Punch Your Inner Hippie

So I knew this woman named . . . Jill, I guess. Anyway, she was all excited, because she was going to start her own business. And I said, “Great. Starting your own business is a powerful, American thing to do. Andrew Carnegie started his own business. Steve Jobs started his own business. And look where they are now. Well . . . dead, I guess. But their businesses are still around. But know who didn’t start his own business? Adolf Hitler.”

I waited for her to continue her explanation, but she didn’t, so I prompted, “A bakery that does what?”

“You’re not going to make a robot out of bread or some sort of hover cake that doesn’t require a plate because it hovers?”

“So this is just going to be some boring, stupid bakery like you can already find anywhere?”

I went ahead and interrupted her, as it was obvious by now that she was wasting my time. “Your idea of opening a bakery is stupid and worthless and an insult to this great country. And you are stupid and worthless for pursuing it.”

Anyway, my point that I would have explained to Jill if she hadn’t run off (I really have a problem with people running off before I get to the point) was that in America, we need to aim high. And I mean really high. So high that people say, “You can’t actually hit something that high. The bullet will lose momentum before it reaches the target and fall back down and hit you in the head.” But that’s just your inner hippie trying to discourage you. Or it’s actual people around you. Either way: punching.

Because what does the Declaration of Independence say is one of our fundamental rights? The pursuit of happiness. And that’s what you need to do: You need to find some happiness and pursue it. That happiness must possess your wakeful mind, and then you need to stalk, kill, and skin that happiness.

Oh, you’re already happy, you say? Shut up. Find some new happiness and hunt that down. You must always have new happiness quarry to pursue. You must be bloodthirsty for happiness, never satisfied with whatever happiness you obtain, and always moving forward. This is ambition. For your tank of awesome, ambition is your fuel. It is what drives you to do great things, constantly pushing forward to get to each lofty goal you’ve set your sights on. You must continually fill your tank of awesome with ambition to keep it always moving. That means that as soon as one of your ambitious goals becomes attainable, you need to set an even greater one. The only complacency you will ever have will be death.

Your inner hippie, in his mission to destroy your awesomeness, will of course fight against this drive. You may say, “Today I’m going to invent a new product, build a business, overthrow a dictatorship, and karate-chop a rattlesnake!” but your inner hippie will say, “Man, that sounds hard, and it’s probably not going to work out. Let’s just play some Grand Theft Auto.” Whenever you set your sights high, he’ll try to readjust your aim down to low, easily obtainable things that provide you with no awesome. So what do you have to do to fight your inner hippie on this?

That’s right! You punch him in the face! You’ve been paying attention to this book.

And the way you punch that noisy, useless hippie is with an uppercut of ambition. Your hippie would be happy if you just sat around on welfare watching reality TV all day, but you need to smack that hippie in the face with your big plans and your declaration that you will not be satisfied unless your life is a constant cavalcade of challenges, riches, and explosions.

AMBITION MADE THIS COUNTRY

Were the founders of America ambitious? Well, if they’d listened to their inner hippies, they would have said, “Oh, I guess we can just pay the unreasonable taxes to the British. I mean, what’s the alternative? Grab some muskets and start a war? That’s like impossible. Let’s just play some hacky sack.” But the Founding Fathers did not listen to their inner hippies. Instead, they shot lots of British people.

And ambition was what drove the frontiersmen out into the wilds. Their inner hippies were like, “You can’t go out there; you’d be on your own! If you got thirsty, your mom wouldn’t be there to get you a juice box! And the place is full of wild animals! And not fun animals like the ones from the circus that ride unicycles and juggle; we’re talking mean ones that bite and are overly antagonistic when you try to teach them juggling or any other basic clowning skills!” But the frontiersmen just punched those hippies inside themselves and ventured into danger anyway, because they were fueled by ambition and thus ready to go forward no matter what challenges, obstacles, or non-entertainment-minded wildlife they faced.

Everything you have now—from your freedoms to your technology to the readily available burgers and fries on every street corner—is because of the ambition of those who came before you. People who looked at things as they were and said, “This could all be better. We can have a greater country with more freedom. Electronic boxes should be in everyone’s house and interconnected so we can share thoughts 140 characters at a time. And I’m tired of waiting up to an hour for good food; I want mediocre food within minutes.” But instead of just whining for things to be better—the inner hippie’s only response to such grand ideas—these people had the ambition to make the changes themselves. Because when you have ambition, you just punch that inner hippie as soon as you see him—before he can even get a word out. Because you have a world to change.

