by Brian Wong
In other cheats I’ve talked about the importance of getting a great core group of supporters together and sticking with them, and your investors are definitely part of your core group. So when deciding which investors to “go to bed with,” my advice is this: Choose people with whom you want to spend the next five years of your life—not just people good for a one-night stand. Choose the kind of investor you’ll love, and who’ll love you. Choose the people who know that “ideas fail—people don’t.”
This cheat works both ways. If you find the right people to invest in you, it will be somebody who’s looking for the right people to invest in.
Museums are one of the great cheats of humankind. They’re specifically designed to cut to the core of greatness, without revealing all the labor that led there. They’re the equivalent of vitamins for the brain, with specific neurological nutrients distilled into their purest form.
They give you every imaginable way to stretch your brain. You end up seeing the world in a whole different way. You don’t have to see every exhibit, or take the tour. Just wander and wonder. The museum will rub off on you, even if you don’t intend it to.
If you allow it to be, the experience can mimic a virtual rebirth, re-creating those earliest moments of your infancy when your brain was flooded with so much sensory overload that it literally had to prune neuronal pathways to remain functional.
Go to museums to get a glimpse of what existed long ago, or far away, or in the mind of a person you’ll never meet.
It’s inspiring, if you allow it to be.
If you don’t let it be, it’s nothing—just a boring field trip for people who aren’t ready to open up.
“Inspiration,” of course, has another, physiological meaning: breathing in, or opening your lungs. So go to museums, stand in awe before a work of art, either visual or technological, and take a deep breath. Let in the art. Let out the breath. You’ll be different.
I’ve been to hundreds of museums in about a hundred different countries. It’s my favorite recreational activity.
I walk in with my eyes open, and I walk out with my mind open. With the best of luck, I walk out with my heart open as well.
I’m known as somebody who’s hard to freak out. Every time some seemingly end-of-the-world crisis hits our company, or somebody in the company, or one of our close associates, and people start running around like their hair is on fire, I need to stay cool.
People assume it’s because I’ve seen it all and been through everything. True, I have seen a lot of things, but not everything. I’m twenty-five—do the math.
I’ve been through everything in my mind, though. I’m always thinking through and imagining what plan B is, when to bail, and when to go balls-to-the-wall into war. That’s what entrepreneurs do.
An entrepreneur doesn’t have the luxury of corporate security, so staying cool in the face of insecurity is second nature to us. We don’t look for security in what we have or in what our profits look like. Those are just the accoutrements of security. True security starts in the heart and stays there. It’s much more mental than material.
Here’s a sweet cheat for keeping that golden sense of security close to your heart: Learn to look for the Third Way.
Most problems seem on the surface to be solvable with binary solutions: invest or divest, dismiss or retain, spend or save. That orderly system of analysis is Western culture’s classic method of rational thinking—literally classic, since it started with the Socratic method, when Socrates and his buddies sat under trees, untangling reason from mythology and emotion.
But it’s no longer optimally functional. The modern era’s bottomless cybercloud of information has rendered it obsolete, simply by revealing a whole new universe of options accessible with a single click. But the best entrepreneurs are creative enough to do the clicking in their own heads.
Finding the Third Way is the new classic method of problem solving.
The Third Way almost never jumps out at you on your first search (literal or figurative). It takes extra thinking, research, innovation, strategizing, game planning, and meta-gaming—but it’s there, waiting for you to find it.
The Third Way is more than just the middle ground, or a compromise. Those were the early connotations of the term, when it originated in the 1950s, as a problem-solving device both in politics (primarily right-wing versus left-wing) and economics (primarily capitalism versus socialism), but the concept has evolved and now carries a far different nuance.
For intuitive and creative types, finding the Third Way can be more an art than a science. But it’s also reachable with pure reason.
Discovering it depends almost as much on will as thought. Where others have stopped, you continue searching. There’s always another way—and if there doesn’t seem to be one, you create it. It may involve a factor or resource that wasn’t immediately apparent. It may be a solution that previously wasn’t possible but is now. It may come from the most unexpected of sources, in the most unexpected of ways. That’s one reason it works for entrepreneurs: They’ve got the balls to let go and soar to the cognitive territories that would make a corporate drone airsick.
