Over the past 50 years, we’ve achieved enormous progress in the world especially from a technological standpoint.
Peter Thiel the Great Contrarian puts it this way, “we’ve achieved enormous progress in the world of bits, but not so much in the world of atoms.”
For me, that pretty much sums up how much we’ve ‘grown’ simply by following the crowd.
Evolution forged the entirety of sentient life on earth using only one method…
Taking Risks.
So many people, risk so little these days. They spend their lives avoiding danger. And then they eventually die inside.
Personally, founding and bootstrapping my own business wasn’t as easy as I thought.
Formally educated as an Engineer led me to believe that I could build anything.
Just as a good student, I believed that studying hard to prepare myself would help me thrive in the world of entrepreneurship.
It didn’t. For me, I’ve tried various strategies, businesses, methods and fail 7 out of 10 times.
I believe the ability to build something from nothing is probably one of the key attributes that you’re is cut out to be an entrepreneur.
Thinking like a maverick gives you that extra zest.
It helps you find the challenges that limit you in life and discover creative ways to overcome those challenges…
Essentially it gave me the resilience to handle all the other difficult downsides that come along my way.
My thick skin, sheer tenacity, and unwillingness to give up, were the much needed tools to survive the shark infested waters of business.
Your mind is like a walled garden. If you’ve been saying the right things to yourself, not even death can touch the flowers blooming there.
But how can you be so sure you’re saying the right things? Find out from one of my rules below.
Being a Maverick resonates with me so much that I’ve compiled a list of rules to remind myself daily.
If you can’t afford a hire a mentor, be one yourself by reading this everyday.
Here are the rules.
1) Create Confidence out of nothing. Confidence doesn’t come easy if you aren’t prepared mentally. I learned that If I took a few steps into the right direction, i’ll be more confident.
This is a choice and it comes from knowing that you’re headed in the right direction.
2) Dream with your eyes wide open. Most people daydream. They see someone driving a fancy car and a living their dreams. And they wished they were their shoes. Strong envy creates a very potent side effect called unhappiness.
3) Be happy with whatever position you find yourself in. Most people think they’ll only be happy when they have all the wealth in the world. That’s not how you arrive there. Happiness is something you achieve internally and then it emanates outward.
I found that the success is always a moving target. There’s always a larger target you have in mind. Consciously I’m moving towards it because I’m dreaming with my eyes wide open. Making minute decisions every single day to move to where I want to be.
4) Compound effect. The most powerful force in the entire Universe. Don’t underestimate the 1% action you’re doing day in and day out. In a few years, that effect can be seen. This 1% Rule is also the No-Brainer secret to making four-figure a month in Kindle Publishing!
5) Your Capacity for Delayed gratification determines your future wealth. A Stanford University experiment demonstrated that one of the most important determinants of a person’s future wealth was the capacity for delayed gratification. They put children alone in a room and gave them each a marshmallow and told the children that if they didn’t eat the marshmallow they would be given a second marshmallow, and they would then have two.
Many years later the children that were able to resist temptation and did not eat the marshmallow were significantly more economically successful than the ones that ate their marshmallow. In fact, the ones that were able to delay gratification tested better in a number of ways, got higher SAT scores, were healthier, and more successful in everything they did.
7) Don’t focus on the competition. I make this mistake time and time again. I tend to focus on my competition to try to get ahead of them. This misses the whole damn point. When it comes down to it, it doesn’t profit anyone, you’re just trying to struggle for ego and pride.
8) Be flexibly stubborn. Hitting the brick wall with your head until you see an opening is admirable but stupid.
9) Be a Jack of all trades. You’re a Master of none but able to see the bigger picture. Learn as much as you can to delegate your inadequacies and really focus on your strengths. My friend called me this once when I was in University, today I can prove him wrong. Many of the world’s most impactful individuals have been expert-generalists: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Ben Franklin, Da Vinci, Marie Curie…
10) Recognize patterns and connect the dots looking backwards. You can plot to where you’re heading and know that you’ll arrive there one day and not someday.
12) Failure is fine but don’t pat yourself on the back because of it. When your business or relationship fails, there’s probably a million and one reasons why it happened. You won’t be able to pinpoint exactly why it did happen so dust it off and move on.
Most people don’t learn much from failure. And it ends up being more damaging, they either give up or justify why they failed.
13) Be open and radical to new ideas. Once you’ve achieved success don’t completely discount something out. I realize that the comforts of success can blind you terribly. Its a poor teacher. While failure is overrated, it helps you see things clearer. Arrogance is a drug humans use to poison themselves. If you are not careful, you might miss the biggest one yet.
