The world bursts at the seams with people ready to tell you you’re not good enough. On occasion some may be correct. But do not do their work for them. Seek any job; ask anyone out; pursue any goal. Don’t take it personally when they say “no” – they may not be smart enough to say “yes”.

– Keith Olbermann

Personal development books are full of recipes for goal achievement. You’ve got to get clear about what you want, become a “vibrational match” for the financial success you desire, make the decision that you will attain your goal at any cost, and by the way, here’s an anecdote about some guy you’ve never heard of, who followed every step of my Unlock Your Inner Genius Master Course (TM), and is now, like, super happy to have traded his $300,000/year job on Wall Street for the simple, hunter-gatherer life of a fisherman on a remote island in the South Pacific.

Hmmm…

Okay, okay, I am being a bit harsh. The goal of this post is not to rant against personal development books. Rather, I intend to talk about the actual process of achieving personal goals, using a recent example from my own life. And the first point I want to make is this: There is no secret and no system. There is no frequency that needs tuning into, and no visualization clear enough to guarantee that things will happen.

There is only hard work and hustle, uncertainty and despair, pressing forward when you have no clue where to start, and the inevitable criticism put forth by a seething, vocal minority of non-doers.

Of course, there are also all the upsides that come from giving everything you’ve got to hopefully, maybe, at least give yourself the chance to get exactly what you want. But I’ll talk about those more later.

The recipe for achieving personal goals that I am about to offer you is, in fact, not a recipe at all. It is just a story about one fairly major attempt I made at doing things on my own terms. In some ways it was amazingly successfully. In other ways, things didn’t go as expected. But either way, I’d do it all over again.

In fact, I am doing it all over again. More on that later too.

Moving to Vancouver

In the spring and summer of 2009 I was shopping around for a new place to live. Not just a new house, but a new city — maybe even a new country. I’d been living in Montreal for the last five years, and absolutely loved it, but I didn’t want to let that blind me to exploring other parts of the country and/or the world. In the worst case, if things really didn’t work out, I could always just move back.

After spending a few months in Europe, I ultimately decided — for reasons that would be too off-topic to get into just now — to return to Canada. I was itching to start a new project, wanted a place that would present as few obstacles as possible to building new things, and eventually selling said things, and ultimately decided to move to the West Coast. I ended up in Vancouver.

The Itch

I touched down in Vancouver on August 15, 2009. Before I’d even moved into my own place (I was still crashing on my buddy’s couch), I immediately set to work on coming up with a new project. Carpe diem, etc.

For me, there is a fine line between business and self-actualization. I see the former as a vehicle for the latter. I don’t tend to think of business ideas in terms of what’s hot and what’s trendy. Instead, I tend to think in terms of what’s missing. In the summer of last year, after a few months of being single, the biggest thing that was missing for me was a quality relationship.

Of course, I had no idea at first that the goal of finding a quality long-term relationship would result in an idea for a business. That’s where Twitter came in.

You Are What You Tweet

By last summer, I’d been using Twitter for a couple years. Indeed, I have a link to my Twitter account in the sidebar of this blog, since I think it offers a great way to interact with readers. I also use it to follow people who interest and inspire me.

As I used Twitter more and more, I started to see its potential in helping me achieve the goal of finding a mate. I say this even as someone who swore off dating sites, and for that matter, still does.

As a potential platform for online dating, I saw that Twitter provided a unique window into someone’s life. Unlike typical online dating profiles which are easy to fake, a user’s Twitter stream tells you a lot about who they really are: what kind of work they do, what their social life is like, whether they actually are into all kinds of sports, how influential they are, etc. Sure, you could make up everything about yourself in your tweets, but I personally have yet to see that happen with anyone I come into even vague contact with on Twitter.

As I thought more about the things Twitter is good at, I saw an opportunity to combine a personal goal with the itch I had to build something shiny and new. Since Twitter itself is really bad at being a dating service (and so it should be), why not build something for people who are interested in connecting with Twitter peeps beyond their 140 character limits?

People like, erm, me.

After running the idea by a few friends, there was no doubt that I had to get started on it as soon as possible. My personal goal of finding a great relationship had merged with my interest in the world of followers, at-messages, and tweets. I was going to build a platform on which Twitter users could take their interactions beyond single sentence exchanges and into feature-length conversations. I was going to build a Twitter dating website.

From Thought to Action

The distance between when I started thinking about this idea and when I started implementing it could be measured in hours. I knew that inspiration is perishable, and that if I didn’t act immediately, it just wouldn’t happen.

