manovations

[manovations]

Be Relentless, Be Obsessed

Forget about taking breaks. Days off are for the weak minded and even weaker willed. That’s literally my mantra, but it wasn’t always like that. People often ask me how I entered multiple unrelated industries with unrelated professional degrees and in a few years have found myself rubbing shoulders with some of the who’s who of Silicon Valley, sit down meetings with venture capitalists, angel investors, politicians, and generally astonishingly talented people.

It’s simple, not easy, but I worked my ass off, surrounded myself with people who are way more intelligent and capable at their skillset than I could ever dream of being, read copious amounts of books and spent literally thousands of hours researching every subject of interest obsessively and rarely sleeping more than 5hours over the course of many years. I will continue to focus on this process and as time continues will educate myself further, adding more tools and abilities, but more so than that, a better awareness of how to succeed and avoid failure. 

You hustle, take opportunities, and work smarter and longer than others and you’ll find yourself quickly surrounded by those you once dreamed of meeting; only now, you are suddenly co-creating a new narrative with mentors, friends, and cofounders that share your drive.

Reality is that this was a multi year process, I spent the first year uncertain about my life direction after leaving what could have become a lucrative field in medicine, but after talking with those closest to me, professors, and even deans of medical schools it made sense to change directions.

 It’s taken me a while but I’ve learned to find out those professionals and industry leaders and ask for their advice, their success alone gives credence to their input. Now I do my best to find a way to communicate with them on the same frequency and feel the same confidence and social calibration with them in any situation and let go of any sense of imposter syndrome.

The next two years were a process of refining away all the unnecessary bullshit one accumulates from a life of self limitations and social programming, a shedding of the self, and eventual rebirth with a new identities and much more refined and well rooted self-esteem borne out of ruthless effort. The following year had been one of putting it all to the test and creating something useful out of my passions, talents, and natural desires. How to get there?

Step 1: Get to work. Any job to survive so long as you are in the right city with the right opportunities and people around you, that’s one of the greatest secrets to success that very few people take advantage of which is to do a side hustle or work another full time job while pursuing your passion and interests.

Step 2: Ignore other people’s foolish advice about what they suggest you should do as a profession, even if they claim to care deeply about you and ‘want only the best,’ for you. They are all wrong, nobody’s experiences are the same, nor are their desired passions, mine included, in fact after you read this article, which you should approach with healthy skepticism if you haven’t actually gone through your own struggles, I’d recommend you discard all this as anecdotal and get back to work and keep hustling til you’ve actually made it.

Step 3: Find a way to immerse yourself with the type of people you emulate and eventually want to work with. 

For me that opportunity came in the form of being quite literally one of the first ride-share drivers and community organizers in the world, creating themed vehicles while working alongside early management to refine what ride-sharing even meant in San Francisco. It was not a glorious side job when you thought about it, since I worked with the intent goal of collecting 2,000 business cards.

The biggest perk, flexibility, and enough side money to start my own home-share rental business and comfortably survive and a habit I kept every single weekend in the city for nearly 30 months, not so much for earning but instead to literally meet tens of thousands of people and understand the nuances of what they did and getting access to the most brilliant minds to crowd-source solutions to problems while consulting on startups and building teams on my own. 

The irony, I wasn’t the only one, dozens of friends would ‘uber-proof’ their ideas and pitches, even meet investors during the early days when early adopters were in fact the tech and financial elite looking to escape the inflexibility of taxis.

My only reprieve from this crushing consistency came in the sense of taking adventurous trips abroad to further explore who I was becoming on this journey. Over the course of years I expanded out to home-sharing communities and helping manage large scale platforms and talked to everyone, but most importantly, did my best to listen, and in doing so, got to know the city and how it’s people think and operate in the most intimate way, to learn about the underpinnings of society and how successes are made and lost all from an outsider’s perspective. 

