ForeverJobless 2016 Quarterly Report


When I shared how I was setting my goals this year many of you commented or emailed saying you’d like me to share quarterly updates. So, in this post I’ll share with you how I progressed towards my goals, what worked, what didn’t work, how I’m proceeding forward, and why.

It’s important to keep in mind that these are the only things that matter.

There are many people online that share their goals if they achieve them, but without understanding how and why they worked, and sharing what didn’t work along the way you won’t be able to extract the takeaways that would allow you to replicate the results you’d like in your own life. The successes or failures along the way to a goal and the lessons behind them are what to focus on.

Most people focus on the end result. The end result is irrelevant. The end result is just a byproduct of the actions and decisions that lead to it.

To make it easy to know what I’m referencing for each part, I’ll quote parts of that article where I laid out my initial goals/plans. If you have not yet read that article, I would highly suggest it. Not only might it give you a new perspective around how to set your goals, but it will allow you to fully understand what I’m referencing in this post, so that you can follow along with me this quarter, as well as the rest of the year.

“For this year, my priority goal is less focused on just one specific end result, but moreso on certain actions I’ll take. Instead of one yearly priority goal, my priority goals will be set in quarterly intervals, keeping in mind certain things I’d like to achieve for the year, but optimizing the quarterly goal setting for happiness and enjoyment, rather than progress towards one yearly priority goal…

How I normally operate is to set a yearly priority goal and if I want to guarantee its achievement I just reverse engineer it and let all other goals be secondary… nice to hit, but not at the expense of the priority goal. The big difference this year is that in some sense I have several ‘secondary goals’, although since I’ve eliminated most other distractions maybe I’ll have a chance of achieving them all as if they were priority goals. We’ll see. My priority goal adjusting per quarter allows me to dive 100% into something on a sprint basis, and either eliminate if I don’t enjoy, or double down if I do….

What I’m working on(writing) will be a new challenge for me, and so I’ll be tweaking the ways in which I try it, and going down the path I most enjoy.

So, there’s not necessarily a specific yearly path with a plan like this, but all I know is I’ll enjoy it and it will lead to good things.”

Go as far as you can see, and when you get there you will see farther. – W. Clement Stone

First quarter priority goal

My priority in the first quarter will be releasing an average of one article per week to the blog. So, by the end of the first quarter I’ll have 13 new articles posted. However, even though it’s a number goal, the focus is on quality, not quantity.

First quarterly goal: successful

Here are the 13 articles that were published in the first quarter:

Blog post 1: How To Achieve Your Goals (9,605 words)

Blog post 2: Sunk Cost Fallacy (3,739 words)

Blog post 3: The Packed Gym of Failure (1,948 words)

Blog post 4: Dream Life (3,242 words)

Blog post 5: 4 countries in 4 days, with a ‘94% chance of living’ (4,467 words)

Blog post 6: How To Set Goals If You’re Not Sure What You Want (11,638 words)

Blog post 7: Arnold Schwarzenegger Infrastructures of Wealth (2,200 words)

Blog post 8: Learned Helplessness (2,524 words)

Blog post 9: Easy Business To Start: The ForeverJobless Free Business Idea Edition (4,685 words)

Blog post 10: Don’t Cap Flow State: Extreme Hyperfocus (1,991 words)

Blog post 11: Entrepreneurial Quicksand (2,313 words)

Blog post 12: James and the Giant Bamboo (2,710 words)

Blog post 13: The Penny Stakes of Business (1,819 words)

I experimented with a few different types of posts, and really just tried to write content that I thought would help you think in a different way or see something from a new angle. 13 posts may not seem like a lot, but I published over 50,000 words in quarter one.  

“My list and traffic is likely to grow as a result of publishing high quality articles, which is something I enjoy, but I’m okay sacrificing significantly bigger numbers for enjoyment”

I overestimated the amount of shares I’d get just from publishing the articles. So, I need to adjust my strategy and spend some time on marketing. I’ll be limiting the time I spend on it so that I make sure I’m still optimizing for enjoyment, but I’ll be pouring some marketing gasoline on ForeverJobless in Q2.

fjgas

“That’s the benefit of having these sprint goals. If I was tied to a certain long term goal without knowing exactly how certain parts of things will play out as I progress/achieve quarterly goals, and learn what I’m enjoying most, I may continue for a year doing something I don’t want to do.”

“if you’re so busy doing whatever takes up all your time, you’re unlikely to realize how little time you spend doing what you should actually be doing.”

In taking a step back and evaluating what worked and didn’t work each quarter, as well as what I enjoyed and didn’t enjoy, it allows me to fix what’s not working, keep doing what is, and proceed accordingly.

I even spent a day doing an in depth expected value breakdown, which takes a lot of work but is extremely clarifying and worth the effort. I’ve considered offering that as a service to larger businesses as it’s surprising how many people are fooled by the wrong metrics, and how significantly your upside changes when the right numbers show you what’s up.

Most people blindly continue with whatever they’re doing.

Huge flaw that limits success and happiness.

“knowing your strengths is a very important variable to knowing what you should be doing, and very few people know their strengths well. It’s easy to think you do, but since what we’re extremely good at often comes natural to us, it’s not easy to realize what you’re incredibly good at isn’t so easy for others. You don’t think of a normal skill of yours as incredible because it’s not difficult for you, which actually makes it incredible.”  …

  • “Find the best way of expressing your thoughts: writing, one-on-one conversations, group discussions, perhaps lectures or presentations. Put value to your thoughts by communicating them.
  • Seek audiences who appreciate your ideas for the future.
  • Your futuristic talents could equip you to be a guide or coach for others. Unlike you, they might not be able to see over the horizon. If you catch a vision of what someone could be or do, don’t assume that he or she is aware of that potential. Share what you see as vividly as you can. In doing so, you may inspire someone to move forward.”

The strengths exercises I went through last year made me realize I should spend some time personally working with others. I’ve been spending time each week working with a small group of ForeverJobless subscribers in a mastermind. In some ways it happened by accident. In the calls I did for subscribers last year, one person reached out to thank me, and mentioned he wanted to be part of a mastermind group. I had been considering starting one for serious subscribers, so him and I started doing calls together each week, with the idea that once I decided to officially launch/promote a mastermind, more people would join… but I never publicly launched/promoted it. And… I realized I liked it a lot. It clearly wasn’t about the money I was getting or I would have rushed to fill up a group. I enjoy helping and sharing in his progress.

The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like. – Steven Pressfield

“I decided my goal for the new year was to not focus on making any money, and to put out content that I thought was important, and helpful for people. Money can be a distraction, and lead us to unintentionally do things for that purpose. If money comes as a byproduct, cool, but I’m putting zero focus on making money this year. If I make $0 and release the content I’m planning on releasing, it will be a good year.”

With no focus on profits, I accidently started monetizing as a byproduct of providing value. A number of people started emailing wanting to join the mastermind and I didn’t even promote it. Most people don’t even know I run one. I just casually mentioned it in a post. Provide value, and you don’t have to chase money. Most people have the two reversed and struggle badly.

“I really get excitement out of helping people who will take action. So, it’s somewhat irrelevant to me how many people I reach if I’m not helping them change their lives. I’m less concerned with quantity. If I have a platform of 1 million people and none of them do anything, I’d rather have an audience of just 100 people, who all take action and change their life.”

I never used to spend time coaching. The mastermind group is an awesome group of guys, and they’re killing it. It’s a blast to do. The members of the group are moving towards some big goals, and it’s exciting to hop on calls each week and hear about all the progress they’ve made. It’s fun working with people who are committed to results. They take any ideas they get from the calls, and they go execute. That is fun to be a part of.

“No matter what it is, I learned that no matter how much I want to help, I need to stop getting sucked into investing time if it’s not with action takers.

Non action takers won’t do anything with the time you invest, and normally want it for free, so it’s not helping you or them. Action takers will reap rewards for you and them both now in the future, and I don’t just mean monetarily. It’s fulfilling to share a part in people’s success.”

One of the posts I released in Q1 detailed an easy business to start, and detailed how to think about it in a way that would allow someone to be successful with it if they took action.

I was hoping to get bombarded with emails of people taking action and starting this service. And I did get bombarded with emails…. but mainly from people who wanted me to solve it for them. 🙁

It was really frustrating to see so many people read it who claim to want success so badly, who don’t have an idea to work on yet, not take any action.

Consuming is the opposite of producing – Noah Kagan

Don’t let reading articles alone confuse you into thinking progress is being made. If you’re reading but not taking action you’re missing the most important piece of the puzzle.

Someone who read that article that wants to make more money or start a business, didn’t have an idea to work on, and didn’t take action needs to take an honest look at themselves and ask if they’re fooling themselves.

It’s not me trying to be negative for those of you that didn’t take action, it’s me genuinely wanting to help you.

I won’t lie to you and give you the ‘rah rah, “you can do it” like all the other blogs do because they want you to buy their courses. You CAN’T do it if you don’t take action.

You need knowledge, yes.

But then you need to execute on that knowledge.

One comment that stuck in my mind was from the post about how to set goals:

This really made me stop to think. It’s a huge problem, and one that honestly stumps me. There’s so many people who want their life to change, but aren’t planning to take the action needed to change it. I’d like to think the content is helpful in turning non-action takers into action takers. Based on some emails I’ve gotten, I know it’s working for some, I just wish it was happening with more people.

It’s an interesting problem to solve, but not one I’ll be dedicating a significant amount of time to at the moment.

I know that to achieve what I’d like to achieve this year I need to stay focused on my own goals, and dedicate any additional time to helping those who are taking action.

“What I put out is only successful if it positively impacts your life in ways that others could not produce. I want to help those who are taking the action to help themselves.”

“ForeverJobless has likely been the most undermonetized site in the space, and it’s not really accidental… money and ego don’t really act as the drivers for me.”

I know at some point I’ll need to monetize to grow and have the impact I want to have with ForeverJobless. I want to have a bigger effect on the world by teaching people how to think more optimally not just in business, but in life.

My friends and I joke that right now I spend money to work for free 🙂

When you monetize in some ways the money you make is calculating how much value you’re providing. Obviously that’s not an entirely accurate statement, as it’s easy to pour marketing on something people don’t need and spend your energies convincing them to buy it like many do. But if you’re actually offering something for money and people pay you for it, they’re saying that they believe it’s valuable to them. People vote with their money. If they wouldn’t pay for something, they’re saying it’s not valuable enough to them.

I haven’t 100% decided how yet, but at some point I’ll need to monetize to help grow ForeverJobless, to be able to help more people. My goal still isn’t profits this year. My goals remain the same. I actually plan on putting 100% of any proceeds back into ForeverJobless this year. Creating revenue streams would enable me to hire extra team members if needed, as well as produce a project I’m considering that would take a sizeable investment to make happen.

I think you’ll like what’s in store the next few quarters.

The artist must operate territorially. He must do his work for its own sake. To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution…

When the hack sits down to work, he doesn’t ask himself what’s in his own heart.He asks what the market is looking for…

The hack condescends to his audience. He thinks he’s superior to them. The truth is, he’s scared to death of them or, more accurately, scared of writing what he really feels or believes, what he and himself thinks is interesting. He’s afraid it won’t sell. So he tries to anticipate what the market (a telling word) wants, then gives it to them….

In other words, the hack writes hierarchically. He writes what he imagines will play well in the eyes of others. He does not ask himself, What do I myself want to write? What do I think is important? Instead he asks, What’s hot, what can I make a deal for? The hack is like the politician who consults the polls before he takes a position. He’s a demagogue. He panders…

It can pay off being a hack. Given the depraved state of American culture, a slick dude can make millions being a hack. But even if you succeed, you lose, because you’ve sold out your muse, and your muse is you, the best part of yourself, where your finest and only true work comes from. – Steven Pressfield

Whatever I do I know I have to have this mindset.

Despite being an entrepreneur and understanding the obvious, that you make more money if you give the market what it wants, there’s a big part of me that doesn’t care what the market wants. If I learned and started offering snapchat classes right now I’d make a killing, because it’s “hot” at the moment. But I’d hate it.

Teaching you how to think is most important to me, and what no one is doing. That’s obviously significantly more difficult to monetize, but it’s where my focus is at the moment.

Here’s a few questions I ask myself when I’m considering doing something:

Is this valuable for people?

Is this more valuable for them than what exists on the market?

Am I happy doing this?

Does this help me reach my goals?

“Yearly Goals:

  • I will write a book that changes the way people think.
  • My fitness goal is getting to 2.9% bodyfat(calipers) while weighing 150+ pounds.
  • I’ll create a high quality singles event, or something similar that makes meeting high quality people more efficient.”

The priority goal will always be what the quarterly goal is. So, there’s a chance I double down on a specific goal and a victim could be one of the yearly goals, but that’s okay. As long as I ensure accomplishment of my priority goal(which at this point will be re-set each quarter for me), I’m happy.

Book:

The book is being slowly written alongside of the articles. After thinking about it and getting feedback from Jay Papasan, it’s not something I want to rush to get done. I still plan to achieve the year end goal, but blocking off 2-3 months and doing nothing but the book to complete it asap isn’t the way I’ll be going after it.

Fitness:

Fitness was a surprising fail for me this quarter. Little injuries and other excuses kept me from going more than I should, and my eating was okay, but could have been better. I used the minor injuries more of an excuse for days off than I should have. Q2 I’m going to heavily ramp up. Despite being okay with letting secondary goals be a victim to accomplish quarterly priority goals, this is one that with relatively small effort can have a significant impact on your life, so I’m disappointed in efforts here in Q1. In the next three months I expect a pretty drastic body change from myself.

Singles Event:

Reached out to a few people about it, but no real focus here. If it was to become a reality this year I’d have to dedicate some real time to it, as it’s not something I’d just want to throw together, and unless I wanted to just pile money into hiring people to create the event, it’s not priority enough for me to focus on at the moment.

Q2 priority goal:

Double traffic.

As mentioned I spent pretty zero time marketing in Q1. I sprinkled a little marketing on in March, but Q2 I will dedicate enough time to at least double traffic.

For the amount of time I put into content, it’s silly not to get it in front of more people. Since it didn’t snowball into more eyeballs on it’s own like it sometimes will, I need to create the outcome I want. If you’ve read both of my goal posts (How To Achieve Your Goals and How To Set Goals If You’re Not Sure What You Want), you understand that traffic doubling this quarter will not be something I hope happens. The result will happen because I’ll structure the actions I take this quarter to insure that it does. Reverse engineering your goal simplifies the process. The goal is all but achieved already, the actions just need to be checked off.

The traffic was really small this quarter due to purposely not focusing on marketing. 

Month before I started(when I was not really doing anything):

January was when I decided to give a priority effort to writing/ForeverJobless. Here’s how the quarter looked:

I don’t necessarily want to spend my time marketing, but it’s something that needs to be done.  At the moment, it makes the most sense for me to do it. In the future, I may have someone else handling that focus.

Despite the priority goal this quarter being to double traffic, I plan to publish an additional 13 articles.

My focus will continue to be on writing, while pouring enough marketing gasoline on ForeverJobless so that traffic at least doubles.

fjmarketing

I’m going to try what I’m calling ‘Elon days’ in Q2. Elon Musk is known to split his days between his several different companies. A few days dedicated 100% to Tesla, a few 100% to SpaceX, as well as a little bit to SolarCity. Now, I’m obviously not launching rockets and changing the automobile industry with tens of thousands of employees, but the model still makes sense to try. I’ll just be doing it within ForeverJobless. Here’s an tentative test schedule I’ll be trying:

Monday: Marketing Day

Tuesday: Writing Day

Wednesday: Buffer Day

Thursday: Marketing Day

Friday: Writing Day

Saturday: Free Day

Sunday: (you’ll find out soon) day 😉

 

I’m still living in Cape Town at the moment.

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In a few weeks I plan to head somewhere new, possibly back to Austin for a bit, or to Barcelona. Also considering Vancouver as an option.

To sum it up, here’s what to expect in Q2:

  • Follow along as I double traffic this quarter
  • 13 new articles
  • New projects being released for you

In closing, if you or someone you know would benefit from being a part of the ForeverJobless mastermind, email me for details.(note: it’s not for beginners, mainly consists of 6 figure business owners).

If there’s anything else you’d like to see in these quarterly reports, comment below and let me know. I plan to release another next quarter.

Thank you for all of your comments on my posts, they help motivate me to write more for you.

What are your goals for quarter two?

Let’s do it!


The Penny Stakes of Business


I was 20 when I started playing poker. I didn’t even have a credit card, so I gave my college roommate $50 and he transferred it into a poker account for me. You obviously can’t wager very much with just $50, and I didn’t want to. I wanted to learn the game and try and win. So, I played the penny stakes. Winning or losing a couple dollars was a big swing, or at least it seemed it at the time.

I tracked my wins and losses every day in a notebook. I was supposed to be using it for taking notes in class but tracking poker pennies seemed like a much better use for it.

I remember the account got down to like $35 at one point as I was learning.

Slowly I got better and better. I got back up past my initial $50 deposit. Then I got to $100. Man! Was exciting.

I was reading anything I could get my hands on related to poker. I was talking poker with anyone who’d talk about it. I watched Rounders half a dozen times. I was hooked.

I couldn’t believe you could actually make money at this. $100 turned into $200.

$200 turned into $500.

Then $1,000.

“Is this real? Am I really going to be able to take this money out?”, I wondered.

Seemed unreal that you could profit from doing something so fun.

“Take it out man, you’re going to lose it!” I’d hear from people once they heard I was making money from it.

That’s the thought process for most people. Eliminate possibility of losses, instead of maximizing the possibility of winnings.

Luckily I didn’t listen. I kept learning the game, and kept playing.

Since I was still playing such low stakes, there wasn’t many swings. Obviously I’d still lose some games, but overall my graph went up pretty consistently.

I can remember thinking, “it’s so easy, why would I move up?”.

The easy money I was making down at the penny stakes was too good to be true. Why give that up and risk losing all my profits?

All the other penny players advised me to keep playing for pennies- “it’s so easy man!” 

Well, being ever curious and inquisitive, I wanted to find out what higher level players thought. I didn’t know any at the time. I was a 20 year old kid at a tiny college learning to play in his dorm room.

I’d occasionally see a player online at higher stakes games sitting by himself with a lot of money. So, I sat down at his virtual table, and started a conversation with him.

I’m sure I asked a lot of intrusive, newbie questions like,

“Do you make a lot of money?”, but he was pretty open with me. He was around the same age I was, and supposedly making $1,000/week.

“$1,000/week!”. I was initially skeptical. I mean, I might have made around $1,000 or so off of my initial $50 deposit after a few months. But $1,000/week? Seemed too good to be true.

He gave me some advice for certain forums and books to read, and so I did.

“Woahhh.” It was like I found gold.

There was what at the time was a relatively small community of players. They were openly sharing stories about their adventures, and many were sharing about their wins and losses.

And they weren’t sharing them in an effort to sell coaching or some other ulterior motive, they were all just genuinely interested in exchanging ideas and figuring out the most optimal way to play.

It seemed like a number of people were making good money.

I found a few people who seemed like they were smart, and knew what they were talking about. Then I read as many posts as I could find from them.

(note: It’s the same strategy I used when I was beginning in business, and the same strategy I still use today when I want to quickly learn about a subject.

Find 1-3 people who seem like they really know what they’re talking about. Read EVERYTHING they say. Ignore EVERYONE else.)

There were plenty of people making money at the time, so even if someone was making money it didn’t mean they were any good. Sometimes it just meant they sucked less than the players who really had no idea what they were doing. That’s usually how growing, or hot markets work. It’s easy to confuse someone making money with someone who really knows what they’re doing.

After absorbing as much as I could, I moved out of the penny stakes and started playing higher.

Long story short, after a short learning curve I was making significantly more money playing at higher stakes. Over time I moved up again. Then again. Then again.

If I had stayed at the penny stakes so that I could protect my money and because it was “easiest”, I would have limited my results. It’s true that it would have been “easiest”, but in going with the easy route it would also mean I would not have reaped the rewards I did from poker.

