Choose Yourself! (3 page)

So, of course, I moved in. Directly outside my window: the world famous New York Stock Exchange. I looked to the right and there was Federal Hall where George Washington was sworn in as the first president of the United States. A huge flag lit up at night, projecting its negative shadow straight through my apartment. I loved it.

I loved everything about living there. I felt like part of history. Like maybe this would be a new start for me. Which was an odd feeling, because everything else was going to hell. The S&P 500 was heading towards a 20 year low, where it reached the magically hellacious number of 666. I was losing more money than I thought possible and going through a divorce. One time I made the mistake of looking at my bank account balance. I considered, once again, jumping out the window, or figuring out which drugs would anaesthetize me long enough that I’d never have to think about my problems again.

Then I lost my job. Nobody called me. Nobody wanted to talk to me because I was bullish on the market and everyone thought I was crazy. Certainly nobody wanted to help me make money. I was trying to get other companies started but people had their own concerns and I didn’t have my health or priorities intact (as we will see later, those are critical for success). I was just as depressed as they were, and they were just as depressed as everyone else.

And it wasn’t just that the stock market was at a low. That’s too easy an excuse. The human race hasn’t survived for 200,000 years just to be shattered by a little blip in capitalism.

We’d all had a tough decade. We all suffered from postsocietal traumatic stress disorder. The first step was admitting it: Internet bust. 9/11. Corporate corruption on a scale never before seen. Housing bust. Financial crisis. Bailouts. Madoff. On and on. It was rough. As a society we got afraid. Too afraid to move.

So I did the only thing I could do: I woke up early one morning in early March and bought a bag of chocolates. Small Hershey’s chocolates, like you hand out on Halloween. At around 8 a.m., I stood outside the entrance of the New York Stock Exchange and started handing out chocolates to everyone walking inside. People would be staring at their feet like zombies as they walked in, but 100 percent of the time, they would stop, look up, take the chocolate, and they would smile.

Chocolate releases phenylephylamine, the same hormone that is released when you fall in love. Suddenly, for a brief moment, everyone in the stock exchange was a little closer to falling in love. This made them less likely to be depressed, at least that day. This is not to say you should eat chocolate all the time. You’ll get obese. It’s much better to just simply fall in love.

But we were having a hard month/year/decade right then and everyone needed a break. Everyone needed a piece of chocolate at the beginning of the workday.

It was March 9. A Monday. The Friday before, the S&P closed the week at its lowest point in thirteen years (and ever since). By the end of the week, the S&P was up nearly seventy-five points. By the end of the month, it was up more than 125 points. And it’s been going up ever since.

I’m not trying to brag. I’m not trying to say how great it is that I saved the global economy. It’s not bragging if it’s true.

This is not a classist or communist argument. This is not about optimism or pessimism. More people are finding financial success than ever before while unemployment or “underemployment” (where people are employed, but at jobs paying less than they are accustomed to, that they are massively overqualified for) has reached upward of 20 percent

Does this mean the rest of us just die? Of course not. This isn’t all doom and gloom. It’s just reality. And it’s actually good news. It’s the decline of institutions that have lied to us for the past one hundred to two hundred years. It’s a new reality that people who apply the principles in this book—who start carving their own path—can take advantage of.

Human beings are born pioneers. The rise of corporatism (as opposed to capitalism) forced people into cubicles instead of out into the world, exploring and inventing and manifesting. The ethic of the Choose Yourself era is to not depend on those stifling trends that are defeating you. Instead, build your own platform, have faith and confidence in yourself instead of a jury-rigged system, and define success by your own terms.

It’s time to get back to our roots. It’s time to ride the surf as the ocean crashes onto the beach. Fight it, and the undertow of falling median earnings and a shrinking middle class will pull you down and drown you.

PERMANENTLY TEMPORARY

I recently visited an investor who manages more than a trillion dollars. You might think a trillion dollars sounds impossible. I did. But there’s a lot more money out there than people let on. It’s squirreled away by families who have been hoarding and investing and reinvesting for hundreds of years. And this trillion dollars I speak of belonged to just one family.

We were high up in the vertical City of New York. His entire office was surrounded by glass windows. He brought me over to one of them. “What do you see?” he said.

I don’t know, I thought. Buildings.

“Empty floors!” he said. “Look at that one. Some bank. All empty.” He pointed at another building. His fingers scraping across his window like…I don’t know…whatever a spider uses to weave its web. “And that one: an ad agency or a law firm or an accounting firm. Look at all the empty desks. They used to be full, with full-time employees. Now they’re empty and they will never fill up again.”

I spoke with several CEOs around that time and asked them point-blank, “Did you fire people simply because this was a good excuse to get rid of the people who were no longer useful?”

Universally, the response was a nervous laugh and a “Yeah, I guess that’s right!”

And because of the constant economic uncertainty, they told me, they are never going to hire those people again. Recently I joined the board of directors of a temporary staffing company with $700 million in revenue. The year before they had $400 million. That growth occurred in a flat economy. I now can see firsthand and immediately what parts of the economy are hiring full-time and what parts of the economy are moving toward using more temporary workers.

I’ll tell you the answer: ZERO sectors in the economy are moving toward more full-time workers. Everything is either being cut back, moved toward outsourcing out of the country, or hiring temp workers. And this goes not just for low-paid industrial workers, but middle managers, computer programmers, accountants, lawyers, and even senior executives.

My investor friend was right.

