# The 5 Guidelines For [[GOTBook/1. Ready For Final/0 GOTBook Intro#Thinking In Vectors|Directional Growth]] ## One: Check Off The Basics **Sleep Enough!** Not getting enough sleep is like getting drunk every morning. If you’re tired, you’re not sleep well. Track it and make sleep a priority. Don’t use stimulants or alcohol close to bedtime, it will help. Consider blue light glasses and meditation before bed as well. I find heavy duty blue light goggles combined with no screens for 60-120min before bed to be a magic combination. **Eat natural food** And avoid processed food along with restaurants. Why? Natural food is better for you. Processed food has things that don't occur in our ideal diet; they're often not as healthy. Natural foods are more likely to be nutrient-dense. Just eat natural food. Restaurants, especially in the US, serve massive portions. They cook with high-calorie ingredients. And they're a great way to spend a lot of money. Don't spend a bunch of money at restaurants if you don't need or want to. Going to restaurants to critique them is a personal hobby for me, but I much prefer to take my daily meals at home. **Spend at least 30 minutes outdoors every day** Nature helps you increase your creativity. It helps you relax. It's straight up healthy. Once again, spend time outdoors. Thirty minutes a day is a good starting point, and it's pretty easy to do. Maybe take a walk, or sit on your porch and stare at the trees in the clouds. It's surprisingly contemplative.. It is important to have good mental health when you go into entrepreneurship because a depressed person would be much worse at running a business than a not depressed person. They would suffer higher rates of stress as well. So, you would want to ideally ensure that you are as mentally stable as you can be. This will ensure that there is more positive performance throughout your organization. In some cases, mental health and instability could be the difference between success and failure. **Playtime/nonsexual companionship of at least four hours of a week - time being playful and happy with other people, not thinking about work. ** Spending time with other people is good for our mental health, and overall well being. Just embracing the fun and happiness that can come from other people’s conversation, and doing things with them. Spending a few hours being social with people is important. The connections we make outside of work often prove beneficial to long term goals. Get into more of those favorite activities and new experiences. Take a break to get ahead! I believe that people need different kinds of relationships. Social relationships trump sexual relationships from what I’ve read, experienced, and seen. **At least 2 hours/week completely alone (no electronics either!)** I recommend at least two hours per week being completely alone with no electronics, maybe a pen and paper or a whiteboard. Just entirely switch off all your devices, go as far as turning your Wi-Fi off if you have to. You can even go outside, or sit in front of a big, open window. Just spend two hours daydreaming, and thinking. Take the time to relax your mind. Some of your best ideas will come from here. It will do your mental state some good too! **Notifications off if they aren’t super important (all electronics, messaging, and chat)** Turn notifications off o unless they're super-duper important. Pretty self-explanatory these days, but notifications are bad for you. Your phone is designed to keep you on it. That's not good for you. Spend time off your phone, your phone is not where work happens. Spend most of your time this way and your life will change. Your phone is where you think work happens. Work happens in your head. Work happens when you get things out to your people. Work happens when you DO! **No more than 8 hours/day on screens** I break this one all the time, and it is the one that is going to come back and bite me in the ass the most. Why? Because screens are super bright and they might be hurting our eyes. We don't know. Eye strain is a real thing. Also, when you take time off-screen, reading, and working with pen and paper, you’ll remember more. That's good for you. The variety will be good for your mind. Screens are addictive. Almost all consumer technology today is designed with a habit loop of some sort in mind. That implies potential for addiction. During the Covid-19 quarantine situation, I’m working longer hours. Including video games I’m on a screen for almost 12 hours per day. Normally I would go out and fill my time with other hobbies and activities. You have probably grown up in a world where you have not really known a life without digital technology, and maybe you’re uncomfortable separating yourself from it. That is very close to addiction. Realize that 8 hours is a third of your day. That is as much time as you would spend sleeping. William Gibson, famed author and futurist, posited over a decade ago that we became cyborgs the moment we attached Blackberries to our hip 24/7. In 2021 I’d say it’s hard to disagree. Set Do Not Disturb times, and limited screen timers. There is a whole array of apps like RescueTime and Freedom that are designed to make it more difficult to spend a lot of time on your computer. You have to be very conscious of your relationship with technology, because technology designers and creators are conscious of it, and they are designing this technology to be addictive. They