On Power Read online

  GET BETTER FRIENDS

  “Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future.” This quote has been attributed to various people. What it means is that as you progress toward the person you want to become and accumulate power in all facets of your life, some of your old friends and acquaintances may not fit into your plan. Once again, what I am saying might offend your delicate sensibilities. And that’s too bad. In our socially liberal society, we may care about each other’s feelings, but real life doesn’t care. The real world is a Darwinian place: only the strongest survive. Roll with the punches or be knocked down.

  I’m not saying this because I take some kind of pleasure in judging your friends. I’m saying this because I want you to know that powerful people must make sacrifices. And you must be aware of friends who will bring you down during your pursuit of power. The further you advance, the more these people will reveal themselves. I’ve seen too many would-be successful people fizzle out because a couple of their buddies started calling asking for money, wanting a drinking partner, wanting to send them down the rabbit hole. Lose the bum friends who hang around you only to bring you down. Lose the drinkers who are only focused on having a bar buddy. Most of all, lose the swindlers who will latch on to you the moment you get some money before they’ve sucked you dry.

  “But he’s my best friend,” you say. Unless he is helping you to gain power, no, he is not. In addition, you will be judged by the company you keep. Hang out with people who are more successful than you and people who are better looking than you. They go to better parties. They know other powerful people and they will take you places you may not get to by yourself. Yes, that means spending less time with the people you like but who can do nothing for you. Machiavellian? Manipulative? Insincere? Why, yes, all of the above. And it works.

  You must decide here and now if your goal is to maintain the friendships you already have or if your goal is to seize power. Once you have achieved your goals, your less connected, less powerful friends may still be there—or they may not be. But you have a single life, a single body, and a single legacy to consider, and you must do with it what you must to make your dreams come true. Sometimes that means saying good-bye to people who cannot help you. Your friends should be a snapshot of who you want to become in the coming months and years. The herd in which you travel converges on shared values, and if you run with the herd that values power and success, you are more likely to become powerful and successful. If you run with a herd that values relaxation, pleasantries, going to the bar and having a beer, lying around and watching sports, guess what? That’s all you are likely to achieve in that herd.

  SPEAK ENGLISH AND SPEAK IT WELL

  Communication is key to power. The better you sound speaking English, and the more convincing you are when you speak, the more you will enhance the perception of your power.

  The most powerful figures throughout history, from civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. to saints, sinners, despots, and even Gandhi, had the gift of gab. Your initial impression of a person, right after the way he looks, comes from the way he speaks.

  Language is important, and at the moment, the English language is most important, on a global scale. If this offends you, read this part carefully. I am not making a value judgment on English as superior to other languages. America is the greatest country in the world—I’ll spar with anyone on that point. But that’s not what I’m trying to say here. Not only is it incorrect to say that I’m promoting English as “better,” but these hurt feelings are a waste of time. This is about pragmatism. Tomorrow, if Mandarin becomes the dominant language on the planet, guess who is going to be opening his Mandarin 101 book that evening? Me. I speak multiple languages because they are useful, not because I like one better than the other.

  GO WHERE THE POWER IS

  Have you ever noticed that successful people all seem to know one another? Work out at the same gym? Eat at the same restaurants? Belong to the same clubs? If you answered yes, then my question to you would be . . . why aren’t you there? “It’s too expensive,” you may say. Okay, then apply for a job or an internship in one of these places. Find a way in, in any way that you can. Don’t wait for an invitation. Cold-call people like Elon Musk did, go hang out in the clubs where your heroes play like Dave Grohl did, or pester people for internships like Warren Buffett did (I’ll tell you their stories later in the book). Ask for advice. Ask to shadow your hero for a day. Ask and you may receive. But you won’t get anywhere if you don’t ask.

  I was proud to be invited to ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange. I’m not telling you about this to show off. I’m telling you because I want you to understand the reason I was invited to ring the bell: because I choose to put myself in the company of decision-makers and CEOs, and this leads to opportunity. When you keep this kind of company, you will do better in life, and you will expose yourself to many more opportunities than if you were, for example, sitting next to all the wonderful people in a baseball stadium watching a game. The hot dog you are eating may be delicious and the game you’re watching may be entertaining, but nothing you are doing will help you to advance up the ladder of power.

  That’s right: your recreational activities are one of the things holding you back. “But that’s my life, it’s what I do for fun,” you say. Business is life. It is everything. You should be that excited about your next project, your dreams. Everything else is a waste of time. Follow your dreams, not your empty pleasures. Otherwise you will spend, spend, spend, have some fun, and then die without having achieved anything.

