Create or Hate: Successful People Make Things

by Dan Norris

CHAPTER 1 Successful People Make Things

.h2 1.

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

.quote

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.

“Creativity isn’t about wild talent as much as it’s about productivity.

To find a few ideas that work, you need to try a lot that don’t. It’s a pure numbers game.” Being creative isn’t magic. It’s just a person deciding to create.

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

.quote

“It’s easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It’s a lot more difficult to perform one.” —Chuck Palahniuk

.quote

A lot of people aren’t inspired by other people’s success. Instead, they are overwhelmed and threatened by it. Jealousy and negativity kick in, and Hate rears its ugly head. 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?

Any time you engage in negativity, you feed Hate and starve Create. Every time you make something and ignore negativity, you become a better creator and you starve Hate.

“Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.” —Voltaire

.quote

The higher the stakes, the higher the reward, the more Hate wants control.

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.

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” —Sylvia Plath

.quote

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. Where there are excuses for failing to create, there’s Hate.

“If things are not failing you are not innovating enough.” —Elon Musk

.quote

Excuses are essentially lies. Hate’s strongest weapon is to convince you of things that aren’t true, in order to stop you from making things.

We all have the same amount of time in a day (even Beyonce!).

.hate

If you are living in a free country, all time is ‘free’ and you make the decision how to allocate that time. As a father of two amazing children, I made the decision to allocate a lot of my time to them. I probably don’t watch as much TV as the average person, but I do use my ‘free’ time to run three businesses, outside of writing books and speaking at conferences. All time is free — you choose how to allocate it.

.hate

Most of our creative output happens when we aren’t working. Much like how a bodybuilder’s muscles grow during the 21 hours of rest between workouts, it’s during the not working that the work actually happens. This is why you get your best ideas when you are relaxed, when you have a change of scenery or are on holidays. Or even when you’re in the shower!

.hate

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. There are a bunch of productivity tools and techniques available that the vast majority of people don’t use. 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.

.hate

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.

.hate

Being focused and productive helps weed out the ‘I’m time challenged’ excuse and gets you an early one-up on Hate.

People have a very warped understanding of failure. In Psycho Cybernetics, Maxwell Maltz breaks down how humans learn: Skill learning of any kind is accomplished by trial and error, mentally correcting aim after an error, until a “successful” motion, movement or performance has been achieved. After that, further learning, and continued success, is accomplished by forgetting the past ‘errors,’ and remembering the successful response, so that it can be imitated.

Skill learning of any kind is accomplished by trial and error, mentally correcting aim after an error, until a “successful” motion, movement or performance has been achieved. After that, further learning, and continued success, is accomplished by forgetting the past ‘errors,’ and remembering the successful response, so that it can be imitated.

If you aren’t regularly failing, you aren’t seeking a new destination. You are following a predictable path that doesn’t lead to anything new and you are learning nothing. You aren’t creating anything either. In other words, you are failing. You are failing to grow and failing to improve and failing to realize your full potential.

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 you can fail quickly and without worry, you can correct course quicker, improve quicker, learn more, and achieve more.

I like to aim for a 97% failure rate. 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.