Because of the sale of my house earlier in the year, I had the bankroll to allow me to focus on building the site full-time, at least for a little while. From the moment I started working on it, I devoted every second of every day to it, seven days a week. I had no idea what the hell I was doing, no grand vision of the business model or the marketing strategy, so I just barfed out my ideas in code and gradually massaged them into something that sort of worked.

Within a couple weeks of starting, I convinced a buddy of mine to quit his job and join me on the project full-time. He’d previously founded and sold a network of Canadian classified ad sites, and I thought his experience would be a great asset moving forward.

In the mad rush of August and September 2009, we ate slept and breathed this project. We were maniacs on a mission and were fairly confident that world domination was imminent. Even though it wasn’t quite ready — hell, we weren’t quite ready — we launched the site on October 1st. We called it Plenty of Tweeps.

The Magic of Just Friggin’ Doing Stuff

Our initial version was pretty crappy. It was fairly stable and bug-free, but it was also somewhat feature-free too. And the user interface, while easy to use, was a little too Twittery in its look and feel.

But here’s the really cool thing about actually doing stuff, even when you have no clue what you’re doing or if it’ll work: people notice. People start talking about you. And people started talking about Plenty of Tweeps. I got interviewed by a popular local newspaper, Mark caught the eye of some of his investor friends, and even one of the founders of Twitter tweeted about us!

More recently, Plenty of Tweeps got mentioned on CNN and on one of the most popular social media blogs in the world, Mashable.

Even as I reflect on this now, I have no idea how this happened. I’m a decent programmer, but I’m no rock star. And while I have a keen interest in user interface design, I learned probably half of what I know from the building of Plenty of Tweeps itself.

And I haven’t even gotten to the really cool part yet.

Single? Use Twitter? Awesome.

There is another highly useful side effect of scratching your own itch: You get to actually use the thing when it’s done. And use it I did.

The product worked exactly like I hoped it would. Reading a person’s tweets gave me about as good a sense of them as you can get without actually meeting them in person. So I just went ahead and liked some profiles to see what would happen.

Surprisingly, people started joining. I exchanged messages with various girls on the site, and went on a couple dates. Going on a date with a girl you met from a dating site you built is a pretty trippy experience, to say the least.

A couple months after we launched, I met someone off the site that I really clicked with, @alicia_CHt. That’s her on the Plenty of Tweeps homepage. ;)

If You Build It…

When I say Alicia and I really hit it off, I mean it. She’s Australian and also lives in Vancouver. Just weeks after we met, she flew back to Australia for a month to spend the Christmas holidays with her family.

A few days after she left, we were chatting on Skype, and she was joking about how I should come over, “you’d have free accommodation!”, etc. I knew she was teasing, but I also knew that a month apart was a long time for two people that had just met. Not one to waste time, the next morning I booked a ticket, and a couple days later, I met her at the airport in Sydney.

Fast forward to today: We recently celebrated our nine month anniversary, six of which we’ve been living together. Building a dating site that I personally wanted to use turned out to be a pretty good idea after all.

The Present

Plenty of Tweeps continues to move forward, and while it hasn’t yet been a runaway commercial success, it continues to attract new signups every day. It’s obviously been a huge personal success, and a great addition to my consulting portfolio.

In the past several weeks, I’ve started doing the whole thing all over again with a new project called Quitfest, dedicated to the thousands of people who have commented on my post on quitting drinking. For the past few years, that community has been using a blog post to communicate with each other, and I think I can build something much easier and more fun to use for that purpose.

I spent all of this past weekend working on it, I’ll be on it all day today the second after I hit Publish on this post, and I’ve shifted back to an early riser schedule to help me finish my billable consulting hours early enough to allocate a few hours each day to Quitfest.

In the same way that I had no idea what I was doing with Plenty of Tweeps, I’m fumbling my way forward with Quitfest too. I can’t tell you if I’ve picked the right feature set, the right pricing model, or the right marketing strategy, or even the right idea for that matter, but I’ll find out soon enough.

But here’s what matters most, and here’s the entire reason why I wanted to share this story with you: I haven’t succeeded yet. I haven’t yet reached that glorious point where I can claim to support myself entirely from my own projects. Every fucking time I do anything, I get criticized for it. If you read the CNN link, you’ll see what I mean. Hell, I’ve gotten severely flamed on this blog for some of the things I’ve written. I’ve even gotten severely flamed for not writing for a while.

