Choose Yourself! (9 page)

I have baggage. I have people I care for. Other people I’d rather avoid. I have things I hope for. I have goals and ambitions. I have grudges. No matter how much of a minimalist style you want to have, you are still stuck with all these things in your head, for better or for worse.

What if you could just wake up in a new place and all the baggage was gone? What if you decided, “You know what, these goals aren’t worth it. Too many people die while climbing the perilous mountain of their goals.” When you are young, you think you can climb that mountain. But when you start to get a little older you realize, “Damn, if I fall now that’s a long way down.”

Disappearing into the depths of some ghetto, satisfying only your minimal needs, using your aura of mystery to acquire minimal friendship, and just living each day as it is dealt to you, may solve most of these issues. But they probably won’t. The question is: with your current identity, can you live as if you’ve already disappeared? We all want to de-clutter. To throw things out. But a minimalist lifestyle is bullshit unless you can do it across every sheath in the daily practice: not just physical, but also emotional, mental, and spiritual.

More important is to throw away the baggage, the grudges from the past that, a thousand years from now, will mean nothing. Give up on the ambitions for the future that are more trouble and anxiety than they are worth. To de-clutter your brain. To be free. To suffer a “little death” or to be “born again.”

Meditation Exercise: Picture yourself in a brand-new identity. Truly homeless. A vagabond. A nomad. Imagine you have enough in the bank. Imagine your prior responsibilities are all taken care of. You can go to India and live there for twenty years on almost nothing. Nobody knows who you are. You are brand-new. It’s as if you woke up in a new body. You have no connection to the past and no goals for the future. Really picture every detail of it. When I visualize it, I feel a great weight lift off my shoulders. I want to feel that way all day long. Tell me the truth: how do you feel?

BUT REALLY, CAN I DISAPPEAR?

Assuming you have the basics down, the freedom described above, is it possible to get the freedom that disappearing implies?

The answer is yes. In fact in the Choose Yourself era, you will have no choice.

You might not be able to live “off the grid”—we are beyond issues of privacy—because your every move is constantly tracked. But who cares? Do you think the government really cares about you?

The key is to
make money
off the grid, to make money outside the imprisonment of corporate America and out of the reach of the powers that choose or reject us. To be able to work from any location. As we move toward the employee-less society, where ideas become currency and innovation gets rewarded more than manual or managerial services, you will have the opportunity to live a life you want to.

In
I Was Blind but Now I See
, I wrote about how people no longer needed a home or an education. How both are leashes that society has created to hold you down and prevent you from growth.

But let’s take it one step further. Do you need to even rent? Do you need to stay in one place? Maybe if you have kids and the kids are going to a public school (though I’d recommend
unschooling
, but that’s an entire other book [
1
]) then you might be tied to one place.

Otherwise, the entire dream of technology’s full potential has finally come true. It hasn’t just created efficiencies at the workplace. It’s created efficiencies at home, as well. Earlier I stated that the rise in technology was partly the cause of the era we now find ourselves in—being forced out of the nest so we either fly or die.

But ultimately it’s our ever-increasing quest for a frontier—physical, technological, material, and spiritual—that creates the opportunities for those who hunt for them.

We still live in a consumption world, where people continue to accumulate computers, cars, TVs, furniture, etc. But none of it is necessary.

You can move from place to place using services like AirBnb, which find very nice, furnished places for you almost any place in the world for relatively cheap prices. You can use services like Zipcar to find the closest car, with key in the ignition for you, to take on your extended trips.

When I travel using AirBnb and Zipcar, I bring almost no luggage with me. I don’t need a computer or a tablet because phone sizes now are almost as big as mini-tablets. And anytime I need a computer, there’s usually a convenient FedEx Kinkos around from which I can use to write articles. All of the books I would want to read are on my “phablet” (my phone/tablet, which is the Galaxy Note II). Almost any work-related tools I need are stored within apps on my phone. The only thing I can’t do with the phone is write, but that’s where FedEx Kinkos comes in.

And what else do I need? What else do I need, ever?

Well, you might ask, what if you have a job?

Get rid of it. You ultimately don’t need it. You ultimately will be pushed out of it. We’ve already talked about it. We’re already living it. Cubicles have become commodities. Whoever sits in a cubicle becomes replaceable. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

You might say, “But I can’t get another job just like that. I can’t quit my job.”

Fine. Don’t. Do the Daily Practice instead. It will be like magic, I promise you. You will find another job. You will find the right places where you belong. You will find ways to develop alternative sources of income so your reliance on one source of income diminishes. The opportunities are there, you just need to be flexible and fluid enough to take advantage of them.

I’ll give you one example. A friend of mine created a database of all houses in the United States that are “rent to own.” In other words, they are for sale, but the owner is willing to rent the houses until the rent paid in equals the price he would’ve gotten for the house.

How did he create the dataset? He basically looked at about a dozen other databases keeping track of all housing data and scraped specifically the rent-to-own houses off of them.

A lot of people in this economy are looking for rent-to-own houses. Banks aren’t lending money and since incomes have fallen versus inflation (as we move toward the employee-less society) people don’t have the money to make down payments.

So he solved a problem affecting a lot of people. He advertised on Google by buying keywords like
rent to own
. In order for someone to look at his database, they have to buy an annual subscription. Since people could potentially spend hundreds of thousands on the right house, they were willing to spend a few hundred on a subscription to his database, which he updates every day with new listings.

Last month when I called him, he had made $300,000 from his database. I tried to call him the month before that, but I couldn’t reach him. He was on vacation in Greece. For the entire month.

