40 to 50 percent of US marriages end in divorce.When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. That is—everything around you that you call life was made up by people no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. . . . Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
—STEVE JOBS
The gleaming waters of Lake Washington were stunning from where I stood on the grassy lawn of a grand home. Conversation hummed around me. Glasses clinked as wine was poured. The sweet, spicy aroma of barbecue filled the air.
Just behind me stood Bill Gates, the owner of that home. One of the wealthiest men in the world and the legendary founder of tech giant Microsoft, he was chatting with his other young guests.
I was twenty-two and a few weeks into my job as a Microsoft intern, celebrating at the annual barbecue at Bill Gates’s home to welcome Microsoft’s newbies. Back then, Microsoft was the company to get into, equivalent to working for Apple or Google today. And I was in!
There was so much excitement in the air—we were like young Hogwarts students meeting Dumbledore for the first time.
I’d labored toward this goal for years, first working my butt off to get good grades in high school so I could gain admission to one of the best engineering colleges in the world—the University of Michigan, where I studied electrical engineering and computer science. In Malaysia, where I’d lived until the age of nineteen, as in other parts of Asia, it was the norm for families and educators to promote the idea of growing up to become an engineer, lawyer, or doctor. As a kid, I remember being told that if you were smart, that’s what you did. It was just kind of how that world operated.
Yet the sad truth was that I dreaded my computer engineering classes in college. What I really wanted to be was a photographer or a stage actor. Photography and performing arts were the only classes where I got As. But those were not acceptable careers at all, according to the rules. So, I gave them up for programming. After all, I had to be practical and realistic. Get good grades. Get a good job. Work the nine-to-five. Save my money for a healthy retirement. Do it right and I would be a “success.”
And I was beginning to succeed. It felt amazing to be honored with this opportunity to be in Bill’s home and to be working at this company, then in its heyday. My professors were elated for me. My parents were thrilled. It made the hours of study and my parents’ sacrifices worthwhile. I’d done everything that had been asked of me. Now it was time to reap the rewards. I had arrived. And I was standing in the home of Bill frickin’ Gates with my career laid out before me.
But deep inside, I knew I had a problem.
On that fateful day in the summer of 1998, I had simultaneously accomplished two things: first, the completion of a long, many-year journey, and second, the painful realization that I had been walking in the wrong direction the entire damn time.
See, I genuinely disliked my job. I’d sit in my private office at Microsoft headquarters, staring at my triple-screen monitor, and count the minutes until I could escape. I disliked the work so much that, even though Bill Gates was standing just a few feet away from me surrounded by my colleagues, I felt too ashamed to shake his hand. I felt I shouldn’t be there.
So a few weeks later, I quit.
I was too chicken to take charge and quit. To study at a top computer engineering college, get the coveted interview, and then snag the even-more-coveted job at the company my fellow students were dying to get into—to get that far and then quit was going to disappoint a lot of people.
So I did the next best thing a spineless twenty-two-year-old could do. I deliberately got myself fired. I simply goofed off and got caught playing video games at my desk way too many times during office hours until my manager was forced to fire me. So, as they say, that happened.
I went back to college and limped to the finish line. I had no idea what I was going do after graduation and felt almost stupid for blowing my huge opportunity with Microsoft.
As it turns out, getting out of there was the smart thing to do. I wasn’t just quitting a job (and a career path)—I had also decided to quit following the socially approved rules for how life is supposed to work.
When I went my own way rather than choosing the path of the practical and realistic job, it wasn’t because I thought there was anything wrong with being a computer engineer. But I did—and still do—think there’s something wrong with the idea that we should work at something we have no passion for, just because it’s the norm or the rule in the world we’re born into.
Yet many of us do just that. According to a Gallup study surveying more than 150,000 Americans, 70 percent of respondents said they were “disengaged” from their jobs. Given the amount of time we spend at work, a job we have no passion for puts us at risk of living a life we have no passion for. But it’s not just our ideas about careers that are faulty. Consider these additional stats:
40 to 50 percent of US marriages end in divorce.
