luck helps—but only if you don’t seek it. The answer to the question, then, is perhaps this: not those who want to and not those who need to, but those who are utterly determined to—whatever the cost. What are the biggest myths you know regarding getting rich? The first is the claim that people did not set out to get rich but became rich by “accident.” “Oh, I only did what I love to do and woke up one day to find myself wealthy.” That sort of thing. It may have happened. But very rarely in my experience. The second myth is that people got rich by having a “great idea.” While this is a more feasible hypothesis than having got rich by accident, it is a trap, because it is a partial truth. All of us have had great ideas from time to time. The follow-through, the execution, is a thousand times more important than a “great idea.” In fact, if the execution is perfect, it sometimes barely matters what the idea is. If you want to get rich, don’t sit around waiting for inspiration to strike. Just get busy getting rich. Thirdly, and lastly, I think that perhaps the most destructive myth about becoming rich lies in remarks like: “Well, it was OK for you starting out in the late 1960s. But times have moved on. You couldn’t do it that way today.” Perhaps not, but you can certainly do it some way. Times change, but human nature, the lure of wealth and the determination to acquire it remain a shining constant in the world of ambitious men and women. And just what is the most precious thing in life that riches can supply? Easy. For me, it’s Time. It sounds crazy, but the richer you are and the more financial advisors you employ, the less likelihood there is that you can ever discover what you are really worth. It’s a nice problem to have, but it is still a problem. In the words of the art collector and oil billionaire John Paul Getty: “If you can actually count your money, you are not really a rich man. in a nutshell, my experience has been that money is color-blind, race-blind, sex-blind, degree-blind and couldn’t care less who brought you up or in what circumstances. Money is one of the most neutral substances on earth. Others may conspire against you obtaining it through bigotry or prejudice. But they can only succeed if you permit them to. Young, Penniless and Inexperienced? Excellent. You stand by far the best chance of becoming as rich as you please. You have an advantage that neither education nor upbringing, nor even money, can buy—you have almost nothing. And therefore you have almost nothing to lose. Nearly all the great fortunes acquired by entrepreneurs arose because they had nothing to lose. Never trust the vast mountain of conventional wisdom. It contains great nuggets of wisdom, it is true. But they lie alongside rivers of fool’s gold. Conventional wisdom daunts initiative and offers far too many convenient reasons for inaction, especially for those with a great deal to lose. You have stamina far, far beyond those who are twenty or thirty years older— the stamina necessary for long, grinding hours of labor in the cause of getting rich. Stamina enough to party all night and go straight back to work for a twelve- or sixteen-hour day. Along with a degree of callousness and enviable powers of speedy recuperation from reverses, stamina is your secret weapon. In addition, your instinctive knowledge of modern technology gives you another edge. Anyone not busy learning is busy dying. For as long as you foster a willingness to learn, you will ward off sclerosis of the brain and hardening of the mental arteries. Curiosity has led many a man and women into the valley of serious wealth. Ambition, fearlessness, self-belief, stamina, a degree of callousness, a willingness to learn. These are your advantages over the middle-aged and the old. Slightly Better Off and On the Way Up? This is the point at which many people vaguely wonder about starting their own business, I employ a great many people smarter than I am. That’s not false modesty, that’s a stone-cold fact. The only two reasons such geniuses continue to work for me and put money into my pocket are that, on the positive side, they enjoy their work, and on the negative side, they fear losing what they have already gained—challenging work, congenial colleagues, a certain status and the promise of promotion and pay raises. fear holds them back, with the exception of those rare individuals who are content with their lot. “Fear is the little death, death by a thousand cuts,” goes the ancient Japanese saying. My earnest advice is to get yourself a young and fearless partner with tons of stamina. Choose him or her with care. It’s your best chance to get rich. Let us explore factors likely to exclude an individual from becoming rich. There’s health, for a start. People in poor health usually find it difficult, no matter how clever they are, to muster the stamina that becoming rich demands. We must also factor in disadvantage and age. Not of color, sex, race, religion, upbringing or lack of education. None of those present insuperable hurdles in a Western democracy. But mental handicap, growing senility and the physical decline of old age—none of which need be life-threatening in the short term—virtually rule out any serious accumulation of wealth, except by inheritance or winning a lottery. So that leaves the relatively fit and those not old enough to call themselves old. Real winners are people who know their limits and respect them. The odds may still appear daunting, but only to those lacking sufficient guts and determination to try. If the odds of getting rich put you off, then you deserve to stay poor. Or, to put it more kindly, whether you deserve it or not, you will stay poor. I would use, instead: “Once begun—the job’s half done.” Because taking that first, irrevocable step has proved to be the most difficult part of nearly every venture I have been involved in. All debate can do is clarify, support or contest the next step. The risks remain, however much talking is done. A commander may be proved wrong. He may be proved right. But prompt decisions and orders, right or wrong, are far healthier than endless debate and prevarication. This applies equally to a debate within one’s own mind. Fretting is counterproductive at any level. And so is lack of action. Knowing that fear of failure is holding you back is a step in the right direction. But it isn’t enough, because knowing isn’t doing. Fear of failure and the avoidance of blame, then, is what drives Jeremiahs and haunts them. To be fair, it haunts all of us. In essence, it comprises two components. The first is our natural