Create or Hate: Successful People Make Things

by Dan Norris

“There are people who make things happen, there are people who watch things happen, and there are people who wonder what happened.” —Jim Lovell

I believe you will be happier, more fulfilled, and maybe even more successful if you create something.

What I’ve Learned About Success “Everything around you was created by people who were no smarter than you.” —Steve Jobs

Timing is a huge factor that is rarely acknowledged and can often be the difference between complete failure and monumental success. What a person starts with, who their friends are, and what they have access to are all factors that determine success.

I can’t tell you how to be successful. But I can tell you that if you don’t make anything, you won’t be successful. Successful people make things.

But all of that didn’t mean I wasn’t creative. Because, as it turns out, in certain areas I can create things that people find interesting and useful. I just didn’t know it yet. With a musician for a mother and an accountant for a father, I’ve found a sweet spot as a creative entrepreneur. Who would have thought?

Don’t write yourself off just because your creations aren’t immediately successful, or aren’t considered great by the people who surround you.

“Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.” —William Shakespeare

Ricky Gervais says, “It’s better to create something that others criticize than to create nothing & criticize others.” That’s great, but the problem is it’s much easier to criticize others than it is to create something yourself.

Once you criticize something that someone else makes, you are under infinitely more pressure to make something great yourself. After all, you can’t whinge about someone else’s work and then produce something that’s not significantly better. Right?

If you hang around a bunch of negative people who only whinge about everything, your Hate will grow, and you will probably never create. The same goes if you decide to friend people on Facebook who are always pointing out negative things, or if you work in an environment full of pessimistic people. What if you recognized every time someone was being negative, and chose not to entertain it at all? What if you only spent time with people who praise you for making things? What if you worked for yourself and didn’t have anyone constantly telling you your work wasn’t good enough?

When you notice Hate, you should acknowledge it. We’ll talk more about this later. Feed your creative side and starve Hate so that when Hate does stand up, you are ready. This is the time when what you are doing might actually mean something.

You’d never talk that way about someone else, would you?

“James, please don’t be one of those guys that teaches people something before they know it themselves. At least wait until you are successful before you attempt to to create something. Hypocrite!”

Every self-help book ever written says that — believe it or not — what you tell yourself is what you become.

So how do you spot Hate? Listen for that little voice in your head, telling you — in quite reasonable and measured tones — why you can’t do something. The excuses that Hate comes up with often seem perfectly legitimate, which is why its influence can be hard to spot. Excuses are Hate’s speciality.

Most of our creative output happens when we aren’t working.

Research has shown that elite performers don’t necessarily spend more time practicing. They are just more productive when they do practice. Learn how to use your time more productively to free up time for making things.

Things like single-tasking, smaller projects, tracking your progress, setting goals, doing timed work sessions free of interruption, and adding accountability are all proven methods for maximizing your productivity in a short amount of time.

When you have less time, you become more productive. It’s often then that you really start to see where your priorities lie. When I do my 7 Day Startup Challenges, I really notice this. I do live calls for an hour or so each day and I constantly manage the Facebook group. I run three businesses, and — on top of that — I always set myself a goal for the challenge so I’m ‘walking the walk’ and participating with the members. On the last challenge, I wrote the last 10,000 words of this book on day 6. It’s amazing how effective I can be and how much less time I spend on Facebook and Snapchat when the challenge is running.

Work smarter, prioritize, and you’ll be on the road to beating Hate by creating more.

Remember, productivity breeds creativity.

The safe path — the one which you don’t have to correct course — is the ultimate failure. This is one of Hate’s most powerful tricks. It can make you fail, while making you feel like you are succeeding. If things are not working, and the failures result in learning and course correction, then failing is a good thing. If you can fail quickly and without worry, you can correct course quicker, improve quicker, learn more, and achieve more.

Another way this manifests is in the excuse of ‘I can’t see the Return on Investment (ROI)’. People don’t take chances unless they are certain of the outcome. But rarely does anything worth doing creatively have a guaranteed outcome.

When software entrepreneurs start businesses, they aim to give away their product for free and hope 3% of their audience will sign up for the paid version. Obviously they want all their free customers to sign up for the paid plan, but they settle for a 97% failure rate. This ratio has served me well. When I started my mastermind group, I had 7,000 members in the free 7 Day Startup group. I aimed to fail at 97% and have 3% sign up for my paid mastermind. I had 200 people sign up, which was around 3%. This alone guaranteed more income each year than I’d earned for any of my first 7 years as an entrepreneur.