And since you have all these great things because of the ambition of those before you, what is expected of you? Well, your inner hippie would say, “You should just lie back and enjoy all the stuff others did for you while complaining loudly and annoyingly about it.” Should you listen to him?

I hope you didn’t answer that question, because it was rhetorical. And if ambition is driving you, you don’t have time to waste on pointlessly answering rhetorical questions (because, come on, who would be this far into this book and say, “Yes. I should listen to my inner hippie”? I mean, really).

What you should do instead of listening to your inner hippie is set your sights even higher. If the efforts of those before you got you this far, then you need to have the ambition to do things much greater than they did. The greatest results of the hard work of the best and brightest of those who came before you is now your floor. Because of your advantages, everything you do should make all their efforts look like a bunch of garbage babies would do. That’s the level your ambition should aim for to bust your inner hippie right in the chops.

THE AWESOME, TRANSFORMING POWER OF AMBITION

So what do you use your ambition for? Answer: Everything. Using ambition, you can transform a normal, everyday goal into something awesome. Because if you’re doing anything and not aiming for greatness, it’s not going to give you that drive to keep your tank of awesome rolling on.

Here are some examples of using ambition to turn boring goals into goals that are worth your time:

After Ambition: Cook a meal so great that it changes people’s lives and they vomit at the thought of eating a meal not cooked by you.

After Ambition: Have your family become a dynasty that dominates the political climate in the realm like a house from Game of Thrones.

After Ambition: Have your work overturn the entire industry, revolutionizing society. Spend your free time basking in the adulation of the press and swimming in your big vault of money.

After Ambition: Become such a huge local influence that the town is renamed after you.

After Ambition: Master every field of study and every skill to the point that you make Batman look like some poser.

After Ambition: Become a raccoon-killing machine such that you are known as the “Raccoon Bane” and are a fearsome legend among raccoons, spoken of among them only in hushed whispers.

After Ambition: Make a yard so beautiful that random passersby will knock on your door and hand you money because they just assume there is some sort of fee to look at it.

After Ambition: Forget about exercise and saving money and instead jetpack to work, because everyone will be in constant awe of that awesome guy who just jetpacked in to work while a guy on a bicycle looks like a dork.

APPLYING AMBITION

So now you’re probably saying, “I want to unleash the power of ambition and knock out my inner hippie with the punch of awesomeness.” Well, good; you’re now ambitious about ambition. But your next question probably is, “But where do I start?”

In the previous chapter, I asked you to look around and see everything through a lens of gratitude, taking in all the blessings you have. Now I want you to look around with the eyes of ambition. I want you to look around and see the flaws in everything—think about how each thing around you can be improved. For instance, I noticed that the bookstore just doesn’t carry enough books about punching hippies. Once you find things that can be improved, begin to plot how to do it. If it helps, imagine yourself sitting in a command center inside a hollowed-out volcano—the traditional place for such grand scheming.

But plotting how to make the world around you more awesome is only the first part of ambition. You also need a real plan of action and follow-through. This is where you will need to focus on only a few ambitious goals, because you don’t have time to be awesome at everything.

Ha! I’m kidding. That was a test. If you were truly tapping your ambition, you would have responded to my telling you what you can and can’t do with a shout of “Bah!” and a dismissive wave of your hand. True ambition defies all constraints people would dare try to impose on it.

“A taco where the shell is a big Dorito? That is an affront to both God and man!”

Anyway, if you’re properly applying your ambition, your lazy inner hippie should be whimpering at the thought of the Herculean tasks you have set before yourself. Maybe he’ll even start screaming at you to stop and reconsider such huge undertakings. And that’s when you pour your ambition into your tank of awesome and just run him right over. No screams or pleas or cries for rationality will stop you, because ambition keeps you moving forward. All objections will be little crunching sounds under your treads.

So what have you seen around you that could be made more awesome? What in your life can you improve? What grand, insane schemes can you come up with? It’s time to crush your inner hippie and lunge after these grand new ideas, embracing the ambition that is your American heritage.

