The self-improvement industry is full of contradiction. Perhaps the most obvious, is that most of the people who buy self-improvement products don’t seem to improve.

This leads to the perception by most effective and intelligent people that something is off. The industry must be either a cult or a scam.

My close friend Bjoern Herrmann perceives one of the leading self-improvement “gurus”, Tony Robbins, as such:

Tony Robbins implicates a short cut to personal success and happiness. I’d compare him to a pill of ecstasy – he makes a certain type of people temporarily feel better. This delays them from practicing continuous introspection and prevents them from maturing as healthy human beings. Instead they are being misled by false excitement. Go on his website and read these titles “The path to permanent weight loss’ or the ‘the money masters’ … the absolute wording in his messaging sounds to me like a scam to exploit people who lost their internal compass. Those people need thoughtful and ongoing support of their family and friends.  If I think about it there is not much difference between Tony Robbins business and a secte or a radical political movement. In fact many abusive and criminal sects/political movements started off as self help movements.

There is no doubt that the self help industry attracts people who are looking for a quick fix. Most of the people attracted to the movement are undoubtedly struggling and a bit broken. It does appear that most fail to make significant changes in their life because they have trouble following through and are unable to establish a work ethic of continual practice after the emotional high of the weekend or program wears off. (This problem is much wider spread than the self-improvement industry. People everywhere get excited by peak experiences and performances but fail to find sufficient motivation to endure the daily grind of building anything worthwhile. Many kids like playing sports, but few get up before school to practice everyday. Conferences generate many business ideas and partnerships, but few follow through and implement them.)

However, it is important to note that struggling souls looking for answers in a self-help guru may not be living admirably, the intention of buying a self-improvement product is more admirable than simply doing nothing and wallowing in self-despair. At least these people are trying to improve their situation. The majority of people with problems have resigned from trying to fix them.

Because the quality of the audience of the self-improvement industry is low, the quality of the content unjustifiably gets a bad rap. I’ve looked at enough of the industries’ material to know that there are many high quality products and techniques, do have the potential to create lasting change in people’s lives, if practiced regularly. I can say this from personal experience, having adopted many habits and techniques into my own life. But it does require a discerning eye though to separate the wheat from the chaff. For business reasons, I will discuss below, a lot of the gold is surrounded by crap as a result of a corrupting allure of profits.

I must agree with Bjoern that many info-marketers do have scammy marketing tactics. It is sad that many have adopted these tactics, especially when many of them have important ideas to share. I know this industry is particularly fond of the A/B test, so the messaging must have evolved this way because it is more effective and drives more sales. Even so, the moral judgment on scammy marketing tactics, isn’t so cut and dry. If the product is really good, how different is a scammy marketing tactic from a parent trying to get a child to eat their vegetables by singing “hear comes the choo choo train” and shoveling a spoonful of peas into their child’s previously clenched mouth.

On the other hand it is quite deplorable if it’s not just the marketing tactics that change, but the core content also morphs to pander to the quick fix mentality of the desperate consumer, as it has with the best selling book The Secret, which teaches people that the secret to life is positive imagery. All you need to do is want something bad enough, and if you just focus your intentions strongly enough on what you want, you will get it. (Watching Dave Chappele’s satirical take on The Secret is a must). Positive thinking is a necessary but not sufficient condition for goal achievement. But it sure would be convenient if that was all that was needed!

If it’s true that scammy marketing tactics get broken individuals in the market majority to open up their hearts, minds and wallets, then that means there is a serious void for the people who are really making waves in the world, who are scared away by these marketing tactics. Because I do think there is real value in many of the top-tier self-improvement products, that could help many effective people reach a greater percentage of their potential.

This is the paradox of the self-improvement industry. It starts out with well intentioned high quality content but because greater profits are found with the mindless majority, it inevitably evolves to cater to them, shunning the world’s more effective, independent thinkers, who are the ones who actually have the inter-personal foundation to apply these techniques to radically improve themselves. But the marketing causes the healthy to turn a blind eye, and the sick to buy a remedy they cannot absorb.

This blog post is part 1 in my 3 part series on Mental Health. You can find part 2 here: Psychiatric Discontents & A Movement Towards A Better Model Of Mental Health, and part 3 here: Towards A New Paradigm of Mental Health And An Enlightened Society.

The world has way too many people on medication. It is destroying their potential to create a life they love. And it is destroying the world.

We medicate to treat real, serious symptoms, but from my own experience, I don’t believe our medication practices are treating the true cause. And we won’t treat the true cause until we stop attributing mental health problems to something out of our conscious control, such as genetics and biochemical imbalances.