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(the only graph of mine we could find- 1 week of winnings while running hot)

Not only was I was able to make a very significant amount of money for someone in my early 20s, but the challenge of trying to beat the next level kept it interesting, and it was much more fulfilling than if I’d just played for pennies in an “easy game.”

If I’d stayed where it was easy, it would have lacked a challenge, been unfulfilling, and only made me a small amount of money.

I think my path to poker success was made easier because of the fact that I’m a logical thinker, so I only followed other logical people who could explain their thought process behind why they were doing what they were doing in a way that justified their reasoning. It kept me away from following people who may have had decent results, but didn’t actually think very optimally. Incorrectly following the ‘temporary earners’ who make temporary money only because of market conditions means you’ll be following suboptimal advice. It’ll be proven over time as their results fluctuate and often drop hard once the market corrects itself, and becomes more efficient.

Another reason I was able to steer clear of bad advice… there weren’t people selling all sorts of courses on how to extract more money from penny stakes games! 

pennystakesad

I wasn’t distracted at possibly doing better at the penny stakes. I followed the more optimal route of playing a different level of game entirely.

In the business world, and in life, most people don’t have these luxuries so there’s constantly barriers and distractions to getting to an optimal path.

There’s all sorts of illogical thinkers telling you to join them at the penny stakes of life.

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Plenty of penny stakers in business want to make more money, so instead of going to the next level of the game, they teach others how to play the penny stakes. They want the “easy” road of the penny stakes, but they want the profits of the big stakes. So, they sell the penny stake dream.

People who might be the same hungry kid at the poker tables as I was looking for a good path to follow will be bombarded with advice.

“Start a blog!”

“Write a book!”

“It’s easy, click on my link!”

“Just buy this course, ‘blogging the penny stakes’!”

If you follow that illogical path you obviously won’t find a pile of money waiting for you, but the penny stakes salesman might.

If the salesman succeeds, then they’ll be a “success story”, and they’ll market that success even further as if it justifies the path they’re selling. If people thought about the logic, they’d realize the penny stakes dream they’re selling people isn’t even the same way they’re getting paid.

I remember the early days of poker. The community of players I mentioned who really knew what was going on with the games had a secret code. If you were at a table and someone seemed like they knew what they were doing, you’d ask a question with the secret code in it, and based on their response you’d know if they were in the ‘know’, and part of the ‘secret club’(I know it’s super dorky but whatever).

Well, in the current online business space, it seems like very few people are in the know. Everyone’s buying and selling ‘penny stakes dreams’, and no one seems the wiser for it. Behind closed doors there’s a small group of people ‘in the know’ who are frustrated at how many people are being bamboozled into going down a suboptimal path, but no ones saying anything about it.

Like in poker as the games progressed, many of the suboptimal thinkers teach, not because that is their calling, but because it’s more profitable for them to do so. Most of the optimal thinkers continue to actually play the game.

You must recognize what game you’re playing, and who’s profiting from that game. Like they say in poker, if you don’t know who the sucker is at the table… you’re the sucker.

It’s okay to play the penny stakes to learn the game, but at some point you’ve got to start playing the real game, or you’ll be stuck with penny stakes returns forever.

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Don’t let the gurus convince you to play for pennies, as they collect dollars for telling you to play the wrong game.

“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.” – Henry Ford

 

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James and the Giant Bamboo


Two neighbors had big plots of land right next to each other. They’d just purchased them. James, always a friendly and outgoing guy, saw his neighbor out back and decided to go introduce himself.

James: Hey neighbor, I’m James

Derek: James, nice to meet you, I’m Derek.

James: What are you planning to do with all this land?

Derek: Well, since we’re in a great area for it, I was considering bamboo trees.

James: That’s awesome, I was thinking of doing the same.

Derek: That’s great. Let me know if you decide to do it, we’ll go grab everything together.

A few days later James headed over to knock on Derek’s door.

Derek: Hey James, I was thinking of heading to go grab all the supplies, want to join?

They both hopped in James’ truck and went to grab all the stuff.

Neither knew much about the trees, they just thought they looked great.

Over the next week or so each of them planted their seeds.

They were both ecstatic. They couldn’t wait until their land was full of bamboo trees.

They would always see the other out back when they were watering the soil.

They’d excitedly share their vision.

James was planning a walking path surrounded by all his bamboo trees, and towards the back of the bamboo forest it would lead up to the small pond that was on the back of his land.

James1Derek planned to cover a lot of his yard, but to use a portion of the trees to produce income for him. Bamboo trees were in high demand, so he figured he could sell off a portion of them each year to make money.

 

Derek1

James couldn’t wait for his vision to turn to reality. He even had a vision board collage up on his office wall about how his yard would look when his bamboo trees had grown. He envisioned walking with his kids back to the pond.

James2

He was out there all the time making sure to consistently water and fertilize them. He used fresh water, and made sure they had nitrogen so they had the greatest chance of success.

When he saw Derek, he’d usually be using tap water.

James: Derek, don’t forget they’ve got a better chance to grow big and healthy if you use fresh water. The fluoride from the tap water doesn’t do as well with them.

Derek: Ahh, it shouldn’t made that much of a difference. Cheaper doing it this way.

Over the few months, James started to see a little less of Derek.

When he caught him out back one day he went over to make sure he was okay.

James: Derek, where you been man? Haven’t seen you out here as much.

Derek: Nothing’s happening man. They’re not growing.

James: They told us it would take a long time, remember.

Derek: Ya, but I mean, there’s NOTHING. I don’t know if it’s even working.

James: It’ll still be a long time before we start seeing anything. It hasn’t even been a year yet. Remember what they said at the nursery. These things are really slow to get started. Just keep at it, it’ll work.

Derek: Ya, I guess you’re right. I should probably fertilize them it’s been a while.

Over the next few weeks James saw a rejuvenated Derek out back watering and fertilizing. He was still using tap water, but hey, at least he was back at it.

Then just like before, he saw him less and less.

Eventually, he didn’t really see him at all. Finally one day he bumped into him.

James: Hey, where you been man! Good to finally see you back out here.

Derek: Ya man, I’m planting some apple trees.

James: Apple trees, oh nice. What about the bamboo, haven’t seen you out here much.

Derek: Forget the bamboo trees, they didn’t work at all. I see it didn’t work for you either.

James: But Derek, it hasn’t even been two years yet. We’ve still got a ways to go.

Derek: Ahh, I don’t even know if it’s going to work. I’ve heard stories where people spend all sorts of time watering, fertilizing, and it doesn’t work. I’m not even sure if the soil is good here, that’s why I’m planting these apple trees in a different spot over here just to be safe.

Besides, apples are hot right now. Because of all the droughts, buyers are paying a lot for them. I figure I can make more off these than I would have for the bamboo. You should do these too. There’s a lot of money to be made with them.

James: I think I’m just going to stick to my original plan.

Derek: Dude there’s nothing growing. It might not even be working. What if you never get any bamboo trees? You would have spent so much time for nothing!

James: They told us how long it would take. If I just keep doing what they suggested, I should get the results.

Derek: Ya, but if you don’t, you will have wasted all this time.

That kind of frustrated James.

“What if Derek was right”, he thought. “What if I spend all this time and nothing ever comes of it.”

It was demotivating to think about.

“Maybe Derek had a point. Maybe I’ll look into apple trees.”

The next morning when he woke up, James went into his office to research apple trees. When he sat down at his desk, he couldn’t help but look up at his vision board. The amazing bamboo tree forest he’d been envisioning for years. He knew he couldn’t stop now. He closed down his browser and decided to stick to the plan.

Derek was often out of town for work, so James didn’t see him much.

They’d occasionally bump into each other when Derek was back in town and make some small talk, but Derek was often making negative comments about James’ bamboo dreams, so James liked to keep his distance. He’d joke about him spending so much time on something that might never pay off.

On the second year after planting his apple trees, Derek’s trees started to bear fruit. He boasted to Derek about how much money he was making from selling the fruit.

Derek: Man, I told you that you should get into apple trees. There’s so much money to be made. You’re missing out.

This made James want to look into the apple business again. Derek said he was making a lot of money, so maybe it was worth considering.

This time he didn’t let his vision board stop him from doing some research. He spent many days looking into it. He called some nurseries to get pricing, and strongly considered making a big purchase.

He called his business mentor Zach and told him of his potential plans.

Zach: Wait, I don’t understand, why do you want to get apple trees?

James: My neighbor does is and is making a lot of money. He told me he’s crushing it right now.

Zach: Ya but, you don’t even like apples. You’re probably the only person I know that literally hates apples.

James: I mean, I don’t eat them, but I could sell them.

Zach: But why do you want to sell them? I mean, your business is doing pretty well you don’t need the money. Why apple trees? Plus, what about the bamboo trees?

James: The bamboo trees might not even work. Plus, apples are hot right now bamboo trees aren’t.

Zach: I think you’re getting distracted. James, let me ask you a question. Why did you decide to plant the bamboo trees?

James: I’ve always wanted to have them for as long as I can remember.

Zach: Right. It had nothing to do with them being “hot”. You had a deeper vision. You’re letting the potential short term money on something you don’t even like distract you.

James: Ya know what, you’re right. Thanks Zach. I knew there was a reason I called you.

After he hung up the phone he decided to scrap all the apple tree research that was taking up the room on his desk, and stick to the plan.

James3

He continued taking care of the bamboo trees, and patiently waited for his vision to come to fruition.

Every time he saw Derek he’d hear about what an opportunity he was missing out on.

Time continued on, and still no signs of progress in the backyard.

His anniversary with his wife was coming up and he wanted to do something nice for her. He planned a several week vacation in Europe for them. They took off on their trip together, and had such a great time while they were there he didn’t spend much time worrying about his business which operated pretty well without him, or the lack of progress in his backyard.

When he returned home, he was excited to see the kids, and to get back to the office and see how the team was doing. He pulled up the driveway and his kids excitedly ran out to the car to greet them. His parents, who’d been watching them while they were away, followed behind.

“Mommy, daddy, we have a surprise for you! Come quick!

They sprinted out to the back of their house as they tried to keep up after their long journey back.

He was shocked when they reached the backyard.

“Oh my god!”

The bamboo trees had come out of the ground. They were everywhere! He realized it had been over five years since he planted them, around the time they told him they should start to show. He couldn’t believe it.

“It worked!”

He even saw some next door at Derek’s house. It didn’t look like Derek was home though. His car was gone, and there were apples all over his lawn.

james4

“That’s strange”, James thought. I hope he’s okay.

Each day the bamboo trees grew more and more. He had his boys stand in the same spot in the yard once a week, to show how fast they were growing. They loved it.

A neighbor down the street came by to see. “Wow neighbor! Man, you’re so lucky! I wish I had bamboo trees in my backyard. It’s like they popped up overnight. Lucky you man!”

A few weeks later Derek returned back home. James saw him pull up and headed over.

James: Derek, you’ve got to check it out, the bamboo trees are growing.

Derek: Really!?

Derek headed in back of his yard with James.

Derek: Holy crap, they are.

His yard didn’t quite look like James’. His were a lot smaller, and many of them were yellow.

James: What’s up with the apples Derek, they’re all over the place. You’ve got a lot of money rotting on the ground out here, where you been? Everything okay?

Derek: Ya, but I found a new opportunity, that’s why I’ve been gone for so long. I know of some guys making a ton of money. I’ll make even more than I was on the apples.

James’ wife called over to him because he had a phone call.

James: Oh, looks like I’ve gotta run. Let’s chat soon man, I want to hear about your new venture.

He said goodbye to Derek and headed back home.

As the months passed, the bamboo trees grew taller and taller. It was amazing. It was looking more and more like his vision board every day.

The next time he bumped into Derek, he wanted to find out how his new project was going.

James: What’s up Derek, how’s the new venture?

Derek: Didn’t really pan out man.

He was pretty short with him, he could tell he didn’t want to talk about it.

James: Sorry to hear man. At least you’ve got the apple business though.

Derek: Ahh, well the apple business isn’t so hot at the moment. The droughts from the last couple years stopped, and so many people are selling them now. So, prices dropped a lot, it’s not even worth it to deal with. You can barely make anything on them anymore. Besides, mine are smaller and less valuable than a lot of the others who are doing it. It’s a waste of time.

James: Oh, that sucks Derek, really sorry.

Derek looked out at his yard, then at James’.

Derek: Man, I should have just stuck with the bamboo trees. If I had, my yard would look like yours right now, instead of this mangled mess of half assed bamboos, half of them rotting, and dead apples all over the ground.

Derek’s yard was a mangled molehill compared to James’ massive mountain of a bamboo forest.

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James had built the trail back to the pond that he’d always envisioned.

He finally took his vision board down, because his backyard looked even better than the portrait he had initially hoped for.

His persistence had paid off. All those years of watering, fertilizing, and making sure the bamboo trees had the best nutrients. It was all worth it.

He placed his original vision board in a poster tube package, along with a big photo of his family standing on their trail new the pond, their giant bamboo trees towering over them.

He sealed it up, and sent it off to Zach.

See, Zach had been mentoring James for years, and was the one who initially told him to put the vision board of his bamboo forest up in his office. He was glad Zach had been there to keep him on track when he got pulled away. He knew Zach would get a lot of satisfaction from seeing his vision become a reality.

How does James and his story relate to yours, or someone you know?

Probably more than you think.

Do you have a big vision that you want, that may take a while to pay off? It feels like it’ll take forever, and “what if it doesn’t work?”. Usually that’s enough to pull you away. You might take shortcuts, or you might get distracted with new opportunities that pull you away from your goal. You let naysayers persuade you to quit.

You hear about other people doing great at something, and you don’t realize that they’re loudly proclaiming their wins, but they stay quiet when it’s not working out well. The temporary noise from temporary successes of others distracts you into chasing the hot markets, rather than the good markets, and opportunities you actually want to be involved in.

Do you have a mentor like James did who can help keep you on the right track? Help you find good opportunities, and stay away from bad ones? Keep you focused on the prize when everyone else is falling victim to the shiny object syndrome?

If not, get one.

If you go after a big goal you truly want to achieve, and you stay committed to it, you’ll likely attain as much success as you envision. Maybe more.

None of it will come to fruition if you chase shiny objects that pull you away from that vision.

If you do stay committed to the plan, and it’s a good one that’s been approved by someone who’s been where you want to go, you’ll likely get what you want.

When that happens, people will see your achievements as an ‘overnight success’, as they won’t see the day in and day out commitment that went into it. Like the bamboo, results that seem to show up overnight just appear publicly in that way. People will see the end result and assume you were “lucky”. It helps them feel better, as it gives them a reason to justify why they have not seen the same success.

If they really took an honest look at themselves, or had a mentor who could help them do so, they’d realize they were too busy jumping from idea to idea, quitting way too soon, working on things they shouldn’t have been just because it was the latest ‘craze’.

To use the bamboo tree analogy, success comes from picking an optimal route for you, and despite setbacks and naysayers, just continuing to water and fertilize your initial idea.

There’s no payoff in a bunch of half done projects.

bambooblogL6


Entrepreneurial Quicksand


If you’ve been reading ForeverJobless for a while, you’ll know that I used to be a professional poker player. I started playing in college, got pretty good over the next few years, and then became a full time pro, which I did for 3-4 years before switching my focus to business.

I got better as a player from reading all sorts of poker books, poker forums and talking strategy with other players, and coaches.

I started my poker journey with just $50, and did whatever I could to learn the game as I went. If I played against a player who seemed good, I’d message them and start asking questions.

Slowly I got better and better. I still remember how exciting it was as I started to grow my initial $50 deposit. I was excited about the money, but probably moreso just learning and beating the game.

It was fun to learn to outthink people, and profit for doing so. That skill translated well over to business. Not just from a competitive standpoint of outthinking competitors, and having them call you “lucky” just like they did at the poker tables, but in the sense of evaluating opportunities and thought processes. Is this +EV? Is there a more optimal opportunity to consider? Why isn’t anyone else considering that? Hmm… why is everyone doing this type of business when it’s -EV? Don’t people know this is a bad idea?

I have a very analytical mind. It probably helped me quite a bit in poker.

Not only did I learn from those who knew the game when I started, but I also ask “why” a lot. If something doesn’t make complete sense to me, I want to know why it is. “Wait, why would you bet here, but not there?” … “Why is folding correct, why not re-raise if he’ll fold X % of the time?”.

I questioned a lot of “correct” advice, and learned that while it may have been profitable at the time, it was not actually optimal. I’m glad I questioned some of it, because once I started implementing some things into my game I started making more money, even though the books I was reading wouldn’t have told me to do that. My style became more optimal than the books I’d read to initially learn the game.

I can’t take credit for coming up with all the ideas on my own. Many weren’t mine. Some were strategies that were working for friends I talked poker with. If the strategy made logical sense to me, I tested implementing it into my game. Some were from poker forums, or coaches I’d hired.

But a lot of my playing style was very different than the books I read that were written by the experts. As a matter of fact, it became almost the opposite.

“If everyone is playing the popular way, why not just play a style that would beat that style?”.

Over time my winnings skyrocketed. Players thought I was crazy because I played a very, very aggressive style. They assumed I was just some wild player.

While many of my opponents were playing “correct” according to books, and in a way where they could have been a profitable player, I played a style that would obliterate a “correct” style of play, so all they could do is sit back and wait for a big hand as I kept collecting their chips, or try to play back at me out of frustration, but that would only make them hand me their money faster since no one had taught them how to play against that style. As you’ve learned from the ForeverJobless blog, emotional decisions are obviously -EV. They’d call me lucky, and plenty of other names. The emotional thought process didn’t lead them to think about WHY they were losing.

Internally they probably thought, “I’m doing exactly what the books said, this crazy guy is bound to lose his money at some point!”. So they’d put more money on the table, and a usual result was them losing more of it. Why? Well, they weren’t really thinking about why they were playing the way that they were. Again, their mindset was emotional. A logical mindset is the one that could have helped them. An emotional one just led them further astray.

They didn’t stop to ask if the strategy they were using was actually optimal, they just did it because that’s what they had been told to do.

Often the ‘good’ players who’d read all the books were actually easier to beat than the amateurs. You could tell exactly what they were going to do.

It’s often just assumed that if someone is an “expert” on a subject, you listen to them. We grow up listening to our parents, teachers, bosses, idols… people rarely question why they say what they say though.

I was probably an annoying kid for my parents or teachers. I asked “why” a lot.

“We need to go to the store.”

“Why?”

“Because we need to pick up some bread”

“Why?

“So we can eat.”

“Why can’t we eat something else that’s in the house?”

“Let’s just have a quiet ride to the store okay honey?”

“Why?”

As I grew up, I’d occasionally get in trouble in school for challenging what a teacher said and asking too many questions. “That’s just the way it is” or “because I said so” are not a very logical answers, and I let them know. In a strict private school, let’s just say that’s frowned upon 🙂

Should I have been in detention for asking questions? Maybe they should have been in detention for not having answers.

How are you supposed to trust someone’s advice when they can’t even explain why they’re telling you to do what they’re telling you to do?

If someone is illogical, whether it’s the way everyone else is doing it or not, doesn’t make it right just because everyone else is doing it wrong.

If something doesn’t make sense and when questioned on it, someone can’t give a logical response as to why they are doing something, authority figure or not they probably don’t actually understand why. So, instead of just doing the same thing “because we’re supposed to”, the better use of time would be figuring out if it’s actually an optimal thing to be doing.

Let’s look at how this applies in the business world.

Everyone starting out wants to make money. It’s exciting. I get it.

yamoney

A better initial question than “can I make money at this?” is, “is this the optimal thing for me to be doing?”.

See, much like poker was when I got started, most people just blindly followed whatever advice was out there, and maybe they got some temporary results, but over the long haul they wondered why it didn’t work.

“I don’t understand, the gurus said to do this, it’s not working for me!”

I see this with most entrepreneurs. The average question equates to them just wanting to be told what to do. It’s like they’re waving a flag that says, “I plan on failing!”

failing

They don’t plan on thinking for themselves, they just want someone to tell them what to do.

startablog

You must learn to think for yourself if you want to be successful in this game, or any other. I cannot stress this enough. Blindly following the advice of someone you view as having the answers is. So. Ridiculously. Bad.

You must understand why.

