Unconventional Living: Breaking Free from Other People's Expectations - Prof. 889, Apuntes de Psicología

¡Descarga Unconventional Living: Breaking Free from Other People's Expectations - Prof. 889 y más Apuntes en PDF de Psicología solo en Docsity! | AOIECONFORMIY CE SER MN [LEE UE RULES YOU WANT Wiro ; CHANGE -. THEWORLD ! CHRIS OUILLEBEAU A O “ART. NON-CONFORMITY Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want, and Change the World CHRIS GUILLEBEAU "ART. NON-CONFORMITY Set Your Own Rules, LivetheLife You Want, and Change the World CHRIS GUILLEBEAU A PERIGEE BOOK A PERIGEE BOOK Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) 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No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. PERIGEE is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. The “P” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Guillebeau, Chris. p. cm.—(A Perigee book) eISBN: 9781101452721 1. Deviant behavior. 2. Individuality. 3. Lifestyles. I. Title. HM811.G85 2010 303.3’72—dc22 2010013078 Most Perigee books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, or educational use. Special books, or book excerpts, can also be created to fit specific needs. For details, write: Special Markets, Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014. http://us.penguingroup.com To Jolie, my partner in world domination and life CHAPTER 1 Sleepwalkers and the Living World Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with their song still in them. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU The purpose of this book is to transform your thinking about life and work. You’ll benefit from the transformation if you’re in a season of life where you’re getting ready to make some changes. Alternatively, if you don’t see any big decisions on the horizon but you’d like to create an opportunity for change, this will help too. Lastly, if you’re feeling stuck in something and have always believed “there must be more to life,” this book is for you. As you set out on your journey, you’ll meet a variety of people. Along the way some of them will help you, while others will stop at nothing to prevent you from succeeding. We’ll look at how to connect with the people you need, and how you can help them while they’re helping you. We’ll also meet some of the people who set out to harm you—gatekeepers, critics, and vampires among others. I’ll show you their agenda and their tactics—and how you can beat them. You’ll learn about world domination, creative self-employment, career independence, radical goal-setting, contrarian travel, and a number of other unconventional ideas. Some of these topics require lengthier study for full mastery, but this book is meant to be compact and complete. By reading and applying the lessons within, you’ll be fully equipped to accomplish anything you set out to do. Hopefully, you’ll also be challenged to do more than you ever thought possible before. Success, Motivation, and the $32,000 Lesson In the battle between hope and fear, hope usually wins out in the end. Accordingly, this book is for people who want to change the world. I’m writing for believers, not cynics, and if you make some big changes as a result of the stories and ideas you read here, we will both have succeeded. In the event we succeed, you’ll have the ability—and the obligation—to live life on your own terms and help other people while you’re at it. The goal is simple: nothing will ever be the same. If anything else results from our time together, I will have failed. In that case, I’ll deserve one-star reviews on Amazon .com, and you’ll deserve an apology for my wasting your time. I don’t want one-star reviews, and no one likes to apologize, so I have the strong incentive to earn your trust and provide a rewarding experience. After working in West Africa for four years as a volunteer aid worker, I returned to the United States to attend graduate school in the fall of 2006. The official story is that I completed a two-year master’s degree in International Studies at the University of Washington. The real story is that I spent $32,000 to learn about motivations. Later on we’ll look at the overall experience of higher education in comparison to the formation of the writing career I began shortly thereafter. For now, the important point is that about halfway through checking off a list of required courses for graduate school, I realized that roughly 80 percent of the assignments I worked on had little or no value. The projects were simply “busywork” designed to keep students working on something so that the system could sustain itself. I also noticed that this type of work was not conducted solely by students—faculty and administrators were also engaged in a significant amount of pandering. One professor who was wise to these strategies used the technical term “bullshit” to describe this kind of work. Bullshit is work that is done merely to complete requirements, make you look good, or otherwise fill up the hours of the day. Just as faking it can be an effective way to get through higher education, mediocrity is the standard by which much work is judged once you get out of school. Assuming you’ve had some kind of job, you probably already know how this works. If you’ve ever completed a task for the sole purpose of making yourself look better without any improvement being produced for others (customers, colleagues, etc.), then you’ve been a participant in the game of mediocrity. Similarly, if you’ve ever been to pointless meetings that drag on far too long, this description should come as no surprise. I’d like to keep the bullshit and the mediocrity to a minimum. It’s a short book, and there’s a lot to cover. In the 20 percent of the time that composed the rest of my graduate school experience, I learned an important lesson: “Always look carefully for someone’s motivations and agenda.” Whenever you read a book, for example, ask yourself, “Why did this person spend months or years crafting this material?” and “What is their agenda?” Sometimes the agenda is stated; other times, it’s hidden—but there is always an agenda. If you haven’t learned this lesson before, congratulations, you are now $32,000 richer from having skipped graduate school. No need to thank me, but feel free to apply this lesson and start thinking about motivations and agenda whenever you read. You also don’t need to look for a hidden agenda here. I’m happy to save you some time and tell you up front why I wrote this book. My motivation is to help people challenge authority and live unconventional, remarkable lives. The mission is to support a full-scale revolution with a simple underlying message: You don’t have to live your life the way other people expect you to. If you stop reading now and begin living every day according to that statement, your life will never be the same. Since learning to think carefully about motivations is worth at least $32,000, I have no idea what learning to live life free from the demands of others is worth. You’ll have to decide that for yourself. On the other hand, I hope you keep reading, since we do have a few other things to cover along the way. Important! I Do Not Want to Waste Your Time Before we go any further, I want to make sure I don’t waste your time. To make sure this book will be useful to you, I’m going to make a number of assumptions right here at the beginning. The assumptions are based on the following four principles: • You Must Be Open to New Ideas • You Must Be Dissatisfied with the Status Quo • You Must Be Willing to Take Personal Responsibility • You Must Be Willing to Work Hard Most people who have fundamentally changed the world have done so through the use of all of these principles. Let’s look at each of them in more detail before going on. 3. YOU MUST BE WILLING TO TAKE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY You must take responsibility for what happens in your future, good or bad. Our past may be somewhat responsible for defining who we are at present, but it does not need to define our future. If you had a terrible childhood or someone deeply hurt you at some point in the past, here is your chance to prove them wrong. If you had a nurturing childhood and have never known deep hurt or social disadvantage, you’re better off than the rest of us. Where much is given, much is required, so it’s time to step it up. Regardless of where you fall in that spectrum, from here on out, win or lose, you must be willing to take responsibility for yourself. 4. YOU MUST BE WILLING TO WORK HARD Many people believe that the key to an improved lifestyle is less work. I think it’s better work . I believe that most of us want to work hard, but we want to do the kind of work that energizes us and makes a positive impact on others. That kind of work is worth working for, and the other kind of work is worth letting go of, finished or not. Instead of being easy, the most memorable times in our lives are often the most challenging. Overcoming the challenge is worth it in the end, but the challenge itself is also worth pursuing. If any of these principles sound basic to you, let me assure you that they are actually quite rare in application. Almost everyone says they are open-minded, but when it comes down to it, most of us are deeply uncomfortable with change. We like things the way they are, or at least the way we imagine them to be. Similarly, many people refuse to take personal responsibility for their lives. Instead, they look to others to meet their needs. When things go wrong, they blame external factors—their employer, their partner, their parents, the environment, the government —pretty much anyone other than themselves. Most people accept the status quo without question, sleepwalking through life, looking in from the outside. When other people manage to escape, sleepwalkers find ways to marginalize or ignore them by pointing out something wrong with their escape plan. Finally, when it comes to work, many people put in long hours without actually working very hard. Their eye is on a future that is years or decades away. The mentality we’ll look at here is all about working hard on meaningful work that matters both now and for the future. Don’t believe these things? No problem. I’m not offended and I hope you aren’t either. For the sake of your time and my book reviews, though, I’m afraid that we aren’t a good match, and your time will be better spent elsewhere. If you agree so far, or at least if you’re willing to give it a fair shot, I invite you to join me for the rest of the journey. A final warning before we continue: dangerous consequences can result from careful consideration of these ideas. People have quit their jobs, changed careers, founded charities, traveled to the far reaches of the earth, gone back to school or quit school entirely, and made all kinds of other unconventional changes to their lives as a result of thinking carefully about motivations. I’ll tell you many of the stories as we go along, but I should first begin by telling you how all of this came about. Who Am I to Tell You All This? Let’s be very clear about something: I adhere to a guru-free philosophy, and I don’t claim to have all the answers. What I have done, for better or worse, is chosen freedom as my highest personal value and learned to construct a life around that choice. In a story that will be recounted further in chapter 6, I skipped high school and went to college instead. I met my wife while we were both earning our degrees. Jolie was also interested in living overseas and pursuing a different career path than the people around us were choosing. More than 10 years later, we’re still together. My last conventional job was at the age of 20, when I worked the night shift slinging boxes at FedEx in Memphis, Tennessee. The job sucked. One day I came home at 4 a.m. (if you stayed past midnight, you got 50 cents more an hour), and sat down at the table I had snagged for $15 from the Salvation Army. I looked around the room and thought, “You know, I don’t think I want to do this anymore.” On a whim, I decided to check out a new website called eBay .com. Surveying my apartment for a bunch of old stuff I didn’t need, I took a few photos of the items and decided to see if anyone was interested. This was in the early days of digital photography, so the process was old-school. I took the photos with a 35mm camera, dropped the film off at the drugstore, picked up the prints the next day, took the prints to the university library, scanned the images, and emailed them to my 15-year-old brother in Montana. Ken, my brother, had his own website that presented a critical analysis of anime films. Clearing some space on the server, he kindly uploaded my random images so I could use them in the auction listing. My first week I made $19 an hour, which was more than twice as much as I made at FedEx. The same day the auction sales went through, I was scheduled to return to work after a three-day weekend. It was December, and Memphis was suffering a rare ice storm that left much of the city incapacitated. Ice storm or not, life at FedEx went on, so I prepared to pull out of the apartment driveway. Despite the needs of busy retailers during the holiday season, my car felt otherwise: as I began to back up, the car slid under the ice, lost control, and narrowly missed crashing into the parked truck belonging to my neighbor. “Why am I doing this?” I asked myself. I turned the engine off, went back inside, and never returned to the world of traditional work. I quickly ran out of stuff to sell from around my house, so I started looking for wholesale sources. I found a good deal on Jamaican coffee—I could buy it for $10 a pound and sell it for $17 to connoisseurs in the United States—so I started receiving 50-pound sacks of beans at my apartment every week. In what became known as the great coffee disaster of 1999, one day the Salvation Army table collapsed under the weight of 80 bags of freshly ground inventory. The table crash freaked out the cat, and a semi-permanent layer of coffee dust settled on my floor, but I wasn’t too worried about the damage. By that point I was able to invest in a superior table for $40 at Home Depot. In addition to coffee, I learned about how to design websites and build an email list of potential buyers. For the next couple of years, I supported myself through a montage of creative self-employment. It wasn’t making me a millionaire and it definitely wasn’t strategic, but it worked. I had been an amateur musician for several years by then, and I started playing around town more frequently. I worked in the mornings, spent a couple of hours each afternoon studying jazz and music theory, played freelance gigs at night, and traveled to local festivals on the weekends. Those things were fun. I enjoyed playing music, and I appreciated that I could work whenever I wanted. Something was missing, though—I felt like I was doing a lot of fun things, but I had no overall focal point for my life. I volunteered at my church and gave money to charity, but those acts seemed basic and insufficient compared to the urgent needs around the world. Depressed after 9/11 and browsing the Internet, looking for extended service opportunities, I read about a surgeon in Africa who had lived in war zones for 17 years and counting. The story was fascinating. Many doctors and other professionals occasionally hop off for short stints abroad, but here was a guy who had chosen to spend nearly all of his working life in the poorest countries in the world. When I learned that he was living on board a hospital ship that was seeking long-term volunteers, I was hooked. Together with Jolie, who was working as a high-school teacher at that point, I signed up for a two-year commitment that turned into four. The job and lifestyle were both extremely transformative. I worked with refugees, warlords, and presidents, and bounced around West Africa as I negotiated on behalf of the medical charity that operated the ship. Even though I worked for free, it was the best job in the world, and served as a better foundation than any university could have been. The time to leave the best job in the world is right before you get tired of it. With the notable exception of Gary Parker, the surgeon I had first read about, many of the people I knew who continued to work in post-conflict countries year after year became bitter and cynical about their surroundings. I don’t necessarily blame them for it—war zones are hard places to work—but I knew I didn’t want that to happen to me. After four years, I was getting tired, and I didn’t want to join the ranks of the cynical. Jolie and I returned to the United States and began a new life in Seattle, Washington. I entered graduate school, worked full-time in a new publishing business and traveled to 20 countries a year while training for marathons on the side. My time in Africa had given me some good leadership experience, so I used those skills to volunteer at a local non-profit organization, where I served as the president of the board. I kept busy, in other words, but once again I felt like something was missing. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I knew it was out there somewhere. I always loved to visit new places, and the years spent in Africa had helped me get comfortable with challenging travel situations. I decided to visit every country in the world, a quest that has taken me to more than 100 countries so far. Then I started writing about it, first on a website that grew to tens of thousands of regular readers, and now in the book that you are holding. My story is not complete, and I certainly don’t know it all. An important part of the guru-free philosophy is that no one is better than anyone else, and most of what you need to know, you already know—we’re just going to fill it out a little. If you’re just starting on your own unconventional journey, the best way to understand it is to talk about monkeys. BY ITSELF, MONEY HAS NO VALUE We need money to live in a modern world, and we should find a way to get what we need without harming anyone else. However, by itself, money has no value—the value is produced only when we exchange money for other things. The reason why this is important is because many people don’t know how much money they really need to do the things they want. They often wildly overestimate or underestimate how much money they need to exchange for their desired life. According to near-unanimous scientific research, pursuing wealth for wealth’s sake won’t get you very far. A certain amount of money produces happiness, and a bit more produces a bit more happiness, but beyond that, the correlation between money and life satisfaction is null. Therefore, we’ll look at using money as a tool to get what you want, but not as a pursuit in itself. CHOOSING BETWEEN YOURSELF AND OTHERS IS THE WRONG CHOICE You’ll have to make some hard choices to break out of the cage, but thankfully, choosing between yourself and others isn’t one of them. You can do good things for yourself and still make the world a better place for everyone else. In fact, the goal is to find as much convergence as possible between these values. Give yourself permission to dream, and then get to work planning. As we’ll see in the next chapter (and throughout the book), though, it’s not all about you. Even though we don’t have to compromise on our personal ambitions, most of us are not ultimately happy with a life that is completely self-centered. Instead, our lives become most meaningful when we combine our own desires with an active strategy to help other people at the same time. CHANGING THE WORLD IS NOT ALWAYS PRACTICAL Every idea in this book is designed to be highly practical, and there is no classroom knowledge here. However, be aware that “being practical” can sometimes be code language used by critics to marginalize your choices of freedom. Never forget that changing the world is not always a practical endeavor. Throughout history, most people who have made fundamental shifts in science, humanities, or the arts have been frequently accused of being impractical. At various times it has been impractical to think that women are equal to men, that humans should not own other humans, that criminals should be rehabilitated instead of merely punished, and so on. The same may be true with the choices you make. It’s not always about taking the easy way out—breaking out of the cage can be harder than falling in line with the rest of the monkeys—but you’ll usually have a choice. CHAPTER 2 Setting the Terms of Your Unconventional Life The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them. —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW After working in New York at the same comfortable job for eight years, Bernard Lopez suddenly quit, broke the lease he had signed on a new apartment, withdrew all his retirement savings, and set out to travel across the United States by bicycle. One of the questions he heard over and over (after the initial reaction of “Are you crazy?”) was “Are you doing this to raise money for charity?” If Bernard had said yes, most people would have nodded their heads, their curiosity at least partially satisfied. It’s usually acceptable, if not always completely understood, to do something unconventional when it benefits other people. But Bernard wasn’t raising money for charity or riding his bike across the country to raise awareness for anything. “No,” he said truthfully when people asked. “I’m doing it for me.” The idea for the bike ride of undetermined length came to Bernard after a series of shocks. He had recently ended a seven-year relationship, and shortly after that painful separation, his father was killed in an accident. After reflecting on these events during a long walk one day, the idea came to him: “I should leave my life in New York behind and bike across America.” The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do. —WALTER BAGEHOT The idea wouldn’t go away, and instead of putting it off, Bernard chose to embrace it fully. He dutifully gave notice at his work and apartment, bought a bike, and started riding with no certainty of what would happen after he was done with the long ride. The initial days were jarring, but after a while he settled into a routine built entirely around riding all day and finding a place to stay at night. At the end of the trip, Bernard relocated to Chicago with a feeling of invincibility. He began a new career and continued to travel every summer. It is no exaggeration, he told the readers of the online journal he kept, that the bicycle trip “has forever changed my life as it allowed me to reach my full potential and discover the real me.”1 Discovering What You Really Want Throughout the book, we’re going to look at how our lives are intimately connected with others, how some of those people are counting on you, and how you can improve the lives of others all over the world. But over the next few pages, we’re not going to think about that at all. The first part of this chapter will focus on your own personal goals and desires. I believe in helping other people, but I also believe in relentless individualism. I believe that the crazy dreams and big ideas we have when we are young can be more than just fantasies. No, in the end it is not all about you—but there is also nothing wrong with doing things entirely for yourself. As for me, I enjoy running for hours by myself, listening to music and thinking about my projects and plans. I enjoy taking solo trips around the world, arriving in cities without an agenda or obligations to fulfill. Some people call this selfishness, but I tend to believe the answer is more complicated—without the energy I derive from being by myself, I know that I wouldn’t be of much use to anyone else later on. Your dreams and big ideas belong to no one but you, and you never need to apologize for or justify them to anyone. If you already know exactly what they are, great; you’re halfway there. Most of us, however, find that we need to take some time to think about it, and that’s what this section will help with. Because we usually need some time to figure this out, I’d like to voice an opinion right from the beginning: when it comes down to it, most of us do not want to sit on the beach and take it easy every day for the rest of our lives. Some of us would get tired after only a few days; others might enjoy it for an extended period of weeks or months. But just as we wonder “Is that all there is?” about conventional careers or life paths, after the initial detox of sunbathing and margaritas, we’d be asking the same questions about beach life—or whatever our vision of fantasy land is. A while back I was walking in an unfamiliar part of town, and I passed by a gas station advertising lottery tickets. For a moment I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to buy a ticket and dream? Then I realized that for the most part, I already had the life I wanted. I felt like I was in the 90th percentile of happiness and fulfillment. Of course I wanted to go further, but I knew that a lottery ticket (even a winning one) wouldn’t take me there. Most of us have lottery fantasies from time to time. I don’t think they’re necessarily harmful; I just think there’s a better alternative. The alternative is to write your own winning lottery ticket, not by the sudden accumulation of wealth but the gradual reduction to what you decide is essential for your life. That’s my proposal: creating your own life isn’t quite like winning the lottery. It’s better. Instead of fantasy land, most of us crave a life of adventure and personal growth. Joseph Campbell understood this years ago when he wrote about the meaning of life. “People say that what we’re seeking is a meaning for life,” he began before clarifying, “I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. What we seek is an experience of being alive.” As part of the experience of being alive, I believe we’re looking to find our place in the world. On a planet of seven billion people, where do we fit in? This is essentially the central question of life, and finding the answer begins with understanding what we really want. What Do You Really Want to Get Out of Life? Let’s bring this analogy to what I call “life planning” and look at some practical ways of figuring out what you really want.2 It’s kind of like planning a wedding, but more important. There’s nothing wrong with planning for a big, meaningful day; I just think it’s even better to plan for a big, meaningful life. Life planning begins with an unfortunate fact: many people have no idea what they really want to do or accomplish over the course of their time on earth. Instead of moving toward a destination, they become mired in “life avoidance” by ambling around without a clear sense of objective or purpose. This is not entirely their fault. Our formal systems of education do not devote much time to coaching young people in how to figure this out. Evaluations of our abilities and knowledge, which typically take the form of standardized tests, focus almost entirely on occupational planning instead of “big picture” ideas. Since a lot of adults have not figured out what they really want, they naturally find it difficult to pass on the values of soul-searching to children. For their part, spiritual leaders offer answers to the deep questions of creation, mortality, and ethics, but typically give little guidance on how we should actually fill our days. Thus, the cycle continues. At some point, though, we each have to take responsibility for ourselves even if no one ever taught us to think about what we want. The lack of understanding and self-awareness hurts us more than anyone else. It holds us back from greatness and keeps us living unremarkably average lives. To break out of the sleepwalking pattern, we have to define what we want and then find a way to make it happen. Credit where credit is due: a few years back, I read the book Wishcraft by Barbara Sher. One of the things Barbara said in the beginning resonated with me for a long time: “Whatever your dreams are, start taking them very, very seriously.” That time in my life was a period of intense self-reflection, and I realized that even though I had done a lot of fun things by then, I hadn’t been taking my dreams very seriously. I resolved to start doing that right away, and my life has been radically different since. If you need help, there are a few different ways of figuring out what you really want to get out of life. Feel free to use any of the three approaches outlined on the following pages, modify them in the way that suits you best, or do something completely different. Whichever way you choose, make sure you have at least a general idea before going forward. 3. PLANNING FOR SERENDIPITY I’ve always had a lot of projects going at once, and I enjoy the process of trying to keep all the plates spinning in the air. For me, if I’m not involved with a bunch of things simultaneously, I’m not happy. However, I also want to make sure I have time to embrace spontaneous ideas as well. We’ll come to this later, but the point I want to make now is that a lot of people express surprise that I can do “so much.” I don’t speak for all the organized people in the world, but I’m going to let you in on a secret that pertains to many of us: A FEW SUGGESTIONS (WHAT’S IN/WHAT’S OUT) Far be it from me to tell you what your goals should be. It’s your life, and you make the rules. Principles can be good starting points, however, so treat these ideas as suggestions for your consideration. What’s In • All the time you want for the people you love • As much time as you need to think or plan • Work that is fun, fulfilling, and challenging • Some kind of financial independence (we’ll look at this much more in chapter 8) • A few “adventure” goals, like climbing Kilimanjaro or trekking through Nepal • Some kind of travel goals, based on your own preferences (see chapter 10 for more info and ideas) • Something that other people “don’t get” but that makes perfect sense to you What’s Out • Drama and whiny people • Busywork, or any work that ultimately lacks value • Schedules that are set by other people • Unnecessary obligations or things we do out of a sense of guilt we’re not as super-disciplined as you think. Really. What many of us have done instead is create a structure around our work that allows us to improvise. We do take the goals seriously and do work hard, but any discipline that comes about is usually a result of building a good structure to begin with. Some of my most fulfilling experiences have been on days when I didn’t have a lot planned. I’ve taken off for long runs in dozens of world cities without a map or any knowledge of the local language. I’ve watched the sunset without an agenda in Zambia and the Faeroe Islands. Almost every time I experience something like this, I always think to myself, “Wow. Life is good. I am so thankful to be alive.” Nor do the experiences have to be exotic to be serendipitous. I also enjoy sleeping in at home once in a while, going out for coffee in the afternoons, playing video games, and deciding on a whim to do something completely different one day. Another way to think of it is this: in the long run, I want to be focused on the goals, my ideal world, and helping people however I can. In the short run, I have to take steps to ensure those things are happening, but it’s not a highly regulated environment and I’m free to change it up whenever I want. If anything, it’s a flexible-but-purposeful environment. To anyone who says they don’t like to set goals and prefer to take things as they come, I’d say, “Try setting the goals.” I think you’ll like seeing how much you can do when you really try. But don’t worry, because you don’t have to give up serendipity or flexibility. If anything, when you work toward getting what you really want, you’ll have more time available to be spontaneous, and more energy for the “fun” things you like to do. You and the Rest of the World As long as what you want does not cause harm to others, you never need to apologize for pursuing your own dreams and big ideas. They belong to you for a good reason. Once you’ve done some thinking about what you really want to get out of life, however, you’ll likely want to move toward thinking about how you’ll make the world a better place for others. This is because while you can do almost anything you want, in the end you probably won’t be satisfied with a life that completely revolves around you. Often this concept is presented as an afterthought. I’ve been to a number of seminars on entrepreneurship, and many of the talks have the same format: in a one-hour presentation, someone will spend 55 minutes talking about how to get rich. The final five minutes will consist of a reminder to “be sure and give back.” “This is what it’s all about,” the presenter sometimes says at this point, while the screen flashes photos of his trip to an orphanage on the other side of the world. Coming at the end of a long talk about making money, I’ve always thought of this slip as the “Oops!” moment. The Oops! is the forced moment when the realization hits that maybe there’s more to life than what was shown during the main subject of the presentation. To avoid the equivalent of the Oops! moment in your own life planning, start thinking seriously about how you will really change the world right from the beginning. These questions may help: • What needs can you meet? • Who looks to you as a leader? • What bothers you about the world? • How can you make things better? • What can you offer the world that no one else can? There’s no need to wait to get serious about making a positive difference for those around you. As a general rule, if you don’t know what to do on any given day, spend at least some of your time helping someone else. Instead of having this be an afterthought, you can build a life focused on the relentless pursuit of what you want coupled with the call to make a difference—starting today. Principles of Unconventional Living When you reach the convergence between getting what you really want while also helping others in a unique way. I call this “world domination,” where you live a life of adventure and focus on leaving a legacy that makes a radical difference for other people. There’s no need to settle or accept anything less. As you pursue the plan of action, working on the life list, other goals, and making the world a better place, these principles may help in the implementation: There is almost always more than one way to accomplish something. If you begin your adult life on the conventional college track, you quickly learn the patterns and behaviors to which you are expected to conform. You’re supposed to take a certain number of college courses each term; you need to select a major at some point; you’re supposed to follow a fairly standard track that leads from History 101 to a graduation ceremony a few years later. Then, you begin your first “real job.” Your first job is supposed to be entry-level. At some point you move to a position in the middle, where most people spend most of their careers. Some move on to senior positions (partner, executive, tenured full professor), but this move usually comes after a long time in the middle. Granted, the specific expectations and job positions vary by industry—but almost all industries follow a similar pattern of apprentice, beginner, mid-level, and executive. At every stage in this process, there is usually a fast track or alternative path you can pursue that will allow you to skip many of the steps that everyone else spends ages on. The alternative path (also called the “unconventional choice” throughout the book) is not only more efficient; it’s also often more effective. When faced with a choice between abundance and scarcity, choose abundance. Scarcity is the default mode of operation for most of us. It’s a hard habit to break, but almost always worth it. Scarcity involves hoarding, and abundance involves sharing. We’ll look at this more in chapter 9, but in short, the choice for abundance typically involves a refusal to view the world as a zero-sum competition. No one else needs to lose for you to win (and vice versa). When faced with uncertainty about taking a leap of faith, take the leap. You’ll regret the things you didn’t do much more than anything you did, so you might as well try new things. You also won’t have to worry about burnout. When you do what you love, why would you burn out? (If you’re going to worry about something, worry about regretting a decision you really wanted to make but held back from because of fear.) Intelligence is not a prerequisite, but determination is. To take over the world, or do whatever you want to do, you don’t need to be especially intelligent. In fact, in some cases high intelligence can be a handicap, because smart people are very good at making simple things complicated. You will, however, need to be fairly determined. This is because we live in a conventional world, and doing what you want can be surprisingly difficult. If you’re afraid of sacrifice or lack the ability to stick with something you believe in, you might be tempted to give up along the way. You can have unlimited dreams and goals, but not unlimited priorities. Almost every time I head out on an international trip, I end up talking with someone who expresses an interest in doing the same thing. Their statement is usually something like “Wow! I wish I could do that.” Here’s the thing: I realize that there are plenty of people out there who are not able to travel or make the same choices I can. Having lived in the poorest countries in the world for four years, I know many of them personally. Most of the people I interact with now, however, as well as most of the readers of this book, don’t fit into that category. The people I talk with now who tell me they “wish” they could do something but feel unable have usually made a number of choices that prevent them from doing what they wish. They have chosen to prioritize other things above their stated desire. Some of them, I’ve noticed, can even seem a bit resentful of those who step out in a different direction. When I offered to help a friend plan an upcoming trip to Europe, she eagerly accepted. But then she said, “You know, not all of us can just take off and fly around the world like you do.” I laughed it off and helped her anyway, but her off hand remark stayed with me after our conversation had ended. As I thought about it later, I realized that the statement reflected a common form of jealousy. This friend made more than $80,000 a year and certainly could have afforded to travel anywhere she wanted, but it wasn’t her priority. As you begin making more and more of your own choices, you’ll encounter feedback like this fairly often. Many people are uncomfortable with change and different ideas, and they’ll work hard at rationalizing their own choices when they come across someone who has made different ones. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing for someone to prioritize a life around working at the office and buying things for their home; I’m just suggesting that they openly acknowledge that as the priority. If you get a few things in order, the stages of growth are exponential. It takes many small businesses a long time to make $1,000 a month. I remember when I first made $1,000, I was ecstatic. Never mind the fact that I worked days and nights for several weeks to get the $1,000—when you’re just getting started as an entrepreneur, it’s sometimes better not to do the math. Sometimes the smallest decisions can change your life forever. —KERI RUSSELL But to go from $1,000 a month to $5,000, it’s not usually five times as hard. For some reason no one completely understands, it’s usually only about twice as hard. In other words, if you can find a way to make $1,000 a month on your own, you can usually find a way to make $5,000. The same is often true with personal habits. Have you ever known someone who changed a completely sedentary lifestyle to a completely active one? One year the guy is an overweight smoker who eats and drinks too much. The next year he undergoes a remarkable transformation where he quits smoking, radically improves his diet, and becomes a fitness freak. We see those people and think, “That’s amazing!” And on a personal level, it is amazing. But the most amazing parts are the first steps. Somewhere along the way, momentum kicks in and never stops. Momentum carries marathon runners from mile 24 to mile 26.2. It can help you scale up your life, but first you need to be very clear on what it is you want and where you are going. What Are We So Afraid Of? Fear begins with an undefined worry, a voice in the back of your head that says you’re not good enough, you won’t succeed with anything big or significant, and you might as well give up and stop trying to stand out. The implied message is, “Who are you, anyway?” We often imagine these words as coming from other people, perhaps someone who hurt us long ago or a negative person still involved in our life. These voices are not entirely irrelevant—the consequences of neglect and abuse are real—but it’s also true they can be manufactured or exaggerated by our own insecurities. Because the biggest challenges we face are often internal, we need to deal with them first. When we really get serious about our insecurities, we usually find that three specific fears emerge: the fear of failure, the fear of success, and the fear of change. The greatest of these is the fear of change itself. Whenever we take a big leap, we know that no matter what happens, our life will probably be different. To many of us, taking that leap is scary. Always do what you are afraid to do. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON All things being equal, we generally resist change until the pain of making a switch becomes less than the pain of remaining in our current situation. This is why incompetent or even hostile employees are allowed to remain in a job far longer than they should, because managers don’t want to deal with finding someone else to replace the bad apple. It’s also why people accept all kinds of situations that are unproductive or downright harmful, from jobs that drain their energy without producing much in return to dysfunctional relationships. To break the cycle, the fear of the unknown has to become less than the stale acceptance of the current situation. There are two ways to make this happen: • Increase the pain of the current situation • Decrease the fear of the desired situation Sometimes we don’t get a choice in deciding between the two options. Let’s look at an example I call a “watershed moment”—you’ll see why in the story below. The Great Apartment Disaster of 2008 I love to travel, and I don’t mind the stress and logistical hassles that some people are bothered by. You can throw flight delays, absurd security checks, or long bus rides at me and I’ll keep smiling throughout most of it. When it comes to actually moving somewhere, though, I hate it. From start to finish, I don’t like anything about the process. I feel guilty about owning too much stuff, I don’t enjoy packing boxes, I worry about leaving things behind, and I worry about taking them with me. On moving day, I revert to the lowest evolutionary level of humanity: I can pick up boxes and stack them in the U-Haul, but that’s about it. One recent December, Jolie and I returned from a vacation to find our apartment flooded due to a broken pipe in another unit. The pipe had burst over the holidays, and no one had noticed for a while. While we had been away, an emergency repair crew had entered both units, dismantled our bed, and carried the pieces out to the living room—along with all of our clothes and everything else that had been in the room. The carpet in the bedroom and all the way down the hall was also removed, leaving the hard floor below and a generous helping of nails waiting to be stepped on. At first I was annoyed, but I tried to operate under the principle that it was an accident and everyone involved in fixing up the unit was acting on good faith. We set up camp in the living room for what we thought would be a night or two. A night or two stretched into a week, then two weeks, then nearly an entire month. During that time we continued to sleep on a mattress in the living room, a situation we termed “urban camping” in an attempt to stay positive. While camped out, I learned an important lesson: the greater the number of insurance companies that are involved in a construction project, the more likely it is that none of them will take responsibility. Each representative we talked to agreed that the damage was not our fault, but no one was willing to pay for us to stay elsewhere during the repairs. As the weeks went by, I experienced a growing conflict between two undesirable alternatives. It wasn’t fun to sleep in the living room and plan our lives around various work crews all day. Despite the discomfort of moving, after 10 days of little progress, I finally began to think about making a change. We had happily lived in the apartment for more than two years, but this situation was really pushing us to the limit. Then I went away on an overnight trip, and Jolie called me at 11 p.m. to say that we had no water. After a few tense calls to the landlord and the construction supervisor, we still didn’t know what was going on. The water might be coming back on in the morning, or it might be coming back in two weeks. Who knows? The implied message was that we should be grateful for our not-so-nice apartment and the mattress on the floor of the living room. Hearing the news about the water sent me over the edge. I could deal with urban camping and bogus insurance companies, but I wasn’t willing to deal with not having water for an undetermined period of time. At that moment, the pain of remaining in the situation became greater than the pain of making a change. That was the moment I became ready to move. Jolie agreed, and we immediately started looking for a new home. Less than three weeks later, we moved a few hours south of Seattle to a new home in Portland, Oregon. We hadn’t really planned on changing states, but since both of our careers are flexible, we decided it would be about as much trouble to move to a new state as it would be to move across town. We had been interested in Portland for a while, and we took advantage of what was originally a negative experience in the form of a flooded apartment. I’m glad we made the change, but it never would have happened if the pain of the apartment situation had remained strictly an annoyance instead of the disaster it turned into. Overcoming Fear: The Twin Stories of Sean and Aaron When the apartment was flooded, I was forced into thinking about change. In other situations, we have much more choice in the matter. Because I’ve been self-employed for most of my life, I often meet with people who want to know how they can take more control of their own lives by embracing entrepreneurship or another kind of unconventional career. These meetings have been with people from diverse backgrounds, including students, engineers, journalists, artists, and investment managers—just to name a few. All of them were interested in creating an unconventional career. What they diff ered in was the level of awareness of their own “quiet desperation.” Some were interested in self-employment merely as a possibility, whereas others would do anything they could to get closer to the goal. To put it another way, some of them were ready to embrace the uncertainty of change, and others weren’t. I’ll tell you two stories to illustrate this important distinction. These stories are not composites (they are both completely true), but it’s also fair to say that the patterns in each of them have been repeated time after time. Building Your Own Net Bestselling author Paulo Coelho famously wrote, “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” Similarly, you may have heard the old saying “Leap and the net will appear.” The skeptic in us may be quick to dismiss these ideas as self-help fantasies. I think there’s actually a lot of truth to them, but even if you’re not convinced, that’s okay—we can reduce the fear and increase the odds of success before taking the leap. To do that, we’ll build our own net and then take the leap. The process involves three steps: staring down the brick wall of fear, building the net, and smashing through the wall. STEP 1: STARING DOWN THE WALL Conquering fear begins with acknowledging fear. Because our fears and insecurities are often illogical, it helps to break them down to the most basic level. You can do this by making a list of all the things you’re afraid of at any given time. For my example, see the list on the next page. Remember that most remarkable people were not born competing in the Tour de France or flying to Asia to climb onto trash heaps. Most of them were fairly average people like everyone else, who simply woke up from sleepwalking somewhere along the way. They made a few key decisions that forever altered the course of their lives—decisions like filling out an application or having a big talk with a boss. A FEW THINGS I’M CURRENTLY AFRAID OF5 • I’m only on chapter 3. Will I ever finish writing this book? • What if it sucks? What if I get bad reviews? (Or worse, what if no one pays any attention?) • I’m afraid of the forces of mediocrity and lethargy. I’m afraid of becoming too comfortable or getting lazy. • When I travel, I’m afraid of trying to speak another language. • Sometimes I feel paralyzed. People say they want to travel with me, and I think, “Oh no—then they would figure out that it’s not always that exciting.” • I’m afraid that people will think I’m faking it. • I’m scared of getting older and missing out on something I should have already done. (In the words of John Mayer, “I’m only good at being young.”) STEP 2: BUILDING THE NET Apply the “no regrets” mind-set. After acknowledging fear, you then need to change your mind-set and prepare for making a change. A few years ago, while I was living in South Africa, I began to think seriously about living a life without regrets. I realized that even though I had been fortunate to have had a lot of great experiences at a young age, there were still a few areas of my life that were undeveloped. Among other things, I worried a great deal about what other people thought of me, and I was so afraid of disappointing them that I would allow that fear to influence many of my decisions. A few friends told me they were going to climb Table Mountain later in the week, and they invited me to come along. At first I said, “No, I have a lot of work to do,” knowing that I had a meeting to attend and the other people at the meeting would wonder why I was absent. For the next couple of days, the decision nagged at me. I finally called my friends back and went with them to climb the mountain. I know this sounds like a small decision—giving up one morning’s work—but at the time it felt incredibly freeing. I’ve thought back on it many times as I’ve moved on to other stages of life. There are times, for example, when I’ve reconsidered my decision to try to visit every country in the world. I could still travel without such an exhausting goal, but I know that I’d always regret it if I didn’t try to go everywhere. By applying the “no regrets” philosophy, I experience a big shift in perspective. I can climb mountains on a workday. I can go to countries that most Westerners only read about. Twenty years from now, I know I’ll be glad I did. Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy. —DALE CARNEGIE Take the worst case scenario. Asking yourself, “What’s the absolute worst thing that could happen?” if something goes wrong can be very empowering. It helps you put things in their proper perspective. To take it further, you can also ask, “Will the world end if this does not go the way I expect?” Shockingly, I’ve found that the answer is usually “no.” In Warsaw last year, I went for a long run along the river, followed by a big breakfast at my hotel. Life was good. Then I logged on to check my upcoming travel plans. On what I thought was a routine task, I called Singapore Airlines to request a seat assignment for my flight back home from Asia the following week. “I’m sorry, sir,” said the friendly agent on the other line, “But I don’t see your name on the manifest for that flight.” This happens to me a lot—at any given time I have a series of complicated itineraries in progress, so I asked her to wait a moment while I looked up the record locator for this one. When I retrieved the printout from the bottom of my bag and looked at it closely, I did a double take. “Uh, I’ll have to call you back,” I said to the agent, and hung up the phone. To my dismay, I discovered that I had double-booked myself on two nonrefundable tickets from Tokyo to Seattle the following month. Due to my error, I had no way to get back from my current trip—which would take me to Asia in a few days, and then on home a few days after that. At first, I panicked. There I was in Poland, scheduled to fly to Asia in a few days, and I had no way home a few days later. When I managed to calm down, I asked myself the “worst case” question: what’s the worst thing that could happen? In this case, I’d be stuck in Japan without a way home, and I’d probably need to buy another plane ticket. It’s not fun to buy a one-way ticket from Japan on less than a week’s notice, but in the long arc of life, it’s probably not that big a deal. That’s pretty much what ended up happening. I felt dumb for making the big mistake, and I didn’t enjoy paying the credit card bill for the extra ticket—but the world didn’t end. Whenever people ask me if things ever go wrong with my trip planning, I now have an easy answer: “Well, this one time in Warsaw . . .” Create mass accountability. You can also create mass accountability to help you smash through the wall. Sean Macias (a different guy than the other Sean), struggled with quitting smoking for years. He finally got serious and set up a Twitter account called rebootself . The goal was to “reboot” everything about his life he was unsatisfied with, starting with quitting smoking. Sean invited anyone who was interested to follow along with his goal. Each day he posted updates: “It’s been 72 hours since my last cigarette . . . ,” “One week down . . . ,” “90 days without a smoke . . . ,” and so on. More than a year later, he’s now officially a former smoker and has moved on to other health-related goals. Give yourself a carrot. Some people may be uncomfortable with linking rewards or punishment to achievement (“Shouldn’t the process be enough?”). My philosophy is, hey, use whatever works. I bought a new round-the-world plane ticket when I sold the proposal for this book. Nine months later when I turned in the manuscript, I booked a trip to Armenia and Azerbaijan. Your carrots may not include trips to remote parts of the world, so naturally you’ll want to pick something more appropriate for yourself. Keith Richards: “If you’re going to kick authority in the teeth, you might as well use two feet.” In fact, you’d better use two feet, because when you start attacking authority head-on, authority tends to fight back. Thankfully, lashing out with a teeth-smashing kick is not the only way to fight. You can also fight indirectly by going around the obstacles you encounter, or by changing the rules of the confrontation. To start, let’s back up and look at some tactics that are frequently deployed to hinder people from making their own choices. Marginalization and the Department of No Why do people do what other people expect them to instead of what they really want? There are a number of reasons: inertia, fear of change, and no one’s ever told them they don’t have to, for example. But here’s one more: sometimes people fall in line because authority figures are very skilled at keeping them in their place. Many of these authority figures are “gatekeepers,” which can be defined as follows: Gatekeeper. n. 1. A person or group with a vested interest in limiting the choices of other people. 2. An obstacle that must be overcome to achieve unconventional success. Gatekeepers are especially effective at telling you which choices you have, thus giving you the illusion of freedom while simultaneously blocking access to what really matters. It’s like asking, “Would you like a or b?”