We’re all inferior (or maybe none of us are)
Filed under: Inspiration & motivation, Life of Johnny, Online biz
The other day, I got an email that really bummed me out.
Just recently, I was part of an affiliate promotion. I did pretty well with it. It was a really cool program and I was proud to spread the word, and I was pleasantly surprised that a fair number of my people agreed that it was cool and signed up, despite it being very different from anything I’d been a part of before. It was nice. I’d again used that win/win/win principle I talk about so often, and everyone was benefitting, and I’d made some nice coin without a ton of effort, and all was well with the world.
Except that I wasn’t good enough. I was good, but not good enough. This email proved it.
The email I’m talking about ranked the top affiliates for the promotion, and I came in seventh overall. The first place person referred almost four times as many as I did. I stopped thinking about win/win/win and pleasant surprise and started thinking about seventh place. Suddenly, I didn’t feel all that successful.
Right now, nobody is feeling sorry for me. In fact, probably some of you or most of you are all angry at me, thinking, “Boo fucking hoo — Johnny only made X amount of money and not four times X, whereas I’m still struggling to make my first hundred online. I feel so BAD for him.”
But the fact that I was bummed out about something like this is exactly my point. It’s like complaining about having too many supermodels after you. Or not having enough time to be able to drink all of your fine wine. Should that email have bugged me? Of course not. And that’s exactly why I decided to write this post.
Why did it bother me? Because it told me that someone was better than I was. Six people, actually… and in the universe of this one event, they were a LOT better than I was.
So: Are YOU feeling beaten up? Are you feeling inferior?
Well, join the club.
You’ll never be good enough
The pain in the ass about life is that at least as far as I’ve experienced — and as far as I’ve seen in everyone I’ve known — you’ll never really outrun your insecurities.
If you become rich, there will always be someone richer than you are, and you’ll envy them. And if you used to be poor, it’ll take a lot of self work for you to ever not feel destitute, even while rubbing yourself with thousand dollar bills.
If you used to be a scrawny kid who got bullied all the time and you bulk up, you’ll still feel intimidated when you go back to high school reunions, and you’ll always notice when someone is stronger than you are, no matter how irrelevant the context.
Personally, I can’t talk to an attorney or lawyer without thinking that these people must wonder why they should take this young kid seriously. And I’m 34.
I wasn’t on the football team in high school and I never got invited to the cool kids’ parties. (In fact, the reason I almost never drink is thanks to negative associations I have to those cool parties.) I defined myself by academic success. I was always the smartest kid, and if I thought someone was challenging my position at the top of the nerd pack, I’d work as hard as it took to beat them. The grades and accolades didn’t matter. What mattered was finishing first, because that’s who I’d decided I was.
The good thing about the world is that it’s big enough that someone will always give you something to strive toward, to force you to stretch and be better. And the shitty thing about the world is that if you always do that — if you always define success by comparing yourself to others instead of comparing yourself to where you used to be and where you’d like to be — there’s always a ton reasons to feel like a big, fat loser. Like, all the time.
I’m doing pretty well, right? Built a business from scratch in well under a year, got up to six figures, built a great base of readers and customers, closing in on my own rock star life and have like a quarter million mentions on the web according to Google.
Yeah, but six people were better than me recently.
And also, I listened to Brian Clark’s interview with Glen Allsopp and realized that what I’ve done, Glen did before age 21.
Oh, and I haven’t caught up with my mentors. Never mind that it’s only been a bit over a year… they remain better than me.
I look at other popular blogs, and unless they’re lying, they all have many times the number of RSS subscribers as I have. And person X just accomplished this. And person Y just started this new thing, and it’s making Z dollars, and everyone loves it.
You can’t win this way. If success in anything (or everything) is defined as something you’re always striving for, then that means you’ll never actually have it.
If you’re feeling beat up, more success won’t make that feeling go away.
There will always be someone better than you, whether you’re at the bottom of the barrel or the top of the heap. It’s like that episode of The Simpsons where Homer is trying and failing to compete with the invention record of Thomas Edison, and he realizes at the end that Edison was just trying and failing to keep up with Leonardo DaVinci. If we insist on living in someone else’s shadow, there are plenty of tall folks out there to feel small next to.
I listen to a ton of personal development material. (I go way back. Remember those giant folding plastic things filled with Tony Robbins cassettes that snapped closed like a big flat Tupperware container?) One from way back that I still listen to on my iPod is Deepak Chopra’s The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, and in it, he talks about the concepts of “self referral” and “object referral.”
In object referral, the point of reference is in the external world, and worth and accomplishment are defined by looking at other people and outside circumstances. This is the reference point of the ego.
In self referral, the reference point is yourself. You don’t look outside to see how you’re doing. Instead, you look within.
I still struggle with this because we’re trained to look to others, to keep up with the Joneses. Hell, that rock star life post that people seemed to like so much? It’s all this same stuff. If you’re doing what you think you’re supposed to do and wanting what you think you’re supposed to want, you won’t see that if you look inside, you may already be doing what you want to do and achieving what really matters.
If you’re feeling inferior, like you could never do what Naomi Dunford has done, I get it. A year ago, what she’d done intimidated the hell out of me despite the fact that a few years before, she was a wage slave like the rest of the world, and that a few years before that, she was living in a homeless shelter. Despite the fact that she has plenty of her own well-publicized neuroses. Despite the fact that she and I both now feel inferior to any number of people who are more successful, better liked, more stable, or whatever than we are.
You don’t need to become more successful in objective terms. You need to train yourself to watch only your internal compass to see where you’re going relative to where you want to be. If you do that, you can improve and actually feel the improvement instead of remaining just as far away from newer, bigger objects of envy.
Deep down, I’m still the twelve-year-old kid who wasn’t good at sports and who had to score well on objective tests if he was to establish his worth. I try to not be that kid, and to instead be who I am today. I usually succeed, but not always.
Who are you? Are you your past, or do you allow yourself, in every self-referring moment, to be your present?
That “live in the moment” thing? Yeah, I think there might be something to it.
My So-Called Rock Star Life
When Lee Stranahan and I were recording our course Question the Rules, Lee pulled out this concept of his “Celebrity Mansion Life.” And it was brilliant.
(NOTE: Because I’ve been carrying this concept around in my head for the past two weeks as the “Rock Star Life,” I’ll bastardize Lee’s phrasing and use that instead. I can do these things because this is my blog.)
Basically, the idea is to imagine what life would be like if you were a celebrity or a rock star. Leave out the drugs and illicit sex, and think of the day-to-day stuff. What do you imagine life under those circumstances to be like?
Some people will imagine racing Maseratis off of cliffs, but most of us will think of more basic things. Rock stars live in awesome houses in awesome locales. They can sleep in as long as they’d like. Then you see magazine articles about how they have all this time to work out, and they’ve got a private gym, so they do that for a long time. They eat some fancy food and do what they want with their time, and so forth.
Boil that down: Nice house. Nice locale. Nice home gym. Lots of time to work out. Eat well. Do what you want. All just for example, but you get the idea.
Once you remove the trappings that probably don’t matter to you anyway (original masters’ artwork on the walls, thirteen expensive hookers bathing in a slurry of cocaine and Cristal), you may just realize, as Lee describes he did, that you can have most of that now.
Let’s say you’re working from home, or working for yourself. Do you, when you wake up, immediately sit down and start working? Do you have a task list on your desk that you’re bound and determined to complete, as if it were a mandate from above? Do you beat yourself up if you don’t accomplish enough in a day, the way a boss might beat you up if you had one?
It’s an easy trap to fall into. Even if you’re independent and don’t go to a job every day, there’s still a tendency to follow a nine-to-five way of doing things.
Lee describes how, after realizing that he was living as if he had a job (and he doesn’t), he started thinking like a rock star.
Instead of working first thing, he started going down to his home gym. Really nice treadmill bought off of Craigslist for $100. Nice, big TV from Craigslist for $80. Nice sound system with BOSE speakers someone gave him for free. He could even follow this rock star morning workout by eating some of that butcher shop thick-cut bacon he talked about, and the fine cheese he paid $1 more per pound for.
Here’s the rub: If he had millions and millions of dollars, how different would this picture be?
The treadmill might be a little nicer. The TV might be flat. The optional breakfast might be served by a butler. But who cares? He gets up when he want, and goes to the gym first thing. It’s a damn nice setup with damn nice stuff in it. It was cheap. And he can do it RIGHT NOW.
The rock star life follows the 80/20 rule just like everything else does. Lee got 80% of the important elements of what he wanted. Chasing the remaining 20% would offer rapidly diminishing returns.
I was thinking about this because last week I went down to Charlotte, North Carolina with Robin to scope out our own rock star lives.
I’m tired of tolerating things that suck
Every winter, I get depressed because Ohio winters are miserable.
Never mind the sub-zero cold. Never mind the mountains of snow. The worst part is the skies. Around the middle of October, the skies in Ohio cloud up with a chronic gray haze that lingers until mid April. The days get shorter, and we as a nation to do what some assholes suggested years back, making the situation far worse by changing the time so that the days are effectively even shorter. Whereas we used to play in the sun until nine in the summer, we huddle inside in the winter to avoid the cold darkness outside that arrives at five.
You lose motivation. You hibernate. Whatever healthy habits you acquired in the summer, you either abandon or manage to maintain (and adapt to a shittier form of) using superhero-like will. You watch a lot of TV. You get irritable, and low-grade depressed. You get bored. You gain weight, because you can’t take the kids outside without 45 minutes of preparation. The chronically overcast skies rob you of sunlight, and you start to feel like the ceiling on the world is very low. If you’re me, taking in the short, cold, and sunless days, you can actually start to feel claustrophobic after a while.
Every winter, I get depressed because Ohio winters are miserable… and every fall, I get depressed because winter is coming.
I’ve realized the last few years that I spend at least three full months wishing that it wasn’t one of those three months. That’s stupid. That’s no way to live life. It’s like how people hate Mondays, think of Wednesdays as getting them “over the hump,” and start to get excited on Fridays because the weekend is coming. Why would you spend five-sevenths of your life wishing it were the other two-sevenths? And why the hell would I continue to spend a quarter of my life wishing it were the other three-quarters?
Good question.
If things go according to plan, we’ll move to Charlotte next spring or summer. It doesn’t get nearly as cold there (but there is a change of seasons, which I’d like), and even on the shortest, coldest days, there is sun. And the city’s downtown area is safe, unlike Cleveland’s rob-you rape-you eat-you inner city. And don’t get me started on the lack of culture and things to do around here, and how much cooler the Charlotte area is.
But get this, because it’s important:
Charlotte isn’t any more expensive than where I am now. The property values are about the same. Even the restaurants and gasoline cost about the same. I can work from literally anywhere there is an internet connection, and Robin’s job is unnecessary and totally replaceable. We have very few friends here, and those we have we see very infrequently. Robin’s parents are close, but they’ll be moving down when we do. Other than proximity to my mother, there is literally no reason to stay here.
So why did we stay where we are for so long? And if you don’t like where you live, why have you stayed there for so long?
Hell… if you have a lamp in your house that you hate, why is it still there? Why do you go to restaurants that are okay (but that you don’t love) if there are alternatives? If you’re in a shitty relationship or marriage, why do you stay? If you’re independent, why do you still end up working nine to five, or tell people “I can’t do X because I’m working”? You’re the boss, aren’t you?
The answer is: Inertia. And overcoming inertia doesn’t take money. It just takes effort.
Moving will be hard. We’ll have to sell our house, and my in-laws will have to do the same. We’ll have to find the perfect property near Charlotte — close enough to the city to get to things without a long drive, but far enough out to have horse acreage. We’ll have to do the actual move — which always, always, always is a shitty and annoying process.
Staying would be comparatively easy, because overcoming inertia is hard.
But it’s not too expensive to move.
It’s not unbelievably difficult.
It’s not true that I don’t know how to do it.
I just need to exert enough effort and initiative to overcome inertia and get this ball rolling — to get out of a comfortable rut — and I can be living in a warm, sunny place with a ton to do, great amenities, and already more local friends than I have right here.
That’s a rock star life. And it’s totally achievable, now, for about what life currently costs me.
We act like the people who live in nice places have rock star incomes. The people who do what they want with their time? They must be independently wealthy. People who travel? People who have beach houses? They’re loaded. This is a lifestyle that is totally inaccessible to us normal people.
Bull. Shit.
The illusion of the rock star life is a very, very fragile misperception. The smallest bit of thought will cause it to shatter, especially when you use the 80/20 rule to get 80% of what you really want using 20% of the time, money, and effort that the 100% version would take.
Can you have a six-story mansion? No, but you can have a house like the one you currently live in, in a really nice place. Can you lie around all day? Maybe not, but you can occasionally sleep in, and go to a movie in the middle of the day. (Note: You can do this even if you work for a boss. Just call in sick.)
It’s amazing how what holds us back sometimes is nothing. Nothing. Nothing but an illusion.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going for a run, and then I’d like to get some work done before I go to the theater to watch Inception again.
I’ve got a way with the ladies
I’ve been exchanging a bunch of emails with “rich, happy, and hot” gals Marie Forleo and Laura Roeder lately because we’re doing a bootylicious* free call tomorrow that you really should sign up for immediately. But then I got to thinking: “Are my people REALLY going to be interested in Marie and Laura talking about becoming hot and successful businesswomen?”
Because let’s be honest: I always picture you all as Chuck Norris types who eat steel and breathe fire while jumping exploding monster trucks and simultaneously fighting ninjas using only your bloody fists and massive penises.
But then I realized that a call like this one with Marie and Laura totally fits because while I myself am almost impossibly macho, I’ve always been surrounded by and supported by and bolstered by women. My greatest allies have always been women. I believe in giving credit where credit is due when I tell my various stories of both triumphs and woes, and nine times out of ten, I find myself giving that credit to a woman.
I don’t know how that happened, but it happened.
Talking to Marie and Laura totally fits because assuming that only WOMEN can learn from WOMEN is kind of dumb and sexist. But what’s more important is the fact that plenty of you out there are fighting those exploding ninjas just as I figured, but are doing so with your massive ovaries instead of penises, and are possibly landing multiple blows with cute pink “Hello Kitty” handbags.
So yeah, let’s hear it for the ladies. Check out these snippets of JBT backstory:
Back in high school, my best friend was a girl. We’ve always kind of leaned on each other.
Through my teens and twenties, I worked for my mom’s company. In its 25-year history, that business employed three men, none of whom worked at the same time. Most of that business’s big clients were women. So 95% of that time, all of my business interactions were with really successful women.
I got my first big shot guest blogging on IttyBiz.com, thanks to Naomi Dunford — someone I continue to work with closely, chat with regularly, and trade neuroses with compulsively.
The reason I finally launched a blog and looked into Twitter was my mother, who was doing both before I was. She talked me into it.
Although my adventures in real estate investment did not go well, my trusted partner through all of it was a female property manager. Without her, things would have collapsed from day one.
I just hired an assistant, Amy. When describing the job, I said that it wasn’t so much about hiring an assistant as hiring a “right hand.” I wasn’t looking for someone to get me coffee and answer phones. I wanted and am developing someone who will partner with me to keep business straight and keep me from tripping over myself.
And of course, through some pretty serious scariness over the past few years, my never-flinching wife Robin was in many ways the one thing keeping me sane and responsible and on track. No matter what kind of stupid shit I got into, she kept trusting me. I never heard a second of complaint, which was good because I wasn’t in a position to take much complaint or hassle without totally folding under the pressure.
So why do I work so well with women? Why are they so responsible for creating and forging and supporting me? I have no idea. But it happened.
Another biggie: I don’t remember the quote exactly, but I think Kyeli from the Freak Revolution said that I was one of like five guys she actually liked and trusted. She and Pace invited me to stay at Chez Lesbian when I went to South by Southwest, and to sleep right there on their fucking couch, despite the fact that they’d never met me in person before.
Why? I don’t know.