Why are you working on the business you’re working on? What made you choose that route? Did you choose it blindly because a guru told you it was a good way to make money? What was their incentive to do so? Were they incentivised to show you the optimal route, or were they potentially incentivised another way?

Classic example in the ‘info’ space online. “Start blogs, sell books!”

The huge majority of people telling you to do those things are monetarily incentivised to do so.

Are they the optimal ‘business’ or money making ventures? Hell no. People should definitely not be starting a blog or writing a book the majority of the time. It is unequivocally a suboptimal decision for 99%+ of people.

However, it is an ‘easy’ business with no barriers, so people are confused into thinking it’s good for them. Easy and optimal are very, very different things.

blogbooksoptimal

A guru says, “start a blog”, “write a book”, and you trust that it’s what you should be doing because they say so.

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Many people never stop to ask “why”, but if you did, they would likely say, “to build a platform”, “because then you can become an authority”, “then you can sell things to people”, “to get a name for yourself”. Now, while these all sound like reasonable answers to a question like that, they are not logical reasons to do so. Since most people don’t think logically, they blindly accept guru answers and go about their way.

 

platform

Well, you’ve got to go a lot deeper than that 🙂

Have you broken down the EV(expected value) of having a platform for what you intend to do if your goal is to make money from it? Why didn’t you do so? Because the guru selling you the course or having you click on their link didn’t tell you to? Of course they didn’t, that would be a barrier to them making money.

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They either don’t understand that it’s important, or don’t have goals aligned with teaching that to you. Is putting up a barrier to get money from you good for their profits? No, that would be a foolish thing to do if their goal is to maximize their profits.

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Have you insured that your offering will check off the two steps to building a profitable business? If not, why are you doing it? Because a guru told you to follow your dreams and that “you too can be like them.’?

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If they became a guru in the first place it’s likely that at some point in time they passed the two steps. That is what allowed them to be successful.

Why wouldn’t they make sure you did the same?

Again, it’s not good for their bottom line, and/or they don’t actually understand that you need to do it.

If you aren’t thinking for yourself, you’re going to continue to get hustled left and right. It’s not always the gurus faults, some of them actually think the medicine they’re selling you will help.

The side effect of the potion may be a road that’s filled with capped income and struggles, because you didn’t fully understand why you were doing something. If you play follow the leader sometimes you’re lucky just to pick up the leader’s scraps. Good for the guru, bad for you.pillsPeople are confused into thinking that the success of one person doing something a certain way can be replicated the same exact way and expect the same success. That’s flawed logic for a number of reasons.

If everyone is being told to do the same exact things, it is unlikely to be optimal for very long.

In other words, if something is optimal, and then everyone starts doing the optimal thing, it is not likely to be the optimal thing anymore. 🙂

Much like poker, once everyone is playing the game the same exact way the books say to play, even if at one point that was a very profitable way to do so, after a while the only one profiting from that advice is the author. The gurus have the choice to become the student again, and learn why their optimal strategy is no longer optimal, or do everything they can to maximize profits before people learn it’s not very good advice anymore.

In poker many of the old time gurus would talk down about the internet phenoms and claim they hadn’t been around the game long enough to be good. “We’ve been in the game for decades”, they’d say, and try to make it seem like the new ideas and new strategies coming from higher level thinkers were incorrect, as if time was the reason. About as illogical as you could get, and why they were starting to get crushed in their own games. If they’d really thought about it, they’d realize the 20 years worth of hands they’d seen could be done in 1 year online from a college kid, and not only that could be reviewed in depth after.

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Many of the old timers got crushed, and often resorted to becoming coaches, or teaching seminars instead of playing because they couldn’t make money in the games anymore.

Some of the ones who evolved and realized there was a more optimal way to play remained in the games because they adapted to the improved play.

Take an honest look at your current path. Why are you on it? Is it because you’re playing follow the leader? If so, you better be 100% sure you’re following the right one. It’s a very unlikely probability that you are.

Have you asked why you’re doing what you’re doing? Is it because someone told you it was a good idea? When given reasons for why it was a good idea, did you think deeply, and logically about those reasons? As mentioned earlier it’s easy to come up with practical reasons why to do something, it’s significantly different for those practical reasons to make logical sense for you to be doing. Often practical reasons are distractions that take you off a more optimal path.

Stop doing things because it’s what people say to be doing, and start doing them because they’re why you should be doing them.

Think on this: the most optimal path to be on, is not what everyone is already telling everyone to do. When it’s at that point, it’s likely become a suboptimal path, or has been for a long time.

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Don’t Cap Flow State: Extreme Hyperfocus


Ever find yourself in flow state(being in the zone) and then something comes up to pull you out of it? Most often it’s by our own design. We structure our lives in a way where flow state is limited, so our results are too, as an accidental byproduct.

In this article I’m going to share why hyperfocus is so important, and give you an idea to help increase the amount of time you spend in flow state.

What is flow state?

Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by complete absorption in what one does.

Most people’s lives are set up in a way where it’s difficult for them to even get into flow. They work on things they don’t like, get distracted a lot, and the occasions where they are in flow, they have something on their schedule that will interrupt it.

Why does this matter? In short, because flow state, or being in the zone is directly tied to your success, and your happiness. So, when you limit flow, you’re limiting your own success and happiness.

When you limit flow, you’re limiting your own success and happiness

As you know I like to integrate things into my life that make success and happiness easier. Want to know one interesting way that I do this?

I don’t cap flow.

I know what you’re thinking, “what does that even mean Billy?

Well, I set up my life in a way where the times I’m in flow state, I maximize the time that I’m able to stay in it.

If you already follow my blueprints for how to achieve goals and how to set goals even if you don’t know what you want, then a side effect of that is you’ll already have a decent structure in place for getting into flow state.

But I want to share a simple flow hack that’s much easier than what everyone else tries to do. So many people are obsessed with how they can get in flow state more often, and all the tips and tricks that might help them get in the zone easier.

flow focus trick

A much easier strategy to being in the zone more and maximizing flow state, is just not to pulling yourself out of it once you’re already in. Seems obvious but almost no one does it.

Let me show you what I mean.

Here’s a personal case study of extreme hyperfocus I shared with the Incubator a couple months back:

Results that can be achieved with extreme hyperfocus

Over the last month or so I’ve been slowly eliminating things on my to do list. Basically, trying to have as little as possible to do, so that all my time only goes towards doing what I want to do.

The last week or so I’ve been sick, so not only did I not have much on my to do list because of my elimination spree, but I also didn’t go out at all, didn’t go to the gym, etc… Basically all I did was write. The results:

The results:

2,172 word blog post

3,919 word blog post

2,447 word blog post

3,522 word blog post

2,268 word blog post

1,462 word half written blog post

This doesn’t include a handful of other 2-300 word notes/ideas I wrote down on other topics. I might have written close to 18,000 words on the week.

Now, if you’ve been a ForeverJobless reader for a while, you know I’m a relatively slow writer. However, with extreme hyperfocus, pretty absurd results were possible.

Now, I can’t not do anything all the time, but this is a good example of what’s possible with extreme hyperfocus, in a very short period of time.

So, maybe it’s writing, or finding a good supplier, or vetting out a business idea, or whatever it may be for you- if you tried eliminating everything else even just for a brief period, you would amaze yourself.

It’s in large part due to flow state.

Do not cap flow, and you will find the results from being in the state of flow for a longer period of time significantly more beneficial even if the only thing you changed was not capping flow.

How did hyperfocus allow me to get into a state of flow?

With something like writing, a lot of the time is figuring out what to write, then jotting down some ideas, starting to write some, and then a lot of times you’re already on to the next task before you really get anything great going. Then next time you come back you’ve got to figure out what you were writing, and try and get re-engaged with where you were trying to go, start brainstorming again, etc…  If you’re lucky enough to hit a flow state, you cap it by jumping to your next task and starting the process all over the next time.

With the example above, I literally did nothing except eat, sleep and write. Whenever I reached the state of flow, results came very fast. Before being in the zone, they came very slow. For example, sometimes the first hour or two I had a couple crappy paragraphs, but then magically 3,000 words appeared on the page- that’s because of flow state.

Flow Focus

When you have no other distractions, your mind will constantly figure out solutions to what it is you’re trying to do. Flow state is right around the corner. If instead you have things constantly pulling you away, either before flow comes, or when you’re in the state of flow, your amount of time in flow state is significantly impacted.

Flow Graph

non Flow

 

 

Flow Schedule

Flow takes time to reach. So why would someone want to limit flow state? Well, it’s not that you want to limit it, but setting meetings and calls at times you may be in flow unintentionally takes you out of flow state, day after day.

Remember my simplified schedule I shared in how to set goals:

  • 4:30 wake up
  • 5:00 writing
  • 9:30 main task
  • 10:15 gym
  • 12:30 other tasks, entertainment, or more writing
  • 8:00 read in bed
  • 8:30 sleep

You’ll notice I don’t have things like “calls”, “meetings” or any set schedule activities right after my priority goal task. You may remember time blocking from The One Thing, where you don’t schedule anything during your time block so that you can give focus to your main goal. Well, I take it to the extreme and don’t even schedule anything after my time block.(the things after it are simply delayed if I’m in flow state)

Why?

The reason is so that the times when my time block is up and I’m in flow state, I just keep going. I remain hyperfocused. There’s no alarm. There’s no pressing things I need to get to. There’s just flow, or no flow. Hyperfocus, or unfocused. If I’m not in flow state, I just go about my day after my time block is done. When I am in flow state, I keep going. Everything else gets pushed back until I’m no longer in the state of flow.

If I do have any calls or meetings, I always schedule them much later in the day so that there’s no chance a potential flow state is interrupted.

What is something that would allow you to make significant progress right now?

What do you think would happen if the only thing you did was not capping flow state once you reach it?

I know you might be thinking, “but I have too much on my daily schedule”.

Okay.

I understand you can’t just block everything else out of your life if you’ve got a tight schedule already. Some of you have jobs, families, and other obligations. That’s okay. Here’s what I recommend:

  1. Do your best to limit the amount of scheduled activities immediately after your time block period. So for example if your time block is in the morning, try not to schedule morning meetings directly after. If it’s in the afternoon, don’t force yourself to go run errands at a certain time, or some other task that doesn’t need to be done at a specific time. May not be milk in your fridge, will be massive flow happening!
  2. Flow TasksPick a certain number of days you can block everything out and do nothing else. Go rent a cabin for a long weekend, or do something as simple as hanging in the library for a day.

You will likely get more done during this period than you could have if you had 5x the days, because you’ll spend 5x of your time in flow. Flow is where the best work happens. Days you can completely eliminate any distractions allow you to be hyperfocused.

Now, if you’re a really busy person, I know it sounds too simple and not to sound dismissive, but I’d recommend trying not to be so busy. Look at the things you do each day and ask yourself if are really getting major life benefits from all of them, or if they’re acting as more of a distraction from the things that would get you major life benefits. Now, ask the same question if you were in flow state for the goals you want to achieve.

What benefits am I getting from my list of to-do items?

What benefits would I possibly achieve from spending that time in flow state for my priority goal?

The upside of being in flow state longer will often significantly outweigh the downside of not getting some of your to-do list done.

The writing example I shared was just one example.

I usually have a don’t cap flow rule when I’m pursuing a goal, I just didn’t have a term for it before.

I did the same thing with my podcast. It helped me get over 58,000 downloads my first month with a very tiny audience at the time. I wasn’t even spending more than an hour or two usually, but the days I did reach flow I would just keep going and script many episodes in a row, where if I had capped flow state, I wouldn’t have been able to.

When I had fitness as my priority goal, I would go to the gym first thing in the morning, and not plan anything after. So I could take my time in my workout and be in flow state. It was literally impossible not to make significant improvements because I was there every day, and never in a rush to leave. There was no possibility for something to distract me from it, or cause my workouts to be rushed and less than optimal. Hyperfocus. Guaranteed flow state. Results were a guaranteed, expected byproduct of not only time blocking it first thing in the morning, but not capping flow state when I was there.

Flow BusyFlow Busy Productive Goals

 

If you just commit to yourself to having zero distractions for limited time periods, you will achieve life changing results in a very small period of time.

The goal is hyperfocus. It will lead to flow state. Embrace the flow. Do not cap it.

You will be surprised at the results you will achieve if you will just test extreme hyperfocus with your goal.

 

No activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied … since the mind when distracted absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything which is, so to speak, crammed into it. – Seneca

 

Being in flow is +ev. Especially if in flow while working on your priority goal. Do not cap flow state. Cap time needed for activities that do not bring you flow state, so you have more time for priority goals and/or activities that bring you into the state of flow. Stopping flow to work on unessential activities is goal achieving/flow state producing suicide. Flow leads to places for growth. Growth leads to happiness. If you cap flow state, you unintentionally limit your own happiness.


Easy Business To Start: The ForeverJobless Free Business Idea Edition


 

Business ideas are easy to come up with. Yet, so many say the opposite.

“If only I had an idea I would work so hard…”

Uhhh, no you wouldn’t. If that were true you’d already be working on something since there’s an endless amount of ideas out there for the taking. Since it isn’t gift wrapped up like a pile of money people pass over them every day.

gift

 

Business ideas are EVERYWHERE. I mean, literally everywhere. If I had to I could come up with a completely new one in the next couple minutes. But, instead I’m going to write this article for you about an easy business to start.

You’d start a business if only you had an idea, right? ‘Cool story bro’. By the end of this article you will.

easy to start business

I may start a series just giving away good business ideas to start. So, depending on the response to this article, and if people go and start the idea, there may be more to come.

I’m not just going to give you a free business idea.

“Awwww, come on Billy!”

I’m going to do better.

“Oh, phew.”

I’m going to give you my money if you do it, and do it well.

“Ahh, shit. Now I’ll need to come up with another reason why not to do it.”

Then I’m going to show you how easy it would be to market to get other customers. So, you really won’t have any excuse not to do it.

“Well, you see I don’t have money so….”

Not only is it an easy business to start, it doesn’t take any money.

canihavethatback

I’ve actually tried to give this idea away many times.

Why? Because I wish the service existed. I am a customer. I want you to take my money.

Business doesn’t have to be hard.

Step 1: find a problem someone has

Step 2: solve that problem for them

Step 3: collect money

haha

Here’s how most people operate:

guy 1: man, i wish someone would solve this for me

guy 2: love to help man but i’m too busy looking for business ideas

 

Stop following all the ‘rah rah you can do it’ blogs who’ve sent you in the wrong direction looking for random hacks. Start solving needs instead.

What business should I start?

I know you’re wondering, “okay, so what kind of business should I start?”

Here’s an easy business to start:

Article marketing.

“Ohh, that sounds simple, but someone’s probably done it so you probably can’t make much from it.”

Phenomenal limiting belief! Let’s just eliminate your learned helplessness so you can get off the sidelines and make some money.

Some of the best business ideas to start, are the simple ones. Most people have the mindset of, “if it were easy someone would have done it already.”

That is why a lot of really obvious, easy business ideas still exist. Everyone’s sitting on the sideline waiting for some super complex idea that they have to feel like a rocket scientist to solve. You’re making it hard on yourself for no f*$king reason.

There’s numerous services out there that offer to help you write new articles on sites, or get you interviewed, or a lot of similar services to help you get promotion, but I’ve yet to find a good one that is specifically geared towards getting your current articles more exposure. If you’ve read my article on how to set goals you’ll know what my goal is this year- to produce extremely high quality content for you to help you to think more optimally in business, and in life. The services that currently exist would only equate to me doing more work, which would take me away from the work of achieving my goal. Essentially, any work to promote content I’ve produced, takes me away from producing more of it for you. Thus, a service that takes that off my plate is doing me a great service. That’s valuable to me. Value = money. Money goes to the person that solves that problem.

Again, not complex at all. It’s actually a really easy business idea to execute. It’s a 100% hustle business. That’s it. You don’t need intricate skills. You don’t need to program or do any sorts of hard shit that a lot of people think you need to start a business. You just need to hustle. This is literally all you would need to do:

  1. Study what works
  2. Copy/paste proven strategies

Someone else has literally done all the hard work already. There’s plenty of guys who are good at marketing. A lot of them have already written how you could do exactly what I’m talking about. Places like SumoMe, SocialTriggersVideoFruit and Neil Patel. A lot of guys who know how to do this stuff are just doing it for their own businesses instead of turning it into a service for others.

“So, you mean I could literally just copy what others have already proven works, and people will just hand me money?”

This shit ain’t rocket science.

Don’t get me wrong, you have to actually be good at it. Shitty work won’t win you business.

Plus, if you’ve read all my articles(you’re bleeding money and life EV if you haven’t), you’d know the first two steps to starting a profitable business from this article: Cash Cow Business

Step 1: How can you create something of value in a market better than what’s currently out there?

Step 2: How can you reach your potential audience?

The thing is, if you solve step 1 in a big enough way, step 2 becomes significantly easier.

In other words, you don’t have to spend all your time trying to convince people to buy your shit. Why? Because it’s actually good and not some ‘rah rah’ nonsense you’re used to in the internet marketing world.

Most people spend all their time convincing people they need to buy their shit, rather than creating something no one would need convincing to buy.

When you create a product or service that is a need for people that hasn’t been solved, or has been solved but has no marketing at all so no one knows it’s solved, the marketing side of it is really easy.

marketingishard

Marketing is hard if you start a crappy business. Not if your product or service is good.

I posted this on twitter the other day:

Free business idea:

  1. get REALLY good at marketing articles
  2. collect my money
  3. get exposure on FJ
  4. collect more money from that exposure

If you did a good job for me, it’d be very easy to get more business. I’d be happy my problem was solved. I’d give props to the person who solved my problem. I mean, shit… if someone had solved my problem already maybe this article would be about how awesome this person was and how you should immediately sign up for their service.

theman

Truth is, you probably wouldn’t even have to pitch this.

People talk.

Just overdeliver.

 

The value of your service IS your marketing if you overdeliver. People will talk about it and word will spread.

People get confused about this because they’re usually offering shitty products or services so they falsely assume marketing is hard. Again, it is hard if your offering sucks.

cantfindpeople

 

Neville writes good, high quality blog posts. I bet he’d want more exposure.

Ben Greenfield knows more on health/fitness than almost anyone on the planet. I’m sure he’d like more people to read what he writes.

Jeff Rose isn’t just known for his good looks, he writes a massive amount of content that has helped grow his business.

Noah the master of marketing himself writes articles. Nothing this guy likes more than tacos and marketing, He’d eat that shit up.

Joel Runyon writes good stuff.

Bryan writes good articles.

Steve Chou made $700k each last year, in large part due to writing articles. If he’s not too busy counting his money he might have a few bucks laying around to try a service like that.

Richard writes epic articles on e-commerce.

Victor’s site runs on the no nonsense articles he writes.

Glen was one of the initial guys who focused on high quality content.

Paula writes some monster posts.

Charles Ngo puts out good stuff.

When Derek isn’t yelling at people on video, he’s yelling at them through his writing.

If your service is good and you make it +EV for them, these are examples of people who produce real content and would be potential customers.

I mean… shit. You don’t even have to pitch that. Here’s your marketing pitch, “pay me”.

I’m sure Neville could help you with the copy but that’s pretty close to all you’d need.

Business does NOT have to be hard.

I’m not saying all these guys will buy your service. I didn’t ask them. Maybe they won’t like you.

But it took me like two minutes to think of examples of people that might be interested in a service like this.

An easy way to start something like this would be to absolutely crush it for one person, and then just show your results.

Some people enjoy talking about what they will do.

That won’t make someone buy.

If you’re trying to sell an action taker, they’re going to buy on results, not talk.

No one cares what you’re going to theoretically do at some point in the future. Except maybe your mom and dad but unless they’re giving you money you should probably just take action and stop waiting for a magic pile of money to fall in your lap.

goingtobeamillionair

Once you have the results, you don’t have to talk anymore.

