In 2010, I wrote down a set of “first principles” for my life. I asked myself:
“Which rules, if I lived by them for the rest of my life, would make me as happy as I can be?”
7 years later, it’s time to reflect and see which ones stood the test of time.
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I want to share a series of billboards which I think are great because:
I hope you love cars as much as I do. Let’s roll!
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When people sign up for my newsletter, they instantly receive an automated email that asks them: “What’s one thing you struggle with?” Some consider this a marketing trick, but for me, it’s a once in a lifetime chance to talk to readers, say hi and try to help them however I can.
Nevertheless, it does have a research benefit to it: I see which problems keep coming up and what bothers my audience the most. I’ve written so much by now, that most of the time, I can recommend a particular resource for any given issue.
No time to read? Take my free course. Issues with productivity? Gotcha. Can’t google stuff? Wrote a book for you.
Recently, one question kept coming up, which I found myself unable to send people a resource for. It’s a question about projects. A question about starting. Here are three reader responses, all from this week, aimed at it:
“I want to start a business, but hardly have the money or the idea for it!” –Vishal
“I started learning magic tricks long ago, but I never take the time to share my tricks online. There are a few on youtube and I really wanted to share more.” –Flavien
“Being disorganized and lacking focus. I’m a certified NLP trainer and looking to start my own business as a Learning Coach for children. Yet I spend my days on chores, cooking and computer based admin stuff.” –Megan
Can you spot the question? Here’s the one I see: “How do I start a passion project?“
Today, I’ll do my best to answer it. But first…why is it that question?
Coming up with ways to make your brain sharp is a way to exercise your mental faculties in and of itself. But it’s not the only thing I do.
Here are 7 more ways I send my brain to the gym:
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Over 1,000,000 words have flown from these fingers in the past 30 months. Who knows how many it might have been, were it not for these three words:
Bracket unnecessary words.
Read More10 minutes, ha! I’m going to show you not one, but six things that will change your life — and we’ll do it with time to spare.
After this, you’ll feel calm, prepared and ready to take on the world, like this:
Let’s go!
Read MoreI don’t have to teach you to think like a genius. You already are.
A genius is by definition someone who’s wrong a lot so they can be very right about one, usually extremely specific thing, way before everyone else is.
But what if that’s not a special trait of geniuses? What if we’re all geniuses?
I mean, you and I are wrong a lot, aren’t we? And sometimes, we get to say “I told you so” to our friends.
All we do when we call someone a genius is elate them to this status in hindsight.
But in order for us to be able to do that, a genius has to do one thing first, and it’s the only thing that really makes them different: when they know they’re right, they speak up and do something about it.
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“Fruit salad!”
I had to blink a couple times. She couldn’t possibly be serious, could she?
“What do you mean, ‘fruit salad?’”
“I want to create a fruit salad brand. The best one ever! You know, I want to become the Hershey’s of fruit salad!”
My roommate and I were attending a startup event at a reputable VC fund in Munich. Free food, free booze and more hot air than in Richard Branson’s balloon, most of which came straight from the founders’ mouths.
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What you see up there is not a CGI rendering from a movie. It’s a real animal. An inhabitant of the Australian desert called the thorny dragon.
Let’s call him Trey. Trey does a few very uncommon things:
Pretty cool, huh? So how come you’ve never heard of Trey? I mean, he’s not the national animal of any country, there are few clips of him on Youtube and he hasn’t been on the cover of Forbes.
However, Trey, much like his fellow thorny dragons, has a lifespan of 15 to 20 years, which is an eternity in animal land. A few more evolutionary cycles and they’ll close in on the masters of longevity: turtles.
When we look for success, we usually turn to the commonalities of those, who’ve made it to the top. But what if we’re wrong?
Maybe, the only commonality of making it to the top is to not share many commonalities with others.
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500,000. That’s how many words I wrote in 2016. 1,370 per day. 450,000 of those went into summaries and content on Four Minute Books.
Add to that 12,000 words on this blog, another 15,000 words for Time 2 Read, Medium articles, a few long guest posts, work for clients, copy for landing pages, etc. and the half a million mark falls faster than you can say writer’s block.
Up to a million books are published each year in the US alone, half or more self-published by independent authors. When I first saw how much I’d written last year, I wanted to punch myself.
“Why didn’t you write a book, you idiot? Or 2? Or 5?”