This painting requires you to be brave on every topic. Independent inquiry on every insecurity, fear, identity, trauma, love, sexuality, relationship, work and/or life goals.
This painting is the truest of all arts. It's the art of life.
You meet some people in life who let you understand what it means "to live well". It's these people that unlock in you a vision of success, not based on a single metric, but through different personal attributes, qualities and achievements.
What makes these people successful in your eyes comes from their demeanour resulting from their life experience. What this post is meant to do, is share a blueprint for how to be one of those people who live extremely well.
1. Pursue your own vision
Every day gives you millions of infinite micro moment to choose one thing over another. What do you choose? We're conditioned by our past experiences, choices, what feel familiar, our self limiting beliefs, etc - so how much choice do we actually have?
In my case, I have a vision of bootstrapping an agency and turning that in a tech start-up. Everyone says I am an idiot. "Why don't you raise a seed and you can put actual capital against your tech idea", "every year that you go slow, you lose your most productive time in your life", and even my favourite criticism is from Sam Altman, OpenAI, who I admire despite his flaws, in: How to be successful, point 1: Compound yourself. You also want to be an exponential curve yourself...your rate of learning should always be high. As your career progresses, each unit of work you do should generate more and more results. There are many ways to get this leverage, such as capital, technology, brand, network effects, and managing people.", the point on leverage, which I totally agree with - but don't follow.
So why am I going against all of these great advices? Because I like to challenge myself to do something extremely difficult. Then it gets really dangerous, like in surfing, you balance yourself on the wave, floating in the air, the falling and getting up. I've nearly gone bankrupt multiple times, but somehow every single time I am making it out alive.
When you do something really hard, to build something from scratch, you'll most likely feel very confident afterwards, this success should set you up for bigger successes, it's like training, mentally. Secondly, raising capital at a later stage also has other advantages e.g. leverage (to go further).
Lastly, I am personally also interested in the process, even if it goes slowly, the symbiosis of turning the agency into a tech platform. It's like the evolution of a caterpillar into a butterfly.
2. Stay humble
When life sucks and bad things happen e.g. getting fired, break-ups, etc, they humble you. Scarcity makes you think clearly. So the real challenge is how can you remain appreciative and grateful when you have everything?
The key is to let abundance not make you less appreciative and grateful.
"Great power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely". The moment you become successful in your field, domain, work, friend groups, most likely you'll be corrupted and start to take advantage of your position. I belief that only 1% of people can truly stay themselves. Most people become somewhat of a less good version of themselves.
You should train yourself, if you want to be very successful, while being a good human being at the same time.
Here are my rules:
1. Before you say / do something always ask yourself, what's the emotional driver behind my action: are you doing something out of fear, competitiveness, aggression, etc - if any of these questions is yes. Don't do it. Don't compete. There's only 1 person you compete with in this world and that is yourself. On this, I still have much to learn, even though intuitively I know what's right, I still make mistakes, but try to be 1% better every day.
2. Strict with yourself, tolerant with others. Whenever someone lets you down, they can't come to your event, or they bail last minute, they did something wrong, forgive them! People are people, and people are idiots. Everyone is dealing with things you have no idea about. Expect people to let you down every now and then and it creates a lot of space for greatness within that. Accepting people's flaws opens the door for human connection. "A great man is hard on himself: a small man is hard on others" Confucius. These last two examples show how great thinkers throughout time said the same thing, then there must be some truth to it (even though it could still be wrong of course).
3. Look at what you have in common with someone, not at what makes you different. This was from the Dalai Lama. He says people ask me how I am able to connect with every human being. It's because what unites me with the other is my starting point. And the truth is every person knows something you don't and once you see this, you have a lot more admiration and respect for people, which puts you at an equal level and allows true connection to flourish.
3. Surround yourself with great people
Greatness comes in many forms, next to a person's accomplishments it's also about the way they love, their humor, caring for each other, etc. And people who exhibit exceptional qualities will likely influence you. I am not saying anything new here, but as one of the greatest thinkers Goethe said: "Tell me who you spend your time with, and I'll tell you what will become of you". It doesn't matter if you're an artist, entrepreneur, activist - go find the best people out there that do what you want to do, surround yourself with the best, in whatever measure you value. Then you're likely to bounce ideas of each other and become better yourself as a result.
4. Grow your mind like a tree
Life is not one dimensional, and your talent should span many domains. Once you learn to ride the bike with different skillsets, relationships, languages and qualities, they "weirdly" start to influence each other and this feeling is amazing. It's like you can make bridges between domains previously not imagined. Go out there surf, have romantic encounters and study gardening. The world is becoming more and more interesting especially as technology accelerates, the internet is showing us more what's really happening in every part of the world. So instead of putting time into the same things you do every day, you should actively study and/or develop other skills to find the next stage of your evolution in whatever domain(s) interest you.
5. Organise your admin
The world is a dynamic place and if you organise yourself well (within legal bounds), your costs could be lower than doing it the traditional way. Think about how the world is changing geopolitically. It would be foolish to close your eyes for these macro trends and let yourself pay a higher cost every day. How well you live also depends on how you're able to organise your admin in a constantly evolving world.
Note to self: remember your vision from when you were younger, so that every day you simply become more yourself.