What’s here in this article might get you motivated to work on this for a couple days, or a couple weeks. That’s how it usually goes. The excitement wears off and you go back to looking for the easy million waiting right around the corner somewhere.

lookingformoney

To avoid the non action that’s likely to pop up once you lose your initial motivation, I’m going to take this further for you. See, the bag of money around the corner is never wrapped up like a bag of money. It’s often a road filled with limiting beliefs, self doubt and roadblocks which makes you stop before the opportunity turns into the bag of money that it is. So, I want to eliminate these for you.

One major roadblock that may come up is customers.

“But Billy, I thought you said it would likely be easy to get customers if we offered great value.”

This is true. However, the interpretation of great value is going to differ per person. You may have one idea of “great value”, and someone else may have another.

I want to show you what an entrepreneur will be thinking about.

Let’s say you became an absolute beast at article marketing. Great. Now let’s say you go around pitching people $5k/month for your article marketing service. Okay. Well, an entrepreneur is going to want to know what their ROI is. So, if you are awesome at marketing articles and increase someone’s income $3k/month, it’s still not a +EV(expected value) service since you’re trying to charge $5k/month. Now, if you charged that person $1k/month, that might be a good deal. $500/month, a great deal.

I want you to think about this for a minute: Whatever you’re selling, you are not actually selling that. You are selling the results from it. So, if you’re offering someone $3k/month for $5k/month, that’s stupid and you won’t get customers and you’ll complain this doesn’t work. Example of a limiting belief, followed by self doubt, and a barrier that’s likely to put you back on the sideline waiting for that bag of money to appear around the corner. If someone started an article marketing service and claimed people didn’t want article marketing, you’re doing it wrong.

You are NOT selling article marketing. You are selling increased profits for their business. So, if you can’t increase profits, that’s a problem with your offering, not that no one wants the service.

People could give a shit about you marketing their articles. People give a shit about you marketing their articles in a way that it increases the profits of their business after paying you for your service.

I’m not saying short change yourself and charge $50/month or something. You must create win-wins. It should be +EV for you, and +EV for the client. Understand, that you’ll sometimes have to sacrifice short term income for long term EV as an entrepreneur. That is often how successful businesses are built. Everyone looks at something and says, “meh, I don’t want to work hard marketing articles, that’s not the greatest pay.” It won’t be while you’re proving yourself out. When you start crushing results for people your rate will increase. Once you get systems in place your EV will increase since you can take on more customers while spending the same time. Once systems are in place you can then leverage having other people execute the systems you’ve put in place, increasing your EV even more.

So many people are stuck in the ‘I want to get rich overnight’ mindset that they fail to realize that the reason a lot of simple business ideas still exist is because they take work in the beginning, and people don’t like work. So, people either never start them, or they stop during one of the lower paying steps, when the high paying steps were right around the corner if done correctly. Note: done correctly is important, and what most people in this ‘industry’ aren’t teaching you. Rah rah ‘you can do it’ shit that people are putting out is not helping you, and you’ll never achieve your dreams if you are following that nonsense. You must learn how to think. This is the difference between people who achieve success, and people who just talk about achieving success so that you’ll buy their info products and click on their affiliate links. 

You CAN do it… if done correctly. Some questions to ask yourself, with this, or any other business you’re starting:

“Is this a great deal for the customer?”

“How can I make this more valuable for them?”

“If I offer this value to them, long term will this business have a chance of helping me achieve the results that I’d like to achieve”  – note: I’m not talking about tomorrow. Or next week. Or next month. I’m talking about AFTER putting in real work for a while.

Let me give you an example of what to expect:

  1. “this is hard work, and i’m not making much money”
  2. “it’s still hard but this is getting a little easier now that i know what i’m doing, and a couple more people are paying me.”
  3. “now that i’m really good at this and people are talking about the results i’m getting them, i’m charging even more for the same work.”
  4. “i have too much work i need to bring on more people to help me grow.”

Maybe income sucks for you at level 1. Maybe it still sucks for you at level 2. Maybe it doesn’t even interest you until level 4. It depends what situation you’re in. Most people will quit at the sucky levels because they haven’t learned to think bigger picture. They still think in the 9-5 income box… “how much do I get today?”.

Broke people think about how much they can make today. Rich people think about the long term expected value.

When I was playing poker I played for pennies at first. I’m not exaggerating, literally pennies. Then as I progressed, I made more money, and eventually started printing money where I couldn’t believe how easy it was. If I expected money to come right out of the gate, I would have stopped and never reached the ‘printing money’ levels.

Poker looked something like this for me:

  1. playing for pennies (1-3 months)
  2. “hey look, you can actually make some money at this” (3-12 months)
  3. “wow, you can make real money at this” (12-36 months)
  4. printing money stage…”what do i do with all this money?” (36 months+)

I’ve had several businesses where I literally made close to $0/hr for the first many months, and then ‘wa-lah!(voila), I make 6 or 7 figures after the hard work starts coming to fruition and getting to the ‘print money’ stage.

Stop trying to get rich by tomorrow. This ain’t the lottery and this blog isn’t for stupid people.

If you put the work in, you’ll reap the rewards that follow the hard parts that everyone wants to skip.

You can look at ForeverJobless as a live example of this. As you know from this post this is the first time I’ve really focused on ForeverJobless. You know that I’m not really monetizing much, so outside of things like a private mastermind I run, I’m basically making close to $0/hr on ForeverJobless.

Over time if it was my goal, I could probably turn ForeverJobless into a cash cow just as a byproduct of putting out higher value work than what exists in the market. Traffic/subscribers will grow even with little to no marketing as a byproduct of people talking about the content, and people who read the ‘rah rah’ blogs will realize the real shit is over here, and make a +EV life choice about the content they’re consuming.

If I theoretically made $0 this year, and then overnight turned on a money faucet next year people who don’t understand would look at it as an “overnight success” as if some stroke of sheer luck caused all sorts of people to come check out my articles and purchase high value products or services.

Why would people change what they’re reading? Higher value. What sacrifice does it take to produce higher value? I don’t know for others, but personally I often spend dozens of hours per article, that I release for free. If we related articles to business, the way that most people think about business is they’d attempt to release their first article, try and sell it, and wonder why no one is buying. Then day two they’d quit claiming that “no ones interested in reading articles”. That sounds ridiculous, and it is. But that is how most people attempt to be an entrepreneur though, and why they think it is difficult. Low value + expecting overnight results or they quit.

I’m not telling you someone is going to buy your service. I’m telling you someone is going to buy your service is it’s +EV for them to do so. Your job is to make sure that it is.

“Oh, but how do I do that?”

Welcome to entrepreneurship. Your job is to solve problems.

Let’s break this shit down.

I’ve already given you the idea.

I’ve already given you examples of how easy it would be to find potential clients, and even given you examples of ideal customers(obviously don’t bother them unless you can offer them value).

You understand that you not only need to be good at it and offer high value, but need to price it in a way that makes it +EV for them too.

“Ya, but how can I make sure it’s +EV?”.

Glad you asked!

Let me give you an example:

For simplicity sake, let’s say someone has one product, that they charge $100 for. They write good articles, and they convert roughly .5% of visitors into buyers. So, every new visitor is worth roughly 50 cents to them, obviously varying per traffic source, but you get the idea. Let’s say you check out their articles and realize you could probably get them an extra 500 visitors per article. That’d equate to around 2.5 sales per article assuming the sources of traffic were as high quality as their current traffic. If they expected around 2.5 sales per article they’d expect around $250 since they charge $100 per sale.

As much as they like your article marketing service, if you wanted to charge them $300 per article, they’d kick you out the door(more likely out their inbox), since they’d be losing money. Now, we’re not factoring some things in such as the EV of traffic that turns into subscribers that buy sometime the future, and the EV of articles potentially ranking higher for specific search terms due to the marketing that was done, but again just for simplicity we’re looking at it from a high level 300 ft view perspective for someone who wants to make sure they’re getting an ROI.

If you charged them $100 per article they might give you a shot. For $50 they’d almost definitely give you a shot. So, let’s pretend you decided to charge them somewhere between $50-$100 per article. If this person publishes 8 articles/month, a good price point to charge might be in the $400-$800/month range. Maybe when you start out you charge less just to make sure you can over deliver, and knock it out of the park for them.

Maybe you quote them at $600/month, and tell them for being one of the first three customers you’ll only charge them $300/month for the first two months to prove how much you’ll crush it for them. Now, obviously you’ve gotta back up what you say or they won’t be interested in renewing, but that would eliminate the worry of having difficulty getting customers, and might give you some more inspiration to push through one of the hard work steps knowing there’s people with money that will pay you for doing things of value for them.

barrier

Make it so good they don’t have to think about it. After I posted the idea on twitter, a number of people emailed asking how much I would pay them. It’s not the best question. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a normal and completely reasonable question, but maybe just better to call it suboptimal. It’s making someone else work to have to figure out how to make it +EV for themselves without even knowing the level of work you’re going to provide. Someone will want to pay you a lot if you make them a lot. They might pay a little if you make them a little. They won’t want to pay anything if it’s not going to make them anything.

Don’t make it hard for people to give you money. Make it easy. The fact that some guys are attempting to get paid well on the first job without ever having done article marketing is showing they aren’t thinking about it correctly. I think free work is +EV if you’re doing things right, but you don’t even have to do free work. Just charge someone an amount where it’s +EV for them and you learn shit. Your goal is not to make as much money as you can in step 1. That’s flawed thinking that keeps you on step 1, or back to step 0, thinking there’s no good ideas out there.

Now, obviously one of the things you need to be asking yourself is if it’s +EV for you as well. However, remember the important part of that. EV, not income. Your goal is not to have good income day one. Your goal is to have good EV.

So, for example let’s pretend each article takes you 10 hours to promote. So, if you land one customer that releases 8 posts/month, and you charge them a discount of $300/month so that you can prove yourself, that’s only $37.50/article. Eww, sounds yucky. Let’s figure out the hourly. Well, if each article takes you 10 hours, you’d be making $3.75 per hour. Ballin! Now, when most people figure this out, they would do one of three things.

  1. They would quit.
  2. They would raise their prices.
  3. They would do shittier work.

#1 is where most people would end up.

“$3.75 per hour! I’m worth way more than that! I’m not working for pennies.”

And they wouldn’t. They’d sit on the sideline and make $0/hr instead.

#2 is how a lot of people try to operate. They want to maximize what they think they’re worth on day 1. Maybe they even are worth that much, but if no one knows about them and they have no results yet, that’s going to be a really tough sell. So, they might get no customers because of their higher pricing, and claim people aren’t paying for their work even though it’s good. So scenario #2 often leads to #1, quitting.

#3 is another choice. Instead of working 10 hours per article they work 2-3 hours, so they can get the boost to their hourly rate that they desire. Well, like many short term income decisions, it’s a bad EV decision, because people won’t want to keep working with you if you can’t deliver the awesome results they were expecting, and are cutting corners to boost your temporary profits instead. So, clients will leave, and you’ll claim, “no one stays on, customer retention is low”. Customer retention is obviously going to decrease significantly for you if you’re putting in 1/4th of the effort.

So, let’s take the person who decides to forgo these easy outs, and actually puts in the work. Let’s say they take on 3 clients at $300/month. For simplicity we’ll say that everyone produces 8 articles/month, so in total you’d have 24 articles to promote. So, you’d work roughly 240 hours in the month. That is hard work. Straight hustle to earn $900/month. That’s not much.

Now, if you got the results you said you could get them, they’d likely renew at a higher rate. $900/month might become $1,800/month by month two or three.

Once you realized where the most +EV clients for you were and each article started taking you a bit less time as you improved, $1,800/month might become $5,400/month by month four or five.

Once word started to spread about an article marketing service that increases your profits, and you had your systems in place, you may hire a few people to help execute those systems for the new clients that wanted your help.

Maybe instead of just you, there’s three others helping you provide the service. By the end of the year the $5,400/month turns into $21,600/month. You pay $3,000/month for your employees to just follow your systems promoting the articles, so your profit is $12,600/month.

You start year two off on pace for a $150k+ year, and finally realize that getting through the hard parts to get to the payoff was totally worth it. You realize you were never working for $3.75/hour in the first stage of the game. You were being paid to learn and test a $150k+ profit business. You now realize that you’re actually happy the $3.75/hr stage exists. It’s what keeps most of your competitors out, because they don’t realize the payday is around the corner. You collect checks, while they talk about how lucky you got. You didn’t get lucky, you played the game at a level that will be hard work and likely won’t even pay you well per hour for that hard work, but playing at that level allows you to get to the next levels.

I’m not saying you should charge $3.75/hr, and I’m not saying the business is definitely going to make $150k+/yr.

My goal is to teach you how to think so that you realize what’s possible if you put in the work while doing things the right way.

You may or may not make a lot of money in the process. But I guarantee you won’t make any if you don’t try. For something that is a need that isn’t well offered right now, that doesn’t cost any money to start, if you’re someone looking for an opportunity, now you have one.

If you’re already working on a project, hopefully something in this article made you think about something you’re doing in a different way.

If you like the free business giveaway series idea, let me know. More importantly, if you’ve been looking for an idea, execute on this.

Leave a comment if you like the idea of this series.

Leave a comment if you’ll be starting this idea.

Leave a comment if you have questions about it.

And if you don’t have an idea to work on, and aren’t going to try this, definitely leave me a comment explaining why you aren’t.

how to set goals


Learned Helplessness


What is learned helplessness?

Learned helplessness is when people feel helpless to avoid situations they perceive as negative or painful, because previous experiences have made them believe they will be unable to avoid them. This perceived lack of control makes them fail to even attempt escaping a similar fate in the future. They’ve trained themselves to believe they are helpless, and so they don’t even try.

“Learned helplessness is the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn’t matter.”

– Arnold Schwarzenegger

Martin Seligman is known for discovering learned helplessness during an experiment he was performing on dogs. He would ring a bell, and give a light shock to a dog. After a while, the dog would react to the bell as if he’d already been shocked. The interesting part of the study came when Seligman gave the dogs a chance to avoid being shocked. Here’s what he did:

He would put a dog in a large crate divided by a small fence that they could easily jump over. What the dogs didn’t know was that only one side of the crate would give a shock, and the other side would not. The dogs didn’t even attempt to jump over the fence because learned helplessness made them believe the shock was unavoidable.

He then tried the test with dogs that had not previously received a shock. When those dogs heard the bell, they quickly learned that they could avoid the shock by jumping over to the other side of the fence.

Have you ever heard how to chain an elephant?

As a baby, if you chain an elephant, the elephant will learn that it cannot break free from the chain. It will also be uncomfortable if they try. So, the elephant stops trying, and accepts the fact that it cannot break free from the chain.

Even once the elephant becomes an adult, they will not attempt to break the chain, even though it would be very easy for them to do so. They have conditioned their mind to believe they can’t break free from the chain, so they don’t even try.

Learned helplessness psychology

Most people are like the elephant and the dog.

They’ve conditioned themselves with limiting beliefs of what they think they’re able to achieve, and therefore often never even attempt to achieve anything, as they’ve trained their mind to believe they aren’t capable. They assume that it would be uncomfortable to even attempt, due to the risk of failure. They accept a lifelong fate of mediocrity, to avoid the possibility of some temporary discomfort trying to achieve something that again, they haven’t even allowed themselves to believe they can achieve.

Like the elephant, most people are living with a chain attached. It’s attached to their mind, and until they break free, the chain keeps them held in mediocrity. If they just tried to break free from the mental chain, they’d realize they can literally have everything they want, they just need to be willing to break free from the chain, the one that only exists because they allow it to.

You need to uncondition yourself from thinking that failure= pain. Failure = growth. Growth leads to the ability to achieve the goals you want to achieve. So, technically the worst thing that can happen to you if you break free from learned helplessness, is the failure you so desperately seek to avoid, which would lead you exactly where you think you aren’t capable of going.

Once you understand that anything is possible for you, the scariest thought I can imagine is for you to stay shackled to the chains you voluntarily keep in your mind.

Overcoming learned helplessness

What might you be holding onto in your own life that is nothing but learned helplessness?

Are you avoiding starting a business because you tried something in the past and it didn’t work? Is learned helplessness convincing you that the next thing you try won’t work either, so you may as well not even attempt it?

Are you not asking for help because you’ve been ridiculed sometime in the past, and are holding on to the false belief that it might happen if you try again? You’re so worried that someone might think your question is stupid, instead of being more worried about the fact that learned helplessness is keeping you from ever getting the answer.

Are you not asking a girl or guy out because you’ve been rejected in the past? You assume it’ll happen again, so learned helplessness keeps you single.

How is learned helplessness affecting your income? Are you holding onto a job because of the learned helplessness that comes from accepting a paycheck? The belief that you must depend on someone else to put food on your table. You’ll lie down like the dogs and just starve without it?

foreverjobless like a dog

 

It is hardly possible to build anything if frustration, bitterness and a mood of helplessness prevail. – Lech Walesa

Learned helplessness experiment

Charisse Nixon did a study with her class that proved how easy it is for people to have learned helplessness. She gave her class three different problems to solve. What she didn’t tell the class beforehand was that she had given them two different sets of problems. One half got an easy set of problems, the other received a list where the first two problems were impossible to solve. The third problem was the same for both. What happened? Well, she was able to induce learned helplessness in the group of students that received the unsolvable first two problems. Even though the third problem was easily solvable, most of them didn’t even try. They falsely assumed they couldn’t do it. This is learned helplessness at work.

You can watch a video example here:

Now, if she could get students to exhibit learned helplessness in only a couple minutes, how ingrained do you think it is if you’ve been operating under certain assumptions for years? It’s not difficult to realize that a lot of the things you do, and often don’t do on a daily basis are due to learned helplessness.

Learned helplessness examples

Imagine all of the things you aren’t even attempting in your life because learned helplessness is making you avoid them like the plague, because of some tiny little thing that happened sometime in the past, that might even be totally unrelated to what you’re currently avoiding.

Don’t even go to the gym because you assume you can’t take off the weight? Why, because of some extremely weak attempt sometime in the past?

Won’t write an article, or a book because you’re afraid you might be negatively judged because of what someone once said about your writing, years, or even decades ago? You succumb to being helpless just to avoid the same pain. You let the opinion of those who do not matter determine your future actions. Your future actions determine your future happiness. So, in essence, I would venture to bet that the majority of us are in some way allowing learned helplessness to negatively affect our happiness in certain aspects of our lives.

“So many of us choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality” – Jim Carrey

Is the path you’re on a path you’ve consciously chosen, or is it a path designed by your subconscious due to learned helplessness? Is it creating a desire to avoid situations that you perceive may include something painful or negative for you?

If dogs and elephants can so easily succumb to learned helplessness, it’s likely to assume that as humans it’s going to be significantly stronger within us due to our worry about what others think. Dogs and elephants could give a shit what others think, yet learned helplessness still controls them. Learned helplessness is multiplied within us because we don’t want to look foolish to others. Our ego is gasoline on the learned helplessness fire.

Foreverjobless ego

You must take action to overcome this flaw.

Let’s take a look at a relevant example:

Many people refuse to start a business with the common excuse of not having money.

That helps them to justify not having to start a business. It’s learned helplessness. If they really wanted to start a business they’d start without money, or work hard to earn the money to start. The learned helplessness keeps them from ever starting. They view themselves as ‘hopeless’ without money. They must start, or remain in learned helplessness. They must do the mental work to push through the bullshit they’ve built up in their minds. The mental work is often the hardest.

Same with not knowing what to do or not having a mentor. If someone really wanted it they’d invest in a business coach, or at least go work or intern for someone they could learn from. It’s easier to let learned helplessness take over and just stay ‘hopeless’ on the sidelines. There’s no pain there. There’s obviously no success there either, but learned helplessness has trained them to desire this hopelessness over success. It’s easier to assume they just can’t do it, instead of training their mind to realize they can, and taking the actions necessary to do it.

I’ve learned that some of the hardest work we can do is mental work. Our mental conditioning is so unbelievably important, yet because it’s below the surface most people fail to understand when it’s negatively controlling their life. Most of us understand that our outcomes are very closely tied to the goals that we set, and the habits that we form to achieve those goals. What many people don’t do is the work to both understand, and to overcome the fact that many of the goals that we have are being set based on what we do or do not believe. We may set goals lower than we should because we do not believe we are capable of more. Or worse, we may eliminate certain goals all together, because of learned helplessness.

