#1 ADVICE? JOURNAL EVERY SINGLE DAY
Someone once asked me what my number one piece of advice was.
"What should I be doing everyday to grow spiritually and in business?" My answer if I could only give one... Journal! Write! Get that shit out of your head and onto some paper. A napkin will even suffice. You can hold yourself accountable by continuing to compose, and overtime you will develop a unique voice and style. This doesn't need to be handwritten, but there's something genuine and personal that comes with watching your thoughts translate out of your hand and onto paper. Nothing to say, great, write those words. "I have nothing to write, nothing to say." Then watch some happens.
NURTURE THE ECOSYSTEM
Build the ecosystem surrounding your project. When we zoom out from a coral reef, or a tributary, the area we see is being incubated by a greater system, flowing and delivering all the proper nutrients to it from all around. How long did it take for that one component to form and nurture life?
I don't want to sound too abstract, but it took thousands, if not millions of years. How can we think so far ahead to the place where we want our coral reef to rest? What steps can we take to build our home, our project, our world? This is starting to sound like an environmental piece... and maybe it should be.
The surrounding ocean, river streams, forests, etc. You can't have health in one area if the the neighboring is in peril. A more relatable example might be real estate. Someone buying a home in a far off region in hopes that one day the home is to go up in value can take action to ensure that it does. You sit around and wait for growth to come to you. Be a part of it. These may sound like extremes, but perhaps open a business near your far off home. Perhaps start a small annual music festival nearby. Incubate the region, the eco-system.
This translates over to all projects and startups of all types, primarily ventures that surround a niche or community, which, guess what is just about all businesses. Or at least they should be. This correlates with crowd-rise, before you crowd-fund. Build the community. What does the community need? Where do you want your coral reef to go? You might need to create
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DON’T SUFFOCATE GETTING OFF THE GROUND
I swear to God, (swearing for blasphemy sake, yet capitalizing God out of respect) that when you're starting a business, and you want it to happen, and it's your future and your drive, Do Not hold and hug it so close to your chest that you suffocate the dame thing. I want people to drill me on this concept. I want to be told that ownership is precious and it should be protected at all costs, because it's not. You should get / take what you deserve, but honor the time and energy and future pay by letting others help you.
I want entrepreneurs to be so prolific that they could give a shit less about a few percent in ownership. Obviously you have the need for balance and majority control on many instances, but here is the thing that happened that has motivated me to write this post. If you want to raise money and start a business, one that you intend to run, grow and get rich from, why on earth would you prevent your network from helping you do so, faster.
Ex. Someone came to me who had started a super cool business 10 years back and sold it. Home run! Since then the new owners have run the business into the ground. I've been discussing with this guy for over a year now raising some dough from private investors and buying the business back. He's the one who approached me saying he wanted to buy it back. His idea. I offered to help him raise the cash required the buy the entire business and made my request of ownership for doing so.
He did not find it to be a good deal, so we've decided to not work together on this. We're on great terms still, as it's just a business decision, and we're both quite compartmentalized, which is a great thing to incorporate into your soul. (Don't let shit bother you too much and ruin personal relationships.)
Moral of my little story here... If you have a goal, and you've been working on it for awhile, and you're busy, and you want to get it going ASAP, and someone comes along and says they want 5% to get it going and off the ground, getting you the funding you need to do it, you should probably weigh out options, and likely take the deal and get going. What do you have to lose? You have your life ahead of you.
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DEPRESSION WITH ENTREPRENEURISM
Depression is a very new and recent experience for me in life. I had not experienced my first bout until mid 20's, and when it fell upon me I was quite confused and uncertain as to what it even was. Across many site the average age range for depression seems to be 25 - 44 years of age, so it seems I was right on the mark.
You can be riding an extreme high, then you can hit a deep low, but how low can you go? Really really low it seems. I used to ponder my depression vs. productivity on an x/y axis. Am I still operating at a higher capacity than an"average" person when I'm down? That idea has long sense past, as comparing productivity to other people, I believe, is dysfunctional. It boils down to where you average out and "ride" on the scale.
