The Freaks Shall Inherit the Earth: Entrepreneurship for Weirdos, Misfits, and World Dominators

3Choose Your Own Adventure: Defining Success

How one defines success says a lot about how one might come to achieve it. My personal definition of success is this: being able to say yes to what I want to do and say no to what I don't. I'm pretty fond of that definition. It lets me write books and spend time with my kids and my girlfriend. This is how I play, how I choose to spend the hours of my day, and, most important, how I do my business.

But that's my definition. If you haven't yet defined what success actually looks like to you, it's important to do that now. Most freaks I spoke to while writing this book each had their own very clear—and unique—take on success. And even more important, they were able to identify completely new paths to achieve it and were able to recognize easily how others were figuring this out, as well.

Straight out of college, Alexis Ohanian cofounded the very successful Reddit (reddit.com), sometimes called the “front page of the Internet.” Ohanian has used that success to build the travel-pricing aggregation site Hipmunk, and a site that helps with causes and nonprofit efforts called Breadpig. When I spoke with him, Ohanian was promoting his book, Without Their Permission. We talked about how we don't need the gatekeepers of the past to be successful these days.

One of the big reasons I'm so jealous of the generation [growing up now] is they are unencumbered by these same biases. Some little girl in Des Moines can get up one morning and say, “You ...