And that bit about meeting Alicia? Here’s one thing I left out: I liked 199 girls on Plenty of Tweeps. That is not a typo. One. Hundred. Ninety. Nine. While I exchanged messages with quite a few after that, I only actually went on two dates, the second of which was Alicia.

(I left that detail out because Alicia wanted me to. Sorry, baby! I love you. ;)

But one thing I can say for sure is this: I am trying my friggin’ heart out. I can’t think or do any harder. I can’t fall back on that whole well-I-know-if-I-really-put-my-mind-to-it crap. I have no excuses and no rationalizations. This is me running at full power.

And that, to me, is the most important part of achieving personal goals: Not wondering where to start — just starting. Not fearing the damage of rejection — going out and getting rejected. Not needing the advice of some “guru” to tell you what to do — giving yourself permission to live.

When in doubt, go for it. Good luck.

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The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.

– Oscar Wilde

A while back I read a book called Real-Time Relationships, by Stefan Molyneux. It’s a book about creating relationships that are healthy, enjoyable, loving, and virtuous. The author hosts a philosophy podcast called Freedomain Radio, which deals with everything from overcoming procrastination and how to be a good parent, to the ethics of taxation and philosophical analyses of current events.

This article is not a review of the book, so I’ll avoid any comments on its read-worthiness as a whole. But I would like to share with you an extract that forever changed the way I look at things. It’s a quote from the book that concisely summarizes what the whole thing is about:

The Real-Time Relationship (RTR) is based on two core principles, designed to liberate both you and others in your communication with each other:

1. Thoughts precede emotions.
2. Honesty requires that we communicate our thoughts and feelings, not our conclusions.

Molyneux’s point is that so much of the negative communication in relationships arises because we treat feelings as facts, and tend to skip over the thoughts that underly those feelings. This results in arguments that are, in essence, based on mythology.

So let’s say one day Alice says to her husband Bob:

You’re so lazy! You never help around the house!

This is an example of communicating a conclusion — that Bob is lazy — rather than communicating just her thoughts and feelings. It is not necessarily true that Bob is lazy. Perhaps he doesn’t help clean up after dinner because he assumes that, since he cooked dinner, the cleaning task should naturally fall to Alice. Or maybe he left washing the dishes to Alice because he did the vacuuming earlier in the day.

Alice calling Bob “lazy” bypasses these possibilities. It’s a conclusion derived from anger, rather than an honest deployment of what she’s experiencing on the inside. A more sincere approach would be for her to tell Bob that she feels frustrated because he left her to do the dishes, which makes her feel disrespected, makes her think that Bob doesn’t care, and so on.

Replacing the name-calling with an accurate testimony of what it made her feel opens the door for Bob to address those feelings. On the one hand, it might make Bob realize that he really is lazy, and if he cares about his partner he better work on that. On the other hand, he has a chance to clarify a misunderstanding. He could talk to Alice about how he assumed that since he cooked dinner, he thought it was okay if he left the clean up to her.

Whether that division of labour is something they can both accept is a separate issue. The point is that communicating with integrity requires describing your thoughts and feelings, not rushing to conclusions about what’s really going on.

RTR’ing Yourself

In my experience, the Real-Time Relationship is an excellent model not only for productive communication between two people, but also for communicating with yourself. In particular, it’s a powerful tool for dealing with negative emotions.

Let’s revisit those two core principles of the RTR, to see how they apply to dealing with one’s own negativity:

1. Thoughts precede emotions. Emotions, in and of themselves, tell you nothing about the facts of reality. Feeling hopeless about your chances of meeting an amazing girl does not actually mean that you have no hope of meeting an amazing girl. And just because losing that game damaged your confidence so much that you feel like you’ll never win again does not mean you actually will never win again.
2. Honesty requires that we communicate our thoughts and feelings, not our conclusions. The best way to deal with negative emotions — which are often negative conclusions we’ve come to about ourselves — is to examine the thoughts and feelings behind them.

For example, I have always had a fear of losing. As a chess player during my teenage years, this fear surfaced in the form of offering draws to higher rated players when I had a clearly better position. Other times it just kept me out of tournaments altogether: by not playing, I guaranteed not losing.

Recently that fear resurfaced when I started playing go (a board game invented in China 4,000 years ago.) One particular loss a few weeks ago was particularly hard to swallow. I was a solid 50 points ahead in the game, and my opponent was ready to resign. But my follow through was so terrible that he ended up beating me by about 50 points instead.