14)Faith in yourself is something special. It’s your ability to transcend your own human ability and to discern truths about reality. Everyone can have confidence, but not everyone is going to have faith.
15) Inner Reflection is the pep talk you need constantly. Most people drown out their inner voice with outward experiences, social needs, and entertainment. There’s beauty within Solitude every once in a while. I acquired insight and perceptive awareness and philosophical truth when I was hospitalized for 3 months.
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16) Be an independent thinker. Learn to think for yourself. Question everything. Don’t just focus on what’s being taught by Gurus or Experts. The media you tune in every day is conditioning your brain like a heard of cattle. Find out when consensus is wrong and your independent opinion is right.
17) Read widely and deeply in a wide variety of fields. Some more than others to give you extra insight on a totally different area of expertise.
18) There’s no need to wait for the right time. Do it Now! If you’re planning to do something with your life, don’t make a 10-year plan to get there. Try doing it in a year and see how you align all your resources and create the greatest version of yourself.
19) There are alot of motivational quotes on social media daily. But the only ones worth taking note is your very own compilation. Your network of personal quotes which you feed your mind whenever you need great advice. Quotes that tell the story of your life.
I compiled a list of quotes on my laptop where I can refer from time to time. It is my toolkit for changing my life. I didn’t have a mentor or a philosopher as a teacher when I desperately needed one.
These bite-sized learnings are a way to learn the macro from the micro. Peer into the great hearts and minds.
Lex Luthor: Some people can read War and Peace and come away thinking it’s a simple adventure story. Others can read the ingredients on a chewing gum wrapper and unlock the secrets of the universe.
20) Adversity is a great teacher. Read this…
21) While the internet is a gold mine, it’s cluttered with rubbish as well. Questions are your pickaxes that help you discern the truth from Error.
22) Do not try to change your past. Regret is the most terrible of human traps. Trying to change what is already part will consume you from the inside and fill you with hate and anger.
23) There is no such thing as winning or losing. Only movement. Yin and Yang. Good and Bad, everyone has a role in the universe. Try to forgive and forget those who hurt you and try to forgive yourself for doing something you regret most.
24) Don’t compare yourself to someone who is already in chapter 30, when you’re only starting at chapter 1.
25) Everyone has a path laid for them, you get to decide whether you want to walk that path or deviate from it. At the end of the day, we all arrive at the same place. Make sure you go with a light heart.
26) You don’t need to run a 100-km race just to prove your point, climb Mount Everest, get a PhD or completely reinvent yourself just to change your life. The little things done consistently over a long period of time are the ones that achieve big things later on in life.
27) Accept the past mistakes you’ve made. Evolution forged the entirety of sentient life on this planet by mistake. Don’t be too hard on yourself.
28) Humans are imperfect creatures. You don’t succeed because you are perfect, you succeed because you identified your weakness and choose to focus on your strengths and develop good management habits like hiring the suitable partner or delegating.
29) What’s the other side of fear? Nothing. People get nervous for no real reason. Its all in your head. It is a product of thoughts you create. Fear can be a choice.
30) Don’t rely too much on human intellect, good looks and beauty. They’re impermanent. They’re like peacock feathers which display extravagance intended to attract a mate. Our entire society is built like that. Its just an elaborate mating ritual. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter who ends up accomplishing more or less, just as long as you’ve tried your best and have no regrets.
31) You can only change your outer reality when you first achieve it inwardly. Studies have shown that people who can imagine a cold room in absolute detail and recreate that effect physically as goosebumps. Of all the people on the planet, you spend most of the time talking to yourself, make sure you’re saying all the right things. How do you know what is right? Seek knowledge, the truth will set you free.
FACT: There is a link between success and the mental barriers most people place on themselves. The mind is a friend of the conditioned soul, and his enemy as well.
32) An old Cherokee elder is teaching his grandson about life.
He said,”My son, there is a battle between two wolves inside us all.
“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.”
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”
The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”
There is a constant battle for supremacy between goodness and ignorance. Sometimes goodness becomes prominent, other times ignorance defeats goodness. Understand that when one dies in the mode of ignorance, he/she takes birth in the animal kingdom.
33) Dwell on the beauty of life. Not on its ugliness. Watch the stars and wonder. People get so upset over the trivial things in life. I’m guilty of this too from time to time. In the grand scheme of things we’re only here for less than a blink of an eye. To put it bluntly, we’re just bags of meat stuck to a speck of dust floating out in the void.
Look up at the night sky every once in a while and think about the vast emptiness of the universe and all your earthly concerns will gradually fade away.
