Choose Yourself! (11 page)

6) Is your job satisfying your needs?
I will define “needs” the way I always do, via the four legs of the Daily Practice. Are your physical needs, your emotional needs, your mental needs, and your spiritual needs being satisfied?

The only time I’ve had a job that did all that, I had to do very little work and I had time on the side to either write, or start a business, or have fun, or spend time with friends. The times when I haven’t is when I was working too hard, dealing with people I didn’t like, getting my creativity crushed over and over, and so on. When you are in those situations, you need to plot out your exit strategy.

Your hands are not made to type out memos. Or put paper through fax machines. Or hold a phone up while you talk to people you dislike. One hundred years from now, your hands will rot like dust in your grave. You have to make wonderful use of those hands now. Kiss your hands so they can make magic.

One can argue, not everyone is entitled to have all of those needs satisfied at a job. That’s true. But since we already know that the salary of a job won’t make you happy, you can easily modify your lifestyle and work to at least satisfy more of your needs. And the more these needs are satisfied, the more you will create the conditions for true abundance to come into your life.

Your life is a house. Abundance is the roof. But the foundation and the plumbing need to be in there first or the roof will fall down and the house will be unlivable. You create the foundation by following the Daily Practice. I say this not because I am selling anything but because it worked for me every time my roof caved in. My house has been bombed, my home has been cold, and blistering winds have frostbitten my nerve endings, but I managed to rebuild. This is how I did it.

7) Your retirement plan is for shit.
I don’t care how much you set aside for your 401(k). It’s over. The whole myth of savings is gone. Inflation will carve out the bulk of your 401(k). And in order to cash in on that retirement plan you have to live for a really long time doing stuff you don’t like to do. And then suddenly you’re eighty and you’re living a reduced lifestyle in a cave and can barely keep warm at night.

The only real retirement plan is to Choose Yourself. To start a business or a platform or a lifestyle where you can put big chunks of money away.

Some people will say, “Well, I’m just not an entrepreneur.”

This is not true. Everyone is an entrepreneur. The only skills you need to be an entrepreneur are the ability to fail, to have ideas, to sell those ideas, to execute on them, and to be persistent so even as you fail you learn and move onto the next adventure.

Be an entrepreneur at work. An “entre-ployee.” Take control of who you report to, what you do, what you create. Or start a business on the side. Deliver some value—any value—to somebody, anybody, and watch that value compound into a career.

What is your other choice? To stay at a job where the boss is trying to keep you down, will eventually replace you, will pay you only enough for you to survive, will rotate between compliments and insults so you stay like a fish caught on the bait as he reels you in. Is that your best other choice? You and I have the same twenty-four hours each day. Is that how you will spend yours?

8) Excuses.
”I’m too old.” “I’m not creative.” “I need the insurance.” “I have to raise my kids.” I was at a party once. A stunningly beautiful woman came up to me and said, “James, how are you!?”

WHAT? Who are you?

I said, “Hey! I’m doing well.” But I had no idea who I was talking to. Why would this woman be talking to me? I was too ugly. It took me a few minutes of fake conversation to figure out who she was.

It turns out she was the frumpish-looking woman who had been fired six months earlier from the job we were at. She had cried as she packed up her cubicle when she was fired. She was out of shape, she looked about thirty years older than she was, and her life was going to go from bad to worse. Until…she realized that she was out of the zoo. In the George Lucas movie
THX-1138
(the name of the main character was “THX-1138”), everyone’s choices are removed and they all live underground because above ground is “radioactive.” Finally THX decides it’s better to die above ground than to suffer forever underground where he wasn’t allowed to love.

He wasn’t free.

He makes his way above ground, evading all the guards and police. And when he gets there, it’s sunny, everyone above ground is beautiful, and they are waiting for him with open arms and kisses. The excuse “But it’s radioactive out there!” was just there to keep him down. [By the way, I’ve mentioned this example to people before and they usually reply, “Uh, that wasn’t in the movie.” Okay, you’re right. Read the book!]