A Harris poll showed that only 33 percent of Americans polled claimed to be “very happy.”
According to CNBC, “a new report by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which examined debt through the generations . . . found that eight in ten Americans are in debt in some fashion, most often because of a mortgage.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than one-third of adults in the United States are now obese.
Thus, our careers, our love lives, our happiness, our financial standing, and our health are all in conditions that are pretty inadequate. How did we get here, and how do we escape?
There are many reasons why these things happen. But I submit to you that one big reason is the tyranny of rules—rules that suggest we “should” do life in a particular way because everyone else seems to be doing it, too:
I should take this job.
I should date/marry this type of person.
I should go to this college.
I should major in this subject.
I should live in this city.
This is how I should look.
This is how I should feel.
Don’t get me wrong. People sometimes have to take jobs they dislike in order to make ends meet. They have to live in places they wouldn’t choose because it’s all they can afford at the time or because they have family responsibilities.
But there’s a big difference between bending to life’s necessities and blindly accepting that you must live your life according to preconceived rules. One of the keys to being extraordinary is knowing what rules to follow and what rules to break. Outside the rules of physics and the rules of law, all other rules are open to questioning.
To understand this, we first have to understand why these rules exist in the first place.
Who made up the rules of the modern world anyway? To try to answer that question, let’s take a quick leap into the beginnings of human history.
In his fascinating book Sapiens, historian Yuval Noah Harari, PhD, puts forward the idea that at a certain point in history, there could have been as many as six different types of humans living on the planet at once. There was Homo sapiens, which is what we all are. But there were also Homo neanderthalensis, Homo soloensis, and Homo erectus, among others.
But over time, all of the nonsapiens, such as the Neanderthals, died out, leaving Homo sapiens as our prehistoric grandmother or grandfather.
What helped sapiens survive?
The reason for our ultimate dominance, according to Dr. Harari, was our use of language—and specifically, its complexity in comparison to others’. Primatologists who have studied monkeys have found that monkeys can alert others in their group to danger, along the lines of, say, “Look out—tiger!”
But our sapiens forebears had very different brains. In contrast, sapiens could say, in effect, “Hey, this morning I saw a tiger by the river, so let’s chill here until the tiger leaves to hunt, and then we can go there to eat, okay?”
Our sapiens ancestors had the ability to communicate complex information important to survival through the effective use of language. Language allowed us to organize groups of people—to share news of dangers or opportunities. To create and teach practices and habits: to communicate not just where the berries were on the riverbank but also how to pick, cook, and preserve them, what to do if someone ate too many, and even who should have the first and biggest helping. Language allowed us to preserve knowledge by passing it from person to person, parent to child, generation to generation.
It’s difficult to overstate the power successive generations gained from literally not having to reinvent the wheel. Language gave rise to beautiful complexity on every level.
But the biggest advantage of language is that it allowed us to create a whole new world within our heads. We could use it to create things that didn’t exist in the physical world but simply as “understandings” in our heads: to form alliances, establish tribes, and develop guidelines for cooperation within and between larger and larger groups. It allowed us to form cultures, mythologies, and religions. On the flip side, though, it also allowed us to go to war over those cultures, mythologies, and religions.
These changes and more, driven by advances in our thinking and enhanced by our ability to use language to share what we knew, were truly revolutionary—indeed, taken together, Dr. Harari calls this the cognitive revolution.
If you don’t believe how pervasively language shaped us and our world, here’s some intriguing research pointing to its power.
Did the color blue exist in ancient cultures? According to a Radiolab podcast entitled “Why Isn’t the Sky Blue?” in ancient times there was no word for blue in numerous languages. Homer, in The Odyssey, didn’t mention the color blue for the sky or for the Aegean Sea, which he called wine-dark. Nor did the word blue appear in other ancient writings otherwise rich with description and visual detail.
