Putting Yourself Out There

There are a couple of ways to become successful:

1. You go out there and do shit

2. You stay at home and wish for it

Guess which works better?

I have lots of stories, and I’ll share a few. With an MBA from the University of San Francisco, getting a job on Wall Street was a one-in-a-million shot. I hustled more than anyone hustled before, flying out to New York several times to press the flesh and set up informational interviews. It worked.

On Saturday, I DJed at Palm Tree Beach Club at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. I opened for Zedd. If you know anything about electronic music, you know that is a really big deal. How did I do it? Well, I knew someone who knew someone. But it’s not as if they would let any schmoe do it. Over the last 17 years, I have built up a long DJing CV, playing all over the country (and internationally), and building up a large online presence. I have been posting mixes to SoundCloud since 2012, and I have over 2,500 followers. So when the club guy saw my SoundCloud page, he saw that I had been doing the footwork over a period of years and that I had a following. What would motivate someone to spend all those hours recording mixes and posting them to SoundCloud for no money? For this.

This is called “putting yourself out there.” Writing Substacks. Writing books. Recording music. Making YouTube videos. Hell, even leaving your house. Jennifer Lawrence, from Kentucky, was “discovered” simply by walking through Union Square on a trip to New York City. She wouldn’t have been discovered in her living room! Madonna was similarly discovered walking around Manhattan. I am fond of saying that luck will never find you in your apartment. That’s metaphorical, because these days, luck can find you in your apartment, if you are writing Substacks or making YouTube videos, but the principle applies—if you don’t do these things, you have no chance of success. When I was at Lehman, there used to be these young guys who would show up in the lobby with a stack of resumes and hand them out to everyone entering the building. That’s cheesy, but it’s better than doing nothing!

I teach finance to college students, and there is a week in my course where we talk about how to get a job, and my advice to them is to get off your ass and go to the office and meet the people you might be working with someday. Kids today kinda don’t get it—everything is done online, so you apply for a job online and you are hired online and then you are thrust into this environment with a bunch of strange people and a culture that is incomprehensible to you. Going to the office accomplishes a few things:

1. You get facetime

2. You get the vibe of the place

3. They get a vibe of you

4. You will know pretty much instantly if it is a good fit or not

As a corollary, the best jobs are the ones where you know someone or someone makes an introduction on your behalf. You don’t want to be in Indeed-land applying for mystery jobs.

I have another principle: Always go to the conference. Always go to the party. You get opportunities when you mingle with other people. Don’t get me wrong, if you go to a conference and you have 20 conversations, 19 of them are going to be useless. But one of them might change your life. Even fun stuff, like parties—go. You will meet new people, you will have a great time, and you never know what will come of it. And this is coming from one of the world’s biggest introverts. If there is a party in the neighborhood, I always go. If there is a party anywhere, I go. Sometimes you go to a useless conference. It happens. You’re not going to feel the Jennifer Lawrence effect on every outing. It is better than sitting on your couch!

Luck will never find you in your apartment. You want to put yourself in a position where you can be positively exposed to luck. Not bragging, but I am pretty successful. People want to know what my secret is. It’s as simple as this: I am constantly putting myself in situations where I can be positively exposed to luck. Also, open your fucking eyes. Pretend someone emails you with an opportunity—most people reflexively say no. Contempt prior to investigation. I don’t say yes to every opportunity—I definitely turn things down—but I try to say yes to things, and keep an open mind. In 2014, Ed D'Agostino of Mauldin Economics cold-emailed me about a collaboration. That one has added millions to my net worth. I could have said no, I am doing my thing with The Daily DIrtnap, I’m perfectly happy doing what I am doing, I don’t need to make my life more complicated, so no. Earth to ding-a-ling: if you want to be successful, your life is definitely going to get more complicated. It’s not a bad thing.

People shit on social media all the time, and rightfully so. But I have a contrary opinion on social media: it is actually a good thing. Pre-social media, you might have some friends in the neighborhood and you might have a few long-distance friends that you keep in touch with over the phone, and that’s about it. With Facebook, you can keep in touch with a few thousand people. Which is not a bad thing! Yes, all the memes and crap and ads are annoying, but you have this platform where you can reach out and touch pretty much anyone you want. And ask for things! Maybe you need a favor? Maybe you need someone to put in a good word for you? Maybe you need a piece of information? Maybe it’s something more serious, like, you’re going through some shit, and you have a Facebook friend who has gone through the same shit, and you want to talk? This is a long way of saying that it is good to have a big network. Then there is LinkedIn, the ass dumpster of all social media platforms. Some people make it work for them.

Speaking of LinkedIn, I will never fault someone for shooting their shot. Sometimes there is some 24-year-old snot-nosed kid who wants me to go on his podcast with 12 listeners. I say no to these sorts of things, but I can’t fault the kid for asking! I can tell you that when I was promoting ALL THE EVIL OF THIS WORLD (the best of my books), I reached out to all kinds of people looking for help. Everyone turned me down. One guy was even an asshole about it. Don’t be an asshole to someone shooting their shot. It wastes 15 seconds of my time—no big deal. In fact, there is a general principle that should be willing to lift up people in these situations. You would want someone to do it for you.

Here's another one—travel. I live in East Frogkick, South Carolina. If I stayed in East Frogkick all the time and didn’t go anywhere, I wouldn’t be exposed to other ideas and cultures. I don’t know about you, but I always get ideas when I travel. I notice things. I notice behaviors. I get investment ideas out of it. Sometimes someone says something a certain way. If I am hanging around the same people week in and week out, that doesn’t happen. Having said that, I don’t like to travel too much. It is good to spend some time at home in front of the screens. I would guess that I am on the road about 70 days a year, enough to get me the fancy airline status. It is good to have the fancy airline status.

Years ago, Justin Bieber put up a YouTube video and the rest was history. He didn’t have to put up the YouTube video! He could have sang and danced for his family and left it at that. I pretty much spend my life machinegunning content all over the internet. I have written at least 200 of these essays. Only one of them went viral, which is about the right ratio. One of these days, the right person will read one, and good things will happen. Don’t drink, keep putting yourself out there, never stop—that’s all the advice I have for someone in your position. Good things don’t happen if you don’t do good things.