GOAL SETTING

To really start achieving things, you need a concrete set of goals. Not vague things like “I want to be happier” or “I want a more fulfilling family life” or “I want to read more intelligently written books.” Those are stupid, and how do you know if you achieve them? They are the sorts of goals your inner hippie will try to set. Haven’t you punched him enough yet? Why is he still conscious to give you suggestions?

Instead, you need measurable goals so you know when you have succeeded. That way, you can actually celebrate your successes with a cake or by firing a gun in the air^* or blowing up a beached whale with dynamite—however you like to celebrate things. And as you achieve one goal, you know to move on to the next one—to keep your tank of awesome rolling toward new things to conquer.

So let’s set those goals. To start, let’s make some long-term ones. Think of yourself twenty, thirty years from now (if you’re really old, you can skip this step). Where do you want to be then? Make some long-term goals, and make sure they are concrete and measurable. Not “I want to own a big business,” but instead “I want to own a multibillion-dollar company that makes cakes that hover, completely revolutionizing how we eat, since we’ll no longer need plates.” (Wow, that was a good idea Jill had; I don’t know why she didn’t run with it.) So write down your long-term goal.

Now rip up that goal and toss it out. It wasn’t ambitious enough, you little twerp.

I mean it: You need real ambition here. I want giant, seemingly crazy goals. If you’re doing it right, your inner hippie will be yelling at you that there is no way you’ll achieve it. And then you’ll punch him back by making the goal even more ambitious than the one he objected to. When you’ve beaten your goal over the head of your hippie so much that he finally shuts up, that means you’re now where you should be.

So now you need shorter-term goals to help lead you to this long-term goal. Like a goal five years out. For instance, if your long-term goal is to become president of the United States ten years from now, start with an easier goal of becoming president of Canada five years from now. Then you need an even closer goal, like one to achieve in one year. And then one month. Then a goal to achieve by the end of the week. Then the end of the day. And finally, to get started, you need a goal to achieve right this moment. The sooner you start achieving ambitious goals, the more beating you’ll be giving the hippie inside you, so let’s start with an uppercut right now and find something ambitious you can achieve this moment. Perhaps actually write out your goals since I bet you’ve just been reading and not writing down goals like I told you to.

So now you have a list of goals—short-term and long-term—to work toward. This is the fuel for your tank of awesome—it will continue driving you forward at breakneck speed, rolling over doubt, mediocrity, and hippies. And you should have only one set of goals that leads to one long-term goal, as anything else will be a distraction.

If you nodded in agreement with that, you’re an idiot. I just tricked you again; you should have numerous long-term goals, each with its own set of shorter-term goals. You’re trying to be awesome here, and that means achieving on all fronts. Plus, when you have enough goals, you can just constantly achieve them.

Boom! Your company just made the Fortune 500 list, you were the first person to land on Mars, and you got the gold medal in curling. That’s what every day should be like for you.

You will be a goal-achieving machine. Goals will flee from you, as you’re just blowing them away left and right, but they won’t be able to run for long, as you’ll be chugging along in your giant tank, running on high-octane ambition. And you will sit there laughing, the blood of goals smeared all over you.

TIME MANAGEMENT

How much time do you have left on Earth? You don’t know. Tomorrow a koala could fall out of a tree and land on your head, and you’d be dead. Time is a finite resource, and as part of ambition, you need to make sure you put your time to great use and don’t waste it. Every minute of every day, you have to ask yourself, “Am I doing something awesome right now?” And if the answer is no, you need to stop what you are doing and put your time to better use. Unless what you’re doing is sleeping, which is never really “awesome” per se but still quite necessary.^* But other than that, you need to make sure you are tapping into your ambition and using your time to achieve great things, because when you waste time, it’s gone forever.

Goldilocks and the Three Bears

Let me tell you a story. There is a house in which live three bears—a papa bear, a mama bear, and a baby bear. They have just made themselves some porridge and decide to take a walk while it cools. They exit their house, but they don’t lock the door since, you know, they’re bears—they don’t know how to work a lock. I’m not even quite sure how they got a house or learned to make porridge.

Anyway, while the bears are away, a girl named Goldilocks sneaks into their house. I’m not sure why she randomly breaks into houses; maybe she’s a troubled youth. She has a bad home life. Is possibly a gang member.

