Level 5 - Rank E - Lesson 1 Different Forms Of Success: Fill & Download for Free

I wanted to get better at poker. I showed up at the local underground club and within ten minutes I was out $1000 and I went home.My wife said, “Did they scam you?” My sister said, “Was it mafia?”No. I sucked.I went back the next day. Lost another $500. The next day. Another $500. I could tell people were looking at each other when I walked into the club. They were happy.A year later a movie was made based on that club. “Rounders”. In “Rounders” they say, “If you can’t spot the fish at the table, then you are the fish”.I was the fish.So I did what I did with any game or business or activity I’ve ever tried to master. I’ll describe below.Mastery has a language to it. Speak that language and you will learn how to master anything you have some degree of talent in.I’ve succeeded and failed at many things. Many games. Many rises and falls in financial success. I’ve helped run businesses with a billion in revenues. And I’ve built from scratch, with no fundraising, companies with tens of millions in revenues.I’ve succeeded at some of those and failed at some of those. So I feel now I know the difference.I’m a ranked chess master. I’m bad at relationships (I keep trying to succeed but just don’t know how I think. Although maybe I’m getting better).And if you aren’t improving, you’re dying. So I’m always trying to get new at new things (there’s a chemical reason for this, explained below).Next Tuesday I’m going to do standup comedy. I’m also in the middle of pitching a TV show and writing a novel and I’m building my business.Some things will fail and some will succeed. But I’m using the techniques I describe below.Please god, don’t let me fail at Standup Comedy next week. I really want people to laugh.Even if they laugh at me instead of with me. I’m good with that.——If you want to fail at something then “repetition” is the fastest way to do it. FAIL. For instance, I fail at a lot of relationships.Repetition breeds insanity if done wrong.Let’s define what “success” means first. This is all just based on my own experience.I really don’t like the random self-help gurus who hold repeats of 27 people and they chant mantras and try to call down the spirits of success.Let’s get specific.QUICK GUIDE TO WHAT SUCCESS ISA) Financial success is a good metric.Not because life is about Money.But money tells you if you are good enough that people are willing to spend their hard earned dollars on you rather than the other seven billion people.Example: the most successful show of all time is Seinfeld. How do I know? Because Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld made about 900 million dollars each from it.One time I was visiting a hedge fund that managed John Grisham’s money. They told me, “Every time John Grisham writes a book we get another $20 million to invest.”This doesn’t mean John Grisham should win the Nobel Prize in Literature. But it does mean is if his goal is to have a lot of people love what he writes, then he is very successful.B) RankingMagnus Carlsen is the World Chess Champion. When there are tournaments that give you a rank then you know exactly who the Alpha person is, who the Omega person is, and everyone in between.In chess there is a numerical ranking system. The average player on the street has a “rating” of about 1000. The average tournament player has a rating of about 1500. A Master has a rating of about 2200. A Grandmaster about 2500. And Magnus is close to 2800.This is rough, but every 100 points difference means the higher rated player will beat the lower one two out of three times.Tennis has a ranking system. Gold has one.Writing novels has a ranking system. You can use your Amazon rank to measure sales. Or you can win awards to measure quality among the elite.Corporations have a ranking system: salaries and titles. They understand this is how tribes work and that everyone wants to know where they fit into the tribe.We are built to want success in a tribe based on the chemicals in our brain.So find the category that is your tribe. Then you can find success in the ranking system of that tribe. But only AFTER you speak the Language of Mastery.A quick guide to chemical success:- Serotonin spikes when you move up in the tribe (most anti-depressants work off of Serotonin). When you get promoted at your job Serotonin spikes.- Dopamine works when there is POTENTIAL to move up in the tribe (amphetamines and cocaine take advantage of this. The “hope” is often more powerful than the actual result).When you start a new job where you think there is a lot of potential, dopamine spikes.- Oxytocin spikes when you feel comfortable with your place in the tribe. (For instance, when women are in labor with a baby, their oxytocin spikes. They are adding to the tribe).The benefit of being a modern human is that there is not one tribe. You can CHOOSE your tribe.If I’m bad at salsa dancing (stress spikes instead of the “happy chemicals”) I can switch back to my chess tournaments.If I don’t like my job, I can look for a new one, or start a business (or gig) on the side and take control of my own oxytocin.Choose your tribe wisely. We’re all bags of chemistry and we want to maximize those chemicals.This is what works for me:A) LOVEThis is the obvious one.You will only succeed what you love doing. Take two people who are just starting out. One loves it, the other doesn’t. Who will win?Take out talent for a second (a 6′7″ person will play better basketball than a 4′ person…just because).The one who loves something will have heroes .Will see the subtleties in their heroes works. Will see the artistry and, most important, will see the difference between a beginner (which is what we all are when we start something we love) and a master.And even the masters return to the basics to keep recapturing the love.tl;drWhen you love something, you know at the beginning you are bad because you have TASTE. But you strive to improve.B) PLUS, MINUS, EQUALPLUS: Find a mentor: this can be a virtual mentor (someone you read about). Or it can be a real mentor (a coach).When I was 17 I wanted to get better at chess. I was awful.I had many virtual mentors (I LOVED studying the games of Kasparov, Tal, Alekhine, Fischer)AND I had a coach (first Sammy Reshevsky, then Michael Wilder, and John Fedorowicz. All strong professional players. Reshevsky at one point had been the best in the world). I would study with a coach up to 3x a week.The benefits of a coach:- they know the latest learning techniques. So a student can learn much faster with a coach.- they give feedback. This is the only case where repetition is good. You do something, you get feedback, you do again. This is what Anders Ericsson (the god father of Mastery and the creator of the so-called “10,000 hour rule”) calls “deliberate practice.”Anders, who has been on my podcast, has trained everyone from chess champions to tennis champions, scrabble, memory, violin, etc. See reading list below.But you see this in every great master.Mozart learned first from his father, who was a professional composer.Serena and Venus Williams had their father and then many coaches.Magnus Carlsen,the current world chess champion, had Garry Kasparov (who is coming on my podcast next week. Yay!), as his coach for awhile.Hemingway had Gertrude Stein and then Maxwell Perkins, to help him learn the subtleties of minimalism in writing, which was a new form then (and thus, he created his category so he could be #1 in it).Elon Musk decided to make a rocket. So he read many books on rocket science (virtual mentors) and then started hiring and conferring with the best rocket scientists in the world.Now he sends rockets into space.A good friend of mine is doing a project: she started with no understanding of the rules of poker. She hired the best player in the world to give her lessons. Now, nine months later, she is competitive. And still learning. She is writing a book on the process which I know will be a bestseller.EQUAL:Find people about equal to you to challenge you.To get better at tennis, you can't just play your coach. You have to play people who are also trying to achieve mastery, who are at about your level.You will constantly find new ways to improve over each other to be better. You will challenge each other. This will result in the entire group being better.If you look at the history of the art world, it’s always through the development of groups that are then labeled by their particular style (cubism, surrealism, pop, etc)Same with literature.And in something like chess, location was often a way to find equals. For many years, the old Soviet Union would scour the country for the most talented young people and throw them into school together.So for about 60 years, the Soviet Union dominated the world of chess because no other country used the “Power of Equal”.MINUS:You get better when you teach what you’ve been learning. How come?It helps you remember and solidify the teachings.Students often ask questions with beginner’s mind that helps you learn more subtleties of your craft.Many great writers were once professors, for instance (Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, etc).Many great scientists were professors (Einstein, John Von Neumann, Craig Venter, etc).In Zen, it’s a common adage to keep getting back to “beginner’s mind” so you keep relearning and understanding at a deeper level the subtleties of what you love. MINUS, is a way to recapture that beginner’s mind.A great example is two different world chess champions: Jose Capablanca and Bobby Fischer writing chess books for beginners (“Chess Fundamentals” and “Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess”).C) HISTORYYou can’t get better at what you love unless you learn the history.Again, I will use chess as an example since it is both difficult (it takes ten years for the average player to become a Master) and it has a clear ranking system where everyone knows their place.Bobby Fischer was once an average, talented, young player.Then he disappeared.For a year he studied all the games in the 1800s. ALL OF THEM.And he found improvements on each game. How the world champions of the 1850s could’ve played better.When he came back, he would steer his opponents into these “antique” positions from 100 years earlier. They laughed at him.This was part ONE.Then he learned Russian. He started getting the Russian chess magazines shipped to him.He studied every game played by the Russians and their heroes. He found improvements in their games.He had his coach at the time (the famous coach of many young players back then: John Collins).Then he came back.He won every game. He became the youngest grandmaster in history. He became the first person to win every game in a US Championship. Not even a draw.Then on his rise to the world championship, he was beating the best players 6–0 in matches (twice in a row). No draws.And then he even gave one game odds to the world champion (Spassky) and still won the match.Then he went crazy. But that’s another story.Can this work at a job? Of course.Learn how the industry startedLearn how the company started and competed and had its first successesLearn how the executives made their mark on the company to rise up. Learn how executives in other companies