The reality is that companies don’t need to hire as much anymore because technology has reached its manifest destiny from the pulp science fiction novels of the 1930s. Essentially, robots have replaced humans. (The dream has come true! Cubicle slavery is finally over!) I saw this coming years ago. I used to work in the technology department at HBO right when the Internet was spreading across corporate America. It occurred to me then that nobody would need technology departments anymore. For one thing, at least one-third of the programmers were working on networking software. Well, the Internet is one big networking protocol. So all of those people can be fired. Another one-third of the programmers were working on user-interface software. Well, the web browser solves the entire user interface issue, so all those people can go, too.

This is just one example. But across every industry, technology has replaced not only paper (“the paperless office”), but people. Companies simply don’t need the same amount of people anymore to be as productive as they’ve always been. We are moving toward a society without employees. It’s not here yet. But it will be. And that’s okay.

We’re already seeing more startups than ever get funded, get customers, and pull business from the corporate monoliths, which have slept for too long. This isn’t just about money, though. If it were, it would be boring. It’s also not about being a great entrepreneur. I’m an entrepreneur, a writer, and an investor. Not everyone is an entrepreneur. Not everyone wants to be one.

This is about a new phase in history where art, science, business, and spirit will join together, both externally and internally, in the pursuit of true wealth. It’s a phase where ideas are more important than people and everyone will have to choose themselves for happiness, just like I did. They will have to build the foundation internally for that choice to manifest. And from that internal health the rest will come, whether it’s a business, art, health, success.

An example: Tucker Max is known for his “fratire” books. The titles of his first two bestselling books were
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
and
Assholes Finish First
. Both books sold millions of copies.

But he wasn’t happy with that. The publishing industry was taking too big a piece of the pie. Their claim: that they handled distribution, editing, marketing, publicity and they paid advances. Tucker realized that because of modern technology, he no longer needed just about any of this. For a fraction of the cost, he could get editing, marketing, and publicity, and he simply bought the same distribution that the publishers would pay for. And because his prior books were successes, he didn’t need the advance up front.

So he started his own publishing company, in effect, simply to publish his next book.

It was called
Hilarity Ensues
, and he took 80 percent of the revenues instead of just the 15 percent that publishers normally give. He chose himself and ended up making three times the money after all his costs.

This is now happening in every industry. The music industry has transformed. Artists go to YouTube to first get known and then they can skip the major labels altogether as their music gets sold directly on iTunes. We will see an example later on with the musician, Alex Day.

Authors like Tucker Max can bypass a five-hundred-year-old industry by using technology to make three times the money. Tech startups are forming at ten times the pace of the late 1990s. And they are actually generating profits and growing revenues at lightning-fast speeds.

You no longer have to wait for the gods of corporate America, or universities, or media, or investors, to come down from the clouds and choose you for success. In every single industry, the middleman is being taken out of the picture, causing more disruption in employment but also greater efficiencies and more opportunities for unique ideas to generate real wealth. You can develop those ideas, execute on them, and choose yourself for success.

The starting point for all of this is developing the inner perspective that allows you to choose yourself in the first place. Success by itself won’t bring you happiness, because you can’t do any of this from a position of ill health. If your body is sick, if you are around negative people who bring you down, if your idea muscle has not been refined into the perfect machine, and if spiritually you haven’t developed a sense of gratitude and surrender, you will have less chances of success in the new Choose Yourself era.

“Wait a second,” you might say. “Tucker Max wrote a book called
Assholes Finish First
about all the girls he was having sex with. How can you say he’s worked on all of these areas of his life?”

One time I got upset when a well-known pundit tweeted that one of my books was crap. I asked her if she had read the book and she admitted, “No, I just didn’t like the title.” So I wrote a blog post about this.

Out of nowhere I got this e-mail from a fan of my blog who thought I was diving too much into negativity. And he was right. He wrote:

“I assume your blog post was mostly tongue in cheek about the feedback affecting you in a negative way. But if not, then please take this compliment to heart: From one very successful writer to another, I love your blog. Yes, it has its quirks and stylistic issues, but it is utterly original and compelling, and that is an attribute that is incredibly rare. There is so much writing out there, and so little of it is worth a shit—but your blog is one of those that are worth a shit.

I subscribe to like 25 blogs in my RSS feed, and yours is one. And I don’t even really actively invest—I could care less about your financial advice.

Please keep doing what you are doing, and please don’t let the cowardly commentary from the ignorant sheep and trolls get you down. There are a ton of us out here that read everything you put on your blog, and thoroughly enjoy it, but we don’t tend to speak up one way or the other, because we’re normal people with normal lives. Who even writes Amazon reviews? I’ve entertained millions of people, literally millions, but from my Amazon reviews you’d think my job was to punch babies in the mouth. That’s the shitty part about the Internet, and about anonymous feedback, is that you tend to hear from the extremes, those that either love you more than reasonable, or those who are just spreading toxicity.

Fuck those people. You do great work, and I really appreciate it.

I hate to sound like a weirdo Buddhist, but the only things that really matter in this world are the relationships you have with the people you love, and the meaningful things that you do. Haters don’t fit anywhere into that. Don’t devote any mental space to them.”

The e-mail was signed:

“Tucker Max”

In this new era, you have two choices: become a temp staffer (not a
horrible
choice) or become an artist-entrepreneur. Choose to commoditize your labor or choose yourself to be a creator, an innovator, an artist, an investor, a marketer, and an entrepreneur. I say “and” rather than “or” because now you have to be all of the above. Not just one. An artist must also be an entrepreneur. That’s it. Those ARE your choices. Cubicles are getting commoditized. And when that happens, they empty out. I saw it with my own eyes when I visited my investor friend and stared out his office windows at the vacant vertical city.