I don’t mind when I lose because my opponent just outplayed me, but I get really frustrated when I outplay myself. And after this particular loss, my confidence was deeply shaken: How the hell could I play so badly? Why did I try to get so fancy? It’s impossible to blow a lead that big. If anything I had to congratulate myself for being able to fail so spectacularly.

And on it went, to the point that I wondered whether I should just quit playing altogether. What was the point of all the studying I was doing if I was just going to blow games like that? How would I regain my confidence to actually win a won position? Would I ever even win another game again?

Challenging Negative Thoughts

When you start thinking negative thoughts like this, don’t try to ignore them. If you’ve ever tried to repress negative feelings you know that it just doesn’t work. If anything, it amplifies them. Further, trying to stamp out bad feelings gives you no actionable way out of that state. There are underlying premises, beliefs, and assumptions about you and the world around you that have led you to feeling that way, and those need to be addressed.

So the way out of negative emotional loops is not to ignore them, subdue them, or even “just let them be there”, but to challenge them. Confront the negative self-talk directly and identify exactly why you feel that way. Extract the thoughts that precede the emotions.

Returning to my go example, I knew I loved the game and I had no intention of actually giving it up, so I forced myself to figure out how to better handle major upsets like the one I’d just endured. I did that by taking a close look at the thoughts that were going through my head. Here are some examples:

• How could I play so badly? Easy: by making mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. When a doctor makes a mistake, he might kill someone and/or get sued. When a computer programmer makes a mistake, it might lead to a huge security flaw in his software. When an investor makes a mistake, she might lose a few million bucks. And when a go player makes a mistake, he loses a game of go.
• How could I lose such a won position? Because deserving to win is not the same as winning. And by the way, this probably won’t be the last time you blow such a big lead. This is more like “the first major screw up of the rest of your (go playing) life.” But the more it happens, the better you’ll learn to deal with it.
• Will I ever win again? Erm, seriously? Do you really think that if you play another five or ten thousand games you’re going to lose all of them? Do you really think that if you spend a couple hours a day studying and playing go, and constantly seek out opportunities to learn from stronger players, that you’re going to be the same strength in five years from now that you are today? Not. Likely.

The more I cranked up the resolution on my thoughts, the more I realized how silly they were. Sure, I still fear losing and I still hate blowing won positions, but challenging those feelings and forcing myself to reveal the thinking behind them has greatly diminished their control over my actions. And they no longer threaten my continued enjoyment of the game.

I’ve intentionally given a rather tame example here of course, but I use these same principles to confront all kinds of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. I have the same kinds of worries about my writing, my consulting work, my health, my relationships, etc., and I’ve found this process to be extremely helpful for putting things in perspective.

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The first couple minutes of this video, a speech Lund gave about entrepreneurship at Le Web ‘08 in Paris, are rough going as they get the presentation set up. But the remaining 10 minutes are a gold mine of insight and inspiration.

It comes at a time when Lund has just failed badly. Really badly. Like, they’re-coming-to-take-my-house-away badly. He went “all-in” on a newspaper project that bombed, and lost 30 million euros as a result.

He’s not too bothered though. My favourite quote:

I started with nothing as a student [but] I probably had more fun [at that time] than I had last year when I was thinking about buying a private jet.

But the most valuable lesson I take away from his speech is this: An entrepreneur is someone who is more willing to fail at something that matters than to succeed at something that doesn’t.

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The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.

– Aristotle

As Ayn Rand pointed out in her excellent book, Philosophy: Who Needs It, we are all philosophers.

We all have a certain attitude towards life, we all have different hypotheses regarding Flying Spaghetti Monsters, and we all have a standard by which we measure good and evil. The only difference, as Rand says, is “whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought…or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions.”

That you’re reading these words suggests you are most likely of the conscious, rational vintage. Even if you think my writing deserves no particular admiration, you are at least here to consume ideas and think critically about them, to improve your grasp on the art of living. This is what personal growth is all about.

But what if you’ve been involved in this whole personal growth thing for some time and it just isn’t working? What if you’ve read a lot of stuff from the self-help section–Tony Robbins, Tim Ferriss, Napoleon Hill, Stephen Covey, Rhonda Byrne, etc.–but now realize that you’re the same person you were a year ago? What if instead of losing weight, you’ve gained weight? What if instead of expanding your social life, you’ve made unwanted friends and influenced the wrong people? What if you’ve read all that Mars/Venus stuff but your relationship is still lost in space?

Getting Out of the Rut

There are three reasons to explain this:

The first reason is that you don’t apply what you learn. In that case, the ideas that follow won’t help either.

