Choose Yourself! (5 page)

Every day I would dream about it. I thought with a little bit of money in the bank I could take a year off and write a novel. Or two. Or do a TV show. Or quit. Or whatever.

They seemed as enthusiastic about the deal as I was, so I assumed that the money was in the bank without ever looking for other opportunities. Big mistake. When you give up searching for frontiers, inevitably you end up stuck in a swamp, sinking deeper into the mud the more you struggle to get out. I’m not sure that analogy holds, but you get what I mean. Success comes from continually expanding your frontiers in every direction—creatively, financially, spiritually, and physically. Always ask yourself, what can I improve? Who else can I talk to? Where else can I look?

Lo and behold, after months of due diligence and negotiation, the company that I wanted to buy us, rejected us. I felt horrible.

Both of these situations happened at basically the same time, and for the same reason. In each situation my entire happiness seemed dependent on the decisions of one person. I gave power to that one person to make or break my life.

Of course, both rejections worked out better for me; they always will, for reasons that have to do not only with perseverance, but quantum physics, health, spirituality, being a real human, and many other things that I will discuss in this book.

But the most important thing these rejections gave me was a sense that NEVER AGAIN should I rely on the whims of one person to choose my success or failure in any endeavor.

And did that attitude work?

Of course not. It’s like telling someone with hundreds of thousands’ worth of plastic surgery to instantly go back to looking how they used to look. Their body no longer knows how. I kept kissing ass. I kept falling down. I kept being dishonest to my needs inside.

It took me a long time to begin the practice that really indoctrinated me into the Choose Yourself era. This book is about those practices so you can hopefully skip the years it took me to choose myself.

The ability to choose yourself—an ability that is now being forced on us for historical reasons discussed in the last chapter—is the result of a comprehensive framework of health that must be practiced to be experienced, and must be lived to be fulfilled. If you don’t like what I recommend, don’t do it. But it worked for me and all the times I’ve been down on the floor. It’s been the only way I’ve been able to get back up.

No matter how hard it tries, a ripple that laps onto the shore will never be as powerful as the ocean that created it. The goal is to be the ocean—the central force in our existence that moves mountains, creates all life, shakes continents, and is respected by everyone.

This book is about becoming the ocean. About choosing yourself to be the ocean. So everything that you do emanates out like ripples, everything you do moves the earth, and enhances your life and the lives of all the people around you.

Now, let’s enter the Choose Yourself era.

HOW TO CHOOSE YOURSELF

I’m an addict. For twenty years I replaced one addiction with another. I can’t even describe all of them. I’m actually embarrassed. Ashamed.

I would cling to whatever addiction was making me happy at that moment. A fire sucks the oxygen out of everything in the room. When the oxygen is gone, the fire is extinguished. Then burnout occurs. That’s addiction. It takes every form: entrepreneurship, drugs, sex, love, games, and escapism of all forms. I’ve been addicted to all of them. I’ve even been addicted to the 12-step meetings where you get to meet the other people who might be as screwed up as you are.

Addictions: let’s work a hundred hours a week for fame, money, sex, health, more fame, then F-you money, then stand on our heads, then get fancy artwork, big houses, guard dogs, pit bulls that kill people, bigger bank accounts. Heck, let’s own the bank. Then let’s double down on all of the above.

Now there is a new addiction. “All I want is freedom,” a lot of people say. But freedom from what? Who is enslaving you that you can’t get away from? Then people want freedom for their kids, or their parents, or their siblings, or their kids’ kids. Or five generations of kids. Where did all these kids come from?

But still, “It’s all for them. Everything I do.”

Then we get burned out. Too much fighting for freedom. Who were we fighting all of that time? When all that time we were free without realizing it. There are no chains on me as I write this. But the feeling is immense: all I want is freedom.

There are two very important basics for harnessing that freedom and succeeding in the Choose Yourself era. There’s no avoiding them. There are no excuses for not doing them. The good news is they are free.