desire to avoid letting ourselves or others down, perhaps with calamitous financial repercussions. The second is the exposure of that failure to the outside world. Imputing desires or fears or loss of morale to others probably has a fancy psychological monicker—like auto-displacement activity. And it’s not always a bad thing. At least it encourages serious communication, even if it adds little to the decision process. Even so, it is a form of well-disguised cowardice. To sum up then, if you wish to be rich, you must grow a carapace. A mental armor. Not so thick as to blind you to well-constructed criticism and advice, especially from those you trust. Nor so thick as to cut you off from friends and family. But thick enough to shrug off the inevitable sniggering and malicious mockery that will follow your inevitable failures, not to mention the poorly hidden envy that will accompany your eventual success. Few things in life are certain except death and being taxed. But sniggering and mockery prior to any attempt to better yourself financially, followed by envy later, or gloating during your initial failures—these are three certainties in life. It hurts. It’s mindless. And it doesn’t mean anything. But it will happen. Be prepared to shrug it off. • If you are unwilling to fail, sometimes publicly, and even catastrophically, you stand very little chance of ever getting rich. • If you care what the neighbors think, you will never get rich. • If you cannot bear the thought of causing worry to your family, spouse or lover while you plow a lonely, dangerous road rather than taking the safe option of a regular job, you will never get rich. • If you have artistic inclinations and fear that the search for wealth will coarsen such talents or degrade them, you will never get rich. (Because your fear, in this instance, is well justified.) • If you are not prepared to work longer hours than almost anyone you know, despite the jibes of colleagues and friends, you are unlikely to get rich. • If you cannot convince yourself that you are “good enough” to be rich, you will never get rich. • If you cannot treat your quest to get rich as a game, you will never be rich. • If you cannot face up to your fear of failure, you will never be rich. The truth is that getting rich means sacrifice. After a lifetime of making money and observing better men and women than I fall by the wayside, I am convinced that fear of failing in the eyes of the world is the single biggest impediment to amassing wealth. Trust me on this. Until one is committed, there is hesitancy; the chance to draw back; always ineffectiveness concerning all acts of initiative and creation. There is one elemental truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one commits oneself, Providence moves all. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issue from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of incidents and meetings and material assistance which no one could have dreamed would come his or her way. —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE We do get to choose, if we are determined enough, what it is we want to do for a living. In other words, if you feel absolutely moved toward a particular vocation, then that’s exactly where you should head. But be aware that if you want to make huge sums of money, then earning a living by slowly swarming up the greasy pole is rarely the way to do it. The salary begins to have an attraction and addictive-ness all of its own. A regular paycheck and crack cocaine have that in common. In addition, and more to the point, working too long for other people can blunt your desire to take risks. If you want to be rich, you are not looking for a “career,” except as a launch pad or as a chance to infiltrate and understand a particular industry. A job for the rich-in-training is merely something to keep you ticking over, to put food on your plate and wine in your glass. Additionally, it will provide excellent training in management and negotiation skills; it will supply inside market information; above all, it will act as a salutary reminder of what happens to 99.99 percent of your colleagues—the ones who buy lottery tickets and dream of becoming rich but who haven’t a hope in hell of achieving any such thing. So if you want to be rich and you are in the Search phase of your life, then get used to one thing. You are not part of a team—although you may have to pretend you are. To put it more politely, you may have to adopt the idea of teamwork, for the time being, to help yourself understand better how individuals, departments, companies or industries function. Working for others is a reconnaissance expedition; a means and not an end in itself. It is an apprenticeship and not a goal. You should have no long-term, or even medium-term, requirements Team spirit is for losers, financially speaking. It’s the glue that binds the losers together. It’s the methodology employers use to shackle useful employees to their desks without having to pay them too much. When it comes right down to it, “team spirit” and not letting your colleagues down is a feeble reason for procrastination when opportunity comes knocking. Nearly always, it is an excuse to avoid the possibility of humiliating failure. Those who can never be rich may not want you to become rich. While you may not necessarily want to be in a glamorous sector of any market, and they are often very crowded sectors, it helps to be in a growing one. New or rapidly developing industries, whether glamorous or not, very often provide more opportunities to get rich than established sectors. The three reasons for this are availability of risk capital, ignorance and the power of a rising tide. the combination of ignorance and misconception that surrounds any new market or technology works in your favor. If you are quick at grasping concepts and jargon, you become an “instant expert.” The owners of capital love “experts.” Finally, the power of a rising tide masks many start-up difficulties, putting individuals and small companies on a more even footing with conglomerates and established operators; for a while, at least. As a general rule of thumb, then, growing industries with relatively low start-up costs offer more opportunities for those who want to get rich than declining industries, or those that require huge start-up investment. This is not an iron-clad rule, however. While magazine and newspaper sales have been in slow decline in the Western world for decades, this “declining” industry is where I made a great deal of my own money. So how to choose the arena in which