So the question arises: If there’s no word for a thing, can you see it?
Researcher Jules Davidoff studied this question among a particular tribe called the Himba, in Namibia. The Himba have many different words for green but no word for blue.
As part of the research, the tribe members were shown a circular pattern of squares. All of the squares were green except for one that was obviously blue like in the image below:
Oddly, when tribe members were shown the image and were asked to point to the outlier, they either couldn’t select the blue square as the different one, were slower to do so, or chose the wrong square.
But when shown a similar circular pattern of green squares with one square a subtly different (and to many of us difficult to discern) shade of green, they quickly found it.
What would be easy for us was not easy for them. What would be difficult for us was easy for them. The Himba had no word for blue and thus could not easily identify a blue square from a collection of green squares—a task simple enough for most of us. Yet they could discern shades of green we would never notice.
So it seems that what language delineates, we can more easily discern. Our language shapes what we “see.”
How miraculous was this ability language gave us to step back and observe our lives—to scope out that riverbank, assess risk and opportunity, and then seek not only advantage for ourselves but also go back to our tribe and share our thoughts with others. Together we became more aware, better able to plan for and prevail over challenges, and capable of inventing solutions to problems and then being able to teach those solutions to others. Language became the building blocks to culture.
These guidelines for living, developed and passed on through language, eventually evolved into the rules that govern our cultures. Our cultures helped us make sense of our world, process events quickly, create religions and nation-states, train our children so they’d be more likely to thrive, and open up mental and physical bandwidth to do more with our big brains than just try to survive until tomorrow.
Of course, there’s a darker side to culture: when we get so focused on our rules that we turn them into decrees about how life “should” be and label people or processes as good or bad if they don’t follow the rules. This is how you should live. This is how you should dress. This is how women, children, the sick, the elderly, or the “different” should be treated. My tribe is superior to your tribe. My ways are right, which means that yours are wrong. My beliefs are right, and yours are wrong. My God is the only God. We create these complex worlds and then literally defend them with our lives. The language and rules that define our culture can cost lives as much as cultivate them.
With this vast structure of beliefs and practices that we developed for navigating the world, we actually created a new world layered on top of the one we lived every day on the proverbial riverbank. We’ve been living in two worlds ever since.
There’s the physical world of absolute truth. This world contains things we’re all likely to agree on: This is the riverbank; rocks are hard; water is wet; fire is hot; tigers have big teeth and it hurts when they bite you. No arguments there.
But there’s also the world of relative truth. It’s the mental world of ideas, constructs, concepts, models, myths, patterns, and rules that we’ve developed and passed from generation to generation—sometimes for thousands of years. This is where concepts such as marriage, money, religion, and laws reside. This is relative truth because these ideas are true only for a particular culture or tribe. Socialism, democracy, your religion, ideas about education, love, marriage, career, and every other “should” are nothing more than relative truths. They are simply not true for ALL human beings.
I call this world of relative truth the culturescape.
From the moment we’re born, we’re swimming in the culturescape. Our beliefs about the world and our systems for functioning in the world are all embedded in us through the flow and progression of culture from the minds of the people around us into our baby brains. But there’s just one problem. Many of these beliefs and systems are dysfunctional, and while the intention is that these ideas should guide us, in reality they keep us locked into lives far more limited than what we’re truly capable of. A fish is the last to discover water because it’s been swimming in it all its life. Similarly, few people discover how pervasive and powerful the secondary world of our culturescape really is. We are not as independent and freethinking as we’d like to think we are.
How can a world that exists in our heads be real? Consider these examples of mental constructs we have created that do not exist in the physical world—but that are very real to us:
We can’t draw a calorie or point to one, but we believe that eating too many will give us love handles.
We can’t touch or see meditation, but more than 1,400 scientific studies show that it influences body and mind in positive ways, from improving longevity to enhancing creativity.