ONLY DO THINGS YOU ENJOY.
This might seem obvious to you, but it isn’t to most. One might also say, “Duh, I’d love to do what I enjoy but I have to pay the bills!” Relax for a second. We’re going to learn how to do what we enjoy, first. I’m not just talking about those “only pursue a career you enjoy” platitudes, either. I mean it down to your very thoughts. Only think about the people you enjoy. Only read the books you enjoy, that make you happy to be human. Only go to the events that actually make you laugh or fall in love. Only deal with the people who love you back, who are winners and want you to win too.

This is a daily practice.

I only just started doing this in the past few years after being infinitely unhappy, getting divorced, losing money, losing jobs, careers, friends, everything I was clinging to. Eating a turkey sandwich in a diner by myself on Thanksgiving Day 2008, I said, “Fuck it.” I was done.

I used to go out every night. You never know, I would think. I used to go to every business meeting I was invited to. You never know, I would think. I used to go on TV every time I was asked. You never know, I would think. Maybe someone would SEE me. And call me and offer me and give me and want me and like me and love me. Maybe they would press the LIKE button on my face. Brilliant.

[Note to self: invent TV sets with “LIKE” buttons so people can LIKE people they see on TV and that somehow gets transmitted back to the TV networks.]

Ninety-nine percent of meetings don’t turn into money. Ninety-nine percent of the news is a lie (trust me. I know them). Ninety-nine percent of TV is about scandal, murder, and cheating. Ninety-nine percent of the people on the street will lick the flavor right off your Life Saver if you let them.

Every time you say yes to something you don’t want to do, this will happen: you will resent people, you will do a bad job, you will have less energy for the things you were doing a good job on, you will make less money, and yet another small percentage of your life will be used up, burned up, a smoke signal to the future saying, “I did it again.”

The only real fire to cultivate is the fire inside of you. Nothing external will cultivate it. The greater your internal fire is, the more people will want it. They will smoke every drug lit by your fire. They will try to ignite their own fires. They will try to light up their own dark caves. The universe will bend to you.

Every time you say yes to something you don’t want, your fire starts to go away.

You will get burned out.

You can say, “But what if I have to say yes to something I don’t want to do?” Fair enough. We have mouths to feed, responsibilities, retirement to save for, and many things that might keep us in the prison of “No.” Don’t worry about that yet. The Daily Practice plows the field, and makes everything clear so that you’ll know if your “yes” or “no” comes from a place of deep, internal satisfaction.

THE DAILY PRACTICE.
You are empty. I mean this literally. Our bodies are like little galaxies. Galaxies have billions of massive stars in them and yet the reality is that the space between those stars is so gigantic that a galaxy is mostly empty.

That’s exactly like you. You are made up of atoms. Every piece of you.
And yet the actual physical matter in an atom (protons, neutrons, electrons) take up only one-fiftieth of one percent of the space in that atom.
The rest is empty.

So you are empty. There’s nothing really there. The real you—the real fire—is inside this emptiness.

We spend our lives afraid of the emptiness. We want to fill it with love, with money, with pleasures, with anything that could put off the ultimate. But all of those things are never enough. They all decay.

Only the emptiness does not decay.

The best way I have ever found to fill that hole is not to seek external motivations to fill the emptiness, but
to ignite the internal fire that will never go out
. To light up my own inner sky.

So how do you do this?

Picture your body for a second. You have a heart that pumps blood one hundred thousand times per day, or seventy-two times per minute, sending 1.3 gallons of blood through your body. If there’s any blockage—in a vein or an artery—you’ll die very quickly. Within minutes. That’s a heart attack. Blood cleans the system, sending water, oxygen, and nutrients to every part of your body.

All you need to do to live longer is to constantly make sure you are doing everything you can to protect your heart and the blood that flows through it. This is a function of diet, exercise, sleep, and other things. If the heart gets sick, you die. When you finally die, make no mistake, it will be because the heart got sick.

Imagine now you have three other bodies alongside your physical body:

• an emotional body
  
• a mental body
  
• and a spiritual body.
  

Imagine a life force that flows between them and through them, much like blood. Imagine a central core that must keep everything healthy. Just like you must keep your heart healthy to live a long, productive, and even happy life, you must keep these other bodies healthy as well and exercise them on a regular basis. A daily basis. A minute by minute basis.

