James Altucher, an entrepreneur, author, and podcast show host has helped me in my life and career since my friend Ryan Sanada told me to listen to his podcast in April 2015 after my life took a slight downfall. Altucher’s advice: Generate 10 ideas a day if you can; Idea sex or mix various ideas together; Work with others who have skills and ideas that compliment yours; Take care of your health; and most importantly, “Choose Yourself” – pursue all areas of your passions and dreams.
What makes James Altucher so appealing is his openness to not just his success, but his failures. He has mentioned how he made millions of dollars and then lost it all; going through divorce; and feeling depressed to a point where he wanted to die. Yet through it all, he comes back and make millions of dollars again, evolves with new business ideas, and networks with other amazing people.
Also, download his podcast show “The James Altucher Show” and another podcast show that he co-hosts with entrepreneur Stephen J. Dubner called “Question of the Day” where they answer questions and give advice.
Entrepreneur and Author James Altucher wrote a nice article, which is linked below my article. Mr. Altucher wrote, “The world doesn’t need more DO-ers.” He also stated, “Stillness ultimately creates, Doing often destroys.”
Sometimes “doing” does nothing such as having meetings that have no new information or purpose, just rehashed things that were already in motion. There are times when “doing” is destructive such as having a meeting where people are offended or where we cannot commit to an action because we didn’t complete the preceding tasks yet. At times, waiting on action such as actions by the government or investors can be a good thing because new investors and opportunities pop up that could never have happened had things progressed faster. Patience is a key to success when “doing” does nothing.
My sisters are princesses. My nieces are now princesses. They rule the world. Since I was young, I’ve wanted to save everyone from evil. I keep coming up with ideas and mix them with other ideas – some good and some bad. Then I pursue them until I live my imagination. But every now and then, my fantasy comes crashing down. Like a child, I create another dream and do it all over again.
With my nieces Sophie and Elyse on the early morning of March 7, 2016, just before flying from San Francisco, California to Disney World in Orlando, Florida.
My niece Elyse with Princess Belle of Beauty and the Beast at Disney World on March 8, 2016.
My sister Mia, Elyse, and Sophie with Princess Anna of Frozen at Disney World on March 10, 2016.
My niece Sophie in her Princess Snow White dress and younger sister Lara at the hotel in Disney World on March 10, 2016.
My sister Lara holding my niece Sophie at Disney World on March 10, 2016.
My niece Elyse and I in the dining hall of Princess Belle and the Beast at Disney World on March 11, 2016.
A fun song fitting for this journal entry called “Crushin’ My Fairytale” by Celeste Buckingham.
Multiple projects and issues are jumping around in my head while calls and messages keep coming in. So much so that I made an error the other day on one of my tasks. Studies have shown that multi-tasking reduces our performance. It’s much better to focus on one task at a time to maximize our output and results.
With all the different projects and goals that I have to accomplish, I think my mind is going as fast as this song “Alone” by Marshmello.
Since I was young, I’ve been setting goals and then practicing, studying, and doing whatever it takes everyday to achieve the smaller goals in order to reach my larger goals.
As a young soccer player in elementary school, I wasn’t big and strong like some of the other players. I did have quickness and speed, but to better myself, I had to train everyday on my ball handling skills and playmaking skills. I read books, watched videos, and practiced with the soccer ball everyday at parks, in my yard, and even in the house. Eventually, over the years, when I reached high school, I made it to the select teams I wanted and was recognized with awards.
Likewise, to become a politician, I started training to be a politician from my teens by studying political science and then later law, volunteering for politicians at their office and for their campaigns, joined the Young Democrats, business organizations, jaycees, and even got appointed to the Pearl City Neighborhood Board.
When I ran for the Senate and then Vice President of the Associated Students of the University of Hawaii at Manao (ASUH), I would post my posters at 1 A.M. to 3 A.M. in the morning, go to sleep, and then wake up at 6 A.M. to pass out my fliers that had my goals for the university to student commuters walking onto campus from the parking lot and students walking onto campus from the dorms. In between classes I would pass out my fliers to students walking through the mall on campus, with some of them avoiding me by walking around me and onto the grass. At lunch breaks or in the evening, I spoke to the various student organizations about my campaign and what I was going to do for them. I went door-to-door at the dorms passing out easter eggs that my mom and I wrote my name and office on, and I posted my posters on dorm doors of my supporters. I did this for months and was successful in winning a Senate seat in ASUH in 1996 and then the following year, the Vice Presidency.