You and I may not agree on how to define God, but God exists in different and unique ways to many people and much of human society is based on it. Even if one takes the view that God is imaginary, it remains a powerful syntax in the brain that influences how billions live their lives.
Corporations don’t actually exist in the physical world—you fill out forms and get a piece of paper declaring the formation of the entity. But that piece of paper establishes a series of laws and constructs that allow a group of people to come together and build something they couldn’t have built on their own.
We can’t see or touch laws—they’re just agreements among groups clustered in communities called cities, states, and countries. But they allow enormous groups of people to live in relative harmony.
There’s a widespread construct called marriage in which two people are expected to commit to each other for the rest of their lives, and yet every culture has different ideas of what that commitment should mean—physically, emotionally, and financially.
In many cultures, there’s a construct called retirement in which people are expected to alter their activities dramatically after a certain age.
There are no actual borders drawn on the Earth, and the subjectivity of borders becomes painfully obvious when we summarily redraw them, as often happens at treaty time. Yet billions of people belong to border-defined places called nations.
In this way our thoughts literally do construct our world. We create and receive these constructs. We transmit them from generation to generation. They can be incredibly empowering or completely restrictive. For the convenience of being able to operate mindlessly in a complex world, we accept many of these culturescape constructs as true. The problem is—much of them are long past their expiration dates.
If so much of what we call life is mostly created by our thoughts and beliefs, then much of what we take to be real—all the constructs, rules, and “shoulds” of the culturescape—is nothing more than an accidental tweak of history. For the most part there’s no rational basis to prove that what we’re doing is the right way or the only way to do things. Much of what you think is true is all in your head.
How’d it get there? As Steve Jobs said, it was “made up by people no smarter than you.” Once you understand that the rules aren’t absolute, you can learn to think outside the box and live beyond limits imposed by the culturescape.
Realizing that the world you’re living in exists inside your head puts you in the driver’s seat. You can use your own mind to deconstruct the beliefs, systems, and rules you’ve been living with. The rules are very real in the sense that they actually govern how people and societies act, but very real does not mean very right.
The culturescape is so strong, so self-reinforcing that it convinces us that life must unfold in a particular way. This is fine if you’d like to live a regular, safe life. There’s nothing wrong with that. The problem happens when “safety” gives rise to boredom and eventually stagnation.
We start our lives strong; as children we learn, grow, and change at an exhilarating pace. Yet for most people, once they graduate from college and start their careers, that growth slows down and eventually leads to a creeping, boring stagnation. If you were to draw this as a graph, it would look something like this:
But what if we changed the definition of life from the drawing above to the drawing below:
Notice the shift from slow, steady growth to irregular, up-and-down growth. Different, right? What if life was not meant to be safe? Instead, what if it was meant to be a beautiful joyride, with ups and downs as we take off the training wheels of the culturescape and try out things outside what is practical or realistic?
What if we accepted that things will go wrong—but that this is simply part of life’s beautiful unfolding and that even the biggest failures can have within them the seeds of growth and possibility?
Our culturescape evolved to keep us safe—but in this day and age, we no longer need to fear tigers by the riverbank. Safety is overrated; taking risks is much less likely to kill us than ever before, and that means that playing it safe is more likely just holding us back from the thrills of a life filled with meaning and discovery.
The common thread between every extraordinary individual we’ll talk about in this book is that they all questioned their culturescape. They questioned the meaning of careers, degrees, religions, ways of living, and other “be safe” rules. In many cases, their willingness to break away from the culturescape has resulted in innovations and new beginnings that will shift the future of humanity. One such person is Elon Musk.
In 2013 I got to visit the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, where I met the legendary Elon Musk. Elon is a living icon—a man who is changing the course of human history with innovations to electric cars via Tesla Motors, solar energy via Solar City, transportation via his Hyperloop idea, and space travel via SpaceX. He is arguably the greatest entrepreneur on the planet today.