The cause for most mental health problems is that straight up most people just lose the battle against themselves. 

People may be in bad environments. They may have the deck stacked against them but true health will only be found when people confront their internal reality honestly and valiantly.

It is no easy task, but most mental illness can be solved if people learned to control their thoughts and were able to successfully navigate their way to healthy environments that helped them achieve their goals.

Instead of helping people engage in that fight, we numb them into submission with medication.

In my own personal journey I had dark days as a teenager starting around 15, as I dealt with my dissatisfaction with life. I had thrown away belief in god and was dealing with existential angst. I had sports injuries that prevented from competing, stripping my personal identity bare, which at the time was tied to my athletic competence. I had trouble adjusting to the high school social scene. I found my classmates unfriendly and actively mean. I couldn’t find anyone who would have the conversations I wanted to have. I was asking big questions that nobody I knew I found relevant. I felt misunderstood, alone and arrogant. I felt my high school was wasting my time, trying to give me an elite education for a world that no longer existed.

While my particular form of malady may be rare, in experiencing deep pain as a result of dissatisfaction with the world, I’m sure I’m not alone. I could have let my pain consume me. Instead, I used the pain as fuel to find greener pastures. I searched for ideas I was passionate about, and people I could relate to who could support me in creating the life I wanted.

I think if I talked to a doctor about my depression they would have given me medication. I believe this would have destroyed my life.

My acute pain might be gone, but its absence would delude me into believing nothing was wrong and prevent me figuring out how to create a life I love. My life would be pervaded by a permanent background noise, whispering, “Something is missing.”

It is not pain we should seek to avoid. It is settling for a life anything short of our dreams. Ideals may not be achievable but we should never stop trying to get closer to them. 

In some circumstances it is probably beneficial to dull our senses to give our traumas time to heal and the mind a chance to reset. But anything more than a few weeks or months is a resignation of your life.

The reality is that, it is fucking hard to get life where you want it to be. Right now, my life is almost everything I have wanted it to be. But boy has it taken a long time. I think this journey probably started for me at 15. That means it was a fight that lasted more than 6 years. The first time I really felt the tide turn was two years ago when I went to a spa with my friends at the end of a six week experience at an innovation camp in Berlin called Palomar5. I remember lying on my back in a heated pool, with my eyes closed, feeling for the first time that my life was finally on track.

But on track did not mean I had arrived. It was a month before Palomar5 that I decided I was going to figure out how to increase the success rate of startups and try to do my part to accelerate the global pace of innovation. It would take nearly two more years of hard work and persistence, and ignoring lot of people who told me I was too young, too inexperienced and too naive to accomplish what I set out to do, before my ideas would finally gain traction in the form of the Startup Genome.

I now have excellent mental health, excellent physical health, a close-knit circle of friends and a thriving startup. But getting here has felt like climbing a monumental mountain, requiring a tremendous amount of mental toughness and interpersonal work. It’s maybe been only in the last 10 days since the successful launch of the Startup Genome Compass that I have felt I truly reached the mountaintop. If this is true, then it was a 6 year journey. But every end has a new beginning and I am now setting my sights on a new much larger mountain.

I worry that most people haven’t built up the mental toughness to complete this journey. They don’t have the fortitude to stare darkness in the face and keep fighting until they create the life they want. At the same time I believe this inner strength is inside everyone. All people are connected to a long lineage of descendants who have overcome incredible adversity on the journey from Early Primate to Modern Man.

Six years felt like s tremendously long time, and at times I doubted I would ever make it. But I never gave up. If I had to, I would have kept going for 20 years, 30 years, my entire life, because anything less isn’t a life worth living.

My hope is that more people find it in themselves to embark on this journey and battle themselves and their environment until they carve out a life they love. At this point, I don’t have a systemic solution, but I wanted to point out in this post that most of the world’s 6.77 billion people are not achieving their full potential, and until we acknowledge our society’s overzealous prescription of medication as a growing part of the problem, society will be continuing to dig its own grave.

This blog post is part 1 in my 3 part series on Mental Health. You can find part 2 here: Psychiatric Discontents & A Movement Towards A Better Model Of Mental Health, and part 3 here: Towards A New Paradigm of Mental Health And An Enlightened Society.

Today I turn 21 years old.

I feel fortunate to have been given the necessary conditions and opportunities to get where I am today. I want to thank my parents Peggeth and Jeff, my twin sister Zoe, my brother and golden retriever Casey (who passed away late last year), and my many friends who have supported me on this journey and have brought so much to my life. I hope I have brought as much to yours.

We are living in a special time in human history. Never have we possessed greater opportunities and greater challenges.

