Be yourself, the money will rain on you

Hi,

I'm not trying to follow you around, Gordon, I just wasn't very clear in my earlier message.

People already do what they love to do. Some of them are lucky enough to get paid for it.

So my theory is that people should monitor what they're already doing that they're GREAT at, that they do effortlessly, that they do altruistically, and that's Step One.

Step Two is to do research and find someone you admire who is doing the thing you identified in Step One, and use her/him as a model, while staying totally true to yourself. Or you could find three or four models and copy segments of what each of them does. Study their biographies and learn from their mistakes.

To succeed you have to be totally yourself. You can't be a simulated Bill Gates and succeed. But if you and Bill Gates are good at the same thing you can enhance yourself by studying Bill Gates.

Don't say, "I suck as a person, so I can't be myself--I have to simulate being someone else." You're not qualified to decide if you suck as a person; only the market is qualified to make that judgment. I read today in a magazine about a woman who is a plastic surgery addict. She spent $100,000 and went through 28 procedures because she didn't like how she looked. I might judge her as being sick or self-destructive, but this woman doesn't care what I might think--she was true to herself and followed her inner voice. She even turned her obsession into a career: she consults celebrities on plastic surgery and sells a book on her website ( http://www.cindyjackson.co.uk/ ) about choosing a doctor and avoiding mistakes. Sick or self-destructive? Her market doesn't find her so, so it's lucky she didn't pre-judge herself before reaching out to a market.

Hope this was helpful.

Best,

-Boyd