you intend to carve yourself a fortune? There are usually three factors involved in the Search: inclination, aptitude and fate. So how do you judge your own aptitudes? Trial and error is the only way I ever heard of. The problem is that we create an image of ourselves in our childhood and youth (often at the urging of parents, siblings or friends), and subsequently attempt to graft reality onto this image. More often than not, the graft doesn’t take and the result is bewilderment and disappointment. Far better to ruthlessly analyze what your particular aptitudes are and act upon them rather than attempt to graft an oak tree onto a dandelion. Their ability to take chances and to subsequently exploit initial success counted more than their inclination toward a particular industry. Their execution of a strategy trumped the subject of their obsession. To put it less fancifully, they were lucky in the Search and skillful in their follow-up. Boldness helped. Conquering fear of failure helped. Persistence helped. But, without some luck, no one can get anywhere in the search to discover the exact arena in which to do battle, the arena that suits an individual’s aptitudes and inclinations. “Luck is preparation multiplied by opportunity.” — SENECA, ROMAN PHILOSOPHER “The harder I practiced, the luckier I got.” — GARY PLAYER, GOLF CHAMPION “Luck is a dividend of sweat.” —RAY KROC, MCDONALD’S Fortune favors not just the brave but the bold. Boldness has a kind of genius in it, as Goethe pointed out. It can lead to complete failure and defeat, because conventional wisdom often proves to be at least wisdom of a kind. But should boldness succeed, should the chance be seized and sufficiently well executed, then success will surely lead to glory. All around us, every day, opportunities to get rich are popping up. The more alert you are, the more chance you have of spotting them. The more preparation you have done, the more chance you have of succeeding. The more bold you are, the better chance you have of getting in on the ground floor and confounding the odds. The more self-belief you can muster, the more certain will be your aim and your timing. And the less you care what the neighbors think, the more likely you are to take the plunge and exploit an opportunity. Here is the key, then, in the Search. Whatever your inclinations, your aptitude, your abilities or your preferences, never shrink when opportunities arrive. If you have weighed the odds and find yourself convinced, ignore the protestations of sensible people and their conventional caution. Having a great idea is simply not enough. The eventual goal is vastly more important than any idea. It is how ideas are implemented that counts in the long run. Good ideas are like Nike sports shoes. They may facilitate an athlete who possesses them, but on their own they are nothing but an overpriced pair of sneakers. Specially adapted sneakers may be a good idea. But the goal is still to win, Ray Kroc, of McDonald’s fame, did not invent the idea of “fast food.” Humans have been stuffing their face “on the run” since the dawn of history. His genius was merely to recognize this fact and implement a simple five-point plan: standardize the food and prices, franchise the outlets, produce the food swiftly in clean surroundings, offer value for money and market the whole shebang relentlessly. Easy to state; hard to implement. And it flew in the face of all conventional wisdom concerning the sale of fast food at the time. But it was the implementation of this plan that turned a 52-year-old milkshake-mixer salesman with diabetes and asthma into a billionaire. There is another side to the subject of ideas in commerce. Stealing them. Or to put it more pleasantly, emulating them. The error of failing to emulate a winning idea pervades every industry at all levels. Why people should be loath to emulate success is a matter for psychologists. The fact that they do is a matter of fact. The result of such ostrichlike behavior can be catastrophic. The lesson is clear. Despite the words of the old rock ’n’ roll song, the original is not the greatest. Not always. If you want to be rich, then watch your rivals closely and never be ashamed to emulate a winning strategy. The problem with the great idea is that it concentrates the mind on the idea itself. This is fine as far as it goes. But unless the idea is executed efficiently and with panache and originality, then it doesn’t matter how great the idea is, the enterprise will fail. But an idea is not enough. It is never enough. And even its successful execution as a piece of technology is not enough if the company refuses to join with the rest of the world and its own customers in cooperative exploitation. Even so, beware of the great idea. You must encourage great ideas and search for them diligently. But either you control and develop such ideas or the ideas will come to dominate your waking thoughts. And that would not be such a great thing. If you never have a single great idea in your life, but become skilled in executing the great ideas of others, you can succeed beyond your wildest dreams. Seek them out and make them work. They do not have to be your ideas. Execution is all in this regard. If, on the other hand, you spend your days thinking up and developing in your mind this great idea or that, you are unlikely to get rich. Although you are likely to make many others rich. That is usually the way of it. Ideas don’t make you rich. The correct execution of ideas does. There are only six ways of obtaining capital. You can be given or inherit it; you can steal it; you can win it; you can marry it; you can earn it; you can borrow it. Your credit rating is extremely precious. The interest rates on credit cards or similar instruments are beyond the capacity of nearly any legal business to sustain, and while bankruptcy laws have become more generous to creditors in recent years, a history of bankruptcy will plague and hinder you when you seek to return to the fray. Better to labor as a wage slave than as a beast of burden to a loan shark. While it may not look like it to you, there is simply too much money in the world; too much capital seeking too few investment opportunities. How to Get Rich: One of the World's Greatest Entrepreneurs Shares His Secrets Venture capital companies are one way to raise capital, for sure. But the price they demand is nearly always that you hand over a huge chunk of equity. More often than not, they also insist on a date by which your new venture must be sold, either back to yourself or to outsiders. Persistence is a powerful