Table of Contents
Choose Yourself is a book about making tough decisions, and about knowing what to focus on, in the new age of information.
Entrepreneurship (Golden Handcuffs)
Don’t stay at a job for safe salary increases over time. That will never get you where you want to go—freedom from financial worry. Only free time, imagination, creativity, and an ability to disappear at will will help you deliver value that nobody ever delivered before in the history of mankind.
This era signals the end of the middleman, the barriers to entry have been removed. There has never been a better time for you to become an entrepreneur.
That whole “job” thing. The corporate safety net that the Industrial Revolution created. We thought we were “safe.” That we didn’t have to make it on our own anymore. That big corporations would take care of us once we paid our dues with a college education. Well, that was a myth. I can’t say it was a lie, because we all truly believed it. From the top down, we wanted to make it happen. But society isn’t so simple. You can’t break apart spirit from science, arts from finance, or job from innovation, and expect the results to be clean and neat. They aren’t. And the shift has already happened. The earth has split apart.
Ideation
The Mental Body: People have lots of ideas, but they are mostly bad ones. The way you get good ideas is to do two things:
1) Read two hours a day.
2) Write ten ideas a day.
By the end of a year, you will have read for almost one thousand hours and written down 3,600 ideas. One of these ideas will be a home run.
Rule of Reciprocity
Recommend your competition.
Think about it this way: what are two of the most popular sites on the Internet? Yahoo! and Google. What do they do? They just link to their competition, other websites.
If you become a reliable source, then everyone comes back to you; if your knowledge has value, they can only get that by having access to you. They get access by buying your product or services.
Find Seeds
With the entire world of knowledge at our fingertips, it sometimes is fun to get sucked down the rabbit hole like Alice and drift around in Wonderland. Some good places to start are brainpickings.org, thebrowser.com, and (not safe for work), extragoodshit.phlap.net.
Even if you don’t get any ideas from what you see, seeds for ideas will be planted. You can get a similar feeling by going to a bookstore and skim through many different books. This experience will tickle your brain, it will light up areas that have been dormant.
Content Channels
Youtube is a treasure trove of ideas Connect to people on social media, but research them first. Being social has enormous power that shouldn’t be underestimated. Small actions online could lead to big results in the world world.
Health
Being an entrepreneur will take its toll on your body. And sooner or later, you’re going to start to worry about your health. Anyway, here’s some good advice on taking after yourself.
Walk: Oxytocin from walking under sun
Food: Here is my oxytocin-rich meal: eggs, mixed with bananas and pepper.
Smooth Music.
Avoid Sugar.
Nothing is more important than cultivating yourself.
Forget all self-help. It’s all garbage. It’s all about this one silly chemical. The news lately is all about the Higgs-Boson, the “god particle.” Well, oxytocin is the “god hormone.”That said, I’ll do all of the above. I need my body functioning. I need to get rid of mental waste and physical waste and emotional waste. Why not? But at the end of the day, it’s spiritual waste that I’m after. And how do you get that? How do you get to that peculiar desire of trying to have no desires? Because when you expect nothing, you have the immense satisfaction of getting everything you want. How do you get there?
Procrastination is your body telling you that you need to back off a bit and think more about what you are doing. When you procrastinate as an entrepreneur, it could mean that you need a bit more time to think about what you are pitching a client. It could also mean you are doing work that is not your forte and that you are better off delegating.
Figure out why you are putting things off. You may need to come up with better ideas, or delegate your work. Or you need more information, or you may even need a break. Some great people don’t need breaks, maybe Steve Jobs never needed a break, but most people do. When you find yourself procrastinating, there’s probably a good reason, trust your body.
Multi-tasking
Zero-Tasking: Multi-tasking is a myth. Althcher shares a story about how he is addicted to multitasking and is keenly aware of its deficiencies. He automatically starts an online game of chess when someone calls him, and he noticed that his performance drops by 3 standard deviation points.
Anything you try to do while multi-tasking will be affected. Zero-tasking is doing nothing. It is often better to do nothing than to do many things. There is an impulse to always do something, to avoid feeling guilty, but it is often wiser to simple be quiet and not think of anything at all.
He cites a statement a successful business man once said to him, ““Never underestimate the power of a long, protracted silence.”
Find combinations
The best ideas are when you take two older ideas that have nothing to do with each other, make them have sex with each other, and then build a business around the bastard, ugly child that results. The child who was so ugly nobody else wanted to touch it. Look at Facebook: combine the Internet with stalking. Amazing!
Ideas mate with other ideas to produce idea children. Read other ideas. Compare your new ideas with your old ideas. After the Big Bang, the rest of the universe was basically created from collisions.
An exercise to get your subconscious working on an idea: Write down your routine. Make it as detailed as possible. What can you change today? How can you change it?
List your childhood passions.
Make a Decision
The “Power of No.” If someone asks you to have a meeting, have a coffee, get on a call, etc., your first instinct is to say no. Much more value is created when you do the things you enjoy, when you work on your own creativity.
Rushing around the world trying to capture every piece of business will only result in financial and spiritual poverty.
It’s much better to work smarter, not harder.
“A ‘No’ uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a ‘Yes’ merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.” — Gandhi
Don’t lead a double life. Whatever you do will take space in your brain. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you have the ability to juggle many things at once. If you live a double life, that extra life will degrade your brain, it will cloud your thinking, and take too much mental space.
You know why they always say a great weight lifts off your shoulders? Because that’s where your brain is. And your brain is heavy. It rests on your shoulders. When stuff is weighing it down you lose about 10 to 20 percent of your intelligence. Give up control and get smarter.
Do whatever you say you are going to do. Aim to be that guy.
Productivity Advice
Lesson Number One about Choosing Yourself: I can choose myself to call anyone I want. If they want to talk to me, great.
Lesson Number Two: All the conventional methods for making money and distribution are out the window because the barriers to entry that create the premium value are gone.
Lesson Number Three: Everyone will say you CAN’T. Especially when you’re young, but if you pick and choose how to work with the entrenched system, you CAN.
Lesson Number Four: The power of the community you build will be felt in ways you can’t predict (a ten-year-old fan, for instance).
Lesson Number Five: Persistence is more important than industry validation because it’s not the industry that is buying what you’re selling.
Lesson Number Six: Focus on what you can do for your art/business right now instead of trying to aim for things ten years for now.
Consistency
Don’t overinvest on stats, social media, or staying up too late. Focus on being consistent. It is better to do 3-5 hours of focused work every day, consistently, than overwork yourself occasionally. The former will result in massive improvements, the latter in burn out.
Woody Allen never cared about the Oscars, he only cared about his own pleasure. He didn’t anxiously wait for a prize. You should aim to be that way, almost like a mule, to find a form that you are comfortable with and master it. And then have the confidence to play within that form, and develop your own style.
Lessons from Woody Allen?
Wake up early.
Avoid distractions.
Work three to five hours a day and then enjoy the rest of the day.
Be as perfectionist as you can, knowing that imperfection will still rule.
Have the confidence to be magical and stretch the boundaries of your medium.
A third will like you, a third will hate you, a third won’t care…no matter what you do.
Forget about having the most money or making the biggest impact. You should connect with who you are, and see how far your potential can unravel. It is the most human thing you can do. Don’t get stuck in the same rut. Move forward and experiment, but with the confidence that you have earned from experience.
This is not about making the most money, or having the most impact. This is about being connected with who you are. This is about seeing how far your potential truly can unravel, simply because you are human.
You can change the rules, but you must learn them first.
If you’re an entrepreneur and you want a quick guide to know what to think about before launching you business, check out The Myth of Entrepreneurship.