I had a simple question to ask Elon. Being in the presence of a living legend made me a little nervous, so my question came out awkwardly: “Elon, you’ve done some pretty epic things, stuff most people would never even dream about. Yet what makes Elon Musk? I mean, if we could put you in a blender and blend you to distill your essence, what would that essence be?”
Elon laughed at the oddness of my question and the idea of being “blended,” but then shared the following story:
“When I was just starting out, I walked into Netscape to get a job. I just sat in the lobby holding my résumé, waiting quietly for someone to talk to me. No one did. I waited and waited.”
Elon mentioned that he had no idea what protocol to follow. He just waited, hoping someone would come and invite him for an interview.
“But no one spoke to me,” he said.
“So I said: ‘Fuck it! I’ll just start my own company.’”
The world was forever changed that day.
Elon went on to start a little classified ad company in 1995 that was called Zip2 with $28,000. He sold it in 1999 and pocketed $22 million. He then used the windfall to start a company to challenge the rules of commercial online banking—which evolved into PayPal. But he didn’t stop there.
In 2002 he started SpaceX to build a better rocket. And in 2008 he assumed the leadership of Tesla Motors to help make electric cars mainstream.
From banking to space exploration to electric cars, Elon challenged rules that few others dared question and in the process is leaving the planet with a legacy that is jaw-droppingly huge.
Elon shared a lot more, too. And we’ll explore those other nuggets of wisdom in later chapters.
But first, let me introduce Law 1.
Extraordinary minds are good at seeing the culturescape and are able to selectively choose the rules and conditions to follow versus those to question or ignore. Therefore, they tend to take the path less traveled and innovate on the idea of what it means to truly live.
The culturescape is designed to keep us safe. But as I’ve mentioned, safety is often overrated. Elon Musk answered my question, he spoke at length about his journey and what drove him—but he ended with one memorable line: “I have a high tolerance for pain.”
Elon bounced back from amazing dips as he built his companies. He spoke about how, in 2008, SpaceX’s first three rockets had blown up. A fourth failure would have made the company go bust. At the same time, Tesla Motors had failed a financing round and was running out of cash. Elon had to use up most of his windfall from the PayPal sale to finance these companies, and he had to borrow money to pay rent. Yet he came through.
While breaking away from the rules of the culturescape may indeed feel scary, I’ve often noticed a repeated pattern. The dips contain amazing learnings and wisdom that lead to sharper rises in the quality of life afterward. But you will need to brave the momentary pain of these dips. I assure you it will be worthwhile, and in this book you’ll learn how to have the power to weather those downturns.
Every crappy experience I’ve had—from having my heart broken, to almost having to leave my own company due to a conflict with a business partner, to depression and staring down gaping dark holes of the mind—led to some small-but-significant insight or awakening that boosted the quality of my life and made me stronger. I now welcome these dips with an inner delight: Wow, this sucks! I can’t wait to see what I’m going to learn here!
One of these dips, of course, was my Microsoft mishap, followed by my mediocre graduation. With no other job prospects after losing my Microsoft opportunity, I moved to New York City and went to work at a nonprofit at a salary level officially below the poverty line. My family and friends thought I was crazy.
Earning a salary officially below the poverty line meant that I could not afford my own apartment. At Microsoft I had a killer apartment with my own bedroom. In New York City I shared a studio in Chelsea with a coworker named James—a dirty little apartment with furniture that the previous tenants had salvaged from the street. Our sofa and mattresses were covered with black marks that could have been soot, mold, or worse. I dared not imagine what. But I do vividly remember one night in May 2000.
I had convinced the hot redhead from Estonia whom I had met on a work-related trip to Europe to come to New York to visit me. The only problem was that she was going to be staying with me in my awful Chelsea apartment—something I was deeply embarrassed about. Kristina arrived at my apartment and was so thrilled to be in New York that she immediately hopped onto James’s bed and started jumping up and down in the excitement of finally visiting New York.