The second reason is that you apply what you learn, but incorrectly. The author knows how to “ask, believe, and receive” and the reason your intentions aren’t manifesting is because you don’t know the secret.

Or should I say, you don’t know The Secret.

But this is unlikely. Personal growth ideas are generally not that complicated. They are intentionally broad strokes, not intricate mathematical equations. The hardest part is applying what you learn. And, more specifically, applying it day in and day out for as long as is needed to achieve the desired outcome.

You don’t need a university degree to lose weight. There is no Ph.D. in social engineering. And relationship problems are hard to measure; emotions don’t fit in test tubes.

The third reason to account for a lack of success is that you are an earnest student with a capable mind, who is faithfully implementing what you’re learning, but it just doesn’t work. Despite the claims of the enormous power of the Hyper-Mega-Success Formula (TM), and the author’s assertions that “countless experiments” in “modern science” have proven its efficacy, the only thing it’s given you in a Hyper-Mega-Hole-In-Your-Wallet and an ever-present speech bubble floating over your head that reads:

         . o O (WTF???)
        O
       /|\
       / \

It is to this person that I am here speaking.

If you have a large library of self-help books, and you’ve learned from and applied their teachings with excellent results, then what follows probably won’t change much. Output is, after all, God.

But if you find yourself frustrated and in many ways poorer from your efforts–if self-help feels more like self-destruct–then I’d like to suggest an alternate course: Stop reading self-help books. And start devouring philosophy.

Questions Are Not the Answer

At a casual glance, self-help and philosophy appear to be almost the same thing. Both Tony Robbins and Aristotle are trying to help you live a fulfilling life. Both want to help you gain a better understanding of yourself and the world around you. But while the goals of these two fields are similar, the differences in implementation are not trivial.

One of the most fundamental problems with many self-help books is that they assume that questions are answers. For example, in his book Awaken the Giant Within, Tony Robbins, talking about how to come up with goals, suggests you ask yourself (pp. 289-290), “What would I want for my life if I knew I could have it any way I wanted it? What would I go for if I knew I could not fail?”

What’s missing from this solution for choosing worthy goals is…a solution for choosing worthy goals. A lot of people ask themselves this question and have no idea how to answer it. How do you know what you would do if you couldn’t fail? What do you consider “good” (a worthy goal) versus “evil” (an unworthy goal)? And by what standard?

Ethics: The Missing Manual

To answer this particular question, I advocate using your Weird Idea Radar, constantly saying yes to new experiences until you stumble upon something that you can really sink your teeth into.

But equally important is a tool with which to measure the value of your experiences, an instrument that will not only give you readings of “Bad”, “Good”, “Better”, and “Best” but that also explains why this is so. That instrument is ethics.

Ethics is the branch of philosophy that illuminates the path to right action. It is not just about determining which actions which should be legal or illegal; any evaluation of bad, good, better, and best, whether on a personal, social, or societal level falls within the concern of ethics.

If your moral code is based on Marxist ideas, your life goals are going to be completely different from someone whose moral code is derived from Objectivism. Likewise, a hedonist’s ethics will result in a completely different day-to-day experience compared to someone whose moral guide is the Bible.

And here’s the thing: not all moral codes are created equal. If your moral code is broken, it doesn’t matter how you answer the goals question, because the answer will always point you in the wrong direction.

Ethics is the primary deliverable of philosophy. The rest–metaphysics (the nature of reality), epistemology (the nature of knowledge), and esthetics (the nature of beauty)–is interesting only because it all lays the groundwork for understanding how to conduct our lives.

And while an entire book on ethics is at the core of most contributions of those we consider great philosophers–Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, and Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason come to mind–the subject of ethics is conspicuously absent from self-help literature.

In most cases, it is conspicuously ignored.

Ideas – Ethics = FAIL

Since personal growth is all about action, and ethics provides a framework for right action, a solid understanding of ethics is the most important weapon in your arsenal of change.

What happens when you ignore ethics?

One risk, like the goal-setting example shows, is that you just get stuck.

The other risk is that your actions write a cheque that your sanity can’t cash.

The seduction community is ripe territory for causing such psychological fallouts. For example, the Mystery Method is probably the most well-known How-To manual on meeting women. Its premise is that seduction is a linear process. It describes each step of the process, from the opener, to getting a girl interested in you, to how and when to demonstrate interest in her, to getting her in bed and avoiding “buyer’s remorse.”

And, as someone who was involved in the seduction community a couple years ago, I can tell you this: it works. In fact, it’s almost frightening to realize that it works, to see an interaction with a girl unfolding before your eyes exactly like a book told you it would.