When I help people with goal setting, I often tell them that the first step is figuring out exactly what it is that you want, so that we can work backwards to reverse engineer those results and expect achievement of the goal. Well, what is maybe an even more important step is to really take time to think about what you want, and ask yourself if there might possibly be something else, but learned helplessness is keeping you from it. This is difficult, but extremely important.

If you don’t really believe you can do something, you won’t overcome learned helplessness. If you struggle with this, attempt to find your learned helplessness with simple logic.

“I can’t start a business, I don’t have money!”(learned helplessness)

Well, what could you do to make money?

“I could get a job/an extra job but I don’t have time”(learned helplessness)

Where does all your time go?

“Well… I guess I do watch a lot of TV and go out a lot.”

If you stopped watching TV and going out, would you have time to get an extra job?

“Ya, I guess I would.”

How long would it take you to save up enough money for the business you want to start if you did that?

“Probably forever, I never have much money.”(learned helplessness)

Well, how about we just calculate the actual answer. How much extra income could you pick up if you really wanted to. How much per hour, and how many hours?

“I should be able to make $15/hr at restaurant XYZ. I could get 15-20 hours/week if I had to.”

Okay, so how much is that per week?

“I guess around $300/week, but if I did that and my other job I’d be working all the time, I couldn’t do that.”(learned helplessness)

Well, you wouldn’t be working all the time. Maybe working a lot temporarily in exchange for exactly what you want.

foreverjobless work hard

Let’s be conservative and say you get $200/week. How long would it take you to start your business?

“My business would take around $1,000 to get going.”

So how long would that take?

“I guess I’d have enough within about 5 weeks to start my business.”

Great!

“Ya, but then I wouldn’t know what to do, so it’s probably not even worth it.”(learned helplessness)

What would allow you to know what to do?

“If I had someone who knows how to do it help show me what to do. But the guys who know what they’re doing cost money, and I would have spent it all on the business so I’ll never be able to afford them!”(learned helplessness)

Why would you never be able to have them? How long would it take for you to make an extra $1,000 and sit down with a business mentor a couple times to start off on the right foot?

“I guess another 5 weeks.”

So, in a total of 10 weeks you could save enough money to not only start your business, but hire a coach to make sure you’re doing things in a more optimal way?

“Ya, I guess I never realized that’s all it would take.”

—–

Once logic was introduced, this person realized it was very simple to overcome their obstacles. This same person will often spend 10 years in learned helplessness, rather than 10 weeks easily obtaining what they need to solve their problem.

Learned helplessness means assuming that a new situation has the same limitations as an old one that resembles it, when in reality there are lots of positive alternatives. These new possibilities may exist because the situation is different, or because the person has changed, or both…   Learned helplessness drains motivation and energy. When we learn our own potential to positively influence our own lives we can’t help but become more fulfilled. – Mark Tyrrell

Personal example of learned helplessness

I spent decades with the learned helplessness that I couldn’t have the body I wanted. I can specifically remember a time when I was much younger and I asked a trainer in the gym how to get muscle and a six pack. He told me some people just didn’t have the body for it. I’m sure he said something else too, but that’s the part I remembered. Who needs to be strong and ripped if you’ve got the limiting belief that it’s not even possible for you. Way easier- how convenient!

I let learned helplessness keep me out of the gym and under the false assumption that I was born to be small, based on my genetics.

The first step of getting out of that mindset was realizing that I could have the body I wanted, and setting the habits in place that guaranteed accomplishment of the goal.

The reality is that some level of learned helplessness is controlling many of our lives.

People operate under the same learned helplessness that dogs do.

If you’re a human, which most of you reading this article are, you’re even smarter than a dog.

So, realize that any helplessness you feel is created by your own mental prison. Rip off the shackles you voluntarily keep in your mind. You’re the warden and it’s time for parole.

 


Arnold Schwarzenegger Infrastructures of Wealth


Building infrastructure is one of only three ways to lock in a benefit from a dollar one hundred years in the future. Number one is to build public works that will last for that long. Number two is to use your dollar to invent something that will still be used in a century. And number three is to educate your children and grandchildren so that they see the benefits of knowledge and educate their own children and grandchildren in turn. Do any of these successfully, and you’ve invested wisely. You may even be remembered for it.  – Arnold Schwarzenegger

I was in Medellin a few months ago reading Arnold’s biography, Total Recall:

IMG_4310

He’s had incredible success in a variety of different areas. Bodybuilding, real estate, acting, business, politics, etc… In the quote above he was actually referring to government spending, but to see into the way he thinks about things, can give you a glimpse at how to replicate success in whatever area you choose. In this article we’re going to talk about how the quote can be applied with how entrepreneurs should be spending their time, and aren’t. Most go against the infrastructures of wealth that Arnold or just about any other wealthy person would advise.

Most people are either selling their time with a boss(9-5ers, aspiring entrepreneurs), selling their time without a boss(people who think they’re entrepreneurs but are freelancers), button clickers(day trading, media buying, poker, fantasy sports, etc…), or making very small advancements to existing products or services enough so that they can make a profit, and if they can, clicking buttons, or hiring button clickers to maximize that profit until it dies and they repeat the cycle.

Building infrastructure is one of only three ways to lock in a benefit from a dollar one hundred years in the future.

Let’s talk about building infrastructure for yourself that will reap you rewards well into the future.

Number one is to build public works that will last for that long.

When applying this to your own life instead of government spending, we could look at real estate investing.

If you invest in real estate there’s a good chance you’ll be making money on it decades from now. My brother invests in a lot of real estate and not only is he making money today, but he can expect the same places he has today will make him cash flow in the future. Not only that, because of the way the math works, he will have built massive equity for himself, with his renters paying him for the privilege.

foreverjobless real estate

Number two is to use your dollar to invent something that will still be used in a century.

When relating this to yourself, we could tweak it to: are you creating a product or service that is likely to be used just 10 years in the future?

It’s hot to create marginally better products these days, or just shitty products in general and then market the shit out of them by being a button clicker, or hiring a button clicker. Arbitraging dollars from consumers until it dies, and then jumping to the next arbitrage opportunity.

For example, look at the new amazon bookselling wave:

“Okay, I’m going to write 50 books this year to create passive income and be an entrepreneur”

Uhhhh…Okay, you basically have a job… a shitty one at that, and that “passive” income you seek is not passive. It’s going to last for an incredibly short time…. if you’re lucky, just long enough to write 50 more shitty books.

For people who aren’t that familiar with the amazon book niche- yes, there’s actually people who use this as their business strategy… a lot of them. People will look at a few people doing it “successfully”, and then copy the model as if it’s a good one. They get distracted by the possibility of having those results- that passive income to do anything they want in their free time. They get blinded by the fact they’re creating shit, and it’s not passive income.

See, real estate income for example remains passive as long as a new kind of real estate doesn’t come in and make the current living options undesirable. So, a house that rents for $1,000/month now, will likely rent for $1,000/month or more a decade from now.

Your shitty book you spent a week writing, or outsourcing, may get you some temporarily “passive” income after your “free giveaway” promotion boosts rankings and confuses people into thinking it’s a great book, and over time that passive income will disappear once they realize it’s not.

There is essentially no chance you will be receiving much, if any income from that book in 10 years, and not only that since you will not have income from the asset in 10 years, it is not much of an asset, so you can’t sell it.

A savvy investor will see the declining income and know that it wouldn’t be a good investment. You may be thinking, “hmmm, how can I avoid that?”.

Well, if your first thought is to pump up sales with more promotions, giveaways, etc… it’s an okay thought, but it shouldn’t take you more than a second to realize than it’s exactly the opposite of a passive income stream if you must constantly be active to maintain, or to prop the income back up. So, you can see the flaw there. Your second thought might be to hope that an unsavvy investor who doesn’t understand that you don’t actually have passive income buys it. A better option would be to just stop producing garbage, and start creating real value.  When you do that, you’ll have real passive income instead of temporary passive income that’s nothing but an illusion.

foreverjobless passive income

You’re making temporary bets and you’ll receive temporary returns in exchange. The problem is you must realize this now, or you’ll be in the same position year after year, getting enough temporary returns to get you to the next temporary bet, but you will have trouble making significant progress. If you’ve been doing things like this for years and wondered why you can’t get ahead despite having many “successful” projects, this is why.

Ask yourself, are you producing something that has a legitimate chance of being around in 10 years? If so, it might be worth pursuing. If not, I’m not saying don’t do it, but you need to consider that the temporary income should make up for the fact it won’t be around long, and realize there’s usually better spots to invest your time for your future.

If you’re thinking about starting a project, ask yourself, “will I be making money from this in 10 years?” or “will this still be of value to others 10 years from now?”. If the answer is definitely “no”, welcome to temporary income land, please spin the wheel again.

And number three is to educate your children and grandchildren so that they see the benefits of knowledge and educate their own children and grandchildren in turn. 

Now, we could tweak this quote to look at self education, as well as educating others. Similar to what we spoke about in #2, you can’t expect to make incremental or temporary improvements to receive long term results, for you or others.

If you’re educating yourself, ask yourself: “Am I learning things that will be important to my success 10 years in the future? Or am I learning a temporary skill that will have no real impact on my future success or happiness?”

You can ask the same questions if educating others. Most people who are educating others have no business in doing so. Why? Well, you can ask the same simple question. Is what they’re teaching going to have a significant impact on their future? Will they be using that knowledge 10 years from now, or have produced results from that knowledge that will be significant 10 years from now?

if you’re teaching someone to build temporary knowledge with your own temporary knowledge source, as a byproduct, you’ll also have temporary income. Now, if you’re one of the best button clickers, hire one of the best button clickers, are first to market for that temporary knowledge source, etc…, you can make significant enough temporary income that will allow you to put your money into #1(investing in real estate), companies that do #2, or have your time freed up because of the money you’re able to accumulate over expenses so that you can take your time doing #2 yourself. You could also invest your time in educating yourself(#3), so that doing any of the three you prefer in the future becomes easier for you.

Many people make the flaw of going from temporary income to educating. This is often a comical decision made by people who don’t understand how to make money. They may have made temporary income from a temporary income source, and will use that to convince people that they know how to make money, because selling the dream is often an ‘easier’ way to make money for them.

Others may be confused into thinking that they know more than just temporary knowledge because of significant results, which will entice them to buy future products/services from them even if those products/services do nothing but offer temporary returns, or dreams, whether it’s an incremental improvement over the competition or not.

If you’re doing this, you’re not only delaying their improvement, and negatively impacting their future, but your own as well. You’re on a temporary ego and money driven hamster wheel that confuses you into thinking you know more than you actually know, but at some point you’re going to get off the ride and realize you haven’t improved much as an entrepreneur or in knowledge(or as a person), as you’ve been going from temporary income source to temporary income source trying to convince others to do the same. You’ve invited them to join you on the hamster wheel of temporary income, knowing that them joining you enables you to continue the ride with their funding, and gives you the chance at escaping the ‘dream’ you’ve sold them.

Instead, if you were to educate people how to be in a significantly better spot for themselves 10 years from now, you’ve done them a great service. Now, the confusing part can be that there is usually significantly more temporary income in temporary education. What’s “hot”, is what’s certainly an easier sell, especially for people who have not been educated past the point of understanding you’re even selling the education of a temporary income source. So you sell the dream, and the promise that “you too, can be like me”, but they can’t… unless their goal is to sell temporary income but if you understand economics 101 you’ll realize that everyone is teaching people to teach people to teach people. If everyone learns to do the same thing, they become useless pretty fast. Case in point- traditional education.

Wonder why your $100k degree from traditional education is now just a $0 piece of paper? Ya. The info space is the new traditional education. “Today class, we’re going to teach you things that will be irrelevant soon. But not to worry, I’ll have more classes selling you more temporary solutions very soon, so no matter how many things become irrelevant I’ll always have more!”

foreverjobless infomarket

 

The real education is in educating people with knowledge that will still be valuable 10 years in the future. The latest amazon trick, or social media hack, or cheap traffic source will make more temporary income, and will make educators of the temporary income source more temporary income, but 10 years from now, neither is likely to have escaped. They’re both likely to be on another temporary income journey, chasing the dollar from temporary opportunity, to temporary opportunity. Or, they may have jumped off that ride and went back to the time for money hamster wheel, claiming entrepreneurship was too risky, and that the job will protect them. It wasn’t that it was risky. Noticing they were not actually an entrepreneur, or at least weren’t operating as one with long term plans would have been the first discovery to lead them down a better road.

What you spend your time on should be significant enough to give you a return 10 years from now. Take that for what it means to you.

Do any of these successfully, and you’ve invested wisely. You may even be remembered for it.

If you want to be remembered for doing something great, that’s cool. There’s nothing wrong with that. We don’t all have to be Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, but if being remembered is a goal of yours, you’re clearly not going to be remembered for doing temporary shit. You’re also more likely to do very well financially if you do one or more of these three things:

  • Invest in real estate(at the right prices), or something else where it’s mathematically likely you’ll reap significant long term returns while remaining relatively passive.
  • Build something valuable that improves people’s lives
  • Help people to think in a more prosperous way

If you can do at least one of these things successfully, your finances will be in a significantly different situation 10 years from now. Most likely much sooner.

Foreverjobless passive income

 


How To Set Goals If You’re Not Sure What You Want


“To solve a problem or to reach a goal, you…don’t need to know all the answers in advance. But you must have a clear idea of the problem or the goal you want to reach.” – Orison Swett Marden

After reading the recent post on how to achieve goals, you may be wondering,

“Hey Billy, what are your goals?”.

I normally never share my goals, but decided that I will this year. Partially because my goals are significantly different than I’ve normally done in the past, and not how goals are normally set. Partially because of something I read recently that pushed me over the fence to share them, and the other reason being that my goal involves you. I guess those reasons are all slightly related, but let me explain.

This year, I don’t necessarily have one specific, “I must reach X by year end” goal as my priority goal. As you know from reading my article on how to achieve your goals, having that priority goal is what I recommend doing. I don’t normally advise otherwise for most people. There’s a reason I’m doing things slightly differently this year. The last few years the biggest question for me has been, “what the heck do I want to do?”.

How To Set Goals If You Don’t Know What You Want

I haven’t had business/financial as my priority goal for years, as I would often set a goal that would bring me more success/money or whatever metric I was aiming to hit, and would often find myself very quickly bored out of my mind, and preferring to focus on a priority goal such as fitness, or another non-financially motivated goal that I was interested in achieving.

The problem for me wasn’t that I was setting financial goals that were too easy for me, but that the end result of accomplishing the goal wouldn’t change anything in my life.

See, I’ve already set my life up in a way where I can do pretty much whatever I want each day, and ironically the act of setting a goal that doesn’t change anything for me is doing nothing except eliminating the time I have to do whatever it is that I want to do.

There’s nothing I need that most goals will bring me. If you’re familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy, all my needs are taken care of, so having “more” doesn’t really do anything more for me.

 

So, that’s easy, just set goals for things you want to do, right? Well, it’s easy if you know what that is. For me, I’ve struggled with knowing exactly what it is that I want. Everyone says, “oh, that’s such a good problem to have. To wake up and do whatever you want to do everyday.” Well, it’s still a problem if you don’t know what it is. Sounds like a good situation from the outside looking in, but incredibly frustrating when you’re actually experiencing it.

In the video game of life, this hasn’t been my favorite level.

I spent most of last year trying not to work on much, and figure out what it was that I wanted to do. I won’t get too deep into ‘purpose’ related content in this post, as this will already be a mini novel on it’s own.

You may find this article insightful if you’re not 100% sure what your goal should be. It’s a common problem that no one seems to want to talk about. Everyone wants to pretend they have everything figured out. No one does, usually the people working hard to give that impression often have the least figured out.

There’s only a few reasons why someone will not hit a goal that they set:

They either quit way too soon because they didn’t see instant results so they assumed it wasn’t working.

They don’t have a plan how to actually achieve the goal, and are too reluctant to invest in themselves by hiring someone who’s good at it to help.

Or they don’t really want the goal deep down. A lot of people think they do, but if they sat down with someone who understands how to ask the right questions many people would quickly find out they don’t actually want what they’ve been telling themselves they wanted.

If you don’t actually want the goal, you’re not going to follow through on it. Now, I don’t mean like kind of want it. Everyone would take an extra $5k/month, but if the goal you set doesn’t change your life at all in a way that’s meaningful to you, it’s unlikely to really motivate you to push through.

There was a quote I read recently that pushed me over the edge to share my goals, as I usually don’t share them outside of a handful of people who help keep me accountable. I’m kicking myself because I can’t find the quote now, but it said something along the lines of it being important to share your goals if you believe that doing so would help inspire, or teach others. The quote itself was way better, and made me think I was doing a disservice by not sharing my goals, and my current process with you.

If you find yourself questioning your goals, or what you’re currently working towards, I think this article could help you quite a bit.

I actually hesitate to share about the struggle not because I don’t want to share it, but because I don’t want anyone having another excuse to use not to hit a goal. I know it’s hard enough for most people to hit goals, so I don’t want to give you another ‘out’ so to speak.

Don’t use this article for that reason.

How I’m setting up my goals

For this year, my priority goal is less focused on just one specific end result, but moreso on certain actions I’ll take. Instead of one yearly priority goal, my priority goals will be set in quarterly intervals, keeping in mind certain things I’d like to achieve for the year, but optimizing the quarterly goal setting for happiness and enjoyment, rather than progress towards one yearly priority goal.

Part of the reason being that in the past I would occasionally begin a project and instead of scaling/reaping the rewards once it started taking off, I’d find myself extremely bored, and even if there was a payoff waiting, I didn’t want to work on it.

We’re normally wrong about what we think we want, and besides the payoff not being a big driver for me, I felt I needed to set up my goals and my life differently to increase the chance of working towards something I truly wanted.

We either find out if what we are or were working towards was what we actually wanted, through achievement, or in learning more about ourselves.

If you agree with me that we’re normally wrong about what we want, then you would also agree with my belief that setting long term goals, if you have not spent the time to learn much about yourself, is a monumental flaw.

Many people spend their lives chasing goals they don’t actually want, but the chase keeps them too busy to even realize it.

So, I’m going to share with you not only my goals, but more importantly the thought process and the actions that led me to setting these goals.

I’ll show you what I did to try and figure out what I should be doing, what I learned from that, what I considered based on what I had learned, what I decided after giving proper consideration to each of the possible routes, what I’m specifically doing after making that decision, and what to expect.

What I did to find out what I wanted to do

Well, a lot. But a little.

See, one of the biggest changes I made was elimination of things. I knew that if I was ‘busy’ like everyone else, I wouldn’t gain much clarity about what it was that I wanted to do. So, I started working less. I traveled to Australia for a few months and just tried to do a better job of enjoying life. I learned to surf(I’m still a rookie!), worked less hours, and had a good time. It was a little experiment both in working less, and seeing if I enjoyed traveling for extended periods of time.

My ‘work’ was on figuring out what I wanted to do.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t doing anything. I did a number of ‘work’ things throughout the year, but didn’t usually work on them with the goal to create some big business venture from it, moreso if I was getting some enjoyment from it and adding value to people. When I think back on the year I don’t feel like I did a lot, but it’s because I wasn’t really forcing myself to do things I didn’t want to do. Throughout the year I grew an instagram audience for fun, showed others exactly how to do it, I co-wrote a book that’s not yet released, I helped other people start some cool businesses, or improve the ones they had, I lived in multiple different countries, lived at the beach with my family for over a month, met a lot of cool people, and more.

But, as far as having a direction for the year, I purposely didn’t have that the way I’d normally advise doing. My direction was on trying to figure out what direction I wanted to go.

It’s a good problem to have, but like I said, it’s still a problem. I’ve put myself in a great situation to be able to do whatever I want in life and well… now I just need to figure out what that is.

I even went out to San Francisco for a bit and debated creating a large start up. I have a friend who’s been extremely successful, and he urged me to only come up with ideas that had the potential to become nine figure companies. So, I ran a little experiment and did just that. He’d been telling me for years that I was passing up a lot of money, and impact not using my skills on a bigger project.  I’d always started niche businesses in the past, and wanted to explore other options. Five, six and seven figure projects are fine, there’s nothing wrong with sticking to niche businesses… but I wondered if I was bored because I wasn’t pushing myself with what I was capable of. Not just the money side, but impact.

