Choose Yourself! (23 page)

Also, I try to cultivate friendships the way Superman cultivates friendships. He doesn’t hang out at the bar with Lex Luthor. Superman is only friends with the Superfriends: the Flash. Black Canary. Wonder Woman. Batman. They all have secret identities. They all see a world totally out of balance. They all have powers they use for good, and which they use to bring balance back to the world. All of my friends are superheroes, too. Each one of my friends has a different power. But they are all amazing powers and I’m blessed when I see those powers in action. And once someone joins the bad guys, they are no longer my friend. I’m busy saving lives. I don’t need bad friends.

I’m forty-four now. I no longer need to jump off a bed to prove I can fly. I know I’m going to save a life today. And nobody’s going to figure out who I really am. But I will tell you this: I’m Kal-El and I’m from the long-dead planet Krypton.

GANDHI CHOSE HIMSELF TO FREE AN ENTIRE COUNTRY

First, two small stories:

#1:

A woman walks with her son many miles and days to come to Gandhi. She is very worried about her son’s health because he is eating too much sugar. She comes to Gandhi and says, “Please, sir, can you tell my son to stop eating sugar.”

Gandhi looks at her and thinks for a bit and finally says, “Okay, but not today. Bring him back in two weeks.”

She’s disappointed and takes her son home. Two weeks later she makes the journey again and goes to Gandhi with her son.

Gandhi says to the boy, “You must stop eating sugar. It’s very bad for you.”

The boy has such respect for Gandhi that he stops and lives a healthy life.

The woman is confused and asks him, “Gandhi, please tell me: Why did you want me to wait two weeks to bring back my son?”

Gandhi said, “Because before I could tell your son to stop eating sugar, I had to stop eating sugar first.”

#2:

One of Gandhi’s financial backers once said, “It’s very expensive to keep Gandhi in poverty.” Consequently, I suspect the financial backers felt they had some influence on Gandhi. But money means nothing to a spiritual leader.

One time Gandhi said to a group of his backers, “I need to set aside one hour a day to do meditation.”

One of the backers said, “Oh no, you can’t do that! You are too busy, Gandhi!”

Gandhi said, “Well, then, I now need to set aside two hours a day to do meditation.”

Five lessons from this:

1. Nobody can tell you what to do. No matter what they pay you. No matter what obligations you feel you owe them. Every second defines you. Be who you are, not who anyone else is, or who anyone else wants you to be. An entrepreneur, for instance, has investors, customers, partners, employees, and competitors. Everyone wants his input heard. But only you can act to change the world with your ideas.
   
2. If Gandhi was, in fact too busy, then it meant he was not devoting enough time to his spiritual life. Hence his backer inadvertently convinced him he needed more time to devote to silence and contemplation. It is through silence that sound, activity, and action erupts. It was through nothingness that the Big Bang and all creation erupted. It is only through contemplation that the hidden shades of reality can be seen and right action can be taken. Gandhi knew this, and singlehandedly brought down an empire. It’s only through stillness that one can actively create.
   
3. I don’t give any advice on things I don’t know about firsthand. Sometimes I find myself in a political conversation and I realize, you know what? I don’t actually know anything here. And I give up. Or when someone asks me a question on my Twitter Q&As (held every Thursday between 3:30 and 4:30 p.m. Eastern), I don’t say anything unless I have personally experienced or seen the advice I am recommending.
   
4. Sugar is bad. And since most processed carbs break down into sugar, it’s all bad for you if you want to live healthy. Almost every disease out there comes from inflammation and extra weight. The extra weight comes from the sugars that the body breaks down so quickly it forgets to digest. It’s no coincidence that, as I mentioned earlier, Ramit Sethi uses flossing as an example in his talks about how to build discipline. It’s not just about discipline but health. Flossing is the first line of defense as sugar makes its way through your body.
   
5. Nothing is more important than the cultivation of yourself. So many people think they will save the world if they defeat “them,” where “them” is some evil force that is bringing the world down. But once you divide the world into categories, into an “us” versus “them,” then you immediately become a “them” and lose touch with who you really are. And before long you’re calling me a fucking douchebag on the Internet.
   

Society is made up of individuals. The only way to improve society is to come at it from a place of deep, individual satisfaction. The only way to do that is to spend long periods of time just being silent. Find out who the real you is. Ask yourself, “These thoughts that I am thinking, what is generating them?” They are not your thoughts. That is just the biological brain dancing in front of you. Who is the “you” they are dancing in front of? Find that answer, and
then
you can save the world.

The world is made to be filled with strife. Gandhi knew he could only be effective if he identified with the real “me,” which was deeper than the body named “Gandhi,” who was supposedly saving the world. India is a mess now, no matter what Gandhi did, but Gandhi provided a beacon while he lived.

Both of these stories are about the same thing, even though they seem completely different. Gandhi chose himself. He once said, “You must first be the change you want to see in this World.”

Every day I try hard to live by that quote. I hope you can, too.

NINE THINGS I LEARNED FROM WOODY ALLEN

• Try this exercise:
  pretend everyone was sent to this planet to teach you. Famous people, dead people, your neighbors, your relatives, your co-workers. This will give you a strong feeling of humility. And guess what, you will learn from people, you will appreciate them more, and they will actually appreciate you more. Because everyone loves to teach.
  

Think about what some of the titans of American industry could teach you about failure. Everyone who has ever been a success since the history of mankind began has had to deal with failure. Has had to start from zero—and usually more than once. Whether it was Henry Ford, who went bankrupt with his first car company, or Conrad Hilton, who went bankrupt with Hilton hotels the first time around, or the classic example of Thomas Edison who tried one thousand versions of his lightbulb before he achieved success.

But I’m going to start with a more mundane example. Someone who does whatever he wants, and has built his life, his art, and his career, around doing exactly what he wants: Woody Allen.

I hate Woody Allen. Here’s why. Because if you’re Jewish and a little neurotic—like Woody Allen—it has become a cliché to describe yourself as “Woody Allen-esque,” thinking it will attract women. This happens on dating services all the time. The idea is that you’ll attract some waiflike Mia Farrow-ish (or the seventeen-year-old Mariel Hemingway in
Manhattan
) blonde who will love all of your neuroses and want to have sex all the time.

This only happens in Woody Allen movies. And power to him. If Mariel Hemingway wants to have sex with him all the time, then no problem. He wrote and made the movies. He can do whatever the hell he wants in them. It’s up to you whether you believe it or not.

And people believe it. Lots of them.

Allen puts out a new movie every year or two. None of them will compete with
Star Wars
or
Harry Potter
in terms of gross dollars. But that doesn’t seem to bother his studio. They give him $10 million, his movie makes $20 million, everyone is happy, and he gets to keep doing what he’s doing.

So he’s built up a substantial body of work that we can learn from. Why learn from him? Because clearly he is a genius, regardless of what other opinions anyone might have of him (and I only know him through his work. I don’t know his personal life at all.). It is interesting to see how he, as an artist and creator, has evolved. To see how his idiosyncratic humor has changed, how he twists reality further to stretch our imagination. He always stands out and stays ahead of the other innovators. And for other people who seek the same, he is worth observing.

Here’s some of the things I’ve learned from him:

1. Failure.
One of my earliest memories is having a babysitter while my parents went to a movie. When they got home I asked them what they saw and they described a movie where a man falls asleep and wakes up in the future where a giant nose ruled the world. Woody Allen has been there since the beginning for me. And just the other day, I watched
Midnight in Paris
with Owen Wilson (who, despite looking very un-Woody Allen-esque, plays the virtual “Woody Allen” role very well). The movie explores the history of art and how no art form exists by itself but is always influenced by generation after generation of artists before it, dating back hundreds if not thousands of years. It’s one of his best.

But some of his movies are just awful. He admits it. In a 1976 interview in
Rolling Stone
, he said, “I would like to fail a little for the public…What I want to do is go onto some areas that I’m insecure about and not so good at.”

He elaborates further. He admits he could be like the Marx Brothers and make the same comic film every year. But he didn’t want to do it. It was important for him to evolve. To risk failure. To risk failure in front of everyone. And his movies did that, going from the early slapstick humor of
Sleeper
to the darker
Crimes and Misdemeanors
and
Match Point
.

Woody Allen has failed spectacularly, in every way we can imagine—personally, professionally, etc. And yet he’s always pushing forward, trying to surprise us again and again, and largely succeeding rather than giving up.

2. Prophetic.
In a 1977
Washington Post
interview he said, “We’re probably living at the end of an era. I think it’s only a matter of time until home viewing is as easy and economical as desirable.” In the past three days I’ve watched three Woody Allen movies on my iPad. I don’t know if technology changed the way he made his movies. But it’s clear he never got himself stuck in one particular form or style that would eventually fail to cater to the tastes of the average audience. To be creative and stand out in today’s world, you must always be diversifying the artistic experience you put out.

3. Flexible.
We admire the ChooseYourself-ers who quickly recognize mistakes and then transition their business accordingly (the catchphrase lately is that these entrepreneurs know how to “pivot”). Allen typically starts off with a broad outline, a sort of script, but it changes throughout the movie. In a 1978 interview with Ira Halberstadt he says, “To me a film grows organically. I write the script and then it changes organically. I see people come in and then I decide…it changes here. It changes if Keaton doesn’t want to do these lines and I don’t want to do these—we shift around. It changes for a million reasons.”

The entrepreneur, the entre-ployee. In general, all relationships in general shift and change. You set out in life wanting certain things—the college degree, the house with the white fence, the promotions, the family—but things become different. You have to adapt and be flexible.

4. Productivity.
To put out a movie every year or so, plus plays, magazine stories, and books, you would think Woody Allen works around the clock. In a 1980 interview, “If you work only three to five hours a day you become very productive. It’s the steadiness of it that counts. Getting to the typewriter every day is what makes productivity.”

He states later in the interview that when he was younger he liked to get things out in one impulsive burst but he learned that was a “bad habit,” and that he likes to wake up early, do his work, and then set it aside for the next day.

Probably the most productive schedule is to wake up early—do your work before people start showing up at your doorstep, on your phone, in your inbox, etc., and leave off at the point right when you are most excited to continue. Then you know it will be easy to start off the next day.

I read in a recent interview that it takes Allen a month to write a comedy and three months to write a drama. On three to five hours a day, it shows me he writes
every day
, he’s consistent, and he doesn’t waste time with distractions (going to parties, staying out late).

5. Avoid outside stimulus.
These days, I make a huge mistake every day. I start off with the loop: e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, my Amazon rank, my blog stats, my blog comments. Claudia asks me, “Did you finish the loop yet?” And I think it will only take a few seconds but it actually takes about twenty minutes. I probably do it ten times a day. That’s two hundred minutes! Three hours and twenty minutes! Ugh.