made their mark.When I was at HBO, I loved it. LOVED it. I did the above. I learned everything about entertainment and TV. I learned everything about HBO. I would borrow tapes from the HBO library and go home and watch every show they ever did.Did I rise up at HBO. No. But I was a small programmer in the IT department. I ended building their website, pitching a TV show and getting money to shoot a pilot.And then I started a company building websites for almost every company in the entertainment industry. HBO was my biggest client.Be willing to change your definition of success as you get better. Because as you get better you will have more clear eyes on what success means for you.I spoke with Josh Foer once. He was the US Memory Champion. He studied the techniques of all the memory champions before him, dating back thousands of years.He studied with a coach (Anders Ericsson and Ed Cooke, a prior memory champion).And he wrote the bestseller “Moonlighting with Einstein” documenting his path to the championship.Does this work in marketing? Even though SEO and Facebook ads didn’t exist 20 years ago?Yes. This works for EVERYTHING.Study the history of copywriting. Study the history of direct marketing. Study the history of cognitive biases.Even study the life story of Emmanual Juius Haldemann, the man who sold 500,000,000 “Little Blue Books” in the 1920s to see how he would change titles of his books to up sales.Does this work for language development? Of course!Those who study the roots of a language (learning Latin, for instance) will have a much easier time learning a new language (French).tl;dr - Studying the history of any field is the magic bullet for master.D) TALENTIs there such a thing as talent?Yes. Let’s forget about physical talent for a second (the basketball example above).I once knew a kid, Jorge Zamora, who I would watch play chess when he was 11 years old. He’d crush older grandmasters and barely look like he was paying attention.When I would speak about chess with him, it was like talking about physics with a 50 year old Nobel prize winner.I don’t know what he had. I don’t know how to define talent. Is it something in the brain?I don’t know. But it gave him a head start. For all I know, he was the most talented chess player in history. And his brother (my roommate at the time) was a strong master, as was his father. So it ran in the family.Did he use his talent?Sadly, no. I’m not sure what it was. Some people told me he couldn’t handle losing very well. Or the pressure of being such a prodigy.A similarly-developed prodigy, Magnus Carlsen, became World Champion. Not sure where Jorge is now.So two questions arise:How do you know what you are talented at?Fortunately we are all talented at many things. Even though 100% of us will be bad at first (Michael Jordan, immensely talented, didn’t make his high school basketball team).The other day a friend of mine asked me to help him make notes for a script for a pilot that a major network bought.I spent all day on it. I made suggestions on the dialogue, the plot, specific scenes, etc. I LOVED it. It made my heart go on fire.He took my suggestions, and we spoke all day on the phone back and forth about the ideas. I loved every minute.Does this mean I am talented at this? I have no idea. But that’s the clue.Try things so you can find the clues. Then the clues will lead you to your talents.A little child doesn’t ask, “What’s my purpose?”That would be an idiot question. A little child does what he or she loves. And does them obsessively. That’s how talent becomes skill.tl;dr -Do lots of things. See what you love. Do the things you love again. Don’t do the things you don’t love.What if you have no talents?That’s ok also. You might love something but have no talent. It doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the subtleties of mastery.I love chess. I love poker. I love business. I love writing.I might not be talented enough to be the best in the world at any of them.But, by doing the techniques I listed here, I am able to achieve some level of mastery. The benefits to this are immense.One time I was in Argentina. The best chess club in the world is in Buenos Aires. I went there and they wouldn’t let me in. Private, they said.My friend told them my ranking. They let me right in. I played the Argentina Junior Champion who was hanging out upstairs. I won one and he won one. We played and drank coffee with each other all night.Mastery leads to community leads to friendship across the language of the mastery you both share.The Buenos Aires Chess club was the home of the famous Fischer-Petrosian and Alekhine-Capablanca matches. They gave me a tour of where those great players once played.Mastery gave me pleasure. Even if I will never be the best because I don’t have the talent.tl;dr - if you love something but don’t have enough talent, find new ways to measure success in what you love.E) THE LUCK RULE. (OR….THE DAILY PRACTICE)You get luck from energy. Period.I love to write. I write very day. Sometimes I write poorly and sometimes I write well. You can never predict.But I know this: when I have no fuel, I can’t write. My productivity goes from 100 to, sometimes, 0, or worse.Worse than 0 means your life is out of control. This has happened to me many times. Relationships causing me much anger and stress. Businesses going broke. Losing a home. Getting sick, etc.I looked back at everything I tried to get good at and found similarities between the times I had a lot of energy and the times I didn’t.The times I had energy was when I had the most luck.Here’s how I refueled so I could get as much luck every day. This is my Daily Practice:PHYSICAL: Sleep eight hours, eat well (as little snacking as possible), move (walk a few miles a day or some sort of movement or gym or yoga or whatever you do).EMOTIONAL: Be around people who love and support your successes. Love and support their successes.Mike Massimino, the astronaut who fixed the Hubble Space Telescope once told me about an MIT robotics class he took. “Four of the ten people in that class made it into space.”Only a few dozen people out of billions have made it into space.If Mike been in a random bar in Boston there is zero chance he could’ve said, “4 out of 10 people in this bar will go into outer space”.Find your ten.CREATIVE: In every field in life, the people who can do the unexpected, wins.The “unexpected” comes from creativity. Creativity is a muscle. Creativity is a practice.Jerry Seinfeld talks in the documentary “Comedian” how he never “breaks the chain”. He writes jokes every day. Louis CK develops an entire new act every year. This is how he does an entirely new special each year. He probably makes 20 to 30 million per special.I watched him shoot his latest special. I was laughing so hard I thought I would have to leave the hall, my stomach was hurting so much.What if you don’t know yet what you want to be creative on?No problem, write ten ideas a day.What do you write about? Anything you want. Yesterday I wrote, “ten things I learned from delivering pizza when I was 19”.The day before that I wrote “ten ideas for a TV show”. The day before that I wrote “ten chapter titles for a novel”. The day before that “ten products I can invent”.Were they good ideas? Of course not! 99.999% or 100% SUCKED.It’s just exercise. Lift weights every day to get muscle mass and build a great body and break down older muscle (older habits, in the case of creativity).This is how when you need to pull “the unexpected” (the only way to win a game, the only way to sell, the only way to beat the markets, the only way to to be a leader). you will have the muscle developed.But isn’t execution everything?Of course! But:1) You need something to execute on.2) Execution ideas are a subset of ideas You need to be creative about the easiest ways to execute. So you need that creativity muscle be an IDEA MACHINE before you can execute .tl;dr Write TEN IDEAS A DAY for six months and you will be an idea machine.SPIRITUALFill in the blank here. Some people believe in a higher power. Some people meditate.The key is to know when to put regrets and anxieties to the side and learn to appreciate the moment. To love the moment, so you have fuel to infuse the moment with everything in you.THE DAILY PRACTICE tl;dr Every day before you go to sleep ask: “what did I do to improve my physical, emotional, creative, and spiritual health”. Without this, you will not have the energy for mastery.Luck favors the energetic.F) THE 5/25 RULEWarren Buffett taught me this one. The benefit of studying history and virtual mentors.I made such a study of everything Warren Buffett did that I wrote a book in 2005, “Trade Like Warren Buffett”. I studied private letters nobody had ever publicized before.“Promise me,” said the hedge fund manager who gave me the private letters, “you won’t write about this.”“I promise,” I said.But I’m sorry, Whitney. They were just too good. I wrote a whole book about them.The 5/25 Rule of Buffett:List the 25 things you love the mostPut the top 5 on the left, put the bottom 20 on the right.NEVER EVER EVER AGAIN NEVER LOOK AT THE BOTTOM 20.How come? Because you love the bottom 20. They are in your top 25. Of course you love them.But every time you look at them, you won’t put your full energy into them (because, after all, they are not in your top 5), and you will sacrifice energy you could’ve put into your top 5.This rule is critical .Why is it 5? Why not your “top 1”. Isn’t focus about your “top 1”?“Focus on one thing” is the worst advice ever.Because of:G) MASTERY SEX (or HOW TO SHORTCUT THE 10,000 RULE).It’s really hard to be the best athlete in the world.It’s really hard to be the best writer in the world.Matthew Berry was a pretty good screenwriter in Hollywood (look him up on IMDB. You’ll recognize the movies but maybe you never watched them).He also was pretty good at fantasy sports. He was on a few teams. People sought him out for advice.He quit his job in Hollywood after an argument with an actor over “the worst script ever”. He hated it.He started blogging for $100 a post at a fantasy sports blog.Because he had professional experience writing, he quickly became the best writer in the fantasy sports business.He built his own major fantasy sports blog. ESPN bought it.Now he’s the only anchor for Fantasy Sports in the world, on ESPN. When I walk with him in the street, people stop him and say, “Thank you!”