Choose Yourself! (10 page)

i.
Do what they say.

ii.
Do it on time.

iii.
Do a little extra to surprise them.

iv.
Give them ideas for how their jobs can even be better. Never forget sales rule #1: Your best future clients are your current clients.

v.
Make their lives better. Listen to them. Go to their charity events. Introduce them to potential spouses. Introduce them to new jobs because you will have a bird’s-eye view of the entire job landscape in their industry. These are not just your clients of the month: these are your clients for life. You are on this planet to serve them and make their lives better. I’ve had clients stick with me from one business to the next, even in totally disparate areas. You’re never going to lose touch with the lives you save.

DEAL WITH CLIENTS I LIKE.
It’s horrible to deal with clients you hate. That’s like the plumber waking up at 3 a.m. to clean the shit from a condom-flushing lawyer’s pipes. I’ve had to do that. I’ve had clients call me up at three in the morning asking me for job advice. I’ve had clients call me up literally asking me “Do you like me?” I’ve had (I’m counting them in my head now) at least seven clients call me up asking me for bribes if I wanted more business. Did I pay? Of course I paid! I had employees to feed.

For a while I had a three-strikes-and-you’re-out policy. If a client wasted my time on three deals where I didn’t make money, then he was out. But I broke that rule too many times. Now I basically have a one-strike-and-you’re-out policy. When I look at the ways I’ve been ripped off by potential customers (doing work on “spec,” doing a deal where red flags were flying but I was overwhelmed by the dark side of the Force or whatever it was that made me part with my money, etc.), I’m really embarrassed. To think I paid for a great steak dinner for six just so I could hear a pitch about a time machine and a device that makes black holes. I’m about to sue myself right now.

BE ARTISTIC.
Being an entrepreneur means you’re going to create something in a way that a customer can’t get anywhere else. Creation is art. It’s how ideas collide in your head, then how materials collide to make your ideas real. Then it’s how people collide to bring your creation to life in the real world with real users. Then it’s how so much value is created so people are willing to spend money on it. How can you create that value? If you can ignore the petty worries. If you look out your window first thing in the morning and find beauty in the silence. The silence is the only place your creative ideas will come from.

MAKE A LOT OF MONEY.
A lot of money. Let’s be real. That’s the main reason to be an entrepreneur. “But the economy?” someone might say. There is more money floating around than ever before. And a lot of that money is buried and hidden from you. Time to reach out and touch it. The stock market has a capitalization of several trillion dollars. There’s another $2 trillion in private equity funds. There’s $50 trillion in transactions in the global economy every year. If you make money, someone will buy your company. Or, even better, you’ll make so much money so fast you don’t have time to sell your company.

Yeah, it’s hard. It’s stressful. Your employees will have sex with each other and then cry. People will talk about you behind your back. You’ll miss payroll. Your customers will drop you. Your investors will hate you every now and then. The key is to always have the base foundation built; your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual bodies need to be healthy and flowing with each other. This will provide the foundation from which your ideas will get generated, solutions and opportunities will appear almost magically in the face of the problems that inevitably arise for all entrepreneurs, and everyone around you will feel the benefits.

DEAL ONLY WITH COLLEAGUES I LIKE.
There’s that test: only hire someone you wouldn’t mind sitting next to on a plane ride across the country.

Better, then, to be the one hiring than the one trying to be hired. When you are trying to get hired, you put on the mask that says, “I’m the guy who you will like to sit next to flying across country.” I don’t like putting on masks. Nor do I like the people around me to put on masks. It’s very hard to see through all the costumes. People don’t even know they are wearing them; they go through so much of their lives pretending to be someone else, someone who is liked, instead of being who they really are.

COME UP WITH IDEAS.
When you work at one job, you come up with ideas for that one job. That’s fine. Nothing wrong with that. I’m not criticizing working for a big company (although I will. Stay tuned.). But when you have your own company, it never stops.

If you have a product company, you come up with additional features to put on your product. Every day. Then you spec it out. Assign it to someone to do it. Put a time line on it, and check in every day until it’s done. Then you roll it out. See how people use it, tweak it. Build a fan base around it. It feels really good to see someone using what you made.

If you have a service company, you come up with more services. For instance, if you are helping companies post to Facebook, how about you also help companies build an e-mail list out of their millions of Facebook fans?

No matter what, every day you are coming up with ideas to transform your business. When I was running Stockpickr .com, I wanted to create a fund that would invest in the top ideas from the top investors. When I was running a web services company, we almost went into the rap label business, the movie business, the tea business (!), the data business in about ten different areas. In retrospect, some of our ideas were great and we had the software to do them. I wish I had the business sense back then to really pursue some of the ideas. But I didn’t. If an idea didn’t bring in money every month, then it was out. I never raised a dime for that business.

For my next business, I raised $30 million out of the gate, and eventually pulled together $100 million. What happened? Well, it was a bad idea.

NOT BE AT THE WHIM OF ONE DECISION MAKER
(i.e., if you have a boss. Or if you have only one big client, who then basically becomes your boss).

I hate to beg. I hate to look at someone and think to myself, “If only they say ‘yes’ my entire life will be better.” I hate to be nice to someone just so they like me and say yes to me and whatever I’m offering. I bet there are some prostitutes out there who like their job. I don’t know. But I’m not one of them. I hate having sex with people I don’t love. And that’s what happens when one decision maker has control over your financial future at any moment in time.

BE AROUND LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE.
In every business, I’ve loved meeting my competitors. The reality is there’s no such thing as competition. The world is big enough for two people in the same space. If it’s not, then you are in the wrong business. Your sector should be big enough for a hundred competitors. That’s great news. It means you’re probably going to make money.

