Why and How to Be a Modern-Day Hermit
Short answer: To make sense of the world.
Better: To find Self, who was never really lost.
Of course, there is a story behind this - one which has taken my whole life to journey.
I grew up on a farm in Missouri, and returned there when I got "fed up" with the corporate cult world I found myself living in. The world had quit making sense and had become more destructive as the veils slipped away one by one - disclosing the raw intentions of the people around me.
But then as a child, I thought to be a hermit would be a wanted solution. None of what I was taught made very much sense. Classmates were often reacting more than acting sensibly.
Once I finished high school (over my protests, and my mother's insistence) I left the state with an engineering firm. From there I traveled even further and wound up in California, working for a scam/cult which was so deeply intense that it took me 20 years to get to the heart of why it appeared to work, but actually didn't. (Hint: it ran on fear.)
It was during a vacation on the family farm where I found two things:
- Peace was found in the heart, could be generated at will.
- Some people were honestly caring and friendly, away from the press of cities.
Since masses of people tend to compound the errors they were brought up to follow and repeat, I felt I needed to retire from these in order to study and understand that single point of unlimited peace I had found by accident - yet my long time in the corporate cult had not prepared me to find or accept.
Peace is an individual accomplishment.
People massed up together don't seem to be able to achieve it, as their self-chosen programming mutually reinforces errors in logic and emotional response.
Individuals can achieve enlightenment, but not cultures, nations, or groups.
So the effort to achieve world peace is necessarily by reaching out to individuals and help them singly.
And this is what is found to be effective in any marketing - there is no "mass appeal." There are aggregate desires which are common to the bulk of humanity at any given moment. But these are broad - security, freedom, control, respect, prosperity, etc. No one product is able to channel any of these to get mass appeal (and purchases) for any but the most fleeting periods (fads.)
Even when given a choice of only two candidates, the bulk of the people in any nation seldom vote at all. This gives us a recent ploy of using an aggregate of "oppressed" minorities who can be gotten to the polls (in addition to having pets and zombies vote) to elect a politician instead of appealing to the true majority for a response. But politics is a game of control and enforcement. Which is why most people ignore it. And why comedians are becoming sought-after news sources about politics. (Did you know the one of the most most effective way to influence a politician in office - besides ample "campaign contributions" - is to very publicly laugh at them?)
Learning to Ignore Conventional Wisdom
Probably the hardest lesson was accepting that the bulk of knowledge and wisdom out there is bunk. Actually worthless shinola.True, the way our culture is set up, this data keeps people alive as long as they follow the trudging footsteps laid out for them. Government keeps getting in the way with their obstacles, and business keeps finding ways around those and other obstacles.
But there is no real system, just a patchwork quilt of "now you're supposed to's" which lead to a very, very complicated way of life which ultimately leaves you broke and dependent. We're just talking Western Culture here, which is rapidly being spread around the globe as the "new normal".
There is an old saw which I'd first encountered with Earl Nighingale - that out of one hundred people, maybe 5 people will become rich, maybe 15 more will wind up even, and the rest will be broke by the end of their lifetime.
And we aren't talking about the uber-rich, which is really a smaller percentage, closer to .01 percent than the "1%" typically repeated in the "mainscream media."
Rich is actually anything beyond financially free. And it's nothing anyone/everyone couldn't achieve with a little study and work.
You, however, have to have a "millionaire mindset" in order to get there. Now I'm not talking about having a million bucks. I'm saying that you have to be willing to be one in a million in your mindset, your belief system, in order to accomplish it.
Because the world is set up, as Nightingale covered in his "Strangest Secret" recording, to ensure the least among us can still succeed. So the rest have to carry their burden along with our own. Just the way life is set up these days.
It doesn't mean you have to carry more burden than necessary, however.
The 80/20 Secret Rule to Success
All the most powerful laws and rules seem to be hidden in plain site.One of these is the 80/20 Pareto Principle, where an economist observed that out of any given wheat field, 80% of the crop comes from 20% of the acres planted. It's been observed by others to be true in different fields - such as 80% of any business income comes from 20% of their clients. And 80% of the problems in an organization can be traced to just 20% of the employees.
This has another split, which shows up empirically as about 97/3 or 99/1. In any given population, the police force finds that about 97% of the crimes are committed by the same 3% of the population - a small town will only have to look up a handful of the same people to find out who committed that crime. Shades of "Casablanca's" rounding up the 'usual suspects' for interview.
