Success Manifesto

Today I was thinking about love and its meaning in my life...Dictionary.com defines it as, "A deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness."However, this definition confuses me. Below are few questions/thoughts:

1. What about those times when you don't have a loving feeling and you're angry at an individual, but you still feel love? Is this a deeper feeling of love or is it just the individual trying to fool themselves that they're doing things out of love when they're really not. For example, sometimes when I was younger and my mom yelled at me, she said she was doing it out of love.
   
2. Another way of thinking of the question above is asking, "Is love interpreted or felt? In other words, do feelings of love have to be interpreted as love for them to be love? If so, then is love limited to using loving ways of talking and doing loving things (kissing, holding hands, etc.)?
3. Should a lover do what they think is best for the other person or what the other person wants? In other words, should a mother force a child not to have candy, watch violent movies, or play video games because she thinks that is the best thing even though the child really wants to do it. What about in a partner relationship? What if the boyfriend thinks the girlfriend should focus on solutions to problems instead of sharing what she feels?
   
4. Is unconditional love beyond feeling? Is it accepting everything as it is? Does this acceptance have to be felt or can it be something logical (ie, I love or don't love somebody because...)?
   
5. Is love a simple, yet complex 'knowing' that can't be explained? Is this 'knowing' love at first sight?
   
6. Is it love physiological? spiritual?
   
7. How did the concept of soul mates arise?
   
8. Can one be loving to everything, always?
   
9. Should one just let love develop or should one force/develop it?

Posted by Michael Simmons at 05:20 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (37)

Time management seems deceptively simple. In fact, some have even widdled it down to the following two actions:

1. Plan the action (something you're passionate about)
   
2. Act on the plan

Imagine. You're working on the computer with ten windows open; with your phone, TV and instant messenger on; and with your email program automatically checking and alerting you of new emails every few minutes. Does all or part of this sound familiar? Do you ever find yourself in the middle of a distraction such as talking to a friend online having completely forgotten what you had originally set out to do?

I would argue that we create these distractions internally and that they are symptoms of a false belief. To find this false belief, we must find what causes the symptoms, not simply try to eliminate them. Simply eliminating them will lead to the arising of new distractions.

The reality of life is that there's some stuff we like doing and there's some stuff we don't like doing. The activities that don't get done are often the ones we don't like. This dilemma seemingly leads to two solutions:

1. Get rid of the activities we don't like.
   
2. Learn to like everything.

One example of this is the beginning of passionate/romantic relationships. These relationships are often characterized by not being able to see any flaws in the other person and spending lots of time together. However, over time, flaws begin to arise and the initial passion may disappear. At this point, the relationship often ends with the leaving person citing the other person changing as the reason for the break. However, the change, for the most part, is internal.

I would argue that individuals have similar relationships with activities in life. This can be seen when they jump from one project they're passionate about to another project without ever really getting anywhere. It can also be seen on a micro-level when people procrastinate on small tasks.

Yes, we should do what we're passionate about, but we should also learn to love what we don't like in every moment. Furthermore, we can actually see the things we don't like as opportunities for growth.

With that said, the best time management strategy I can offer is, "Be comfortable being uncomfortable" and "Find the passion in every moment. Learn to see every moment as something to cherish and appreciate, not something to avoid and change".

Posted by Michael Simmons at 07:49 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (16)

"There are only two ways to live your life: as though nothing is a miracle, or as though everything is a miracle." -- Einstein

It is often during the anomalous, mysterious moments in life that we make the decision above. We must choose to either connect the missing dots in our understanding of the world with myth or with causality.

For example, let's say that somebody comes into your life and helps you out of a major problem or helps you achieve a goal at just the right time. The mythical explanation could be that everything is controlled by fate and the right things always happen at the right times. The causal explanation could be that by meeting people with similar interests, you are more likely to run into people you connect with.

Or consider, "The Birthday Problem". How many people do you think must be in a room before the probability that some share a birthday, ignoring the year and ignoring leap days, becomes at least 50 percent? Conventional wisdom would say you would need a large number of people for this to happen. According to this wisdom, if you had the same birthday as somebody in your class, you might create some sort of myth to connect the dots. However, in actuality, according to the law of large numbers, it is more likely than not that in any gathering of 23 or more persons, two of them will share a birthday.

