Choose Yourself! (19 page)

NOT ORIGINAL.
I’ve never come up with an original idea in my life. My first successful business was making web software, strategies, and websites for Fortune 500 companies. Not an original idea but at the time, in the ’90s, people were paying exorbitant multiples for such businesses. My successful investments all involved situations where I made sure the CEOs and other investors were smarter than me. One hundred percent of my zeros as an angel investor were situations where I thought I was smart. I wasn’t. I’m mediocre.

The best ideas are when you take two older ideas that have nothing to do with each other, make them have sex with each other, and then build a business around the bastard, ugly child that results. The child who was so ugly nobody else wanted to touch it. Look at Facebook: combine the Internet with stalking. Amazing!

And, by the way, it was about the fifth attempt at such a social network. Twitter: combine Internet with antiquated SMS protocols. Ugly! But it works. eBay: combine e-commerce with auctions. The song “I’ll Be There.” Combine Mariah Carey with Michael Jackson. If Justin Bieber sang John Lennon’s “Imagine,” it would be a huge hit. I might even listen to it.

POOR NETWORKING.
I’m that guy: you know, the one at the party who doesn’t talk to anyone and stands in the corner. I never go to tech meet-ups. I usually say no to very nice networking dinner invitations. I like to stay home and read. When I was running businesses, I was often too shy to talk to my employees. I would call my secretary from downstairs and ask if the hallway was clear then ask her to unlock my door and I’d hurry upstairs and lock the door behind me. That particular company failed disastrously.

But many people network too much. Entrepreneurship is hard enough. It’s twenty hours a day of managing employees, customers, meetings, and product development. And the buck stops here sort of thing. And then what are you going to do? Network all night? Save that for the great entrepreneurs. Or the ones who are about to fail. The mediocre entrepreneur works his twenty hours, then relaxes when he can. It’s tough to make money. Not a party.

DO ANYTHING TO GET A “YES.”
Here’s a negotiation I did. I was starting stockpickr.com and meeting with the CEO of thestreet.com. He wanted his company to have a percentage of stockpickr.com, and in exchange he would fill up our ad inventory. I was excited to do the deal. I said, “Okay, I was thinking you would get 10 percent of the company.” He laughed and said, “No. Fifty percent.” He didn’t even say, “We would like 50 percent.” He just said, “Fifty percent.” I then used all my negotiating skills and came up with a reply. “Okay. Deal.”

I’m a salesman. I like people to say yes to me. I feel insecure when they say no or, even worse, if they don’t like me. When I started a company doing websites, we were pitching to do Miramax.com. I quoted a price of $50,000. They said, “No more than $1,000, and that’s a stretch.” I used my usual technique: “Deal!”

But the end results: in one case, thestreet.com had a significant financial stake so that gave them more psychological stake. And for my first business, Miramax was now on my client list. That’s why Con Edison had to pay a lot more. Often, the secret poor negotiator’s keep is that we get more deals done. I get the occasional loss leader, and then ultimately the big fish gets reeled in if I get enough people to say yes. It’s like asking every girl on the street to have sex with you. One out of a hundred will say yes. In my case it might be one out of a million but you get the idea.

POOR JUDGE OF PEOPLE.
The mediocre entrepreneur doesn’t “Blink” in the Malcolm Gladwell sense. In Gladwell’s book, he often talks about people who can form snap, correct judgments in two or three seconds. My initial judgment when I meet or even see people is this: I hate you.

And then I veer from that to too trusting. Finally, after I bounce back and forth, and through much trial and error, I end up somewhere in the middle. I also tend to drop people I can’t trust very quickly. I think the great entrepreneur can make snap judgments and be very successful with it. But that doesn’t work for most people.

At this point, when I meet someone, I make sure I specifically don’t trust my first instincts. I get to know people more. I get to understand what their motivations are. I try to sympathize with whatever their position is. I listen to them. I try not to argue or gossip about them before I know anything. I spend a lot more time getting to know the people whom I want to bring closer. I have to do this because I’m mediocre, and I’m a lot more at risk of bringing the wrong people into my circle.

So by the time I’ve decided to be close to someone—a client, an employee, an acquirer, an acquiree, a wife, etc.—I’ve already done a lot of the thinking about them. This means I can’t waste time thinking about other things, like how to put a rocket ship on Jupiter. But overall it’s worked.