tool in the hands of a hungry young hustler on the make. I had created capital by swimming with the fishes. One last word on obtaining capital. It’s the worst part of the whole business of getting rich. Nothing is more humiliating or debilitating than trudging the rounds with your hand out, no matter how good your project or fierce your determination. Everyone has to do it and everyone hates it. For a self-made man or woman there is no avoiding it. Beware of anyone who tells you that there are short cuts to obtaining even a small amount of capital. Outside of family and friends, there are none that I ever heard of. But I would not give in. That was the secret ingredient. I would not be a wage slave. I would not take “no” for an answer. I would not give in. I was going to be rich. Some how. Some way. Someday soon. And I would not retreat to the safety of a decent job until I was starved out of house and home. I would not give in. In one of the finest such books in the world, Letters to My Brother by the artist Vincent van Gogh, collected and published long after his death, you will find unbearable heartbreak, madness, rejection, hunger, passion, nightmare terrors and a tale of a man who never gave in. Who would not give in, though it cost him his life. All error springs from flawed assumptions. If there are no assumptions, there can be no error. I am told that during the Vietnam War, a sign was kept nailed on a wall above a particular marine commander’s desk which said: “Assumption is the mother of all f***-ups.” Worse still, by continually wishing and never delivering, you risk denting your confidence, beginning a vicious downward spiral that appears to draw misfortune like a magnet. The assumption that you might be able to achieve some goal if you only wished hard enough is not just a f***-up. It’s a potential personal tragedy. Life is not some kind of rehearsal. Do not mistake desire for compulsion. Only you can know the song of your inner demons. When the going gets tough, when all seems lost, when partners and luck desert you, when bankruptcy and failure are staring you in the face, all that can sustain you is a fierce compulsion to succeed at any price. The answer is that not only does lack of cash flow eventually doom any enterprise, it just as surely prizes control of any entity from its owner or majority shareholder. And it is control and ownership of a business entity which brings with it the promise of future wealth. Lose control of a business by running out of cash and you are relegated to the status of minority investor or salaried employee. Cash flow is something that any entrepreneur must fully comprehend from the get-go. Balance sheets are a matter for accountants, banks and auditors. But cash flow is the heartbeat of your company. You can improve cash flow by observing the following suggestions in a start-up’s early days: • Keep payroll down to an absolute minimum. Overhead walks on two legs. • Never sign long-term rent agreements or take upmarket office space. • Never indulge in fancy office or reception furniture, unless your particular business demands that you make such an impression on clients. • Never buy a business meal if the other side offers to. You can show off later. • Pay yourself just enough to eat. • Do not be shy to call customers who owe you money personally . It works. • In a city, walk everywhere you can. It’s healthy and sets a good example. • Check all staff travel and entertainment claims with an eagle eye. • If you’re going to be late paying, call the vendor’s boss. Give a date. Stick to it. • Always meet payroll, even at the expense of starving yourself that week. • Issuing staff credit cards, company cell phones or cars is the road to ruin. • Leaving lights, computers, printers and copiers on overnight is just stupid. • A vase of beautiful flowers in reception every week creates a better impression than £100,000 worth of fancy Italian furniture. • Get used to groveling. Groveling is an effective tool in a start-up’s cash flow. • They want your business. Play one supplier off against another. Ruthlessly. • Only enter a factoring deal in absolute extremity. Exit it fast. • Keep your chin up. It could be worse. You could be working for them. A very great retailer once said: “There is no victory over customers. “Success is never permanent; failure is never fatal. The only thing that really counts is to never, never, never give up.” That’s that old windbag Winston Churchill again. Most of the worst errors I have made in my life came from forgetting to act small. It’s hard to do when you’re rolling around in coin and everything is going your way. But acting big leads to complacency, and complacency is the reason that many successful start-ups falter. Every day you have to hit the ground running, putting in more hours than even your most dedicated member of staff. You have to stay flexible. You have to be willing to listen and to learn and to emulate success elsewhere. Think big, act small. It’s a recipe that never goes out of style. While especially important for start-ups, it will serve you faithfully long after you have established yourself as a serious player. If you are determined to be rich, there is only one talent you require. Can you think what it is before your eyes skim down to the next paragraph? Right. You need the talent to identify, hire and nurture others with talent. “There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtues are of no avail,” wrote the novelist Aldous Huxley. The French impressionist Degas once said: “Everybody has talent at twenty-five. Talent is indispensable, although it is always replaceable. Just remember the simple rules concerning talent: identify it, hire it, nurture it, reward it, protect it. And, when the time comes, fire it. But never give in easily. If you can, attempt one step farther along the road than appears sensible before giving in. “Persistence” is a vital attribute for those who wish to become rich, or who wish to achieve anything worthwhile for that matter. As is the ability to acknowledge that one has made a mistake and that a new plan of action must now be made. Any such acknowledgement is not a weakness, it is a sign of clear thinking. In its way, it is a kind of persistence in itself. Try, try, try again, does not mean doing what has already failed, over and over again. Quitting is not dishonorable. Quitting when you believe you can still succeed is. You must keep the faith. Belief in yourself and faith in your project can move mountains. But not if you insist on trying to scale the mountain by an impossible route which