34) Nietzche, “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.” To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in suffering. If there is a purpose in life at all, there must be a purpose to suffering and dying.
I cannot tell you what this purpose is. You have to find out for yourself and accept the responsibility your answer prescribes. If you succeed in this, you will continue to grow in spite of all indignities. ~ Viktor Frankl.
35) Don’t aim at success. Success is a moving target. The more you aim at it, the more you’re going to miss it.
36) The pursuit of happiness is similar to success. It cannot be pursued. It only can ensue as an unintended side-effect of your own personal dedication to a cause or reason greater than yourself. You have to let success and happiness happen by not caring about it. Listen to your conscience and go out and carry your duty to the best of your ability. You will then live to see that ‘in the long run’, success will follow you precisely because you have forgotten to think about it.
37) Stay Level-headed. We live in an age where outrage, complaint, vilification and raw emotion more often than not trumps over composure and calmness. Anger is a Hot Coal that you hold in your hands while waiting to throw it at someone else ~ Buddhist Saying.
38) To live is to Take Risks. Otherwise you’re just an inert chunk of randomly assembled molecules drifting wherever the wind blows you.
40) Execution is a dime a dozen. Ideas are worth nothing unless carried out. It can be worth millions.
41) Watch Every Thought. Be aware and ask yourself this, “Why am I having this thought?” By fostering inner awareness, introspection and reasoning is more enlightening than hopes and prayers.
42) Don’t hope. Don’t leave your future in someone else’s hands other than yourself. If you can’t see yourself working with someone else for an eternity, don’t work with them for even a day.
43) Find the desire to learn. Its extremely scarce these days. The internet is abundant with free knowledge. But the will to learn and seek the truth is overpowered by social noise and shiny objects.
44) Nothing we do in life ever lasts. Zoom Out. Even if you’re the next Steve Jobs or Elon Musk; whatever you do will eventually fade. Whatever legacy we leave will fade into the passage of time. The universe has been around for Billions of years, probably longer. And it will continue to exist for many more Billions of years. Your existence and mine are infinitesimal.
Our entire civilization is like a pin in a vast sand dune. Nothing we do lasts. It gets covered by new layers upon new layers of earth. There are entire civilizations that we’ve forgotten. Who were the Sumerians? Do you remember anyone prominent during that time? No.
45) Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” Adversity is never easy (Read what I learnt from my ordeal). It’s uncomfortable, stressful, overwhelming and scary. I was unsure whether I could keep going on.
However It’s a very powerful weapon of detachment. If you can embrace it, accept it as a problem and prepare to challenge the cards you’ve been dealt with, you will find a way to beat the odds and become even stronger than you were before.
47) Your confidence comes from your vision. Having a clear vision in life helps you get where you want to go in life. Once you have that, you will take the necessary steps to get there bit by bit day by day 1 percent at a time. It reminds you why you need to push through that barrier every single day. Even when things get difficult. Why you have to write more, why you have to publish more, why you have to work harder than your peers, struggle more than your friends early on.
48) Carve out your own niche. What may once prove to be a liability can turn out to be your biggest asset. Learn to use your flaws to your own advantage.
49) Success and Victories can make you weak. They tend to make you think you’re invulnerable. Which aren’t true.
50) It is not a curse to be given an archenemy in life. Most people go through life without one and they learn nothing at all from their friends. A wise man can learn and discover so much more about himself through his enemies.
51) Be Frugal. The lavish lifestyle that you keep may end up owning you. It’s only after you lose everything that you’re free to do anything. When you have nothing to lose, you will not be afraid to give up the good for the great. Many times we don’t realize this purely because we’re too comfortable with our way of life. This is where you will gradually sabotage yourself to be able to achieve great thing in life.
52) Reinvest and scale up. Compounded growth is the most underestimated force in the universe. If you’re a startup entrepreneur looking to join the millionaire club, this is one principle that requires discipline. Most people go hog wild and spend lavishly on fast cars and new shiny stuff, the minute they make some money. You will find many of these go bankrupt very quickly. The more you reinvest your profits into a business model you already know works, the faster you’ll get to join the big leagues.
Other posts that may help you: How to Start a Business with Just $50
53) Have a willingness to be misunderstood for long periods of time.
54) Ramp up your rate of experimentation. It’s easy to create products that most people don’t care about. Successful inventions are rare. Not all your experiments are going to work. If you want more great innovations, you have first got to create a lot of lousy ones. Thomas Edison’s Light Bulb principle.
55) Multitasking is a management tool used by corporate companies to make a donkey out of you. The more you focus on what you’re very good at, the faster you are going to master it and moving on to the next skill set.
