a. Asset Protection. Deservedly or not, almost all businesses get sued. Forming a company around the business can shield the owners’ personal assets (and other business interests) from being attached to satisfy the company’s liabilities.

b. Asset Creation. A “d/b/a” does not a company make. If you’re doing business without a company, you’ve got an undifferentiated line of business that is difficult to quantify or encapsulate as a meaningful thing. Ownership of an informal company such as this means simply personally owning the personal assets used in the business. Since most assets depreciate over time, owning them has limited upside potential. And since you don’t really have everything tied up in a nice package, you don’t really have anything to sell to investors or acquirers. Once a company is formed, however, the company itself becomes a separate asset, which can appreciate in value over time and all or part of which can be sold to investors and acquirers.

c. Taxation. A company can be taxed in a number of flexible ways depending on the preferences of its owners. Without a company, all earnings are taxed as personal income.

d. Prediction. If you do not take the time to organize a company before engaging in business activities, the law may dictate that those activities have, in fact, caused a company to be formed for you! Unfortunately, it is quite unlikely to be the kind of company you would prefer. Get these things in order so you know what to expect and can command the results.

Forming a company is not just a conservative business practice. It is the first conservative business practice. Without it, none of the others really matter.

1. Think of a name for the company. Do a trademark search before you form a company. If it’s clean, form your company with that name and file a federal trademark application at the USPTO. Also file a state trademark application in your state.
2. If you think you’ve invented something that’s never been done before, file a provisional patent on your inventions.
3. Make everyone sign an NDA if they’re seeing your source code or learning your bona fine trade secrets (methods, or tricks, or other information that truly gives you a competitive advantage because you know it and no one else does).
4. Make sure everyone — including you — who has contributed to your company’s inventions, know-how, brands, works of authorship, and confidential information signs an agreement transferring ownership to the company.
   
   THEN…
   

5. Get the hell out of stealth mode! Go tell the world. Go public. Go social. Go everywhere. Tell everyone what you’re up to and invite their honest feedback. Crowdsource criticism.

It is true that only the paranoid survive. It is also true that the best way to keep something a secret is not to tell anyone else. No doubt about that.

But if secrecy of the business concept is your company’s only competitive advantage, then your business probably isn’t worth pursuing. If it’s a good idea, others will hit on it — in fact they probably already have — so your secrecy strategy is likely to be next to useless.

In the vast majority of cases, you can’t pitch investors while keeping the business idea a secret. Except in very rare situations, you can’t launch in stealth mode. On the other hand, an authentic revelation of your business idea to the public combined with a willingness to integrate their response into your plans, almost never fails to dramatically increase the value of your ideas.

The copyright to Steam Boat Willy was (and is) of course held by the Walt Disney company. It is probably safe to say that the folks at Disney were troubled by the prospect of Steam Boat Willy’s entering the public domain. It could be argued that when Steam Boat Willy enters the public domain, the copyright on the Mickey Mouse character could be considerably weakened. Once the movie enters the public domain, it is possible that all imagery from the movie, including still shots of Mickey himself, could be freely copied without threat of infringement claims. In 2002, Mickey Mouse was threatening to join the ranks of Lady MacBeth, Robin Hood, and Count Dracula as characters in the public commons, and would thereby become freely available for anyone to use for just about any purpose.

The folks at Disney lobbied their local congressperson, who incidentally was (the now late) Sonny Bono of Sonny and Cher fame, to prevail upon him to prevent Mickey Mouse, an American national treasure, from entering the public domain. Congressman Bono thereupon presented legislation to the U.S. congress to lengthen by 20 years the statutory duration of copyright protection for works like Steam Boat Willy. And that legislation, now known as the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act of 2002, easily passed, extending the duration of copyright on works for hire from 75 years to 95 years.

Amid accusations that the U.S. had dipped from capitalist democracy into oligarchic plutocracy, Disney, a wealthy and powerful organization, commiserated with one of its own brethren, Rep. Bono, to cause the rules that govern us all to be changed to its considerable financial favor. Mickey Mouse was saved from the hands of the public for another 20 years. We shall see what happens when Mickey’s first film reaches its 95th anniversary in 2022.

But what is this light within? Can we find it? Can we become the light within?

There are voices in your head, incessantly chattering at you. They narrate your day; they have an opinion about everything. Your parents are in there somewhere, I bet. And your exes. But mostly the voices are yours.

There are Oscar the Grouches in there too, always threatening to drag you into their garbage cans. They are the refuse from your life’s prior painful events. They are just about the opposite of the light within.

Your head is like the NASA control room at Houston, a roiling hive of frenetic activity replete with shrill, peripatetic voices competing for your attention.

You spend far too much time listening to the ravings of these lunatics. It is time to tune them out.

Somewhere way in the back of the control room, way in the back of your head, is the part of your mind that does not participate in these frenetic conversations, but merely observes them. Find that person. The one who truly isn’t part of the show, but merely watches it.