While in college, in 1996, I typed out my campaign plan and gathered all the necessary information to run for a Hawaii State House seat or Hawaii State Senate seat in Pearl City that was so thick that I had to put it into a binder. After campaigning a number of small political races and even mayor and governor races, by 2002, I was ready to launch my own campaign for the Hawaii State House, but all the Pearl City races had an incumbent. However, the Waipahu, Waikele, Village Park, and Royal Kunia district had an open race due to redistricting. I moved to Waikele and re-typed my entire plan to fit this district. Over the years, I had collected contact information from family, friends, and acquaintances and built a database, which I used to raise $16,000. I mailed three mailers and walked the district 3 times, which is over 18,000 homes over a period of 7 months and lost 20 pounds and burned holes into my pants because of the constant rubbing of my bag that held my campaign material. Like my college student government elections, people told me they voted for me because of my ideas and their respect for my hard work. Over my 8-year political career, I walked my district over 10 times, which is over 60,000 households.
In soccer and politics, I consistently worked hard mentally and physically until I was fortunate to reach my goals.
As far as my career in law, consistency in my studies and efforts helped me to make a comeback after I received bad grades and was placed on probation while attending the University of Hawaii at Manoa. I had a 3.2 GPA but it plunged during a time when I broke up with my first girlfriend. My college counselor asked me what I wanted to be, and I told her, “a lawyer.” She looked at my grades and then looked back at me and asked, “Do you like helping people?” I answered, “Yes.” She continued, “How about being a social worker?” I smiled, unable to agree with her. After that I made my comeback by getting 4.0 grades for several semesters and if I did fall short, I had a 3.8 grade point average for that semester.
Now, after leaving the public sector in April 2015, and pursuing a number of projects in the private sector, either on my own or with business partners, I’m facing a lot of hardship. Some projects had to end, while others keep moving forward. Everyday, I make sure I work on tasks that will add up in helping me and my team in achieving a larger goal. A couple of projects are getting close to fruition – just need to get past a few more walls. It’s exciting and depressing at the same time. Sometimes you’re enthusiastic, while other times you want to cry.
I try my best to surround myself with positive and inspiring people like my friend Brandon who is always upbeat and optimistic. Basically, he’s my life coach. My mom is my number one supporter who has encouraged me to try many things since I was a child. My father’s tenacious style of work ethic has rubbed off on me as I relentless push forward despite my failures. A girl I know who’s from Japan came to Hawaii to learn hula, and now has 4 halaus in Japan and performs and teaches in Hawaii. That would be like me going to Japan to learn sword fighting and the Japanese language, mastering it, and creating schools back in Hawaii. She’s an inspiration to me. My business partners for my various projects always find a positive point even when things are going bad, just like how my mom taught me to look at a glass half-filled as half-full rather than half-empty.
Below is a video by Marie Forleo, an entrepreneur who I’m inspired by, and in it she recommends 5 things to do to stay committed on your goals.
Keep your eye on the “why.” Why you want to do what you do?
Pick your battle. Pick one thing and stick with it. Don’t try to do everything at one time.
Schedule it. Schedule your priorities. Build you life around your priorities.
Ignore your feelings. Ignore the voice in your head that cries and says, “I don’t feel like it.” Override that voice because you know the power of consistency.
Catch that wagon. Don’t have an all or nothing mindset. You will fall off the wagon. Just run and catch that wagon.
“Success doesn’t come from what you do occasionally, it comes from what you do consistently.” – Marie Forleo.
Here is a song called “Try Everything” by Shakira to inspire you as you consistently pursue your goals, whether it’s for your career, health, or personal life. My wish for you is to be happy in this life and the next! I’ll celebrate with you at the finish line, no matter what place we come in!
In life, we often come across opportunities or get involved with something that seems good, but it’s out of our comfort zone. We can analyze the pros and cons, get opinions from others, and follow our intuition.
Sometimes our situation will be more obvious when red flags start popping up everywhere and people advise you to stay away or leave. At other times, there may not be any noticeable problems for us or anyone to analyze. In either situation, we will get an intuition, if not at that earlier moment, it will occur along our journey.
Marie Forleo, an entrepreneur, life coach, and author said it best in her Youtube Show Marie TV that is linked below, “Do you feel expansive? Or do you feel contracted?” Does your shoulders open up and do you feel excited? Or does your body pull in, your head start to shake, where you dread about it?
Our body doesn’t lie. When you talk about something you shouldn’t do, you start to look pasty and depressed. But when you’re excited about what you’re working on, you light up like a Christmas tree.
Great advice that we can apply in our lives and career.