56) Don’t look too regrettably upon the closed doors that life and opportunity presents. When one door closes, another opens. We often look so long and regretfully upon those closed doors that we simply do not see the ones that have been left open for us.
57) Set a Massive Goal or Dream. The body reacts strongly to large wounds, expending significant energy to heal them. Small wounds on the other hand, takes longer to heal because our body don’t think too much of it. So setting a massive goal will make you take it more seriously.
58) Earn as much money as quickly as you possibly can. The sooner you get money out of the way, the sooner you can get to your crazy ideas and solve world-changing problems.
60) Surround yourself with really smart people. Do not just buy into Yes Man’s. You need people who can challenge you from time to time to keep you on your feet. This will keep you in check.
61) Understand that trends are temporary. Generally you do not want to be part of a trend. Think of something that holds true today and will continue to do so 10-20 years from now.
62) Have a sense of mission. Work on unique problems that haven’t gone mainstream. Crazy missions like going to Mars like Elon Musk motivates him and his people tremendously. Missions like replacing legacy banking and centralized financial systems with Bitcoin is another.
63) Not everybody needs to go to college. It’s odd that people are being limited to studying a small varying degree of subjects and end up going into a limited line of work that is trending at that time. This is a educational template that will destroy diversity. People should be learning how to be astronauts or find ETs.
64) Trust and attention is the internet’s currency. If you can learn to harvest the attention of your customers or visitors, congratulations, you’ve unlocked the secret of the digital space.
65) You can reprogram your mind with the stories you tell yourself. The stories you tell yourself can sometimes be self-defeating or self-motivating. It is important that you tell the right ones, because only you can narrate your own life.
66) Go for simplicity rather than complexity. Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex and more violent. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction. ~ Albert Einstein.
67) Learn from other people’s mistakes. Most people tend to share their success stories after the long ordeal, but they rarely discuss why they failed.
68) Learn to get used to rejection. Accept that you’re just not as good as you think you are sometimes. Once you are used to the word No, you can then go out there and channel all your energy and frustration into your next project.
69) When you’re small, rely on your wits and be laser focused. Don’t use brute force.
70) Continuous effort even at 1% a day is key to unlocking your full potential. Do not underestimate that daily 1%.
71) No one can replace YOU. Even if you’re an ineffective leader. Make sure you’re not one.
72) Yesterday is gone. Today is up for grabs. Do something and be remembered. No one owns today. Take it.
73) Like newborn babies, your dreams, ideals, goals and ambitions needs to be protected at all cost. Do not let anyone trample all over it. You wouldn’t leave a baby out to care for on its own, so don’t do it to your dreams.
75) Find out what truly excites you in life. That is passion. It isn’t about any job, career or money. It is an intense feeling that is profoundly meaningful to you as an individual.
76) You don’t always have to raise money, you can bootstrap your ideas too.
78) It is really important to be yourself and truly be happy rather than spending most of your life in misery becoming somebody you’re not. Some people are like sheep, they crowd timidly into the center of the herd in attempt to save one’s skin. The laws of self-preservation no longer applies in this day and age. Conformity is your worst enemy.
79) Entrepreneur Resourcefulness is a key business survival skill to have in an age of scarcity. When money, time and people are limited, see if you have what it takes to get it done and delivered.
80) Learn a lot every single day widely and deeply. That’s how intelligence is acquired. That’s how it build up like compound interest. Go to bed smarter than you wake up.
81) Don’t go with conventional wisdom. Going off the beaten path can sometimes help you reach the same destination faster.
Take Shane Snow: He wanted to be a journalist and write for WIRED, but he didn’t have enough experience and was turned away. It would take him years to actually climb the corporate ladder to reach that position. So he took a shortcut. He wrote for a lousy tech blog for free. Then approach slightly better one and a better one all for free. After he got himself a decent number of articles published. He went for the bigger names like Mashable and Fast Company. Because he had something to show, and they liked it, he got a freelance position. Then just 4 months later, he finally got what he wished for. An article published with WIRED. Following conventional wisdom would have took him years.
82) Blend in to Stand Out. There is this hot dog restaurant in New York. The restaurant has no signs, no ads nothing and its hiding behind a phone booth in a hot dog shop. No one walking past would be able to tell that they were serving delicious hot dogs. But yet it’s always full. Its worst kept secret is its phone booth, dialing 2 would allow you to make reservations. And they are normally filled by 3:30. This restaurant makes customers feel like they’re exclusive. In a world filled with huge billboard signs and annoying ads, this restaurant stands out precisely because it blends in.