The next few decades are shaping up to be pretty decisive for humanity, but I think we’re up to the challenge.

In fact, I’m excited as hell about the future.

My heart pounds and my blood rushes as I think about the increasing role my friends and I will play in shaping this bright future of ours.

For many reasons, society seems to have taken a step backwards or sideways the last few decades. Society’s richest and powerful have not been doing a good job. While the intensity of their pursuit of wealth and progress is commendable, things clearly are not working. Markets are collapsing, democratic governments are dysfunctional, too many authoritarian regimes still have not been overthrown, leaving billions in a stagnating despair, and our ecological system is on the brink of disaster.

As best as I can tell, somehow our (previously adaptive) worldview has failed to evolve and is still directed at a world that no longer exists.

While the future looks like bleak to many, I remain optimistic simply for the fact that we have so much potential to get it right if we can direct our time on energy on the right goals, and pursue them in the right way.

Technology and Capitalism together have created an economic engine so powerful that we can now accomplish in a decade what would have taken hundreds, if not thousands of years in the past.

My work so far, has been characterized by trying to comprehend the bigger picture, and learning the inter-personal and extra-personal skills necessary to play a role in creating the future scenarios that seem brightest.

After many years of intellectual exploration, the last year I’ve been fairly single-mindedly laying the foundation for the Startup Genome Project to transform the way startups are built in order to accelerate the pace of innovation all over the world.

With the successful launch of the Startup Genome Compass 10 days ago, the future of the company is incredibly bright and I believe it is the most important thing I could be working on right now. But that means it will probably be many years before it’s time for me to shift my daily work to the even bigger picture I’ve been discussing in this post.

But in the meantime I’d still like to contribute to the transformation of our worldview, which desperately needs evolving. So, yesterday I compiled a list of the patterns, principles and values I’ve discovered in my first 21 years of life that I believe encircle many of the truths we need to adopt, both individually and communally, for our society to evolve. It is not an exhaustive list, but it is pretty comprehensive. (Though, admittedly mostly focused on systems, goal achievement, inter-personal effectiveness and self-awareness)

You can find that list below. And hopefully updated semi-regularly on this page, which will live in the menu bar.

Let me know in the comments a few of the patterns, principles and values you believe are most important for our individual and societal evolution.

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What makes startups succeed or fail? This is a question we are intent on answering. We believe increasing the success rate of startups has the potential to dramatically increase economic growth all around the world. On May 28th, we released our first report at startupgenome.cc. On August 29th we released our first benchmark application, the Startup Genome Compass to help startups reduce premature scaling.

The role of technology startups in our global economy has never been more important. Startups may seem insignificant compared to large multinational companies that have trillions of dollars of wealth sloshing around in public markets, but a recent Kauffman Foundation study found that the majority of job growth in the United States is driven by technology startups.

The power of information technology has been steadily increasing for the last three decades and has recently reached a level of maturity that has started to trigger a reorganization of the global economy. It has never been easier or cheaper to create a startup thanks to infrastructure like open source software, software as a service, cloud hosting, globally ubiquitous payment processing, viral distribution channels, real-time collaboration, on demand logistic services and hyper-targeted advertising.

As a result, the pace of change is speeding up and the implications of this are immense. Billion dollar startups are emerging faster and faster. The quick ascent of startups like Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Zynga and Groupon are harbingers of a major structural economic change on the horizon. The service sector has dominated the global economy for the last few decades but its sun will set. Just as machinery replaced most manual labor, software will replace repetitive intellectual tasks. Turbo Tax eliminated many accountants, Amazon eliminated many retail jobs and E-Trade eliminated the majority of stockbrokers. In the near future jobs that are more complex yet still methodical will also be replaced by software. Creative Commons is reducing the need for lawyers, Khan Academy shows how one good teacher can replace many bad teachers and the profession of doctors will be disrupted by startups like Halcyon Molecular that turn healthcare from emergency care into a preventative self-care. Balancing out that massive decrease in jobs will be what Richard Florida calls the rise of the creative class.

As the waves of disruption come ever faster, the only way for a company to be competitive will be to behave like a startup. In the landmark book the Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen found large companies are excellent at sustaining innovation but by and large fail at disruptive innovation. Startups thrive on creating disruptive innovations. Recently, thought leaders in entrepreneurship have come to the conclusion that in order for large companies to be effective at disruptive innovation they need to make structural changes that make them behave nearly identically to startups.

