Choose Yourself! (4 page)

And now I see it happening every day. It’s not something that can be changed with laws or with printing money or with a change in values. It’s history now. The world has already changed, and all the pieces are just falling into place.

Which side will you be on?

AND THEN THEY ALL LAUGHED

I liked this girl in summer camp when I was twelve. Of course when you like a girl there’s an important protocol that has to be followed. You can’t just tell the girl you like her. You have to tell your friend, who tells her friend, who then tells her, and then you get feedback. I put the plan in motion.

Sometime during “Art Group” or whatever it was called—I just remember I had paint all over my hands and clothes and face—the girl in question ran up to me and said, “I wouldn’t go out with you in a hundred years!”

All the other kids started laughing. One counselor tried to calm everyone down and said, “Be nice,” but of course nobody listened.

I watched the girl run out of the barn (where else would art group be?), paint all over me, the smell of a barn, the hearing of laughter—the only sense that isn’t fully lasered into my memory right now is taste, and thank god for that because I’d probably just throw up.

I was rejected.

I remember thinking, One hundred years isn’t so long, really. At least she likes me enough she’d consider me in a hundred years.

Rejection—and the fear of rejection—is the biggest impediment we face to choosing ourselves. We can all put together books about all the times we are rejected. We’re rejected by lovers, by friends, by family, by the government, by the corporate world, by investors, partners, employees, publishers, and on and on.

• Try this exercise:
  Think for a second of ten different times you’ve been rejected. Were you rejected for a job? Did you have a novel rejected? Did a potential girlfriend/boyfriend reject you? List ten. Now think about this: how easy would it be to list one hundred? I can probably list one thousand.
  

But what if you never try? What if you are afraid to try for fear of being rejected?

I understand this. I’ve been rejected more than I care to remember; to the point where some days feel like enough is enough. When you put yourself out there on a daily basis, that’s going to happen (whether you deserve it or not): you get hate mail, you get rejected for opportunities (even if accepted for others), you get people who don’t understand you, who are upset with you, angry with you, don’t respect what you’ve done for them.

You can’t hate the people who reject you. You can’t let them get the best of you. Nor can you bless the people who love you. Everyone is acting out of his or her own self-interest.

What you need to do is build the house you will live in. You build that house by laying a solid foundation: by building physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health.

This is not some new-age, self-helpy jargon. “Be kind to people and all will be well.” This is a book on how you can achieve success for
yourself
, and these are the building blocks. The phrase
financial freedom
includes the word
financial
but it also includes the word
freedom
: freedom to explore the blessings that surround us. Freedom to help ourselves so that we can help others. Freedom to live the life we choose to lead, instead of having to live the life that has been chosen for us.

This book will help you build the house where your freedom resides. Just know that the house does not exist in the past. It cannot be built where you are standing right now. It is
out there
.

Since the beginning of humanity, we’ve looked for frontiers. It is only a myth that we have evolved to a point as a civilization where we can count on safety. The only truly safe thing you can do is to try over and over again. To go for it, to get rejected, to repeat, to strive, to wish. Without rejection there is no frontier, there is no passion, and there is no magic.

How we deal with rejection is a combination of several factors. It’s not just about how healthy we are mentally. Or how healthy we are psychologically and emotionally. There’s the saying “Time heals all wounds.” This is true. But we can control to some extent how much time it takes. It takes a different amount of time for each person, depending on the number of factors we allow to affect us.

We will see those factors repeatedly throughout this book when I describe in greater detail what I have referred to in previous books as the “Daily Practice,” and when we analyze the stories of many others who have chosen themselves. Not because they wanted to, but often because they had to.

The key is building the foundation underneath. And then taking a positive action: to choose yourself.

Those with high levels of social anxiety about rejection are shown to have lower levels of a hormone called oxytocin. We are all born with different levels of this and other hormones that help modulate our reactions to different external stimuli relating to things from social anxiety to money to happiness to loss.

Oxytocin levels can be boosted by the foods we eat, how we exercise our mind, how we associate with others, and even is partly responsible for how we cultivate an attitude of gratitude toward both the positive and negative events in our lives.

The point is not that chemicals rule our lives. Quite the opposite. But in order to have a fully functioning life, we need a functioning body, a healthy brain, a functioning social life, a functioning idea muscle, and a very fundamental sense that there are some things we can’t control. For instance, I couldn’t force someone to give me a million dollars in 2002. Any more than I could force that girl to like me when I was twelve.

And obsessing on the things we can’t control is useless. It takes us out of the game. We have to choose to be in the game.

Therapists might say, analyze the past to see where your current negativity comes from. Perhaps a parent rejected you as a young person and now you feel particularly sensitive around rejection.

This doesn’t work. Dwelling on negativity won’t suddenly have positive results. It only brings more negativity into your head. You can’t buy happiness with the currency of unhappiness. The idea that we need to “pay our dues” is a lie told to us by people who wanted our efforts and labor on the cheap.

You need to build a positive base: physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Once these four “bodies” are working in harmony, you can reach out into the world. You build the foundation for the house you want to live in.

Some people say, “Through rejection we find strength.” This is most likely bullshit. Maybe you get some strength and you persevere. But it also hurts. I don’t like to be rejected. There are self-help books like
Failing Forward
or
Excuses Begone
or other negative-oriented titles that embrace rejection and that basically say success is about 90 percent failure and 10 percent perseverance.

This isn’t one of those books.

Here’s what I believe.

We’re taught at an early age that we’re not good enough. That someone else has to choose us in order for us to be…what?

Blessed?

Rich?

Certified?

Legitimized?

