I had an idea for a business. This was 1993. I was going to take videos of houses for sale.

I would charge a real estate agency per house I videotaped. I was going to get rich. Rich!

Customers of the agency would no longer have to go to the house. They could just go to the agency and watch the video.

I went to six real estate agencies and they actually laughed at me and said no thanks. That was the end of that business idea.

Heres what I didnt have:

  • A video camera
  • Any video skills whatsoever. I never had taken a video before.
  • Zero sales ability. I had never tried to sell anything before.
  • Zero money. I had no idea how I would buy a video camera.
  • Zero knowledge. Did the real estate agency have VCRs?
  • I didnt have a car. How was I going to drive miles around to every house?

I didnt know anything. I didnt have anything. I had no resources.

I gave up.

Today Im meeting with a company that does virtual reality tours of houses. Theyve signed up one of the largest real estate agencies in the world.

Does this mean I should have been persistent?

Of course not.

Ready. Fire. Aim.

Thats the ONLY way you can learn, not waste time, move on to the next experience.

Stupidity is the rungs on the ladder to success.

So then I applied for a job at a comic book store. I loved comics.

We dont really have enough business to hire people, the guy at the comic book store told me.

I wrote four or five novels (I honestly forget) that never got published.

I had them printed up and I saved them for over 20 years. You never know!

Recently I threw them all out. Gone forever. Should I have been persistent?

Of course not! They were horrible.

After I left graduate school, I wanted to have an interesting experience. I tried to move into a homeless shelter.

To be honest, I was so down on myself I thought the best way to meet women would be in a homeless shelter.

It would be like a college dormitory, I thought. Only everyone would be homeless. And lovable.

The manager at the homeless shelter thought I was too crazy to live in a homeless shelter. He said, No.

Persistence is overrated.

If they had said, yes, to me working at the comic book store then I probably wouldnt today be about to interview one of my favorite all time singers.

If the gatekeepers had published any of my novels Id be a struggling and unhappy writer.

If I stayed in graduate school, I dont know. Id have spent nine years working on a useless Phd thesis instead of interviewing prostitutes at 3 in the morning for HBO.

If they said yes to me living in the homeless shelter then maybe today Id be homeless. Come to think of itI do have no home right now. I just stay in short-term AirBnBs.

I could have tried harder. I could have resisted all the Nos. I could have resisted and struggled and fought. But why?

Resistance is the opposite of persistence.

It blocks you into thinking there is only one thing that will make you happy. This is the worst disease and its chronic.

So many people I talk with are unhappy because someone, at some point, blocked some thing they were working on. Like a blockage in the artery that prevented the heart of success.

They get obsessed with this blockage. They cant stop thinking about it. They get angry. They cant forgive. They cant forget.

They get stuck. The No they got ended up defining them.

Persistence in having many experiences is more important than having persistence in one experience.

The other day I saw a guy playing a piano in the middle of the street. I asked him what he was doing there.

Living the dream, he told me. Living the dream.

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