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

It takes an incredible psychology to stay motivated through 10,000 hours of routine. The small problems and worries of life continually ask for our attention. These so called Outliers weren’t just blessed with the right family and the right culture. They were also blessed with the mindset that allows them to believe in impossibilities.

I don’t buy that our lives are over by the age of eighteen, that if we don’t have the right amount of practice before then we are doomed. At any point within our lives, we can decide to change. It must be so.

I am so obsessed with the topic of success because its one of the fundamentals of American society. We believe in the impossible, in our ability to become greater through hard work and intelligence. Malcom’s book is dangerous, because it says things like genes and birthdates and economic status determine our true potential.

And it is complete bullshit. The Outliers I know from within my life have come from many different social and economic places. Their birthdates are all over the place. Their intelligence level is all over the place. The thing that matters most, the one thing all the Outliers I know have is this:

An irrational belief in impossibilities.

Success is all about mindset and motivation, regardless of which socio-economic spectrum you come from, or how smart you are.

Of course Bill Gates became successful because he was incredibly lucky. He was born on the right date to get into personal computing, he was blessed to be programming when there simply wasn’t an opportunity for anyone else to be programming. But Bill Gates had something much greater than all of that.

He had a reason to be successful. He had a reason to work so hard at programming. I don’t know what his family situation was like, but I guarantee that programming was more important to him than anything else. We can idealize the right upbringing for him, but we cannot escape this vital fact:

His psychology allowed him to dominate his field.

It is so incredibly dangerous to write his success off as Malcom does in his book. To say Bill Gates became so successful because he was born in the right place with the right genes and the right parents and the right environment. Because as soon as we do, we begin to make excuses for ourselves. We are not successful, we will not ever be successful, because we weren’t born with the lucky roll of the dice.

Even if it is impossible for poor people to lift themselves out of poverty, we meet people every day who do it anyways. Living in Florida, I saw Mexican immigrants working to send money back to their families; starting their own businesses. They’re here illegally, they’re getting paid horrible wages, they don’t speak the language. It’s supposed to be too impossible, they have too little education. But they do it, continue to do it, against all those statistics you read about in Malcom’s book.

The way I see it, you have two choices in life: you can believe in what you see presented as fact; or you can believe in what everyone else believes as impossible.

I choose to believe in the impossible. I think it is the most important choice a person can make.

Within each of us there is the seed of a great person. We must plant the seed, continue to cultivate it, even as it doesn’t seem to grow. There is a certain level of belief inherent in creating anything. You plant your seeds, water, fertilize, pull weeds, and you wait. You work in anticipation, in belief that the plants will grow and produce. But you start from trust and belief.

Maybe our inner greatness won’t reach the level of Bill Gate’s financial success. But we certainly shouldn’t buy in and give up on the pursuit of greatness. Yes, everyone else may seem to have been given greater gifts of education, money, and genes, but we all cultivate the gifts we are given. We all grow our own seeds of greatness into the plant we become, the plant we are continually becoming.

Greatness and happiness is not a roll of the dice. It is a mindset and a set of values acted upon daily.

This is why religion, mythology, and philosophy are so important. As human beings born into an indifferent world, we need models that tell us the world rewards those who seek and live justly. Seek first wisdom, seek first the kingdom of heaven, seek first the eightfold path, and leave on your own Illiad.

Some cultures have the vision quest, orthers have the passage to adulthood, but the net result is the breakdown of your culture’s values. The elimination of imposed standards and ideas, and a seeking for another set to replace them. What is right, and what is wrong. How life should be lived, and how it shouldn’t.

Such dry books on success worry me. Success does not come from statistics and analysis. It comes from a belief in the impossible, an ability to trust your gut, and a level of commitment unattainable by cold calculation.

But this book appeals to a certain type of mind. Who likes to believe everything is calculatable, who likes to know there’s no reason to believe in impossiblities, or ideas without numbers behind them.

And those types of people will never be successful, will never be totally satisfied. There is no such thing as absolutes, it is all an artificial concept placed on top of reality. But true success, true happiness requires a strong belief in irrational things, in things that do not yet exist, and in things everyone else says are wrong.

Those types of people write off religion as gross and perverse, as ways of controlling and manipulating people. They point to the Crusades and say:

“Look at what belief in imaginary ideas produces.”