“Um, that’s my roommate’s bed,” I said. “Mine is over there.”
“You have a roommate? So you don’t live here by yourself? But how do we . . . you know . . . have some privacy?” she asked, shocked and a little bewildered.
I pointed to the inspired solution I had rigged up so we could have privacy: a pink shower curtain that, with a few pulls, created a mock “wall” separating my little nook in the studio from the rest of the shared space with James. (Yes, I was too broke to afford real curtains.) It was plastic and ugly—but it offered just enough privacy to, um, make our nights memorable.
I seriously don’t know what Kristina saw in me, but three years later we got married. Today we have two beautiful kids and a home with really nice curtains.
I would never have met my wife if I had not quit Microsoft, lost all my other job options, and ended up broke in New York—a series of unfortunate dips lined up one by one by one that resulted in one sharp, booming spike: meeting the woman I would marry and having the children I have today.
See, there is beauty in the dips. We try to avoid them by sticking to the passed-down rules of the culturescape, only to wake up one day wondering how we missed out on so much. Don’t let that be you. Life has a way of taking care of you no matter how dark it can sometimes feel—I promise. There’s more to it, of course. You need to learn how to change the rules (Chapter 2), how to heal your mind (Chapter 3), how to remove dangerous beliefs (Chapter 4), how to learn new things incredibly fast (Chapter 5), how to be lucky (Chapter 6), how to find happiness (Chapter 7), how to know what to seek (Chapter 8). And then there’s weathering the inevitable storm (Chapter 9), finding your calling (Chapter 10), and lots, lots more. But when we set forth on this path, anyone can become truly extraordinary.
I love this quote by American football player and actor Terry Crews: “I constantly get out of my comfort zone. Once you push yourself into something new, a whole new world of opportunities opens up. But you might get hurt. But amazingly when you heal—you are somewhere you’ve never been.”
You can be 12 or 80—it’s never too late to question the rules and step out of your comfort zone.
In the coming chapters, I’ll help you examine the beliefs and systems of your life and decide which ones are moving you forward and which are holding you back. I’ll provide keys for unlocking your potential to become extraordinary. This means shaking off the shackles from cultural baggage of the past, expanding your vision of your future, and experiencing a dramatic shift in how you view life, function in the world, pursue goals, and interact with others.
Together, let’s seek a level of advanced awareness in which we can see our patterns and go beyond them and understand that, while we may belong to a particular culture or nation or religion, we’re only part of that culture or nation or religion because we happen to be born in a particular family at a particular time and place, and that the same is true of every other human being on the Earth. Our individual experiences of the culturescape made us who we are. But what happens when we learn to transcend the culturescape? When we learn that no one is better off than another? That none of us is more superior? And that each of us can be extraordinary?
Before we continue, I must issue a word of warning. Questioning many rules of the culturescape will not be easy. Here’s a partial list of all the things that could go “wrong” if you continue reading this book:
You might anger loved ones as you decide to question their expectations of you.
You might decide to leave your current relationship.
You might decide to raise your kids with different beliefs.
You might choose to question your religion or create your own customized religious system.
You might rethink your career.
You might become obsessed with being happy.
You might decide to forgive someone who hurt you in the past.
You might rip apart your current goal sheet and start anew.
You might start a daily spiritual practice.
You might fall out of love with someone and fall in love with yourself.
You might decide to leave your career and start a business.
You might decide to leave your business and start a career.
You might find a mission that excites you a lot and scares you a little.
It all starts with questioning the accepted rules of the culturescape. My friend Peter Diamandis, founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation, famously said:
I love this advice. But before you can challenge the rules of the culturescape, you have to identify the limiting rules that might be holding you back. It starts with discovering the ones you’re locked into and operating under right now (whether you know it or not).
Maybe you won’t be surprised to know that the process starts with language—with a new word, to be precise—for what language delineates, we can more easily discern.
The new word is Brule.