—without letting you know that c, d, and e are also valid choices. In the case of Tim DeChristopher, the Bureau of Land Management pretended the auctions were fair because they were open to “everyone.” In reality, very few opportunities are open to everyone—in this case, the auctions were open to everyone with at least $1.7 million to spare, effectively limiting the process to big oil companies. Understanding that few opportunities are truly democratic is the first step toward successfully challenging authority. Generally speaking, universities are open to everyone who has mastered the skill of taking standardized tests. Churches and religious institutions are open to all who agree to adopt a particular doctrine that defines acceptable and unacceptable beliefs. If a member sways too far from the agreed-upon boundaries, that member will be defined as deviant and will be ostracized by the rest of the group. You may not have to compete against Shell and ExxonMobil in a government land auction, but chances are you’ll come up against your share of gatekeepers. When you apply for admission to college or for employment with a company, for example, you’ll encounter gatekeepers who intend to determine many important aspects of your relationship to others in the institution. Among other things, they’ll determine: • Whether you’re even worthy of consideration in the first place • Whether the institution views you as a threat that should be guarded against • How you stack up compared to others who are also interested in the institution (peers, other applicants, and the people reviewing your file) • How much you should be rewarded (salary, scholarship, etc.) for your contribution to the institution Gatekeepers are “no” people. They are skilled at swatting down ideas and coming up with all kinds of reasons why a request should be denied or why a particular strategy won’t work. Many organizations have an entire Department of No, which usually goes by a disguised title such as Legal or Human Resources.8 The table below lists a few conventional ideas about institutions and compares them to an alternative interpretation that views them as gatekeepers. A Second Look at Conventional Assumptions In the practice of each of the conventional assumptions, the status quo is maintained, order is enforced, and deviants are punished. Alternative ideas threaten the core and are excluded. Note that the role of most of these institutions can be turned around to produce positive change as well. Only about 80 percent of my experience in higher education was a waste of time; the other 20 percent was important and useful. Religious institutions can facilitate communities of individuals and groups seeking to understand faith, where open-mindedness is welcomed instead of shunned. Charities can help people and then get out of business as quickly as possible, setting a good example through a great success story. Unfortunately, the exceptions are rare, and conventional authority will usually need to be challenged before the exceptions can flourish. FOOLING SOME OF THE PEOPLE, SOME OF THE TIME Let’s say you’re a bad person who wants to get a bigger slice of the pie for yourself by taking it away from others. (I know you’d never do that, but just play along for a moment.) Once you understand just how much control gatekeepers can have, here are some of the tools you’d use to convince people to go along with your plan when you find your authority being undermined or challenged: THE APPEAL TO A HIGHER POWER, OFTEN UNSPECIFIED The higher power can be God, the boss, the system, the corporation, or the general powers-that-be. In fact, it is often deliberately vague—a reference to norms or informal rules of society, for example. People refer to the higher power when they aren’t really sure why something is being done in a certain way, but they know that a “just because” answer won’t suffice on its own. The answer is “Well, so-and-so said it, so it must be true.” THE “THINGS WILL BE DIFFERENT WHEN . . .” PREDICTION The words that come after “Things will be different when . . .” vary depending on the setting. Common words include “older,” “children,” and “responsibility.” When I was young, I heard that things would be different when I was responsible for myself. Before I was married I heard that things would be different with two of us. Now one of the most common statements I hear in this category is “when you have children”—usually in the context of “You won’t be able to travel the way you do when you have kids.” Perhaps that’s true. Since I don’t have kids, it’s hard to respond—which is why this kind of straw man argument can be so effective for gatekeepers. On the other hand, I know a lot of people with kids who travel even more than I do. Vince and Jeanne Dee have been on the road for three years and counting, living on $24,000 a year and taking their five-year-old to more than 30 countries. In some of the poorest countries in the world, missionaries and aid workers raise their children, providing them with a worldview and set of experiences that would never be possible at home. In other words, while I don’t have children of my own, it seems it’s indeed possible to travel or live another kind of unconventional life as a family.9 Because we encounter these tactics so often, we tend to accept them at face value. It’s also difficult when the tactics are deployed forcefully, and you feel like you’re alone in questioning them. As we saw in chapter 3, change can only come about when the pain of transition becomes less than the pain of accepting the status quo. When you’re ready to embrace change and challenge the authority of gatekeepers, here’s what you do. DEPLOY THE UNDERDOG STRATEGY (CHANGE THE WAY THE GAME IS PLAYED) When Tim DeChristopher challenged the rights of the oil and gas companies to bid on public land, he found a way to change the rules of the game. Tim wasn’t the first to complain about the unfairness of the auction, but he was the first to get creative and upset the balance. Through an analysis published in the New Yorker that ranged from basketball to every war that has been fought in the past 200 years, Malcolm Gladwell showed how underdogs—sports teams that were widely expected to lose, armies with only a tenth of the size of the larger one, and so on—can turn the tables on the “Goliaths” they are matched up against. To begin, the article showed the odds for various “David vs. Goliath” match-ups in military battles over the past two centuries. In this case, we’ll substitute “underdog” for “David” and “authority” for “Goliath.” Results of Conventional Warfare Authority kicks underdog’s ass, as expected: 71.5% Underdog defeats authority in an upset victory: 28.5% We all like to root for the underdog, but if we had to put money on it, most of us would bet on the authority to win. As Gladwell’s analysis shows, 7 times out of 10, Goliath will march straight to victory when traditional strategies are deployed. Interestingly, when the rules of engagement are switched and the underdog gets creative, the results are nearly flipped upside down: Results of Unconventional Warfare Authority kicks underdog’s ass, as expected: 36.5% Underdog defeats authority: 63.6% Even in a conventional war, Gladwell argues, underdogs can win 28 percent of the time. In a typical underdog battle, David may just get lucky and come out ahead when authority lets down its guard. But when the underdog adopts an unconventional strategy and changes the rules of the game, the percentage of victory jumps even further, to 63 percent. In other words, when the underdog deploys an unconventional strategy, the underdog is actually favored to win.10 Despite all appearances to the contrary, if you were a smart bookie, you’d set your odds in favor of the weaker opponent. What is the difference between the two situations? The difference is that in one situation the underdog deliberately changes the rules of the confrontation. Remember that gatekeepers are all about limiting choices (you can have a or b, but not c or d). The underdog strategy looks for alternatives. In Gladwell’s article, the alternatives included Lawrence of Arabia choosing to take a roundabout 600-mile journey through the desert to surprise his enemy, the Biblical David declining to wear armor into the battle with Goliath, and an undermatched basketball team using a full-court press to confuse their opponent. Tim DeChristopher’s alternative was to find a third protest option as an alternative to the unattractive options of letter-writing or violence. In other encounters with authority, you can simply nod your head, smile, and then go out and do what you intended. As mentioned, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, but thankfully, you don’t really need to ask for either one very often. MORALITY AND THE LAW Martin Luther King Jr. famously noted that “nothing Hitler did was illegal in Germany” at the time. Slavery in the United States (and other countries) was not only legal for hundreds of years, but it was actually against the law to help slaves gain their freedom. Same-sex couples still lack the right to marry in many U.S. states and in the vast majority of countries around the world. I’m not an anarchist; I’m a tax-paying, law-abiding citizen and don’t have any desire to bring down the government. It’s also clear, however, that there are times when morality and the law are on opposite sides. On those clear occasions where the law conflicts with morality, I support the side of morality through creative acts of protest—like what Tim DeChristopher did in Utah, for example. Authority figures don’t know it all. You know that, and I know that—but many of them devote a great deal of their time to convincing us that they are the experts who must be listened to. Chances are, a series of gatekeepers and other authority figures lie in the way between where you are now and where you’d like to go. Resisting authority is largely an active process. If you threaten authority, be prepared for a fight. You can try to kick authority in the teeth like Keith Richards said, but if so, you’d better use two feet. Alternatively, you can get creative and find a way to change the rules of the game, like Tim DeChristopher did. Use stones and a sling instead of a sword. Go around the obstacles. Either way, keep the words of an old Chinese proverb in mind: the person who says something is impossible should not interrupt the person who is doing it. Gatekeepers are good at interrupting, so you’ll need to become good at doing the impossible. REMEMBER THIS • If you’re not happy with the way something is done, you don’t have to accept it. • Gatekeepers are authority figures who seek to limit the choices of others—you can do a or b, but not c, d, or e. • Gatekeepers are good at justifying their actions through circular reasoning. A typical argument involves the phrase “Everyone else is doing this, so why shouldn’t you?” • When challenging authority, direct confrontation is not always the best way. Instead, use the underdog strategy to change the rules of the game. INTERLUDE ALL THE THINGS YOU DON’T NEED When you brush up against the internal obstacles of fear and insecurity and the external obstacles of gatekeepers and critics, it’s easy to be intimidated into giving up. Thankfully, a lot of things we sometimes think of as prerequisites for success are actually quite unnecessary. We’ve already looked at forgiveness and permission—how it’s easier to ask forgiveness, and you don’t really need anyone’s permission CHAPTER 5 Competence Is Your Security Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: you have no one to blame. —ERICA JONG My morning routine is fairly typical: I pour myself a cup of coffee, go online, check my email, scan through a few blogs, then head over to the news. One morning during the height of the global economic crisis, in between articles on political polarization and celebrity watching, I noticed an interesting link from MSNBC.com: “100 Ways to Make Money in the Recession.” Great headline, right? Hey, it made me click, and I wasn’t looking for a job or especially worried about paying the rent. I hopped over to MSNBC in curiosity, but as I skimmed through the list, I grew more and more confused. Almost every “way to make money in the recession” relied on working for someone else, usually through menial labor. Most of the suggestions had to do with part-time employment of various forms: delivering pizza, waiting tables, and so on. Less than 5 of the 100 ideas involved any kind of entrepreneurial project, and those were typically listed with cautionary warnings. (“You can also start an online business, but beware that most businesses fail. If you’re not tolerant of risk, stick to a reliable paycheck.”) In other words, don’t do anything to take responsibility for your own security. Better to work for the man at low wages and be thankful you aren’t out on the street. This mind-set isn’t unusual, but it’s extremely limiting. Delivering pizza may pay for gas money, but if you want to create independence or earn more than just above the poverty line, you’ll need to find a way to take matters into your own hands. If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise. —ROBERT FRITZ If it seems like I’m picking on pizza delivery drivers, I don’t mean to. Prior to my self-employment journey beginning at age 20, I spent a few months of my own driving around town with a stack of pies in the passenger seat. The real culprit here is the attitude behind the MSNBC article: when times are tough, you need the security of someone else’s business to get you through. I think a better statement is: when times are tough, you’d better get creative. A friend of mine likes to say, “I’m sorry you feel bad about not meeting your goals. What I would suggest is that you begin meeting your goals, in order to feel better.” No one else can be responsible for your success or well-being but you. If you agree, what should you do? This chapter is all about risk tolerance, and it’s guided by the principle that taking control of your own career is less risky than trusting someone else to look after you. There’s more than one way to guide your own career, and not everyone is well suited for self-employment—but when you look to yourself instead of anyone else for the answers, you’re on the right track. Taking Responsibility by Taking Action Of all of the things that are difficult to accept, this is definitely one of the most difficult of all. Here it is: your own competence is your best security. You can find your own way out of any recession or external event. This isn’t about positive thinking, visualization, or anything “woo- woo.” You don’t have to put on a Native American headdress and pray for rain. Instead, you need to change the way you interpret events, and then take action to change your circumstances. Memorize and follow this never-fail recipe: get started. Don’t quit. —BARBARA WINTER There are a few ways to do this, but each involves the concepts we looked at in the first third of the book: setting the terms of your unconventional life, overcoming fear, and fighting convention by changing the rules of the game. OPTION 1: THE CASE FOR SELF-EMPLOYMENT I don’t necessarily think everyone should be an entrepreneur or small business owner; as we’ll see in the next example, you can also become career independent while working for someone else. It’s fair to say, though, that a significant group of us want to establish “full independence” by taking the leap to self-employment. For me and many others, self-employment (even if just in partial form) is the best way to cut the dependency cord. I also think our perceptions about risk and entrepreneurship are colored by what we hear in the news. We’re used to hearing about how many businesses fail without considering all the ones that succeed—or the fact that most entrepreneurs start more than one business over the course of a career. The gap between ignorance and knowledge is much less than the gap between knowledge and action. —ANONYMOUS If you find yourself in that group, what kind of business should you start? Ideally, your project should be “location independent,” meaning that you can operate it from anywhere in the world. This doesn’t mean that you’ll pick up and move to Kigali, but it’s good to have the option of roaming around if you so choose. This also means that most microbusinesses are either based strictly on the Internet, or are primarily online with a small offline component. It’s not the only way, but it certainly makes life and work a lot easier. THE $100 BUSINESS Just as you don’t need someone else’s permission to live your own life, you also don’t need a lot of money to start a small business. I’ve started five businesses in the past decade, and every one cost less than $1,000. In fact, before I spent the first $100, I had a very good idea whether each business would succeed or fail. Granted, none of them have gone on to make me fabulously wealthy. But that wasn’t the goal—the goal was to support myself so I wouldn’t have to get a job, and by that measure, every one of the five businesses has been successful. I’m not alone in this experience. I recently sent out word that I was looking for stories of $100 business startups that went on to long-term success and profitability. Here are just a few of several hundred that I learned about: • The Denver TV news anchor who was laid off and started a “Yoga at Work” part-time business for the cost of a $9 domain registration. Within six months she was earning $2,000 a month. • The brick installation company that started when the founder was laid off from a car dealership. He took $18 to Barnes & Noble to buy “some kind of business book,” but ended up buying coffee and looking through books in the café. After a rocky start and a difficult partnership, the business brought in more than $150,000 in its third year. • The “$50 and a bottle of oil” startup that grew to a $6 million business within five years. • The “Retro Razor” project that launched from a Seattle bedroom after the founder ran out of Gillette blades on a trip to Italy (cost: $75.87 for initial inventory). Retro Razor signed up for Amazon.com’s partner program and sales went crazy. More details are available in the “Online Resources” section of this book. Characteristics of Good and Bad Businesses Having been self-employed for almost all of my adult life, I’m admittedly biased toward entrepreneurship. At this point, I can’t really fathom the idea of working in a traditional job. I recently visited my bank to open a new account, and the process took 45 minutes. After the first 15 minutes of sitting there, I started getting antsy. I talked with the woman who helped me with the account, and I asked her, “Is this what you do all day? What happens when no one is sitting here and opening accounts?” She sighed and said, “Well, there’s . . . research. And sometimes . . . administration. We used to be able to use the Internet during downtimes, but now we’re not allowed.” OPTION 3: REDEFINE YOUR PLACE OF EMPLOYMENT BY HIRING A BOSS Susan V. Lewis is a marketer and designer with the all-important superpower of getting things done. After a string of varied, fulfilling jobs (including sports reporter, program director, and painter), she had settled into a five-year stretch at an office where her colleagues didn’t relate very well to her work. Susan was frustrated and wanted to make a change, but she didn’t want to join the thousands of other people who were looking for jobs using conventional methods. “More than 300 people apply for any job I might be interested in or qualified for,” Susan said. “Proving on a single sheet of paper to a computer or disinterested HR specialist that I’m even qualified to begin with is a no-win proposition.” To avoid competing with hundreds of peers who all looked good on paper, Susan had to change the rules and make her own game. Instead of job-hunting, she decided to go “boss-hunting.” She set up a website describing the project, where she posted her CV and background, explained what kind of role she was looking for, and invited prospective bosses to apply.11 Susan believed that there wasn’t much value in changing the rules halfway. Instead, she followed the process of hiring a boss to its natural end, interviewing multiple candidates and finally extending a formal offer with terms and conditions to the company she liked the best. In addition to “boss applications” that came from her preferred city of Dallas, she also received applications from companies in Boston, San Francisco, Toronto, Nashville, Austin, Chicago, and New York. Ironically (or not), the best application she received came from a company that hadn’t even intended to hire a new employee at that time. They had the idea for a new marketing person in the back of their heads, but until they heard about Susan’s boss-hiring project, they hadn’t actually planned to fill the position for a while. Susan is a hard worker, but her success was not entirely related to her superhero power of getting things done. When 300 people apply for a single position, you have to find a way to stand out from the other rockstars. Much of Susan’s success came from turning the job-hunting process on its head and doing something completely different. I understand the objections to using Susan as an example: not everyone can make a website promoting their awesomeness, the concept has already been done, “that would never work in my field,” and so on. The fact is, however, that when Susan started the project, people said it wouldn’t work for her either. She dared to be different, and in doing so successfully changed the rules of the hiring game right at the lowest point in the economic crisis, when unemployment rates throughout the United States were hovering near 10 percent. Confessions of a Renegade Entrepreneur: My Story For me, the options of redefining the rules of work were different from what they were for Allan or Susan. To be blunt, I wasn’t qualified to do much of anything in the traditional workforce, and I wasn’t good at the few part-time jobs I held before striking out on my own at the age of 20. As described in chapter 1, I don’t have a history of building multimillion-dollar businesses. What I do have is a history of survival through self- employment, by any means necessary. Over time I developed an appreciation of entrepreneurship as a force for good in the world—but in the beginning, I