But Jesus does not teach to kill everyone who disagrees with you. Instead, he talks about being peaceful, being kind, and believing god will reward those who love and care for their neighbors.

Is that a dirty, horrible belief? Is that a lie, is that an ugly impossibility?

That the universe could have its own reward system for those who look after others?

It’s this belief that motivates people to become weathly, so they can become responsible stewards of the world and humanity’s wealth. Improving the world and the lives of those around them as they grow wealthier.

Which is the one true proof of success I have ever seen.

And it is the same with the Buddhists, the Muslims, and the Hindus, and everyone else.

Make your life mean more than yourself, and you are granted infinite wealth and happiness. Heaven. Enlightenment.

It is easy to get caught up in the ego. The great impossibility is that we forget this and give of ourselves freely every day. Can we do so if we’re bitter about those born with more? Or if we’re busy studying numbers that prove our own success impossible? No.

(Image from Prague Daily Photo)

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.

Good people shouldn’t seek out suffering and pain and sacrafice, they should seek out strength and goodness. Suffering and pain will come no matter what. We might as well have the world in the hands of those most capable of using it justly. Not in the hands of those who would exploit it.

This worried nobody more than Nietzsche. Even though he loved the man Jesus was, he hated the moral code his followers created for themselves.

He called this victimized Christian morality a slave morality, because it sets people up to be dominated by the evil of the day.

Imagine a Christian Saint were stuck in the cave with the Cyclops instead of Odysseus.

What would happen then? Would he not curl up into a ball and be eaten, for fear of violence?

There are things within our modern world that could take the place of the Cyclops. Things ugly and unjust and born only of violence.

How should we treat them?

Should we willingly submit ourselves to them in peace, or keep them in check with a million strong people?

Though Jesus himself became a martyr, he did not believe all who followed him should become martyrs too.

He said so himself:

“I died so that you may have life.”

We should train ourselves constantly to love strength and goodness, to become strength and goodness itself. We must in order to defeat the Cyclopses of our world.

Let’s all seek to become heroes, not martyrs. Let’s all become kings for the first time in history.

Let’s make the good the strong once again. Let’s love life and live it fully. Strapped to the mast like Odysseus, hearing that siren’s song even though it kills us.

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.

But none of that is relevant, because he lived in a land of cows, where a sheep hadn’t lived for a hundred thousand years. All there was is cows and corn. All he had was cows and corn. All he knew was cows and corn.

Maybe cows and corn doesn’t sound so bad to you, but to Ishmael, cows and corn symbolized a perversity of the highest order. He knew his land was made to support grazers, without work, without toil, but cows and corn required management and intellect and made people feel important and smart. So he secretly hated the cows and what they stood for.

The cows, of course, knew none of this. They just stood around, and talked to each other. They just stood and talked and pooped, and every once in a while, one would say:

“Moo Moo. Moo!”

These cows were just too dumb for smart old Ishmael. In fact, Ishmael had been planning for years, a revolution to upset the cow balance. Today, Ishmael was going to become important. Today, Ishmael was going to become a cow. Today, Ishmael was going to  infect the cow mindset. He was going to become a cow to destroy the cows from the inside out.

Because Ishmael lived in a magical land. A land where anybody could become anything, at their own will. At first these things they became were only dreams, and then they became real. Like everything in this world, they were only dreams, then they became real.

And so Ishmael walked down to the sorcerer, asked to become a cow.

“So, how big is your team?”

“Seven people.”

Dramatic pause. Silent room.

“I don’t think we have any problems that small.”

The deal was off, because the leadership within this major automobile manufacturer simply could not find any problems for a team so small. When my friend told me this story, I could not help but laugh. Of course this company was in major financial trouble, of course they couldn’t design a car anyone would want to build. They don’t understand the first thing about creativity and problem solving.

When you’re given a big problem, you break it down into chunks. Smaller and smaller chunks. The leadership within this company refused to break their problems down. They came to this team, expecting to throw their laundry list of problems at them. But then they saw smallness, and ran the other way.

Only the most horrible bureaucracy could have created and rewarded this kind of leadership. Even with billions of dollars in bailouts, they refuse to make the necessary changes to nimbleness and creativity. Instead, they see cheap loans and cheap labor as their primary competitive advantages. No wonder their cars come in last place.