.He got pretty good at one thing. Pretty good at another thing. And became the BEST IN THE WORLD AT THE INTERSECTION.Scott Adams has written about the also. He calls it a “talent stack”.I called him and asked him about it.He said, “I’m not the funniest guy in the world. But I'm ok. And I’m not the best illustrator in the world. But I’m ok.”He started drawing about his experiences in the corporate world. The hypocrisy of it. It caught on with the other 100,000,000 people who work in cubicles.His cartoon, Dilbert, is now syndicated in 2000 newspapers. He has over a dozen books. He’s sitting on top of a $100,000,000 cartoon empire.I love this scene from the trailer of the Justice League: The Flash asks Bruce Wayne / Batman, “uhh, what are your super powers again?”Batman is famous for not having any but still performing at the level of a superhero.Bruce Wayne looks over at the Flash and says, “I’m rich”.Which is funny.But maybe not the answer. Bruce Wayne put his money into the top scientists who can build him non-stop wearable weapons. And he also trained his entire life to be at peak physical potential (even if he’s not the best athlete in the world).The combination, plus his study of detective skills, makes him a superhero. The best in the world at what he does. The head of the Justice League.H) THE POWER OF NO AND YESI wrote a book about the power of “no”. Not because I was an expert at saying “NO’. But because I needed to learn how to do it better.Every “NO” you say is a success. It means you have more time to do what you love.Over years I’ve made my life so I can make as many “success” choices a day as possible.I donated all of my belongings. Everything. Even extra money I send over to savings for my kids or I donate it.I never buy anything new. I don’t collect anything. I don’t like to travel. I don’t rent. I just live in Airbnbs so I never have to deal with furniture, paperwork, cooking (I always order delivery), and it limits the number of things I can get tempted by because I move around and that always keeps a cap on my possessions.I say “no” to almost all social media (except Quora and except anything that helps me distribute my writing). I say “no” to almost all coffees or meals except with close friends.So now almost all of my choices throughout the day have to do with the things I love: writing, podcasting, some business to keep things going. Oh, and games.It took a long time. Years. So that I ONLY have the choice of making this set of choices. It was really painful. I miss many things I threw out. But life (to me) isn’t about being happy all the time.It’s about setting my heart on fire as much as possible. Doing what I love even if they cause pain on occasion.BUT, I do say “yes” to adventures I think will add to my life.I used to live in the Chelsea Hotel in NYC. They closed for renovations in 2013. A 130 year old beautiful building with a history that includes almost every artist and writer who ever lived in NYC has closed down.Except for one room. One guy is suing and is staying.I lived there for six years. But hadn’t been back. The other day I heard he was hosting a poker game. I was invited. “YES!” I went even though it meant staying up very late for me.I got to see the insides of my old home which held so many of my most intense memories. Every floor was all ripped up. Wires everywhere. The artwork on the walls all gone.Then I got to Tony’s room. He had kept the old favor. We played poker all night. Everyone there was an artist of some sort. There was a standup comedian there as well. She gave me advice about my upcoming attempt at standup.It was an adventure. It was a good “YES”.When you say “NO” to 99% of things, you leave room for a good “YES” that can add to the things you want to master.tl;dr You only have one life. Say “NO” to everything except the things you love. You can’t always do this. But try.I) MASTER WHAT FASCINATES YOU20 years ago, nobody had a passion for self-driving cars.They were only part of science fiction novels. And a tv series called “The Jetsons”.Now, it’s already becoming a major industry. People who master it will get very wealthy.How could they have known?I was talking to Brian Koppelman. Such a great writer. He and his partner, David Levien, wrote the script for “Rounders” and one of my favorite movies, “A Solitary Man”. They also write the show “Billions”, which has become a breakout hit.He told me, “Don’t write what you know”. Which is funny because that is ALWAYS the advice about writing.He said, “Write what fascinates you”.You might not have all the knowledge or qualifications. That’s ok, your fascination will give you perspectives and intensity nobody else has.Dan Carlin, host of the successful podcast “Hardcore History” is not a professional historian. He has no degree in it. But he does the work and now has the most successful podcast about history.More people will get their history educations from Dan than from school.Kamal Ravikant, venture capitalist, best-selling writer and novelist, and accomplished salsa dancer, once said, “If I only did what I know I’d be a janitor someplace.”Nothing wrong with that. But…Fascination opens up the imagination. The imagination is what creates action. Action creates the future.And suddenly what once fascinated you, has become reality. And you are the master.tl;dr - ignore the advice “write what you know”. Kids are curious. They follow their curiosity. Be like a kid.J) THREE HOURS A DAYPeople confuse hours for productivity.Someone asked me yesterday, how do you do all the things you do. You seem very productive.I am actually very lazy. I like to nap when I can. I watch my favorite TV shows often. I like to walk around and do nothing. I talk to my friends on the phone.Someone asked Anatoly Karpov, how much time do you spend studying chess every day. He was world chess champion from 1975 until 1985, and stayed in the top 10 for another 15 years.“Three hours a day,” he said.Ever since he said that, I view that as a maximum on how much time I can spend on my #1 thing I love.The rest of the time is devoted to refueling my energy, practicing my creativity, saying yes to adventures, spending time with people I love, finding things on youtube I can laugh at (since laughter is proven to have all sorts of health and psychology benefits).A friend of mine is the #1 book cover designer in the world. I’ve seen her in action. She lays out 100s of book covers and stares at them.She tries ideas out. She then physically backs off from the computer and shakes her head and her body and turns around and then re-looks at her work. Then she repeats.I’ve never seen her work on a design for more than two or three hours a day. The last cover she designed (my book, “Reinvent Yourself”) hit #1 in the entire Amazon store, above both fiction and non-fiction.Sadly for me, the main compliment about the book I got was, “Great cover!” Ugh! Read it! But people judge books by their covers.K) THE UMBRELLA RULELouis CK started doing standup comedy in the late 80s.He was a great success. He got a job writing for Conan O’Brien, the talk show host. Then he was offered the job to be head-writer. $500,000 a year.He turned it down.He wanted to really master comedy. Not just head down one direction and disappear into the politics of tv writing for someone else.He went on the road and performed 10–15 times a week for years.He wrote a ton of scripts. He wrote for many shows and comedians including his buddy Chris Rock, one of the most successful comedians ever. Chris Rock and Conan were PLUSes and then EQUALS for Louis CK.He performed at every festival. I first saw him perform in 1997 at the Aspen Comedy Festival. I last saw him perform 20 years later in Madison Square Garden a few months ago.He made his own show for HBO. “Lucky Louie”. It failed. He wrote a script for CBS. They rejected it. He made a show for FX at the lowest budget possible. “Louie”. It was a huge success.He rewrites his material every year so no joke is repeated. He learned this from George Carlin (a PLUS).His TV show is not comedy. There was one scene where the woman he loves (Parker Posey) falls in his arms on New Year’s Eve and is brought to a hospital. The show ends with her saying, “Goodbye?” while crying and everyone is cheering for the new year in the background.It’s a dark show.He learned Internet commerce and sells his specials online. He also created an entire series from scratch with an unbelievable cast (first time in history this has been done) and only sold it off his website.He’s acted serious roles in movies ranging from “American Hustle” to “Blue Jasmine”.He’s developed and produced five other shows that are on the air right now.He made from scratch the movie “Pootie Tang” starring, among others, Chris Rock and JB Smoove.Roger Ebert had this review for “Pootie Tang”: “Pootie Tang" is not bad so much as inexplicable. You watch in puzzlement: How did this train wreck happen? How was this movie assembled out of such ill-fitting pieces? Who thought it was funny? Who thought it was finished? For that matter, was it finished?”Many thought it was the worst movie in history. Louis CK said the head of the production company was screaming at him, wondering how he could have let this happen.This is the umbrella. For 30 years he did EVERYTHING under the comedy umbrella. And he became #1. The #1 everTHE NON-RULES:NOTE: I didn’t say “Learn from failures”.This will happen automatically if you do the ten things above and you have a good coach (a good “PLUS”) who will give feedback on your attempts at success.You will also have the psychology to deal with failure if you do the “Daily Practice” described above.Psychology is key but psychology doesn’t come from within, it comes from training your body to have the energy to deal with the stress of mastery. From training your body to maximize its happy chemicals.I also didn’t say, “Find your passion”. Kids never say that. And they master things. So I don't say it. I have no passions. But I can feel in my body when I say “yes” to something that lights me on fire.Maybe one rule I left out:“The 1% Rule”. Get 1% better every day. Compounding, that’s 3800% a year.But don’t worry about that. That happens automatically if you do the above.Another thing I didn’t say, “Be kind to others”. This rule could be important because it helps you build your scene, which helps you build your “EQUALS” described above.This also is a side effect of achieving mastery in the way described above.And I didn’t say, “Find Your Category”. This is good advice: find the area where you have no competition. Create your own category.Steve Jobs took the “genre” of the phone, and made it a little better in every possible way to create his own category of phone. When the iPhone came out it had no competition and sold tens of millions of units within a year.Changed the the entire industry and led to changes in how the entire world consumes media and entertainment.But this is also a side rule to “Do what fascinates you” and “Mastery Sex”.I also didn’t say “The .400 rule”. This refers to baseball. If a hitter only makes good hits 40% of the time, he will be the best player in history (Ted Williams).This rule is a side effect of having a good coach and good equals and good psychology.Perhaps I should say this though: if you are on track 100% of the time then you aren’t taking enough risks.But let’s not focus too much on failure. Let’s just focus on improvement.When making a guidebook of rules to follow, I like to stick to ten things. Else it’s too much. Then I have to spend more time memorizing the rules than following them.Well, I put 11 rules up there. Mastery is difficult. But it’s worth it.I’m not necessarily a master at anything. And I’ve failed a lot. And maybe I’m a bit of a dilettante, I confess.But I love the journey to mastery. When my heart and brain go on fire in my attempts to get better at something I love - this is my magic drug. This is my anti-aging technique.And if you want only follow two rules rather than ten, do: 1) PLUS, MINUS, EQUAL, and 2) THE DAILY PRACTICE described above.I suspect all the other rules fall from those two.I am scared to death to do standup comedy next Tuesday.I’ve done it once before and I loved it but I was scared.I am fascinated by standup comedy. I watch it every day. I read every book on comedy. I have a ton of comedians, humor writers, entertainers, on my podcast. Not because they are so great (although they are) but because I want to selfishly learn from them.I called a friend of mine that I grew up with who is one of the best standup comedians in the world.When he first moved into town when we were 9 nine years old, day one he got people laughing so much the teacher even said, “you’re going to be a comedian”. I couldn’t stop laughing that day. And every day he opened his mouth.And now he has netflix specials, tv shows, radio shows. He’s incredible. He’s among the best in the world.I called him and told him I wanted to learn how to get over the fear of doing this on Tuesday.He said, “The fear is conquered I think just by doing it a number of times and realizing that bombing is survivable.”tl;dr for this entire post.If you don’t want to read a relatively small piece of writing about mastery then maybe don’t master anything.I know I hate it when people tell me what to do.But the above is not advice.Advice is just autobiography. This was my story.