So she sees the three bowls of porridge and decides to eat some. First she tries the papa bear’s porridge, but it’s too hot—and she’s not about to stand around waiting for it to cool after she’s broken into someone’s house. Next she tries the mama bear’s porridge, but it is too cold (I guess it was the porridge that was microwaved first). Finally, she tries the baby bear’s porridge, and it’s just right. So she eats it all up. Usually, you’d think kids these days wouldn’t be all enthused about porridge, but remember: Goldilocks is a thug. It’s not about the food so much as the thrill of eating stolen porridge.

So now Goldilocks is a little sleepy. So she heads upstairs to find the beds. I know what you’re thinking: Goldilocks isn’t exactly a criminal mastermind here; you don’t break into someone’s house and then go to sleep unless you want to get caught. But maybe she does want to get caught. Maybe this is all a cry for help.

Anyway, she tries the papa bear’s bed, but it’s too hard—and it’s not one of those Sleep Number beds you can adjust. So she tries the mama bear’s bed—the papa and mama bears don’t sleep in the same bed anymore, as they’re having some trouble, but that’s a completely different story—but the bed is too soft. So Goldilocks tries the baby bear’s bed, and it’s just right. And she falls asleep.

So the three bears arrive back home. The papa bear looks at his porridge and says, “Someone has been eating my porridge.” And if you’re wondering how he can tell someone took just one bite, well, he’s a bear, and bears have better senses than you or I.

The mama bear looks at her porridge and says, “Someone has been eating my porridge.”

And the baby bear looks at his porridge and says, “Someone has been eating my porridge and ate it all up!”

Now, you or I would call the police at this point, but they’re bears, and they don’t like to get the authorities involved, as they’ve had bad experiences with animal control in the past. So they go upstairs to investigate. The papa bear sees his bed and says, “Someone has been sleeping in my bed.” (I guess they made their beds in the morning; these must be well-trained circus bears or something.)

The mama bear looks at her bed and says, “Someone has been sleeping in my bed.”

The baby bear looks at his bed and says, “Someone has been sleeping in my bed, and there she is!”

Goldilocks hears the baby bear shout and wakes up to see three angry bears staring at her. The papa bear yells, “Who are you? And how’d you get in here?” Except he’s saying it in bear language, so it’s just a bunch of growls to Goldilocks, and she is like freaking out. She screams and pulls out her Glock and starts firing at the bears, but she has no formal firearms training and holds the gun that stupid sideways gangster-style way and totally misses the bears. Plus, they’re bears; they’re not going to be scared of a 9 mm. So Goldilocks just jumps out the window—smashes right through the windowpane—there’s glass everywhere. But she lands on the ground with enough wherewithal to get to her feet and just run. And maybe now she’s been scared straight from her criminal ways, because bears will do that to you.

So what’s the point of this story? The point is that there is no point! I had just talked to you about time management and how important your time is, and yet you just sat there as I wasted your time and told you a story you’ve heard a million times already. You could have used that time to start a business, write a novel, or master the touch of death, but you lacked the ambition to use your time more efficiently. Now that time is gone forever. So I hope you really liked that umpteenth retelling of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” because you basically just ruined your life by reading it.

No, not really, but that’s how you need to think of your time; it’s this precious resource of which you have only a limited amount. The hippie inside you wants you to be just fine sitting around and completely wasting it as you achieve nothing in life, but you need to have the ambition to put your time to great use.

So should you never watch TV or play video games or anything else that uses up your time? Of course not; video games are fun and awesome, and there’s some great TV, like Breaking Bad (I haven’t actually seen that show, but everyone raves about it). When you work hard, you should have some time to enjoy yourself, but the key is you first have to work hard (take that, inner hippie) and make sure you use the time on stuff you actually enjoy. If you start to not enjoy a video game, stop playing it. Ask yourself: Are you still launching birds at green pigs because you’re having fun or out of a misplaced sense of duty? And if you’re not enjoying a TV show, stop watching it. Don’t go, “Well, I need to clean space off the DVR, so I’d better watch it.” Just stop DVRing shows you don’t actually enjoy. And don’t let someone tell you, “Oh, this show is great, but it doesn’t really find its footing until the third season.” Demand that shows be good from the get-go, or don’t watch them. Don’t let video games or TV shows or anything else waste your time. Be the guy who walks out in the middle of a movie. If you have the ambition to demand excellence from your work, demand excellence from your free time as well.