In every business I’ve been involved in, I’ve gone out of my way to meet my competitors over breakfasts. I always learn so much: how they build up (their “secret origin” story that every superhero and every entrepreneur has), how they get past certain hurdles, how they handle difficult clients, what clients they can throw me (!), do they want to get bought, how much do they think they are worth, how do they get customers, and on and on. Even now I’m not in any one business, but I like to meet successful bloggers, authors, and angel investors. I learn from all of them and build good friends. This is how you build your “tribe.” Your tribe, in part, is defined by you (you seek them out) but also defines you (you’re in the tribe of entrepreneurs or you are in the tribe of cubicle people).

BE AN EXPERT.
When you start a business and you have a service or product that is good enough for people to use over other similar products or services, then you are now an expert in your space. Even if you are new to the space, you’re an expert. I like that feeling. I like giving talks. I like writing about the areas that fascinate me. I like starting businesses or being involved in sectors of industry that fascinate me. Sometimes you shouldn’t be an expert and yet you still are.

When I started 140love.com, a dating service for people on Twitter, my site failed miserably. I was actually invited to give a talk at a Twitter-related conference. The title of the talk was “Twitter and Love.” I was going through a divorce, and I had been dumped by four or five girlfriends in a row. Now I was supposed to give a talk about love. The irony is so thick I could spread it on sandwich bread if bread wasn’t so high in carbs.

Anyway, that business died fast. And I didn’t show up for the talk on the day of the conference. They had to find a quick replacement. Sorry, Jeff Pulver. He never invited me to speak at a conference again.

ONE LAST THING.
I’ve discussed the reasons why this major paradigm shift is occurring. It’s not that the system is out to get you. Or the system is imploding. This is not a conspiracy theory about the government or capitalism or the “1 percent.” This is actually a great opportunity for people who can now navigate the rough surf that history is throwing up on our shores.

Regardless, you need to change for the changes that are coming. Some of these reasons I’ve covered in the preceding chapters, but I will go over all of them again so you don’t have an excuse for not remembering them.

1) The middle class is dead.
I laid out all the statistics and anecdotes earlier. Again, I don’t say this as something to be scared of. And maybe I’m saying it a little too harshly. But at the current rate of incomes, and with the flight of capital out of the United States, you have to take this into account when making major life decisions. It’s not like you can choose for this to not happen. It’s not a choice. This is happening. In fact, it’s already happened and we are all the Walking Dead.

2) You’ve been replaced.
Technology, outsourcing, a growing temp staffing industry, and productivity efficiencies have all replaced the middle class. The working class. Most jobs that existed twenty years ago aren’t needed now. Maybe they never were needed. The entire first decade of this century was spent with CEOs in their Park Avenue clubs crying through their cigars, “How are we going to fire all this dead weight?” The year 2008 finally gave them the chance. “It was the economy!” they said. The country has been out of a recession since 2009. Four years now. But the jobs have not come back. Everyone is getting fired. Everyone is toilet paper now.

Flush.

3) Corporations don’t like you.
This is not a surprise to capitalists and entrepreneurs or even artists. The entire idea behind a corporation is to set up a legal structure that takes advantage of cheap labor. The cheap labor makes something for you for less than you sell it. I’m not saying this isn’t unfair. It is what it is. But you have to make sure if you are being exploited that you learn how to exploit back. You use the corporate job as a rest stop on the way toward being healthy, on the way toward figuring out how to innovate and take advantage of the mythical safety net to move onto bigger and better things.

4) Money is not happiness.
A common question during my Twitter Q&A, asked at least once a week, is “Should I take the job I like or should I take the job that pays more money?”

Leaving aside the question,
should I take a job at all?,
let’s talk about money for a second. First, the science: studies show that an increase in salary only offers marginal to zero increase in “happiness” above a certain level. Why is that? Because of this basic fact: people spend what they make. If your salary increases $5,000, you spend an extra $2,000 on features for your car, you have an affair, you buy a new computer, a better couch, a bigger TV, and then you ask, where did all the money go? Even though you needed none of the above, now you need one more thing: another increase in your salary, so back to the corporate casino for one more try at the salary roulette wheel. I have never once seen anyone save the increase in his salary.

In other words, don’t stay at the job for safe salary increases over time. That will never get you where you want—freedom from financial worry. Only free time, imagination, creativity, and an ability to disappear will help you deliver value that nobody ever delivered before in the history of mankind.

By the way, this is not just an opinion. We can look at one simple profession: the law.

Lawyers are ranked number one in average pay. They are also ranked as the number-one profession for the percentage of people in that profession who are clinically depressed.

Of course, money can solve a lot of your temporal problems, and your worries in the material world. But it tends to magnify the big internal ones as well, the bad qualities.

5) Count right now how many people can make a major decision that can ruin your life.
I discuss this in the chapter “And Then They All Laughed.” I bring it up again so you can’t escape it: how many people do you have to kiss ass to in order to achieve career goals? One? Two? The point here is to not kiss ass at all. To know that there are at least twenty people who independently can help you to achieve the success you need.

You build up this list of twenty people the old-fashioned way—you help them. The only way to create value for yourself is to create value for others.

• Exercise:
  think of two people in your network who don’t know each other but you think can add value to each other’s lives. Introduce them. Do this every day. Get better and better at it. The more value you bring to the people in your network (even if it doesn’t directly bring value to you in an immediate way), the greater the value of your network. And then the greater value you will have.