The first summer in San Francisco I left one relationship only to fall into one that was probably not the best decision given my living and work situation but provided incredibly valuable lessons and coincided with the tragic loss of the man who made one of the greatest impact in raising me to be a man; this experience provided an innumerable number of life lessons and valuable insights and thankfully many positive memories that paralleled just as many struggles. 

Here’s the thing, I do not regret it at all, all of the struggles made me into a much more well rounded person and showed me that money and time are utilities, sources of energy that can be spent or created depending on how you position yourself and can either destroy or create a sense of purpose and urgency. 

When you begin to forge a new life you will always be faced with setbacks, that’s just how it is, it’s called ‘hard knocks’ but really it should be called “KO’s” because the lights may literally go out when you’re flat broke and sleeping out of your car because you’re trying to save every last penny in order to buy a better car to make money more efficiently and then eventually save enough to bootstrap your business. 

Personally, I’ve find ways to leverage time to gain access to business opportunities by reducing time spent on myself through absolute minimalism. To me, you need to only buy what you can afford, but on top of that, you must be a person of value and create value so that others can pay you way more than you can spend, it’s that simple really. Be someone of value. It’s simple, but it’s not easy, since the vast majority of people aren’t focused on creating something valuable and contributing to society, you have to fight whatever resistance you incur and overcome obstacles with the same desire to breathe. What I’m saying is, work hard, work smart, stay positive, and never, ever, no matter how crappy things get, forget what you really want and desire and how you are absolutely going to get it. 

I often get told that I am demanding, overtly logical, and emotionally insensitive, the accolades of compliments go on and on, but I’m never told that I am ineffective or apathetic to making changes or facing hardships. I am always prepared to fight for what I believe in, which many times means living with the mindset of a warrior with purpose. In my daily life I try to purge out any weaknesses or inefficiencies as if they were a cancer, waiting to spread and metastasize and kill me; I have no time for dying, I’m here to maximize life and stick it out living, I’ve come too far and hopefully you feel the same way about your own future.

You want to get better, not worse with time, and that means practice, honing your craft; a relentless and obsessive force that drives you forward to success.

[manovations]

Preparing for the Journey:

As I stare at my itinerary for 2018 it almost seems cathartic knowing that the reflection I see is not the man I once knew and felt comfortable being. Gone is my wildly curly hair, the long beard, and most of my romanticizing of living like a feral animal…for now. Change, in it’s tumultuousness we fall deeper into understanding who we really are, what we are capable of, and what boundaries we had previously set for ourselves now mean nothing at all. Embarking on a journey is inherently one of the most human expressions of existence; to go into the unknown seems risky only if you feel unprepared. There lies the dilemma, how does one prepare for such an uncharted experience?

Frankly, I can only give my anecdotal insight.

1. Prepare by reducing your liabilities.

Sell it, donate it, end it, throw it out, repurpose it, or leave it where it is. Applies to material objects, houses, cars, your old clothes, subscriptions, and even relationships that are not serving your best interests. If you can fit your entire life into a carry on backpack and a hand held device, you’ve just stumbled upon one of the greatest access points to freedom in this world: flexibility. If you can eliminate or reduce financial debts and tax liabilities before you leave, the better. The less you have, the more you can gain.

2. Be Flexible.

Most of us stick to routines, patterns, and in it we become like an overly rooted tree that starts to burst through sidewalks and disrupts anyone crossing your path. Uproot and become like a young sapling, growing new roots and leaving seeds of wisdom with others you meet along the way. Like a seed, you can grow anywhere, you only need nourishment.

2. Reduce ties to your past life and locale, but remember the lessons you gained.

Moving forward is not an excuse to be negligent or foolish, it’s an opportunity for dramatic growth based on the hard work you’ve already done. Remember the struggles and hold them close enough to give you confidence, but not so closely that you suffocate to improvise a new solution.

