When choosing where to live, convenience trumps everything. I always in terms of efficiency when doing tasks.

However, it can lead to sub-optimal solutions.

You end up picking the best MARKETING, NOT the best VALUE.

Today, I decided to try a food stand which looked really inconvenient. Long line. Hot heat next to burning coals 1 inch away from singeing your skin. Crowded in a cramped space.

It turns out, they sell chicken and fish 70% below my previous haunt.

Lesson: Seek the Inconvenient.

One suggestion is to learn things outside your field.

How do you do this?

1. Collaborate on projects with people outside of your field

2. Attend talks and conferences outside of your field

It doesn’t have to be perfect.

You must ingrain this in your psyche: Entrepreneurial mindset != Consumer mindset.

Otherwise, you’ll waste time on ideas that are appropriate for only a small niche.

I’ve since changed my mind, but only with respect to certain types of activities. They must be BOORING.

Here are some examples:

• Monkey coding
• Paying bills
• Filing forms
• Email replies

Why is this so? Who cares. It just works. Probably has something to do with relieving Maslow’s need to socialize.

It states that you need to buy a certain amount of assets in order to diversify away the ‘unique’ risk.

In other words, the weird stuff will cancel each other out.

I would argue that this concept should also be applied to being an entrepreneur.

Instead of putting all your eggs in 1 basket, you should try to have at least 2 products in different categories. That way, if some ‘unique’ risk comes along, the other one will be okay. That unique risk could be something like Google entering your space.

This also applies to the model of ‘rapid prototyping’. The more prototypes you can build, the more likely you will reach the expected outcome.

In the case of entrepreneurism, I would argue that if you create enough ‘helpful’ and ‘unique’ products, you will eventually be rewarded proportionately, even if the majority end up being duds.

Lessons:

• Take on more than 1 project at a time. Ignore the people who tell you to focus – that is a ‘cog-in-the-wheel’ employee type of mentality.
• Iterate quickly. The faster you can, the faster you will get to your deserved reward.

Mark says that you need to stop COMPLETELY; otherwise, your brain won’t have mental cycles free to process new information and get new ideas.

Action: I blocked a phone number of someone who has been annoying me. Avoid people touting ‘mindset’ over real skills.

But how do you know if you have one? Cal Newport, in his excellent blog, never answers that question.

Here’s my test:
If a co-worker sat next to you and watched you for one month, would they be able to do 90% of what you did?

Here are some reasons why:

• Idea Sourcing: My latest breakthrough idea (yes, it really was a breakthrough) came from a co-worker trying to use my application.
• Time constraints = Prioritization: Although I’m coding/marketing at a pretty good clip, I prioritize better when I have real time constraints i.e. only working on the web application at nights/weekends.
• Brain-Boosting Workout: I belong to a pretty sweet gym in the office building, one of the best in Thailand. My brain gets energized when I have blood flowing to it.

Lesson: It’s good to have a day job. Having cash flow to pay for your expenses will make you think much clearer. Think Maslow’s Needs. Also, projects will take you much longer than you think.

Then all of a sudden, I could no longer access my Google Adwords account. A pretty big deal.

For those who don’t know, DNS stands for Domain Name Server. When you type in a domain name, your browser needs to contact a DNS to find the real IP address. In other words, a name is translated into a number.

When I tried to access the account, I would simply get a blank screen.

Anyways, long story short, I found out that Google DNS, which I was using, would try to switch me from google.com to google.co.th. And for whatever reason, the local domain just would not work with Adwords.

Once I switched to OpenDNS, everything went back to normal.

They say:

He keeps his living expenses in check so that he’s not dependent on drumming up income (he and his wife have lived in the same California bungalow for the past 14 years), and he keeps only a small staff, preferring to bring on volunteers as needed.

Although the post is about productivity, the most interesting thing is what they say about ‘low overhead’:

Also shows the freedom you get from having low overhead. The less you owe, the less you have to do things you don’t want to do.

‘Low overhead‘ is one of the best things about living in Thailand. You can create the same web app from Thailand as you can from the US, but with much less overhead.

By moving to Thailand, I found I was easily able to satisfy many of Maslow’s needs. And once that happened, my brain just automatically switched into ‘creative building’ mode. I know how many entrepreneur blogs love to talk about building things to make the world a better place. But I found that before you can even begin to think in those terms, you need to satisfy your basic needs first.

For those that don’t know, Maslow is a psychologist who believes that not only do we have needs, but that they follow a specific sequence. For example, before you can think about love, for example, which is a ’social need’, you need to satisfy ’safety’ needs, and before you can satisfy those, you need to satisfy ‘physiological’ needs. It was one of the few things in psychology class I believed to be true

Mark Cuban also mentions something similar about low overhead. He says:

“The cheaper you can live, the greater your options. Remember that.”

The video below demonstrates that living cheap does not necessarily mean living poorly. It’s a view from the balcony of my apartment which costs $300 per month.

(This HD video was taken with a new camera I just bought, one of the first-ever point-and-shoot cameras with HD video, the Panasonic Lumix.)