With so much free money sloshing through that company, the only real solution is small, intelligent teams. But as long as management refuses to think small, we’ll all continue to pay with tax payer money, thousands of jobs, and an embarrassing history of continued failure.

Do we squander it or do we burn through it like it burns through us? Does it pass while we whisper our small needs to it, or do we grab it and yell; demand a life of fire we know life is capable of being? Do we let our spirits be broken and become machines, or do we throw rationality and order to the wind and become something greater than a professional? Quit hiding behind indifference and feel the world’s edge.

Some would say, you can’t burn forever, you can’t outrun responsibility. I say you must never give up believing in impossibilities.

Accepting a calm rationality and an idle progression only kills us. Accepting the world as it is turns us into something less than our potential. Nobody rather spend their life in offices than inside the world itself. Nobody wants the world of schedules and deadlines, of stocks and commodities. It’s a sham on top of a sham. What we want is to be free, and most paradoxically, that’s what we run away from the quickest.

As Moses was leading the Israelites from slavery into freedom, they were surrounded by their ex-captors. Immediately, the Israelites cursed themselves for leaving their masters. They screamed life would have been better in their hands, because they would not be facing death right now, because they would have known what their life would have been.

And that in itself is a fundamental basis of willing enslavement. We decide we cannot stand the idea of an irrational world, where we don’t know what is next. So we cling to things which seem to give us stability. We look to them to provide us with a foundation, but in doing so we lose the one true connection, the one Moses was trying to teach the Israelites. The belief in humanity, and people, and God above all human cleverness. No human designed institution will ever provide a safe haven for the spirit. We must find it within the world and within ourselves. We must find it in a bond of trust between ourselves and the world. Never in our institutions, never in our masters, and never in the rule makers.

For the Israelites, slavery had become a kind of dull comfort, leaving accountability and blame to fall on others. You just picked a person, picked an idea, and onto it you could throw the blame for everything wrong within your life. In enslavement you gained someone else to blame, something concrete to boo and hiss, but you lost the most important part, that inner compass, that divine light that whispers to you in the middle of the night.

How can you hear the inner whisper now, with the phone ringing, with the web browser open, and with the tv on? You can’t hear it from inside an office, you can’t see it from inside a moving car. It speaks in the wind.

If all you hear is the highway, all you see is parking lots. The world spins and turns, but we must always guard our inner sanctity. We must tend our inner gardens the same as a royal garden. Your life depends upon it. All life depends upon it.

New politicians, slicker politicians make loud calls for emotion and change. Wolves in sheep’s clothing use the language of the people against themselves. Torture is fine, torture is security. Go back to sleep, here’s some photos of Michael Jackson instead.

And we do still have that moonwalk which is greater magic than any politician’s promises. The moonwalk is kind magic, anyone can do it. We can all be bright, we can all moonwalk and grab our crotches. We cannot, however, all learn how to live and deceive like a politician. And we must never let ourselves.

Let’s leave the world of politics to the politicians, and let’s keep the world of magic to ourselves. Let’s let them believe they are grasping to a true power, of forces of might and duty, of justice and sacrifice, and let’s leave the magic of the dance of the wind to ourselves. Let’s take pity on them, let’s make them believe. In their importance, in their personal justice. Let’s hide the world of magic from them, let’s keep them fat on facts and judgments. Nobody needs our love more than our politicians.

Let’s pretend they have tricked us, outsmarted us at the oldest game alive. We are completely subdued, we are completely dull and incapable. Only they have the power and intelligence to save us. There is no wind and no magic. Only economists and politicians.

I sit here and write, and mostly think. I sit and think what I should be doing with all these resources in the land of so much, and I come up short. There’s cars and plastics and phones and instant images, but no substance. We can instantly transmit and receive a million little ideas, but never experience. Never depth or meaning. Instead we get tiny fragments of a feeling.

Shopping and working and pretending. No more myth and mythology, just blind self interest and rationality to guide us through this future of perfect and immediate distribution of facts and financial justification.

That’s what gave us our original powers, that’s how we won the entire world. We had this inherent emptiness, and we sold it to keep ourselves free. Free and empty. That’s the way we chose to be. Us in the US. A thousand million souls become bean counters and we are free. We are free to count beans and to buy Chinese. Buy Chinese plastic and break and buy it again.