——BIBLIOGRAPHY: (this is a start, not a complete list).“Mastery” by Robert Greene“Peak” by Anders Ericsson“Moonwalking with Einstein” by Josh Foer“Sick in the Head” by Judd Apatow“Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell“Tools of the Titans” by Tim Ferriss“How to Fail At Everything…” by Scott Adams“Spaceman” by Mike Massimino“On Writing” by Stephen King (and also “What We Talk about When We Talk about Running” by Haruki Murakami)“Ego is the Enemy” by Ryan Holiday“A Man for All Markets” by Ed Thorp“Graceful” or “The Dip” by Seth Godin“Big Magic” by Elizabeth Gilbert“The War of Art” by Stephen Pressfield“The Confidence Game” by Maria Konnikova“Travels” by Michael Crichton“Deep Work” by Cal NewportBye

I pretended to be Superman, jumped off a bed, and broke my foot. I was six years old.The pain was incredible. I kept screaming.My dad brought out the chessboard. My foot was wrapped in ice. We played. The pain went away. I still remember the game. I remember how he let me win. I remember how he waited until I saw the one move that would crush him.He made the pain go away.It’s too MUCH to think about LIFE.Life is hard. And it’s Every. Single. Day.But games are a safe way to figure out all the lessons in life without taking all of the risks.Games not only teach lessons, they have taught me super powers.Games have taught me everything about success. And loss. And pain. And forgiveness. And comebacks. And…Super powers I am convinced anyone can get if they study games.Games have ruined me and saved me. Ruined me again. And brought me back to life.Now I want to share what I learned:THE TEN WAYS GAMES HAVE GIVEN ME SUPER POWERSI can tell a game player within two seconds of talking to a person.There is a ruthlessness to a game player. I can see it. A sort of blood lust in their brains.I’m good at games. Not a professional at any one game. Not the best at anything.But I’m probably equally good at chess, poker, Go, backgammon, checkers, scrabble, and a dozen or so card games and other board games (monopoly or Chinese chess, anyone?)Games have ruined my life. I’ve spent at least 20,000 hours playing games. But I also acquired some valuable super powers.A) THERE ARE SHORTCUTSWhenever I learn something new, there are people who feel theatened. They say to me, “there are no shortcuts!”.They raise their finger. They want to point in my face: Don’t. Do. Shortcuts.This is all BS. There are shortcuts. And you don’t have to pay any dues. Dues are for people who go broke.The only people who say there are no shortcuts are the people who spent all their time succeeding at being mediocre.Barak Obama took a shortcut. He didn’t wait to be a Congressman, Senator for 20 years, Vice-President, President.He ran for President when he felt like it. And he won because he had a combination of skills: charisma, speech-making, high IQ, and the first candidate with a massive social media presence.He also had the perfect storm: people vote their pocketbook and the country was in a financial disaster.Steve Jobs took a short cut. He didn’t rise up through college degree, VP at a business, start your own business, slowly succeed.He build something in his garage, found some enthusiasts to buy it, went public in the first tech stock market boom of the 80s, and then….Apple eventually went almost bankrupt.But by then he was taking his shortcuts on Next and Pixar. He was the master of shortcuts.What does this have to do with games?I’ll give two examples:Scrabble. Imagine two players:Player one spent a lifetime building a great vocabulary.Player two learned three things in three days:Day one: all of the two letter words.Day two: all the ‘Q’ without ‘U’ wordsDay three: ‘SATINE’. Note that almost every letter you add to the letters ’S’ ‘A’ ’T’ ‘I’ ’N’ ‘E’ (the six most common letters in a Scrabble bag) you will get a legal seven letter word, which is an extra 50 points.Example: Add ‘E’ and you get ‘ETESIAN’. So not only you get 50 points but I can tell you from experience the average person with great vocabulary is going to challenge that word so you get to go again.Player two will win every single time.Monopoly:Player One: has been playing since he was a kid.Player Two: Learned the rules yesterday. But knows this one thing: buy, beg, steal, trade for…the Orange properties.Why? The most common square to land on is ‘Jail’ (three ways to get to Jail: Dice, the ‘Go to Jail’ square, and the “Community Chest” card.).The most common dice role is a 7. 7 puts you in the middle of the Orange properties. Build hotels there as quickly as possible and you beat the regular player.With every game in the world there are short cuts that allow you to defeat the people who never left the straight line.And don’t forget rule #0: Everything can be boiled down to a game.Mediocrity pays the dues. Mastery finds the shortcuts.B) STAYING IN THE GAME IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN WINNING THE GAMEI just got engaged. It’s a longer story than what I’m about to describe. This article is not about getting engaged.We were friends for five years. Pure platonic.If at any point we decided (or, rather, I decided) to go for more than that, we would not have worked out.Neither of us were ready. Both of us were a mess. Maybe we still are a mess.When we were friends we sometimes saw each other four or five or six times a week. It was like a magnetic friendship.This is “staying in the game”. If I decided to “win” too early, then I would’ve lost in the long-term.In poker (or investing), you might lose a hand. You might lose ten hands in a row. You might lose ten investments in a row.When I went broke, once twice, three times, I didn’t learn this. Finally I did.Staying in the game means “money management”, means “diversifying your opportunities to win”.In poker, use bets to test theories, not to win everything at once. Same with investing.If an investment is good, a $20,000 investment can turn into $1,000,000. You can make a lot of those investments (“staying in the game”).But if you try to win too fast (i.e. make what you think is “wealth” but you will learn later is not), then you will go broke with just a few mistakes.If you go “all in” in poker just because you saw it in every movie about poker, then you will lose your bankroll fast and go broke.My father was a good chessplayer. In the 1960s he was a master-level player.He also was unfortunately, a LOSER.In other words, he tried to win too fast. He would always throw everything he had at me to try and checkmate me as quickly as possible.And when I first started playing I would be struck by the fury and speed of his attacks. I would get flustered, I would succumb to them. His imagination applied to destroying me would wipe me off the board and even at the age of 17 I would often end up crying while he laughed in my face.But then I realized he was too optimistic. He would make attacking moves that had no logic behind them. They weren’t imaginative. They were just fantastic cities build on quicksand.I started winning. He would hit his head, “Where did I go wrong?” And I would say, “I have no idea” but I would know:He tried to win rather than just staying in the game, probing for weakness.Once his attacks weakened, he would be left with a battered and weak army and mine would slowly come out of their bunkers and kill him like he deserved.C) DON’T MULTITASKIn 1994 I played every day with a strong blitz chess player, Asa Hoffman, in Bryant Park.I had just moved to NYC. I’d play him until it got dark and then I had to catch an hour-long bus to get home, sleep five hours, then catch a bus back and wait for the moment where I could play Asa again.He would destroy me.Often I’d buy lunch and eat while playing him.He said, “He who eats food, loses.”And it was true. My chances against him were at least 50% less while I was eating.Multitasking is a myth.Even a computer can’t multi-task. It seems like it does, but it doesn’t.A computer has a bunch of applications open. And it, super quickly, rotates through the list of applications to ‘listen’ if there is something new to do.If one application has something new to do, then it focuses on that application no other application.The human brain is like that but much more slowly for any tasks that require the most recently evolved area of our brain, the amygdala, which rules how well you do in any game (including the game of life).If you call me on the phone right now I can guarantee with about 90% certainty: I will be playing chess online at the same time.When someone calls me, I pick up, look around for my comptuer, and then while I’m talking I’ll play one minute chess on Chess.com - Play Chess Online - Free Games or wherever against people all across the world while trying to talk to you.Here’s what happens.In chess, people are ranked statistically. The average player is ranked 1500 and about 150 points is a standard deviation.In other words, someone ranked 1650 has a 2/3 chance of beating someone ranked 1500, who has a 2/3 chance of beating someone ranked 1350.My ranking in tournament chess is over 2200. The world champion is ranked over 2800. The average person on the street is about 1000. The average tournament player is 1500.When I am not on the phone, and I play online chess, I am my usual rating: about 2200.When I just play while I talk on the phone, my rating goes almost instantly to 1800. Almost 2.5 standard deviations lower.This means the non-multitasking James can beat the multi-tasking James about 14 out of 15 times.Multi-tasking will destroy all of your abilities. If you are texting while driving you are six times more likely to get into a car crash than a DRUNK driver.If you are worried about money and worried about your girlfriend, pick ONE. Else lose both.Most people multitask all day every day. They look at Instagram in a meeting. They talk on the phone while looking at online clothes.The super power is to be self-aware when you are multi-tasking and prioritize accordingly.That said: if you call me on the phone today, I WILL be playing chess online. One minute each side to keep my adrenaline going, and if you ask me directly, “Are you playing chess?” I will deny it.I was late for my first marriage in 1997. I was playing chess against the Swiss national champion. I was beating him (again, one minute chess, so we played maybe about 50 games).My friend called me, “Are you coming?” and I hung up the phone.I didn’t want to leave even though I was going to get married. Finally, with five minutes before the actual wedding I sadly told my opponent I had to leave.I’ve been doing this for 25 years. I’m not going to stop.D) A WARNING SIGNMinutes after my first kid was born I left the hospital to go play poker at the Mayfair Club (the club in the movie “Rounders” was based on the Mayfair. All the best players in the city played there).Ingrid didn’t let me in. She said through the intercom, “Go back to your wife and kid!”I said, “they’re asleep. They won’t even know that I’m there.”Silence. Then she buzzed me in. I got a free meal. I got dealt a wheel in seven card hi-lo that night. Having kids makes me lucky.