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In Malcom Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The Story of Success, he points out there are four main factors that make up the incredibly successful:

Right birthdate, right social class, 10,000 hours of practice, and right culture.

His book seeks to explain why some people are so spectacularly successful. And he concludes success is little more than a roll of the dice. The lucky few, born smart enough, and at the right time to the right parents, inevitably become greatly successful.

The book conveniently leaves out any inner dialog the incredibly successful may have. By looking at the raw statistics about where a person was born, and his family, he supposes he can tell whether a person will be successful or not.

He is wrong.

People do not become wealthy, do not practice for 10,000 hours because of their social environments. People practice and stick with it because they have two things aligned within in their minds:

Desire and Justification
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Why do good people insist on being victims?

There is no inherent goodness in living a tragic life. The world doesn’t care you decided good people can’t become successful.

It merely asks, who will be in charge, who will lead humanity into the future?

Why should it be the ones with the least morality? Why not us?

There is a disease going around that says, the more you suffer the more of a hero you are. Suffering for a cause, suffering for an idea, that’s what makes a human whole.

Stop.

Suffering does not make us better. Suffering merely gets us caught up with ourselves. We become so self-involved we forget everything else going on in the world.
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Ishmael the sheep herder was stuck again with the cows. It had been like this all his life, he dreamed of sheep all night. By day, he worked in the fields with cows. It was just his luck, dealing with inferior cows for his entire life.

Everybody in his country thought sheep were dumb. But he knew better. Sheep had style, sheep had class, and he was a classy guy.

In school, he had once written a paper, called, “The Cow and the Intellect”, where he proceeded to prove mathematically, cattle to be an inferior species, with an inferior meat, milk, and leather. He spent months on that paper, and that paper was even published in some pamphlet somewhere.
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Everything I’ve got to say is a front, a made up fabrication to hypnotize. You see these words, you feel the black on white, it moves you to tears with boredom, but you can’t stop reading.

You’re caught up in the sexiness of self-sabotage. That someone could purposefully rig the game against themselves is the most beautiful idea you’ve ever seen. You look at the world and ask for punishment.

Taking the route of permanent failure over temporary successes.

Always ups and downs, but never the speed bump ups and downs of everyone else. Only the glacier sized ups and downs, the kind that constantly melt and sink into the edge. Where the up is always coming back down with speed. And when coming back down is a deep sinking.

Other people dream, and you wonder what it is they see from those dreams. Is it you?

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The universe works like this:

First you’re young, you’re cute, the world works for you.

Then you’re older, you’re uglier, and you work for the world.

When we’re older we all play these little tricks on each other, to see who can get away with not working for a while. It falls apart.

The world wants six pack abs and diet drinks and pills you can swallow that make your dick bigger.

Are you ready to give it to them?
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Popularity at all costs, nothing more. Rediculously large sources of income, with no risk. All of it, and all of it now.

You can’t really write until after your head has been cleansed. Of all that junk, of those insecure worries, of those infomercials. I’m going to show up for that interview tomorrow, I’m going to wake up at six, and I’m going to get that job. I’m going to solve all of my financial worries, and it’s going to allow me to be more creative. The more you try to make things happen, the less they do.

The universe senses a gimmick from a mile a way. It’s intelligent, it can sense when you’re being insencere. It can sense when you’re being lazy, and it can sense when you’re in the zone.
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What do you choose to believe in? Is it things that already exist, things you can touch and smell and see, or is it impossibilities?

The people I know living full lives, lives full of power, they choose to believe in impossibilites.

My friend the internet marketer, who started out from nothing. Making a few hundred dollars a month. He got stuck here, for a year. Finally, he chose to believe he could make $10,000 a month with his tiny business. Within a few months, he made that $10,000 in one month. He believed in another impossibility, and he now makes that in a day.

My friend who is riding is bicycle across America. He started out a frustrated liquor store clerk who could barely pay rent. He choose to believe he could ride his bicycle across America. Now he is on his way towards becoming another philosopher king, another source of great power and goodness in the world. And he’s more than half-way done in his ride across America.
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Time never flows in a straight line, it bends and veers. I can remember being sixteen again, sitting at a picnic bench just like this one. Writing and daydreaming. The same as I’m doing now.

Can we ever move away or closer to our inner selves?

I left home at 18 on a vision quest. I wanted to find, I wanted to seek, I wanted to experience adventure and come back with something real. I searched for the answers to the great questions:

Who am I, what is the nature of this world, what is the nature of this self?

I left, I traveled, I gave, I lost, I changed. And I failed.

No immediate wisdom came from the journey, no inner transformations and no wisdom grew closer. Just a little less sure the nature of things, and caught in the same cycles of self-doubt and insecurities.
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I used to know a poor man who had these dreams. Every night, he would see his entire life from before its beginning to after its end. And every morning, he’d wake up embarrassed at his selfish life. He would wake up and tell himself:

“This selfishness is what I need to master. When I do, I will be rich and I’ll be happy. People will love me.”

But then the selfishness would always come back. He was a mess. He would talk to people, and as he talked, he would try to remember his life and how it played out.

Eventually he grew tired of poverty and loneliness. He thought:

The world wants style and poverty and rebellion in a cute little package. It wants fakers and liars, slapchops and snuggies, billionaires and drug habits. I will become that billionaire. Those monkeys will be on my back. Can you see them? They’re made of gold, they’re like nothing you’ve ever seen. I am a shiny new thing.
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