has already failed. This is the core of it. Persistence is not quite as important as self-belief. If you will not believe in yourself, then why should anyone else? Without self-belief nothing can be accomplished. With it, nothing is impossible. There is nothing wrong with doubt, or with fear. They are immensely useful tools. But you either learn to incorporate them into your thinking and your life, or you will be ruled by them. There is no “middle way.” It is doubt multiplied by the fear of failure, unconfronted, which leads to the creation of a vicious cycle where self-belief is eroded and nothing is achieved. Doubts can and should be confronted, as should fear. This is best done in daylight, under rigorous examination. if you have ever escaped from very serious trouble indeed, or have been at the point of death, then you will know that one of two things happens. Either you become cautious to an absurd degree, or you are liberated from many ordinary fears. With liberation comes the knowledge that nothing is really very important in the lives of men; nothing is as terrifying as the fear itself. And from that, paradoxically, comes self-belief—a belief that anything is possible. Secondly, you should remember that you are unique. Any scientist will tell you so. No other human was ever born, or will ever be born, with the same combination of upbringing, flaws and qualities that you possess. Why should you not believe in yourself? If you want to be rich you must work for it. But you must believe in it, too. You must believe in yourself, if only to armor yourself against the laughter of the gods in your quest. Your mad quest to be rich. I am not a manager. I am not even a businessman. I’m an entrepreneur and I go with my gut. Trust your instincts. Do not be a slave to them, but when your instincts are screaming, Go! Go! Go! then it’s time for you to decide whether you really want to be rich or not. You cannot do this in a deliberate, considered manner. You can’t get rich painting by numbers. Make More Baskets: Diversify! I am one of the richest self-made men in Britain for two reasons. I own my company outright, and I began to make more baskets the minute the first had a few eggs in it. Let’s get down to how and why. If you have a successful monthly magazine, for instance, and then launch a weekly in the same category, you will inevitably weaken sales of your original title. This will follow as surely as night follows day. So should you launch the weekly magazine? Yes! A thousand times yes! Why? Because if you do not launch the weekly edition, even though you know it is a good idea, then your rivals will do it for you. Learning to evolve or die is a cardinal virtue. Things do not stay the same. Either you learn to go with the flow and change as rapidly as you are able, or you will be left stranded, like the last dinosaur, by the last warm lake, on the last continent the ice age has yet to reach. Richard Branson has perfected one cardinal rule: he owns or part-owns more baskets than almost anyone alive. “Wait until it grows. Match investment with growth. Make it pay,” Just remember that this advice is not designed for your start-up phase. During the start-up, you concentrate on that one basket as if your life (and the life of your firstborn) depends upon it. But once you have something that’s working and making some money, start looking around quickly for another opportunity. The more baskets the better. I am often, along with my group CFO, Ian Leggett, the only one voting to close down one project or another at my various companies. To the young people involved in that project, it is a matter, seemingly, of life or death. To a man with many other fish to fry, it is just another problem in need of a solution. The reverse of that medal, of course, is that I do not bring to any project the passion and insight of those more closely involved. Even so, by diversifying and building other baskets in other countries, I believe I have become better able to make hard decisions more often. That’s a definite plus. But when you stop listening, you stop learning. And if you stop learning, it’s time to get out of the kitchen and let someone else do the cooking. Listening is the most powerful weapon after self-belief and persistence you can bring into play as an entrepreneur. If you have experience, a little investment cash and will make the time, then the world will bring to your door an amazing collection of visionaries, con artists, madmen and budding entrepreneurs. They all have something to say. Most of your time will be wasted. But what is not wasted will make you richer. Much richer. Courtesy is not a cardinal virtue in getting rich, I admit. But it helps. It works. It greases wheels where force will not prevail. Trouble is, business is not a talking shop. It relies on decisions, often hard decisions, being made in as short a time as makes sense. Seneca, coined the following: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” I have never come across a better definition—that’s why I’m repeating it. Preparation multiplied by opportunity. Say it again. Learn it off by heart. Let it become a daily mantra. Luck is preparation multiplied by opportunity. Preparation is the key. Be prepared. Do the heavy lifting and the homework in advance. Get on with the job, but remain alert enough to spot an opportunity when it arrives. Then hammer it. Despite what you will read in many self-improvement tomes, “partnering” and “symbiotic evolution” are no way to get rich. They may be a way to a better world. They may make you a happier person and a better manager. But they will not make you rich— except, perhaps, in spirit. To become rich you must behave as a predator. I will go further, you must become a predator. Then again, Albert is more intelligent than I am. He had a grand education and read all the right books at university. He is not a self-taught scholar, as I am. But there is a downside to all this intelligence and imagination. He thinks a little too much before he acts. He weighs the options too carefully. He is capable of imagining defeat. As H. L. Mencken put it: “The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.” • Prepare yourself for luck, but don’t seek her out. Let her come to you. • Make your own luck • Don’t whine or ever describe yourself as “unlucky.” (You’re alive, aren’t you?) • Be bold. Be brave. Don’t thank your lucky stars. The stars can’t hear you. • Stay the course. Stop looking for the green grass over the hill. • Don’t try to do it all yourself. Delegate and teach others to delegate. • Remember that most