“Choose Yourself” is a book authored by James Altucher that resonated with me about 7 years ago and got me started on creating. Here are three quotes in the book that I love:
- “The world is changing. No longer is someone coming to hire you, to invest in your company, to sign you, to pick you. It’s up to you to make the most important decision in your life: Choose Yourself”.
- “In this new era, you have two choices: become a temp staffer (not a horrible choice) or become an artist-entrepreneur”.
- “Every time you say yes to something you don’t want to do, this will happen: you will resent people, you will do a bad job, you will have less energy for the things you were doing a good job on, you will make less money, and yet another small percentage of your life will be used up, burned up, a smoke signal to the future saying, “I did it again.”
To me, almost everything is learnable. People are crippled on starting the things that they love because they tell themselves that they don’t know this and they don’t know that. “I want to sell this but I don’t know how to market it” or “I know marketing but I don’t know how to edit a video. ”
So what they do is look for somebody who can do it for them. For instance, we look for someone to pay or look for a business partner who can do the marketing or who can develop the product. But again, the common problem here is that people just say yes even they want to say no. Their commitment level is not on par with your commitment even if you pay them. So things will end up very expensive.
So that’s the reason why I chose myself.
Don’t get me wrong. I believe that in time, you can find someone, a good partner or employee who can have the same passions as yours. You are lucky if you can find someone overnight but that is not always the case. It took me almost two decades before I found my ideal partners and our core team in the business.
I am grateful now that I don’t micro-manage anymore on certain functions in our software business especially in service delivery so I can focus on product development and branding.
But before that happened, I chose myself. I am a programmer so I don’t have problems on the technical side but I self-studied selling, marketing and developed the courage to execute on a trial-and-error even I am naturally introverted.
I studied accounting before I was able to develop an accounting software.
I studied leadership and how to develop team culture even I didn’t like doing it.
In my mid-twenties, I studied photography, video editing, sound engineering, and writing even I don’t have specific goals but now I use those skills to create ads that our competitors couldn’t do consistently.
I studied and experimented on Google ads for our interior products family business when Pay-Per-Click was just starting and now, I run successful ads on most platforms all by learning them from YouTube.
With the massive resources online, we have no excuse not to learn things and not to choose yourself.
I remember I used to commute from our province in Quezon to Manila just to buy guitar tablatures to learn Metallica songs. But now, it is accessible anytime at your fingertips.
During the start of quarantine lockdowns last year, my passion for music playing and recording re-sparked and I am now in the process of learning and developing an online music production as a side hustle.
Every night after my main work, I am doing ear training, vocals and harmonies, composing, drum fills, guitar solos, mixing and mastering, sourcing for artists/vocalists, and studying music promotion and distributions.
I do them myself because I am choosing myself instead of convincing someone to work with me and then end up breaking the relationship because we have different wavelengths.
In any startup, you have to release your product first, build traction, prove your quality and workmanship, and then people will come to you without asking for it. Then decide later if you still want to scale up or just manage your business on a small scale. Scaling up is a whole different topic anyway because choosing yourself does not apply if you decide to grow on a certain level unless you are going to sell the business and build a new one.
In any case, I know it will be a long process before I get to somewhere. It can probably be decades so it boils down to what my real purpose is. Am I doing this to earn money and gain massive followers or likes? Money and fans are good to boost the ego, and yes, I will love it but I know that if that’s my purpose, then I will stop sooner or later.
I already have a mindset that out of 1,000 content ideas that I release for my digital transformation channel/podcast or music records that I post, 99% are not going to earn money and not going to gain likes and followers.
Well, needless to say, my purpose for my digital transformation content is to teach technology-challenged entrepreneurs about digitization and business process automation based on my stock knowledge and experience. While for music, it is just to create different playlists for my own consumption so when I get older, I can just listen to them for memories and show them to my grandchildren.
To sum up, you can learn almost anything in this age. With the right mindset and purpose, then there’s no reason not to achieve your dreams.
Just be patient. Just choose yourself.
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