I’m not suggesting people utilize this idea. By the time you read this book this idea might no longer exist. But there are other ideas. Other things you can sell. Before the rent-to-own idea, my friend was selling subscriptions to an online discount club, which searched the web every day for interesting discounts.

One person was disgusted when I told him about all of this. He said to me, “If everyone thought that way, then the few people who remained property owners would completely exploit everyone else.”

The good news is that there are 250 million people in this country. Maybe more. I forget. And only a few of those people will read this book. Even if the book is a bestseller. And only a few of those people will follow this specific advice. It’s not easy. Particularly if you have families, jobs, etc.

These are just seeds to be planted. Most people will not follow this particular advice. But I hope everyone follows the advice of the Daily Practice, where you internally get healthy enough to make the decisions about what is right for your life instead of relying on century-old customs and antiquated ideas about “property rights,” “education,” “jobs,” “politics,” and so on that have kept people enslaved with ancient philosophical shackles.

The planet is at a tipping point. Spiritually we need to recognize the importance of wanting less in our lives, to the point that we want to disappear. Technologically, we have the tools to make a living anywhere we want. And most of those tools fit inside a device that fits inside our pockets. Being physically, emotionally, and mentally healthy will allow you to combine the spiritual with the technological and sculpt the life that most satisfies you instead of the life that most satisfies society. Don’t think, “I can’t come up with an idea.” You’re getting ahead of yourself. Get all of the bodies aligned first. Later in this book we will learn how to develop the Idea Machine so you can start coming up with these ideas. But trust that when the foundation is built, the rest will follow.

And ultimately, a happy you will be the greatest contribution you can make toward a happy society.

[
1
] Start with my book
40 Alternatives to College
, which could just as easily apply to high school.

JUST DO IT

I called up a plumber. Let’s call him Mike X. Like Malcolm X but with a “Mike.” “Is it really that great to be a plumber?” He was silent for a second and then a sort of gruff voice, “Excuse me?” he said.

“Sorry,” I said, “I didn’t mean to just blurt out a question. I’m writing an article. People keep saying, plumbers make a ton of money and make their own hours, etc. Is it really that great? I want to find out.”

“Heheh. You tell that to a plumber who gets a call at 3 in the morning from some lawyer because the toilet in his guest room doesn’t work and now has to get up and clean someone’s pipes because they can’t take a shit without their shower filling up with shit water.”

“What do you mean? How does that happen?”

“Only so much can fit through pipes. And some things are not meant to go in pipes. People think they can do it themselves but there’s only so much Drano you can use if seventy condoms are clogging the pipes.”

“Jesus, are people having that much sex?”

“Heheh, I’m only speaking from experience.

“So I have to go down there and get out the stuff that never should’ve been there in the first place but has built up over years. And then when it forms a wall in the pipes, you also have to clear out everything that’s backed out behind it. If it backs up enough then it’s going to end up breaking the pipes and getting in other parts of the house, where it never should be. Or it drips onto your downstairs neighbor’s living room carpet or whatever.

“So I gotta crawl in there and clean out condoms, lots of condoms, blood, hair, tampons, and then shit. Lots of shit. I’ve had my hand on so much shit it’s as if I’ve wiped a thousand different asses other than my own.”

“But is the money worth it? Are you your own man?”

Mike paused.

“I guess you can say that. I get to take off sometimes in the middle of the day. I went to watch my kid’s Little League practice the other day.”

“Are you happy?”

“It’s not as bad as I am making it sound. Every situation is a different problem, and I like solving problems. It makes me feel like a detective. And I’m very good at it. But let me tell you something. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I can’t wait to clean out some shit today.’ I’ve never heard any of my buddies who are plumbers say that. But what you learn is that you do the job and you try to make sure you are happy in other parts of your life so the job doesn’t get you down.”

Inner balance. Inner health.

I’m sick of people saying entrepreneurs have it tough. And, by the way, that includes me. I’ve written it plenty of times. I’m sick of me doing it. Here’s what I never wanted to do in my life:

• Be a plumber
  
• Work in a cubicle (although I did for many years)
  
• Be a temp staffer (although I was)
  

I LIKE TO:

MAKE MY OWN HOURS.
There’s the myth that entrepreneurs work twenty-four hours a day. This is horseshit. Most people, entrepreneurs or not, waste time. After starting up several businesses, I can tell you this: I have never made one dime by traveling. And yet, I’ve traveled to most continents for business, cross country many times, meetings all over the place. No money from any of them.

One time I put up a map on our wall and pinned all the places my first company had “offices” and clients. I was walking a prospective acquirer through the room and pointed out the map. He stood there for a while, looking at it. He was sixty-five years old and had been running his own business for almost forty years. He said, “I find that there’s usually enough business right here to make me rich.” We were standing in the center of New York City, the richest city in the world! Why the hell did I ever have to go to Paris, where it’s almost impossible to set up a business, to find clients? He called bullshit on me and he was right. And then he bought my company. Thank god!

Now I’ve learned the “Power of No.” If someone asks me to go someplace, have a meeting, have a coffee, get on a call, etc., my first instinct is to say no. Much more value is created when I do the things I enjoy, when I work on my own creativity and continue to build the foundation for health. Rushing around the world trying to capture every piece of business will only result in financial and spiritual poverty. It’s much better to work smarter, not harder.

HELP PEOPLE.
Here are the people who it’s in your control to help when you are an entrepreneur:

a. Your employees.
I always have the philosophy that I want my employees to call home at the end of a hard day’s work and say, “Mommy, I have the best job on the planet. My boss is great and I can see myself ten years from now running my own business. I’m learning so much.” And you know what? Most of my ex-employees are running their own businesses now, too.

b. Your clients.
You want them to look good in front of their bosses. How do you do it? Simple: