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“Go ahead and come up with a topic” sounds like this really cool and awesome thing when you’re guest posting.

Until you’re cuddled up in bed with your laptop. Thighs sweating from the heat of the battery radiating into your lap. Your 5 year old whining from being forced (?!) to watch SpongeBob on Netflix streaming, yet again. The deadline is 87 minutes away.

And your eyes are watering from squinting at the blazingly white, blank, TextEdit screen.

Yep. That’s me. A few seconds ago.

Right before I asked myself various lingo-filled classic marketing questions: “Okay EPW (yes I call myself that when I’m alone. Yes, I understand this is weird.), what is the Johnny B. Truant brand?”

What topic would resonate with his audience? What’s his target market? What are the JBT unique selling points?

And one word came to mind.

Zombies.

Not brilliant yet witty tag lines full of internet marketing profoundity. Not wordpress sites, not questioning the rules, not jam sessions, not zero to business. No.

Just. Zombies.

And that, my dears, is the entire freaking point.

To find your tribe, to evangelize your brand, to engage your readers, to build a sustainable business …

you must share the glorious zombiefication that is you.

Now of course, yours might not be actual zombiefication.

Yours might be a dozen slightly creepy yet soft & cuddly housecats. Yours might be a smoke-filled RV driving down that one-lane “rental car contracts invalidated” highway on the south side of Maui. Yours might be a nerdy NSFW tattooed pole dancer in a snarky tshirt, hiding her iPhone sexts from her 5 year old “thank god she can’t read yet” daughter. (Yes, that last one is me. Oy.)

But sharing your glorious zombiefication is not the big secret of today’s blog post. No.

The big secret is that you must find the particular flavor of the sexy zombie pole dancer that’s living inside of you.

And as much as I wish I could sell you a “magical fairies growing you money trees in your backyard” solution to this problem … yeah. Sorry about that. There are no freaking magical fairies who can see into your soul. (Well, if there are, I think they’re busy. I mean, if you were a magical fairy, you’d be spying on sexy naked people instead of looking into the murk of people’s souls? Am I right?)

The only way to find your zombiefication is to stop talking about whatever you’re talking about now, and start talking about your zombieficiation.

But oy, it’s not that easy to switch. Oh yes, I know.

You see, if you could read my blog posts from 18 months ago (you can’t, those babies have been obliterated from the internets. I hope.), they would completely freak you out.

Because those posts were written by a lawyer.

(Yes, I was the lawyer. Just wanted to make sure that anyone who’s reading this while drinking or after being up all night with a newborn was on the same page with the rest of us. Are we all caught up? Right. Carry on.)

Those post were boring fancifications, dense with complexities. Never offending. Never taking a side. They were pantyhose and ties (and not in a kinky way).

Those posts were vanilla.

After reading my blog, people would meet me in person. They’d say, “wow, you’re cool / funny / interesting / relaxed / casual / nice and look more young / fun / cute / approachable / warm than I thought you would be!” in this happy yet surprised voice. Oy.

But I couldn’t figure out how to write any other way.

So I had to stop writing.

For six months.

But in the meanwhile, I had to do something!! I had to keep giving away “valuable content” and keep doing all that new age “relationship marketing” stuff!

So instead of writing, I made video blogs.

About how to seduce me. About how goals suck, focus sucks, info products suck, the marketing funnel sucks. About my divorce. About walking on the moon. About my kid. About my life.

And after shutting up for six months, after making dozens of videos blogs, I found myself.

When I went back to writing, the comment section on my blog exploded. (Not actually exploded, that would be scary and rackspace would probably cancel my hosting contract. I just mean I got lots of comments.)

For the first time, I met, even exceeded my goals for selling my programs. I found my tribe. Was able to speak the truth that everyone thought & no one was speaking.

Claimed my weird. Had fun. Went on adventures. Found my ecstasy.

All because I shut up the how of how I had been speaking, and found myself another how to speak.

So here’s is my simple-yet-scary invitation to you.

If you can’t find your truth by writing a blog post, if one how is not working for you, shut that how up and speak somehow else.

Make video blogs or stupid comedy sketches or short-length documentaries. Zing 140 character one liners on twitter. Take snarky photos and post them to your Flickr account. Draw cartoons. Make apple butter. Proclaim your insanities from the top of a banker’s box at the corner of 3rd and Market.

Bottom line … shut the hell up.

And, maybe for the first time, you’ll finally start to speak.

And find your sexy zombie fluffy cat smoke filled RV pole dancer.

I can’t wait to meet her. (I bet she’s hot!! Make sure you get her on video.)

#thatisall

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Elizabeth Potts-Weinstein (or “EPW,” as she calls herself even in private) can teach you how to get your sexy zombie fluffy cat smoke filled RV pole dancer thing going, whatever that ends up meaning, whether you think you’re good on camera or not. You really should check out her Live Your Truth on Video course (it’s up now and will close soon… check it pronto) so that you can get in on her live Q&A session where she’ll do critiques and shit. Seriously. This is fun stuff, kiddies.

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.

(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.

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.”

NOTE: This is NOT a new post. I wrote it for Clay Collins’s Project Mojave blog in November of 2009, but I find that I reference and link to this post ALL THE TIME, so if I were to rank my most important posts, this would probably be at or near the top of the list. And yet it wasn’t on this blog, meaning that most of my readers had probably never seen it. So since it’s been seven months, I decided to put it up here too.

But as you read it, remember that this is seven-months-ago Johnny speaking. The shit I mention going through is pretty much gone now.

Because there is no spoon.

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I’d like to talk about the magic ingredient for success in any endeavor, be it building a Project Mojave “Freedom Business” or climbing the outside of a glass skyscraper wearing suction cups and Superman underwear. Even if you have all the planning and equipment and knowledge in the world, you can’t get anywhere without this magic ingredient. Without the ingredient, you will fall flat on your face every single time.

That magic ingredient? It’s belief.

Allow me to make this all about myself yet again.

I wrote a post two weeks ago on my own blog in which I talked about faith and Martin Scorses’s unit. The upshot, if you don’t want to read that post (and why the hell wouldn’t you? You asshole) was that — as is common in my life — some big financial obstacle had dropped its big fat ass in my path. But instead of freaking out as I usually did, I decided then and there to put my foot down and not believe in the obstacle. (“Don’t believe the hype,” as Public Enemy said.) Instead, I chose to believe in my path, to have faith, to keep moving, and to trust that everything would work out.

See, there’ s a history here. I realized that I’ve been in that same situation a lot over the past year (I own real estate “investments” in Cleveland; ’nuff said) and that each time I’d felt like I was facing this big huge thing that was in my way that I’d never be able to get past, something interesting happened. If I just stayed my path and kept on going instead of falling back, the obstacle disappeared. It always worked out. Always.

So this time, instead of freaking out and worrying, I tried something new.

As I wrote that post, I appeared to have three days to come up with about $2000. I decided to believe that what had happened every other time would happen this time. I decided that this obstacle, like any other, was just a mirage that would dissipate when I actually reached it.

The last line of that post was, “Three days. Two thousand dollars. Now you just fucking watch what happens.”

I’ll leave you in suspense as to the outcome of that situation. For now, keep reading.

But what’s my point? Right now, you’re almost certainly wondering what any of this has to do with you, and with Project Mojave.

So let me get to my keystone premise.

Here’s the take-home lesson: The things that you’re currently thinking will stop you from reaching your goals are, in all likelihood, only your perception. Most of the obstacles that you see in your path aren’t really there.

So now, instead of wondering what any of this has to do with you, you’re maybe a little annoyed at me for being so airy and foofy and hippie-minded or something else derogatory. Of course your obstacles are real. And even if they aren’t real, am I really so assholishly naive as to suggest that simply ignoring all obstacles and forging on anyway will make you successful?

In the short-term, no. I don’t literally believe that. But in the long-term? Yeah, I totally do. Remember, I’m the crazy guy who wrote here about how successful people are not normal — or, if they’re Clay Collins, they are totally shit out of their minds. Crazy people with drive have a big advantage because they don’t know or don’t care that they’re supposed to be intimidated by X, Y, or Z that would scare a normal person. They don’t know that bucking the trend or denying convention is akin to rocking a boat that ought not be rocked… or else.

Crazy people are sometimes successful because they don’t know that they should stop and think about that big problem in their path. Who runs right at a big fucking obstacle as if it wasn’t there? A crazy person, that’s who.

I’m absolutely not saying that if you’re in Project Mojave and have started a Freedom Business selling sock garters for chimpanzees and are getting feedback that it’s a stupid niche, that if you simply forge on bravely, chimps will start wanting sock garters and you’ll become a millionaire.

What I am saying is that if you fail and try again, and fail and try again, and fail and try again, and still refuse to believe that you should stop, or that you personally are a failure, that you will do very well in life.

And if you stop projecting false problems in your path — or panicking about something that might happen — then you’ll soon discover that you’ll build a sense of surety within yourself that you can learn to trust, and that will keep you on that true path. Like an inner GPS.

Because what do most people do? They think, “This one thing could happen. And that would cause this. And then that could happen.” None of it has happened yet, and the truth is that it may never happen. But the game is over before you even get a chance to find out, because the fear and the perceived obstacle get so big that you quit before you reach the decision point. Or, more insidiously, you alter your path. You stare at that thing that may happen and start to believe that it will happen, that it’s inevitable that it happen. And so instead of staying on the right path and going through it, you steer around it. And then you really do fail.

Belief is like a muscle. You have to build it over time, and it all starts with telling yourself that something you fear or something that appears to be in your way isn’t really there. If it is, fine. Take the hit and adjust. But I’ll bet that a bunch of times you’ll walk right through it — no harm, no foul.

But walking over a chasm when you don’t see a bridge? That takes faith. That takes a few instances of blind, stupid, idiotically optimistic faith. I won’t beat that up here; read that penis post of mine again for more detail.

For now, let’s relate it to the source of all of life’s answers: The Matrix.

In the first Matrix movie, Neo goes to visit the Oracle. While he’s waiting to see her, he comes across this kid bending spoons with his mind. Here’s how that goes (complete with Kanji subtitles):

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Having faith while staring down a big obstacle is a bit like bending spoons. Don’t spend all your time figuring out how you’re get over the obstacle. Don’t panic if you can’t see how you’re going to solve the problem. Instead, try only to realize the truth: There is no spoon.

That’s harder than it sounds. All of our lives, we’re conditioned to believe that when X happens, Y is sure to follow… and Y FUCKING SUCKS. You do NOT want Y. Avoid Y at ALL COSTS. Keeping on keeping on when X is a possibility? That’s just stupid. What if X happens? Do you really want to risk Y?

The thing is, yes, X may happen. But it also might not. If you back off every time that something may happen, you’ll never get anywhere. C’mon, have a bit of faith. Grow some balls. Take a chance. Don’t be stupid about it — equivalent to trying to lift 500 pounds when your belief muscle is only strong enough yet to handle 50 — but stretch. Try the 55 pounder again and again until you can do it. Anything worth doing entails some degree of potential risk.

It’s like that sage line from the movie Airplane!: “You take a risk every time you get out of bed, cross the street, or stick your face in a fan.”

You take a risk. You walk right on in the face of an obstacle — one that’s reasonable for you to tackle — and believe it’s not there. And life will toss you bigger and bigger obstacles. If you keep doing this, you’ll start to see that even huge obstacles are often just really elaborate and realistic special effects demonstrations.

So, my little $2000-in-three-days-with-no-apparent-solution problem?

I could have freaked out. In the past, I had freaked out repeatedly. But this time, I found myself thinking, “How many times am I going to face some sort of an impending crisis and discover that it all worked out fine before I stop being duped into panic in the face of new crises? How long before I start to believe in advance that it’s all cool, that it’s all smoke and mirrors?”

So I tried that. Instead of panicking, I stayed on my path and refused to worry. This was a proud moment. I felt like I was getting better at bending spoons because I was starting to realize that the spoons didn’t actually exist.

In fact, I kind of felt like I was at the end of the movie, where Neo is starting to do some crazy shit on that rooftop and Trinity says, “What’s he doing?”

And Morpheus says, “He’s starting to believe.”

So what happened? Within three days, I’d gotten $1500 and a few days’ extension of the deadline. And within those additional few days, I got the remaining $500 and then some. All out of the blue.

There is no spoon.

Even if you think this is all a bunch of New-Agey crap, I think you can still learn a thing or two here. Maybe you really believe that spoons exist. Maybe you don’t believe in serendipity or the notion that everything happens according to a plan.

Even if all of that is true for you, I still guarantee that you’re getting in your own way. I still guarantee that you make spoons out of thin air and put them in front of your face and say, “I can’t bend this fucking thing.”

At the very least, take a close look to what you think is stopping you. Really think about it. Test your boundaries; soldier on in the face of a few of these supposed spoons.

I bet you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

—————

When I found out what was happening with EPW’s daughter Gracie, I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to hear it for Elizabeth and I didn’t want to hear it for Gracie, but most of all I simply didn’t want to hear it for me.

I have two kids. One of them is Gracie’s age. And a few years ago, we had a little scare. It turned out to be nothing, and even if it had turned out to be something, the worst case scenario would have been a few days in the hospital. But even that — that smallish incident that involved my son, that was totally out of my control — knotted my stomach and made everything else in my life irrelevant for a little while.

So I can’t imagine what these two are going through. I don’t want to imagine it. I’d give anything in Elizabeth’s shoes. And I’m sure she’d give anything, too. When one of your kids is at stake, everything else is irrelevant. You don’t weigh costs in a situation like this. You simply pay them.

Which led to a really interesting realization.

>> Read the full post on ElizabethPottsWeinstein.com

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We always celebrate the Fourth of July in Canada.

It’s not planned deliberately, like I’m making a statement or am anti-American or anything. It just always works out that way because my mom owns a cottage on an island in the middle of Lake Erie, and the Fourth is one of those times we always go, and it’s always really hot, and at night, we can watch around a dozen microscopic fireworks displays across the lake in the USA, assuming the flies aren’t biting after dark on the beach.

We’re hardly alone in our non-US Fourths. There are always a lot of Americans there, all of whom are being quite Fourthlike with their many barbecues, bottle rockets, and Jet-Skis. So it ends up being like a US away from the US anyway.

This year, watching all of the activity and very eager to light sparklers and make s’mores over a fire, my son Austin was asking about why the Fourth of July was so special, and it dawned on me just how idiotic it is that we call it “The Fourth of July.” Like maybe we should celebrate “The Seventeenth of August.” (NOTE TO SELF: Begin stocking up for Seventeenth of August cookout.) So I explained to him the whole concept of it being Independence Day, and why maybe we should keep that name in mind instead.

Explaining independence on a 5-year-old level was actually kind of neat. “Independence” is one of those words we mouth without really thinking about, and spelling it out for him forced me to really pay attention and get inside of it.

What exactly were we doing in “declaring independence from England,” other than committing high treason?

We were saying, “We’re cool on our own over here.”

We were saying, “Piss off, England. We’ve got this one.”

But there’s a flip side. Even once we got past the whole “revolt will be punished by hanging while watching High School Musical” thing, we were also saying we didn’t need outside help or supplies or powdered wigs or whatnot. We were apparently willing to form our own new supply chains and do without all of the stuff England had been sending (or would maybe eventually send) our way.

When you say, “We’re going to do things our own way,” you also have to say, “That support you’ve been giving us? We don’t really need it anymore.”

And that’s the catch-22. If you’ve started your own business but are still working a job you’d rather not have, you’re still dependent. If you’ve got some momentum but are fresh out of high school or college and Mom or Dad is still paying your car insurance bill, you’re dependent. This is a quid pro quo world, and if you’re accepting something, you almost always owe something in return — be it time, attention, money, or something else. One way or another, there’s a price to be paid.

At this point in thinking and explaining why we celebrate the Fourth of July, I’ve got existential realizations falling out of my ass, and it kind of dawns on me what a big part of my life has been about.

What a lot of us (but by no means all of us) are after really isn’t a certain amount of income, or to spend our time doing X, or to have a certain amount of job satisfaction or peace of mind.

What it’s really all about for a lot of us is independence. And to be even more PBS afterschool special about it, what we’re really after is freedom.

You realize that, and it sets your priorities straight and maybe you get all patriotic, but this time you’re patriotic about the nation of your own damn self.

No time expectation without adequate compensation.

I regret that I have but one life to give, so I’m not about to give it to a company.

Personally, once I started waving the flag for the United States of Johnny, my priorities got clearer… but the way got a lot scarier.

If you’re always marching toward greater independence, it means you know to choose the lesser paying job along the way if it gives you more time to build your own side thing. You know that no matter how big a paycheck may look, it’s not worth it if it comes at the price of all of your hours. You’re really clear that although a job will finally offer you decent and affordable health insurance, you can’t accept it because it’ll squash your independent endeavors.

Much like early America saying, “We’ve got it, England. It’s cool,” you can declare your independence only if you’re willing to take the flip side, which says that you’re going to have to start making your own damn fish and chips and shepherd’s pies.

It’s only been six months since I severed ties with the last of my big clients from “the old days.” When I worked for those folks, I was mostly okay with what I did work-wise and I wasn’t on a salary or anything, but I knew that they represented this huge chunk of my income (it used to be ALL of my income). So, as long as I kept working for them, my fate was tied to theirs. If they tripped, I was fucked.

So when all of them started to trip at once, I got to make that choice. It was forced on me. “Give me liberty? Um, okay… I don’t really see that I have much of a choice, so, sure.”

Now I see it. Now I know what I’m always going for, and what I’ve been going for from the beginning. More freedom. More time. More of my fate heaped upon my own shoulders instead of someone else’s. It really helps to make decisions more straightforward, even if those decisions aren’t always easy to commit to.

I guess the message here is that independence can suck, but that capacity for suck is part of why it’s so awesome.

Happy Seventeenth of August, everyone.

So the reasons I’m running today’s guest post by Sam Rosen are twofold:

1. Sam is doing this really interesting thing that I’ve never seen before — 60 speakers in 60 minutes giving their best tips on online influence — and you all will like it. (I’m planning to like it myself, actually.) It’s totally and completely free, so there’s no reason not to do it. I also don’t stand to benefit from it at all, which both irks me and makes me feel like Mother Theresa.

2. I needed a post, and it made sense to talk about Sam’s thing (because naturally, I’m in it… since I’m a whore). However, I had the choice of doing the hard work myself or saying, “Yeah, Sam, why don’t you write it because I’m going on vacation in a bit and don’t want to write it myself? Have it on my desk by 9am tomorrow. And by ‘my desk,’ I mean to tie it around a rock and throw it through my window. And by ‘window,’ I mean my email account. And by ‘rock,’ I mean virus.”

So what follows is Sam working and doing my job for me. Enjoy.

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Recently, Johnny wrote that he rarely accepts guest posts. That’s not because he’s a cold-hearted, zombie-obsessed misanthrope who prefers hilarious chickens over fellow humans. It’s because he’s a pompous classist who only associates with Ivy League professors and captains of industry.

Okay, maybe not. If I added that biographical hue to Johnny’s non-existent Wikipedia page, I’d probably have at least 42 Truantians attempt to sue me for slander, including his biggest fan, Ann Coulter.

So why did he let me do a blog post?

It’s not because he has a penchant for Jewish entrepreneurs (JOHNNY’S NOTE: It’s not JUST because I have a penchant for Jewish entrepreneurs). I think it’s because my company, ThoughtLead, is doing something slightly unusual:

We’re putting on the shortest marketing conference ever. 60 of the web’s leading thinkers and doers (including Mr. Truant himself) will speak for 60 seconds each about how to increase your digital influence. On July 6th, at 6pm ET. It’s called the Influencer Project, and it’s sponsored by big companies (like HubSpot, Rackspace, and MarketingProfs).

How’d we think of the idea…and get so many people to join in on the fun?

We Questioned the Rules (Hmm… I like the sound of that. Maybe I’ll create an online course of the same title soon. Damn you, Truant! You win this time.)

You see, not too long ago, we launched another speaker series, called The Purposeful Product (which Johnny, Dave Navarro, and Chris Brogan are actually all speaking on this week). It got rave reviews. But it fell short of the buzz we had hoped for.

That’s because it wasn’t a disruptive idea. Despite the awesome speakers and content, the overall messaging was pretty standard. And, not surprisingly, it didn’t fly like we wanted it to (kind of like Truant’s chickens).

The Influencer Project, on the other hand, is different. It’s already spreading on Twitter, and people we don’t even know are blogging about it.

“A-listers” like Brian Clark, our Third Tribe fave, as well as Guy Kawasaki, Robert Scoble, Gary Vaynerchuk, Brian Solis, and John Jantsch are all speaking.

Frankly, we’re all a bit stunned, and that’s not just because Truant mailed us one of his chickens last night with the mysterious note, “She’s yours. Good luck.”

How to Think Disruptively

Truth is, we were tired of all the “me too” product launches, conferences, e-books, and blogs, and we wanted to do something radically different, something that created a lot of hoopla in a hurry.

So we questioned the rules, just like Johnny told us to (as well as getting a JBT apple-eating tattoo on our left ankles, which our parents weren’t too psyched about).

After recovering from the trauma of “inking” our ankles with Johnny’s admittedly dashing image, we endeavored to isolate five attributes of disruptive thinking. Here they are:

1. Think in terms of memes. “Question the Rules”; “Third Tribe”; and “Shortest Marketing Conference Ever” are all “repeatable” ideas that upend convention. They take schemas (rules, tribes, conferences) in the cultural zeitgeist and give them a twist. Think about Apple’s 1984 Superbowl commercial. It was 1984. The book 1984 represented all of the suits, the corporate meanies, the stodgy, uncreative bastards. They took that and turned it on its head.

So ask yourself: “Is this meme-worthy? Is this something that could spread?” If the answer’s “no,” you might be in trouble. If it’s “yes,” then keep going.

2. Create a collective ethos. If it’s just “your thing,” who cares? But if it’s about the community, if it’s an idea driven by people coming together and rallying around a cause, then you release a different kind of energy. We’re not lone warriors. We’re intersubjectively inclined human beings who, no matter how “big” we are, want to accomplish incredible things with others.

So ask yourself: are you facilitating a collective platform, or just worried about your own product, service, or idea?

3. Get other disruptors on board.  The “influencers,” the people who are already in the public eye, are usually disruptors by nature. They think in different ways. They have styles that set them apart from others. They create memes. By making it easy for them to say “yes” (read: 60-second interview, plus a collective ethos, plus a meme), you not only begin to adopt their thinking—you become their partner in crime. (JOHNNY’S NOTE: I’ve had to decline a lot of interviews lately. “60 seconds” is EXACTLY what made me do this one — they made it easy to say yes.)

So ask yourself: are you making it easy and attractive for other disruptors to join you in the cause of innovation, and maybe even the creation of a new internet shoe empire?

4. Use language—creatively and memorably. When we were inviting A-listers, we used the sentence: “60 of the web’s leading thinkers speak for 60 seconds each about how to increase your digital influence for good and profit in the next 60 days, on July 6th at 6pm ET.” That grabs attention. We intentionally created a sense of rhythm, repetition, and repeatability (you might notice that I’m kind of into alliteration; like Johnny’s zombies, it’s an unhealthy obsession) so that it would “stick” in people’s minds.

So ask yourself: is your language memorable? Do you sound like a white heterosexual middle class religiously unremarkable man living in America, or does your idea have stickiness, repeatability, “memetic” mojo?

5. Create a pattern interrupt. For a long time, everyone selling information products online was using long-form sales letters. Then, one day, Frank Kern did one big video with a huge “Add to Cart” button underneath. Many others followed suit, but he was the disruptor. For a long time, everyone was blogging, and then Twitter made you turn your “logs” (ahem) into 140 characters each. Now there are “corporate micro-blogging platforms,” but Twitter was the disruptor. What do these examples have in common? They took a pattern we were familiar with, and interrupted it.

So ask yourself: are you just following the same pattern, or are you interrupting—disrupting—it, like Tony Robbins does at his seminars when he bucks the “cheerleader” image and starts swearing?

Okay, so by now, you’re probably starting to get an idea of the “disruptive thinking” mindset. And if you’re not, it’s probably hopeless. (Just kidding. I heard that it took Johnny like 10 years to have his first good idea.)

So here’s a question I’d like you to answer in the comments: How can you be more disruptive in your own thinking, without stealing my idea (I know a lawyer, Truant)? What examples of disruptive marketing have inspired you lately?

(JOHNNY’S NOTE: And also sign up to listen to the Influencer Project. It’s free, and it’s the only project of it’s kind. Fo real, yo.)

NOTE: I’m fucking audio-tarded and apparently Jordan is too, because between the two of us, we can’t get audio to stream like every normal person can. Whatever. Just click “download” above and listen to it. It’s fantastic.

When Jordan Cooper of NotAProBlog.com emailed me to tell me that he, Nathan Hangen, and Mike Cliffe-Jones were doing a game show as part of their “Beyond Blogging” project, I replied promptly and said, “Give me a call, dude! Let’s record something involving walruses!” Because Jordan is a comedian, and everyone knows that walrus humor is all the rage at the Improv right now.

So we got on the phone, but it fell apart and somehow we ended up talking little about walruses OR game shows and instead ended up chatting hilariously about some of the blog-business topics nearest and dearest to my heart: the business comes BEFORE the blog; stop analyzing and just DO SOMETHING ALREADY. I abided this because I assumed walrus humor was yet to come. But… sigh.

Still, it turned out pretty damn good even though my shitty headset (which I’ve since tossed) makes it sound like I’m walking disinterestedly around the office during the call. Which I was not doing more than 50-60% of the time in reality.

Anyway, do check out what they’re doing with the Bloggywood Squares game show. It’s fantastically walrusrific. And if you want to know more about the Beyond Blogging project? Well, then sign up for Bloggywood Squares because once they have your info, they’ll be sure to let you know and/or sell your email address to gangsters. One of the two.

What do you mean you’re not signed up for the Jam Sessions? Were you in a plane crash in the desert and have been wandering the dunes for months, forced to subsist on live scorpions and drink moisture squeezed out of your own pants? Is that what has kept you away? Either way, you should join us now that you’re back and your sun blisters have stopped festering. Studies show that Jam Sessions members are smarter, more attractive, and better at Chutes and Ladders than the general population. Truth*.

* Not truth

—–

If you’re in this little blogging space of ours (“part of our dysfunctional family,” as I think of it), then chances are good that you’ve heard some of the discussion over launch fatigue.