“I thought being mediocre is supposed to be bad?” one might think. Shouldn’t we strive for greatness? And the answer is, “Of course we should! But let’s not forget that nine out of ten motorists think they are ‘above average drivers.’” People overestimate themselves. Don’t let overestimation get in the way of becoming fabulously rich, or at least successful enough that you can have your freedom, feed your family, and enjoy other things in life.

Being mediocre doesn’t mean you won’t change the world. It means being honest with yourself and the people around you. And being honest at every level is really the most effective habit of all if you want to have massive success.

HOW TO BE LESS STUPID

One has to balance mediocrity, though. With the human mind, it wants to take us below mediocrity. If given the chance, the human mind will constantly fill us up with thoughts. You would think thoughts make us smart, but it’s quite the opposite.

I’m really stupid. I can tell you in advance. I think at heart, if I work at it, I can be smart. But at the moment, I’m largely an idiot. I feel that I have the right knowledge but I let a lot of stuff get in the way. My head fills up too quickly with thoughts.

You know, “stuff”: worries, guilt, paranoia, grudges, and resentment. Like, for instance, I resent the people who resent me. I think they resent me for no reason. So now I resent them. What a circle-jerk!

I used to think that when I added stuff to my brain I’d get smarter. But this is not true. For instance, if I look up when Charlemagne was born I’d just add a fact to my head that I will forget tomorrow but will clutter my subconscious mind. This won’t make me smarter.

Subtraction, and not addition, is what makes the window to the brain more clear, wipes away the smudges, and opens the drapes.

In the ’90s I had an important business meeting. I was trying to convince Tupac’s manager to let me do his website and enhanced CD (this was right after he died). Not only was the meeting bad, but it was embarrassing.

The manager asked me to put my demo CD into the computer and show him what I had. The only problem: his computer was running Windows. At that point I had never in my life used a Windows machine, only Macs and Unix. So I had no idea how to put the CD in there and get it running. He laughed me out of the room.

I had a chess lesson afterwards. I couldn’t play at all. It was like I didn’t even know the rules. My instructor, a chess grandmaster, said, “What’s wrong with you today?” I was ashamed. And angry at myself. So my intelligence went way down—like 80 percent down.

So many things have put useless, wasteful, thoughts in my head. If you think back to all of your best moments in life, were they moments when there were tons of thoughts happening in your head? Or moments when there were fewer thoughts, i.e., when you were calm and contemplative?

If I want to be happy and productive, I think back to those moments of pain and try to figure out what was going on in my head that made me so miserable that I couldn’t function.

Paranoia is certainly one of them. Waking up in the middle of the night and wondering: is she cheating? Is he stealing? Are they talking about me? Will they sue me? Etc. You lose about 30 to 50 percent of your intelligence. That’s a big chunk. For me, it’s because I can’t think of anything else. I would circle her house until the lights were on and then I’d knock on the door. Or I would go to his office and not leave until he showed up. Paranoia will destroy you.

Sometimes, in the middle of the day, I’ll also experience an extreme attack of resentment. What for? Over someone who wrote about me a year ago? Or someone who blocked an opportunity for me for reasons only he knows. Who knows why people do these things? They are just as unconscious as everyone else. Our goal is to be conscious. To be the one who is aware of the actions and reactions around us. We have to be, if we’re going to be a ChooseYourself-er. Otherwise we will get stuck in the same no-passing lane everyone else is slowly driving in.

I figure I lose at least 20 percent of my intelligence when I am resentful. Maybe 30 percent if I throw feelings of revenge on top of it. Does it really help me to think of which particular bat I will use to take out my revenge fantasy?

Regret is another one it took me years to deal with in my worst moments. I’ve written about it a billion times. I lost a lot of money in 2000–2001. I regret it. Or, I should say, I regretted it. I don’t anymore. How come? Because I saw that regret was taking at least 60 percent of my intelligence away. I couldn’t afford 60 percent. I could afford 2 percent, not 60 percent. I didn’t start coming up with ideas for new businesses until the regret went away.