Failing never felt so good. Aim to fail at 97% or better, and you will be on par with the world’s smartest and most successful people.

If you are telling yourself you suck, then what you are really saying is that you suck compared to someone else. Comparison is a major creativity killer.

If you can get more attention for your idea than your competitors, you will win.

Stop thinking that what you are doing needs to be a completely original work of art.

It has been suggested that we are all the average of our five closest friends,

Leave any groups that are dominated by negative people. Often it will only take one or two people to direct the overall feel of the group into negative territory. Most people don’t have a good negativity radar, so they don’t even see it happening.

Avoid friending negative people on social media. I accept most friend requests on my Facebook page, but if I figure out that they are constantly whinging and being negative, I unfriend them. If they are negative on my page, I delete their comments and block them. It’s my page, and I never gave them permission to bring their Hate to the party. If they want to Hate, they can do it on their own page. You don’t need to give people the opportunity to provide a negative opinion.

Over time, people will realize that you don’t tolerate negativity and will jump to your aid when it rears its ugly head. Once people realize you have a strong negativity radar,...

If you feel you can influence other people or other groups into changing, then feel free to try. But don’t be disheartened when it doesn’t work. It’s very difficult to chang...

Realize that negativity is boring and people don’t actually care. If you are the one who is always whinging about how hard things are and how much you are struggling, people probably won’t like you. As Dale Carnegie pointed out in How to Win Friends and Influence People, “Talk to someone about themselves and they’ll listen for hours.” Talk about yourself for hours, and people will tune you out.

If you are openly negative towards others, people will dislike you. They won’t tell you, and probably won’t make it obvious. (I will, but most people won’t.) People want to be loved and appreciated, and they want to feel like they are valuable. Negativity will do the opposite. Without knowing why, they will start to resent you.

Is this me? How do I do this?

Personality quizzes such as a DiSC Profile, Myers-Briggs types, or the Yohari Window are a good place to start. Don’t let them pigeonhole you into being a certain type of person, though. Use them to help you understand yourself better. For example, you might use them to figure out why you like or dislike certain things or situations.

If you want to know what you are good at, try a lot of things and see what people appreciate with their actions, not just their words.

Get better at reading between the lines. People around you will rarely tell you the truth, particularly if they love you. I notice this is especially true for people who are particularly focused on being positive all the time. It’s great to be positive, but when you want critical feedback, positive people can be a lot harder to read. Self awareness is critical, and if you do need feedback from others, you need to read between the lines and look at body language and facial expressions, instead of the words they use.

Gratitude also kills anger and stress.

Another trick that works well is catching yourself saying, ‘I have to do x,’ and changing it to, ‘I get to do x.’ Most of us don’t really have to do anything; we choose to do it. More often than not, when you think about the choices you are making, you will feel good about the opportunities you have every day.

You don’t really know their circumstances, but you assume you know their situation, because we assume everyone is like us. You need to first accept that you really don’t know what it’s like to be someone other than yourself. Once you accept that, you won’t be as quick to judge. You will be more likely to listen and observe and try to understand people better. Empathy is an extremely difficult skill to master because no one lives inside someone else’s body and mind. But there are things you can do to improve it: Start from this simple place: You are a self-interested human being. Everything you see, you apply your own context to. But everyone else is also self-interested, and they apply their context to everything. Admit that: “I actually don’t understand anyone unless I make an attempt to understand them.”

If you can judge people less, you can understand people better.

Notice people who are curious, who don’t just talk about themselves but eagerly want to hear about others.

Don’t talk as much. During a conversation, listen more and ask open questions. People will fill in the gaps with their own words, and you’ll learn more about them and focus less on yourself.

The next time you are in a conversation, stop yourself from talking unless you absolutely have to.

Don’t make any sympathetic noises such as ‘ooooh’ or ‘yeah’ or ‘right’ (another reason in person conversations are best). Instead, just ask the occasional question if the silence is unbearable. Empathy is about listening. The more you talk, the less you are listening.

What about the idea of Difficult Empathy Problems (DEP)? Don’t just feel empathy for people who are very much like you. What if you challenged yourself to feel empathy for people who you really struggle to understand? What about feeling empathy for people filled with hate?

If you can improve your empathy, you improve your imagination. And imagination is the source of all creativity.

Empathy breeds creativity.