  PRACTICE

  Everything on Earth obeys the same gravitational pull. If you bench-press a hundred pounds, it’ll be the same hundred pounds for the next guy. But there’s a difference in effort for the guy who’s pumping three hundred pounds daily. When he goes to lift the hundred, it’s going to feel quite light for him. That only comes with repetition and obsession. The same goes for every industry and skill set. When Steven Spielberg decides to make a film, do you think he begins to sweat and worry whether people are going to like it or if it will do well in the theaters? Of course not—he’s lifted that weight fifty times before. When Tom Brady throws the ball forty yards up the field toward his receiver, do you think he worries about whether the throw will be completed? No, because he’s repeated this motion infinite times, until it became part of him. Practice is the commonality among successful people. Practice over and over again, until you achieve exemplary results.

  Say you want to become a rock star. Other than being able to brush off the endless criticism you’ll incur along the way, you must be willing to practice, and perfect, endlessly. Think back to Dave Grohl. He couldn’t afford music lessons, but he sat in his room and listened to Beatles records, and he imitated what he heard with a rabid, unceasing dedication to the instruments he loved, until he figured it out. With whatever skill you intend to use to pursue power, you must be obsessed with it enough to never tire of trying to practice and perfect. As a kid, maybe you were sold the nonsense that talent is what counts. This is untrue. Talent is nothing without hard work. Be talented at working hard and you can eventually be talented at almost anything else that interests you.

  What does practice take away from the rest of your life? Well, the answer is time. So what are you willing to sacrifice to make time to practice? Most likely, you will not be able to wake up at noon and float your way to becoming a prodigy. You have to be willing to make the time and to wake up with the roosters. Even at my level, when KISS is touring, we return to the hotel after a show and we sleep, because we have to be up and on the move to our next location the following day. Five A.M. call times are not unheard-of on tour. Get over it, and get on with it. No excuses.

  ALWAYS KEEP MOVING

  This section is going to be most relevant for those of you who have already achieved success on some level. Success is wonderful, but like everything else in life, it can be fleeting. So a slight play on the old, familiar advice appl
ies: after you first succeed, try, try again. I firmly believe that you should never retire if you can help it. Retirement as a concept came into being in 1881, and the retirement age was about the same as life expectancy, which basically means that reaching retirement was not the norm.

  Not only are we living longer now than ever before, but the story surrounding retirement has changed significantly. We’re now sold retirement as a goal to work toward. Something to look forward to. Let me tell you: if your life goal is to sit around and watch television, this book is not for you. Dave Grohl could have retired after Nirvana. Elon Musk could have retired after selling his first or second company, or revolutionizing one or two industries. If you’re looking forward to retirement, you don’t have a powerful enough goal in life. Find a better goal—a dynamic goal, one that makes you excited to get out of bed every morning—and you’re not going to give retirement a second thought. Retirement, to me, is more terrifying than death.

  5

  PERSPECTIVE

  Action is what matters. But the way you view the world will directly inform how you behave in it, how you react to hardship and success, and your ability to harness power. So let’s take those blinders off and learn some hard truths.

  LIFE IS NOT FAIR AND THE WORLD DOES NOT CARE ABOUT YOU

  I’m not the first person to say this, and I won’t be the last. But it bears repeating. Life is not kind or fair. I didn’t make these rules. I’m just aware of them, and that is what gives me power. “All men are created equal” is one of those American ideals we are told to believe in, and it is a nice sentiment. But it is patently untrue. In almost every case—every facet of life, biology, society, physics, etc.—it is untrue. In fact, a more accurate statement might be “all men are created equally unequal.” Some of us are born taller. Some are born shorter. Some of us are able to run faster. And some are naturally slow. And some of us are born smarter. That’s right. Some people’s DNA naturally makes them smarter. However, it’s worth noting that members of Mensa (the organization that recognizes and lists those very bright people) are not necessarily the most powerful or rich. Being “book smart” does not necessarily equal wealth or power. By contrast, people who are the least intelligent by traditional standards can end up being the most powerful and rich. And that’s because they have other characteristics that enable them to excel. The will to win. The will to learn. The will to never give up. The will to work harder and longer hours than the guy next to you.

  We may not all be born with intellectual gifts, but we can all work longer and harder and smarter. The worst student in class can end up more powerful and rich than the straight-A student, if he plays his cards right. There are certain shortcomings that can be overcome with effort, hard work, and perhaps some luck. These are the stories we often cite when we make claims like, “You can do anything you set your mind to.” Some shortcomings, however, cannot be overcome with effort. Some things are actually impossible. Fortunately or unfortunately, the only way to gain the wisdom to know the difference between the impossible and the possible is to try, to work very hard, and to fail—a lot.

  But the fact remains that we do not start on equal footing from birth. Whether we think life should be fair is irrelevant. In fact, I believe that life should not be fair, even if we had the power to wave a magic wand and make it all fair. As a species, unfair circumstances are, counterintuitively, our greatest strength. Darwin showed us that evolution throws things at the wall to see what sticks. Whatever survives the harsh slings and arrows of reality gets passed on to the next generation. And this process makes us stronger. Harsh, unfair circumstances are the very reason we are here, with legs and brains and immune systems and problem-solving skills.