If you haven’t heard about it, the whole launch fatigue discussion started here, and you’ll want to read that post prior to reading this post, or else what I’m going to write about won’t make any sense. (Be sure to read all of the comments if you want your eyes to bleed, and if you want to feel really bad about yourself and whatever it is that you’re doing.)

After that post, the blogosphere promptly blew up like Oprah after announcing her weight loss. This post by Dave Navarro is the other post I read about it, but there were many more and a lot of backchannel discussion about it. Dave’s post made me feel a little better, but not much.

It’s a good discussion to think about, but it’s also a no-win discussion. It’s like what the WOPR said about nuclear war: The only winning move is not to play.

Except that if you “don’t play” in business, you almost never make any money. Which has its downsides.

Let’s put it this way: The message I got out of the whole “launch fatigue” discussion, which included comments, Twitter, private conversations, posts on other blogs, etc., was this: No matter what it is you’re doing, how you’re approaching your business, or how ethically and “Third Tribe-like” you think you’re being, you’re a total jerk and a large group of people absolutely think you’re a shitbag.

The title of this post is “What I’m doing about launch fatigue.” And in case you’re short on time and just want me to cut to the chase and tell you what it is I’m going to do in my business in light of the discussion (because I’m that important), here’s my answer:

Nothing.

I’m going to stick my head in the sand. I’m going to ignore further discussion. I’m not going to keep reading comments about it. I’m going to do nothing in light of concerns about launch fatigue. I trust myself and my instincts, and I personally do not think I’m a shitbag or employing generally shitbaggy tactics. So I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing, and if that’s uncool with someone, so be it.

The problem for any creator is that you’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t. If you sell stuff at all, some people are going to think you’re pushing too hard. If you hold yourself back from launching something because there have been a lot of launches recently, you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face and are, frankly, depriving the world of good stuff, assuming you don’t produce crap.

A lot of new people are going to see this discussion, picture a wary, angry customer base who is tired of being promoted to all of the time, and use that picture as an excuse for their own inaction. They haven’t done anything yet, so why bother to do it now? People will only get mad at them.

Well, guess what? You can’t please everyone, and that goes for everything that ever ends up having any degree of success whatsoever. So the best course of action IMO is to just do your best to not be an asshole. Do that, and most of you will be fine.

“Be reasonable.” “Be cool.” “Be respectful.” Those work as well.

In case you haven’t headed over to check out that Jam Session yet, I’ll just mention that Marissa says very clearly that her intention in talking about launch fatigue was not to convey the message “stop creating and selling products and services.” It was “stop ONLY pimping stuff and stopping with original content and connection.”

It wasn’t “don’t launch” or even “don’t launch using the same formulaic steps as everyone else.” It was “don’t be a whore.”

Really: Are you promoting a ton of stuff (your own and that of others) purely for monetary reasons, ignoring the real needs and desires of your customers? Are you promoting things you don’t totally believe will help the people who buy them? Have you stopped creating meaningful free content, stopped using Twitter to be personable, stopped participating in comment threads, forums, email from customers and prospects, and so on? Are you a non-stop pimping machine?

If you are, stop it.

If you aren’t, then file this whole discussion in your mind as background info, but then keep going.

And also, “Non-Stop Pimping Machine” would make a really good name for a RUN-DMC era old-school hip-hop group.

P.S: Here’s some miscellany. I’m tossing it in mainly because I’m at Borders and there’s some incredibly shitty cover version of the Righteous Brothers “Unchained Melody” playing on the speakers here, and continuing to type is the only way I can kind of ignore it.

About using the same old tactics and formulas: So what if you’re following a typical launch prescription? So what if your prices all end in 7? Is the product good? If it is, then I could care less if people notice that a formula is being followed. Just because something is common doesn’t mean it’s underhanded, even though people tend to imply it.

About Smurfs: They were pretty cool. But I’ll bet you couldn’t actually make gold out of them.