And if you narrow down your own activities to just that 3% or even 1% of all that you do, then you'll find yourself focusing on just those few things which make all the difference in your own life. Perry Marshall has recently become championing this one concept. There is also a book by Gary Keller called "The One Thing" that helps you narrow down your attention to just those few items which bring you nearly all your income, bliss, and cheer.
This also brings up ignoring the usual data streams which keep you tied up and distracted by the constant stream of ineffective and false datums which the politicians and their mainscream media lackeys push to preserve their control over your life and everyone else's.
Between 97% and 99% of all you run into as "vital data" in any field is pure bunk.
You'll find that if you simply dig a little bit below what is "successful" you'll find the real tips and tricks that make it all work.
If you read books by people who have done studies on wide swaths of a category and boiled this all down, you'll find simple and common-sensical datums which you probably already know - but were submerged under all sorts of interpretations.
Dr. Thomas J. Stanley wrote two bestsellers, "The Millionaire Next Door" and "The Millionaire Mind." In this, he consistently shows that millionaires are created sheerly by their own bootstrap efforts every single year. These are focused individuals who achieve their wealth by being frugal and reinvesting any spare wealth into passive income sources on a continuing basis. There are no real secrets to this - it's an extension of the "get ahead" mentality which all 2nd generation immigrants have in common. The 3rd generation doesn't get it, and will often inherit wealth and the better education their rich parent afford them. That education, however, is their doom - they will stay stuck in the middle class and will probably only break even at the end of their lives.
The two top all-time bestsellers on success are Napoleon Hill's "Think and Grow Rich" and Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People." Both of these authors studied literally hundreds of people and their lives to extract the few key data which can create success for any person.
You want to collect a library of books where the author studied and extracted data in this fashion. Study, restudy, then memorize these and then find your own success paved ahead of you. Ignore everything else. Too simple.
Learning Sensible Solutions
This is the crux of why I had to remove myself from any city or concentration of people. Any environment you have reinforces your belief-system. The people you live with or near, their reactions - all these will assist you to adopt mental programs which enable you to best survive in that environment.If you don't have a program for a particular situation, the people around you will provide you with suggestions based on conventional wisdom.
And forget trying to figure out what makes sense if you are constantly interrupted or distracted in your chain of thought. That's why libraries are quiet. City life, with it's sirens and overloud street music, neighbors with their arguments and TV shows blaring - that won't give you anything except the "Muggle" version of success. The "Average", the "Ordinary."
There's no truth in the idea that "thoughts are contagious." It is true that people seem to process inputs around them for about 3 days. (And while a mental habit can be replaced in 30-40 days with conscious effort, any belief-system you've adopted wholesale - such as cult practices - will take around 10-12 years a before they quit cropping up every day - you've been depending on these for so long, you are going to have to replace a huge amount of mental habits.)
Meanwhile, the "News" and Academia (as well as public schools) only teach how to be average, how to hold a job, how to get along. None teach you how to entrepreneur, how to get rich, how to become insanely successful.
You can see now why you should leave the TV turned off (or donate it to charity, or make it into a TiVo-clone and only view to what you want. Meanwhile, get your news and weather from the Internet, where you can pick and verify your news-sources.)
Because their definition of "success" is having and keeping a 9-to-5 job and being nice to everyone you meet, not saying anything that might offend anyone. They don't even teach how to retire successfully.
The successful, meanwhile, are the ones who often have numerous "failures" in start-ups both before and after their "big break" which makes them insanely rich. They learn from these failures and even their successes out so that on the whole they are far more successful than unsuccessful in anything and most everything they attempt.
Our schools and mainscream media only celebrate the one-in-a-million stars whose trail no one can actually follow. What they don't show is the immoral backroom deals politicians inevitably have to agree to in order to get elected. They don't show the complete nightmare any celebrity has when they no longer have any privacy and have to spend enormous sums on security in order to protect what's left of their privacy.
Anyone can get rich. Whether one wants to be rich and famous is a different question entirely. You won't learn either in school, however. This is why the vast majority of the richest top 20 in America never finished college. They couldn't learn what they wanted to know inside those straitjacketed curricula.
How to Discover What's True
You start by throwing away. You have a 1-in-5 chance that any person or datum or text you encounter will be lying to your face - even if they are just repeating what someone else said.So you have to be willing to throw away the bulk of what you study or read or see or hear.
