Mindset
The world was built by people no smarter than you. There is no secret ingredient. The secret is your mind's capacity to create, and the courage to act on it without fear.
Steve Jobs said that the moment he realized one particular thing, he began creating extraordinary things himself. What he realized was that this world was, and is constantly, built by people no smarter than him, maybe just as smart. When you realize that the world is built by people, not by structures, not by systems, when you realize that everything you want to do needs only your motivation to create it, and that there is no deification we should attach to the things happening in this world, or to the systems, or the processes, then you should stop judging and start creating. You should simply build something. Even if that something is the greatest thing in this world. Make it small at first. Build a tiny prototype, in miniature, as much as your budget allows, and realize that everything ever built by the human mind was built by people just like you, with an idea, a desire, and the courage to act. And all you need, if you have the vision and the idea, is to act without fear.
That realization does something specific to fear, which is why it mattered so much to Jobs and why it matters here. We are intimidated by the world because we treat its institutions and its famous companies and its impressive systems as if they were forces of nature, handed down from somewhere above us. They are not. They were made by people, in rooms, making decisions, most of them uncertain and afraid, no smarter than you are. Once you genuinely see that, the intimidation drops, because you stop comparing yourself to a deity and start comparing yourself to a person, and you are already a person. The wall you thought you were facing turns out to be a thing other people built, which means it is a thing you could build too.
I want to give you the secret recipe, and it comes, of all places, from a cartoon, Kung Fu Panda. In it, a panda becomes a kung fu master, and his adoptive father, a goose, makes the best noodle soup in town, and everyone wonders what the recipe for success is, because he promotes a secret ingredient. Over the course of the film the panda asks his father, tell me the secret, what is the secret ingredient. And at the end the father tells him. There is none. It is only the human capacity to perceive, and to create in the mind, that there might be an ingredient of success, a secret ingredient.
So then you ask, does it exist or not, if we create it in our own minds? Let us think about it differently. The secret ingredient in this whole story, in this whole book, is the capacity of our mind to create, and our ability to master creation. Because everything happens through our creative capacity. And that secret ingredient we create constantly in our minds, and we un-create constantly in our minds. It is almost a quantum element. It exists and does not exist at the same time. It is created and un-created, born and destroyed, through the creative capacity of our mind. There is no secret ingredient sitting out in the world waiting to be found. There is only what you are willing to believe you can build, and then build.
The reason people keep searching for the secret ingredient is that a secret ingredient would let them off the hook. If success came from a special ingredient, then not having it would excuse not succeeding. It was never available to me, you could say. But once you accept there is no secret ingredient, the excuse disappears, and what is left is uncomfortable and freeing at once: the only thing standing between you and creating something is your willingness to believe you can and then act. That is harder than a missing ingredient, because it puts the responsibility squarely on you. And it is better than a missing ingredient, because it means nothing external is actually stopping you.
This connects to the single most important trait I know, the one my wife once asked me to define in a single word as the secret of success. I told her, never give up. Because at some point you will win, not the money, but the experience you want. Never giving up, this relentlessness, this being unstoppable, means continuing to create, and to believe, and to find ways to create, no matter how many obstacles stand in your way. And that is more important than the whole process itself, more important than the lessons you take from it, more important than the success itself. Because it can secure you any success, provided your operating algorithms allow for continuous learning.
But relentlessness has to be intelligent, or it is wasted. If we keep banging our head against a wall, continuously, without understanding that we could change position, or that there might be a door a few centimeters away, then all that relentlessness is in vain. So it is just as important to watch how we are being unstoppable. Simply by never giving up, our mind will keep searching for paths, and it may even break through the wall by an existing path, even a harder, more painful one. But maybe that is not what we want. Maybe we want a beautiful experience, where the work is lighter and abundance comes more easily and faster. Never give up, yes, but look for the door before you break your head on the wall.
That distinction, between stubbornness and intelligent relentlessness, is the difference between suffering your way to a result and flowing your way to one. Stubbornness fixes on a single method and repeats it harder when it fails, which is how people exhaust themselves against walls. Intelligent relentlessness fixes on the outcome, not the method, and stays endlessly flexible about how to reach it. You never give up on the destination. You give up on failing routes constantly, cheerfully, the moment they stop working, and look for the door. The unstoppable people who also seem to suffer the least are the ones who understood this. They are immovable about where they are going and completely fluid about how.
