The big question is why, why write this book, why put $100,000 on the cover and who cares?
My book is a bit bait and switch, how else am I going to get you to read it. It is meant to entertain and inspire.
The book is meant for all the underdogs, for all the weird kids and the misfits. The young and not so young adults who read strange books and ask odd questions. And who feel there’s nothing going for them, and that there’s no hope. They feel stuck and they feel rejected. But they have dreams and imagination.
I’m here to tell you there’s not only hope, but even your wildest dreams will become true and a lot more.
At the end of the essay I put the reason why I have hundred thousand dollars prominently featured on the cover and what it’s all about.
As a Eastern European girl growing up I had nothing going for me and I had zero prospects. I was reading weird books, and instead of doing homework I was thinking about aliens and talking about it too, guess how that went ( skipping ahead when I moved to California there was a guy there who too was thinking about aliens as a little boy. And he made a billion dollar empire out of it ).
Going back to being an Eastern European girl with nothing going for me, I should tell you I did have something going for me and it was five shelves of secondhand science fiction books, and dreams and imagination.
I tell you with confidence, all of you dreamers, if you have zero confidence, zero connections, zero support and zero money, I want to assure you that if you have at least one shelf of science fiction books, dreams and imagination, you are at least halfway to everything you ever wanted.
Okay so in addition to being stuck and with nothing going for me, I was going to the wrong school, I went to mathematical high school and guess how I did in equations and in history. And later on I went to architectural school and my professors were asking “so, where are the toilets?” and I was: “in my buildings there are no toilets and there is no building”.
So if you feel you have zero prospects, if you feel that you are stuck like you are embedded in a rock, I’m writing this book to tell you that if you only have dreams and imagination everything will happen for you and more than you dreamed of.
And the lesson is it’s not you it’s your environment. The moment you change your environment you are going to be, man, I’m born for this.
It is not you it is your environment, change it.
The way it happened to me is that I moved to America with nothing but the clothes on my back, I have no idea how I didn’t end up in a Dracula Castle or something, sipping blood. It was so scary. But I had one thing going for me and it was that the American government decided to pay for my education.
And when I went to the Midwest for school I didn’t really like it all that much but there I found what I truly liked. And that was like finding gold. And so my lesson is when you change your environment – you must put yourself in a place of growth and learning.
I guess it doesn’t have to be necessarily a school or a university, could be just a place with potential but here’s how it happened for me and that’s what I’m telling.
When you put yourself in a place of growth and learning you’re going to find out something that you like, and guess what – they’re going to be people there that you like too.
Once you have these two things this will propel you to your next step.
Once this happens it is going to feel so natural, when you change your environment and put yourself in a place of growth and learning you are going to find people that you like and it’s going to push you forward, it’s going to literally sail you to the next thing.
When you find your true love you are going to be, man, I was born for this and of course we all know you weren’t really born for it, nobody knew but you will know.
I am back to the beginning of the essay where I promised a very important lesson about the material.
And here’s a very very good lesson. I had at one point decided that I no longer cared about the material world. And what happened is that I had taken a job as a cleaner at the airbnb I was staying at, and I didn’t have twenty bucks for a bus ticket to go see the opening of my own show. And here’s worse, all my art was in a storage unit which was going into auction. Here’s what failure looks like, and it was entirely my fault. I didn’t have a few dollars to go to the opening of my own art show which I worked really hard for, and all I worked hard at was going to be sold in the county market in Florida for pennies and be lost forever. I want you to read this paragraph again and know what failure looks like, it feels bad too. It was a great lesson for me to learn.
The important part is if you decide not to pay at least much attention to the material – make sure to do it smartly, pay attention in the same way you cross the road – you make sure you do not end up under a car. Take a week to read all there is about smart and simple living, there are so many ways to do this these days, the 4 hour work week, the nomad, the go fasting in the desert way, retreats in India if you want. Scale and live smartly and with common sense and your wits about you.
The reason I put dollar signs on my cover is that you must get the material stuff out of the way and this is the second lesson about the material. When you satisfy your material needs you are going to get sudden clarity, this is when you are going to find out what you truly love and what truly matters to you – then you could say to hell with it, I got it.
Again about the material stuff – you just have to make sure there is nothing you desire materially and take care of your material concerns early, because if there’s something you desire in the material world I discovered that it’s always going to be on the back of your mind. I realized that as creatures with DNA we are very material beings, we operate in the material world and by our nature we respond to material stimuli.
You are not going to find what you truly love if you are striving materially. The moment you are free from worry then you will have the clarity to find what makes you truly happy and what truly matters to you. And here’s my secret about what makes you truly happy – what you are really good at and what you’re great at.
Again, you are not going to find what you truly love if you are striving materially. The moment you are free from worry then you will have the clarity to surely find what makes you truly happy and what truly matters. Here’s my secret about what makes you truly happy – discovering what you are really good at and what you’re great at.
Never want stuff, instead gain inspiration, seek dreams and challenges. Look for knowledge and look for the betterment of mankind. Dream mighty things, think how to touch the hearts of people, think how to take mankind on a great adventure, and fear nothing.