Ideas are the conduit to a new reality.
Soak up ideas and fill up your brain, and new thoughts will start to emerge. These new thoughts will take you down rabbit holes and help you get outside your own head.
These are the counterintuitive ideas I’m obsessed with.
It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything
This short idea sums up my entire life.
I thought losing everything multiple times in my life signaled the beginning of my downfall that I’d never recover from.
But when you’ve lost everything there’s a kind of freedom that comes with it. The worst has happened so you know things can’t get any worse. It gives perspective. It makes you ready to face any challenge.
This is where my discipline and resilience come from. I’m not lucky or gifted or smart. I’ve just gone through a lot of sh*t so not much phases me.
The fear of losing everything is what’s stopping you from doing anything your imagination can come up with.
The most addictive drug is making money doing something you love
I crap on about side hustles like an old man because of this quote.
I want everyone to experience the joy of making money doing work that makes you come alive. It’s the greatest feeling in the world. The feeling turns into flow states that compound your results ten times faster than would seem possible.
Don’t worry how much money a side hustle makes you.
Focus on the addiction you get from it. Because inspiration is energy, and energy is what keeps you going when everyone else you came up with has already given up and got a Netflix obsession.
When our memories outweigh our dreams, it is then that we become old
Age is often used to measure so many attributes in life.
But how old someone looks is shallow as hell. How people think determines their age. Take the doomsdayers. They don’t age well at all. They sound like crazies that are one foot from a pre-dug grave.
There’s no life left in them. They’re triggered by everything. They spend their days arguing in the comments field or watching CNN for the latest bat-sh*t crazy take on some random event that’s none of their business.
You can remember the good times, or go out there and make new memories while your heart still beats.
That’s why I don’t look back on the past too much. And it’s why I don’t waste my time taking iPhone photos of every meal I eat. I’ll never look at these photos again because I’m focused on all the things I want to do before my time comes to an end.
Focus on your dream. Spend time looking forward, not backward.
The time to regret the past is when you’re dead.
How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, sh*t, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?
I spend stupid amounts of time thinking about how we work.
I’m obsessed because we’re right on the cusp of a new reality. The internet has removed barriers and made location irrelevant.
You can Zoom from anywhere, therefore you can work from anywhere.
Making money for someone else is a dying dream too. We want to own the work we do, that way we keep most of the upside rather than give it away.
We’ve seen this shift already in the Creator Economy. Creators want to own the email addresses of their audience so they don’t get squeezed out by a fat cat like Mark Sucksterburger.
Being grateful for your job is a joke.
With wifi money becoming so common, employers don’t need to worry about quiet quitting. No. They need to worry about getting zero applications for a job they advertise.
Gen Z are sharp little kiddies. They’ve figured out this new world of work. And they’re tired of being told what to do.
Work-from-home-forever is never going away. This is the greatest update to quality of life humans have had to date. Not needing to live close to an office in an overpriced ant hill in the city is a blessing.
The hours saved on the commute are glorious too.
I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel
I’m in the process of redesigning my online business.
I figured out people don’t buy products or services. They buy feelings. So it’s my job to make customers feel valued, heard, and respected.
Most of all, it’s my job to surprise and delight them. The way you make people feel extraordinary is to leave them better than you found them.
People make buying decisions with their emotions. Make people feel.
Join the feelings economy.
Photo by Diogo Nunes on Unsplash
They laugh at me because I’m different. I laugh at them because they’re all the same.
(Kurt Cobain, Nirvana)
The Nirvana album cover with the child showing his willy while swimming in a pool is a potent memory from my childhood.
I’ve said for a long time: screw being normal.
Normalcy is where greatness goes to die. People tell me I’m weird all the time. It’s the best compliment you can get. It means you haven’t been stuck inside the Matrix and can think for yourself.
Institutions mold us all to be the same so we’re easier to manipulate.
Being weird is being yourself. Don’t trade weirdness for any amount of money. Ever. It’s your only competitive advantage.
Most people have two lives: the lives we live and the lives we are capable of living
During my long stretch of mental illness I felt like this.
The person I was knew there was another person hiding inside. But getting that new person to reveal himself to the world is one of the greatest struggles of my life.
The person we’re capable of becoming is fearless.
They see fear as a challenge. They take risks because regrets are too painful. They don’t wait for permission slips and they certainly don’t let any mofo tell them what to do.
Your potential lies on the other side of fear.
Create a fear list and then proactively conquer each one. Start with the smallest and then make your way, slowly, to the biggest. That’s how you become unstoppable without luck or a rich daddy.
No one has it worse than the person who is deprived of randomness
Rigid schedules lead to the death of creativity.
It’s why people like Tim Ferriss believe in deliberately making small changes to their day that lead to randomness. Simple changes such as taking a different path to work. Or asking coffee chops for a free latte when they can afford to buy one.
Randomness interrupts your mind’s common patterns.
This is the heart of where new insights are found that can lead to revelations that change one’s life.
Without randomness life gets boring. We start to take everyday things for granted. We start to feel something is missing. Or we turn to our addictions to secretly add variety to our lives.
Randomness is the key to creative greatness.
When life gives you lemons, lean back and squeeze that sh*t into your eyeballs. Then glare back at life and say, “that all you got, m*therfucker?”
What Mark is trying to say here is discomfort is a good thing.
It reveals answers to problems you can’t solve with a calculator or a google search. If you get struck down nine times and get up ten times, it’s a powerful feeling that will cause people to get out of your way.
Because when you won’t take no for an answer, people see an awakened human that inspires them — and inspiration opens closed doors.
Intellect is not wisdom
The old guard worships IQ.
I see it in writing all the time, where gatekeepers shout “we want experts.” What they mean is we want more people with fancy letters after their names who appear smart and have a high status in society.
This is the elitism virus in full effect.
Average people are writing the future of writing. Some call it social media, others call it citizen journalism. But what I’ve learned is internet users are tired of experts, because elitism enables them. Elitism is also known as the “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” *wink wink*
Real wisdom is found in the minds of those who are emotionally intelligent. They’re the ones that understand the world because they take the time to understand humans through listening.
They don’t seek status. They show up with humility.
People who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can’t fathom
Consumerism stops us from accessing early retirement, or even mini-retirements we can take in the next year or so.
Upgrade your income with online income streams while keeping your expenses the same. That’s how you get wealthy to buy your time back.