Consider you're buzzing high 7 days per week for 27 days, then your energy starts ebbing away... you might drop 10 points down on your mania, which is perceived as a huge drop, and it is, because your body feels it as a dramatic shift. Just 10 years earlier, you might have been riding lower than you are now on average, so when you drop those 10 points and start to experience that entrepreneur / momentum depression, it's important to remember that this new level was at one point your highest. It's about the drop or the gain. Here we're discussing the drop since it is what causes the depression.
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HELP YOUR WAY TO SUCCESS!
"Do for others what you want done for you."
This philosophy stems from the idea that if we want something within a certain industry, perhaps we put ourselves and our own careers in that industry one step back from the industry at-large. This idea is combined as a lead generation philosophy. Example. If you want to be a selling author, why not nurture the writing community, and help others get their works out in the community. This does in effect make you a bit of a producer or agent of sorts, but not a manager or broker. If you're an animator, and you want to have your animation seen all over the place, why not create an Instagram that promotes great animation and their animators, build that following, then sneak your own work in from time to time? You can feature great artists, ones you look up to, reposting their work. Watch as they thank you and like your posts on your community profile. You'll build a society of people, just like you, and people that follow work. Then, when the time is right, strike, and take what you deserve.
DUAL PROCESSING YOUR EXPERIENCES
When you are doing startups, running businesses, it's crucial to fight for it 1000%. You have to operate like it's the only thing in the world to you, because it is! I also think it's important to, at moments, give yourself permission to acknowledge the growth and enrichment you're receiving from everything you've experienced through the process.
I turned 31 years old a few weeks ago. Reflecting back on the dozen or so failed projects, I remember at the time having no vision of the future outside of that one company or concept. Nothing else existed, and that was important for momentum. I also remember having thoughts like, "This is the best and greatest idea I've ever had in my life and will ever have." I could not have been more wrong.
Now, a dozen ideas later, I am going strong, better than ever actually. I've learned the number one lesson. "It is not only ok to 'fail,' it's crucial that you do." Failing doesn't have to mean the entire company goes to shit. Not at all. Aspects of it can fail. Giving yourself permission to sponge-up the lessons, learn from mistakes and truly adhere to the lesson that the journey really is better than the destination. Arriving at the end, which by the way, never ever ever comes, is just another reward, just like all the lovely moments along the way. When you're motivated, you never reach an end goal, you never reach the top, or the summit.
You will always more more ideas, different ventures, and new business partners. To conclude, you couldn't have arrived where you are now without having taken the steps behind you. Treat everything like it's the only and last thing you'll ever do, but know that it's ok to be excited that if things don't "work out," because all that experience you just absorbed... you'll be unstoppable.
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PRETEND YOU’RE POWERFUL, BECAUSE…
Every once in awhile, just because, when you enter through one of those automatic doors, like the ones at hotels, hospitals, etc., just wave your hand in front of it like you did when you were younger, or like your kids may do now. Do it to remind yourself that you are powerful. Do it to remind yourself of the kid in you. Do it for your imagination. If you practice magically opening doors in your mind, imagine what doors will actually open for you in life.
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DEATH OF NAIVETY
Some people say humans are viruses and that we destroy everything we touch. I won't disagree that we are an invasive species, where interestingly enough we call all creatures and plants the same, even though we introduced most of them into areas they shouldn't be. Now we have no excuses. Our collective education has surmounted to a great height. Or has it? We cannot claim for much longer the lizard / monkey brain as an excuse. People all over the world are dying. We're not apes throwing shit at each other, killing for territory, and ... oh wait, we are still doing that. Humans have come a long way. We're young, I mean, we just got electricity in the late 1800's. Yes, we have drastic civil injustice, we are doing terrible things to people, pissing on the ground to claim our turf, I mean, we even did it on the moon. Flag. Bam!