The increasing economic importance of startups, along with decreased barriers to entry has caused interest in entrepreneurship to explode around the globe. New startup ecosystems are being built up all over the world with the hopes of replicating the success of Silicon Valley. Spearheading this movement are startup accelerators like Seedcamp, Techstars, Opinno, Founders Institute, 500 Startups, and Sandbox, but they are accompanied by hundreds of others. On an individual level, the brightest people worldwide, are increasingly seeing entrepreneurship as the career path of choice. The release of The Social Network has captured the imagination of today’s young people, and catapulted Mark Zuckerberg to the same status as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street almost 25 years ago.

But despite the increasing economic importance of scalable startups, we still don’t understand the patterns of successful creation. More than 90% of startups fail, due primarily to self-destruction rather than competition. For the less than 10% of startups that do succeed, most encounter several near death experiences along the way. Simply put, we just are not very good at creating startups yet.

Eight months ago we launched the Startup Genome Project, with the goal of increasing the success rate of startups and accelerating the pace of innovation around the world by turning entrepreneurship into a science. If successful, it’s hard to imagine the type of impact this could have.

Some of the world’s biggest transformations occurred when arts were turned into sciences. The scientific revolution in the 16th century triggered the age of enlightenment. The development of scientific management, which peaked in the early 1910’s, made large companies dramatically more efficient and arguably was one of the biggest causes of the explosion of wealth the world saw in the last century.

We believe the effects of cracking the code of innovation by turning entrepreneurship into a science will trigger a new era, that we are calling the Entrepreneurial Enlightenment. In the midst of the largest global depression in almost a century, a revolution in entrepreneurship could propel the world to a level of wealth never seen before by enabling scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs to be integrated into the fabric of society faster than ever before. Offering hope that we may finally be able to master some of the most pressing challenges, including water, energy, food, health, security, poverty and education.

No revolution is triggered alone. In the quest to make entrepreneurship a science, we are standing on the shoulders of giants. In just the last 2-3 years the number of people extracting and codifying the informal learning of entrepreneurs has hit a point of critical mass. Steve Blank kicked off the move towards a science of entrepreneurship with his seminal book The Four Steps to the Epiphany. In the book, he introduced the concept of Customer Development. A few years later Eric Ries combined Customer Development with Agile Development and Lean Manufacturing principles to create the Lean Startup methodology. Interest in the Lean Startup has morphed into a global movement. Other major contributors to the science of entrepreneurship include Dave Mcclure on Metrics, Sean Ellis on Marketing, Alex Osterwalder on Business Models and Paul Graham with his essays.

Yet despite this huge knowledge base emerging about how startups work, startups have been able to absorb little more than the basic patterns of how to build a startup. Most founders don’t know what they should be focusing on and consequently dilute their focus or run in the wrong direction. They are regularly bombarded with advice that seems contradictory, which is often paralyzing. And while startups are now gathering way more qualitative and quantitative feedback than they were just a few years ago, their ability to interpret this data and use it to make better product and business decisions is sorely lacking. The primary cause of these problems is that we lack the necessary structure to synthesize our accumulated knowledge on the nature of startups. We are missing a common language and framework to describe and measure entrepreneurship and innovation.

(Reposted from the Startup Genome Blog)

Three days ago we launched the Startup Genome Compass, a benchmarking tool for startups and our new research on the primary cause of failure for startups: premature scaling.

There’s been some confusion about exactly what we mean by premature scaling and we wanted to respond to the feedback we’ve received and elaborate on the findings from our research. To make it clearer, we need to go a little bit deeper into the theory and methodology.

I’m seeing a lot of writing on wealth inequality lately. Theoretically I think the natural distribution of our complex system should be something close to a power law. And we aren’t THAT far from it now. But it seems as if the bigger reason the global economy is STAGNATING right now is not because of unequal wealth distribution but rather because most of the world’s wealth is being wasted on INEFFICIENCY and FRIVOLITY. Whether its 100M Car Collections, Bloated Government Payrolls or “Dipshit Companies”. Why are CAPITAL and LONG TERM VALUE CREATION so far apart?

In wake of the press the Startup Genome Project has received over the last week, a friend complimented me on my modesty and hoped I would continue to retain it. He was confident I would.

My philosophical tendencies urged me to understand what caused this disposition of mine.

Here are three thoughts:

1) As the circle of what I know expands, what I know I don’t know expands faster (the circumference of that circle).

2) I don’t gain satisfaction by looking behind me to see peers I have passed. But I do gain inspiration by looking forward to see the peers, mentors and role models I can learn from. I measure my accomplishments against it’s impact on the world, not other people’s contributions. And I went through a long exploration to make sure I was working on the most important thing I could, so jealousy is not an option. I have my path, others have theirs.

3) What I’ve done is minuscule compared to what I will do. I know continued progress will require overcoming many humbling challenges.