I’ve never had “a way with the ladies” AT ALL, but I’ve always been surrounded by awesome women. That’s kind of a gyp, actually, but maybe not because it’s still pretty cool.
It’s kind of like having a superpower. Any guy can relate to other guys. Any guy can fit in well with guys (except for gay guys in the Army… I feel your pain, dudes). But a lot of guys don’t fit in well with women too. And why should we? I’m surprised women accept us at all half of the time. We’re often pretty gross.
I do have a bunch of awesome male friends and partners and cohorts, and it’s cool because we can all just hang out and do good stuff and be gross and creepy together. We get together and grill meat and drink blood and shoot guns and rebuild engines.
But at every crucial moment in my life, I’ve always had these women helping me out. It’s like that adage about how behind every great man is a great woman, except that that expression is bullshit because any intelligent woman knows to never stand behind a man because that’s where farts come from.
It’s interesting.
I don’t really have a point to this or any idea how to wrap this post up, so I’m just going to kind of stop writing.
… aaaaand, now.
(But I will remind you again about that call I have tomorrow with Marie Forleo and Laura Roeder tomorrow. You should sign up for it even if you can’t make the live call, because there will be a recording.)
* They forced me to use the word “bootylicious.”
You can’t always get what you want (but hell, you should get it at least sometimes)
I see where this is going.
I wrote not too long ago about being lazy. Then, I got praise for talking about being lazy, and now, today, I had this idea to write about spending time and money on stuff just because it feels good, and so it kind of looks like I’m moving in the direction of being a feel-good, let’s-do-nothing guru, so maybe soon I’ll just start soliciting donations, trying to expand into the lucrative hedonism market, or perhaps trying to appeal to the shiftless hippie market. (Although, the hippie market is largely penniless, so maybe not.)
Perhaps. Let’s see where this goes.
For now, I’ll just say that I’m embarking on an experiment that I think Tim Ferriss would be proud of, with his whole “let’s work less and Tango more” way of doing things. Tim Ferriss and maybe the folks at Zen Habits, who kindly linked to me two days ago.
Specifically…
I’m asking: How can I radically increase my productivity — not so that I can do more in the time I currently spend, but so that I can do the same amount of stuff in far less time?
I’m asking: How much of this STUFF in my life (tasks, loose ends, mental clutter, paperwork, what-have-you) do I really need?
I’m asking: How much of what I really want out of life in the moment — primarily the emotional states of relaxation, satisfaction, happiness, etc — can I create NOW instead of stressing out now so that I can apparently create them in the future?
There’s posts upon posts upon posts I could (and likely will) write about those three questions and what I’m doing about them, but the last has been on my mind lately because it’s something anybody can do right now, without waiting for permission, and without any training.
Right now, you could decompress and feel better.
Right now, you could have more of what you’re really looking for. Not everything, and not even most things. Not the private yacht, and maybe not the freedom from your job if that’s what you’re after. But you can have some of it, right now.
And that’s a way cool thing to realize.
What I mean
Last year, my well-documented real estate woes were dragging this household down. On average, we had to find $2500 on top of our regular living expenses each month simply to stay afloat. That was the shortfall between what the real estate cost to maintain and what it brought in in revenue.
I wasn’t making tons of money, so this was tough to say the least. Even when my income started to increase, it was nearly impossible to find that much money to throw down a hole, never to see it again.
Imagine being required to take twenty-five $100 bills out of your wallet each month and burn them, and you’ll get the picture.
It was nearly impossible to do that month in, month out, for the better part of two years. But here’s the thing: It was possible. We had to beg, borrow, (but not actually steal) to find that money, but what seemed impossible had to be possible in fact… because we did it.
Interestingly, although we could find that impossible $2500 to throw away, much smaller expenses were far, far harder to afford.
For instance. In the midst of mind-numbing stress, we’d want something fun, like a Wii. But we couldn’t get it, because we couldn’t afford it. How could we? They cost a couple hundred dollars. We didn’t have that to spare.
Robin would get a gift certificate for Christmas to go to a nice place and get her hair done and would say, “I wish I could do that more often”… but of course we couldn’t afford stuff like that, because we had to trim everywhere we could.