As the year went on I did less and less. I’ve considered doing some speaking and got offered three speaking gigs during the summer. It was cool to be offered some great opportunities, some of which I would have got to speak with some very big names, and made some great contacts. And well, I turned them all down. They would have been great for the ego, but if you really want to know anything about yourself, ego must be eliminated. I asked myself, “would doing speeches help me figure out what I want to do?”. No, they wouldn’t. I probably would have enjoyed them, but I wouldn’t have figured out what I wanted to do by talking about something I already know.

I did a handful of things through the year to learn about myself while helping others. For example I sent an in-depth survey to ForeverJobless subscribers and asked what they were up to, what they were struggling with, how I could help them, and more. I then set up dozens of calls with people from those surveys to try and help them. Both because I wanted to see them do well and knew I could help, and also because I was curious to see how much I would enjoy it, and which parts specifically.

By the end of the year, I had basically eliminated all ‘work’, and found myself living in Medellin, Colombia, focused on optimizing happiness. I mean, I went to the extreme to not work. My goal was to wake up and do whatever I wanted each day. I didn’t know what that was, but unless I made time for it, how would I find out? I took spanish lessons, played basketball, wrote, read, worked out, hung with friends, you name it. But I wasn’t doing much of anything I didn’t want to do.

My daily schedule was basically reading, writing, and thinking. That’s what I did each day. If something fun came up I did that, but otherwise I focused on learning more about myself, and what I wanted. It blows my mind how few people make time to actually know themselves. Most stay so busy that they don’t even know that they don’t know what they really want.

 

“To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom” – Socrates

 

Besides reading books some of the reading I did was from old journal entries, which was actually very helpful because it helped me determine what I was doing when I was enjoying life and what I was working on, and when I wasn’t, so I could try and figure out how to best spend my time. I compiled a list of things I enjoyed throughout the year, and spent time not just figuring out how to do more of those things, but in understanding why I got enjoyment from them.

Some of the reading I did included several exercises that help you to find your strengths.

how to find out what you want to do

Like I mentioned in the beginning, I won’t go too deep into purpose in this post- I plan on writing on it in the future, but knowing your strengths is a very important variable to knowing what you should be doing, and very few people know their strengths well. It’s easy to think you do, but since what we’re extremely good at often comes natural to us, it’s not easy to realize what you’re incredibly good at isn’t so easy for others. You don’t think of a normal skill of yours as incredible because it’s not difficult for you, which actually makes it incredible.

I reached out to some friends and family to try and uncover strengths in myself that I might not have been aware were strengths.

Around the same time, I got a few emails from friends who needed business or life advice. I found myself really excited to try and ‘solve’ the problems they were having. It didn’t feel like work. Several times I ended up turning what could have been a few sentences of advice into insanely detailed breakdowns mathematically proving the answer for them. One of them ended up being over 8,000 words calculating the expected value of every project a friend was working on or considering working on, to know what he should ramp up and what to scale down or eliminate.

Outside of writing some things for friends, I spent a lot of my writing time on subjects/styles that were significantly different than I had written in the past.

To end the ‘what I did’ section, let me share something I wrote to myself during this time:

Right now it’s Friday night and I’m sitting in a cafe in Medellin. I’ve got my earphones in playing concentration music. Everyone walking by on the street are headed off to enjoy the weekend. The people around me in the cafe are all talking spanish, so I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying even if they wanted me to. Talk about elimination of distractions. Now, if I was back home near my friends and in my normal routine, I’d be more likely to be out right now, or watching movie or something. I know for me self discovery/writing what I’m writing is important. I don’t know what the results will be from doing so, but I feel like they’ll probably be significant. Maybe not in the way other people look at significance. Or maybe so. I’m not sure, but I’ve eliminated distractions for the possibility to find out.

What I learned from the journey of self discovery

So, what did I learn from doing all of this? Well, a lot.

Socrates demonstrated a long time ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery.

Where to start…

I realized that I’ve been “living the dream”… but I’m not living it. I’m always thinking of what the next dream is.

For a long time now I’ve had my life set up in a way that allows me to do what I want, but because I haven’t focused enough on self discovery, I probably didn’t actually know what I wanted. As frustrating as it was to realize and to try and solve a seemingly unsolvable problem, I realized it’s probably a good thing because in my quest to figure out my own solution, I learned that many people who think they have the solution, don’t. In some sense I was happy I was experiencing this frustration now, rather than going through most of my life assuming I had an answer, and then figuring out one day while I was old that I did it all wrong. Many ‘wise men’ operating under the guise that they have things figured out, are only wise in staying ignorant to the fact that they don’t actually know what they think they ‘know’.

As mentioned I did several exercises throughout this process.

One of the tests I took told me that my two biggest strengths were “analytical” and “futuristic”. This didn’t necessarily surprise me, it’s always been relatively easy for me to break down ‘complex’ things into very basic solutions, as well as logically thinking ahead to predict what’s likely to happen based on variables.

Here are some of the things the test told me:

 

  • Choose work in which you are paid to analyze data, find patterns, or organize ideas.
  • Find the best way of expressing your thoughts: writing, one-on-one conversations, group discussions, perhaps lectures or presentations. Put value to your thoughts by communicating them.
  • You might excel in entrepreneur or start-up situations (hey would you look at that!)
  • Seek audiences who appreciate your ideas for the future
  • You inspire others with your images of the future, yet your thinking may be too expansive for them to comprehend. When you articulate your vision, be sure to describe the future in detail with vivid words and metaphors.
  • Your futuristic talents could equip you to be a guide or coach for others. Unlike you, they might not be able to see over the horizon. If you catch a vision of what someone could be or do, don’t assume that he or she is aware of that potential. Share what you see as vividly as you can. In doing so, you may inspire someone to move forward.

 

Both sections told me to find a partner… essentially an operations manager. It’s something I’ve thought about in the past. Basically someone smart who loves taking action and wants to be the operator, but may not have the analytical/futuristic components that I thrive at.

(side note: It’s funny, everyone wants to be a start-up entrepreneur because it’s ‘hot’, but if someone’s wired as an operator they’d be substantially happier and make significantly more money if they embraced it and partnered their unique talents with someone who has the other stuff figured out. There’s a significant demand for amazing operators. Being a start-up entrepreneur is publicly hot. Being a great operator is secretly hot.)

Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong. Most often, people know what they are not good at- and even then more people are wrong than right. And yet, a person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weaknesses, let alone on something one cannot do at all – Peter Drucker

While the strengths that were revealed didn’t necessarily surprise me, what did give me an “aha”, was the fact that I’ve spent so little time on those things the last few years. I’ve literally spent almost no time on my top two strengths.

This is why it’s so important to make time and space to analyze yourself. It seems so obvious right?…just work on what you’re good at. Well, first you’ve got to know what that is, and second…if you’re so busy doing whatever takes up all your time, you’re unlikely to realize how little time you spend doing what you should actually be doing.

One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence. – Peter Drucker

What I learned from coaching calls that I did:

I learned that I really liked helping people that would take action. I mean, I already knew I liked helping people. It’s something I’ve always enjoyed. But, there were sometimes when I helped people that I didn’t get much joy from it. I’d feel drained and not understand why. From helping people on the calls, and through email, or in the Incubator or mastermind, I figured out the difference for me. If I help someone and they get value and will take action, that makes me really happy. Partially because I know their life can change because of it and I’m excited to hear about it when it happens- it’s similar to the feeling of a vacation you can’t wait to go on: It may not hit the calendar for a little while, but you know it’s coming, and can’t wait to experience it. Partially because it’s fulfilling knowing some insight I gave them will help improve their life.

When I don’t feel like someone will take action, it’s really unfulfilling and I just feel drained.

Seems obvious, but it’s something I initially couldn’t figure out…why did I love helping people, but feel drained some of the time? That was why. If I spend time showing someone how they could change their life and come away feeling like they’re not going to do anything, I feel like the little time I have is wasted. Paid or not, I don’t like the feeling. You can’t pay me to hate my life.

When I talk to someone who appreciates the value they get, and will use it, I get really excited for them and feel energized.

What I learned from fun experiment projects:

I learned that I enjoy solving things, and then I’m bored. There has to be new challenges. Where most people would be excited that they figured something out and it would be wise and profitable to then scale it up, I am bored and ready to go onto the next thing.

For a simple example, I started an instagram account and decided to figure out how to scale it, and quickly grew an account of close to 100k followers. In a personal ‘30 day challenge’ I grew by over 40k followers, and got over 9k email leads, in one month. The most obvious thing to do would be to scale it up and go get a million followers and 100k+ email leads. That’s a normal, and profitable thought. Scale it up and print money off it. Instead, my first thought was, “meh”.

list goal

It was the same when I grew my podcast to 100k downloads in 7 weeks with a ‘baby’ email list at the time. Normal person thought: “wow, I can easily grow this to millions”. My thought, “Is this making a big enough difference?”.

podcast launch goals

I think part of it being like I mentioned above, that I really get excitement out of helping people who will take action. So, it’s somewhat irrelevant to me how many people I reach if I’m not helping them change their lives. I’m less concerned with quantity. If I have a platform of 1 million people and none of them do anything, I’d rather have an audience of just 100 people, who all take action and change their life.

I think the other part of it is due to the fact that the success of those things wouldn’t change anything for me. Others have the mindset of “I’m going to grow an audience and sell lots of shit to people!”. A popular way of thought and not necessarily wrong, but not ideal for me. ForeverJobless has likely been the most undermonetized site in the space, and it’s not really accidental. Like I mentioned in the first part, money and ego don’t really act as the drivers for me. Just chasing money goals for the sake of money isn’t motivating as I already have the means to do what I want. Plus the ego part is irrelevant to me. Other people are fueled by the size of their platform.

twitter

 

You can see them light up when they talk about it. I think I would have been the same way a few years ago, but that doesn’t drive me.

It’s not that I don’t like money. Far from it. It’s just that it’s far less meaningful at a certain point. The diminishing returns help crystalize what money and ego may distract you to work on.

The one common theme was the things I enjoyed the most were related to high level strategy/discussions, and/or figuring something out that’s interesting to me and/or helpful to others.

For example the exercise I did in figuring out opportunities that had the chance to become nine figure companies was fun for me. The idea generation was fun. The due diligence was fun. The finding out that I was successful at selecting some pretty good ones was fun, as I discovered in due diligence for two of the ideas that there were a few people already attempting to do what I had thought would be of value and had already raised eight figures to try and solve it. So, the ideas were clearly in line with having the potential to become nine figure companies. I then enjoyed trying to figure out why those companies hadn’t been successful yet and weren’t on the map, and formulating strategies based on my findings. I do things like that for fun.

—–

Elimination of distractions is +EV

A big lesson for me was learning what I was capable of when I eliminated all distractions. I don’t think you necessarily need to take it to the extreme like I did in moving to another country and eliminating all work, but I surprised myself with what I was able to accomplish in doing so. There was one week when I was in Colombia where I wrote close to 18,000 words. And I don’t mean like rambles of words just to be able to pat myself on the back for a high word count, but six in depth articles, some of which I think was some of the best writing I’ve done(one of which has been posted so far: sunk cost fallacy).

The more I write, the more I discover. – Unknown

I can remember that being the best week I’d had in a long time. I didn’t really do anything except write that week. I think part of the reason I had fun was I was writing on things I thought were interesting or valuable. Much of the content was significantly different than writing I’d done in the past.

It’s easy to subconsciously trick yourself into writing(or swap out for whatever you’re doing) for what others think they want. I learned I had a lot more fun writing content I knew people needed, even if they didn’t know they needed it. Eliminating the care for money helped make it easy to write what I wanted.

One thing I’ve learned about myself in this process is that I enjoy teaching people to think more optimally, in a way others aren’t teaching, or explaining optimally. I have little to no interest in sharing the same exact message someone else has, even if the opportunity is good. I get more excitement in changing the way people think, and helping them see things from a perspective no one’s shown them before that can add value to their lives.

On top of that I want to spend time on things that are important and meaningful. A part of me felt like creating the best course on Instagram was like becoming the best t-ball player. If someone wanted to crush it on instagram, if they signed up and took action they would, but I feel the opportunity cost of me solving something like that for people is at the expense of me solving something bigger, or more important.

 

No matter what it is, I learned that no matter how much I want to help, I need to stop getting sucked into investing time if it’s not with action takers.

Non action takers won’t do anything with the time you invest, and normally want it for free, so it’s not helping you or them. Action takers will reap rewards for you and them both now in the future, and I don’t just mean monetarily. It’s fulfilling to share a part in people’s success.

While I learned a lot about what I liked and didn’t like in the process, I still had a lot to consider.

What I considered

  • When my main strengths came up as analytical and futuristic, my first thought was getting involved in VC or private equity, as I’m very confident I’d have an edge in those fields.

  • Real estate
  • Following through on the ‘9 figure business opportunity exercise’, and starting one of them.
  • Dating company: I got a few interesting opportunities presented to me- one of which was to run a new dating company. Dating is one of the most inefficient markets there is, and since I’m single I understand the pain points of current dating solutions, and it’s something I’d love to see ‘solved’. It intrigued me quite a bit because of my own personal desire to have dating/relationships become much more efficient.
  • Publish a book I’ve been considering writing for a while, and more articles. I think most of my best content is unwritten, or at least unpublished. I have all sorts of private posts that I’ve sent to friends or students, or posts that I just never published. Many topics I think are important are not talked about.
  • Focus on building a huge platform, and then write a best seller.

What I decided

With the investing stuff, I thought I might lack fulfillment from doing so. I wasn’t going to change much from being involved, I’d just make whoever I was investing with/for more money than others could. That’d be fun for a while, to ‘beat the game’ so to speak, but knowing how I’m wired as soon as I knew I could beat it I’d probably just be looking for the next challenge. The monetary payoff would be good, but there needed to be something more to it for me.

It’s the same kind of world I was in back when I played poker professionally. When I knew I didn’t want to play anymore, I debated going into something like trading. Then I thought about it and it was the same thing as poker, just with a higher ceiling. Investing is the same. I know I can beat the game, but… so what? If I play the game nothing improves for me, or the world. I do something for money, and would basically be in the same position, just with higher numbers on bank statements.

My strengths fit in that world really well, so who knows maybe I’ll be involved somehow one day. It won’t be now though.

 The professional turns down roles that he’s done before. He’s not afraid of them anymore. Why waste his time? – Steven Pressfield

Real estate- I checked out my brother’s operation on the east coast right before I went to San Francisco, and there’s definitely plenty that excites me about real estate. However, even though I’m interested, I couldn’t get excited enough to make it the thing that I did right now.

Starting a nine figure company- I uncovered some interesting opportunities to attempt this, but for me I didn’t think getting into an opportunity just because it’s an opportunity would drive me for very long. The challenges would have been intriguing, but unless it was more meaningful to me or something I was passionate about, the running of a business just because it was a great opportunity clearly wasn’t what I was looking for. When I thought about the next X years I’d have to spend doing it, it was on things that I didn’t really care about that much. Yes, they’d make a significant difference if they came to fruition, but I didn’t know if I cared that much about the difference they made. It was ‘game changing’ for the industries they were in, but just not the type of games I wanted to play.

Dating business – This was probably the only company I seriously considered getting involved in. But as much as I’d like to see dating ‘solved’, I didn’t necessarily want to run a company right now. Maybe I end up doing some advising for them, but running a company doesn’t excite me at the moment.

Create a huge platform and launch products to fund the growth, and then launch a bestseller…

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. – Mark Twain

This is the rage these days, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just that attempting to launch a bestseller if that was my purpose is more of an ego ranking. I asked myself if I’d rather write the best book, or a bestseller, what would I want to write? I’d want to write the best book. The actions that I’d take if my goal was to launch a bestseller would be significantly different than the actions I’d take to write the best book.

The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like. – Steven Pressfield

I caught a post on Facebook from my friend Jayson that mentioned that you shouldn’t measure the success of a book by the number of copies sold, but instead by the success of the readers. I think that’s dead on. There’s a lot of bestselling heaps of ‘rah-rah’, but again, quantity isn’t the goal for me.

What results have to be achieved to make a difference?- Peter Drucker

 

If I wrote a book and it sold a lot of copies and I could call myself a best seller what would that do? Well, I’d maybe feel temporarily cool. Mini ego boost. That’s not a result that impacts very much for me or others.

If instead all of my focus went into putting out content that changes the way people think, that makes a big difference.

Great thinkers have always been motivated by the enjoyment of thinking rather than by the material rewards that could be gained by it. – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

When considering what route to take, I opened myself up to considering the possibility that I might be a better thinker/writer than entrepreneur. I don’t know if that’s the case, but I’m at least temporarily much more interested in it. If you took out all the parts of business I disliked, you’d be left with a business strategist/coach/advisor/writer or some other similar role. I often stayed away from these roles because of the mindset of “if they were good at it they’d be doing it not talking about it”, which may have been a limiting belief, along with the fact that business is significantly more leveragable.

Self-doubt can be an ally. This is because it serves as an indicator of aspiration. It reflects love, love of something we dream of doing, and desire, desire to do it. If you find yourself asking yourself(and your friends), “Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?” chances are you are. – Steven Pressfield

I know a big reason I limited the amount of ‘teaching’ was never wanting to fall into the ‘guru’ space, as many gurus aren’t even gurus for what they attempt to guru on. So, I didn’t want the comparison. Again, probably some sort of limiting belief, I’m not sure.

Noah Kagan from Sumome has been incredibly helpful in helping me think through things, and asked me what I’d do if no money were involved.

“What would you do with all this if there were NO money involved? You could do whatever you want for fun.”

I didn’t really find it all that difficult to answer.

I told him I’d write the book I’ve mentioned to him before.

That came to mind the second I processed the question.

I mentioned a small list of things, a couple of which included:

Continuing to help people with their goals/businesses but while implementing a high vetting process to only work with action takers

Spend time figuring out a more optimal way to meet high quality women

Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.- Seneca

I’d always debated writing, it was just one of those side projects that I thought maybe I’d get around to at some point. I was living flaw A from dream life. I’d put myself in a situation to do whatever I wanted, and unintentionally I wasn’t doing what I wanted. Ya, I could keep building up more money, and someday write things that I think would be helpful for people, but that didn’t seem very optimal.

The more resistance you experience, the more important your unmanifested art/project/enterprise
is to you – and the more gratification you will feel when you finally do it. – Steven Pressfield

I decided my goal for the new year was to not focus on making any money, and to put out content that I thought was important, and helpful for people. Money can be a distraction, and lead us to unintentionally do things for that purpose. If money comes as a byproduct, cool, but I’m putting zero focus on making money this year. If I make $0 and release the content I’m planning on releasing, it will be a good year.

The artist must operate territorially. He must do his work for its own sake. To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution…

“When the hack sits down to work, he doesn’t ask himself what’s in his own heart.He asks what the market is looking for…

“The hack condescends to his audience. He thinks he’s superior to them. The truth is, he’s scared to death of them or, more accurately, scared of writing what he really feels or believes, what he and himself thinks is interesting. He’s afraid it won’t sell. So he tries to anticipate what the market(a telling word) wants, then gives it to them….

“In other words, the hack writes hierarchically. He writes what he imagines will play well in the eyes of others. He does not ask himself, What do I myself want to write? What do I think is important? Instead he asks, What’s hot, what can I make a deal for? The hack is like the politician who consults the polls before he takes a position. He’s a demagogue. He panders…

It can pay off being a hack. Given the depraved state of American culture, a slick dude can make millions being a hack. But even if you succeed, you lose, because you’ve sold out your muse, and your muse is you, the best part of yourself, where your finest and only true work comes from. – Steven Pressfield

At the end of the day, I don’t know if I’ve necessarily ‘solved’ this problem of mine, in finding what I’m uniquely meant to do/brings me maximum happiness/fulfillment, but educating people how to think about things in a more optimal way and help enable them to live the life they want is definitely something that pops into the discussion for me quite a bit.