I've come to the belief that that the different ways of looking at the world are not mutually exclusive and that one way of looking at the world is not inherently better than the other. I believe and have seen both ways used in empowering ways and/or limiting ways. In the end, I think applications of ones beliefs are key.

For example, let's take the American myth that anybody can achieve their dreams. According to one of my professors 48% of people in America believe that they will be in the top 1% of the richest people in the country. So obviously, 47% of the people are wrong. However, I still believe that people need to keep up hope and reach for the stars so the belief could be used in an empowering way. Similarly, somebody with a more probabalistic view of the world might look more into how the 1% of people got where they are and then replicate important parts of the strategy thus increasing the probability they fall in the 1% category.

Posted by Michael Simmons at 07:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (13)

For the next few months, I plan to focus my time on the following:

1. School
   
2. Meditation (1.5 hours/day)
   
3. Extreme Entrepreneurship
   • Building advisory board
     
   • Raising funds
     
   • Helping to launch workbook
     
   • Writing the second edition of the book
     
   • Further building systems (web site, etc.)
     
   • Looking for distributor
   
   
4. Writing Fiction Book with Best-Seller and Movie Potential (50 pages in so far)

Posted by Michael Simmons at 12:54 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (9)

I started blogging in late June of 2003 and updated it fairly continuously until January of 2004, making over 200 total posts in all. Some of my general musings on it are:

1. Word-of-Mouth: In the back of my mind, I pictured the blog quickly growing via word-of-mouth and having lots of regular readers. While it did garner regular readers, the number was fairly low. This probably has to do a lot with my writing style, how long I've been writing, the interestingess of what I write about, and so on.
   
2. Managing the Network: Overall, I thought the tool was very effective in keeping in touch with people of varying relations to me. With a growing network of contacts, I'm quickly realizing that actually effectively managing my network is going to be a larger obstacle than growing it.
   
3. Accelerating the Network: I thought the blog was a very powerful tool to accelerate initial growth of contacts. For example, let's say I just met somebody at an event. By reading my blog, they can rapidly learn more not only about certain things I've done, but who I am and how I think.
   
4. Inspirational/Useful: I did get comments from regular readers of the blog that they found it inspirational read.
   
5. TIME!: In the end, the largest challenge to blogging was the time spent creating a quality entry, which is about 1.5 hours for me.

   In the end, did the benefits outweight the costs? In other words, was it worth it? To that question, I must give the answer that nobody likes to hear, which is 'maybe'. I think I learned a fair amount, which I can apply to making a blog that is better moving forward. Here are the preliminary changes, I plan to make:

   1. Make less frequent, but higher quality posts.
      
   2. Measure what works and what doesn't.
      
   3. Integrate Sheena and I's blog more. If you haven't noticed, we are dual-blogging now.
      
   4. Generate word-of-mouth. I plan to spend more time thinking about what I'm going to write about and making the writing more interesting.
      
   5. Leverage Notifications. Movable Type has a feature where whenever new blog entries are made, you can notify people of the entry and send them an excerpt. I would like to advertise this feature to people when they sign up for the quarterlyEE Newsletter so that Extreme Entrepreneurship is on their mind more often.

Posted by Michael Simmons at 12:28 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (12)

It has been nearly four months since my last full length post. Let me first start off by saying that while a lot has not changed in my life, a lot has changed in my thinking. Let me start off with the life updates though:

Life Updates:

1. I've chosen to graduate NYU in August. I'm taking 13.5 credits over the summer, which includes the following classes: managerial accounting, global history, consumer behavior, and two independent studies.
   
2. Upon graduation, Sheena and I have chosen to raise funds and focus on the publishing company full-time.
   
3. Sheena and I have moved from Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn, NYC to Washington Heights in Manhattan, NYC on April 1st after a 24-hr moving marathon (no exaggeration). The area is completely different than any I've ever been in before. Rather than go into details, I will just say that it is very much like living in a different country. The first language is Spanish, not English.
   
4. I spoke to the freshman class at the Stern Business School at NYU. It was the largest audience I've ever spoken to and I thought it went very well.
   
5. My dog, Ginger, died.
   
6. For spring break, I went to a 10-day meditation retreat in Illinois. It was absolutely one of the best experiences I've ever gone through! More that later.

Posted by Michael Simmons at 12:03 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (21)