I have been reading a lot of business autobiographies, memoirs, and biographies lately. So far, I have completed Losing My Virginity by Richard Branson, Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance, and Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, co-founder of Nike.

My favorite thing about reading these books is that it depicts a world of success, striving, strategy, struggle, persistence, and meaning. Bad things happen, good things happen, but it’s all really important stuff. I don’t even mean that on absolute terms, I mean — relative to the capabilities of each businessman I’ve read about so far, they really seem to be maximizing their potential. I know that can’t really be proven, but it seems obvious that they are exercising a far greater percentage of their potential than most people seem to.

Now what do I mean by that? How can we really say that ordinary people aren’t maximizing their potential, especially given that I’m a determinist and have written about the non-existence of free will before? I mean that most people don’t actually seem to like their jobs, the society they live in, many of their habits — and they don’t even seriously envision a way out of it. Let alone action and planning, they don’t seem to take their daydreaming very seriously.

The standard shouldn’t be that everyone is a millionaire, I’m not saying that at all, but if you look at these millionaires and billionaires, they had different patterns of behavior when they were at or even below the resources of for example distressed upper-middle class families in chronic debt. The key differentiation seems to be that they have some clue where they’re going — a long term orientation. It sounds simple, but I really think it boils down to that, from what I’ve studied so far. (and I have a lot to learn but it’s been awhile since I wrote a post here and I’ve been reading a lot so I wanted to see if my writing’s improved any)

I’ll use some of my goals and interests as an example, since I’m trying to apply what I’ve learned from these people, and then I’ll explain how they themselves seem to apply the same mindsets and virtues and why I think that helps them succeed. I’m no zillionaire, so hopefully a down-to-earth example will help. This is not some unique thing I’m doing, you can read all about the benefits of working to learn vs working to earn in Rich Dad, Poor Dad for example. Or the advantages of productive daydreaming and planning over day-to-day meandering through the motions in Think and Grow Rich in turn written by someone who dedicated his life to these concepts. I’m really not coining up with anything original here, I just felt like writing my thoughts on this and seeing what other people think.

My interests in things to do pretty much encompass business and writing — I know this because when I read stories about business stuff, or read really good fiction, or write a blog post, I’m pretty happy and serious about it, time flies, I don’t get burned out, and my motivation tends to wax rather than wane over time. Now those are just things-to-do and each is a huge category — you can write posts like this or novels — then there’s the question of your style, do you write stream of consciousness or thoroughly cite every little thing. Are you interested in science-fiction or classic lit? These little things — like whether an architect wants to build skyscrapers or mansions, or whether a futurist wants to build rockets or develop nootropic drugs to make society more productive and cure Alzheimer’s — seem to be what allows the division of labor among the ultra-successful to be both extremely diverse and super fun and engaging. It’s 2017 and there are a lot of really successful people and organizations and they’re all valid and making progress but they couldn’t have just “picked whatever.” I couldn’t write rigorously cited dry articles because it doesn’t fit my preferences — I’ll point you to good resources like books so you can see where I’m coming from and come to your own conclusions, but I’m not a researcher type like that. On the other hand, some people do that — I really admire Eliezer Yudkowsky’s work on rationality and he cites things relentlessly. Personally I think if you can’t Google and evaluate things for yourself without a string of citations, you should be reading something else. That’s not a judgment of you, it’s just division of labor. Value is subjective. Not everyone will want a Tesla, some will just want to take the hyper-loop.

Oh, and to answer the questions above, I like science-fiction and philosophical fiction and I’d be more interested in developing nootropics than rockets as a futurist.

So yeah, before anything else, you want to figure out what you want to do and how it manifests from your personality. Daydreaming is a pretty good way to do that, or paying attention to your feelings when trying stuff out. You can also ask your friends.

Next, pick what you want to create. This doesn’t really have to be specific, a lot of examples in books like Think and Grow Rich just involve creating “lots of money.” By creation, I generally mean practical imagination. That’s pretty much how things get developed in all these books: you just pay attention to what you day dream about and — this is important — you start to add more of a tinge of realism to it and take it seriously. Odds are you’ll know what meshes with your personality and the age you live in. I’d really prefer to fly a space freighter or captain an adventurous merchant ship around than deal with all this 21st century blogging and business genius crap, but these days that’s handled in exactly that way through cool sites like Alibaba. Start daydreaming in reality. Maybe for that example, becoming an import agent through Alibaba.

After that, come up with a vague plan to begin with and just start with it. At this point you’ve literally picked what amounts to a realistic concrete version of a childhood fantasy. Since you’re probably either a teenager or an adult, and we don’t tend to be interested in things we know nothing about and don’t even read about, it’s probably at least physically possible. This combination of practicality and idealism seems to be the intersection that defines all creative (as in, productive and useful as opposed to destructive and unpleasant) success in the world. The best example of that is Elon Musk — he literally took the daydream right out of the minds of Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov of a future where we have better tools than we do now — and then because he was really interested in that, he was super motivated to study engineering and talk about it. Let’s say you’re a retarded plumber, that’s your dream. It’s still valid — you should still have the feeling of “damn I really love toilets” combined with a passionate interest in studying plumbing schematics and hanging out with plumbers or reading plumbing memoirs. It’s not just for rich people, writers read a lot of books that they like and then write the confluence of their idealism, the style they’ve absorbed, and their keyboard. Scientists want to know something, they learn how to study it at university or on Coursera, and then they do the experiments or the research.

I think that about sums it up — know what you want, do the things that people who succeed at that do (in my case, liking business and writing both, that means reading good biographies at the moment) which should come naturally, and be willing to live in a van or a tiny house in order to be able to focus on it. It’s actually a lot cheaper to live, even for a family, a happy and comfortable life than addictive advertisements, over-taxed liquor, and boring repetitive TV commercials might have you believe. If you look up tiny houses you can see families that have made a comfortable life for themselves without sacrificing their finances to excessive debt or their careers and talent to necessity. The Zappos guy lives in one, I’m really looking forward to reading his book. This isn’t just for stay-at-home moms and crazy 20-year olds — if you have a family you can look into reducing your expenses. There are so many experience-focused financially awesome lives you can live with or without a family — look up digital nomadism, van-dwelling, RV-dwelling — see people who match your demographic who manage it and figure a way to make it work. If you’re an employee see if you can switch to being self-employed so you can work whenever. Save up enough for a few months and learn some trade or photography and put some ads up on craigslist.

Everyone talks about this, if you’re reading this kind of post you probably already know what you need to do, I don’t expect you to do it though. Most people don’t really adopt this stuff. I’m just writing this to organize my own learning and thoughts on it. I do hope it helps someone though.