Underneath relentlessness is resourcefulness, being full of resources, or better, finding a solution in anything. Being resourceful means being creative first, playful, able to observe every element of your ecosystem, of your life and your business, clearly, without extreme alternating emotions, negative or positive, and from there extract the resources or the ideas that lead to other resources, that help you reach the next step. Sometimes we believe we have no resources at all. When I was at the second, or third, restart of the marketing business, after going bankrupt twice, I had no money, no reputation, no knowledge, and no clear direction. And that was the interesting part, because in fact I had all of them. It was just that the emotion was so strong, an amalgam of fear and ambition at once, that I could not see them. The moment you look, with a clear mind, and it is not easy to do that under pressure, but it can be reached through meditation, through detachment, at all the resources you hold, you can build the scheme, the system, most favorable to you for winning. And it may be easier than you think.
The mistake most people make, and the place many founders go wrong, is that they try to follow someone else's path. The goal is not to follow the other person's path. The goal is to understand it, and follow your own. When you do that, you realize you have all the resources you need, because life brought you exactly where you needed to be, to understand your lessons, to become aware of the truths in your life, and to play with them and create something. When we were restarting, I stopped and said: I have a handful of people, few, loyal to me, who fit no system written in any school, with no experience in this industry, or very little. No business partners, because I owed a lot of people money. Less money, because it all went to paying the debts of the past. And it was clear that any game we played exactly the way others played it would lead us to failure, because the rules, in our company, had to be different. So we set a different system, one where each person learned what they had to, but we built on each person's actual abilities, exactly as they were, without wishing them to be something else. Not understanding the standard system turned out to be a blessing, because it forced us to invent our own game, and that game produced a bigger success than the people we considered competitors.
So being resourceful means understanding all your aspects, benefits, ideas, thoughts, people, financial and non-financial resources, including your disadvantages, and being agile enough to invent your own game and put them into play, so you can turn even your disadvantages into advantages. Entrepreneurship, contrary to what people believe, is not about business, money, books, products, or anything else. Entrepreneurship is about you and your mind, and your ability to reach where you want, to try and keep trying no matter how many obstacles stand in the way, to create and keep creating no matter how many unknowns are in the creation, and to see an idea, a vision, and hold it in your mind even when others disagree.
I want to close the loop on relentlessness, because it is the trait that ties all of this together and it is the one most easily misunderstood. Never giving up does not mean never changing course, and it does not mean grinding harder against the same wall. It means never abandoning the destination while remaining completely willing to abandon any particular road to it. My wife asked me for the one-word secret and I said never give up, but everything I have learned since is about how you never give up, intelligently, looking for the door, staying resourceful, inventing your own game when the standard one is rigged against you. Blind persistence exhausts you against walls. Intelligent persistence finds the way through, and it is the difference between the people who suffer their way to nowhere and the people who flow their way to somewhere.
And underneath all of it sits the realization I keep returning to, that the world is built by people no smarter than you. Once that is truly felt, not just understood, the fear that keeps you from starting loses its foundation, because the thing you were afraid of turns out to be made of the same material you are made of. There is no secret ingredient. There is a mind that can create, a willingness to act without waiting for certainty, and the refusal to stop until the experience you wanted exists. That is available to you today, in whatever small form your budget allows, and no one is coming to hand you permission, because no one ever had it to give.
Which is, in the end, what freedom actually is. Someone once asked me what freedom means to me, and my answer was short: the power to create without limits. Only the power to create without limits, without constraints. That is what all of this has been about. Not the money, which is easy to make and easy to lose. Not the secret ingredient, which does not exist. The capacity of your mind to create, and the courage to act on it, is the whole thing, and it is available to you right now, because the world you are looking at, all of it, was built by people no smarter than you, with an idea, a desire, and the willingness to begin. So stop judging, stop waiting for the secret, and build something small today. That is the recipe. There never was another one.