Yes, we are still monkey's, we're still lizards, but when do we claim otherwise? We're in outer space, cameras sooo far away, incalculable distances, yet corners of the earth still commence in genital mutilation and vast populations still defecate in public due to no plumbing. We know eating too much red meat is bad for us. We know we need to grow more vegetables so we can feed more people and stop using hundreds of gallons of water to generate a single lb of beef. We know it's ok if two men love each other. It's two humans, who love another...
Oh, can I remind you again that we're launching then landing rockets back on Earth now? We're solving problems, that we created! Is there a single non-profit working toward a cause that we humans didn't cause in the first place? This cycle is in itself, dysfunctional, don't you agree? Theatre. Why are we raising money for theatre, music venues, and community gardens? Why are non-profits raising money for school books, for the environment, social equality, etc.?
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TIME TRAVELING
I talk about time travel from time to time, because... it's real. We've all seen the movies about altering the past, changing the future, some guy steps on a bug back in the dinosaur era, 65 to 230 million years ago, then Donald Trump never becomes president.
Something more attainable however... is what can we do for ourselves, knowing, and believing that we are indeed time traveling, warping through space, spending our lives on habits and patterns that are engrained in us. What happens to us if we eat healthy, or start our business, or start painting again, daily, and we set that as a pattern in ourselves, perhaps spending 21 consecutive days doing so, then we warp through time.
What year do we land in, and who are we?
We land in tomorrow, and the day after, and the day, week, month, year, decade, decades after that.
We, arrive!
We arrive at the better , ideal image of ourselves. We arrive at this, very realistic scenario, of where we want to be in our lives. Short term goals and objectives, fought for, strived for, where we then blank out, and arrive, like a hibernating state on a spaceship to Mars, because you will arrive. We will arrive, and you will want to wake up on that day, at whatever age it is, and know that you are still embarking on the greatest journey ever told, and that not only are you successful, but you matter, and you, are important, and you did something great.
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STOP PRETENDING
No one is a genius, and if you want to call someone such, I believe that what you're truly acknowledging is their lack of "filter" that they have, whether it be oil painting expression, or deciding to dig deeper into splitting an atom and pondering the laws of the universe. I've always thought, "Nothing is hard or difficult, but many things take a lot of time." It's all about self-permissions. This is important to acknowledge since I believe that we all have "genius" thoughts. You just didn't write it down and express it in some way.
Express your thoughts. I just came upon Seth Godin last month for the first time! Seth talks about this. He says everyone should blog, I don't disagree. I think everyone should journal. Is there a difference? I don't know anymore. I was raised by my grandfather, I'm old school. Get that junk out of your head in some way, shape or form. It's flushes the brain toilet out.
Now, when people talk about motivation, following their dreams, dysfunctional habits and setbacks, we all know the answers to our own questions. We all know we just need to get moving. We know what we need to do for ourselves. Yes, ideas from others are great, helpful and guiding. "How to lose weight" "How to be this and do that and follow our dreams and become the ideal versions of ourselves." Idiots Guide to Loving Ourselves" is hopefully the book no one ever, ever has to write.
We all know what we need to do. We need to STOP PRETENDING that we don't know who we are and what we want. We are not lost and it's getting out of control. You are not in an identity crisis. Eat healthy and run. Want to start a business?! Do it, fail, do it again. Who cares. You do. We all do. Want to paint? What should we do? Say it with me? (paint!) I understand being human is a bitch. It really can suck... we are meaning making machines trying to add significance to just about everything we do. But we have got to stop pretending that we don't know what we want for ourselves.
We want to be happy. Do you not have a single interest? Did that BBC special on Penguins not get you totally stoked for the environment. I mean.... if you're favorite past-time is Candy Crush.... start a candy crush club or something.
I believe this! 100%. Raise your hand if you know meditation can benefit you. Now raise your hand, honestly, if you meditate. Raise your hand if you agree that cigarettes are bad for you. Now, honestly, raise your head if you smoke. It's ok that you smoke right now. It is. But it's not ok if you smoke a month from now, especially if you just raised your hand acknowledging that it's bad for you.
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