design it first for their profit, then for your benefit. **Exercise as much as feasible for your schedule, ideally daily - For a Minimum of 30 minutes. ** Exercise as much as feasible for your schedule. I know very successful entrepreneurs who spend three to four hours a day working out. I think that's way too much personally, but a minimum of 30 minutes a day is easy. You might even decide to hit two birds with one stone and combine your daily outdoor activity with your exercise, maybe take a walk. Or you could do a cycle of 5-minute exercises: crunches, push ups, squats, pull ups, etc. I like working with a Sandbag Routine. Heavy sandbags are cheap to make, and they work pretty well for a wide variety of exercises. But again, exercise is a “You Do You” situation. **All vices in moderation** The final basic rule, all vices in moderation. Why? Because if you overindulge, then you will pull yourself out of alignment. You will lose track of your goals, and you will either not succeed, or you will fail in some other portion of your life. As a result, you can have just about any vice you want, but imagine you've got some limited number of vice points, and you can distribute them among your vices, but that's all. You can't spend any more. Maybe all of those vice points, amount to 10 or 15 percent of your time and beyond that, you can't do vice stuff. You can't stack them forever so they take all your time. Vices are pleasurable but do not help you. They will not make you better. They will not help you succeed. Be wary of them. ## Two: Stack cash and make big bucks Everything you do in business comes down to one of those two things: 1. Increase your savings by reducing expenses. 2. Increase your revenue through money-making endeavors. If your activities for work are not relating back to those goals in some way, you're probably doing something that isn’t important enough for _you_ to be doing. ## Three: You’re the vision not manpower Be an editor like Jack Dorsey. Be a visionary like Steve Jobs was. Be Khaled, not Drake. [[GOTBook/2. Final Edits or Revision/First Principles Project Planning|You want to be the producer, not the main actor.]] Your job is to bring together all the best people into the room. You put out a platinum record because you've got the greatest lineup. You're the captain/coach. Yes, you have to get out there and work when nobody else can, but your first role is to make it easier for everyone to do their thing. **_That is by far the most important and hardest step because you can't scale your organization if you're stuck working in it every day._** You can certainly make 6+ figures hustling in a year or two. If you hustle hard, have a great network, or sell a top tier product you can even hit 7 or 8 figures that way. But it's like playing the game on hard mode. Systems can bring a 5->6->7->8->9->10... but they don't help until they're built. Systems take time and/or capital to create. Processes grow into systems as they develop to be self correcting. ***To break the hustle cieling, you need a system tipped drill.*** If you're stuck below it, you're either in the wrong business or not really trying. If there are excuses or blame left to place, then it is the latter. Otherwise, consider the former as a possibility. Hustle slows down as you scale. You’re one person and momentum outpaces any additional speed (like gravity or wind). That’s why it slows. Also, it always requires you if it’s hustle based. Hustle is awesome, but ultimately needs systems to scale When I was starting Call for Content I limited myself to 10 hours a week in the business. And if I was working more than that, I hired someone. [[GOTBook/2. Final Edits or Revision/Dashboard Management|With fractional labor these days it's pretty easy to fill the smaller roles quickly.]] **_Unless it's something that only you can do; find somebody to do that task._ ** ## Four: Know Your Endgame ***Hope is a flashlight, not a strategy. It can light the way and when it goes out, you're left in the dark.*** If you lose all hope, you're destined to fail. It's as simple as that! But if you have hope for something impossible, you're likewise setting yourself up for future dissapointment. I find hope is best used as an enhancer of potential visions/ideas of the future. It should not be part of the plan to get somewhere, but rather a prerequisite for wanting/planning to go there in the first place. ### [[GOTBook/1. Ready For Final/Personal Philosophy|Why Do Awesome Shit?]] There are 3 primary buckets that people fall into for their Life's Purpose: 1. Comfort 2. Impact 3. Play to Win #### Comfort People seeking comfort have the goal of a life well lived. One that they can look back on with happiness. Most people fall into this bucket. They are not seeking to build a legacy, cure cancer, or create the next iPhone. They simply want to live and be happy without much worry. Lazy Entrepreneurs are often of this type, building income for fun and profit so they can spend more time doing whatever (with whomever) they love. #### Impact This is where Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and others like them fall. They want to leave a "***dent in the universe***." The sacrifices that must be made to achieve this goal are too great for a Lazy Entrepreneur. Success for this type of person means that they must be willing to give up everything in pursuit of accomplishment. It is not for the faint of heart, nor for those