Self discovery questions

I wanted to share with you a series of questions I came up with that helped significantly when it came to making the decision. When looking at running a dating company, a market I really want to see changed, compared to writing, I asked myself:

Q: What would I do if I did the dating business, and it failed?

A: I’d go back and write.

 

Q: If the dating business succeeded and I made all sorts of money, what would I do?

A: I’d go back and write, I’d just have more money in the bank.

 

Q: If I did the writing that I wanted, would I go start a dating business after?

A: Hmm… probably not.

As many ideas as I have around the dating industry and as much as I want to see it solved, the running of a dating business isn’t necessarily a goal of mine. In the past I think I would have gotten distracted and done the newest shiny thing that had my attention. This series of simple questions helped me significantly, and could be helpful for you as well.

Several people sent me messages that pushed me more and more in the direction of writing/sharing advice/helping others:

You need to understand that you are incredible talent, with a real message and purpose. I would hate to see you attempt to take a shortcut to your real purpose – impacting other people’s lives. This is a “god given” gift, don’t waste it. – Paul

Messages like this really hit home a lot, probably moreso that I came across some of them while in the middle of trying to find out what unique abilities I had, and what it was that I should be spending my time on(without them knowing I was trying to figure something like that out).

Also, seeing the success of a few people I’ve helped has been really fulfilling. Much more so than if I started another business to try and make more money. It’d be temporarily cool, but not really fulfilling. Been there, done that.

So, if it wasn’t obvious, I’m going to focus on writing for the time being.

Although my writing has mainly been business focused up to this point, I may expand it to other areas as well.

Don’t speak unless you can improve the silence. – Unknown

I feel like I can. So I will.

My goal setting process

What am I doing about it?

In short, writing an absurd amount of content.

As I’ll discuss in the section below, my first quarter goal will focus on writing articles, rather than just instantly writing the book. I’ll be able to write on subjects I haven’t explored writing on yet, which may potentially lead me to material that becomes an important part of the book.

One major change as mentioned is that I’m setting quarterly priority goals and not necessarily a yearly priority goal. I’m basically optimizing my year for happiness. If I’m enjoying what I’m doing, I’ll renew at the end of the quarter and continue. If I’d rather be doing something else, I’d adjust the next quarterly priority accordingly.

How I normally operate is to set a yearly priority goal and if I want to guarantee its achievement I just reverse engineer it and let all other goals be secondary… nice to hit, but not at the expense of the priority goal. The big difference this year is that in some sense I have several ‘secondary goals’, although since I’ve eliminated most other distractions maybe I’ll have a chance of achieving them all as if they were priority goals. We’ll see. My priority goal adjusting per quarter allows me to dive 100% into something on a sprint basis, and either eliminate if I don’t enjoy, or double down if I do. Like I mentioned in the beginning of the article I don’t necessarily recommend this for most people- you must be honest with yourself and make sure you’re not creating excuses to get lazy, and it’s really more for people who are questioning what they’re working on. What I’m working on(writing) will be a new challenge for me, and so I’ll be tweaking the ways in which I try it, and going down the path I most enjoy.

So, there’s not necessarily a specific yearly path with a plan like this, but all I know is I’ll enjoy it and it will lead to good things.

Go as far as you can see, and when you get there you will see farther. – W. Clement Stone

The benefit of not focusing at all on the money is that I put out content that I want to put out. Like the quote about the ‘hack’ mentioned earlier, I don’t rent myself out to what’s hot, which is significantly different content than what matters. People want what’s hot. People need what’s important. The problem is, if it’s not hot they usually don’t realize it’s important, so the lack of demand for it creates an economy where everyone is producing content around the ‘hot’ subjects.

In the early years of this century, the most highly respected diplomat of all the great powers was the German ambassador in London. He was clearly destined for great things- to become his country’s foreign minister, at least, if not its federal chancellor. Yet in 1906 he abruptly resigned rather than preside over a dinner given by the diplomatic corps for Edward VII. The king was a notorious womanizer and made it clear the kind of dinner he wanted. The ambassador is reported to have said, “I refuse to see a pimp in the mirror when I shave.” That is the mirror test. Ethics requires that you ask yourself, What kind of person do I want to see in the mirror in the morning? – Peter Drucker

When I look in the mirror, as the quote says, I refuse to see a pimp, despite the profitability of becoming one in this industry.

First quarter priority goal

My priority in the first quarter will be releasing an average of one article per week to the blog. So, by the end of the first quarter I’ll have 13 new articles posted. However, even though it’s a number goal, the focus is on quality, not quantity.

Yearly Goals:

  • I will write a book that changes the way people think.
  • My fitness goal is getting to 2.9% bodyfat(calipers) while weighing 150+ pounds.
  • I’ll create a high quality singles event, or something similar that makes meeting high quality people more efficient.

The priority goal will always be what the quarterly goal is. So, there’s a chance I double down on a specific goal and a victim could be one of the yearly goals, but that’s okay. As long as I ensure accomplishment of my priority goal(which at this point will be re-set each quarter for me), I’m happy.

How I’ll accomplish my goals:

How I’ll accomplish my fitness goal:

Working out daily on my workout program outside of rest days, and eating a specific macronutrient breakdown.

Fitness is a habit that just has to be maintained- I already know how to do it, so it’ll make it a bit more feasible to accomplish a very aggressive goal while also pursuing other goals. I already went thru the struggle to ingrain the habits, so I just need to get them back on track by putting systems in place that ensure success. Once the habits are back, getting shredded is just an expected byproduct that you don’t even have to think about.

The variable that I’ll have somewhat limited control over will be the amount of muscle I can gain while cutting(which is difficult), but I won’t find out unless I attempt it.

How I’ll accomplish my book goal:

Having “writing a book that changes the way people think” as the goal keeps my values aligned with the book. If my goal was, “sell 50,000 copies”, or “get a $500k book deal”, my book may turn out differently, because my actions would lead to accomplishing that goal. If I wanted a $500k book deal, I’d be spending most of my time on marketing now, not writing. You don’t normally get book deals for your writing, you get them for your marketing. I don’t want to spend my time on marketing. That would make me unhappy. Clicking buttons and arbitraging traffic/subscribers would be profitable for me, but that’s not how I want to spend my time. There’s nothing wrong with marketing if that’s what someone enjoys doing, or if that helps them meet a specific goal. I just know it’s not what would make me personally happy at the moment. So, pre-marketing(building a giant list or huge traffic numbers) to hawk the book once it’s ready, which would be great for book sales, isn’t what I’ll be spending my time doing. My list and traffic is likely to grow as a result of publishing high quality articles, which is something I enjoy, but I’m okay sacrificing significantly bigger numbers for enjoyment, as well as the ability to put out as high quality of a book as possible. Maybe selling a certain number of copies will be a goal once the book is finished, but right now it’s not important to me. I enjoy tier goals anyways, and writing the best book I can is a good first tier to hit.

If I’m going to have any chance of accomplishing a goal, I must be motivated to achieve it. If I had set “get a $500k book deal” as my goal, I’d be marketing the shit out of everything this year and my posts wouldn’t be as good but I’d be likely to get some sort of book deal. However, I’d be a lot less happy because a book advance wouldn’t inspire me to wake up and market everyday, because I don’t want to do that. I want to write a book that changes the way people think. So, having another $500k(or whatever number) doesn’t help me do that, it just gives me another $500k. So, I’m not concerned at all with a book deal of any kind, just on writing the book I want to write. Now, 10 years ago?… Ya, a big advance would have been life changing, so it would have made sense for me to be marketing my face off to try and arbitrage a big book deal. Now, it would just make me unhappy chasing something that doesn’t positively affect my life. If I died in a year I wouldn’t say, “well at least I got a lot more traffic this year!”. No one would.

The reason I’m explaining my thought process behind this is so that you can think about it for your own goals. The first goal that normally comes to mind may not be the goal that would actually motivate you.

Before hoping to sell a certain number of books, first I need a book. How do I get a book? Well, I need to write. Writing a certain number of hours per day essentially guarantees I end up with a book at some point this year.

Maybe I finish the 1st quarter goal of writing one article per week and I say, “you know what I wrote my one article a week, but I’m not any further along to having a book”. Then, maybe my 2nd quarter goal becomes writing the same amount per day, but for the book instead of articles. Or, maybe I start writing twice as much per day, where the blog post habit is built in, but I put in additional writing everyday for the book. That’s the benefit of having these sprint goals. If I was tied to a certain long term goal without knowing exactly how certain parts of things will play out as I progress/achieve quarterly goals, and learn what I’m enjoying most, I may continue for a year doing something I don’t want to do.

How I’ll accomplish the dating event goal: 

Dating the way most people date is really suboptimal if your goal is to find a high quality person you match with. This would be a post in itself, plus it’s secondary to the other goals at the moment, so I’ll save for another day.

How I’ll accomplish my currently quarterly goal:

  • Write at least 4 hours/day

When setting your priority goal and your actions to guarantee achievement, it’s important your internal dialogue helps eliminate limiting beliefs that will either make you set a weaker goal than you’re capable of, or give you reasons to quit during your quest for achievement of the goal.

Example internal dialogue for me:

Goal: Average one article per week

Limiting belief Billy: How?… Some of my posts take 20+ hours to write.

Logical Billy: Okay, write 4 hours/day.

Limiting belief Billy: Per day! How?… Days get busy there’s all sorts of stuff that comes up.

Logical Billy: Okay, eliminate the things that come up. Wake up at 4:30am to make sure writing is always done.

Limiting belief Billy: 4:30! How?… I need 8 hours of sleep to operate well. That means I’d need to be asleep by 8:30.

Logical Billy: Okay, so be in bed around 8, so you’re asleep by 8:30.

Limiting belief Billy: 8! But I’d never be going out much at night.

Logical Billy: Okay, so don’t go out much at night

Limiting belief Billy: Oh, okay.

logicalbilly

 

The only reason I’m including this internal dialogue is because of how many comical excuses I hear as to why people can’t achieve their goals. They’ll hold onto any reason they can justify as an excuse to explain to others why they aren’t doing what they want in life. When you tear away the nonsense, you’re left with nothing but an excuse, no matter how reasonable you attempt to make your excuse sound to others.

Goals are so easy when you really break them down. Yes, you have to sacrifice some things when you want to achieve a goal, but let’s really think about this…

If you look at my goal, the only thing I’m sacrificing is going out much at night. I can still go out, I can still hang with friends, I can still date, I can still travel, I can still work out, I can still do literally everything I’m already doing/want to do. The only thing that changes is I do them on an earlier schedule than I’m used to. So, occasionally there’ll be something fun going on at night that I’d prefer to do that I’ll skip, or maybe I go and am a bit tired the next day and need a nap. But, let’s take a look in the future a year from now. If I went out at night would I look back at the year and say, “wow, I’m sure glad I went out so much at night!”?

No, it won’t be something I miss at all. I can still see the same people I would have seen at night during the day. However, if I achieve my goal, it will be fulfilling for me and I’ll look back and be very glad I made the sacrifices I did to guarantee achievement of the goal.

When I hit a very aggressive fitness goal in the past, I didn’t look back and say, “man, I really miss the pizza and ice cream I didn’t get to eat this year”… Of course not, it gives you even more satisfaction in having sacrificed to achieve your goal, when you know most other people give in. As you progress towards your goal, the struggle is actually rewarding. I enjoy the struggle. If you truly commit, the struggle becomes the most fun. The excitement from goal achievement is awesome, but the struggle even more so. The pain or sacrifice is like candy and you get to be the sugar fiend.

What I’m doing to weigh the odds of achieving my goals in my favor:

Eliminating all distractions, and all monetary considerations.

I’ve always had something going on… now I’ve got ‘nothing’ going on, so it’s even more important I’m not interrupted. I initially got a private villa in Bali so that I could focus.

eliminate distractions

Since this posting I’ve relocated to Cape Town, South Africa, but in general I’m putting myself in situations where I’m not distracted.

No activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied … since the mind when distracted absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything which is, so to speak, crammed into it. Living is the least important activity of the preoccupied man; yet there is nothing which is harder to learn. – Seneca

I know I can’t be distracted by the things most people are distracted by if I want to have a year I’m happy about. The ‘time suck’ emails, the normal day to day that most people get caught up in, the new opportunities that will do nothing but distract me… they must all be eliminated.

People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy. – Seneca

 

Maybe other people are better at blocking out things, but I have as much shiny object syndrome as anyone. I have more business ideas in a week than many entrepreneurs have in a year, which is not always a good thing.

I know that for me, elimination of distractions and going more the essentialism route is +EV.

Is reading some awesome new strategy about building a list or the newest traffic hack or the hottest conversion trick going to help me?

Hmm.. lemme check my current priority goal:

One article per week.

Geez, doesn’t say anything about traffic or subscribers… I guess not.

May not learn the newest traffic hacks. Will accomplish my goal.

Here’s my tentative daily schedule that I will test and tweak as the year progresses:

If you want more details on how to set your schedule to accomplish your goals, download the pdf at the bottom of this post or if you’re already a subscriber you’ve obviously already received it in your inbox 🙂

  • 4:30 wake up
  • 5:00 writing
  • 9:30 main task
  • 10:15 gym
  • 12:30 other tasks, entertainment, or more writing
  • 8:00 read in bed
  • 8:30 sleep

I’m also eating a lot of food throughout the day to help reach my fitness goal, usually through a cook or meal delivery service to make more efficient.

So, I still have a packed day, just not packed with nonsense. I only do things that get me the results I want, and allow me to live a life I enjoy.

Let’s compare my schedule with the average person:

  • Wake up tired
  • Drive to work
  • Work on lots of random ‘stuff’
  • Check lots of social media so you don’t miss anything ‘important’
  • Throughout the day figure out what to eat, usually choosing very unhealthy options because it’s unplanned and that’s ‘easier’.
  • Sit in traffic on way back from work
  • Possibly some tv to distract their brain at the end of the day because they’re burnt out from doing things they didn’t want to do.
  • Sit awake in bed wondering why you don’t have the life you want
  • Repeat

Such a waste of time all day, and never going to magically produce living the life you want.

Some other rules I’ve started implementing for myself this year that help keep my daily schedule in check, which help make my goals easier to achieve:

  • No flights before noon- this allows me to get my writing and my workout in, even if I’m traveling. I noticed that on days when I have flights it’s often hard to do these things. So, I just eliminate the possibility of creating forced off days for myself. Again, just eliminating things that hinder chances of reaching my goals.
  • No phone while laying in, or sitting in bed- I noticed ‘just checking facebook for a minute’ before bed, or when I got up in the morning often turned into an absurd amount of time spent absorbing that internet dopamine. It either limited my sleep, which then limited my productivity the next day, or delayed me from starting my day in the morning. So, a very simple good habit, no phone while touching bed, eliminates a bad habit with very little effort.

Remember, your life is a byproduct of your habits, and most good or bad habits are leading to the life you are living right now. A few small tweaks here and there will make a significant difference, even though it sounds like an insignificant change.

The flight rule might give me over a dozen extra writing days and workouts I might not have gotten this year, and the bed rule maybe a few hours/week. Add that up over a year, and potentially several weeks worth of writing or workouts will be accomplished that may not have without the new rules in place.

I remember the first time I met Jay Papasan, who co-wrote The One Thing(highly recommend reading), which is a great book that does a phenomenal job of breaking down how certain actions and habits act as dominoes that lead to accomplishing what you want. We were grabbing coffee in Austin where we’re both based, and as we were discussing our goals I remember him lining up salt shakers to illustrate the domino effect that each action has on everything else. Literally any small action, or habit, has a domino effect on other things that will happen in your life. This is something most of us dismiss because it’s hard to realize the importance each action and habit has on our life.

—–

  • Don’t compare results with others. Focus only on what I want. I will clearly make less money in going the route I’m going, so it’s important not to let results from those profiting from what’s hot distract me into going a different direction. “I refuse to see a pimp in the mirror”
  • Not capping flow. I keep my day relatively flexible after getting my priority goal task done. This allows me to keep going with my writing if I’m in flow. Having mandatory stop times for writing if I’m in flow would be -EV.
  • Cut out time needed to travel from place to place. When I was in Medellin the first few weeks, I was spending hours and hours per day going out to try and find good food to eat, ordering, waiting, and then finally eating it. Once I got a cook lined up productivity skyrocketed. In Bali despite having a cook come to the house each day, the traffic and weather were horrendous, so a simple trip to the gym sometimes turned into a long, unproductive time waiting out a rainstorm with a motorbike, or hiring a driver to sit in bumper to bumper traffic to get there, and then waiting for one to do the same on the way back. A lot of wasted time just waiting around. This among other things made it super inefficient for my goals, so I hopped on a flight to Cape Town because I heard it was awesome, and I currently live right across the street from a major gym, with many cafes and coffee shops within a short walk to go write from.

goalachievementmap

I’m planning to spend the next several months in Cape Town. No distractions in Colombia helped a lot, and I want to replicate that effect here. Little extreme? Probably. Will I accomplish my priority goal this quarter? Most definitely.

What to expect:

  • 13 new articles by the end of quarter one
  • Higher quality articles than you can find anywhere else for the content I’ll write on. I’m committed to writing better content than anyone in the space. A part of me says, “wait, you’re not supposed to say that.” The other part of me knows that needs to be my mindset. It sounds semi-contradictory to ‘don’t compare yourself to others’, but in knowing this is my specific priority goal at the moment, making sure the quality is better than anything out there is important to me. Not getting distracted with other’s goals/numbers is a bit different. My goal is to make you consider new ways of thinking. I want each article to be the best article you can read on the subject. If it’s not, writing it seems like a silly use of time. My goal isn’t regurgitation of what’s already been said, it’s to say something new, and/or say something in a more optimal way for you to understand or put into action, that will lead to an improved life.
  • And if you’re interested, a quarterly breakdown talking about how the quarter went, how the priority goal went, how yearly goals are progressing and how I’m setting up the next quarter.

(Please comment below the article if this is of interest to you. If there’s enough interest I’ll do a detailed breakdown so you can track how I’m doing throughout the year.)

Closing thoughts on how to set and achieve goals

Don’t let “he was going to do it tomorrow” be what they write on your tombstone. – Unknown 

So, while this post basically gives you a really in depth look at what I decided and how I came to that decision, it really came down to not putting off something I know I wanted to do, despite passing up a lot more money from alternative routes in the meantime.

I have no idea what that will lead to, but it will probably be good things.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path. – Steve Jobs

I’ve always believed if you want uncommon results, you’ve got to travel an uncommon path.  

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—. I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. – Robert Frost

Pursuing a path that purposely avoids better financial rewards is definitely an uncommon path. Like I mentioned I’m more concerned with life/happiness optimization than monetary optimization at this point. It may lead to monetary gains in the future, but it’s not the focus so we’ll let it play out and let what happens, happen.

Successful careers are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values.- Peter Drucker

—–

To be perfectly clear, I’m not saying you should follow this method for your goals. I’m just openly showing you what I’m currently doing and how I came to the decision. I can pick out potential flaws in my own plan- a part of me thinks that not spending time scaling up a bigger audience is a huge flaw(or hiring someone to do so) because less people will be exposed to the content I’m producing. If I significantly expanded the amount of people reading my content, I’d feel great about it and I’d positively impact more people. But, for me personally at the moment, I knew if I set a specific number for audience size it’d distract me and make me want to hit that number. It’s just how I’m wired. So, again, I eliminated all distractions for the time being, even ones that positively impact some of those goals.

I’ll leave the job of sharing/promoting my content up to you for the time being 

A man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his DESIRES. In doing this, he is fulfilling a need (giving himself identity by functioning in a set pattern toward a set goal), he avoids frustrating his potential (choosing a path which puts no limit on his self development), and he avoids the terror of seeing his goal wilt or lose its charm as he draws closer to it (rather than bending himself to meet the demands of that which he seeks, he has bent his goal to conform to his own abilities and desires).