predators are lucky most of their lives, unlike their prey. • Whiners and cowards die a hundred times a day. Be a hero to yourself. • If being a hero isn’t your style, then fake it. Reality will catch up eventually. • Just do it. It is much easier to apologize than to obtain permission. • Never take the quest for wealth seriously. It’s just a game, chum. • Next time you bump into Lady Luck, giver her a whack on the rump from me. • Be lucky. Get rich. Then give it all away. (We’ll get to that bit later.) How to Get Rich: One of the World's Greatest Entrepreneurs Shares His Secrets All negotiations arise from weakness, unless you are one of that strange tribe who finds themselves intoxicated with the process of bargaining and negotiating itself. All great companies, all well-run organisations, need great managers and great staff. That much, at least, is pretty obvious. You forget it at your peril. all organizations are a reflection of the people who start them. The only “style” I assume you’re interested in developing is an efficient money-making machine which is also a great place to work. Please remember: you are not reading this book to become a successful manager. Managers rarely become rich. Most managers are lieutenants. Personally, I don’t think I was a very good managing director or CEO of any of my companies, so my advice concerning your choice of middle management is limited to the following: the world is full of aspiring lieutenants. Most people seek job security, job satisfaction and power over others far more than they seek wealth. Serious negotiations are very different from day-to-day bargaining and should be approached differently. They imply a weakness in the position of at least one of the parties involved in the negotiations, unlike day-to-day bargaining, where no such weakness need exist. The first thing to be done, perhaps the most vital thing, is to establish exactly where those weaknesses lie. Weaknesses in serious negotiations usually exist in both camps, of course, at least to some degree or another, and it becomes important to swiftly determine which weakness is most pressing and most potentially catastrophic to which party. An immediate balance of weaknesses may well prove more decisive than any long-term balance of strengths. • The flea has established to his own satisfaction the elephant’s urgent need. • The flea has learned to ignore flattery. • The flea has learned that an elephant cannot be your friend in negotiations. • The flea has learned he is not a good negotiator. • The flea has learned to “empty” himself and make himself believe he does not care. • The flea has overcome his lack of skill by setting a price he will not deviate from. • The flea has hardened his heart and has walked away when the price was not met. • The flea has introduced a rogue element (the trade magazine) into the negotiations. • The flea has weighed Greed vs. Need. He believes Need will outweigh Greed. A Few Tips on Negotiating • Remember that few of us are any good at detailed negotiations. That includes your opponent, by the way. • If you are a poor negotiator, like me, then set a limit on what you will pay or accept and on any conditions attached. Do not deviate. Your first thought is your best thought. • Most negotiations are unnecessary. Don’t enter into them. Remember that “the fortress that parleys is already half taken.” Save serious negotiations for serious occasions. • Do your homework. And do it rigorously. What you don’t know or haven’t bothered to find out can kill you in any type of serious negotiation. • Despite my jungle book examples above, the devil really is in the detail in serious negotiations. Get all the professional help you can trust. But do not surrender control of the negotiations or the agenda to such professionals. They are not the ones who will have to live with the consequences—you are. Professional advisors are there to explain and advise, not to decide. • If your advisors are leading you down a path you don’t approve of during your negotiations, call a “time-out” and tell them privately that if they continue along that route you will get yourself some new advisors. The world is full of them. • Never fall in love with the deal. A deal is just a deal. There will always be other deals and other opportunities. • Avoid auctions in business like the plague—unless you are selling something, that is. You will nearly always pay more than is wise if you are the “winner” of an auction process. • The negotiator opposite you is not your new best friend. He is not your partner. He is not your confidant. You have no obligation, outside of ordinary courtesy, to please him or satisfy his demands. He is the enemy. If you do not understand that real winners and real losers emerge from serious negotiations, then you will be robbed, whatever the circumstances. • Take no notice of management manuals that tell you to leave passion and emotion out of the negotiating room. If you are emotional or passionate about something, then let it show. But leaven emotion with courtesy, and, if possible, with wit. If you’re not the witty type, then flattery and self-deprecation are good substitutes. • Listen when engaged in serious negotiations. Then listen some more. You are in no hurry. Nobody ever got poor listening. Also, use silence as a weapon. Silences are disconcerting. People tend to fill silences with jabber, often weakening their bargaining position as they do so. • Choose a rogue element to your advantage and bring it into the negotiation at a late stage. You’ll be amazed at how often this tactic produces results. • The British created the largest geophysical empire in the world with one tactic: divide and rule. It always works. It never fails if you can get to exploit it. Get to know the other side. There may be slight differences in the individual approaches of their senior managers and, possibly, in their goals. Drive a wedge and keep hammering. • Permit no such weaknesses in your own camp. I have often banned senior executives from taking part in negotiations simply to avoid this trap. Better you are in there on your own, outgunned, outflanked and outmaneuvered, than to have two or three of you silently squabbling. • Everyone thinks they are a great negotiator, but most of us simply are not. If it’s your company, then, for better or worse, you are the final arbiter. That remains true whether you are a good negotiator or a bad one. • If you suspect you perform badly on such occasions, do not attend, even if you are the 100 percent owner. Get someone else to do it after setting out your response to