The light within you is the part of you that watches the show. The one who is aware. That’s the real you. The true self. The light.

You are not your thinking mind. You are the one who is aware of your thinking mind.

You are not defined by your emotions. You are the one who observes them.

At your purest essence, detached from the garbage in your mind, you are a bright shining light full of energy and peace and love and happiness. You are the one who observes with joy. You are the light within.

The true you, the light within, is the one with the power to objectify and detach from your thoughts and emotions. To become the light within, focus on leaving the show for a while. Don’t participate; just watch. Shed your thoughts and emotions and look at them from a distance. They are not you. They are some separate thing you can observe.

Cultivate the light within. Attend to it. Visualize it. Become it.

If you want to be happier, try being more thankful.

Your life is an amazing miracle, which, truth be told, you did absolutely nothing to deserve. It’s a gift, a daily birthday present, a sumptuous banquet set before you absolutely free of charge. Your only job is to accept the gift, to take the seat that’s been offered, and, well… eat, man!

The people in your life are all volunteers. Thank them for choosing you to spend their time with.

“When you’re born, you don’t come into this world, you come out of it,” noted the late Zen philosopher, Alan Watts. The universe made itself into you like an apple tree makes apples. That alone is worthy of worship, in my view. No deity required.

Nobody who cares about your well being is going to suggest that entrepreneurship is a good idea. Because they know that chances are as an entrepreneur you are going to be worse off than you are now.

Financially, entrepreneurship is a lousy idea. Do it anyway.

Entrepreneurship is not easy. Nothing worth doing is altogether easy when you really think about it. No interesting questions are terribly easy to answer. No juicy problems are easy to solve. But the rewards are plentiful.

Entrepreneurship is tough. It requires energy, devotion, grit, gusto, and an enormous amount of work. Nobody is going to come by your office and suggest that you ought to do it, and if you ask, nobody is going to suggest that they approve, for the most part.

But, remember the choice is yours and yours alone. It’s your life. This is not a dress rehearsal. This is the show. It’s YOUR show. Only yours. You’re on!

Intellectual property is everywhere. You can hardly exist in the modern world, let alone on the internet, without accessing or using someone’s intellectual property.

The rules of intellectual property help you turn ideas into money, which, at its essence, is pretty much the goal of any creative or innovative business. Most productive companies can be thought of as little machines that take ideas in one end and pump money out of the other end by turning those ideas into tangible assets that can be owned, protected, and ultimately sold for profit — a process enabled and governed almost entirely by intellectual property law.

Today’s so-called knowledge economy veritably demands a working knowledge of IP. In developed economies, the owners of a company – its shareholders – generally expect the company’s management to seize every lawful opportunity to increase the company’s valuation and reduce the company’s risks. Intellectual property law provides an array of options for achieving these goals. The wise entrepreneur should therefore obtain an understanding of IP basics and treat IP as an important component of efforts to maximize both company valuation and shareholder wealth.

Thankfully, of course, not all artistic endeavors have a business or money-making focus; plenty of IP is created every day that is never intended for sale or profit. But even these non-commercial creations are governed by the rules of intellectual property, so it’s a good idea for creators across the spectrum to become familiar with how IP works.

IP is the ROI on R&D – it’s the reward you get for investing in innovation and design. Effective use of IP can create substantial value. Any enterprise that creates, innovates, designs, invents, or advances the state of the art in any technology should consider protecting its creations, innovations, designs, inventions, and advancements by obtaining all available IP rights.

Aggressive, consistent attention to IP should be a core practice for businesses and solo artists alike. Creators of every size and flavor can use IP to fatten their valuation and thin their risk profile. Assets as prosaic as a brand name and a customer list can be protected by IP. Nearly every company and working artist owns such items and can use IP to protect them.

Like they say, “Go big, or go home.”

Life is way too short not to supersize it.

My clients and friends know this. They’re all rockstars, too. And that ain’t easy.

We humans are stuck with some evolutionary baggage. We come from schools of fish and herds of animals for whom sameness is a survival skill and standing out from the crowd gets you eaten. So we have evolved a pleasure response to our own conformity. Fitting in to our peer group evokes a sense of comfort. Somewhere deep within our brains lies machinery that makes us really dig being part of the flock.

Choosing to be a rockstar requires unflocking. You need to overcome the visceral desire to just sit down, shut up, and accept the status quo like everyone else. You need to get up, stand up, scream and shout.

Be prepared for some criticism. Evolutionary disdain for radical behavior works outwardly too; we instinctively fear and loathe the behavior of our peers when it runs too far afield of the norm. And we have no qualms about letting them know it. This kinship-based weirdness suppressor is an evolutionary backup to keep us in line if we can’t self regulate as individuals. When people have too many different ideas, we think they’re crazy and we tell them so. Witness the very epithet “mad scientist.” Heck, witness how any group of teens treats a nonconforming peer. When Fulton proposed the steamboat, they called it Fulton’s Folly and they said it would never work. After all, why put a steam engine on boats when we’ve got reliable, centuries-old sails and oars? I have no doubt that when the first caveman tried rubbing two sticks together in an effort to make fire, the rest of us stood around making fun of him and suggesting he was the Devil. We have trouble conceiving of our own place in a world that is populated by too many crazy rockstars. Just ask the 19th century oarsmen that Fulton’s incredibly useful steam engine put out of work.