( a steel wheel)IMPORTANT NOTE TO Ingrid: we always run into each other and you tell the wrong story!My wife was NOT “in labor” when I was at the club. She was asleep.But still…that was pretty messed up of me.Another time (1992), I was playing chess at 6pm. My girlfriend called me and said, “Don’t forget we have people coming over at 6:30 for dinner.”“One more game,” I said.I was playing Seggev, in Israel. I only knew him from chess but we had played hundreds of games together. And we were competitive. I wonder what he is doing now.By midnight, my girlfriend was banging on my office door. I had to pee. But I couldn’t stop playing to get up. I was obsessed. She eventually stopped banging and left while crying.In the morning I ran into her when I was coming home and she was leaving for class. She was crying. She threw her book bag at me.Whenever I play a game obsessively it means only one thing: something is going wrong in my relationships.I escape into a world where my relationships are over the familiar friendships of a board, or a deck of cards, or an online interface bringing me to the obsessive acquantances I’ve made all over the world.When I escape like this, I know for 100% fact that something is wrong in some part of my life: romance, career, school. (usually in my relationship at that time).In my first year of graduate school, I was unhappy. I realized I didn’t want to be an academic computer scientist.I obsessively played a game called “Go” (the most popular board game in the world simply because it’s the most popular board game in China).I failed all of my classes that year. I would play Go all day and night. I convinced all my friends to learn Go so I could play them.I took lessons from the former Amateur Champion of China. I read books about Go all day long.(Sakata Eio, the greatest Go player in history. I love this photo because he looks like a killer, as opposed to the probably very good pro player behind him)Eventually I was thrown out of graduate school. This was part of the reason. The other part had to do with drugs but that’s another story.When my investing was going bad in 2001 I obsessively played Hearts and Spades (two card games modeled after Bridge but individuals (instead of partners) could play.) I never played Bridge. I’m not much of a team player.Games put me in a flow state. I disappear into the 8x8 of a chessboard. Or the nuances of opening with two 7s right off of the big blind. Or a beautiful shape in Go.In tournament chess, I could sit still for six hours straight playing a game. When I first started computer programming I viewed it very much like a game.I was not getting along with my college girlfriend. So I would program on a project all night and then all the next day. I wouldn’t eat or sleep. The only thing that existed was the world of that giant program.The girlfriend and I broke up. But I wrote a research paper and presented it in German and was the first time I ever did public speaking.And yet…thrown out of graduate school a year or so later. So nobody wins.But I do know now: Obsessive games is a strong signal that something is going VERY wrong in my life.That rule is never wrong. I always listen to it.E) READING PEOPLEIn a poker club, you are usually playing against people you know, people who you’ve played thousands of times before.But if a new person shows up, you always want to be seated immediately to their left.If someone is no good, then when they have a difficult decision they will pause. You can almost feel them using brain energy for difficult decision making.If the decision is difficult for them, you can make it easy for them: whatever they bet, you raise. Then everyone else behind you folds and they ultimately fold with their mediocre hand - or try to bluff you with their mediocre hand. Even better.If someone is good, then they might pause for many reasons. Then you have to read their nuances more carefully.(no offense to him, but everyone at the club loved it when Norm Macdonald would stop by)In chess, if you make a move that surprises someone, they might even jump in surprise. Or, again, pause longer than normal. Then you know you can push the attack, even if it’s no good. They are scared.Dating is sometimes called a “game”. People with no game are usually considered people who are bad at reading both body cues and verbal signals from people.As you get good at a game, your brain begins to catalog thousands of body language signals. With each new type of body cue that you catalog you also catalog how you will handle it.Negotiating is a game. So is sales. So is friendship. So is parenting.The better you can read people., the more successful you will be.Games are the “safe” way to learn to read people.Don’t get good at just one game. The body signals in chess are much less important than the body signals in poker, for instance. And those are different than the body cues in Scrabble.I know some people who are world-level at chess but it’s like they have no ability to communicate with people. Get good at being a game player. Not good at just one game.(one of my favorite recent podcast guests)F) THERE IS NO FAILUREI’m sick of failure porn on the Internet.Just because you failed at a business doesn’t mean the next one is going to be a success. In fact, it’s probably also going to be a failure.Just because you went broke once doesn’t mean you learned anything. All you learned was how to go broke.I say this, knowing that I’m guilty of writing a ton of failure porn.To understand what “failure” really is and how to use it I had to ask the question:Why do we play games in the first place?The answer is that it’s a safe way to “hunt” without it being so high stakes (you won’t lose your life). You can be a “killer” without having to kill anyone.You can race against people without having to wait until a lion is chasing you. It’s fun to keep score.We get dopamine hits as we do well. We feel like we have higher status in the tribe.So games make us feel connected to our community and is a safe way to get skills (super powers) that are useful in high stakes situations.Failing doesn’t give you a super power. You’re just a loser then. Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser.BUT…experiment.Thomas Edison was in a game: how can he find the right filament to light an electric bulb. So he tried. Didn’t work. Tried something new. Didn’t work. Tried and tried and tried.1000 times. He experimented. People say he failed. He didn’t. He knew it would work. He experimented.And then he won the game. And it changed the world and it made him wealthy. He didn’t focus on the outcome (getting wealthy or “changing the world”). Nor did he feel stupid (“Ugh! How come the 681st filament didn’t work. I’m such a loser!”)He just focused on the process. He kept track of all his experiments (like how comedians video tape their sets, chess players go over their losses, investors go over their decisions leading into a bad investment) and kept experimenting until something worked.This is so important I’ll make it a separate letter:G) Process > OutcomeJerry Seinfeld once said that when he was bombing he would simply fall back on his material that he knew was funny and eventually it would work, because he had experimented thousands of times with that material to sharpen it up.(Jerry Seinfeld, always trying out new material. Here he is, at the standup club in NYC I am part owner of. Just last week. Experimenting with new jokes).Once I said, “I can only be successful if I publish a book!” Or, “I can only be successful if I have a million dollars.”These are outcomes.Outcomes are bad masters. And we are pitiful slaves when outcomes are our masters.I was a slave to bad masters. Until I learned from my game playing that striving for one outcome is pointless.Only process matters.The more we want one outcome, the more we will self sabotage it and not get it.If every day, I want to improve at a game, I’ll study the game and all of it’s nuances. If I want to get marriage, I’ll think about ways to surprise and care for my wife.Do that enough, and the outcome will take care of itself. More love in my life. More affection. More satisfaction.H) SUPER CONNECTIONI’m an anxious person.The worst was after my divorce 11 years ago.I was obsessed. Obsessed with all of my loss. All of my change.I was losing daily contact with my kids. I was losing money. Draining it like a hemorrhage. I was scared and lonely.I thought I was going to die. I couldn’t sleep. Every night at three in the morning, demons would waken me and ask me how many days until I went broke. Ten days? One hundred?It didn’t matter. The demons were laughing at me. The angels were nowhere. They were blistered across the red-shot sky when the morning would finally meet up with my anxieties.I took pills (which helped for awhile). I meditated. Nothing helped in the long run.One thing began to help.Only one thing.Connection.Connection with a friend.Connection by being in love.Connection with my community.Connection with my beliefs.Connection with a larger group of people with the same interests.For me, games are connection.Every Spring in NYC there’s one first day where it’s warm. And every year since I was 17 years old (I’m 50 now) I would go out to the park that first day of Spring and I’d seem them all and we’d spend the day playing.Some of them are dead now. Some moved. And it’s now a different park (Union Square instead of Washing Square) but every first warm day of the year, the tribe gathers.One time I was in Buenos Aires. I didn’t speak Spanish.I went to the chess club. Known for being one of the best chess clubs in the world. The famous matches Alekhine-Capablanca and Fischer-Petrosian were brutally fought in that club.I knocked on the door. They opened it a crack. No english. No, no, no, I couldn’t come in. Go away.Finally I communicated my ranking. It’s a worldwide ranking system. Their eyes widened. They let me in. They gave me a tour. Suddenly they spoke half-English: “Here’s where Fischer sat. Here’s where Petrosian sat.”I met the junior champion of Argentina. We played two games. I won one and he won one.