For many of us, dreams and goals make life exciting. I enjoy coming up with ideas, expanding my skill-sets, and building relationships. However, sometimes in the midst of our hustle to do well in our lives, we forget the importance of having gratitude for what we have now and accomplished thus far. We get too fixated on what we want and get frustrated when all our efforts are not taking us there. We all love success, but with every dream and goal we pursue, there will be challenges and even failure. Some statistics say 8 out of 10 businesses started will fail. Many have pursued the path to become a U.S. Senator or President of the United States and have fallen short. Others have attempted to reach the highest levels in their field of work but have failed to attain that level. Failure is only failure if we don’t appreciate what we currently have and what we have gained. Shoot to be number one in the world, but number 50 is still pretty darn good. We can make peace with our mind knowing that we did our best, and won’t have the pain of wondering “What if I had given my idea a shot?” Through failure, we gain knowledge in areas we may have not been familiar with; build new relationships; and even come up with more ideas to pursue. With failure, we change and evolve, often leading us to worlds we’ve never experienced. When we embrace failure as part of success, we can keep moving higher to a level where we can keep failing until we succeed, and keep succeeding until we fail.
James Altucher interviews Hawaii’s own Steve Case, billionaire, founder and former CEO and Chairman of AOL, and former CEO and Chairman of Time Warner AOL. Mr. Case now runs Revolution LLC, a venture capital firm based in Washington D.C. that invests in other businesses and Case Foundation, a philanthropic organization based in Washington D.C.
Mr. Case wrote a New York Times bestselling book, “The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur’s Vision of the Future.”
In the interview by Altucher, Mr. Case stated the following:
1st Wave: Building the Internet.
2nd Wave: Building on top of the Internet – software, apps, etc.
3rd Wave: Integrating the Internet across our lives – learning, health, food, etc.
From the latter part of the first wave or early part of the 2nd wave in August 2002, I started an Internet retail business selling Hawaii and island-theme products on a Yahoo Store platform. In December 2002, I created this website/journal/blog for my political career and at that time I was one one of the few politicians in the country doing a journal/blog so I was interviewed by Times Magazine for their article on this issue in their December 18, 2006 magazine. I ended my Internet retail company in January 2012 and this website/journal/blog has evolved from a political website to a lifestyle and business focused website in the past year. The 3rd wave in the Internet will be exciting as we all add more creativity to it. For me, I hope to provide content on my website and other websites that inspires you to strive for your dreams and most importantly, be happy.
Here’s a great interview of Elizabeth Gilbert by Marie Forleo in regards to unleashing your creative self. Ms. Gilbert is an entrepreneur, author, and motivational speaker. Below the video are my notes from this amazing interview. It’s sure to lift your spirit and keep you motivated as you pursue your creativity.
Jon’s Notes on Marie Forleo’s interview of Elizabeth Gilbert – Author
Latest Book: “Big Magic”
Nugget’s Wisdom: The real reason we don’t move creatively ahead is always and only fear.
Afraid they don’t have talent; afraid of rejection; afraid of criticism.
Nugget’s Wisdom: I have no desire to become a fearless person.
Only people who are fearless are psychopaths and toddlers.
Fear is a necessary companion.
Fear is the reason why we’re alive today. Fear protects us.
Nugget’s Wisdom: Creativity will always provoke your fear.
Acknowledge the importance of fear and invite it along. I’m just writing a poem. It’s not life or death.
Nugget’s Wisdom: You can’t let fear have control over your creative choices.
Fear can shut your creative choices one by one. No don’t do that – No, too risky.
Nugget’s Wisdom: Guaranteed it’s already been done, but it’s not yet been done by you.
40,000 years of the art and pretty much it’s been done before.
Shakespeare borrowed stories and told them in a way that’s never been told before.
Artists have always been responding to stuff but you can add to the pile.
What moves me is the humanity in the authentic piece of creation. My heart and mind has changed. The world looks different.
“All love eventually becomes help.” Inspired by Paul Tillich.
You will radiate a thing that people wants to be near.
Every pursuit comes with a shit sandwich. What do you love but willing to eat the shit sandwich?
7 years of rejection letters. Are you willing to still eat the shit sandwich?
Even when you succeed, your shit sandwich will be media criticism, people criticism, etc.
Is this still better than nothing doing it? If yes, then you’re on the right path.
Nuggets of Wisdom: People murder their creativity by insisting they’re not truly creative unless their creativity pays the bills.
Jump and the net might catch you. What would do even if failure wasn’t a word you’re thinking of.
You may or not get everything you want.
Don’t be fixated on how much money your creativity makes. You work on your creativity because you love to work on it.
Don’t get so battered that you lose your house, family, etc. that you shut down and never want to work on your creativity.
Be child-like, not childish. Don’t be childish – I want it and I should get it. People get rage, resentment etc. for failure. Do be child-like and be open to creativity like a child.
I wish there was a shortcut for personal and spiritual growth, relationships, health, but there’s not. It takes a lot of work.
Nuggets of Wisdom: Perfectionism is a serial killer.
I don’t want to be perfect, I want it to be finished.
There’s a lot of good unfinished work.
If your standards are so high, you’ll never finish you work.
The contract I made was to be a writer, not a good writer.
I promised the universe that I would be a writer, not a good writer.
I don’t want to go to my grave with 50 pages of an unfinished novel.