Like so many things, practice makes perfect—or at least more perfect. And after a while, searching for the Third Way starts to become second nature; it almost seems fun. That’s when you start to create a game plan for every crisis that might occur and envision every possibility that might be present. It becomes almost a hobby.
That’s the mentality it takes to stay cool as an entrepreneur. The mentality says: “Screw the crisis. Bring it on. I’ve seen it all.”
Nothing hits you in the gut quite as hard as pouring out your heart in a presentation designed to excite people about new possibilities, and then getting blank stares or someone explicitly saying, “I don’t get it.”
What’s that about?
In my book, it comes from a lack of imagination—and, even more specifically, from a lack of curiosity. If people are curious, they’ll find a way to imagine it.
Curiosity is the root of all ambition. Curiosity is wondering: “What if I can do something that will change my life? What if I could change the world?”
That leads you naturally to the next question: “How do I do it?”
There’s nothing more powerful for igniting the human spirit than curiosity. The power of curiosity supersedes even the force of the most primal emotions, because it exists at a higher plane than emotion. It’s a state of mind that melds emotion and rationality into a transcendent state of mind that’s full of wonder.
Too many people, though, just aren’t capable of wonder. They see what exists, and they know that there are things that could exist but don’t. And it means nothing to them.
I’ve also known people who look at the same problem or idea for years and years, and there’s something about it that always keeps them curious. Then serendipity strikes, and they suddenly see something new. A better way. The Third Way.
Sometimes that’s called a stroke of genius. It seems almost to arrive on wings of its own, in the same sense of genius recognized by early Greco-Roman culture: genius as coming from a genie—a magical external (not internal) force that confers special, transitory powers. But the truly magical force is not some genie. It’s the power of curiosity.
Curiosity triggered the most profound change in my life. It happened during a moment when I wasn’t even trying to think of a business idea or to create anything. I saw people who were playing games on their devices become visibly annoyed when ads popped up, and I wondered: “What if there was a form of advertising that people like?”
Curiosity seeks further curiosity (just as money seeks money), so I wondered: “What kind of advertising would that be?”
Funny ads? That’s been done—and they’re only funny the first few times. Scary ads? Fear gets attention—but nobody likes it. Happy ads? They get old as fast as funny ads. Catchy ads you just can’t forget? If it’s an ad, people will find a way to forget it.
The question piqued my curiosity. It left a bug in my ear.
If you get curious enough, the rest will take care of itself.
For me, curiosity was the spark that created Kiip.
Now I can share that initial spark of curiosity to drive our customers to believe in our vision as much as I do.
I go to a sales presentation and leave a bug in somebody’s ear with simple little questions, like: “Why is everybody rejecting your advertising? What would it be like if you ran something that people actually responded to? What would that kind of advertising look like?”
And they’re like: “Well, Brian, what would it look like?”
I tell them: “Think beyond the ad. It isn’t even an ad; it’s a reward.” If the ad was the format that was leaving zero impression with consumers, it was natural that the future of advertising would have to be something entirely different.
That line piques their curiosity every time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brian Wong is the cofounder and CEO of Kiip, a leading mobile advertising network that uses innovative reward systems to redefine how brands connect with consumers. Brian received his bachelor’s degree from the University of British Columbia at age eighteen after skipping four grades, and shortly after, at the age of nineteen, became one of the youngest people to ever receive venture capital funding. He has been recognized with many awards for his creative and entrepreneurial achievements, including Forbes’s 30 Under 30 three times, Business Insider’s Top 25 Under 25 in Silicon Valley, Mashable’s Top 5 Entrepreneurs to Watch, and the Ad Age Creativity Top 50. He speaks routinely to corporations such as Kraft Foods, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, L’Oréal, MasterCard, Pepsi, and Deloitte and has keynoted at SXSW, Cannes Lions, CES, Forbes Summits, TEDx events around the world, and more.
Kiip is reinventing how brands connect with consumers through mobile rewards. Kiip powers rewards in more than 4,000 apps on iOS and Android and works with more than 700 top brands in the world. The company has raised over $24 million in venture capital from American Express Ventures, Verizon Ventures, Relay Ventures, True Ventures, and Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and has been named one of the world’s 50 Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.