Again, study people who have done real-life studies. Not academic controlled experiments. Napoleon Hill studied over 500 of the actual makers and shakers of his day. Dale Carnegie is reputed to have critiqued over 150,000 speeches from the people who paid to take his speaking course - average folks. Stephen Covey studied 200 years of American self-help literature before he wrote his "7 Habits" of Highly Effective People."
The "Accidentally Rich" Can't Teach You Much
The worst advice I've ever seen were from people who accidentally got rich early in life and then considered themselves an expert in that area. One guy struggled for years at MLM before he found out people made more money selling training to MLMer's than they did in MLM itself - and then started making millions with Internet Marketing schemes, not any Network Marketing opportunity itself. If it weren't for hiring someone to take over that business, he would have blown all those millions on "doo-dads" such as expensive cars and wasteful business practices. In fact, his advice simply won't work - unless you extract what actually makes it work and discard all the rest.(In Internet Marketing, there is a little group of people who are self-styled guru's and make money from the naive. They refer to each other and pay affiliate sales to their fellow "guru's" who have big mailing lists of greenhorns who are addicted to the "get rich quick" bug. You'll find they are each chasing the "next big thing" and teach nothing basic or long-term. In short, they are selling expensive edutainment without any real value. Blind leading the blind. Keep your day job - you'll need it.)
You may also want to invest in books which are continuing bestsellers long after their authors died. The truths in these books, as well as the quality of presentation, still continue to remain true. Look at Aesop's Fables, the Gospels of Jesus, Lao Tze's Tao, Sun Tzu's Art of War. There are more modern books, such as Norman Vincent Peale's "Power of Positive Thinking" which have been found widely workable by millions.
The main test is, "Will it work for me?" Not everything any one writer says will work for everyone or anyone. You have to be willing to reject everything until proven (especially what I say.) Only you can prove if what you read, hear, or see is workable for you - whether it will make you more successful in life.
It's not all the glowing reviews on Amazon which make it a good book - it's whether the majority of what that author says actually ends up helping you. Last I checked, the majority of book reviews were false or just suck-ups. Like Internet Marketing, where these "testimonials" are faked or exaggerated.
Statistically, it's one in 10,000 who will make an actual success in any line of business or any opportunity or any training course. 3 percent will finish the course. Just 3 percent of those will make their money back. Only 3 percent of that last bunch will become an outrageous success. Do the math: 1/10,000.
Same goes for people you work with. Accept help conditionally. Hire slowly, fire quickly. See if you can contract out specific functions for a fixed payment. Hire services with no future commitments. These people will do decent work for you or they'll be replaced with someone else's company. Way different from having people suck up in order to keep their job.
Last piece of advice: fire your boss. This will give you more freedom than you can imagine. Your success has always and only been in your own hands. Everything which isn't leveraging your time invested is a time-suck. A fixed amount per hour or per year is a waste of your time. Passive income from producing a single product you then re-sell over and over (especially digital products which have almost no overhead) is the best leverage for your time.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is just holding you back. Fire them. I've been there, done that. A J.O.B. just means "Just Over Broke" - you work only hard enough to not get fired, and they only pay you enough to keep you from quitting. If it weren't for your bills, you wouldn't need to keep that job. Get rid of your bills and get rid of your job. Get enough passive income coming in to cover your monthly expenses - then any income after that can be reinvested toward getting as rich as you want to be. It's just that simple.
Summary
- These data above I've learned from the School of Hard Knocks. I've worked at a variety of jobs - entry-level and management. I've done freelance. But the best boss I've ever had is myself, as well as the best employee I've ever hired.
- I've had some good bosses in my time. Some who really cared. But they all got fired one way or another. And I finally quit hiring them.
- I only really started getting rich after I became a hermit and threw away everything I had been told, replacing it with what I'd learned from my own testing.
- The best truths I've found were found in multiple books by different authors, but almost written the same.
- Study people who have studied people and boiled down what they knew. Then boil that knowledge down for yourself.
- Quit following the herd. Spend your days in quiet study. Narrow down what you've learned into those data which consistently and routinely work - for you.
- If you have to, go be a hermit for awhile (after you arrange your finances so you can.)
- You're already a success - you just have to manifest it. Throw away all reasons you can't and you'll only be left with reasons you can.