was mostly trying to pay the rent each month. I’ve heard it said that an entrepreneur is someone who will work 24 hours a day for themselves to avoid working one hour a day for someone else. It’s fair to say that was a good description of my work for a number of years. I didn’t create any kind of sustainable infrastructure; I did everything myself. For better or worse, if I didn’t feel like doing something, it just didn’t get done. I’d be the first to say that this isn’t the smartest model to follow, and I’m not necessarily defending it. For my early years, though, it worked just fine for me. I was focused on other things—four years in Africa, playing music at night, traveling, graduate school, and so on. I wasn’t getting rich, but I had all the money I needed to do most of what I wanted. Once I had earned enough for the month, I stopped worrying about it until the next month. After moving overseas, I continued to support myself through moonlighting, consulting on Google Adwords accounts and building websites for clients in the United States and Europe. At first the work took only a few hours a week, but in my third year abroad, a new information publishing business I had started on a home visit began to take off at the same time my volunteer responsibilities were picking up. My colleagues and customers in the business, which was based in the United States, had no idea I was living in Africa, and my non-profit colleagues in Africa didn’t know about my second life on the Internet. A couple of times a month I’d set my alarm clock to wake up for 3 a.m. conference calls by satellite phone, where other participants would marvel at working on location from Los Angeles and London. I never said a word about being even farther away, in places like Sierra Leone and Liberia. I worked 45 hours a week on volunteer projects and at least 20 hours a week on the business. It was all going well—or at least, as well as could be expected, but one evening, the duct-taped operation fell apart. I had just returned from a long day in the field, delivering medical supplies to a village two hours away from the capital city where we were based. I went online through the flaky satellite connection and began downloading email. I thought I’d spend 20, maybe 30 minutes processing messages and uploading orders before calling it a night. Then I read the message titled “Urgent Update” and saw that it was from my new fulfillment center. The message explained that they were shutting down the company, effective immediately. “No more orders will be shipped,” the owner said, and in fact, no orders had been shipped in three weeks. When I frantically called in on the satellite phone to get more info, the number was disconnected. In retrospect, I should have seen the distress signs—inventory not being added to the database, a halfhearted response to inquiries—but in between delivering truckloads of relief supplies and helping bring patients in from all over the region, I simply missed it. Reading that email on a faulty Internet connection late at night in my small office, I sat and wondered what in the world I could do. I had a huge crisis on my hands, not much time to deal with it, and I was doing important work in Sierra Leone that I couldn’t just leave behind to fly back to the United States. Within a few hours, other business owners left out in the cold chimed in on several online forums to fume at the company that had left us all without a crucial link in the supply chain. I was mad too, but I knew that concentrating on the anger wouldn’t help me. The fulfillment center would still be out of business, and I’d still be stuck without a way out of the crisis. The better answer, I knew, would be to focus on a solution to the problem. I could deal with the negative feelings later. I called back home to my brother, who had first helped with the business more than five years earlier but now had his own career. “Ken,” I said, “I’m going to need your help.” My plan was for him to sign up as my temporary, one-man fulfillment center while I worked on a long-term solution. Thankfully, he was up for the task. Next, I called my printer to order new supplies, three new fulfillment centers to see if they could help, and several other customers of the failed supplier, to check out the new options. Over the next ten days, we replaced $20,000 worth of product and found a new supplier willing to accommodate a number of “refugee clients” from the failed fulfillment center. At first, the process of sorting out the mess was extremely stressful. During the first few hours, I had no idea if I could recover from such an unexpected problem. Sitting there after I had made my last phone call around midnight, however, I began to experience a deep sense of calm. As strange as it was, I felt that in some ways the crisis was even a welcome event. It forced me to reevaluate what I was doing and to think creatively about solving the problem without dropping too many balls. “This will all be okay,” I wrote in my journal while on hold with one of the vendors. “I’ll find a way to get through this and be better for it in the end.” And in fact, it was okay. My brother did a great job as a one-man shipping agency for three weeks, the new fulfillment center took over after that (providing much better service than the first one ever had), and I gained a new sense of confidence that I could handle any problem that came my way. The lesson I learned was that you can come back from anything. Even if your supplier disappears off the map and you are 5,000 miles away, a creative entrepreneur has to be able to patch things together somehow. No one else can be bear the blame, or the responsibility for the comeback. Paradoxically, when you manage to survive a crisis that had “deathblow potential,” you’ll often end up stronger than you were before the walls fell down. The best part of all was that most people around me had no idea what was going on. My faraway customers were happy, and my non-profit colleagues in Africa never knew about the crisis I was dealing with in the evenings. I continued the volunteer commitment for another year before relocating back to the United States for graduate school, and I even slowed down the extra hours I put in while the business continued to grow. A Cautionary Note on Your Escape Plan Of course, the above scenario could have gone another way—my attempt to resurrect a business on the verge of cardiac arrest could have failed completely. Even if that had happened, however, I’d still have been better off than working in a bank and dreaming up escape plans. Speaking of that, “escape” is a common theme of many self-employment resources, and I can understand why. When you work in the bank where you can’t use the Internet, escape is probably the foremost thing on your mind. But be careful. When you focus on escaping the humdrum of the cubicle (or wherever you spend your workdays), you also need to have something to escape to. Otherwise you may end up no happier than you were prior to the escape. Like the bride and groom who spend dozens of hours planning a wedding but little time actively planning the life they’ll share after the big day, the other side of escape may be abrupt and unfulfilling instead of the exciting adventure it should be. I’m also skeptical of the idea of eliminating work or reducing it to its most limited elements. It’s not that I think there’s anything wrong with making more time for family or activities you enjoy. I just think that if someone is unhappy with how they are spending their workday, the answer is to find better work. Personally, I like work. I believe in a 168-hour workweek that is filled with activities I love. A few hours of sleep can be thrown in if necessary. Whatever side of that issue you come down on, the most important thing is to take the control of your career into your own hands. Entrepreneur, rockstar employee, creative professional, or somewhere in between—the best job security is your own competence. REMEMBER THIS • No one else will be responsible for you or care about your well-being as much as you. • You can create your own security in a regular job or by working for yourself. (I think working for yourself is easier, but it’s not the only way.) • Like Allan Bacon’s “Life Experiments,” slow and steady change can produce big improvements when done consistently over time. • Some people think self-employment is risky, but the real risk lies in deriving your security from an external source • Don’t just escape from something; escape to something The Cost of Becoming an Expert This story is not about my relative academic success.12 The story is about the value of what I gained in graduate school versus what I started working toward at the same time: becoming an authority through online writing. If the goal of graduate school is to prepare students for a more advanced career, it’s fair to measure that goal against alternative methods. As usual, I was involved in a lot of activities during the first half of 2008. I ran a marathon, traveled to more than 10 countries, finished a commitment as a board member for a non-profit organization, and had plenty of other fun experiences. The two most important projects I completed were: • Finished my MA program at the University of Washington • Officially started the Art of Non-Conformity (AONC) site and built it to a respectable level within the blogging community While these projects were being completed, I was faced with a decision to either continue my education with the PhD program on the East Coast or stay in the Pacific Northwest and focus on writing. I chose the writing, and I’ll show you why here. It all started with the observation that my MA thesis was read by a grand total of three people. Each of them said nice things about it, but the audience was extremely limited. By contrast, an online manifesto I published around the same time was downloaded (and presumably read, or at least glanced at) by more than 100,000 people in the first six months of publication. That experience made me realize that my online work had the potential to make a much more significant impact on the world than any graduate education I could pursue. I know that there will be some questions about this comparison, so stick with me and I’ll try to answer them before we close out the chapter. For now, take a look at the following table. Academics like to break things down in a comparative perspective, so let’s look at a few factors a bit closer. Graduate School vs. the Blogosphere Financial cost. Over the course of five quarters, I paid roughly $32,000 to attend the University of Washington’s Jack-son School of International Studies. This figure does not include books ($300 a quarter until I learned how to use the inter-library loan system) and other expenses related to obtaining my degree (a new computer, hundreds of pages of printouts for essays and term papers, gallons of coffee, etc.). I ended up graduating one quarter early, thus saving what would have been another $4,000 in tuition for the final spring quarter. To be fair, I also received a “free” bus pass and gym membership in exchange for my $32,000, which were both used and appreciated. For my website, I paid $8.95 a month for hosting and began with a free WordPress theme I downloaded. Two photographer friends helped me with a photo shoot around Seattle one morning—they were kind enough to let me pay only with lunch—and I spent the first three months writing initial content that would help me when things got busy later. As the site grew more popular, I paid more money to upgrade the design and add some new services (video updates, newsletter, and so on). However, I made these investments only after I had achieved enough initial success with the project to have a good estimation of what the improvements would be worth. In total, I probably paid about $5,000 over the first year—a bit more than one quarter’s tuition, and funds that were recouped very quickly. Time spent writing seminal work. The time spent writing and revising the seminal works (a 60-page thesis for graduate school and a 29- page manifesto for my website) was roughly the same. I spent approximately ten hours more on the thesis due to some last-minute revisions requested by one advisor. Number of readers. After 40-plus hours of work, my MA thesis was read by a grand total of three people. I had the opportunity to publish a revised version of the paper in an academic journal, but the readership would have been very small and specialized. By the time I finished graduate school, I was busy with my new website, so I never got around to submitting the paper for publication. By comparison, in the first six months of publication, the online manifesto was downloaded more than 100,000 times, by readers from more than 120 countries. Two years later, it continues to be downloaded by at least 50 to 100 new people every day, whereas my thesis (“Post- Conflict Governance and Stability in Liberia”) sits unopened somewhere on my old laptop. Feedback from readers. At the end of my thesis presentation, I was told I passed with distinction. That was nice to hear, but I only heard it from three people, and I don’t think they’ve thought much more about my paper since our big meeting that day. Even if it was superb (which would admittedly be a big stretch), it certainly wasn’t very influential. By contrast, I’ve received thousands of emails and site comments from readers who read the manifesto. Some of them have made radically different life choices as a result of reading it. I’ve heard from people who have quit their job, changed careers, started a charity, left abusive relationships, traveled the world, and taken all kinds of other extremely meaningful actions. I don’t think that my work was the sole motivation for these actions, but the fact that it was a significant part of the motivation is good enough for me. This kind of feedback continues to be one of the main reasons I write. Number of peers. Just as the number of readers is an important metric of influence, the number of peers is also a good way to see how you stand out in the world. Each year, approximately 631,000 students complete graduate programs in the United States alone. In total, approximately 9 percent of the U.S. population has a master’s degree or higher—relatively distinctive, but hardly unusual. It is more difficult to judge the number of peers for online careers. Granted, there are millions of bloggers, but the vast majority are writing casual, primarily personal content. The AONC site is currently in the Top 3,000 sites in the world as ranked by Technorati. This ranking system can be somewhat arbitrary, but I think it’s fair to say that my influence is far greater as a writer than as the recipient of a graduate degree. I also became a member of the LifeRemix network, a small group of personal development and productivity authors. Among others, the group includes popular sites by Gretchen Rubin (Happiness Project) and Leo Babauta (Zen Habits), which allows me to associate with some of the most widely recognized authors in my industry. Within the LifeRemix network, I have exactly 21 peers, nearly all of whom have become personal friends. Being in a group of 22, or even a group of 3,000, is a lot more influential than being in a group consisting of 9 percent of the U.S. population. Recognition as expert. My graduate degree was in International Studies, with a focus on development in Africa and a side concentration in Public Affairs. These are important topics, but I’m hardly alone in those fields. To stand out requires additional years, if not decades, of further training and publishing of academic papers read by a small audience. For the website, I chose to focus my writing on “Unconventional Strategies for Life, Work, and Travel.” This has led to my being viewed as an expert on alternative ideas for each of these areas. People write in by the hundreds every day, asking me which frequent flyer program they should join, how to charge their Nintendo DS in Asia, how to start a microbusiness, and all kinds of other topics. I still adhere to the guru-free philosophy and believe that people can obtain any information they need for themselves, but I’m happy to help wherever I can. Time spent on unproductive tasks. My experience in academia was that I had to focus on pleasing people far more than doing good work. As mentioned at the beginning of this book, about 80 percent of the tasks and projects I completed for my degree had no lasting value, and judging from all the other students I hear from every day, I don’t think my experience was unusual. The opposite holds true in my new career: roughly 80 percent of what I do has some kind of lasting value. I can’t claim to have eliminated all inefficiency in my writing career. I do a lot of things the slow-and-manual way, and some of my processes could definitely be improved. However, I’m comforted by the fact that about 80 percent of what I do is directly related to my overall goals of living the way I want while simultaneously helping others. If I never get beyond 80 percent, I think I can live with that. Outcomes. After five quarters at the University of Washington, I received a nice piece of paper in the mail. No career assistance was offered. By contrast, my online writing has opened the doors to an entirely new career. Air New Zealand flew me to the South Pacific to write about one of their destinations. I’ve written for CNN, Business Week, the New York Times , and other A-list publications. This book you are reading now is another product of that initial success. I regularly receive invitations for new opportunities—trips, speaking engagements, magazine articles, and so on. On this level, it’s hard to even make a comparison between the experience of graduate school versus creating an independent career. It won’t be the case for everyone, but for me, I’ve clearly found the better choice. Alternative and Independent Learning What about the question of learning—you know, what higher education is supposed to be all about? Personally, I value learning, but formal education and learning do not always go hand in hand. If your primary goal is to learn instead of to prepare for a career, you may be better off going it alone. Yes, there are exceptions. If you want to become a professor and work toward innovation in the academy, then you probably need the graduate degree. If you want to become a medical doctor, I suppose it’s good that you don’t learn how to cut people open with a “For Dummies” book. But the exceptions are greatly outnumbered by the rule that it is often quicker, cheaper, and easier to become your own expert. If you value learning but aren’t a fan of debt or busywork, why not create a way to learn what you need on your own? The One-Year, Self- Directed, Alternative Graduate School Experience offers a customizable plan to fit the needs of almost any aspiring student. By following the alternative graduate school program, you’ll gain the rough equivalent of what tens of thousands of other students regularly spend tens of thousands of dollars on. In return, you’ll have gained approximately the same amount of knowledge (if not more) that you’d receive in a general social science or humanities program. Naturally, if your field of interest varies, the program can be suitably modified. If you love literature, read 100 books instead of 50. If you’re interested in computer programming, learn more than just how to blog. Now that universities are listing course materials online, in some cases you can even go through the same courses that paying students do. Download the syllabi for the courses you’re interested in and listen to podcasts by professors.13 THE ONE-YEAR, SELF-DIRECTED, ALTERNATIVE