who seek anything less than total dedication to the path. Personally, I find them a bit intense and generally not much fun to be around. Interesting, yes. Entertaining? For a night or two. Enjoyable? Only if you seek the same goal. Few are cut out for this pursuit. #### Play The final group is where I fall, as do other Lazy Entrepreneurs not purely seeking comfort. We live and play for the love of the game. Every challenge is a chance to rise to the occassion. Every career and business an obstacle course waiting to be conquered. This group are those they see life as a playground. They find joy in the pursuit of mastery and improvement. Comfort is a byproduct, but only a temporary respite is possible. If you are of this type, then you will never be satisfied with stillness for long in any aspect of your life. That's OK, there's always more to be done. ### Visualizing The Future You Desire I find the idea of a "*vision statement*" to be a bit nebulous. I've found a few exercises to come up repeatedly in the practice of building one that lasts. I recommend spending a day going through these, spending 30min to an hour on each - then reviewing every quarter or annually. ##### Write Out Your Bucket List Answer this simple question without any concern for resources: > What would you like to try, experience, or do before you die? ##### Funeral/Eulogy Visualization This is one of my favorite visualization exercises, developed (or at least popularized) by Stephen Covey in *7 Habits of Highly Effective People*. > What would you want friends to say about you? Family? Colleagues? If you spend time thinking about these, even “listening” to what specific people would say – or better yet, what you’d like them to say? What would you like to be remembered for? ##### Ideal Day Visulization If you could spend the rest of your life in a Groundhog's Day like loop? What would that look like? > Visualize and decribe in detail every minute and hour of your ideal day. How would you spend it? with whom? What would you be doing? From meals to activities, to what your bedroom looks like. ##### Life Goal/Purpose (5 Whys Edition) This is one of the simplest I've come across, and the one that I find myself coming back to most often. > What's your purpose in life? What one goal would you give up everything to accomplish? Why? I like to take these sorts of goals down to their root using the 5 Whys technique - asking "Why" after each answer until we're 5 layers deep. In my experience, most people are unable to gte past the 2nd or 3rd "Why". That's generally a signal they ahven't reached their truest version of their purpose yet. ##### Developing One, Unified Vision Combining all these together will allow you to develop a much more detailed vision of the life you should be leading. I'm almost never entire on track when I review, and adjusting course gets me closer to my goals. ***It's about moving in the right direction, consistently. Getting there takes a lifetime.*** ### Know Your Number Mine is about $20,000,000 in 2018 dollars. Know how much you need to achieve everything you'd like to in your life, based on the exercises above. Consider the various things you'll want and need to buy, the costs of supporting a familiy or infrastructure for your ideal goals. 1. What will it cost to cover your necessities? * Healthcare * Housing * Food 2. What about luxuries? List them out in detail * Education * Support Staff * Travel * More Expensive Food * 2nd Homes, Estates, Beach Houses, Etc. 3. What about your ideal life? Does it differ from the list above? Are there business expenses or other costs to reaching your unified vision? 4. Add all the above up, and then double or triple it to be conservative. That's your **Number**. In all the above, it is key to remember that there are actually 3 variables in play: 1. Revenue (pre-tax, pre-expense $) 2. Capital (Time, Saved/Held Money, and Network) 3. Cashflow (Free flowing $ you can spend as you please) Understanding the requirements of each is vital to having a holistic vision of your future, and something I recommend you do an accounting of on a regular basis. ## Five: Perception > Reality Lazy Entrepreneurship seeks to [[GOTBook/3. Rewrites/Performance Enhancing Work Methods|maximize output]]. It's much harder to change reality than it is perception. If you want to maximize output, then maximizing your ability to change perception will allow you to have a greater impact on your work. Even if it may not always be as permanent. Perception is more important than reality until the rubber hits the road. The Library of Alexandria [[GOTBook/3. Rewrites/Learning|held all knowledge in the world]]. One torch burned it all to the ground. From the ashes a single new story was imprinted upon our memory for centuries to come, of Julius Caesar - who conquered the world of his time. You are like the Library of Alexandria. You tell yourself stories. You prize all of these stories that you tell other people. With a single match, you can change that perception, in one great flash of flame you can burn up everything and have a single new story again. You can light the match to gain control over perception, but a rogue flame can do the same. Choose the story you want to tell, and make sure it is the one that spreads. _Much of your work will likely involve convincing powerful, soon to be powerful, or important people that they should trust you. You want to be the guy who they can trust. _