In short, he has not dedicated his life to reaching a pre-defined goal, but he has rather chosen a way of life he KNOWS he will enjoy. The goal is absolutely secondary: it is the functioning toward the goal which is important. And it seems almost ridiculous to say that a man MUST function in a pattern of his own choosing; for to let another man define your own goals is to give up one of the most meaningful aspects of life — the definitive act of will which makes a man an individual. – Hunter S Thompson

What I put out is only successful if it positively impacts your life in ways that others could not produce. I want to help those who are taking the action to help themselves.

You may not realize it but your shares and comments help me realize what’s most helpful to you. It’s a way of voting for value. So if there’s something in any of my articles that you found really helpful, or helped you get an “aha” moment, let me know so I can give you more of them.

Simply put, I want to help.

 

how to set goals


4 countries in 4 days, with a ‘94% chance of living’


I normally don’t post this type of content on my blog, but my friends urged me to start sharing some of my adventures. I shared this a few weeks with them, and decided to share here.

To give a little context so the references make sense, I was living in Bali and had already had a run in with a bat a couple times. I had an open roof bathroom(my bathroom) and to keep the story short, there was someone flying around the bathroom a couple times when I tried to take a shower, and it wasn’t me. I posted about the encounters with the video of the roof opening to see if anyone had ideas how to avoid future run ins.

A week later, this happens:

 

I had just finished up my dinner at a local cafe(in Bali at the time), and was riding back to my villa on my bike. Something flew by and brushed my arm as I was riding. Figured maybe it was a bird or something. I get back to my spot and decide to wash my arm off. I go into the bathroom, throw some soap and water on my arm and it stings. wtf? Why does my arm sting? I look close and there were red marks. I squeezed and a little blood came out. Oh boy.

So… I start googling “bat bites”. If you didn’t catch my last Bali post, I had a few encounters with bats already, so it was something to be worried about. Turns out, bat bites are often really hard to feel, and many people never even know they were bit. I looked at the images and hmm… google bat bite arms look a lot like my arms. I couldn’t be sure but I decide I better get it checked out.

I ask the owner’s son for a ride into town and he suggests I should just throw some cream on it instead of going to the doctor. “You just rub it in!”, he says excitedly, clearly happy about providing me that advice. I thank him for a solid, and obviously well thought out idea, but I decide to make sure I don’t get rabies instead.

He drops me off in town at the doctor’s and I tell him what happened. He explains that it’s often pretty hard to tell with bat bites, so it possibly could have been a bird’s claw or something, but due to the fact that there were bats in the area, there was a definite risk.

Our conversation felt like some comedic sketch. There was times when I thought I was being punk’d.

Just to give you a sense of the scene, any info we’re exchanging is done so with the biggest grin ever on his face. No matter what kind of news balinese give you, they do so like it is the happiest/best news they could tell you. They always have a smile. If I was foaming at the mouth he’d smile and excitedly tell me that I didn’t look so good.

“Only about 6% of bats have rabies… It used to be 6.5%. Now only 6%”, as if the reduction was somehow relevant to my decision.

“Umm, but if it did and I don’t get the shots, I die right?”

“Yes, 100% fatal.

…but very low chance, so up to you.”

Da f$*k?

6/100 times I die if it was a bat and he’s talking about it like we’re deciding whether I should order a sandwich or not.

Umm, ya doc I think I’ll choose not dying.

“You are unlucky”, he says with a big smile on his face.

He tells me how rare it is for bat bites in Bali.

“I’ve only seen 4-5 cases with bats here”.

I’m like, “this year?”, because rabies scares are common in Bali.

“No, in my life…Haha!”

They laugh/giggle at everything too.

He looks at his computer screen and has a kind of puzzled look on his face.

“Seems you were also in here just a few weeks ago because of a cat!?”

I explain that I’d been bitten/scratched by a cat after accidently stepping on one at the gym. Silly me not looking out for cats in there.

catwatch

 

“Haha, you are very unlucky”, his grin getting even bigger.

I had him repeat it so I could record it, but it was 10x better in real time.

“You are unlucky vid”

I tell him to bring on the shots. I’d heard they’re pretty painful, so I ask if they’ll hurt much. “Maybe some”, he says while still grinning as if he’s going to enjoy stabbing me.

“I had to get them once.”

“Oh really?”

“Yes, my cousin bite me.”

“Wait, your cousin bit you so you got rabies shots??”

“Yes, human mouths very dirty!”

wtf?

“What, I don’t understand… were you worried your cousin might have rabies?”

“You can never be too sure!”

I can’t make this stuff up.

At least I’ll get to meet a pretty nurse out of this or something.

Instead, in through the door walks an enormously large man with a bunch of needles in his hand. Solid. He stabs me in each arm and throws a tetanus shot in my ass for giggles.

I head back to bat villa to live another day.

I wake up the next morning and decide I should probably get some more medical opinions. See, the doctor had told me that I didn’t need immunoglobulin because of the location of the bite. Seeing as though ‘death’ is the side effect if he’s wrong, I decide it might be worth an extra call or two.

To make a long story short, that ‘call or two’ turned into me gifting piles of money to Verizon, and learning more about rabies vaccines than just about any non rabies doctor on the planet. Based on the information I now had, it was decided I should get the immunoglobulin.

And, the thing with immunoglobulin is, if you need it, you need to get it within 7 days. The good news was, I felt confident it was the right move to get it. The bad news was, they didn’t have it in the city I was in. That was part of the reason I spent so long on the phones, not only determining that I needed it, but the type of the vaccine to get, as well as the best place to go for it.

The language barrier made the conversations much longer than normal, and much more entertaining.

Example conversation:

…after an already in depth conversation explaining that something flew by and brushed my arm, but I didn’t know for sure it was bat…

“So it flew by you?”

“Yes”

“But it might not have been a bat?”

“Correct. Could have been a bird, could have been a bat. Not sure, I barely saw it as it flew by”

“Was it a monkey?”

Most of these calls were done in broken english, which worried me that I’d show up in another country for a shot, and they’d have no idea what I was talking about.

I double checked that the place that seemed best would have doctors that could speak english.

“The doctors speak english right?”

“Almost.”

“Almost??? What does that mean?”

“Doctor almost speak english”

“Oh, that explains it. I’ll see you soon!”

After many exhilarating conversations with people from Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand, I booked a flight to Bangkok, where not only were shots $1k instead of $4k+ in Indonesia, but they were leaders in rabies.

“Leaders in rabies, or leaders in preventing rabies?”, I wondered aloud.

Shit, who’s got time for details, I had a flight to catch!

Either way I’m freerolling with $3k, feeling like a rabid winner.

Well, I thought I had a flight to catch. Every time I tried to book the flight, it was declining. I tried another card, same thing. Occasionally when outside the country your card will get locked to prevent fraud charges. I called my parents to see if I could try theirs. Same thing, declined. Oh, boy. I have to catch a flight for an anti-death shot and they won’t let me book!

I didn’t have time to sit there and try and call the credit card company or airlines to see what was up. I was barely going to make it as is. I decided to just head for the airport and hope for the best. I figured I’d call the credit card company and airline on the way.

A month in Bali was packed into my suitcase in about 15 minutes, and after navigating on the back of a motorbike with luggage out of the ricefields, I met the uber driver in semi civilization and headed to the airport. I told him I had to make it there quickly, and he took his task very seriously as we swerved in and out of traffic at insane speeds for the next hour. I would have peed my pants but I hadn’t ate or drank all day… I was starving, dehydrated, and headed to the airport without a flight.

I got a hold of my credit card company and they said there was no issue with my card, it must have been with the airline. I called the airline, and they said the flight was full. I asked them if there was any way to get on. They said they may offer a voucher if someone wants to take a different flight, but no guarantees. After getting familiar with the american embassies the last few days, I decided to give them a shout. I mean, hey, if anyone could get someone on a booked flight I figured it might be them. No answer. Called more embassies. No answer. Cool, I’ll handle it myself. I barely had any cash left on me because in Bali almost no one takes a credit card. Like, seriously almost no one. Meals? Cash. Gym membership? Only cash. Rent?… ya just cash.

I only had 2 $100 bills that the exchanges wouldn’t cash because they had writing on them, and a very tiny amount of rupiah(indonesian currency). $200 is a lot there, so I knew my plan. If no one took the voucher I would stand in the middle of the gate, and make an announcement that I was putting an extra $200 on top of the voucher for someone’s ticket. I hoped to be mauled in excitement. It’d be a more exciting way to go out than rabies. With my luck the person to take me up on it would be a professional balinese money exchanger and tell me he can’t take it because it has a marker spot on it.

I get to the airport and it’s a very short line. Sweet, plenty of time to negotiate my way onto the plane. I check my watch, about 4.5 days until death… 6% of the time. I mean, you don’t die right away, that’s just when it’s too late to catch it. Shit, maybe it was higher. Who knows, I got that number from a guy who was vaccinating himself from human bites.

So, this tiny line was taking forever. I didn’t understand. There were maybe a dozen people in front of me, and 2-3 attendants helping them. An hour later, I’m literally in the same line. I finally make my way up to the counter and get ready to unload my sales pitch to get on this fully booked plane with no ticket.

“Passport please.”

“Okay, so, I don’t actually have a ticket I tried to…”

“Passport.”

“Yes but I’m not in the system my purchase didn’t go…”

“Passport?”

“Okay, sure!”

Long pause while she searched for my nonexistant trip, as I replayed my pitch in my head.

“Okay, Mr. Murphy, you’re in 47c on the first leg to Singapore and….”

“Wait I have a ticket?”

“Yes, you just need to pay for it it’s unpaid.”

She slid me a piece of paper that was literally an IOU.

I shit you not the airline had booked my ticket, and written a note to themselves that I still owed them money for it. Welcome to Indonesia.

As I waited for my boarding passes, I now realized why it had taken so long to get through that tiny line. She was handwriting me a receipt for everything. The time, the flights, what I paid… everything. lol

receipt1

 

receipt2

 

“Am I going to make the flight?”

I had gotten to the airport with plenty of time, but now I had burned close to 1.5 hours getting through a 12 person line, and still had to get through security.

A man who worked for the airline took a look at the security line, and gave me a nod.

“You should be fine.”

Sweet.

“You may have to book another ticket to get into Thailand though.”

“Another ticket? What do you mean?”

“You got a 1 way ticket, so they’ll want to know when you’re leaving. Sometimes they won’t let you in without an outgoing ticket.”

I didn’t have time to think about that now, I barely had time to get to the gate. I’d worry about that hurdle if it came up.

Finally I received some very nicely hand written receipts and off I went.

Made it through security in a breeze, and not long after slid into my seat, ready to get this show on the road.

I was so happy to be on the plane I didn’t care how bad the person next to me smelled. He was coming from an extended time in Bali and while I didn’t confirm it, I’m not entirely sure his place had a shower.

I started wondering what % of the time a bat would have to join me in the shower before I stopped showering(see previous post), before drifting off to sleep.

I arrived in Singapore and headed to the board to see when my flight was taking off. Hmm, not up there, maybe I’ve got some time for a meal. Uhhh, yep. After checking my ticket I realize I’ve got like 9 hours. lol. In my rush and excitement just to get to Bangkok combined with my lack of geography skills, I didn’t realize the majority of my 14 hour trek was a layover. Luckily Singapore airport is the shit. I would seriously consider living in it for a month. They’ve got everything. A gym, massage rooms, arcade, business center, movie theater, tons of restaurants and bars. They even had a sort of hotel there that you rent in 6 hour blocks. If I didn’t need to go to Thailand I would have worked out a long term deal on the spot. I grabbed a meal and went back and got a room. “We just have one room left, so price is …” and he named some price much higher than what was listed. “Cool, I’ll take it.”

“Your check out time is 5:30am, what time would you like a wake up call?”

“Umm, 5:29.”

“No, no, no, no. I’ll put you down for 5:15.”

Well, alrighty then!

As I was finishing checking in and about to head to my room, a guy came in and asked a lady at the desk if they had any rooms. “Yes we do!”

lol. I headed off to my room to grab some sleep.

I wake up, semi refreshed, and head off for a quick pre-flight meal.

Off to Thailand we go.

plane

 

I make it to Thailand with no issues, grabbed all my bags and headed straight to the hospital for the shots. It’d been such a whirlwind, I hadn’t even booked a hotel yet. As I waited for the doctor, I figured a better use of my time would be swiping through Tinder. Solid decision making continued.

“Oh look, I’ve got a mutual friend with this girl”…

“Vince! Ohh, ya I think he lives out here sometimes, maybe he’s in town.”

I message him on whatsapp to see if he’s around.

“Yo, I’m in Bangkok for like 24 hours, you in town?”

He is! Sweet. I’m starving so we make food plans.

After a few minutes the doctor is ready to see me. He is awesome. Super glad I booked the trip. This guy knew his stuff.

rabies doctor

 

I quizzed him on everything I’d learned in the last 48 hours like a newbie who’s just read Rich Dad Poor Dad for the first time and is pretty sure he’s just a few days away from having a real estate empire.

We decide it’s best if I get the shot, just to be on the safe side.

He tells me they’ll spread it out between both legs so it isn’t quite so painful. “Ahh, shit. These are the ones that hurt. I’d heard stories about how painful rabies shots were, and thought I’d lucked out with the ones I got in Bali. Na, it’s the immunoglobulin that’s the killer. I was getting 10 cc’s, so they were going to spread them out and do 5 in each leg.

I have no idea what a normal shot is, but all I can say is it’s significantly more. I got one giant needle in one leg for about 30 seconds worth of a shot, and after a quick break for her to get the other needle up to bat, another 30 seconds or so in the other leg. I didn’t time it, but it felt like a long time. The second hurt like hell coming out. Okay, these are definitely the rabies shots people don’t like. I get it now.

nurse

 

As the nurse and I were making small talk, she learned the bite was likely from a bat.

“Oh, how did it happen? Were you playing with it?”

I couldn’t tell if everyone was f*$king with me or these were genuine questions.

“Umm, no I wasn’t playing with it.”

I got out of there to meet with Vince. As I stood up, my legs were already starting to feel like I’d just finished a monster leg day in the gym. These were gonna be sore.

I checked out and got my bill. Only $848. Boom! Well worth the trip. I would have paid $4-$5k in Bali, and probably more in the states.

#winning

vaccinebill

 

I hopped in an uber and headed off for Vince’s.

Had a good time hanging and catching up. We hadn’t seen each other since Tony Robbin’s event in Dallas last year. Always good to run into friends from all over the world, and hear about their latest adventures.

mevince

 

I had been debating where I would go, and had reached out to my network to build a short list based on my criteria. With the help of friends, and Tinder, I slowly eliminated some choices, and Cape Town rose to the top of the list. I booked a flight, so I was off to South Africa the next day.

The following day I realized I had a poor understanding of how crowded it’d be to get a car to the airport in Bangkok rush hour. I find myself scrambling to hop on a subway, having no idea where to get off in a country that only a small % speak english. Vince told me I’d be fine and gave me lots of confidence when he said, “you can still make it”. Shit! That doesn’t sound good. Plus the worried look on his assistant’s face made me think my chances weren’t great. Welp, if I miss my flight I guess I can just book a trip to Singapore and live in the airport for a while. Sounded like a legit backup plan, and I felt good about it.

As I squished into the crowded subway with all my bags, I second guessed my decision to pack a suitcase full of books.

books

 

Seemed like a clever idea at the time. Now having a portable library didn’t seem so brilliant. I’m wayyyy old school, and refuse to reform, but okay Kindle, I see your value.

As each stop passed, it got slightly less crowded. I asked a few people if they knew how long until the stop for the airport. They just looked at me like, “maybe next time you shouldn’t pack all those books.” No english.

Then a stop or two later, I see a light. I know that light, it’s coming from a super white person like me.

“Hey man!” I say with an enthused glimmer of hope that someone will understand my question. “Do you know which stop the airport is?”

He tells me it’s about 8 minutes away and says that’s where he’s going.

“Great, I’ll follow you!”

Boom. still #winning

In my determined focus to make sure I didn’t accidently get off at some random stop in Bangkok, my mind now shifted to the next task at hand. Actually making it on the plane.

As the subway pulled to a stop I see the bright light arise from his seat, and he shined the way as I followed behind.

Once inside the airport, I raced off… well, walked quickly I guess. When you carry libraries with you you’re not going to win any races. There were four floors to choose from because hey, one would have made things too easy. After being pointed in multiple directions, I finally found where I was going. I rushed up to an empty check in desk. Ahh, easy game. Well, no wonder it was empty everyone else had probably checked in an hour ago. As long as customs wasn’t backed up I might make it.

They go to check me in, and tell me I need another ticket.

“Another ticket?”

“Yes, the system won’t let us process it unless you have a ticket out of South Africa. You only have a one way.”

“Wait, so I can’t get on the plane even with a ticket there?”

“Not unless you have an outgoing ticket.”

I’m glad I had heard of this the day before about Thailand, or I wouldn’t have had any clue what she was talking about. I guess South Africa is even more strict about that.

“So, if I buy one right now I’m good?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,”, I say as I log onto the internet. Fake ticket it is.

I attempt to buy a 24 hour refundable ticket so that when I land I can just cancel it. I mean, if I’m trapped in South Africa, at least I’ll be trapped inside, and not at an airport. Guess I’ll find out when I leave.

No internet signal.

They refer me to information where they can supposedly help get me online.

I run over to information while leaving my bags just laying on the floor. I mean, they were almost checked in, kind of like when the doctors would “almost” speak english, and that turned out okay, so I figured I was good. Plus, if anyone tried to steal them they’d probably go for the heavy bag thinking it was valuables and be really disappointed to get home and realize their jackpot was a bunch of books.

Information gives me some pamphlet about how to use the internet. After attempting many times to sign up for this internet, I realize I keep getting kicked off because of the signal still.

“Yes, the signal is very bad in the airport.”

“Umm, so how can I get internet?”

They suggested going to some coffee shop outside of the airport.

Am I being leveled? I’ve never seen the movie but it reminded me of that Jim Carrey movie where they put him in all these situations to see how he’ll react and he doesn’t realize that his whole life is a tv show.

In January my life had just been one big running Seinfeld episode. Cats, bats, headbutted by a monkey, comical motorbike accidents. You name it. What I’ve written is just my last 72 hours.

I don’t have time to find the cameras so I run back to the counter to tell them what’s up and ask if there’s anywhere else to get internet. One guy feels my pain and asks for my phone, and puts in his personal internet code. Boom, VIP, no need to see ID. Don’t know who this guy was but he’s the only guy in the building with internet access.

I quickly log in, buy some random flight while double checking that it’s within the 90 day visa window so that I don’t run into another problem, and bam, a hopefully refundable $1k later I’ve got a ticket out of South Africa.

At this point my bags are gone, so either some thief is about to become way smarter while enjoying an excellent green wardrobe, or they checked my bags. Boom, bags checked. Still #winning

I ask my VIP friend what it’d take to get a VIP pass through customs. This dude hooks me up again. My man!

vip

 

Eight minutes until boarding, with customs still to go. I decide I should take a second to take a picture of the premium pass in my hand to remind myself to tell this story later. Another solid time investment, spewing dividends on the keyboard as we speak. I see the customs area and start going that direction. I notice a flight board listing the flights. I think about how much better this story will be if I can get a selfie with the flight time while it’s boarding. I laugh. This sounds like a great idea and would be funny, I tell myself. Maybe I’m slightly delirious from the lack of sleep and all the cc’s in my leg, which at this point feel like I squatted 500 pounds and I’m just kind of dragging my legs along. I decide maybe it’s better to get on the plane.

I drag my legs with me and confidently show the premium pass to the security lady. She points me to a line with almost no one there. Sweet. After a very small wait, I get up to the counter, and am told I didn’t fill out some form. I’m sent back to fill it out. At this point these things make smile. I know I’m on camera and want the audience to see how cool and calm I am. I fill out the form and go back to the line. She sends me through. I find the gate. I make the plane.

I settle into my seat amazed that I made the plane, and ecstatic that I won’t get rabies.

I decide it’d be funny to tell my seatmate the story about the bat, and then somehow make it look like I’m foaming at the mouth and want to bite him. Maybe I’m still delirious, and decide it’s probably a good time for a nap instead.

I realize that in 17 hours I’ll land in South Africa, with no idea where I’m staying.

Things have a way of working out. I dose off, and get ready for the next adventure.