STRESS

You often hear you should avoid stress, but should you really? Do you know what doesn’t have any stress? A rock. A sack of potatoes. The dead.

Stress is just your body’s way of saying, “Hey, shouldn’t you be doing something right now?” And your body is right: You should be doing something, because when you stand around doing nothing, you’re just one bindle away from being a hobo. Now, your inner hippie will want you to avoid stress by never having the ambition to achieve anything, but you will never find peace down the hippie’s path, because eventually you will be consumed with the stress of being a lazy, filthy hippie whom everyone hates.

Stress is just the part of ambition that actually makes sure you’re on the move and accomplishing things. When you set lofty goals, you’re going to place a lot of stress on yourself to actually reach those goals. So how do you relieve this stress? Well, you know how your inner hippie wants you to handle things. “Well, I can’t raise a family, train for a mixed martial arts tournament, breed prizewinning emus, work on my rap album, hunt for Al Qaeda terrorists, and teach cats to do circus tricks all at the same time; it’s too stressful. I’ll just try to achieve less. Oh, sweet mediocrity—hold me in your flabby embrace!”

But the best way to relieve stress is to accomplish things. Like, let’s say you’re stressed about finances. So go become a billionaire. Boom; no more stress on that front, and you’re awesome.

Of course, if you achieve enough, you’ll soon have so little stress that you’ll start to become a lazy hippie, which is why you have to keep adding new goals to give yourself new stress to keep active. You just need to strike a balance; you want to stoke the fire of stress inside you enough to keep yourself moving but not so much that it eventually overtakes your body, burning you out from the inside until you are a hollow husk of a man. You don’t want that. So some stress but not too much. If it kills you, that was too much.

SUMMARY OF CHAPTER 7: AMBITION

In this chapter, we learned:

• Bakeries are stupid.

• You need ambition to fuel your tank, because apparently it’s not battery powered. I don’t know if they make hybrid tanks.

• Ambition can turn simple, useful activities into crazy, lunatic things.

• You need to write out goals that are long-term, short-term, and medium-term. It sounds like a lot of work.

• Some of the stories Frank tells might be tricks. Don’t read them.

• If you are not stressed, you are potatoes.

In the next chapter, we’ll talk about the cannon on your tank of awesome: confidence.

Study Questions

What causes some people to be satisfied with mediocrity? Do you think Satan is involved? Or Democrats?

When people don’t write out goals, do they even know what they are trying to achieve? Or do they just kind of piddle around until their DVRs record something interesting?

Think of the last time you had a really stressful day. Did you take the stress head-on by trying to accomplish something, or did you curl into a ball and whimper? Which do you think is the more effective strategy?

ANSWERS TO COMMON QUESTIONS

Q. Doesn’t this chapter contradict the last? In the previous chapter, you said we had to learn to be grateful for all we have, but in this chapter you want us constantly trying to achieve more than what we have.

A. Being grateful for what you have doesn’t mean you can’t constantly strive to have more. Stop trying to make this complicated.

Q. It just seems like you’re tasking us with dual purposes—both looking for contentment and trying to improve our lot in life.

A. I already dismissed your silly concern. Shut up.

Q. Don’t we need some people to be nonambitious and be janitors and fry cooks and run regular bakeries, or nothing would get done?

A. Yes, but that’s what other people are for. There will always be many mediocre people in the world, but I assume you bought this book because you want to be awesome. Otherwise, instead of this book you would have picked up Settling: How to Not Be So Disgusted with Your Pathetically Average Life.

Q. Is that an actual book?

A. If it isn’t, I probably should write it, because a large segment of the population really is mediocre, and if I wrote a good book aimed at them, I could totally clean up.

Q. You’d probably want a less insulting title.

A. Why are you brainstorming about it? Are you thinking of stealing my idea? If you do, I’ll murder you.

Q. You can’t just threaten to murder someone like that.

A. Yes, I can because of the Castle Doctrine. A man’s book is his castle, and thus you can threaten to murder someone from within the confines of it.

Q. None of that was anything close to being legally true or even making sense.

A. Then why don’t you write I’m So Smart and I Know All About the Castle Doctrine?

Q. Would you murder me if I did?

A. No; that book sounds stupid. Have at it.