“This is easy for you to say,” people say to me. “Some of us HAVE to do this!” The now-beautiful woman had to do it also. “What are you doing now?” I asked her. “Oh, you know,” she said. “Consulting.”

But some people say, “I can’t just go out there and consult. What does that even mean?”

And to that I answer, “Okay, I agree with you.” Who am I to argue? If someone insists they need to be in prison even though the door is unlocked, then I am not going to argue. They are free to stay in prison.

9) It’s okay to take baby steps.
“I can’t just QUIT!” people say. “I have bills to pay.” I get it. Nobody is saying quit today. Before a human being runs a marathon they learn to crawl, then take baby steps, then walk, then run. Then exercise every day and stay healthy. Then run a marathon. Heck, what am I even talking about? I can’t run more than two miles without collapsing in agony. I am a wimp.

Make the list right now. Every dream. I want to be a bestselling author. I want to reduce my material needs. I want to have freedom from many of the worries that I have succumbed to all my life. I want to be healthy. I want to help all of the people around me or the people who come into my life. I want everything I do to be a source of help to people. I want to only be around people I love, people who love me. I want to have time for myself.

THESE ARE NOT GOALS. These are themes. Every day, what do I need to do to practice those themes? It starts the moment I wake up. “Who can I help today?” I ask the darkness when I open my eyes. “Who would you have me help today?” I’m a secret agent and I’m waiting for my mission. Ready to receive. This is how you take baby steps. This is how eventually you run toward freedom.

10) Abundance will never come from your job.
Only stepping out of the prison imposed on you from your factory will allow you to achieve abundance. You can’t see it now. It’s hard to see the gardens when you are locked in jail. Abundance only comes when you are moving along your themes. When you are truly enhancing the lives of the people around you.

When every day you wake up with that motive of enhancement. Enhance your family, your friends, your colleagues, your clients, potential customers, readers, people who you don’t even know yet but you would like to know. Become a beacon of enhancement, and then when the night is gray, all of the boats will move toward you, bringing their bountiful riches.

This chapter is not a wake-up call. It’s not a fear-mongering, “get ready to be poor” sort of chapter. It’s not even a rallying cry to the greatness and plentitude of entrepreneurship. It’s reality.

LET’S GET SPECIFIC: WHAT SHOULD I DO?

You’re probably asking: well, if I quit my job, what should I do?

I’ve begun asking people who did it. What did they do? How do they quit their jobs and, basically, make a million dollars? Not everyone is Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page. Not everyone is going to drop out of college and create an iPhone or a time machine or a toilet that resizes itself automatically depending on who is sitting on it (although that would be pretty cool).

Some people would simply like to quit their current crappy jobs and make a good living. Some people would simply like to quit their jobs and make a million dollars. In that Facebook movie (you know, the Justin Timberlake vehicle), JT says, “A million’s not cool. A BILLION is cool.”

Well, actually JT, very often a million is pretty cool. Not everyone is going to be a VC-funded $100 million hotshot. Sometimes it’s nice to make a million dollars, be your own boss, and use that financial success to catapult to freedom.

I called Bryan Johnson, who started a company called Braintree. You may have never heard of Braintree but you’ve heard of their customers. They provide credit card transaction and payment services for companies like OpenTable, Uber, Airbnb, etc.

I’ve never spoken with Bryan before. I am not an investor in Braintree. As far as I know I’m not even an investor (unfortunately) in any of Braintree’s clients. I like to call people who I think have interesting stories and hear what they have to say. That’s the way I build my network of not only financial contacts but also potential friends.

I knew Bryan had an interesting story about how he set up Braintree and I knew it would be helpful for those people asking “what do I do next?”

The Cliff’s Notes version: In 2007, Bryan was a manager at Sears. He quit his job and started Braintree. Within two years he was making more than a million per year. Eventually Braintree grew much bigger and raised $70 million from Accel and others investors.