Educated?

Partnership material?

I don’t know. But this feeling of insecurity overwhelms us. When we are not chosen, we feel bad. When we are chosen—even by idiots—we feel like that one actress (I can’t remember and I refuse to look it up) who said at an awards ceremony, “You like me! You really, really like me!”

Goldie Hawn? I forget.

We need to unlearn this imprisonment. Not dissect and analyze it. Just completely unlearn it.

When I get on a subway, I like to find a seat and read and daydream until I arrive at my destination. Who doesn’t? Nobody likes to hang onto the crowded smelly poles, bumping into people, crowding together, shaking at each stop, trying to hang on for balance, for dear life.

What does this have to do with choosing yourself?

A very simple test was done by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram. He took ten students and sent them on the New York City subway system.

They went on subways and walked up to all sorts of people who were sitting down: young, old, black, white, female, male, pregnant, etc. To each seated passenger they said, “Can I have your seat?” Seventy percent of the people gave up their seats.

Two interesting things: one, that the percentage of people who got up was so high. They were simply being asked to get up and they did as they were told.

But the other interesting thing is how reluctant the students were to even do the experiment. To ask people for their seats went against everything they had ever been taught. This is obviously an extreme. But it points out how hard it is for us to do things for ourselves unless we are given some implicit permission.

I’m not saying “Choosing Yourself” is equivalent to manipulation. I’m not saying it’s equivalent to always getting what you want.

But understanding the rules of this Choose Yourself era that we now find ourselves in will give you the confidence and skill set to go out there and simply ask the world for your proper place in it. Without a doubt, you will get what you ask for. Not in a law of attraction sort of way, where the idea is you get what you visualize. That doesn’t work without having all of the other pieces in place.

This book is about those other pieces, and getting them in place. It’s about understanding the external myths that have broken down; the same ones that created the massive American middle class, which is now dying, and left us with the Choose Yourself era in the fallout. People are walking around blind. If you are the one who can see, you will be able to navigate through this new world. You will be the beacon that will enhance the lives of everyone around you and, in doing so, trigger the actual law of nature that says when you enhance everyone around you, you can’t help but enhance yourself.

DOES ONE PERSON HAVE CONTROL OVER YOUR LIFE?

About twenty years ago, I realized I was tired of trying to be liked by others. I was constantly trying to package myself so I would be chosen for jobs, books, deals, partnerships, or love. Depending on the situation, I would put on an entirely new costume, a new mask, or a new set of lies, right down to political and religious beliefs. “Dan Quayle might be the greatest vice president ever,” I said to one girl as she lit up my cigarette even though I didn’t smoke, and I probably thought Dan Quayle was the worst choice for a vice president ever. And then when I leaned in for the kiss at the end of the date…“I don’t feel about you that way.” Rejected.

I suffered two other rejections that thoroughly disgusted me to the point where I said, “That’s it. I’m choosing myself.”

The first: I was pitching a TV show,
III:am
. Three a.m. The idea was to explore the flip side of life. From 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., the “normals” are outside, conducting their business. Dressing in their suits, getting the grande soy cappuccinos, kissing up to the boss, eating three meals, gossiping, watching TV, having a glass of wine at the end of a tough day, and finally cajoling themselves to sleep after tucking in all of their worries for another night of rest.

When “normal” human beings wake up at three in the morning it’s usually because those worries have prematurely woken up before the dawn. “James! You have to worry about this.” And when it happens, we tremble. There’s absolutely nothing we can do at three in the morning about our regrets, our anxieties, our fears of loneliness or depression or poverty. The paranoia that creeps in from the cracks in the windows, from the cracks in our minds.

• Here’s an exercise for those who typically wake up anxious and paranoid at three in the morning:
  instead of counting sheep to get back to sleep, count all the things you are grateful for. Even the negative parts of your life. Figure out why you should be grateful for them. Try to get up to one hundred.
  

But what about the people who live only at three in the morning? People who are out and about, conducting their lives every day at those hours. Living a life completely opposite of the “normal.” I started going out at three in the morning on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Not Saturdays, where everyone is out partying, but the nights where if you were around at three in the morning, there’s a reason. And it’s usually not a normal one.

What I found was more than just prostitutes, their clients, drug dealers, and homeless people (although I certainly found a lot of them—and throw in the pre-op transsexuals and dominatrixes for good measure). I also found a whole class of people who did not fit into the conventional path of life and had to carve out their own. A path that only existed when nobody else was looking, when the lights were out, when 95 percent of the world was asleep. It was almost as if a 3 a.m. religion existed, one that was self-reliant and relished how the world can be lived upside-down but still lived to its fullest potential.

For three years I interviewed people every week for the HBO website. During one of those years, I also took material and shot it as a pilot for HBO. HBO was very excited about it and threw some money behind the pilot.

Then they rejected it.

There was ONE executive at HBO, in particular, who could make or break my project with a simple “yes” or “no.” I was constantly afraid of her and what she was thinking. What would her mood be every time we went in with a new update?

Finally she gave her verdict: “For material like this, you either need to show your neighbors fucking, or someone killing their mother while naked.” We had material pretty close to that but not quite as base or lowest common denominator.

We were rejected. All it took was one person on a bad day. She was, and I think still is, head of HBO’s Documentaries and also head of HBO Family Programming. The shows your kids watch.

The second: I was trying to sell my first company. We had one potential buyer. I never even considered trying to get other buyers. They were going to offer $300,000. I had about $500 in my bank account. I had never sold a company before. I knew nothing about business at all, in fact, and yet we had built up a solid, little business that was doing well.