To become a rockstar, you’ve got to get used to haters and cultivate a certain pleasure in flipping them off. You’ve got to get yourself spending time around people who appreciate weirdness and smartness and boldness, who value your ideas because they are crazy and new. You’ve got to remember that pretty much everyone who ever said it couldn’t be done, about anything, was wrong.

Step 1 to becoming a rockstar is overcoming fear. It’s also step 2-10. So that means fishbrain avoidance from here on out, right?

You want to be a rockstar, but you’ve got this paleocortex in the back of your head insistently pumping out the signal that you are a fearful little ball of nerves just desperately trying to avoid getting eaten (because your paleocortex knows that you are crunchy and good with soy sauce) and pressuring you to stay inside the comfort of home and avoid the whole hornet’s nest.

Not much of a rockstar, your paleocortex. Best to move north.

‘Cause you’re also gifted with these highly organized electrochemical potentials in your cerebral cortex, the very newest part of your brain, which paves the way for all sorts of useful skills, such as choice. Such as choosing whether to supersize it.

You control the horizontal; you control the vertical. Let yourself become the star you are, star. Choose to be a rockstar.

Always go for the longshot, kids. Always go for the Hail Mary. If you miss it, that’ll suck, but everyone will forgive you because hey, it was a longshot.

In short, I feel 20 years younger.

How did I do this? About a year and a half ago I stopped eating things that are bad for me. I adopted a paleo lifestyle. I eat like a caveman.

Chiefly, I stopped eating grains (wheat and corn) and processed sugar.

“Wait a minute! What? Grains?” you say. Sure, sugar is not so great — everyone knows that — but grains are the very foundation of the food pyramid, aren’t they? The FDA says so!

Turns out, grains hurt you.

So yeah, I stopped eating grains. And sugar. I also stopped eating soy, legumes, seed oils, and unpronounceable chemicals of all kinds. The basic paleo trip is to avoid eating classes of foods that were not available to our cave-dwelling, pre-agricultural ancestors. These foods make us fat and sick because we haven’t evolved a good way to digest them.

The point of eating paleo isn’t to eat exactly what our primal ancestors ate. The point is to eat foods that your body is prepared to digest and grow healthy from instead of foods that cause inflammation, disease, or digestive turmoil. And it turns out that many foods we humans began eating after the dawn of agriculture and civilization — like grains — aren’t so good for us. We’re healthier if we stick to the kinds of foods we ate when we were hunter-gatherers.

Let me restate, because I know it’s hard to, um, swallow, but it’s true. I, a red-blooded American man, have stopped eating bread, pasta, flour, corn, beans, soy, refined sugar, peanuts, and most everything that comes in a package or a box. I don’t eat pizza. I don’t eat sandwiches. I don’t eat big macs or tacos. I don’t eat cake, pie, or doughnuts.

I don’t eat oatmeal or granola or whole grain anything.

I eat plants and animals. I eat beef, pork, poultry, fish, eggs, fruits, and vegetables.

That’s pretty much it. That simple lifestyle change has put me into the best shape of my life.

Everything I eat comes in its natural package. I eat bacon and eggs for breakfast just about every day (did I mention that my cholesterol has never been lower?). I eat a lot of red meat. I eat a ton of almonds and coconut. I am never without salmon. I shop mostly in the perimeter of the grocery store and stay out of the aisles.

Many people respond to paleo eating with revulsion. “How can you give up bread?” they demand. “Oatmeal is good for you!” they insist.

Turns out, it’s not good for you. Not at all. Grains and sugar make you fat and make you sick. So do artificial sweeteners, preservatives, and food colors. They poison you.

If you want to be healthy and fit, eat real food.

Note that I am not talking about Atkins or low carb diets. I eat a lot of carbs. I just get them from fruits and vegetables instead of grains.

I also eat a lot of fats. When you see “low fat,” read “chemical soup.” When you see “fat free,” read “filled with crap.”

If you don’t believe me, hey that’s cool. I’m just a caveman. Your modern ways frighten me.

But I do know one thing. A year and a half ago I was putting on the love handles and creeping into the unhealthy miasma of afflictions typical of a middle-aged American lawyer.

Today I’m a young, thin, muscular guy in near perfect health. And that is because I went paleo.

Take a page from my book. Stop eating poison. Go paleo.

If you’re interested in the science that proves that what I say is true, read The Perfect Health Diet by Paul Jaminet, Ph.D. and Shou-Ching Shih Jaminet, Ph.D.