(in Buenos Aires, me vs the Junior Champion of Argentina)“Come back,” they said. They were smiling. We all became Facebook friends. “You are always welcome.”Wherever I am in the world, I can find the game players. The other killers. And I can connect. We live this one short life. So little need for anxiety.The lions are no longer after us. But we are still members of our tribes. And the gameplayer tribe is the oldest tribe throughout the world. Older than any religion. Older than civilization.One more example:On March 9, 2009, (and yes, I’ve written about this before but here it goes again), I was living on 15 Broad Street.(I lived in the building on the left)I always like living in places with history. 15 Broad used to be the JP Morgan bank when JP Morgan was alive.The first terrorist attack in NYC was right in front of the building, intended to kill Mr. Morgan.When I walked outside in the morning, I’d see the huge US flag draping the gigantic New York Stock Exchange. And to my right was an enormous statue of George Washington, signifying the spot where he was sworn in as first President of the United States.I got out of my anxiety for a day.I wanted to help my community.March 9, 2009 everyone was depressed. The market was at its lowest point in what felt like decades. It was the worst crash ever. People were saying “capitalism was over”.So I decided to save the world.I bought a bag of chocolates. Chocolate provide the boost of dopamine to make us feel part of the tribe, make us happy, make us more willing to take risk.All the traders walking into the New York Stock Exchange had their heads down. They were depressed. They were lonely and worried about their mortgages, just like me.It had been a brutal year.So I gave everyone a chocolate. The guards nodded ok at me so I just stood out there and I asked everyone walking into the New York Stock Exchange if they wanted a chocolate.It was as if I were shaking people. The vaporous expressions looking down would suddenly look up at me, their eyes focus, they would smile, nod their heads, I’ll take a chocolate. I did that for two hours that morning.I’m not taking credit: but that was the bottom of the market. I wrote about what I did that very day so it can be double-checked.Later I was on Yahoo Finance with Aaron Task and Henry Blodget. They asked me if I thought I really saved global capitalism that day.I said, “Hey, it’s not bragging if it’s true.”PLUS, MINUS, EQUALOh my god, is he going to write about this again?? Yes! Yes I am. And I’ll make it new.Frank Shamrock was the greatest UFC fighter in history. He had to learn to fight. So he told me what he did.PLUS: Find the people better than you and emulate them: real-life mentors, books you read, virtual mentors you study via videos or books or second-hand experiences. Or have a podcast. Call them up!EQUAL: Find your peers. The ones growing up with you.The best business deals i’ve done are with people I’ve been in business with for almost 20 years.Do you know what that means? It means 20 years ago we sucked. And now we’re finally good.Who is in your scene?Jack Kerouac, William S Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg were a “scene”. The Beats. They edited each other, they rewrote each other, they published each other. They grew up together to create a new art form.(Jack Kerouac (“On the Road”), Allen Ginsberg (“Howl”), William Burroughs (“Naked Lunch” - the Beats).Jay Leno, David Letterman, Robin Williams, and a dozen others all performed in 1977 (often on the same nights) at The Comedy Store in LA. They were a scene.Peter Thiel, Larry Page, Jerry Yang, Elon Musk, all intertwined and competed in the beginnings of the Internet in the 90s. They competed, but their competition spurred them on to billions. They were a Scene.Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Bill Ruane, Tom Knapp, Walter Schloss all exchanged ideas on value investing throughout the 60s and 70s. They called themselves “The super investors of Graham-Doddsville”. They were a Scene that all became billionaires.Buffett sometimes says he is “lucky”. He is BS-ing people into that “aw shucks, I’m your grandpa” thing that he does.But he’s a stone cold killer. And he built up with his “gang”. His scene. He started building that scene in 1952 and hasn’t taken a day off. I should know. I wrote the book, “Trade Like Warren Buffett” in 2005 which I’m told (by a WSJ reporter) that it’s his favorite book about him.The best chessplayers and poker players spend dozens of hours a week thinking about their Equals both as competitors but also people who they could relate to, talk to, exchange ideas with, maybe go into business with. This is their community.MINUS: If you can’t teach/explain in simple language what you do, then you don’t know what you are doing.The best way to change the world is to change your self (see “PLUS”, “EQUAL”) and then pay it forward (“MINUS”).And guess what? Whenever I teach, my life changes. My PLUSes get better. My EQUALs get better.In 1991 I got thrown out of graduate school. I got a letter from the Dean of Students named Merrick Furst.In 1994, Merrick saw me in a cafe, studying a game of chess. He asked for lessons.I started teaching him once or twice a week.Today, 24 years later, I consider him still one of my closest friends. Our lives keep intersecting. He was my PLUS, then my MINUS. Now we are best friends. Now he’s saved my life.Find your PLUS, MINUS, EQUAL today. Write their names down. It might change tomorrow.But this is your Scene.J) THE UNEXPECTEDEveryone else is doing the expected.The expected is encouraged. Bosses don’t get threatened. Employees feel safe.How many people went to colleges they didn’t like, married people they were neutral on, took on careers they hated because it was what was expected of them by parents, culture, society?In comedy, the only way to make people laugh is with a punchline that was not expected.A simple example: Steven Wright always brings down the house with: “It’s a small world….but I wouldn’t want to paint it.”In business you win when you develop the strategy nobody else thought of. Amazon buying Whole Foods. Apple dominating the music business.In games, the only way to win is to consistently play the move nobody expected.Bobby Fischer was a talented young chess player in the 50s. Nobody expected much.He disappeared for a year. He studied every game played in the 1800s by the masters.Everyone knew those games by heart. That was part of how every chessplayer trained.But Fischer came up with an improvement for each game.Then he returned. Everyone wondered, why is he playing these openings from the 1800s.Until he started winning every game and became the youngest US Champion and grandmaster in history.(a young Bobby Fischer)K) SUPER STRENGTHMy boat had crashed into the rocks and I was flung, barely alive onto the shore.Not really.But it felt like that. I had exiled myself 80 miles north of the scenes of my horrible crimes against money and family. I was broke and depressed and lonely.I was in a small town people forget about. The town was filled with musicans, artists, writers, and people like me who were just cast out of every other place.At first I gained a quick 30 pounds. I was so depressed I wouldn’t move. One time I went to the store on the corner. I asked the cashier, “does it seem like the entire world is depressed?” and she just looked at me.She said, “Can you fix computers?”Objectifying my looks!I went back home and didn’t leave for another month.Finally I started to get out. I’d wake up at 5 am and walk over to the basketball courts that overlooked the river and then the mountains beyond.The first train to NYC would be barreling down and I could see the sleepy people with their coffees staring out the window at me shooting baskets.Then at 6am the cafe would open.Pretty soon, there were a few others as lost as me. We’d all meet there at 6 in the morning. Victims of divorce, career, death, whatever.Out came the Scrabble board.For years we’d play. I’d spend the entire day looking forward to the next morning. I wanted to play Scrabble.And I wanted to win. I wanted to destroy my new friends.I studied. I studied every book. I’d get books of puzzles (scrabble boards with a picture of the seven letters I had to place: what’s the best solution). I’d memorize lists of seven letter words (e.g. SATINE + 1).I learned how to learn. I had done it at least four or five times before with different games. So I did it again.12 years later, Dina from those days of banishment stopped by with her husband and we joked about how Scrabble was our salvation.We not only found a game, but we found our friends, we found our community, we found we had the strength to kill (in the game sense).This gave me the strength to look for new opportunities.To find them where nobody else did. To experiment. To deal with experiments gone awry. To learn how to find even newer opportunities.Looking for opportunities is a skill. You can either find them everywhere, or you can find loss and depression everywhere.Games gave me the super power of finding new opportunities everywhere I look.Whoever said, “there’s no such thing as a new idea” is an idiot. There are new ideas every day.And you can see this clearly on a game board. No two chess games are alike. No two Scrabble games are alike. No ten handed poker game is like any other.Learning, coming up with solutions, dealing with fear, dealing with risk, connecting with people you want to destroy….Practicing high stakes scary situations in a safe environment….Finding my place back in the tribe.Finding a new tribe.Learning to learn. Finding my plus, minus, equal.And then, when my strength has been rebuilt, wading back into the river, finding the boat that never really crashed but I had jumped off of.Climbing back on. Fearless and confident now but careful and cautious.Leaving the dust and despair behind. Sailing. Sailing into the sun rise.The ultimate power of a game player.Finding a new beginning. Being the champion of that moment.(30 years later. First warm day at the park:)

