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Nobody can tell you what to do.
If he was, in fact too busy, then it meant he was not devoting enough time to his spiritual life.
It is through silence that sound, activity, action erupt.
It’s only through stillness that one can be creative.
I don’t give any advice on things I don’t know about first hand.
Nothing is more important than the cultivation of yourself.
once you divide the world into categories, into an “us” versus “them,” then you immediately become the “them” and you lose touch with who you really are.
“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”
BASIC DIRECT MARKETING: LIST THE OBJECTIONS UP FRONT
So a great sales technique is to address all of the objections in advance. Eminem’s next set of lines does this brilliantly.
In a rap battle (or a sales pitch), if you address everything your opponent can say, he’s left with nothing to say. When he has nothing to say, the audience, or the sales prospect, will buy from you. Look at direct marketing letters you get in email. They all spend pages and pages addressing your concerns. This is one of the most important techniques in direct marketing.
Reduce the supply of yourself while demand is going up and what happens? Basic economics.
A) LUCK “Luck has nothing to do with it, because I have spent many, many hours, countless hours, on the court working for my one moment in time, not knowing when it would come.”
We often daydream, and think, and plan. But the only thing that gets results is action. Not a single ounce of greatness in history ended with thoughts. It happened with hands. With actions.
B) SATISFACTION “I can’t become satisfied, because if I get satisfied, I’ll be like, ‘Oh, I’ve won Wimbledon, I’ve won the U.S. Open. Now can I relax.’ But now peopl...
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It’s only when I lost everything that my real learning began.
“Tennis is just a game, family is forever.”
We have to celebrate what we’re good at. But also celebrate other things in life the love of another person. Our friends. Something funny. I always have to tell myself to diversify my celebrations. Celebrate the small. Not always the big.
A shortcut to meaning is to just every day ask before you go to sleep, “Who did I help today?”
Many studies have shown that when you compliment children on “growth” versus specific accomplishments, they perform better in the long run.
Someone asked me recently where I expect to be in five years. I never think about it. Not ever. I only try every day to improve 1% my physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health. The results will take care of themselves. This is the ONLY way today to plan for a successful tomorrow.
E) LOVE “I think you have to love yourself before you fall in love. I’m still learning to love myself.” Me too. It’s a practice. Not a thing.
“Honestly, I don’t read the press. I don’t know what they’re saying.” Nobody escapes the HATERS. Why? Because they hate themselves. There’s no other answer.
Thinking keeps the adventures of life bottled in your head. Action makes you a hero.
If I spend my life aiming for that 1% improvement every day then I may never be the best in the world at anything. But I know I will be the best “me” at everything.
Life is truly owned by the people who dive into it and make every experience special and unique. The masters of the world don’t let the oppressors—even their internal oppressors (the worst ones of all)—drag them down. Instead, they create out of thin air the experiences, the situations, the magic that constantly exist around them.
You don’t have to turn pain into music. But turn it into something. Write. Write ideas. Start a business. Get a job and blow that place away while you devise your evil plan of escape. Start today.
Every day I wake up and look out the window and say to whatever it is outside of myself, “Help me save a life today.”
It doesn’t require faith but a tiny amount of surrender. Ask this every morning about your friends, your lovers, your employees: how can I help them just a little bit more, with the simple resources I have?
Ice Cube says one line: “If it’s not hard, it’s soft.”
If a piece of writing is not hard, it’s weak. It’s not worth writing. It’s not worth sharing.
If it’s not hard, it’s soft.
If you can’t BLEED or KILL or SLASH YOUR GUTS with your word, then...
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If you can’t take it to the edge, then you played it too...
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Don’t just gossip or talk to say words. Say words that are your reality, that are your pain, that express you. If you can’t change the world, then you know you have to change yourself. Mostly, for me, if I can’t say something that has really hurt me, or helped me, or changed me in some way, then I need to just shut up. I need to not write it. Find a pain inside of yo...
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1)PERSEVERANCE This is the one rule that never goes away. For all my episodes of “The James Altucher Show,” this is the ONE constant.
So he acknowledged it took him 17 years of writing every day before he had a hit. EVERY DAY.
“When you’re being interviewed, control the interview, don’t let them control you. If they ask you something you don’t like, then say what you want and ignore the question.”
5)WORK I asked him why people think they can just get up there and rap without putting in the 17 years. He gave me the only real answer. “People are lazy.”
First, he mentioned that “if you do anything for the money or the girls, then stop. There’s plenty of ways you can do something easier. If you want to be the best, you have to do it for love.”
It’s almost like there’s a grammar of success. When you learn to use that grammar to learn one language, you can also apply the same techniques to learn to be a success in new areas. The key is to not keep pushing in one area of life, but to use that meta-grammar of success to keep changing and learning and becoming a success in other areas.
But during the interview with Coolio, I leaned back against the wall and just listened and blurted out questions whenever I was curious and wanted to learn more rather than force it.
“But then the interview changed,” he told me at the end, “and you got me to reveal some deep shit. Some shit I didn’t want to get into. Kudos on your skills,” he said.
“I don’t care what other people think,” he said. “Original artists don’t care.”
They have a deeply personal emotional anchor they can tie their work to.
No emotional anchor = no art. No meaning.
Every single day, art and innovation are right outside the emotional prison of your comfort zone.
What are your emotional anchors? The events that staple the timeline of your life to something that totally destroyed who you thought you were?
Louis CK says, “If you think about something three times in a week, you have to write it.”
A good quality blog post has particular qualities that make it different from any other literary genre: *IT HAS TO CAPTURE YOU from the first sentence.