I call this the Daily Practice.

This might sound corny. It might sound like mumbo-jumbo. I don’t know. I don’t care. It’s a method of thinking that works for me. Other techniques might work for other people. Good luck to them. This works for me.

In the next chapter, I’ll describe a simple Daily Practice to start off with. But below is the best way to keep these bodies healthy. It is from a foundation of health (in all four bodies) that you build the platform to choose yourself. The rest of the book describes how one can use this foundation to build the succeeding layers to create even more choices that lead to success. And you’ll read stories of people who have done just that.

THE PHYSICAL BODY.
The shell that we must take care of to live. It houses everything we do. And it’s pretty simple. We know when we are doing bad things to it. Too often we think, “Once I achieve X, Y, Z, goal, I’m going to get back in shape.” But it doesn’t work that way. Not that you need to be ripped and jacked or eight-packed or whatever. You just need to be healthy. And you know what I mean?

You need to shit regularly. That’s it.

And how do you do that?

You don’t eat junk food. You sleep seven to nine hours a night. Avoid excess alcohol. Exercise. And by exercise I don’t mean run eight miles a day. I mean take walks. Can you take a ten-minute walk every ninety minutes? Can you take a twenty-minute walk? Can you use the stairs instead of the elevator? Do five minutes of yoga?

My routine: Wake up somewhere between 5 and 6 a.m. Mostly protein breakfast (I like Tim Ferriss’s slow-carb diet that he describes in his book
The 4-Hour Body
), and a late lunch around 2 or 3. Lots of walks and breaks while I walk. You can never get enough exercise really, and no creative person has ever complained about too much walking. And then I go to sleep between 8 and 9. Nobody ever died of starvation avoiding that third meal of the day. And if you eat too late in the day, or drink alcohol too late in the day (which pretty much wipes out drinking alcohol at all), your body gets into trouble digesting at night. Which will hurt your sleeping. Which will hurt your metabolism in the morning. And so on.

THE EMOTIONAL BODY.
Emotionally I try to surround myself with only positive people who inspire me. This way I can learn to be positive. To be a beacon to those around me.

It’s important to avoid people who bring you down. Not in a cruel way. But avoid engaging or overly dwelling on people who are constantly draining you of energy. A friend of mine is starting up a company as I write this. One of his partners is constantly criticizing him. Every time I talk to him he says, “ABC is at it again. Here’s what he said now.” And he goes into a long diatribe of the latest crimes against humanity his partner has committed.

The key is: acknowledge that the person is driving you crazy. You can’t suppress that. But with observation, the pain will begin to wither. And the less you engage with the person, the less overall effect that person will have on you. Even if that person is close to you (and they often are. That’s why they get to push all of those buttons), find out ways to not engage. Say hello in the hallway, smile nicely, but no engagement. Put a quota on yourself how much you can complain or feel anxious about that person in a day.

You can’t be beautiful unless you get rid of the ugliness inside. People become crappy people not because of who they are, but because they are crapping inside of you. Stop letting that happen.

• Here’s an exercise I do that can help in this regard: I try to be quiet. Instead of speaking the average 2,500 words a day that most people speak, it would be nice for me to speak just one thousand words a day when possible. This forces me to carefully choose my words and who I engage with.
  

THE MENTAL BODY.
Your mind desperately wants to be the BOSS. It needs you to be very, VERY BUSY with BS stuff so it can do all the things it’s good at: obsess, worry, fear, be depressed, feel exuberance, forward thinking, backward thinking, thinking thinking THINKING until…

burnout.

So you need to tame the wild horse or it will tame you until you are a slave. Nobody wants that. The way you tame it is through focused use. Set a goal: I’m going to come up with ten ways I can have more time for myself. Or I’m going to come up with ten ways I can make my job better. Or ten business ideas. Make sure the list you plan to do is a hard one. You need to make the mind SWEAT so that it gets tired. So tired that it’s done for the day. It can’t control you today. TIRE IT OUT! Then do it again. Ten MORE ideas. I discuss this much more in the section “How to Become an Idea Machine.”