If you don’t like it, go write your own fucking book. And you know what, you won’t.
Nuggets of Wisdom: What will make you finish it is not discipline, but self-forgiveness.
Forgive yourself for not doing well.
I’m not Hemingway, but I’ll keep trying.
Nuggets of Wisdom: There’s no better thing to spend your life doing that saying yes to that invitation.
When did inspiration promise you anything – other than the amazing experience you have dancing with it for some time? Inspiration will watch you fall off the cliff and smile and ask you, “Do you want to do it again?”
Find ways to cushion the fall. Despite the pain, one of these days, you will say yes to inspiration again.
You will create something that you love and then you may hate it later. You love it and you dismiss it. It’s okay.
It’s not a baby. It’s just a thing I made. People will criticize it, attack it, hate it.
It’s independent of you. Your creativity was making you as you were developing it. When you finish it, forget about it.
Nuggets of Wisdom: There are two kinds of creators in the world: the martyrs, and the tricksters.
Reject the martyr way. I will do this even if it kills me.
Trickster: I didn’t come here to get hurt.
Tricksters do things in a transgressive way. They play with things, turn things upside down. Down have to treat things as a holy way.
Trickster trusts the universe. Put it out there and see what happens. Don’t be so heavy. There’s no one way.
We live in a take, take world. When our energy is drained to the point where our health begins to fade, it’s time to pause to review our life and then make the changes necessary to recover.
To combat this, we have to focus on those who fill us with positive energy and who truly care for who we are. We also need to work on what we’re passionate about and provide value that helps others. Somehow, when we do this, good things come back to us.
Today April 23, 2016, I finished my 15th draft of my Writing Project #1, a fictional story that I created back when I couldn’t sleep on October 11 to 12, 2006. In the story, the young male protagonist Ken whose health is ailing meets a girl named Kaylee in his dreams who suffers from memory loss, regret, and deep sorrow. As his relationship develops with her, he realizes that his strange dreams are much deeper than ordinary dreams. While in the dream world, he discovers a powerful secret about energy that can not only help Kaylee with her memory loss and sorrow, but save his life and bring balance between good and evil. However, by helping Kaylee attain happiness, Ken realizes that he would lose her forever.
The love between Kaylee and Ken will empower us to play a role in making our universe more positive. I dedicate “Us” by Kaskade & CID to all of you.
With innovation, hard work, relationship-building, and a relentless pursuit of success, comes a higher level of jealousy, envy, and scrutiny. It doesn’t matter how good our intentions are. We are often told that we knew what we were getting into. The message is clear: If we wanted to avoid such negativity, we should’ve settled with an average life. But that message goes against everything that our parents and teachers taught us – that we can go as far as we want to go.
I believe that we should continue to pursue our dreams and develop friendships that last a lifetime. We must keep working hard to create products and services through our ideas. If others want to judge us by extraordinary standards, then we just have to live super extraordinary lives.
Though I’m no longer serving in the public sector, I will do my best to help Hawaii and America’s economy through the companies that I’m a partner of. In the spirit of the music events business that I’m involved with, here is an uplifting song “We Don’t Stop” by Kaskade that encourages us to keep doing the best we can in our pursuit of happiness.
At times, our greatest enemy is ourselves. Our negative thoughts push aside our positive ones, which in turn, affects our actions and everything around us. We get hard on ourselves for our failures when there was so much that we gained from taking that journey. We dwell on the past and what we don’t have, when the future is so bright with endless possibilities. We mourn the dead even though they never did leave us. Meanwhile, there are so many people who love us, and many more who are cheering us on to make our next move. So why stay still and let the darkness consume us? We have to make our move, and then another, and then many, many more. The future is relying on what we do now. To maximize what’s ahead of us, we need to be alive in the here and now. By practicing gratitude and compassion, we can transcend past our fears and into the light of happiness.
Below is a song called “Spirits” by the Strumbellas that reflect my feelings in my journal entry above.
Put on your best headsets. This is “Shots” by Imagine Dragons. Girls have gone in and out of my life, and as for my career, well I’ve had my ups and downs. We go through challenges but keep striving as hard as we can for the world that we’ve imagined until our time is up.
With my nieces Sophie and Elyse on the early morning of March 7, 2016, just before flying from San Francisco, California to Disney World in Orlando, Florida.
My niece Elyse with Princess Belle of Beauty and the Beast at Disney World on March 8, 2016.
My sister Mia, Elyse, and Sophie with Princess Anna of Frozen at Disney World on March 10, 2016.
My niece Sophie in her Princess Snow White dress and younger sister Lara at the hotel in Disney World on March 10, 2016.
My sister Lara holding my niece Sophie at Disney World on March 10, 2016.
My niece Elyse and I in the dining hall of Princess Belle and the Beast at Disney World on March 11, 2016.
JON RIKI KARAMATSU 