How many more ideas can we come up with?
Seth Godin had an April Fools post where he said he’s out of ideas and totally tapped.
Cooking, as an analogy, can have 2 types of ideas. One where you mix up the ingredients creatively, and something new comes out. This is creativity, but what happened when someone discovered pasta. The amount of variables in a recipe increased when pasta got added to the mix.
Consider the invention of a car. Then companies creatively create new makes and models of cars. And then someone creates an autonomous car. Autonomous cars are not just creativity, it’s a fundamental push. The variables available increase. Will Seth crank out an idea a day until he’s dead, but none of them actually pushed us further? Do all the pushes come from deep fundamentals jumping into other fields – like self driving cars came from optics / cameras / computer AI, and not from mechanical engineers. It’s like the fundamentals between multiple fields get mixed.
When you discover high fructose corn syrup, that idea likely came from a chemist instead of a cook.
Seth had an article where he says to fill out the “to” field in an email last (to keep you from accidentally sending an incomplete email to that person). This is a good idea, but it feels more like a recipe than an advancement. To me the advancement here is the underlying truth of it, which is “Consider the biggest likely mistake, and eliminate that possibility.” With that push, you can crank out a million blog posts / recipes that are all great (like filling out an email intelligently).
You start to notice most consultants have a few ideas and rehash those in a million different ways. I listened to a 6 hour course from Dan Kennedy (arguably the best direct marketer) that’s 15 years old, and listening to all his new interviews as of late are just rehashes of things he’s already said. Same thing happens for everyone, the question is how much. Tim Ferris has a few great ideas and the rest is him rehashing them mostly.
Restated, if you listen to 5 interviews of Tim Ferris, the 6th interview will give you very little additional useful knowledge.
Some recipes are still worth discovering, but we’ve got to focus on whether we’re pushing and creating something new, or recombining existing things. I think recombining things sometimes creates the new variable though. Flour and water, just a combination of things we’ve already discovered, creates something new – dough. What’s very interesting is that Dan Kennedy and Seth Godin probably get their best ideas sitting around thinking to themselves about stuff, and NOT listening to others. They’ve got enough ideas in their heads from other people that they can start to do amazing things on their own.
The way to go it seems is to fill your mind as much as possible, then allow yourself to keep recombining ideas to either get the new recipe or new ingredient altogether.
If you’re not envious of someone you may be insane.
People love to say whatever they want is “very reasonable” and “isn’t too much to ask.” They say stuff like it’s pretty reasonable to:
ask for a bunch of coworkers that are competent,
expect the drive-thru worker to get your order done right,
to expect your CPA to NOT get you audited again,
to have your spouse have dinner ready,
to have a business doing what you love make great money,
and so on.
Maybe your reasonable desires and expectations ARE reasonable. But maybe not. It’s hard to tell, so we came up with the best reasonability and sanity test ever –
Do the Truth Cake Envy Test: if there’s no one that you could possibly envy for living the life you want, you’re likely insane and you’re unreasonable.
If you don’t know a SINGLE person that works with all smart colleagues, but you think it’s “reasonable” to expect something that you don’t even know could possibly exist in the universe, this is probably a good start to the definition of insanity. If you know of someone that has a spouse that helps out around the house, then sure, maybe you could be aiming for that too then. But when you don’t know of anyone that always has their drive-thru right 100% of the time, it’s probably not reasonable for you to expect that either. If you don’t know know anyone at all making $200k a year teaching guitar lessons, then yes, it IS unreasonable to expect you’re going to “do what you love and teach guitar, but also get rich.”
If you can find the person (hopefully there’s more than one) living the life you’d like, try to surround yourself with them.
So, is it too much to ask to get a multi-million dollar startup off the ground and still have a social life? Well, if you don’t know a single person that’s managed to do that, then yes, it’s TOO MUCH TO ASK. Yes, you might change the world and do something no one else has ever done before. But before you go patting yourself on the back calling yourself the next Steve Jobs, realize you’re much more likely to be insane.
Stop imaging the life you want built on fairy tales and instead find someone’s life that you envy and see if you can mimic that lifestyle before you invent a lifestyle that’s never been experienced.
Great news – it’s all your fault.
People love to hate on lawyers. Are lawyers greedy evil people or an awesome way to understand a fundamental component of success? Should we hate on them, or realize they’re innocent and not to blame?
If you try to entice someone to break the law, it’s actually illegal and called entrapment. It’s not ok to leave a pile of cash and drugs sitting in plain view inside your car, with the doors unlocked, and wait for someone to break the law and steal it.
What’s the difference between a lawyer that sees someone spill hot coffee on themselves and sues and makes millions, vs the situation I just described? If there is a low effort, low risk way to make money, people will go for it. If it happens to be low risk and low effort to sue McDonalds to make money, then people will do it. Therefore, you can see that the judge is to blame for many of these legal problems. Stop the stupid judges, you’ll stop the stupid lawsuits.