I want to clarify two points before give my answer. Firstly, a bad government does not necessarily mean that the government wants to hurt its people intentionally, and vise versa. So I would regard what the government had done as bad if its consequences hurt people no matter what the intention is. Secondly, all Chinese leaders in modern Chinese history do have the same dream of “making China great again (MCGA)” based on their traditional education that the Chinese culture used to be the greatest and an educated Chinese is dutiful to work for China, and this MCGA is of course mixed with different personal world views and ambitions. So I’ll try to answer the question with a brief analysis to begin with on why and how things of China happened to be this way with a reminder now and then on what a thinking might have been involved.Modern day Chinese government started in 1911 after the Uprising of October 10, 1911. Five national flags had changed in Mainland China since as showing below. With each flag change there was a major social change behind, but all changes were somehow connected to MCGA based on Chinese thinking. I’ll make my case with a chronological account of the major events along with flag changes.Flag A （1889–1911）: Qing dynasty (1644–1912), an empire that had a territory three times of the precedent Ming Dynasty, was a creation of Manchus who came from the north of the Great Wall and conquered Ming Dynasty of Han Chinese in 1644 (figure below, left) without using a national flag officially until 1889 since national flag was a western concept. Under constant pressure from both inside and outside, the empire, as a fully recognized sovereignty by the West and having had numerous conflicts with European powers, finally sent official delegates in 1905 to Europe and America to check the Western world out and announced its plan to transform the Dynasty to constitutional monarchy in 1906 as a result. The dynasty published The Outline of Imperial Constitution three years later. But the reform fell short and the dynasty was ended after another three years after its announcement of the Constitution outline. The ruling people simply didn’t have the way of thinking to figure out what was truly wrong with their system and how to save the decaying dynasty.Flag B （1911.10–1912.1）: The 1911 Revolution to overthrow Qing broke off on October 10, and a stratocracy was established next day in WuChang. It has been acknowledged as the beginning of Republic of China (ROC), and their national flag, the first one for ROC, was this “18 ball-star” flag (also the picture above, right), a reflection of the revolutionaries’ ideal of reinstating Han people’s rule of the 18 provinces, the territory of Ming Dynasty. Specifically their ideal was “ to expel the Tatar barbarians (驱逐鞑虏), to Revive Chinese Society (Zhonghua) (恢复中华)”. Zhonghua meant the Han dynasty both culturally and territorially at that time and was formally proposed in 1895 by the revolutionaries .Flag C (1912–1928): The 1911 Revolution was an unexpected easy win for the revolutionaries. Within seven weeks following the uprising 15 out of the 18 provinces, the territory of Ming Dynasty, announced independence from Qing. The 13th Dalai Lama, who was in exile in India after Qing emperor stripped his title resulting from a dispute, also announced Tibet independence from Qing after the Uprising. He came back next year (or in 1913) and made an announcement of Tibet independence again; and Mongolians announced independence on 12/28, 1911 as well. However, among the revolutionaries those who wanted to inherit Qing dynasty won the debate over those who only wanted to “revive Zhonghua”. On the first day of 1912, ROC was formally announced to have been established and the flag was changed to this “five-colored”, representing a republic of five peoples: Hans, Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans, and Muslims (Hui 回). Han people, who used to overthrew the huge Mongol-ruled Yuan Dynasty and revived Han dynasty of Ming by expelling Mongols out of their proper, now were no longer following their ancestors to revive Han dynasty by expelling Manchus out China proper. Rather, they inherited this huge Manchu dynasty entirely without putting up much fight. The flag showed their ambition. They believed that they would build a new republic to make the MCGA dream come true. However, counting for 95% of the total population, they never seriously consulted with other non-Han leaders of the four big minorities about the ruling of this new republic yet still an inherited empire, and most of them still believed that those minorities were barbarians. ROC consequently denied both Tibetan and Mongolian independence claims by including both areas in its Provisional Constitution of the Republic of China launched in March, 1912.It was a turning point for the history of Han Chinese, for they had to think for the first time about everything not only happening in their proper but in the areas as twice large as their proper inhabited with only other minorities who didn’t speak/write Han language/characters, nor worship Confucius but their own gods, and their economy was based not on tilling but grazing. Manchu emperors ruled Han people thru adapting Han culture and other non-Han people thru Tribute System, in which the emperor’s power quickly waned with the increase of distance between him and his subjects which in effect allowed self ruling. Although ROC’s sovereignty over Tibet and Mongolia was internationally recognized, still, in 1924 came the first blow to ROC: Mongolian People's Republic was declared to be independent with Soviet Russia’s support that was first rejected by ROC but finally warranted twenty years later through a treaty between MPR and Soviet Russia in 1945. The treaty also permanently separated outer Mongolia from inner Mongolia allowing the latter stay within ROC. In 1946 ROC formally accepted MPR, the size of ROC was down by about 15% in Han people’s eyes.This paragraph and the following are added on Oct 9, 2020, four years after the last edit on Nov 18, 2016: There was an important time period in the Flag C time window with the Han Chinese. It’s the time some Chinese began to explore the difference between the unification of China as a country and the centralization of China’s ruling power. Two individuals are standing out, Sun Yat-sen vs. Chen Jiongming.Sun has been regarded as the founder of modern China by the two rival parties, the Kuo Ming Tang (KMT, i.e., theNational Party) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP.) Both parties favor highly centralized ruling system as Sun had advocated for. So, logically after both KMT and CCP wan the ruling power consecutively through continuous civil wars (interrupted by Japanese invasion in 1931), Chen, in the contrast, had been criticized by both KMT and CCP as a traitor to the Sun-led Revolution. Only in recent years more truth have been revealed about the real life of people in that period and beyond, and the real debate and conflict between Sun and Chen. (One of the books in English is Professor Prasenjit Duara’s Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.)Flag D (1915.12.15–1916.03.22): A short but very important time for only about 100 days. Key words for this 100 days: ROC was put in constitutional crisis within three months by one of her founders after its birth and the republic empire failed in her beginning.After the Uprising of October 1911, the forced-out military strongman Yuan Shi-kai was called back to rescue Qing empire and became the number one man being the Premier. His troops made the rebellions----the ROC union of the independent provinces----under check, and both sides started to make deal under British mediation. Both agreed to let the Qing go and to start a Han ruling empire, and Yuan would be the president because he was the only one able to hold up the stake. In December 1911 Sun Yat-sen, the leader of anti-Qing Han revolutionaries but not the actual leader of 1911 Revolution came to China from his exile. Sun let his followers elect him provisional president on Dec. 29, 1911. It annoyed Yuan obviously, and even New York Times was surprised in its report of Dec. 31, 1911: “Dr. Sun's election, occurring simultaneously with the peace delegates agreeing to refer the form of government to the convention, indicates a lack of harmony among the republicans, which partly stultifies the work of Dr. Wu Ting-Fang and apparently violates the understanding with Yuan Shi-Kai.” (Wu was the first British educated Chinese Barrister grown up in Qing dynasty.)Yuan immediately pulled his representative out of the talk. It apparently pressed Sun to publically announce on Jan. 21 and 22, 1912, that he was only doing the job for the time being and would step down to let Yuan be the president as soon as the Qing Emperor had abdicated. The talk was resumed and both sides agreed to peacefully transfer to republic with Yuan promising to persuade Qing to surrender the ruling power. The Empress Dowager Longyu announced Abdication on behalf of the last Emperor to yield ruling power to Han people on Feb. 12, 1912. The outgoing Empress surely in fear of being mistreated made it clear in this fewer than 400-character Abdication that the power was going to the Han representative, her Premier Yuan Shikai, to organize a new republic government.However, Sun controlled Nanjing congress made the Provisional Constitution on March 8 and approved and announced by the stepping down Sun on March 11, the same day Yuan augmented as the president. As the historian Tong Tekong describes, “This Provisional Constitution, which has deeply influenced the modern history of China, …(has) changed the format of government from American Presidency to French Parliament. Its provision of presidency makes the premier directly report to the congress not the president, and, thus, the president becomes only a state symbol. Sun announces it on March 11, 1912……This design is obviously created to restrain Yuan. He is not going to have the power like Sun did.” (My translation of quote from 《袁氏治国》by Tong Tekong, 2004)The ROC inevitably fell into constitutional crisis immediately as a new republic empire that desperately needed a strong government to make the transfer from a Confucian faith-state tyranny to a rule-of-law republic while Yuan's hands were tied up. Without Yuan’s leadership, all local strongmen thought that this republic was a joke, or a game for power. ROC lost its critical first two years to set its footing. The entire politics was a circus to the people simply showing that democratic freedom as a brand new ideal was a chaos but nothing else. This experience and understanding of democracy has continued in many Chinese minds to this day.After a chaotic period for a little more than three and half a year since his presidency, Yuan, advised by his advisers, the renowned American legal scholar Frank Johnson Goodnow (…known for his assertion that the Chinese people were not mature enough for a democratic form of government—a position that was later utilized by Yuan, as he attempted to proclaim himself the Emperor of China in 1915-6.), and his Japanese adviser Aruga Nagao (有贺长雄, the first Japanese Nobel prize nominee), had a showdown with Sun’s party and decided to reform the republic empire. In December, 1915, Yuan announced his reform—-to change the system to constitutional monarchy with the name Empire of China with regnal year Hongxian (洪宪), meaning “grand constitutional”. But it was beyond the understanding of ordinary Chinese who never heard anything in such that an emperor would be living and ruling under constitution. They just wanted not to see another emperor crown on any of their new rulers, regardless. ——A lesson definitely learned by all later Chinese leaders whoever ruled China ever since: Never bear emperor title to rule no matter what the reality is.Yuan publicly withdrew his plan and apologized to his people 100 days later. He died on the 6th day of June, 1916, after failing to bring the system under control, only bearing a name of “arch-usurper of state power” recorded in history books still taught in today’s China. Sun continued to fight for power to modernize China under him by starting “third revolution” .Flag E (1928–1949 in Mainland; –present in Taiwan): Sun started a new party, Chinese Revolutionary Party (CRP), the pre-KMT. He asked party members to be absolutely loyal to him, even claimed, “ …without me any pursuit of republic or democracy has to end in its opposite side. I must ask every comrade to obey me for I’m pursuing the revolution (for the nation). You would be deadly wrong