But that wasn’t what was interesting to me.

“How did you do it?” I asked him. “What are the steps?”

“I really disliked my job,” he said, “and I never believed in the idea of getting a fixed wage. I had been a salesman before in the credit card processing business where I would go out and get merchants like restaurants and retailers to switch their business to the company I was selling for. So I figured I could do this but work for myself instead of another company.”

Rule #1: Take out the middleman.
Instead of going back to the company he used to sell for, Bryan cut out the middleman and went straight to a credit card processor, worked out his own reselling agreement with them, and did all of this BEFORE leaving his job at Sears.

Many people ask me, “I’m at a job, should I raise VC money yet?” NO, of course not! First you have to hustle. VCs want to back someone who shows a little Ooomph!

Rule #2: Pick a boring business.
Everyone is always on the lookout for “the next big thing.” The next big thing is finding rare earth minerals on Mars. That’s HARD WORK. Don’t do it! Bryan picked a business that every merchant in the world needs. He also knew that it was an exploding business because of the e-commerce explosion. You don’t have to come up with the new, new thing. Just do the old, old thing slightly better than everyone else. And when you are nimble and smaller than the behemoths that are frozen inside bureaucracy, often you can offer better sales and better service. Customers will switch to you. If you can offer higher touch service as well, they will come running to you.

Rule #3: Get a customer!
This is probably the most important rule for any entrepreneur. People want to find and take the “magical path”: get VC money, quit their jobs, build a product, and then have millions of customers. It NEVER works like that.

Bryan found ten customers (out of the first 12 he approached) who would switch their credit card processing to him. He figured he needed to make $2100 a month to quit his job. With his first ten customers he was making $6200 a month, so he had a cushion in case some dropped away. He quit his job and suddenly he was in business.

Rule #4: Build trust while you sleep.
This rule is often “Make Money While You Sleep.” But Bryan was already making money while he slept. He was making money on every credit card purchase with his first ten customers.

“I didn’t want to be going up and down the street looking for customers,” Bryan said. “I needed to find a way to get online businesses as customers. Someone suggested that I needed to blog. And to blog well you need to be totally transparent or it won’t work. So I started blogging about what was really happening in the credit card industry including all the unscrupulous practices and how merchants were being taken advantage of. Then I’d put my posts on the top social sites at the time--Digg, reddit, and StumbleUpon--and sometimes the posts would get to the top of these sites and my website would get so much traffic that it would crash.

“But I became a trusted source about credit card processing. So before long all these online sites that had previously had a hard time navigating this industry would start contacting me to switch their payment services.”

A couple of things there.

Rule #5: Blogging is not about money.
Blogging is about trust. You don’t sell ads on your blog (rarely), you don’t get the big book deal (rarely), but you do build trust and this leads to opportunities. My own blog has made me a total of zero cents but has created millions in opportunities. In Bryan’s case it led to more inflow and his biggest early opportunity.

“Basically, OpenTable called me and they wanted a software solution to handle storing credit cards, handing the data to restaurants, and being compliant from a regulatory standpoint. I signed a three year deal with them that allowed me to build a team of developers and we built them a solution. We now had more services to sell to customers.”

Rule #6: Say YES!
He started out just connecting merchants with a credit card processor. Then OpenTable asked him to do software development even though he’s never developed software before. He said YES! He got software developers, built a great product, and
at least
quadrupled his income. His decision to say YES! elevated his business to a whole new level, not just in the services he offered customers but in how they perceived him. Suddenly, word of mouth was spreading and other online companies started using Braintree’s services: Airbnb, Uber, etc. And the VCs started calling because all of their clients were saying Braintree was providing all of their payment services. It’s not that easy for startup online companies to get payment services.

Bryan told me, “When I first started, for each new customer we’d put together an entire package for our credit card processor on why we thought the customer could be trusted and would be a legitimate merchant.” Which leads to…