I would skip going to Starbucks. Not buy DVDs. We’d watch every penny, because we needed that money to piss away on real estate debt.
Then it hit me. That was fucking idiotic.
How to be totally irresponsible
Each and every month, we were throwing away $2500 on average. THROWING IT AWAY. These investments weren’t recovering; the money was literally going bye-bye, never to appear in our lives again.
We could find money to do that with, but couldn’t free up a measly $150 for a Wii system.
We could burn $18,000 over the course of a year, but couldn’t find $85 for a nice salon job, or $15 for a fucking DVD. Or $4 for a latte.
We had all this pressure to generate money for something we hated, but wouldn’t allow ourselves even the smallest things we enjoyed if it meant laying out cash.
That was bullshit. Taking care of obligations is all fine and well, but refusing to take care of ourselves in order to do it was criminal. We were worth more than a slave’s existence. We were better than simple indentured labor.
When this dawned on us, we slowly began doing things that were really irresponsible. Bit by bit, we pushed. We bought the latte. I’d badger Robin until she’d make an expensive hair appointment. We bought the Wii.
Interestingly, no bad things happened. We were already past red-line, so finding $2600 we didn’t have wasn’t much different from finding $2500 we didn’t have.
And on the flip side, we found that allowing these small comforts made us feel better. Made us a bit more clear-headed. Made us more confident. And at around the same time, I was developing my new “fuck you” attitude. Better moods led to me being able to better tap my resources, to show up more on a day-to-day basis, to come up with solutions to problems that had simply always felt depressing and hopeless. And eventually, with hard work, things started to change for the better.
Coincidence? Maybe. There were a lot of factors at play. But making the mental shift that said, “I’m worth more than this shit” was part of what allowed things to change, in my not-so-humble opinion.
I don’t know how to finish this post
There’s not a huge moral here, and a ton of gray area. If your financial situation is shit, I don’t suppose it’s blanket good advice for everyone to shirk responsibility and buy fun stuff — especially when you consider that a lot of shitty financial situations were created by behaviors like buying the big screen HDTV when you couldn’t afford it.
But I do know that life can beat you up plenty. There can be a lot of people and circumstances on the other side of the fight, struggling against you. If you insist on joining their efforts to destroy you instead of ever fighting on your own side — never pushing back, never opposing those people who are beating you up — then things just get that much harder.
Maybe you shouldn’t buy the Wii. But maybe you should blow off work for the afternoon and go for a walk, because it feels nice and allows you to clear your head.
If you’re in the grocery store and they have cheap floral arrangements and you like flowers, maybe you should spend five bucks to buy a bouquet because it makes you feel good.
If your house is dirty and you really should clean it, maybe you don’t, and maybe you read a book instead.
I can’t tell anyone what to do, and everyone will have to find their own line between “being reasonably responsible” and “stupidly pretending to be responsible while actually crapping on your own head.” And there’s a difference between “giving yourself a break in order to recharge and fight a better fight” and “sticking your head in the sand without actually improving things.”
I can only tell you what I’d do, and what I’ve done. And I’ll tell you here and now, honestly, that if I was still in that $2500 monthly mess and had an opportunity to take a $200 weekend trip that I knew would get me out of my head and improve my mental state, I’d do it even if it meant paying my “responsible” bills late. I’d make “what I have to do” wait until after I’d satisfied at least a little bit of “what I want to do.”
Use this advice with caution, but know this: Life can be an asshole to you sometimes. When it is, don’t insist on always being an asshole to yourself too.
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P.S: In the spirt of The Interactive Offer, about which I had a rollicking good webinar with Clay Collins on Wednesday (you can still get the recording here), I’ve been considering creating a product centering on some way-cool ways I’ve been answering those three “I’m asking” questions near the top of this post. Ways that have reduced the amount of time I’m required to work by 30-40% already, and have drastically reduced my stress levels and cleaned up my mental and physical clutter at the same time.
Would anyone be into me creating a new product or course around that? Any ideas or suggestions, any interest, any what-have-you? Let me know in the comments if so.