as soon as you doubted about your obedience. You people simply have so limited knowledge and experience, so you go nowhere except following me without asking any questions.” (My translation of quote from A Memoir of the Era of Chinese Revolutionary Party 1989《中华革命党时代的回忆》by Ju Zheng.) Sun’s CRP transformed to KMT in 1919, two years before Chinese Communist Party was created.In 1923 KMT under Sun received financial and military aid from Soviet Union after Sun had repeatedly failed to find aids from western countries and Japan. KMT held its first Nationalist Congress in 1924, claiming to represent all political classes in its struggle for the unification of China. KMT reorganized to adopt key organizational features of the Soviet communist party. Sun allowed CCP members to join KMT and increasingly used ideology as a means to centralize the power of KMT. It’s Sun who started following the Soviets to set Anti-Imperialism as the primary goal of Chinese revolution, and he was the one who first used the term Unequal Treaties to prove the Chinese humiliation by International Imperialism. His student and successor Chiang Kai-shek reunified China in 1928 by defeating all the “running dogs of Imperialism,” the local warlords. He changed Sun’s policy of collaboration with CCP and crackdowned CCP in 1927. He now became another “running dog of imperialism” called by CCP, a party more revolutionarily radical, but his teacher Sun has been regarded as the Founding Father of Modern China by both parties.Chiang’s fight against CCP was doomed after Sino-Japanese war broke off in 1937. As the historian Anthony James Joes puts, “The Japaneses war devastated the Nationalists forces, revived the Communist party, and thus changed the history of the world.” (Resisting Rebellion: The History and Politics of Counterinsurgency, 2006) But Chiang insisted following Sun’s ideology. At the end of WWII, seeing the dawn of Japanese defeat, Chiang Kai-Shek published his China’s Destiny and brought up the Unequal Treaties magic again to fuel up nationalism to support his rule but ignored internal reforms. The corrupted KMT rule ended in 1949 after a three year long bloody civil war between KMT and CCP.During Chiang’s rule Xinjiang Muslims rebelled in 1933 (First East Turkestan Republic). Ten years later, Muslims, encouraged and organized by the Soviet Union, rebelled at Ili. It lasted to 1949 and the rebellions turned to CCP for support against Nationalists. Second East Turkestan Republic was short lived during the rebellion but its influence continued to this day among Xinjiang Muslims.Flag F (1949-present, in Mainland): After PRC was created in 1949, the Nationalist State system was replaced with Communist State system in Mainland China. CCP’s rule of China during Mao era was Stalinist style plus Mao’s destructive thinking in the construction of PRC. By the time of Mao’s death the GDP of PRC was less than 5% of the world’s against its 22% world population, which made per capita GDP of China at a level of a little more than a fifth of the world’s. (table below, Loren Brandt et al, 2014)Led by Mao China joined USSR bloc and fought against America in N. Korea and Viet Nam, had border conflicts with India and USSR, and was in war with Viet Nam after Mao’s death. Conflicts between Han ruling and Tibet and Xinjiang minorities have remained as the main concerns of the government from time to time, including Dalai Lama’s escape to India in 1959.China’s industrialization before Reform was a copy of Soviet model. Over one hundred thirty Key Projects mostly of heavy industry were most completed aided by Soviets. China also developed nuke bombs and launched satellite while having an undeveloped economy. A great famine broke up at the end of 1950s thru the beginning two years of 1960s that perished millions of lives. Mao started Cultural Revolution in 1966 to continue his pursuit of MCGA mixed with his Marxism and never had China’s social norms reinstalled until his death in 1976.After Mao’s death Economic Reform started in late 1970s internally and extended externally in early 1980s. China reopened to the world and the reform eventually led to the abandonment of communism practice in PRC but the country did not change its flag for the first time in past 100 years after a major social transformation. China had made her first remarkable social change essentially peacefully for ten years until Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. But the country didn’t stop its economic reform and its per capita GDP has grown from ~20% to 116% of the world average, ranking at ~80th in 2014. Chinese economy now is the second largest after pooling in all of its 20% world population.To summarize, I would draw some factual conclusions based on this very brief review of China’s past 100 years:1. There have been many Chinese leaders who all wanted to live up to this MCGA in past 100 years with personal marks. Sun, a typical example as widely revered and as reviled, gave MCGA a personal interpretation for all Chinese and moved forward with measures undermined the first Chinese republic. Deng, who was one of many Mao’s students and comrades, reopened China which led to the great success of Chinese economic development but the abandonment of communism unintentionally. Today’s China is at her apex in Chinese history although its per capita GDP is still behind many countries. Never before there were so many Chinese who could enjoy a quality life like now. China’s new leader now is apparently taking MCGA personal again. So China’s future will largely determined by his own MCGA interpretation.2. Modern China is an inheritance of Qing Empire although the ruling people Han are not the conquerors. However, after Han’s ruling became no more a Tribute System, PRC itself has been bearing characteristics of imperialism. During Mao era this characteristics had been managed thru “class struggle” but evolved to a conflict between Han and other major minorities after “class struggle” was discarded. The fundamental cultural differences between Han and other minorities have not been diminished thru 100 year long Han ruling, and Han people’s MCGA hasn’t been transformed to becoming other minorities’ dream which is clearly shown in China’s social and economic development that mostly is in the region of southeastern but not in northwestern China.3. The MCGA dream is rooted in traditional thinking but has not evolved along with China’s industrialization to a Chinese Modernity. The theory of Sun has helped Han Chinese keep China united but also created nationalism that blamed China’s misery on the Western capitalism and led China to choosing Russian Leninism. Its practice in China caused Chinese people tens millions of lives and put Chinese economic development on hold for 27 years.4. The failure of China’s early republic experiment has been imposing a huge negative impact on Chinese people’s view of democracy and keeping haunting them, which in combination with China’s imperialist characteristics has been strangling China to an emotional tangle. Restrained by the way of Chinese thinking together with decades long twisted education, it becomes a somewhat popular Chinese view that there are always hostile forces out there who only want to destroy China. This ghost can come out to play at government’s will to shift the attention of the public to Chinese problems.5. China’s economic development in past 35 years is a great achievement. This achievement has made the MCGA dream never so close to come true. It’s no question that the achievement is attributed to the work of Chinese people. However, it is to a large extent misinterpreted in ignoring the fact that it is a part of the modernization of entire human civilization. To over emphasize this great achievement as the inevitable renaissance of ancient Chinese civilization creates a blind pride blocking people from seeing what human Modernity is really about and from recognizing the problems with Chinese culture. It will only slow down the development of critical thinking and consequently make it more difficult to find solutions to existing historic Chinese issues.Finally, What makes Chinese government a bad government? I believe, that the leaders of Chinese government keep thinking in a traditional way in their effort to make MCGA come true often becomes what makes Chinese government a bad government as shown in modern Chinese history. China has never been so strong and resourceful but the traditional thinking cannot evolve with the fast progress of Chinese society and the world modernization. China’s government is ruling her with great fear in my view which is inherited from the history and enforced thru self victimized education to Chinese people. The 1.4 billion Chinese people should not only be the labors of the world factory but also part of the brain pool of entire human race, including the non-Han Chinese, to think freely. It won’t happen until Chinese leaders are free from traditional way of thinking.*Edit: After seeing it viewed by over 3k times I decided to come to correct some errors and comment on my claim in the last sentence. Obviously it is rhetorical if every Chinese leader only comes from Chinese people. Therefore, I think that we can only say that the ruling of Chinese government will change with time when people make changes with their thinking. I know that I might be wrong. So I truly welcome critics and appreciate different thoughts.**Edit: I made correction on Chinese GDP calculations. Now I would like to add my perspective on the MCGA as to what it really means in order to clarify questions by the reader related to it. Probably nobody knows exactly what the contents of MCGA are because it is basically a subjective wishful thinking that was initially based on “Chinese Humiliation” . The humiliation was real, yet the question was who to blame on for the misery. Through late Qing dynasty and early ROC years Chinese elites commonly believed that the Chinese culture itself was the root cause of the problem and the culture needed to be modernized. The thinking was changed after Sun Yat-sen turned to Soviet Russia for help and formally announced in Sun–Joffe Manifesto at the beginning of 1923. Sun since modified his Three Principles of the People in which his first principle Nationalism (MinZu 民族) was no longer “to expel the Tatar barbarians (驱逐鞑虏), to Revive Chinese Society (Zhonghua) (恢复中华)”, but to unify China and maintain its independency through the course of Anti-Imperialism. Obviously it fitted the the new ROC, an inherited Qing empire, by attributing all Chinese problems to Western powers’ bullying. Chinese culture itself was spared but a victim of Western invasion. After the showdown between the more radical revolutionary CCP and KMT, Confucianism was replaced by Communism in Mainland after KMT was eventually defeated. Thirty years later after communist practice failed in PRC it logically led to the belief that communism must be the problem. Now, after achieving its great economic development, China is returning to the point to catch the culprit again. The answer is obvious if Sun’s theory still holds up to Chinese leaders. Or else, if their way of thinking has changed because Sun’s theory can’t hold up any more when being scrutinized differently.