Everything I Know

Everything I Know ditches all the rules and gives you a guide to living a fulfilled and adventurous life that can be infinitely updated, stretched, expanded and customized, based on who you are, instead of another “do-this-to-get-rich-fast” scheme that doesn’t work for everyone.

Here are some of the external yardsticks the world gives us to measure our worth by, which we usually happily take and compare ourselves with:

Money Grades Sales Revenue Diplomas Number of shoes in your closet Twitter followers

First, forget all of those. Instead, answer this simple question: What is important to you? What do you think matters? Whatever answer pops up in your head, it’s the first step towards finding your own, inner values. Chances are your internal worth is totally separate from any of the ways the world measures how valuable you are, and that’s great.

Now you have your own yardstick, with an incredibly simple way to measure your sense of worth by asking: How well do I live up to my own values?

Ironically, this is also the basis of worldly success, because it allows you to start doing things your way and create something unique, that’s different and irreplaceable.

Ideas aren’t the result of thinking inside a vacuum. Every thought you ever have is the result of your cumulated experiences – the entirety of what you’ve ever felt, seen, heard, read and learned.

In that way, we innovate by letting others inspire us and then infusing our own, unique values into it.

Therefore, you can start by “stealing” initial ideas to start working with, for example by meshing three different website designs into your own, or mixing a travel writer’s style with one of a scientific research paper. The more you iterate and integrate what you stand for into the work, the less it’ll look like the original, until you arrive with something totally unique to you.

Imagine the idea you start with as a piece of clay, which you shape until it’s in line with your values, so it’ll eventually tell your own story.

Look at Four Minute Books. With each summary, I take a small piece of someone else’s work, learn from it, and then tell you a story about it from my own perspective.

Note: Paul suggests you focus on creating, not what the final result looks like. As a certain Ernest Hemingway said: “The first draft of anything is shit.” But it’s important to let your creativity flow unfiltered in the beginning. Just go, make something happen.

Recently, I realized that much of the “one-size-fits-all” advice out there, well, doesn’t fit. I got really frustrated by it and switched to listening to people with a more philosophical approach,…