GRADUATE SCHOOL EXPERIENCE • Subscribe to the Economist and read every issue religiously. Cost: $97 + 60 minutes each week. • Memorize the names of every country, world capital, and current president or prime minister in the world. Cost: $0 + 3-4 hours once. • Buy a round-the-world plane ticket or use frequent fl yer miles to travel to several major world regions, including somewhere in Africa and somewhere in Asia. Cost: variable, but plan on $4,000. (Check the “Online Resources” section for more information.) • Read the basic texts of the major world religions: the Torah, the New Testament, the Koran, and the teachings of Buddha. Visit a church, a mosque, a synagogue, and a temple. Cost: materials can be obtained free online or in the mail (or for less than $50) + 20 hours. • Subscribe to a language-learning podcast and listen to each 20-minute episode, five times a week, for the entire year. Attend a local language club once a week to practice. Cost: $0 + 87 hours. • Loan money to an entrepreneur through Kiva.org and arrange to visit him or her while you’re abroad on your big trip. Cost: likely $0 in the end, since 98% of loans are repaid. • Acquire at least three new skills during your year. Suggestions: photography, skydiving, computer programming, martial arts. The key is not to become an expert in any of them, but to become functionally proficient. Cost: variable, but each skill is probably less than three credits of tuition would be at a university. • Read at least 30 nonfiction books and 20 classic novels. Cost: approximately $750 (can be reduced or eliminated by using the library). • Join a gym or health club to keep fit during your rigorous independent studies. (Most universities include access to their fitness centers with the purchase of $32,000 in tuition, so you’ll need to pay for this on your own otherwise.) Cost: $25-$75 a month. • Become comfortable with basic presentation and public speaking skills. Join your local Toastmasters club to get constructive, structured help that is beginner-friendly. Cost: $25 once + 2 hours a week for 10 weeks. • Start a blog, create a basic posting schedule, and stick with it for the entire year. You can get a free blog at WordPress.org. One tip: don’t try to write every day. Set a weekly or biweekly schedule for a while, and if you’re still enjoying it after three months, pick up the pace. Cost: $0. • Set your home page to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special: Randompage. Over the next year, every time you open your browser, you’ll see a different, random Wikipedia page. Read it. Cost: $0. • Learn to write by listening to the Grammar Girl podcast on iTunes and buying Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. Cost: $0 for Grammar Girl, $14 for Anne Lamott. • Instead of reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, read The Know-It-All by A. J. Jacobs, a good summary. Cost: $15. TOTAL COST14: $10,000 or less CHAPTER 7 The Power of Your Own Small Army I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers. —RALPH NADER Let’s return to the story that began in chapter 1. Like many others after the tragedy of 9/11, in the fall of 2001 I became depressed and introspective. I had been in lower Manhattan a few days before the towers fell, and the experience naturally led me to reflect on the value of life and what I was really contributing to the world. At the time I was working part-time in the mornings on my own business and playing jazz music with local bands at night. I enjoyed both activities and had a lot of fun, but I kept thinking, “There must be more.” One night I went online and read about the horrific civil war in Sierra Leone that had left the country completely devastated. Throughout the previous decade, a violent conflict between rebel fighters and government forces had caused tremendous damage to the country and its people. Then I read about Dr. Gary Parker, a plastic surgeon originally from California who had given up a lucrative practice for a volunteer opportunity in West Africa. Plenty of doctors fly off to the ends of the earth for a short volunteer stint, but Gary was different: he had been living in a small cabin on a hospital ship for more than 17 years. Instead of doing face-lifts in Santa Barbara, Gary spent his days reconstructing faces that had been disfigured by tumors and war wounds. If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader. —JOHN QUINCY ADAMS Along the way, he met Susan, another volunteer, who became his wife. Gary and Susan had two children, and the Parkers lived as a family on board the ship. While I was sleeping in every day before heading to Starbucks for my morning coffee, they were all stationed in Sierra Leone—the poorest country in the world according to the U.N. Human Development Index. As I read Gary’s story, I thought to myself, “If a surgeon could give up 17 years of practicing in California to work in war-torn countries, the least I can do is go and see what it’s all about.” I was intrigued by Gary’s example of selflessness, and I wanted to be a part of it. Some of the attraction was the idea of helping others, but it went beyond altruistic motives. Walking around in a daze after 9/11, I saw the opportunity to be a part of something bigger than myself as a way out of my depression. A few months later, Jolie and I left our comfortable lives in the United States to move overseas. We went to Sierra Leone and moved on board the same ship as Gary, Susan, and their children. All in all, we spent four years working with them in eight different African countries, and those years were far more influential to me than anything I had learned in college or my early work as an entrepreneur. Gary was a leader I was willing to follow, and I eagerly enlisted in his small army of volunteers. Why You Need Your Own Small Army, and Who’s Got Your Back Maybe you’re not ready to head off to the ends of the earth to spend four years working for free, but if you’ve read this far, you probably have at least one big goal you are committed to achieving over a long period of time. No matter the goal, you’ll likely discover that you’re going to need some help along the way. If you want to become a working artist, you’ll need fans and patrons to support you. If your plans involve some kind of entrepreneurial project, then you’ll need a group of loyal customers to ensure reliable income over time. Even highly individualistic goals, like writing a book or visiting every country in the world, can benefit greatly from the support of a small army of loyal partners. The price of greatness is responsibility. —WINSTON CHURCHILL Why will people willingly follow you? Because they’ll believe in your cause, and because your work helps them in some way. In fact, if you give people a good enough reason, many of them will stick with you for life, allowing you to scale up your project or move to another goal after you achieve the first one. In this chapter we’ll look at how to acquire a network of allies and followers, how to make their lives better, and how to put them to work so they can help you at the same time. This chapter examines each part of the process, but first, an important disclaimer. Disclaimer: I’m going to use the terms “leader” and “followers” here, but I want to be clear that the relationship is not always one-way. Leadership has little to do with titles and everything to do with influence. If you’re a leader, never forget that your followers are real people who have a lot to contribute. Wherever your leadership journey takes you, always remember that your followers are not just a number. A small army typically consists of five groups of people who connect with you in different ways. Prospects have heard about you and are curious about what you’re doing. Before making any commitment, prospects look for the “reason why”—why should they care? Why should they be interested in what you have to offer? Followers, the largest part of the team, learn of your cause, find it intriguing, and actively seek out more contact from you. If you have a website, they’ll join the newsletter list and follow it regularly. If you have a business, they’ll buy from you regularly. They are also following a number of other individuals and organizations, so you do not have their exclusive attention—but they care about you and are eager to learn more. They have crossed over to your side of the fence. True fans are hyper-responsive followers. They typically represent 2 to 4 percent of your follower base, and they are completely committed to your success. True fans scream at concerts, go to sports events even when the team is in last place, post comments on blogs, and eagerly watch for any news from their hero. When a musician puts out a new album, her true fans will buy it without waiting for the reviews. In fact, if you have any kind of business, true fans will buy almost everything you sell. Allies are like-minded individuals who are actively waging campaigns of their own in similar fields. They are your peers. Some of them may be followers or true fans of your work as well, but you’re both on a similar journey. Lastly, friends of friends represent your extended network. The idea is that when you need specific help with something, you may not necessarily know who to ask—but someone you know can probably help find the right person and connect both of you. Note that these categories are not completely distinct from one another. You can be a follower, for example, (or even a true fan) and also be an ally. People will also sometimes move between one category and another as they interact with you and everyone else who is connected to their lives. Instead of thinking too much about categorization, it’s more important to spend time on recruiting and maintaining your small army —and then putting them to work. The Plan of Action Most recruitment and maintenance activities for your small army fit into these three steps: Step 1: Recruit Your Small Army Step 2: Train and Reward Your Army Step 3: Ask Your Army for Help Each step is related and in some cases may occur simultaneously, but let’s break it down a little for simplicity’s sake. STEP 3: ASKING YOUR ARMY FOR HELP Only after you have attracted prospects, converted them to followers or true fans, and deepened the relationship can you ask people to really help you. Technically, you can ask for small things in the beginning—join the email list, confirm your subscription, complete a survey, and so on. To go beyond the basics, though, you’ll need to have established a strong relationship and proven that you are worth helping on a more significant level. When you’re ready, what can your army do for you? How can you ask them for help or put them to work? Let’s look at five different ideas. OPTION 1: HELP YOU SPREAD THE WORD The most basic, entry-level commitment a follower can make is to help bring in new prospects to your campaign. Followers have their own circles of influence, and they can get the message out to the people they know far more effectively than you ever could on your own. When they endorse your work or personality, their own friends and followers will pay attention. If you are a writer, you can ask readers to help spread the word about your books, stories, articles, or blog posts. Be specific—not just “Please tell someone about this,” but “Please pass this on to three other people” or “Please submit this post on your favorite social network.” If you are a visual artist who relies on galleries or coffee shops to show your work, ask everyone you know for contacts in the industry. Use the “weak ties” phenomenon (discussed on the next page) to your advantage by finding out how you can get in touch with galleries that are more prestigious than you would otherwise feel comfortable approaching on your own. If you are a speaker, teacher, or consultant, you probably know that the best thing you can do is get some experience under your belt so that companies and event planners will hire you. Even as a beginner, you can do this by letting your small army know you are available. You may need to work for free at first, but once you get a few events under your belt and have good references, you can go back to your network and ask for more help finding paid opportunities. OPTION 2: HELP YOU CONNECT WITH ANYONE As part of asking for help, you’ll also want to connect with the fourth and fifth groups of people in your network, your allies and friends of friends. Remember that allies are on a journey similar to yours. The challenges they face will also be similar—and they’ll likely know a number of other people in the field that you haven’t met yet. You should connect with potential allies as early as possible. When you launch a new project, actively introduce yourself to everyone who has influenced you and anyone in a similar field. Tell them what you’re doing and how their work has been an inspiration. Help them out wherever you can without keeping score. Don’t try to sell them on anything or ask for something at this point; instead, aim to establish a relationship. One of the most interesting facts about social networking is that most people love to introduce and connect other people. Perhaps most interestingly of all, the people known by your followers may end up being more helpful than the people you know directly. This is because of the social phenomenon known as the “strength of weak ties.” See the “Online Resources” section of this book for more info, but all you really need to know is that “weak ties” refers to people unknown to you but known to your friends and allies . Strong Ties = People you know directly Weak Ties = People known to your network (friends of friends) The interesting thing is that even though the people known to your network are referred to as “weak ties,” when you’re referred to them by a mutually trusted friend, the relationship is instantly strengthened. As you recruit your small army, chances are someone you know will know exactly how to help you meet anyone else you need to know. OPTION 3: PROVIDE FINANCIAL SUPPORT As you build a small army over time, your followers can financially support your work even if your primary goal is to do something different than run a business. In a popular online essay, former Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly argued that it is possible for a musician, band, or almost any artist to earn a good, sustainable income with a fan base of just 1,000 true fans. Remember that a true fan is someone who will buy almost anything you produce. These fans will drive long distances to concerts, actively post reviews of your work, debate critics on your behalf, and regularly tell their friends about you. This model is an evolution of the classical arts tradition, where individual artists were supported by patrons who appreciated their work. Back in the day, an artist might have only one patron who agreed to support him in return for artistic dedications and commissioned projects. The beauty of the small army model is that with a number like 1,000 fans, the artist is not dependent on such a small source of support. Some fans will inevitably drop out throughout the life span of an entire career, but if artists can maintain a suitable base, their financial support need not suffer and can even grow over time. OPTION 4: GROW YOUR BUSINESS When run properly, a small business will attract prospects, customers (fans), and hyper-responsive customers (true fans) over time. Once you have acquired a sufficient base of each group, there are a number of things you can do to leverage the relationship to grow your business. With the support of the true fans of your business, you can create a continuity program to increase monthly income. You can build a funnel of entry-level products that lead to higher-level products, enabling you to serve customers who are at different stages in their relationship with you.15 Most important, you can aim to redefine the conversation between you and your customers by taking the emphasis away from selling and toward meeting the needs of people who look to you for help and inspiration. Instead of selling products, you focus on solving problems. Instead of attracting skepticism, you build trust. For a good example of how this works, consider the interesting model of public radio and TV stations. If you ever listen to public radio or watch public television, you probably know that the content is freely offered without advertising. Once or twice a year, the station will conduct a fund-raising drive where gentle (or not-so-gentle) social pressure is used to convince free riders to join the paying subscriber group—a direct application of converting prospects and followers (listeners) to true fans (contributors). This model can now be adapted on a micro level thanks to the widespread adoption of the Internet. Some creative entrepreneurs are discovering that they can do essentially the same thing with their own network of followers and fans: give everything away without restrictions, and ask the small army to decide what to pay. Since most of us can’t easily open a new public radio station, let’s look at two examples of individuals who have succeeded by adapting this model to different mediums. Example 1: The Travel Writer David Rowell runs The Travel Insider , a website and email newsletter about the airline industry. Each Friday since November 2001, David has sent out a long, detailed message summarizing what has been happening in the airline world that week. The newsletter is highly opinionated —some readers get upset about David’s rants—but over time, David has benefited from his “tell-it-like-it-is” reputation and built a core following. All of the content David offers his readers is free, but since this is his full-time job, naturally he needs to be supported. Once a year, David produces a fund-raiser where he asks readers to contribute. A core group of about 800 subscribers typically responds to the call for help, contributing a range of amounts from very small ($5 to $10) to $250 or more, with $50 being the average. For the rest of the year, David is relatively silent about his need for support. Additional contributions do come in from time to time, but the bulk of his yearly income is derived from contributions and pledges made during the fund drive. These true fans, and a number of general followers, are happy to “pay” David for the free newsletter he sends them each Friday. Example 2: The Online Comic Strip From a small storefront office that contains more video game consoles than computers, Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins design a triweekly comic strip filled with inside jokes that is read by hundreds of thousands of video gamers. The tone of Penny Arcade , their comic strip, is frequently lewd, and sometimes the inside jokes aren’t even understood by the insiders. Mike and Jerry would be the first to say that the humor of Penny Arcade isn’t for everyone. Instead, it is for their own small army. In the beginning, Mike and Jerry admitted that they enjoyed making the comic strip but had no idea how to run any kind of business. This was not a crucial problem in the early days, but then they started hosting video game conventions for a few thousand of their closest friends. Going from online comic strip to worldwide gaming convention wasn’t easy. They needed an army, and they found one in their massively loyal fans, who volunteered in huge numbers to staff the convention and keep the peace. In 2007 they moved out of a local conference center into the enormous Washington State Visitors and Convention Center in downtown Seattle. In addition to the gaming conventions, Penny Arcade has also utilized its vast network to help children’s hospitals throughout the United States