3. Find a guide or become your own.  

Most of my life I struggled to find guides, so I went out and stumbled on my own paths. Most of life’s obstacles have been shared and conquered by countless others before you, either you haven’t read it, heard it, or seen it, but the knowledge is out there and many times easily within reach. If you find yourself out there on your own, fear not wandering warrior, you still have your intuition and lessons at your disposal, apply them carefully and adapt to the circumstances.

4. Be Thrifty, flexible, and Smart.

Save if you can before hand. That means having enough to embark on this journey, but also enough of a cushion to land on your feet wherever you arrive. Every great wanderer knows this can be your golden parachute if things go awry, so be sensible and make sure you have enough to survive without a job for months or reduced wages if you are building a company in some foreign place. By being flexible, you gain access to opportunities that others are too rooted in their lives to take. Here you can drop a few seeds, work hard, and see if something takes root. Being smart about how you use your time means not wasting opportunities out of fear, but also means keeping your wits about you and keeping in touch with those who care about you, even a simple messages can do the trick.

5. Find a purpose. We are all here to take action, and purpose is the great driving force that moves us forward. Wake up with a sense of knowing that you are more capable than you were a day earlier. Smile, laugh, scream, cry; it’s not always going to be easy, but whatever setbacks you are experiencing are temporary, giving up isn’t an option, but pivoting is. Your purpose can shift and change dramatically, and sometimes you are blessed with enough energy to have more than one. If you are one of those lucky souls, please share with the world your inner drive, you will inspire more than you can imagine.

We humans are wanderers, adrift in this cosmic space, sending signals outward that we are doing something magnificent, let those ripples in space signal that you have something great to share, and this is just the beginning.

[manovations]

Want a fresh start? Burn the boat at the dock and all your money.

One of the greatest things that I've learned from my travels is that if you have to close a chapter in the poorly edited book that can sometimes be described as your life, and you've already run out of whiteout and the pages seem scrawled with too many undecipherable corrections or red, it’s better to just burn that whole damn book and start over. I’m not kidding at all. 

Sometimes it’s better to scrap it all. Burn the damn boat with all your possessions while it arrives in the dock at your new destination, hell, throw the money in the pile too. You want to see if you can survive, want to see what you’re made of, care to discover whether you’re cut out for a bit of reckless entrepreneurship that really defines the stories of some of the world’s most powerful leaders, how about you start from scratch and build the life you want from nothing? Don’t bring in the past world, relationships, possessions, anything, leave it all behind. 

There’s something incredibly cathartic about burning ‘things’ and watching what you may have worried about all this time suddenly evaporate into a beautiful display of ashes and embers and flutter through the night sky, especially if it happens to be during the Vietnamese New Year celebration known as the Tet and you’re sharing that moment with one of the cities wealthiest female entrepreneurs as you kneel down in the middle of a busy street in the swankiest of Hanoi’s neighborhoods and throw piles of money into a fire. 

The Vietnamese believe that the tradition of burning away what worries you will allow you to be free from the fears and anxieties that prevent you from attaining what your heart and soul desires, as if the fear of success itself turns to ashes and what is left behind is a barren road on your new journey. The money itself is symbolic but a belief that success and wealth will come when you are no longer afraid of the sacrifice of having nothing or losing it all, that the risks and ambitions to follow through must go past the feelings of what might be lost along the way. 

Many of us wish to do great things; for some they’re self interested, others, may desire to spread wealth or joy and opportunity to a greater audience, yet the intrinsic desire of doing something more should never be held back by where you have come from, what you possess, or what you have even done up to this point, all of which become irrelevant when you give yourself no chance to look to the past for guidance but rather live in the present and reach forward into the future, further and further away from that rickety and charred carcass of a boat that you set ablaze when you stepped onto these new shores. 

The lands of today and tomorrow will never reflect what has been trodden on in the past, so fret not brave wanderer, this new path is left open to exploration and opportunity, and now, it’s your chance to discover who you want to be, what you would like to do with your time, as well as who you want to impact and share your time with. Who knows, with uncertainty, comes opportunity, and as with all great fresh starts, a chance to pen a new book about what your life will become.