Patent trolls, frivolous lawsuits, and so on are only a massive problem because of the judges that let these lawyers win and award huge sums of money.
People would stop hating lawyers so much if judges used good sense in cases. When you see a lawyer right now, it’s someone that is looking for loopholes and gaps in the logic of law, motivated often by greed and selfishness. But that wouldn’t happen if the judges didn’t entertain these antics. We’d laugh at frivolous lawsuits taken up by these awful lawyers, because we’d know that the judge would not even entertain these ideas to begin with.
It’s true for all things – massively rewarding awful behavior will ensure that behavior will not stop.
But wait! The judges are just enforcing laws put in by people in Congress. Let’s blame Congress! But wait, Congress is just the House of Representatives and the Senate. Let’s blame the Senate! But there’s 100 people (Senators) in the Senate. Let’s blame a specific Senator! But Mr. Senator is a terrible person because of his parents…let’s blame his parents! And so on.
Everyone can be blamed.
But successful people often blame themselves for everything. We hear good advice saying to take responsibility and don’t play the victim. But why, and how? The only way to do this is to blame yourself, for everything, as it’s the only way to have a semblance of control in your life. If you’re out of control of everything, meaning everyone else is to blame, why bother doing anything, or trying anything? It’s more reasonable, and realistic, to feel like you have control, and the only way you can do this is to realize some wonderful news…
It’s all your fault.
The real reason why successful people wake up at 5am
“Successful people are working when others don’t!” – Not (fully) true.
Richard Branson wakes up at 5am.
Tim Cook (Apple CEO) wakes up at 4am.
Warren Buffett wakes up at 6:45am (and this is considered sleeping ‘late’)
Oprah wakes up at 6am.
Gurus claim vapid things like “they’re awake while others are sleeping, and that’s how they get ahead!” …But then they go to bed at 8pm, and sleep while everyone else is awake.
There’s not more hours in the day because of what time someone gets up. They all need 6-8 hours of sleep to function. So why does waking early clearly give an edge for many?
Because when you’re up at 4am, and everyone else is sleeping, you can get some work done without other people hounding you to do stuff or constantly interrupting you. By 6pm, people have already worked, and they’re ready to play until they’re sleepy. If you’re unavailable because you’re in bed at 8pm, you’re just “no fun” and have no fun social life. If you’re unavailable at 8am, however, you’re “worthless” and you should be working like the rest of us!
The point is you have to work at all the same times other normal people are working (which are creating problems that need your ‘urgent attention!’). Since people only play in the evenings, it’s best to be asleep then. Best to just be considered “no fun” and be asleep when people are enjoying their lives in the evening.
Working late at night doesn’t work. If “successful people work when others sleep” was fully true, then staying up and working til 4am would be great. The reality is that staying up til 4am makes you sleep until 12pm, which means you were “worthless” to everyone from 8-12pm. Not good. You’re also missing a productive window to get other people to do stuff in those 4 hours. If everyone woke up at 4am, waking up early wouldn’t work.
It may be debatable on the happiness of someone that’s ultra “successful,” but has no social life or anyone to share that success with – well, that sounds more like failure to me.
Realize that these morning people get an edge when they work when others sleep, AND they work when others work. It’s like doubling your productivity. Regardless, in the future when someone yammers about how successful people working when others don’t, you can watch their mind go into a train wreck when you ask why successful people don’t stay up all night and sleep all day then. So quote a more accurate statement,
Successful people sleep only when others are playing. – Truth Cake
The 90 second secret to unlocking creativity in every field.
Some want to have their knowledge take on a life of its own, and come up with new ideas.
This creative point happens when you understand your fundamentals.
Listen to 100 videos by Gary Vaynerchuk, whom hits the fundamentals over and over in different ways, and when you listen to next one, there’s a good chance his new idea in that video is one you’ve already thought of.
Richard Feynman, noble prize winning physicist, kept coming up with new ideas but would then discover someone else had already done it. He kept reading books of increasing difficulty, one of those books was Paul Dirac‘s book on Quantum Electrodynamics, and the end paragraph said, “Some new ideas are here needed.” At this point Feynman began to be credited with new ideas since the ideas he created hadn’t been previously discovered.
Feynman could have learned all the ultimate theories and sped through like most people. But he would have gotten to Dirac’s end paragraph and realize he has no ideas of his own if he didn’t spend excessive time understanding fundamentals. He jumped back and forth from the understanding fundamentals more deeply and then to the latest applications / theories.
Learning 1000 cooking recipes is harder than simply understanding the interactions and taste of 20 ingredients and creating 1000 recipes yourself instead.
One guy wanted to compose his own tunes, refused to learn other’s songs, nor take lessons on playing, because he didn’t want to stifle his creative process by putting him into a narrow track.
This is not how creativity is born – he composed nothing.