83) Travel and immerse yourself in different cultures. Take a month to go live in another part of the world each year. It develops your intellectual humility. If you find it difficult to take a month’s break, immerse yourself in movies that tell stories of different people having different viewpoints in life. It reinforces your neural pathways in your brain to explore new perspectives.
85) Start writing. Start a blog. Learning how to write consistently about your life-experience and what you learnt is a sure-fire way to brand yourself in your own unique way. Be unique, stay relevant. Readers don’t want to know what you do, they want to know what you know.
The best articles or blog posts let readers learn from your experience, your mistakes and your knowledge. Always focus on benefiting readers. When you do, your business or company gets more and more exposure over time. Over time I say…
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86) Complaining Rewires your Brain and sets you up for Failure. Research shows that most people complain once every minute during a typical situation. Complaining about money, the government, the economy and about life and the cards you’ve been dealt with. Its tempting and it feels good just like smoking or drinking because your brain remembers what you do repeatedly and your neurons starts to branch out to each other to ease the flow of impulses.
So why don’t you think you remember the last time you complained? Like I said above, be aware of your thoughts and actions at all times.
Don’t allow complaining or Anger to be your default behavior. If this has occurred to your for the past 20 years. Its high time you Rewired your brain.
I was caught in a mental turmoil which threatened all the values I held before and threw everything I had into doubt. Complaining would have been the influence of my personal ego suffering the loss of these values.
Gratitude allowed me to experience the beauty of art and nature like never before.
88) Do not settle for mediocrity. Far too many people these days celebrate that. Most feel “good enough” is great. It has become the normal standard of living. Imagine a Captain setting the rudder of the ship by just one degree. Well you might think, its not much. After a couple of hours, that ship is now off course by hundreds of miles. That’s how significant that 1% is.
89) Don’t fall for Quick Get Rich Schemes and Promises that sounds too good to be true. I’ve fallen for those promises each time. They sounded all professional and trustworthy with all the social proof. These are things that distract you and divert you off course just like the 1 degree change in the rudder of your ship.
90) Find ways to democratize your life and business.
“Macintosh democratized computers; Google democratized information; and eBay democratized commerce. In the same way, Bitcoin democratizes our money from Banks.” “You don’t get many chances to democratize an industry, so I seized the opportunity and created CoinZodiaC to usher in the Bitcoin Era”
91) Sometimes life isn’t fair and Justice isn’t served. Until today the perpetrators who splashed acid at my face and robbed me have not been caught. At such times it is not the physical pain of it all that hurts the most, it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all. In spite of all the enforced physical and mental primitiveness of life, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen. Character is built by how you respond to what happens in your life.
92) Take pride in your scars. Scars are like medals branded on the flesh. They are proof of your long experience in battle. Scars speak louder than the sword that caused them. ~ Paulo Coelho
93) Go to work on your dreams right now. If you don’t someone else will hire you to build theirs. So recognize your calling as early in life as possible and proactively and creatively persists day in and day out towards your dream.
94) The Fastest way to improve your life is to improve it one minute at a time. Spend one minute longer exercising. Invest one minute longer writing. Spend another extra minute helping your friends. Get to work a minute earlier. Spend a minute meditating. An extra minute creating healthy meals. All it takes is just 1 minute. If you can do that, perhaps you’ll notice a difference in a year.
95) The one person you need in your life if you’re stuck. A role model. A teacher. A mentor. If you hit a stumbling block, these are the people who could give your insight into your troubles.
96) Do not overwork or overdo it. That is bad stress. Good stress is when you are applying mental and physical adaptation a step at a time. Stress can make you grow or it can damage or destroy you.
97) Your current struggles are developing your strengths. Strength does not only come from winning. If you want to judge a person’s character, judge him/her by the number of times he/she bounced back from hardships. Deciding not to surrender, that is strength.
98) A paycheck is like a drug. Without a consistent paycheck, most people won’t be able to keep food on the table. People get happy when they have money, they get upset or moody when they don’t. I’ve learned early on that I had to work for myself for free without any consistent income for years before I made any significant amount of money. The number of years you are able to work on your project for free will determine whether you have what it takes to succeed financially as an entrepreneur. Fact is most businesses fail because of this one addiction. Learn to break this paycheck addiction. It’s ultimately financial slavery.
100) If you want to move the world, you must first move yourself. People talk and talk and talk. Everyone seems to be a critic or a pundit nowadays. Everyone laughs from the park bench. So many have great ideas. If only they’d take their first steps and walk the talk. In business and life, IDEAS are the ignition, but DOING is what drives the car to your destination.
I hope you’ve benefited from this. please feel free to add the ideas and rules of your own below.
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