Our fungus chicken, our moldy soybean meats, we are the land of freedom to choose. Torture and release, we have the choice. Bailouts and banks, singing and dreaming, we are free to choose. Choose light beer and organic dog food. Choose green lighting and an SUV. We are free, free to buy.

Kerouac and Vonnegut tried to give us a new mysticism. Of searching and nonsense, but it’s never stuck. It’s time for a new lie, a new dream bigger than self-help books and rights or equality. Before we all lose that giant flame of power within us, the flame of irrationality, of believing the impossible, despite all the evidence against it.

It is the rigidity of belief that destroys us, that corrupts us. We must be open to multiple truths, all at the same time. Rigidly holding to ideas, that’s the downfall. Even the most beneficial of beliefs, even the most true of truths, if held they bite back. Truth and lies and beliefs must be played with, not coveted and protected.

And as we sit down and get comfortable, there’s a knock on the side door. It’s my childhood, she wants to show us something.

Our perfect universe of coffee and pudding implodes and we’re whisked away to the roof of my old elementary school. We’re both eleven and the cops will tell our parents if we get caught up here.

I should let you know now; I brought you here because I had something important to tell you. But seeing my old house from here, and hanging out with you, I’ve forgotten all about it. Let’s check on my sixth grade girlfriend. She lives a couple blocks from here.

She’s sitting in her house, alone. Her dad just left for the day and she’s glad for it. She likes being alone the best. It gives her time to sit alone and be calm. Her dad is always annoying her.

I want to show you something important but you’re going to laugh. It is where I get all my super powers from; it’s where I got the entire universe to fit in a dollar bill.

It’s my magic cardboard box. Get in and see.

We’re at a giant buffet and it’s in your honor. You have persevered against all odds to become all you ever dreamed. Your family is all here and they’re healthy and happy, and so proud of all you’ve done. You’ve made it, you are a success.

I ask the maître ‘d if he’d get me a coffee and a bagel. He brings out a plate of different bagels and a nice light roast coffee. I pick a toasted everything bagel with vegetable cream cheese and take a bite.

I wanted to tell you something important, but here’s the thing– nothing really is. I wanted to tell you everything you needed to know so the buffet comes true, but there’s nothing you really need to know. You’ll figure out things are generally shitty, but if you try and make life better for the people around you, and stop daydreaming about yourself, they’ll take care of you too.

Everything happens inside of this little box.

We can daydream for hours and it’s always real.

Do you believe in heaven? Looking through this box, I have found heaven. Do you want to see what heaven looks like? Let’s go.

I twinkle my nose and a big box with a red cartoon button appears. It says “heaven button”, and I push it.

The planet drops out from underneath us, and we begin falling down. We fall down so far we’re on the other side of the earth, where down is up. We keep going down, which is now up. Eventually, we get to heaven.

It’s just a big long corridor and there’s moving pictures of people on the walls. One guy is walking his dog, is leaving jail, and a girl on the right is getting peed on by her kid.

We walk down a ways and say yo! to God. He’s hanging out with Biggie and smoking a big joint. He’s not really God, of course. He’s god’s cousin, Rickie, and he’s from Jersey. He speaks first.

“So you brought that guy, the dude, huh?”

“Yea, and he’s wondering about heaven.”

“It’s a state of mind, bro. This place doesn’t exist, you’re just on mushrooms.”

God’s cousin laughs and passes the joint to Biggie.

“Nah, bro, but look, it’s like heaven and hell ain’t places you go to after you die, they’re places you go while you’re still alive.”

Biggie nods.

“Every dollar store religion says the same thing but people are too busy updating their profiles.”

“God created man in his image. And what the fuck did god do? He created a whole entire universe, and then chilled the fuck out. Does he worry about shit? Hell no, god lets shit work its own shit out. You’re supposed to do the same thing.”

“Create your own universe, and then chill the fuck out. Quit tryin’ to live in other people’s worlds, and live in your own already.”

God’s cousin disappears and you’re back in the box, alone.

You reach into your pockets and there’s a note from god’s cousin there. It says,

“Get ready to die, tell God I say hi.”

And so, a great number of jobs are being lost that are no longer needed maintain the same output.

Is this something to be afraid of, something to worry about? Is the world going to end, are millions of people going to end up on the streets?