Brene Brown has written an excellent book called
The Gift of Imperfection
, but I’ll summarize it here: perfectionism is sometimes the most dangerous set of thoughts you can let make their home in your head. When I was running a fund, I never wanted to have a down month. I’d be afraid to talk to my investors. One guy, who is still a good friend (I spoke with him today even) said, “Listen, if you’re going to be a fund manager you have to be able to talk to people when you have a down month.”

But I was ashamed. When I lost my house, I moved seventy miles away. I didn’t want to run into anyone. I felt shame. When I write a blog post I think is weak, I might take it down before too many see it. I’m ashamed of it. I want to win the Nobel Prize for blog writing. Or get at least ten thousand Facebook “like”s. But I can’t control that; I’m imperfect. The shame of imperfectionism takes at least 20 percent of my intelligence away. Because people sense and appreciate honesty, and honesty about imperfections, believe it or not, creates enormous opportunities. I’ve seen it happen in my own life.

And related to perfectionism is certainly the feeling that you want to control the events around you. I want to control everything around me. But sometimes things are bad and there’s nothing you can do about it. Sometimes you have to surrender and say, “This is bad now but good things will happen later.” Then a great weight lifts off your shoulders.

You know why they always say a great weight lifts off your shoulders? Because that’s where your brain is. And your brain is heavy. It rests on your shoulders. When stuff is weighing it down you lose about 10 to 20 percent of your intelligence. Give up control and get smarter. A simple example: you are late for a meeting but there’s traffic. You can think, God damn this traffic. Why am I always in traffic? Or you can be thinking about something smart: like how good bacon tastes. Can I make a better bacon? Or how would I start a helicopter airline to take me from one side of the city to the other. These seem like dumb thoughts. But they are much better than “God damn this traffic!”

Even worse than trying to control the future is feeling a total lack of control over things that have already happened in the past. This is regret. A good friend of mine wrote me recently. I should say, wrote me six weeks ago. Every day when I wake up I tell myself: don’t return e-mails until you read, then write. But then sometimes I have other things to do. Meetings. Or BS stuff. Or eating. I say, “Okay, I will return that e-mail later.” And then when later comes, I feel bad that I hadn’t returned his e-mail earlier. Then, at 3 a.m., I’ll turn over and say to Claudia, “I didn’t return that e-mail”. She’ll say, “Urgh…ushghsh…emmmm,” which was not the answer I was looking for. Then I don’t sleep as much. Then I feel guilty. That takes away about 10 percent of my intelligence right there.

First there’s the past but then there’s the distant future. We ultimately have no way to predict the future. But our mind does one thing over and over that leaves us less intelligent: it constantly puts us in a fantasy world that includes our worst-case scenario. Let’s say I lose $1,000 in the stock market one day. Sometimes I think to myself, “Holy shit, if I lose that amount every day for the next…” And it gets worse and worse. My worst-case scenarios have my children begging for food on the harsh streets of Bangalore. I’ve spent at least a year of my life, when you add it up, thinking of the worst-case scenario. Even though the worst-case scenario HAS NEVER HAPPENED. Or if it does happen, it was never as bad as I thought it would be. I have a scarcity complex. If I didn’t have that then I’d have an “abundance complex.” And I firmly believe abundance follows an abundance complex. So I’m smarter (and wealthier) when I give up that scarcity complex.

If we truly want to learn, we never learn when we are talking. We only learn when we are listening. Claudia wanted to say something important to me. But I spoke instead. I imparted my great wisdom on her before she could get a word out. Finally, she forgot what she was going to say. Probably because my words were so wise they were like the Bible. Or like
Robert’s Rules of Order
. Or
Strunk & White
. That’s how wise I am.
STRUNK & WHITE
! Extra talking probably takes away at least 15 percent of my intelligence. Because I could’ve been listening and learning. Or reading about grammar. Or not getting into an accident when talking on the phone. Sometimes we just have
to Shut Up!

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day. She was giving me every reason why she couldn’t succeed. Her age. Her looks. Her privacy (“I can never write what I want”), her lack of time, and so on. Everyone has excuses. Everyone says “I can’t.” I can’t be a medical professional unless I go to medical school. I can’t be a filmmaker unless I raise $10 million to make a movie. I can’t marry a supermodel because I’m ugly. I can’t I can’t I can’t. For every “can’t,” you should send me $10. I can do all those things. Particularly if I have your $10.