The best way to have creative freedom is to understand your fundamentals so well it is applicable in other fields. A fitness trainer that understands a bicep curl that goes deeper into the biology of muscles, the chemistry of proteins, and the physics of torque, will start to understand and be able to come up with their own workout routine better than someone that just studies a “concentration curl” and “hammer curl.”
A lot of people want to get through the fundamentals to get to the ‘real world stuff’ but instead we should try to go in reverse, getting more and more fundamental, and also exercise the idea of how different fields all can, on a deep level, fundamentally tie into one another.
How to teach fundamentals the fastest:
Sometimes, you get educators that understand the value of fundamentals and bog people down in theory for years before getting to the practice part. However, people learn best by repeatedly understanding a fundamental theory, seeing the resultant theory in practice, then go back to the fundamentals, and rinse & repeat that process.
If you’re already creative, consider what fundamental things you learned that make a creative tipping point for you to focus on learning those elements even better.
If you’re not creative, consider how your field relates to all other fields in some way – if they seem unrelated, you’re not seeing at least some of the fundamentals yet, and you need to focus on that.
Role models, mentors, and why getting rich doing what you love is likely impossible.
If you love mowing grass, making $150k a year business from it is going to be hard.
If you love plastic surgery, making $150k a year business from it is going to be easy as hell.
The gurus pounding the idea of visualization, persistence, marketing, and so on need to shut up for a second and say, “Hey, before I talk about the 8 secrets of an amazing Google AdWords campaign, are you even in an industry where there’s money to be made?”
Thankfully, your happiness maximizes statistically around $70k, and lots of jobs / businesses in many different industries can hit that level.
But if your goal is to make some serious cash for whatever reason and you insist on trying to do it in the industry you know / love, then you need to find someone else doing the same thing you’re doing. If no one else that you know of is living the life, doing the work you want to do, making the money you aspire to, then you need to pause and think whether whatever ‘edge’ or difference you have is enough to make it possible, because it’s likely not.
Considering all the industries and passions that people can have and so few having massive income behind them, you’re likely not getting rich what your passionate about.
Tom Bilyeu was a co-founder of Quest Nutrition Bars. Sounds like his passion is nutrition! But Tom wasn’t in the nutrition industry, he’s in the business industry. His daily grind is managing employees, signing and negotiating contracts, dealing with sales, growth, marketing, taxes, etc. That’s business…not nutrition.
A doctor doing brain surgery actually has a grind where he’s doing what he loves – cutting into gooey brains. He’s also an employee though, and it’s worth noting that being an employee is often the ticket to doing something you’re truly passionate about.
In fact, if you’re NOT passionate about business, entertaining, finance, or real estate, and want to make $150k plus, you’re probably not getting rich on your “passion.”
First off, that’s ok. Secondly, it’s easiest to simply find out how many people are doing something similar to what you want, living the life you’d like and modeling (mimicking) them.
Finding a hero will confirm that what you’re wanting has been done and is possible. Start with finding your hero – not a goal. Then you can alter and reshape that model to be uniquely yours.
Most people won’t be able to make it past the first step here:
1) Find someone who’s day to day life you’re envious of. If it doesn’t exist or even close, you’re on your own kid.
2) Determine if how they got to where they are now is acceptable / possible for you (eg. did they win the lotto, got lucky, disciplined, etc) . If not, go back to #1. If so, go to #3.
3) If #2 was positive, then model the hell out of them.
Being logical and mean doesn’t make you smarter
“It is what it is!” – No shit…
“It’s neither here nor there.” – Of course!
“It might or might not be a good idea.” – Isn’t everything?!
These vapid types of statements are like honey to a bear wanting to prove how dumb others are for using these types of statements. But is it really proving other people are dumb, or is it proving something not so pleasant about yourself?
Open wide, this bite of Truth Cake is going to be bitter but has a sweet aftertaste. So let me explain what all these phrases actually mean, because despite them logically saying nothing, they do say something. So to all you grumpy cats that are too smart for your own good, here you go:
“It is what it is!” means “You can’t fight it, resistance is futile, and it’s better to accept that some things in life are awful, but accepting them is a good idea.”
“It’s neither here nor there!” means “This point isn’t so relevant to the bigger picture at hand.”
“It might or might not be a good idea.” means “It’s really hard to say with any certainty whether something is the case or not.”
Only being able to take stuff literally, especially language, doesn’t make you smarter, it just shows you’re grumpy and have no ability to understand subtext.
So be nice. Focus on what makes you a smart and wonderful person, because picking on people’s silly vapid logically absurd statements isn’t a good way to prove anything positive about yourself.
What is this site?
Self improvement for smart people.
I follow business leaders, gurus, and philosophers and note things others missed that I’ve found valuable.
This site is my precious treasure chest of ideas on business, philosophy and life. And hopefully during your pillaging here, you get your mind blown.
My life’s goals are to help summarize the human knowledge base, dispel self improvement myths, and achieve a resultant and unrelenting state of 24/7 euphoria. I’m kidding, but we’ll still try!
Follow along on my journey!
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