  Unfairness, hardship, asymmetry: these are sources of pressure, and pressure turns coal into diamonds. This is a concept that, sadly, we seem to be on the verge of forgetting in this country. The more compassionate we become, the more we cater to one another’s feelings, and the more we attempt to make life easier for the less fortunate—though these are all worthy endeavors—the more we forget that these utopian ideals are not the natural order of things. The further we manage to get from the feral reality of natural selection and competition, the less prepared we are to face the realities of our world. Nature may be cruel, but this is neither right nor wrong. Nature simply is, and we must be aware of and prepared for this fact in our quest to gain power.

  Political correctness tells us that nothing is more important than the way people feel. If something offends us, if it hurts our feelings, if it makes us feel that we have been treated unfairly, it is to be shunned and snuffed from the public discourse. We believe this because we are trying to love one another. Because the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and we are afraid: afraid of failure, afraid of feeling sad or angry or bitter, afraid of not accomplishing our goals or seizing our dreams, afraid of death. We want to construct an artificial world around us made of packing peanuts that will shield us from these negative and necessary parts of life, but in doing so, we leave ourselves unprepared for the realities of the world. When they hit, they are that much more surprising, that much more brutal, and that much more devastating.

  This is not a new concept. At some point in the late sixties, the self-esteem movement emerged. People decided (some say due to the guidance of a psychologist named Nathaniel Branden) that feeling good about yourself was positively correlated with real-world success and real-world results. This view is inherently solipsistic—the world does not care if it makes you sad or affects your self-esteem. The world is an unfeeling series of facts that you must come to terms with or ignore at your own peril. Self-esteem is certainly a positive emotion, and I already espoused that confidence in yourself is your first and most useful tool when you begin your journey. But self-awareness and awareness of the real world and its rougher edges are the next steps, and more useful.

  We hand out participation trophies and tell kids that they’ve succeeded as long as they tried their best. But imagine if a surgeon said, “Well, I wasn’t talented enough to perform that heart surgery. I’ve never been very good at it, and the patient died. But I really tried my best, and that’s all that matters.” This would be unacceptable. A person with this attitude would never even make it through medical school to become a surgeon. That person would fail, and failure in this case would be a good thing. Because people who think that doing their best is good enough should not be allowed to perform heart surgery. Unfair? Incredibly. And, incidentally, good for the world.

  Trying your best is not as important as results. Consequences are important. Hard work and trying one’s best are merely strategies to get results. Teaching someone correct sprinting form is the first step toward winning a race, but actually crossing the finish line first is what determines whether that person actually wins the race. No one would know the names Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps, despite their flawless form and incredible fitness level, if they did not win.

  Numerous articles and books have been written about the failure of the self-esteem movement. As with almost everything in this book, I’m not the first to plant a flag here. But in our quest for power, this source of weakness must be discarded. We must not conflate how useful self-esteem can be in pursuing a goal with the goal itself. A pile of wood, a hammer, and some nails is not the same as a house; they are just the first steps toward building a house, and they mean nothing if you do not finish the house or do not build it well.

  In Shakespeare’s plays, the fool or the court jester was often the only character who could speak the truth to the king, because he was a jokester who was not to be taken seriously. In the modern era, we can similarly look to our comedians for glimpses of the truth. Let us turn to a routine by the late, great, fire-tongued George Carlin on this topic:

  All of this stupid bullshit that children have been so crippled by has grown out of something called the self-esteem movement . . . and I’m happy to say it has been a complete failure, because studies have
repeatedly shown that having high self-esteem does not improve grades, does not improve career achievement, it does not even lower the use of alcohol, and it most certainly does not reduce the incidence of violence of any sort, because as it turns out, extremely aggressive, violent people think very highly of themselves. Imagine that, sociopaths have high self-esteem . . . I love when these politically correct ideas crash and burn . . . The self-esteem movement revolved around a single notion, the idea . . . that every child is special . . . Every child is clearly not special . . . But let’s say it’s true. Let’s grant this . . . Isn’t every adult special too? . . . And if every adult is special, then that means we’re all special and the whole idea loses all its fucking meaning.

  If it was true while Carlin was alive, it has almost certainly gotten worse now, in an age where political correctness and sensitivity are enforced to such a degree that many feel that their free speech is being infringed upon. We believe we are all special, that we are all entitled to “win” and “succeed.” But if everyone wins, and if everyone is special, then almost by definition no one wins, and no one is special. If there are no boundaries between winning and losing, then winning and losing are the same. Every time you walk out your door and expect the world to cater to your fragile feelings and subtle, sensitive ideas about right and wrong, you rob yourself of power. It’s a jungle out there. Being idealistic is fine, but being prepared is more useful and will allow you to navigate the world and use reality to your advantage, instead of being “oppressed” by it.