and Canada. They do this through an annual fund-raiser called Child’s Play. Since 2003, the army of gamers has raised more than $2 million in donations for toys and games at children’s hospitals, proving that a subculture not always regarded as being outwardly focused (predominately male video game players) can rise to the occasion of a good cause. OPTION 5: JOIN THE CAUSE, LITERALLY Once you go beyond the basic commitments, you can also ask followers to literally join you on location to advance your cause. This requires a greater commitment than most followers can make, but that’s okay—if you have a worthy cause and have built the right relationships, the people who are a good fit won’t hesitate to sign up, while other followers can cheer the rest of you on from the sidelines. When it comes to asking people to literally join your cause, the possibilities extend from the significant to the fanatical. Dean Karnazes, an ultramarathon runner who gained fame for having pizza delivered to him on the street while running through the night, set a goal of running 50 marathons across the United States in 50 days. The idea was interesting by itself, but fortunately, Dean and his sponsors had the good sense to think carefully about the reason why other people would care about it. To answer the question and provide a good reason, Dean decided against the original idea of running each marathon by himself on unofficial courses. Instead, he would run each race on a registered course with other runners who had signed up in advance to come out and join him. On some days, more than 50 solo runners, including a few who had never run more than 10 miles at one time before, came out to run the entire 26.2-mile event with Dean. Together they raised money for charity while boosting the awareness of running all across the country. Gary Parker, the California surgeon who had been living in Africa for 17 years, offered me a chance to join his cause on location. I eagerly embraced it, and many others did too. One of the others was 30-year-old Scott Harrison, a former nightclub promoter from New York City who had grown tired of partying every night and was looking for a more meaningful commitment. As what he originally viewed as “a year of penance,” Scott joined Gary and me in Benin to document the work of the organization and learn more about international development. When the year was up, Scott was ready to move back to New York—but he didn’t want to promote parties anymore. This time, Scott decided to promote the need for clean water and sanitation throughout Africa. From his days as a nightclub promoter, Scott had amassed an email list of 12,000 people. Many were personal friends, others were colleagues, and others were models and celebrities. Instead of starting over, Scott decided to start with the list. He wrote to everyone he knew and told them his idea: founding an international charity that donated 100 percent of revenue directly to program expenses. The money would fund local charities in the neediest countries in the world, and to provide accountability, they would use images from Google Earth that proved when the wells and latrines had been installed. Presented with the compelling story and a way to help, Scott’s small army of nightclub contacts came through. Relying primarily on volunteers and a few staff members funded by grants, Scott built Charity: Water to a $5 million organization in less than three years. The organization’s volunteer board of directors is responsible for paying Scott’s salary and funding the administrative costs of the organization, while Charity: Water continues to give 100 percent of its income directly to field partners. WARNING: HOW TO DEFEAT YOUR OWN SMALL ARMY It all sounds so simple. Recruit people who care about your work enough to support you, provide them with continual motivation to follow along, and then charge off to storm the castle. Well, that’s basically how it works, but if it’s that simple, why doesn’t every artist, entrepreneur, or anyone else with a big goal follow this model? First, understand that it is not easy to get a significant number of followers and true fans. You can follow lots of people (I keep up with about 100 email lists and blogs), but you can only be a true fan of a few. Next, trust is hard to gain but very easy to lose. If you want to destroy the relationship between you and your followers, all you need to do is abuse their trust. To defeat your own small army, simply don’t do what you say you’re going to do, and don’t apologize when you make a mistake. If you let people down without explanation or apology, good luck rebuilding that trust. Unfortunately, avoiding this blunder is harder than it looks. No one starts a campaign to change the world with the idea that they will end up letting people down. The problem usually comes about when the project is succeeding rather than failing. When things are going smoothly and you find you can take shortcuts that no one seems to notice, you may be tempted to take more and more shortcuts. Eventually, everyone notices, but by then it may be too late. If you want to maintain the momentum and keep your followers happy, don’t give in to the temptation. In short, your goal as a leader is to challenge people without insulting them. You want to lift up your followers and improve their lives in a meaningful way. If you continue to meet the needs of your fan base, it won’t be difficult to maintain their trust. When you can do that and are willing to keep working for a long time, your army will succeed, and so will you. What do comic strips, international charities, travel writers, ultramarathon runners, musicians, and small businesses have in common? To help them succeed, all of these campaigns recruit a small army of followers. They help followers get what they want, and they convert followers into true fans. They leverage relationships with allies and friends of friends to bring them the needed connections and resources. Remember that our lives are connected with other people all over the world. By identifying a specific cause and recruiting a small army, you can achieve far greater success than you otherwise could on your own. Cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead once said something that has been repeated in graduation ceremonies ever since: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead was right. Your small army can help you achieve your own goals. They can help you help others. They themselves will be helped at the same time, in true win-win-win fashion. What are you waiting for? REMEMBER THIS • Think carefully about how you can help people get what they want. If your campaign uplifts others or meets an important need, you’re on the right track. • Create at least three ways your followers can connect with you—examples include a blog with RSS feed, a profile on a social networking site, a newsletter, or a live event. • Communicate in at least two mediums. For example, if you are a writer with a blog, supplement the written posts with an occasional podcast or video message. • Directly ask people to join your army, and then ask them for specific help. • Set a target goal: within the next x months I will have x new followers in my small army. FRUGALITY AND SPENDING I embrace frugality as a personal value, but frugality for me is not about pinching pennies in every part of my budget. Instead, it’s about making conscious choices to spend on the things I value—and avoid spending on other things. After paying the rent and other recurring bills, the way I approach my discretionary spending is outlined below. 1. I happily exchange money for things I truly value. 2. As much as possible, I don’t exchange money for things I don’t value. 3. All things being equal, I value life experiences more than physical possessions. 4. Investing in others is at least as important as my own long-term savings. Travel is my biggest personal expense, and I regularly spend about 20 percent of my annual income on it. Many people spend 20 percent or more of their income on debt reduction, and I’ve taken great care to ensure I have no debt. If I can’t afford to pay for something in full, I don’t buy it. In addition to big expenses like round-the-world plane tickets, I also appreciate the privilege of spending small, regular amounts of money on things I particularly enjoy. I like going to Thai or Mexican restaurants for lunch and having a coffee break at Starbucks or a local shop in the afternoon. I don’t eat out every day, but after I achieved enough regular income where I could go out for lunch whenever I wanted, I felt happy. This is where my practice of frugality differs from conventional interpretations. My view is that if you like having a latte every morning and feel like the purchase is a good value, by all means pick up a morning latte. It’s much more important to worry about eliminating debt and being clear about the bulk of your spending. While I purposely plan for round-the-world tickets and don’t mind going to Chipotle several days a week, I’m adamantly opposed to exchanging money for things I don’t value. In my case, I don’t feel the need to have a car, and I purposely relocated to a city where public transit is affordable and reliable. I also spend only about $100 to $200 a year on new clothes. Admittedly, there are a couple of exceptions to the rule of paying only for what I value. I don’t have much choice over paying the electric bill, for example, but I want to make sure I’m not paying a whole set of electric bills each month. I also don’t like paying $400 a month for a health insurance policy that doesn’t cover doctor’s visits, but because I am self-employed and living in the United States, it’s just what I have to do. Yes, it bothers me, but after a few running injuries for me and an ankle surgery for Jolie, I don’t think it would be wise to attempt to be uninsured as long as we live in America. Aside from the necessary exceptions, I’ll work hard to ensure my spending is aligned with the overall values I’ve chosen. The next one is that I generally prefer life experiences to “stuff.” Stuff represents things that fill up the house, while life experiences represent things that I do. Concerts, long weekends in nearby cities, dinners with friends—those things are experiences. Clothes, household items, and pretty much anything that takes up physical space falls into the stuff category, which I’d prefer to avoid or at least limit. Lastly, because I know I’ve received a lot from life thus far, I want to make sure I actively give back in the form of investing in others. Each of these ideas is discussed in more detail throughout the next section. A FEW PRINCIPLES I’m going to offer a few personal finance suggestions here, but the key is to be deliberate in your own value judgments. I don’t necessarily think my way is best for everyone, but I also know that many people experience a great deal of internal dissonance over where they spend their money. No matter how you decide to manage your money, it greatly helps if you’re clear about your values. Time is not money. I embrace frugality partially as a means to an end, but it’s also a personal value. Being frugal in some areas allows me to spend freely in others. It’s not always a direct relationship, though—my decision not to pay $2 to ride the bus home from an appointment one day doesn’t allow me to buy a $4,000 round-the-world plane ticket. Under a strict “time is money” perspective, it would be much better for me to ride the bus home (10 minutes) than to walk (30 minutes). The incongruity doesn’t bother me, because it’s not my goal to live the most optimized life possible. The key is to avoid doing things out of habit or because I’m not brave enough to overcome my fear of change (see chapter 3). Deferred gratification can be a form of life avoidance. Deferred gratification, the principle of sacrificing something now in hopes of enjoying it in the future, has both pros and cons. I’m writing this book a year in advance of publication, giving up other income and devoting a lot of time in hopes that you’ll eventually read it, all because I believe in the project. I also deposited $300 in my long-term savings account this month, another sacrifice I was happy to make. At the same time, the practice of deferred gratification can also serve to help people avoid making a lot of decisions about how they actually live now. This is one aspect of my financial life where I definitely want balance—I don’t mind saving for the future, but not at the expense of enjoying life today. What if you save for 40 years, putting off all kinds of opportunities, then get hit by a bus the day before retirement? Better to plan for the future while also living in the present. There is no such thing as good debt. I realize there is a debate over whether some kinds of debt are “good” versus other kinds that are “bad.” “Good debt” usually refers to student loans or mortgages, whereas “bad debt” refers to credit card debt and other high-interest loans. Personally, I don’t want to owe anyone anything. Even the so-called good debt locks people into decisions that they may not be comfortable with for all of the years they hold the debt. For years I stated my preference for renting instead of owning a home, and it was clear from the conversations that I was almost always in the minority. These days, I’m happy to see more and more people beginning to understand that a 30-year mortgage isn’t always in the homeowner’s best interest. I’m also glad that the housing market has tightened up and it’s much harder for people to get mortgages where the repayment schedule is a high proportion of their income. To get serious about saving, focus on increasing income more than cutting expenses. This is because cutting expenses is essentially a scarcity behavior, whereas increasing income is essentially an abundance behavior. As an entrepreneur, I have a certain amount of control over my income. If I want to make more, there are a number of projects I can take on to increase revenue. I realize this is tricky, because I like to save money and eliminate unnecessary spending too—so we’ll look at this distinction more in the next chapter. The point is that it may be easier to increase income, especially for those who are inclined to self-employment. Work toward financial independence, but never retire. ESCAPING DEBT ASAP If you’re already in debt and want to escape, you can do one of two things: (1) find a way to pay it back, as quickly as possible, or (2) look for an alternative solution like deferral or debt forgiveness in exchange for public service. Check out Adam Baker’s site at ManVsDebt.com for an interesting profile of someone pursuing the first option. Sean Ogle, profiled in chapter 3, waged his own war on debt by spending virtually all his disposable income on paying back his credit cards and car loan. (Then he got even more serious and sold the car.) By the way, if you’re in debt and looking for the way out, you’re not alone. A broad community of personal finance bloggers from every conceivable demographic have set up their own sites to share tips and strategies for whittling down debt and embracing frugality. The kingpin of these blogs is GetRichSlowly.org. Many other sites can be found by checking out Man Vs. Debt or Get Rich Slowly. Lastly, you may need to sacrifice or put a few things on hold to bring the debt under control—but as Adam’s and other stories show, you don’t have to postpone your entire life just because you’re in debt. It’s at least as important to enjoy your life as it is to escape the debt. Retirement for many of us is an old-fashioned idea—we may want to retire from a particular job and then move on to something else, but we don’t necessarily want to stop working altogether. In my early days of goal-setting, I decided I wanted to be financially independent. I originally defined this as having enough wealth to be able to live off the interest without doing any other work in exchange for money. As the next couple of years went by, I reevaluated this goal and began to see that my definition was a bit too traditional. Since I never wanted to formally retire, why was it so important for me to accumulate a large amount of capital? It would be better, I realized, to focus on creating financial security through an income-based strategy. Let’s look at the difference. WEALTH-BASED FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE (USUALLY A $1M+ TOTAL GOAL) Financial experts love to argue about these things, but the consensus allows for a 4 percent withdrawal rate on your total financial assets every year. This means that to achieve wealth-based financial independence, you’ll need to save roughly 25 times your expected annual expenses. For example, to be able to safely withdraw $40,000 per year, you’d need to amass $1,000,000 in savings. For $100,000, you’d need to have $2.5 million. You’ll also need to account for expected inflation, since $40,000 now won’t be worth the same $40,000 years later. INCOME-BASED FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE (USUALLY A $100K OR LESS ANNUAL GOAL) Income-based financial independence is based on replacing employer income with self-created income. Instead of trying to accumulate wealth (all the money you have in an investment account), you think primarily about increasing and diversifying income. The goal here is not so much to save a big fortune, but to change your sources of revenue to the point where you can regularly obtain enough income without working for an employer.17 Instead of making the accumulation of wealth (capital) my goal, I decided to focus more on building my income in a manner that would allow me to do almost everything I wanted without the confines of a day job. I also moved away from the pursuit of wealth to goals that were oriented more toward life experiences. I wanted to build a business, but I also wanted to travel. I chose to sacrifice some of the wealth-building for the travel, giving up additional income so I could embrace other, more rewarding experiences. “Full” financial independence in the form of accumulating a large amount of capital is still a valid goal, but I’ve come to see it in the “nice work if you can get it” category. Since I have all I need to live on, and don’t feel like I have to make a lot of sacrifices in the things I care about the most, I’m not that worried about it. It will happen eventually, and in the meantime, I’ll be enjoying the life I value most. PART III The Power of Convergence Let’s put it all together. Work, adventure, and building a legacy that will far outlast your time on the planet. If that sounds good to you, jump on in. CHAPTER 9 Radical Exclusion and the Quest for Abundance Every man dies; not every man really lives. —WILLIAM WALLACE My favorite novelist is Haruki Murakami, who has essentially created his own genre of work. In Murakami’s books, cats talk to people, fish fall from the sky, entire worlds of alternate reality are created, and all kinds of other crazy things happen. The protagonists usually spend a lot of time wandering around Japan and doing whatever they feel like, which strikes some readers as boring but is one of the main reasons why I enjoy Murakami’s novels so much. (I also spend a lot of time wandering the world without an agenda.) After 30 years of writing fiction, Murakami published a nonfiction book that explained his writing process and philosophy. One of the most interesting points was when Murakami discussed a choice he had made at the beginning of his career. Having completed his first novel shortly after turning 30, Murakami set out to prioritize the greatest part of his life to be spent developing a relationship with a wide group of readers who followed his work over time. Here’s how he put it in his own words: I placed the highest priority on the sort of life that lets me focus on writing . . . I felt that the indispensable relationship I should build in my life was not with a specific person, but with an unspecified number of readers. As long as I got my day-to-day life set so that each work was an improvement over the last, then many of my readers would welcome whatever life I chose for myself. Shouldn’t this be my duty as a novelist, and my top priority?18 We tend to read statements like that and immediately dismiss them as unrealistic, or perhaps even rude. How could someone choose to prioritize their relationships with countless people they had never met? Shouldn’t Murakami focus on his family, close friends, and local community first—and then in his spare time, worry about the people who read his novels? Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. —ALBERT EINSTEIN Another way to look at it is that Murakami focused on what he would gain instead of what he would lose. He identified what he really wanted and ordered his life around that. The practice of abundance, which we’ll focus on in this chapter, is all about embracing life to the fullest and ordering your life around a few key priorities. To make that happen, you’ll need to look carefully at all of your current obligations to determine which ones are actually necessary and which can be eliminated. It’s Not a Paradox This chapter ties together two conflicting ideas and shows how it is possible to take on a broad range of activities while also simplifying to the essentials. I appreciate the concepts of simplicity, decluttering, and minimalism, but I think of them in the same way as frugality: I want to connect them to a greater purpose related to a life of abundance. I want to shut some things out while letting other things in. If you’ve ever come back tired from a vacation, if you’ve ever used the phrase “working for the weekend,” or if you’ve ever wondered about the elusive life/work balance idea, maybe it’s time to think more about convergence. Ambition is not a vice of little people. —MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE As we’ll consider it here, convergence is the state of being where everything in our lives is in alignment . We have good relationships with family and close friends, we’re excited about work, we’re in good health, we do more or less what we want to every day, and we know we’re making a difference in the world. In short, we find ourselves full of gratitude and regularly challenged in an active, abundant life. To achieve convergence, two separate (but related) activities are required: saying goodbye to unnecessary tasks, obligations, and expectations—then welcoming in a wide range of other things that enrich our lives. CHOICES, INPUTS, AND OBLIGATIONS YOU CAN USUALLY END We’ve looked at eliminating “stuff,” but let’s get a little more serious. Why not stop making commitments to events, activities, or people who bring you down? I know that some will consider this harsh, but I try to avoid spending much time with people I find to be negative or who otherwise attempt to subtract value from my life. I know that I probably can’t change their behavior, but there’s a chance they’ll influence me to be more negative than I’d like, just by my being around them. The same is true with the information we consume. Try turning off the TV for a month, and see if you really miss something important. If anything you read, including this book, is not interesting and helpful to you, you should put it down and spend your time in a more meaningful way. Apply this strategy militantly, and you’ll see positive changes in your life almost immediately. Thinking about what to exclude from a life is like defining an ultimate goal or set of best practices: it’s highly personal, and your answers will likely be different from mine. Just as we’ve done throughout the book, though, I’ll offer a few suggestions for your consideration. Give up meetings and TV. Seth Godin writes the number one business blog in the world, with a readership base of hundreds of thousands. He is frequently asked how he has time to do everything, especially write back to everyone who emails him. His answer is that he doesn’t watch TV and doesn’t go to meetings, so that gives him four to five more hours a day than most people have. Give up the phone. Use the phone for people you want to talk to and ignore the rest. Check voicemail once a week, if at all. To be fair, your voicemail message shouldn’t say, “Leave a message and I’ll call you back.” Do you really want to call everyone back? If not, just leave a message with your name.20 Contrary to conventional wisdom, you can do this in business too. I decided a long time ago to stop chasing customers. I do post a phone number on my business websites, but in most cases the number goes directly to an automated recording that tells callers to use the website for support. When customers request personal help by phone, I tell them, “Sorry, but due to my frequent international travel, I do not provide phone support. I understand if this means you won’t buy something from our company.” This practice was incredibly freeing. A few people have complained over the years, but I’ve made the policy as transparent as possible. Interestingly, some of the people who complained and said they wouldn’t shop from a merchant who did not have a real phone number ended up buying anyway. Give up email. Personally, I like email, so I don’t want to give it up. But if email stresses you out or you find yourself unable to keep your eye off your inbox, it’s not a necessary part of life. Leo Babauta from the popular blog Zen Habits recently gave it up, and he used to send and receive up to 300 emails a day.21 If you’re getting overwhelmed, you can also declare “email bankruptcy” and start over from the beginning. To do this, take a deep breath, hit the “Archive” button on all your mail, and send the following message to your contacts: Subject: I’ve declared email bankruptcy Dear friends, family, coworkers, and spammers, Your message is important to me, but I’m getting overwhelmed. There are currently xxx unread messages in my inbox. It freaks me out every time I look at it. To fi x the problem, I’ve decided to “go bankrupt” and start over. I’ve archived all the old messages and won’t be trying to sort them out. The good news is that I’ll be more attentive from now on. Thank you for your understanding. (Sending the message is optional, but if you’re really worried about missing something important, you might want to consider it.) Part 2: Enriching Our Lives Through Abundance The acts of decluttering and radical exclusion raise the question of what should stay. After you banish unnecessary or undesirable things from your life, what do you keep? I propose welcoming in a life of abundance, filled to the brim with things you enjoy doing and that leave a legacy. We’ll look at legacy more in chapter 11, but it starts with living a full life. At the end of the day, I want to be tired—not from a grind of tasks that leave me with a feeling of “What did I really do today?” but with a sense of wow. Let’s go back to some of the things we looked at in chapter 2: the life list, the ideal world, the goals. Don’t you want more of that, not less? How can we get more? Believe it or not, part of it starts with stress—the good kind. As best illustrated by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his classic book Flow, the moments in life we are most proud of can actually be stressful: The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times . . . the best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. As for me, I’m interested in finding out what I can accomplish with the whole 168 hours available to all of us each week. Subtract sleeping hours, and you get a more realistic 98 hours a week. Subtract a Sabbath day, which we’ll look at in a moment, and you get 74 hours. That’s 74 hours, or 4,440 minutes, to fill with things you like to do. I don’t want to waste those minutes. I want to run marathons, start businesses, build websites, write, talk with fun people, help non-profits, travel to 20 countries a year, and sometimes sleep. Have I mentioned I drink coffee? I like coffee. I know from experience that if I didn’t do these things, I’d be miserable. Whenever I sit still for too long, I feel like my brain is atrophying. I’m interested in reducing useless, unnecessary stress, but when given the choice to do something interesting, I want to find a way to make it happen. UNDERSTANDING HOW YOU RELAX AND RECHARGE I think it’s best to spend the majority of our weekly 4,440 minutes on meaningful projects and relationships, but you’ll also want to understand how you best relax. As an introvert, I generally find this time by myself. Especially when I’m traveling in a faraway place where I don’t speak the language, I sometimes go days at a time with very few interactions. Sometimes these days can be lonely, but I don’t think loneliness is always a bad thing if it allows us to slow down and reflect on the world around us. When I’m not traveling, I try to take a Sabbath day every week from 6 p.m. on Saturday to 6 p.m. on Sunday. During that time I’ll be 90 percent offline, which means I may log on to read the weekend newspapers, but I won’t be hitting my email or working. Otherwise, any time for work or fun is fair game. AVOID THE PARADOX: KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN YES AND NO When you encounter opportunities, distractions, and requests for your time, how do you decide whether to say yes or no? It’s up to you (as always), but here are a few ideas: • Say yes to legacy work. (We’ll look at this much more in chapter 11.) • Say yes to work that leaves a deliverable. (Define work in output instead of time.) • Say yes to your kind of fun. • Say no to work that doesn’t leave a deliverable (unnecessary meetings). • Say no to busywork. • Say no to things you would do only out of obligation. • Perform an instant gut check: yes or no? If you have a bad feeling about something, say no. If you feel slightly intimidated but also excited, say yes. How is it possible to dramatically reduce certain inputs while simultaneously increasing the amount of other inputs and activities? The answer is that doing less of some equals doing more of something else. You can have almost anything you want, but you can’t have it all at the same time. (“Anything but not everything” is how productivity leader David Allen puts it.) Practicing the art of radical exclusion is good for two reasons: first, it eliminates the unnecessary from our lives. But just as important, when you say no to some things, it gives you the chance to say yes to many more. All things being equal, I’d rather regret something I did than wish I had done something (but sat it out due to fear or other commitments). Let’s embrace more of life, not less. Balanced people don’t change the world, and I’d rather spend my time feeling worn out from meaningful activities and projects. How about you? After sleeping and a day of rest, how will you spend your 4,440 spare minutes this week? REMEMBER THIS • You can probably have anything you want, but probably not everything at once. Radical exclusion is the process of eliminating things that are unnecessary, or even stepping away from almost everything for a set period of time. • Creating a to-stop-doing list can usually help eliminate several hours of tasks in the average week. • Asking “What’s the worst thing that can happen if I don’t do this?” may help you feel better about eliminating an obligation. • After eliminating the unnecessary, start opening up to everything you’ve always wanted to do. It’s not a paradox; it’s a life of abundance. What If Travel Isn’t Your Thing? This chapter focuses on seeing the world, and I know that not everyone wants to see the world in the same way. Some people may not be interested in frequent travel or worldwide relocating at all. Remember, this is just what I do. I include the example of contrarian adventures for two reasons. First, to show what’s possible when you work toward creating your desired lifestyle. I’m self-employed but not independently wealthy, and I don’t have any unfair advantage that isn’t obtainable to most of the people who will read this book. Second, even though not everyone likes to travel, I’ve noticed that when you ask, “If you could do anything, what would it be?” one of the most frequent answers is “I would travel more.” There are many variations on the kind of travel any particular person aspires to—some of us would backpack through Southeast Asia, others would trek to Hawaii in search of perfect surfing, still others would look for some kind of volunteer vacation in Africa or Latin America—but the point is that the desire to travel frequently rises to the top of many “If I could do anything” lists. Because not everyone likes to travel the same way, I call what I do “contrarian adventures.” My particular style of travel uses the principles shown throughout the book: there is almost always an alternative way to accomplish something; you should do what you want instead of what others expect; and the goal is to achieve as much convergence as possible around everything you are passionate about. If you really don’t like anything about exploration, you can safely skip the rest of this chapter. Be careful, though: I’ve found that even people who say they don’t like travel can usually think of at least one place somewhere in the world they’d like to visit before they die. I believe that if you can save as little as $2 a day, you can get to that place within two years or less. Many places cost less, and if you can save more than $2 a day, you can get there sooner. Unless you’re certain that you don’t have any interest in the outside world, you might as well consider a few options for venturing beyond your immediate surroundings. How to Experience the World If you’re new to world travel, the experience can be intimidating. How you choose to set forth is as much a result of your own personality and style as anything else. Thoughtful planning. The planner is an engineer who takes the time to map everything out in advance. If you’re expecting me to criticize this approach, I’m not going to. Whenever I’ve been stuck somewhere because of my own stupidity or poor planning, I often wish I had used the engineering approach. Since I usually tend to wing it, you’ll have to do your own thoughtful research on thoughtful planning. It probably involves guidebooks, spreadsheets, and double-checking to make sure you actually have a plane ticket for the place you plan to visit. Test the waters. The concept of mini-breaks has become popular in part due to Rolf Potts’s Vagabonding book, Tim Ferriss’s popular 4- Hour Workweek, and the general subculture of digital nomads who work from anywhere. Web developer Cody McKibben took this approach when he moved to Bangkok, Thailand. He bought a ticket from California, received a 90-day visa upon arrival at the airport, and said to himself, “Great! I’ve got three months to figure out what I’m going to do.” His apartment, which he displayed on YouTube to the amazement of his friends in California, cost a bit more than $200 a month. Over the three months, Cody adjusted to life in Thailand and worked on building a small consulting business. Cody hasn’t struck it rich yet, but he doesn’t need to. He spends much of his free time helping a local charity, In Search of Sanuk, which was founded by another expatriate friend who permanently relocated to Thailand. Jump in with both feet. Some people become expert planners without ever actually doing anything. To avoid that trap, you can also get a round-the-world ticket or one-way discount fare, pack your bags, head to the airport, and figure the rest out as you go. As long as you pick a relatively affordable destination as a starting point, it’s not that difficult. Affordable (and fun) choices include most of Latin America; the subregion of Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand in Southeast Asia; and South Africa. Gary Arndt, a former software executive, took it even further. “The idea of traveling around the world wasn’t something that gradually dawned on me,” Gary said. “It all happened in an instant. Once I had the idea, I knew it was something I had to do.” He left home, gave away everything that didn’t fit into one suitcase, and started traveling alone on an itinerary he decided to fill in later. Two years and 70 countries later, he’s still going. Jeanne and Vince Dee did the same thing, except they brought a three-year-old along with them. Their daughter, now six years old, has become completely bilingual, and the whole family has been traveling nonstop for the past three years. So far the Dees have been to more than 30 countries together, mostly traveling overland on bikes, cargo ships, buses, and other creative modes of transportation.22 How It Works for Me The alternative lifestyle I’ve chosen allows me to travel around the world several times a year without paying a great deal of money. I stay in hotels for free using the many loyalty program points I accumulate through travel hacking (more on that in a moment), on the couches of friends who offer to host me, and once in a while on the floor of the airport before an early flight. Just as work expands to fill the time allotted to it, so too do the possibilities of travel expand as you get more creative and adventurous. A typical trip for me is two or three weeks long, repeated several times a year to each major world region. During that time, I’ll visit several places, usually on at least two different continents. Typically, at least one of the stops will be somewhere I’ve been at least a few times before, and at least one place will be a new stop for me. Now that I’ve been traveling for a while, I can get around pretty quickly and I don’t struggle with the culture shock that often hits new travelers. My kind of travel is not about sightseeing or visiting museums. A lot of the questions I’m asked in travel interviews are rudimentary. What kind of backpack do I use? None. What’s the weirdest thing I’ve eaten? I’m vegetarian, so a lot of the “weird” things are off-limits for me. What’s my favorite country? I don’t have just one, but among others, I really like South Africa, Hong Kong, Macedonia, Jordan, and Chile. Instead of obsessing over luggage, I like exploring, reading on park benches, and being spontaneous. I don’t claim to be an expert on every place I visit, and I wouldn’t make a good tour guide. After receiving nearly 1,000 stamps in my passport over the past decade, though, I’m pretty comfortable with settling in and finding my way around almost anywhere. I simultaneously work and travel at the same time. If I’ve been staying in hostels or guesthouses, every few days I’ll check into a business hotel so I can catch up on the hundreds of emails that I receive every day. If I have an important blog post going up in the morning on the East Coast, but I’m traveling in Asia, I’ll set my alarm clock so I can be awake to review feedback the first hour it goes live. Because I could be anywhere, I try to accommodate the other person’s schedule when working on a group project. In Kuwait I slept from midnight to 4 a.m., woke up for a conference call via Skype, then went for a run along the seashore before going back to bed for the rest of the morning. (If you’re going to run in Kuwait, where the temperature can be more than 120 degrees during the day, 4 a.m. is a good time to do it.) Sometimes it can be stressful. But I do work from anywhere I am in the world, and for the most part, it turns out just fine for me.