The answer is no, at least not because of lack. We grow food more efficiently now than ever before. There are too many houses and not enough people to fill them. There is no lack anywhere, except for the ones we arbitrarily create for ourselves.

So why the panic? Who gains by all this negativity, all this pessimism and doubt?

Nobody, and it’s time to face facts. Though we may be losing jobs all over the world, we are gaining an unprecedented opportunity.

Think of all those intelligent, hard working people who have just been laid off. Previously, they were working well below their potential. They now have plenty of time to be creative, to sit and think, and to create the next generation of innovation.

Because innovation never stops. It refuses to be hung up by big business or big government or doomsayers. We create and we innovate, because that is what god did when he created the universe, and that is what we will continue to do because we were made in his image.

We do not look to the world and ask where we fit in. Instead, we look to the world and ask what we give from within ourselves.

Ten thousand jobs is something we can live without. Falling demand is something we can deal with. But what we cannot deal with is people who chose to be beaten.

If we stop believing in the impossible, in our power to transform the world for the better, then we can start to worry. Because the whole world works only through faith; faith in money, faith in employment, faith in economies, faith that our efforts will see benefits.

What benefits will you reap from this economic downturn? Will you take it as a chance to create something new you’ve dreamed about, or will you use it as an excuse to continue blaming others for an imaginary lack?

But then, one day, the prince ran away from the palace. He came to the next land. There, to his astonishment, from every coast he saw islands, and on these islands, strangle and troubling creatures whom he dared not name. As he was searching for a boat, a man in full evening dress approached him along the shore.

“Are those real islands?” asked the young prince.

“Of course they are real islands,” said the man in evening dress.

“And those strange and troubling creatures?”

“They are all genuine and authentic princesses.”

“Then God must also exist!” cried the prince.

“I am God,” replied the man in full evening dress with a bow.

The young prince returned as quickly as he could.

“So you are back,” said his father, the king.

“I have seen islands, I have seen princesses, I have seen God,” said the prince reproachfully.

The king was unmoved.

“neither real islands, nor real princesses, nor a real God, exist. Tell me how God was dressed.”

“God was in full evening dress.”

“Where the sleeves of his coat rolled back?”

The prince remembered that they had been. The king smiled.

“That is the uniform of a magician. You have been deceived.”

At this, the prince returned to the next land, and went to the same shore, where once again he came upon the man in full evening dress.

“My father, the king, has told me who you are,” said the young prince indignantly. “You deceived me the last time, but not again. Now I know that those are not real islands and real princesses, because you are a magician.”

The man on the shore smiled. “It is you who are deceived, my boy. In your father’s kingdom there are many islands and many princesses. But you are under your father’s spell, so you cannot see them.”

The prince returned pensively home. When he saw his father, he looked him in the eyes.

“Father, is it true that you are not a real king, but only a magician?”

The king smiled, and rolled back his sleeves.

“Yes, my son, I am only a magician.”

“Then the man on the shore was God.”

“The man on the shore was another magician.”

“I must know the real truth, the truth beyond magic.”

“There is no truth beyond magic,” said the king.

The prince was full of sadness. He said, “I will kill myself.”

The king by magic cause death to appear. Death stood in the door and beckoned to the prince. The prince shuddered. He remembered the beatiful but unreal islands and the unreal but beautiful princesses.

“Very well,” he said. “I can bear it.”

“You see, my son,” said the king, “you too now begin to be a magician.”

I barely distinguish between thoughts and words. Here on this ferry, for example, there was a man, my teacher; for years he simply believed in the river and noting else. He noticed that the river’s voice spoke to him; he learned from its voice, it raised him and taught him. The river seemed like a god to him. For many years he did not know that every wind, every cloud, every bird, every bug is just as godly and knows and can teach just as much as the venerated river. But when this saint went into the forest, he knew everything, knew more than you and I, without teachers, without books, only because he believed in the river.

Whether things are semblances or not, I too am a semblance, after all, and so they are always my peers. That is what makes them so dear to me and venerable: they are my peers. That is why I can love them. And now this is a teaching that you will laugh at: Love, O Govinda, seems paramount to me. Seeing through the world, explaining it, despising it may be crucial to great thinkers. But all I care about is to be able to love the world, not to despise it, not to hate it or myself, to be able to view it and myself and all beings with love and admiration and awe.