Daniel's notes on Your Next Five Moves

My haters keep driving me. As a matter of fact, I have a list of statements that people have made to me over the years. Most people read positive affirmations to produce confidence in themselves, but I have a completely different set of "affirmations" by people who doubted me or tried to put me down. Reading and rereading the list creates a level of fire inside me that all the money in the world can't match.

Maybe the most important hater in my life was a stranger. When I was twenty-three, my dad had his thirteenth heart attack. I rushed to Los Angeles County Medical Center, a public hospital. The people there were treating him like dirt. I completely lost it—lashing out, throwing things. "You don't mess with my dad!” I was so out of control that security had to escort me out of the hospital. During my tantrum, a guy said to me, "Hey, listen. If you had money, you could get better insurance and get better doctors to take care of your dad. But you didn't pay for this. Taxpayers are paying for this. This is called public health insurance."

After they threw me out of the hospital, I sat in my Ford Focus, and the tears poured out of me. The anger was replaced by shame. The guy was right. My dad was getting lousy care because I didn't have the money to provide him with better care. And I didn't have the money because I spent more time in nightclubs than I did in front of customers. I was at a low point in my life. The woman whom I'd thought I was going to marry had just dumped me. I had $49,000 in credit card debt. For thirty minutes, I cried like a baby.

The main reason IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture of how IBM would look when the dream was in place and how such a company would have to act, I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there. In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one.

Use Your Heroes and Visuals to Remind Yourself Who You Want to Be Who do you have in your mentoring vault, whether dead or alive, that offers perspective and counsel? Creating a visual of your heroes will challenge you to live up to the ideals of those you seek to emulate.

My office is bizarre, and it was expensive to create. The key is to start somewhere. I started off with pictures from magazines that I taped to my bathroom mirror and now have my entire office as a reminder of what inspires me. I challenge you to find a way to create a visual that reminds you to be heroic. Start with something small. You don't need to hire an artist; Photoshop will do.

Who do you want to be? That's the question we started with, and it's the one we'll end with. The only way to answer it is by becoming clear about the life you want to live. In doing so, you will immediately embody that person and act as if you are already there. It's a lifelong practice.

In his insightful book Principles: Life and Work, Ray Dalio said, "I learned that if you work hard and creatively, you can have just about anything you want, but not everything you want. Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones."

You want to choose a path that puts the odds of winning in your favor; in poker, it's called game selection. What determines if you win in any game (or business) isn't how good you are; it's how good you are relative to your competition. That's why it's so important to know your own strengths and weaknesses and find a market in which you have an inherent advantage.

The book Blue Ocean Strategy was the key resource that led me to find a game in which I could win. The premise of the book is that rather than competing in games where you're an underdog, find unexplored new markets in which you can win—and ultimately make the competition irrelevant.