every conceivable option that might arise. This tactic can be devastating to the other side, and Peter, Bob and I have used it on many occasions in the past. You have to trust your nominee completely, though. • Above all, establish where the balance of weakness lies in any serious negotiation. Most strengths are self-evident, especially strengths... I may well have been only able to put a few hundred million dollars in the bank because I recognized that this getting rich malarkey is just a game. To become rich you must be an owner. And you must try to own it all. You must strive with every fiber of your being, while recognizing the idiocy of your behavior, to own and retain control of as near to 100 percent of any company as you can. If that is not possible, in a public company, for example, then you must be prepared to make yourself hated by those around you who are also trying to be rich. To become rich, every single percentage point of anything you own is crucial. It is worth fighting for, tooth and claw. It is worth suing for. It is worth shouting and banging on the table for. It is worth begging for and groveling for. It is worth lying and cheating for. In extremis, it is even worth negotiating for. Never, never, never, never hand over a single share of anything you have acquired or created if you can help it. Nothing. Not one share. To no one. No matter what the reason—unless you genuinely have to. Ownership is not the most important thing. It is the only thing that counts. Nothing counts but what you own in the race to get rich. If you haven’t much skill, or much wit, or much talent, or much luck, and yet you insist on owning more than your fair share of any start-up or acquisition, then you can become rich. If you take what you’re given, you will probably not get rich. Because ownership isn’t the important thing. If you want to be rich, it’s the only thing. Not everyone works to get rich. In fact, most people do not. But almost everyone wishes to be respected. If you want to get rich, then learn to delegate. Don’t learn to pretend to delegate. Delegation is not only a powerful tool, it is the only way to maximize and truly incentivize your most precious asset—the people who work for you. The financier John Paul Getty put it best half a century ago: The meek shall inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights. Exactly. Risk equals reward. “An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay” is not risk-taking. Competition isn’t some misty-eyed concept that should be confined to students of the “dismal science,” Economics. Competition is the heart, soul, liver, lungs and kidney of the beast we call Western capitalism. How you react to it, how you face up to it, defines whether you can stay rich, and probably whether you can get rich at all. No intelligence-gathering exercise is ever entirely wasted in business. There is only so much pie. Talent bakes that pie. What is it you are attempting to achieve here? You are trying to become rich. This must be the main focus of your business life. Becoming rich. How to Get Rich: One of the World's Greatest Entrepreneurs Shares His Secrets If you have entrepreneurial flair, then you can go into just about any business and make money. If you wish to become rich, look carefully about you at the prevailing industries where wealth appears to be gravitating. Then go to where the money is! That is where you should focus your efforts. There is no substitute for good timing. There is always luck involved, but it’s often the kind of luck you help make yourself. You cannot get rich all on your own. No one can. You have to create, or work within, the right environment. In the same way, it is almost impossible to build an individual fortune without colleagues, confederates and one or two professionals on board. You will need others who believe in your idea or your talent to work with you and for you. You just can’t do it on your own. You need to create an environment. But why would clever, cunning and adept people work for a mug like you? Simple. There are many clever, cunning and adept people who are risk-averse. You are not risk-averse because you are dedicated to becoming rich. Your employees, your colleagues, your suppliers and your customers are all human capital. Choosing among them is an art form. Yet creating the right environment in which money can be made is essential. 1. Never choose an important employee or a key supplier alone. 2. Go further than reading a person’s references. 3. Make notes. Speak little. 4. Good suppliers respect attention to detail. 5. Pay employees well. Bonus better. 6. Be alert for “crossovers.” Many times I have been interviewing someone for a job and realized that they are not suitable for the job in question. However, the candidate would be perfect in another position in my company. 7. Only hire winners. 8. Ignore your prejudices, likes and dislikes. 9. Promote from within when you can. 10. Don’t leave senior employees in any job too long. Whatever it is you intend to do to get rich, get good at it. Hire people who are better than you at it. Listen and learn and get better still at it. Why does it count? Why is it important to focus on doing an outstanding job? Firstly, talent will flock to your company. Talented employees mean you have more opportunities to make more money. Secondly, you will make fewer errors. The quality of your management will see to that. Thirdly, it places a premium on your assets and the worth of your business. That means you get richer faster. Fourthly, it’s simply more enjoyable—which means you will enjoy coming to work and will spend more time focusing on doing an even better job. If there is any way at all you can play “pass the parcel” with a venture you believe is destined to fail and in which you are a principal, then do not hesitate. Pass the damn parcel and move on to the next opportunity. Experience is only a name we give to our failures. You have to cut loose to get rich. There isn’t any other way. Now you must cut yourself loose from naysayers and negative influences: Firstly, they fear that you are placing yourself in harm’s way—and, to them, that cannot be a good thing. Secondly, they fear that if you should succeed, you will expose their own timidity to the light of day. You cannot spend your life assuaging the fear of failure (and success) that is the common lot of the risk-averse. Now you must leave the safety of the ant colony and the hive. You are to become a loner, an outcast, cut off from the very thing that defines what many of us believe we are. But it cannot define you. Not