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Table of Contents
Copyright
Contents
Dedication
Be Ballsy: Learn how to get to the bolder version of yourself.
Cheat 1: Appreciate What You’ve Got—and Kill Your Fear!
Cheat 2: Get In Over Your Head
Cheat 3: Go Balls-to-the-Wall—but Only When It Counts
Cheat 4: Find the Action
Cheat 5: Piss People Off
Cheat 6: Smell Their Fear
Cheat 7: Don’t Ask—Announce!
Cheat 8: Think on Your Feet!
Cheat 9: Screw the MBA
Cheat 10: Don’t Treat People with Money and Power Like God
Cheat 11: Get High-Powered People’s Phone Numbers
Cheat 12: Never Learn the Rules
Cheat 13: Ask Yourself: What’s the Worst Thing That Can Happen?
Be You: Remember: you are your greatest asset. Home in on your best skills and learn how to take them to the next level.
Cheat 14: Don’t Pitch Your Business—Pitch Yourself!
Cheat 15: Light Your Halo!
Cheat 16: Know Your Superpower!
Cheat 17: Be a Follower
Cheat 18: Don’t Try to Win a Humility Contest
Cheat 19: Don’t Outsmart Yourself!
Cheat 20: Make Age Your Friend!
Cheat 21: Tune Out!
Cheat 22: Make Your Own Fun
Cheat 23: Don’t Try to Be Better Than Everybody Else
Cheat 24: Do It Your Way
Cheat 25: Take a Splurge Day
Cheat 26: Be Legendary
Be Unforgettable: Learn tips and tricks around PR, build your brand, and get attention for yourself and your ideas.
Cheat 27: Make Things Look Consistently Pretty: The Power of Appearance 1.0
Cheat 28: Kiip Changing Your Look: The Power of Appearance 2.0
Cheat 29: Dress the Part: The Power of Appearance 3.0
Cheat 30: Reinvent or Die!
Cheat 31: Don’t Tell Your Own Story: Media 1.0
Cheat 32: Make Boldness Your Genius: Media 2.0
Cheat 33: Make the News! Media 3.0
Cheat 34: Make Other People Feel Smart
Cheat 35: Get to the Point!
Cheat 36: Kiip Your Mind Wide Open
Cheat 37: Kiip Moving
Cheat 38: Don’t Overshare
Cheat 39: Drop Out of Dropping Out!
Cheat 40: Coffee with Brian!
Cheat 41: Don’t Get Drunk at Work
Cheat 42: Know When to Let Go
Cheat 43: Find the Right Fit—and Be the Right Fit
Cheat 44: Avoid Eye Contact
Cheat 45: Mind Your Manners
Cheat 46: Be Ignorant
Cheat 47: Know Who’s the Boss
Cheat 48: Look Like You Know What You’re Doing
Cheat 49: Get a Trademark Haircut
Cheat 50: Tap into the Power of Email
Cheat 51: Use Exclamation Points
Be a Trailblazer: Conventional wisdom is dead. There are better ways to get ahead—these cheats will put you in the right mind-set to be a leader among your peers and your industry.
Cheat 52: There’s No Substitute for Being There
Cheat 53: Generate Serendipity
Cheat 54: Take Advantage of the Golden Age of Ideas While You Still Can
Cheat 55: Focus on What Won’t Change
Cheat 56: Tie Yourself to a Greater Vision
Cheat 57: Make Re-creation Recreation
Cheat 58: Toss Your Cap in the Air
Cheat 59: Make Like a Blindfolded Race Car Driver
Cheat 60: Build the Character of an Entrepreneur
Cheat 61: Take Moon Shots
Cheat 62: Display the Intellect of an Entrepreneur
Cheat 63: Fuck Luck
Cheat 64: Write It Down
Cheat 65: Embrace the Power of Two
Cheat 66: Go!
Cheat 67: Be Money
Cheat 68: Choose Your Investors Wisely
Cheat 69: Go to Museums
Cheat 70: Go Beyond Binary
Cheat 71: Imagine, What If?
About the Author