anymore. You are a wild pig rooting for truffles. You are a weasel about to rip the throat out of a rabbit. You are an entrepreneur. You are going to be rich, and you don’t much care, within the law, how you are going to do it. THE WORLD IS FULL OF MONEY. SOME OF IT HAS MY NAME ON IT. ALL I HAVE TO DO IS COLLECT IT. You see, you have to choose a new mine where you suspect there is money, or an old mine with a different angle to get rich. The right mountain. A great new mine right now is in telecommunications, or the Internet, or legalized gambling. Property is always good. (You can start small in property and you can get lucky quickly. It’s a crowded market, though, for that very reason.) Fear nothing. Another easy-to-say and impossible piece of advice. Tough luck, chum. Life’s a bitch and then you die. Get used to it. It isn’t going to change anytime soon. If you want to be rich you must make a pact with yourself about fear of anything. You cannot banish fear, but you can face it down, stomp on it, crush it, bury it, padlock it into the deepest recesses of your heart and soul and leave it there to rot. you will instantly perceive (among many other things) just how much money there is in the world and how pitifully easy it is to obtain it. Money that already has your name on it. All that is stopping you is fear. I do not know of what kind. It may even be fear of succeeding. But if you want to be rich, gentle reader, and if you can read these words, then all that is stopping you is fear of one kind or another. You have no one to blame but yourself. The world is full of gazelles with diamonds in their guts. But I do know that you must make an accommodation with your fears if you are to succeed. At least, I know that to be true in my own case. As to how such a trick is to be accomplished, I cannot help you. We each, in turn, must face down our secret demons, if we can, whether we wish to be rich or not. To succeed in the game of piling up material wealth, it becomes a necessity. In the words of the wisest of men, William Shakespeare: “Present fears are less than horrible imaginings.” You will never start unless you start NOW! That’s right. Right now. Even as your eyes scan this page, your brain should be plotting and planning ideas and possibilities, weaving a web to ensnare what you could achieve, if only you will cease this endless prevarication and commit yourself. Commit yourself heart and soul, mind. Heart and soul. No half measures or lukewarm approach is likely to succeed There is a place for impetuosity and leaps of faith. A place for belief. That place is here. And the time is now. You must take your first steps on the long, lonely road to wealth by beginning now, When opportunities come you must pounce. Whether you are just starting out or have been at it for a long while. If an opportunity should arrive just as you are taking your family on vacation, for example, do not weaken. Need will drive you, but you must not prevaricate. You must act at the slightest hint of a chance to make money. You must go, go, go! If you wish to get rich, there are no reasons why you should not get rich. None at all. For they are not “reasons”; they are excuses. For the most part they are pitiful alibis, half truths and self-serving evasions you have erected to spare yourself from the quiet terror of taking your own financial life in your hands and making your dreams concrete reality. The only three valid reasons for not attempting to become rich are: “I do not wish to be rich.” Or, “I wish to be rich but I have other priorities.” Or, “I am too stupid to try to get rich.” The Upside-Down Pyramid for Getting Rich 1. Commit or don’t commit. No half-measures. 2. Cut loose from all negative influences. 3. Choose the right mountain. 4. Fear nothing. 5. Start now. 6. Go! • Keep giving it away. The faster you give it away, the more money will flow back to you. Not because of “karma” or “universal cosmic forces,” but because you then spend less time defending it and more time making more of it. • Get your own private advisors. The professionals who help run your company must be first class. • Never stop looking for talent and promoting talent. This single suggestion will keep anyone rich. Talent is all most companies consist of. Talented people are crucial to keeping your company humming right along and growing. No deal is a total make-or-break deal. Not one. If you cannot get the terms you know make sense, then walk away. Lead. Do not be led. The Eight Secrets to Getting Rich 1. Analyze your need. Desire is insufficient. Compulsion is mandatory. 2. Cut loose from negative influences. Never give in. Stay the course. 3. Ignore “great ideas.” Concentrate on great execution. 4. Focus. Keep your eye on the ball marked “The Money is Here.” 5. Hire talent smarter than you. Delegate. Share the annual pie. 6. Ownership is the real “secret.” Hold on to every percentage point you can. 7. Sell before you need to, or when bored. Empty your mind when negotiating. 8. Fear nothing and no one. Get rich. Remember to give it all away. In the words of John Gall, writing about “Systemantics” twenty years ago in The Whole Earth Catalogue: Systems tend to oppose their own proper function. Systems tend to malfunction just after their greatest triumph. [We all] have a strong tendency to apply a previously successful strategy to the new challenge. The army is now fully prepared to fight the last war. How to Get Rich: One of the World's Greatest Entrepreneurs Shares His Secrets I went to college on an art scholarship and never took an art class.
I won awards at photography and had my own darkroom and never showed anyone that I knew. I joined a creative writing class, wrote some stories that the class loved, the teacher said I was smarter and more talented than he was. I stopped writing after that class. In the same class, someone was so impressed with my creativity they wrote me in their story. I walked away without talking about it. I used to draw and make cartoons and haven't drawn years, and it is a skill, and it has faded. My apartment used to be filled with paintings and books, and I threw them all away. I remember applying to an art school but delayed the portfolio and put it together at the last minute so it was not the best it could have been. I did not make it. I never applied to another school and got an MBA instead. I have started writing and then dropped so many books I lost count. The list could keep going, I have not done or finished so much. The time of self destructing my creativity is over. D |
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