Sometimes word for word like the book told you it would.

But there’s a problem here. If you need money quickly, both mugging a blind man in a back alley late at night and selling off one of your five TVs to the local pawn shop will achieve that goal, but clearly only one of these alternatives is viable.

While the Mystery Method can answer almost all your questions about meeting women–why she needs to be interested in you before you demonstrate interest in her, why going for rapport before attraction will get you LJBF’d, why backhanded compliments will actually increase your appeal–there is one question for which no answer is provided: Is this right?

Is the right approach to meeting women to observe alpha males, identify the characteristics and behaviours that distinguish them, and then emulate those attributes in the hopes of producing the same results? Is posting and analyzing “lay reports” on the internet a sensible way to improve your skills with the opposite sex? Will 20 lays make you happier than 17?

The short answer to these questions can be found here:

• Seduction for Smart People: Should You Become a “Pickup Artist”? – Part I
• Seduction for Smart People: Should You Become a “Pickup Artist”? – Part II

The long answer can be found in Neil Strauss’s excellent book The Game.

Learning How to Learn

What do you know? How do you know that you know it?

This might sound like a cute little brain teaser, something to think about while you’re waiting for the bong to make its way in your direction, but it is a vital day-to-day enquiry. It is the primary concern of epistemology, the branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge: what it is, how to acquire it, and what its limits are.

Rendering the sharpest image of reality that your mental hardware can support means continually upgrading your mental software. But the only ideas worth “installing” are those that perform useful functions without causing your system to crash all the time.

It may seem like recognizing bad ideas is just common sense, but refined critical thinking skills are not innate. Looking through the history of the scientific method for example, you’ll find that the idea of using a controlled experiment with two identical populations and one variable is only 250 years old. Without that idea, many of the major medical breakthroughs we make today would not be possible.

Growth requires critical thinking skills. Ideas need to be resisted before they can be accepted. When you’re studying advice on personal growth, that resistance comes in the form of some necessary questions: What does this author know? How does he know it? And how do you know that he knows it?

Blurring Reality

There’s a lot of wisdom in self-help books that can never be considered knowledge, because it involves claims that are so general that they cannot be proven either true or false. As long as these claims are kept in a box labelled “beliefs”, that’s generally not a problem. There are a lot of areas in life that we aren’t sure about–and might never be–and beliefs provide us some way of wading through uncertainty.

Unfortunately, in my experience, self-help books have a tendency to blur the line between fact and fiction, making scientific claims (statements that can be demonstrated as true or false) with insufficient, or even bogus evidence.

For example, to continue picking on Tony Robbins, in his book Unlimited Power, Tony talks about the power of writing down your goals and refers to the famous Yale Study of Goals. The story goes like this:

In 1953, researchers studying goal setting surveyed the graduating seniors from Yale University on their goals and aspirations for the future. They discovered only 3% of the graduating class had specific, written goals and objectives.

20 years later, when they tracked down the same graduates, the researchers were astounded by the results. They discovered that the same 3% who engaged in goal setting activity and had clearly written goals when they graduated in 1953 were more successful, and worth more in terms of wealth than the other 97% put together. The same 3% also tended to have better health and relationships than the other 97%.

Evidence like this is so powerful that it’s almost overwhelming. So it’s no wonder that the same story has been repeated by some of the most well-known self-help gurus, including Zig Ziglar and Brian Tracy. After all, if you had known the power of clear, written goals 5 or 10 years ago you’d probably be a millionaire many times over by now, right?

There’s just one problem with this story: It is complete bullshit. Total air. It never happened.

Eyes Wide Shut

This might seem like a small fib, but the problem with false claims is that they rarely travel solo, and hollow evidence leads to hollow conclusions. If the Yale story were true, then the power of setting clear, written goals would indeed be enormous. And if you hadn’t been doing that lately, it may actually be the missing ingredient to your success.

But even with razor-sharp, written goals, even with all your I’s dotted and your T’s crossed, you still have all the real work ahead of you. The decisions you make along the way will require refined moral judgement. Choosing the people with whom you’ll associate will require a keen sense of virtue. And making yourself equal to the work at hand will require learning from impeccable sources.

Becoming a student of philosophy will make you a more rigorous student of everything else. You will no longer have to squint when reading. When a scientific claim is made, you will insist on evidence to back it up. You will learn to spot logical fallacies that might normally have gone unnoticed. You will avoid the frustration of false expectations derived from false affirmations.

Self-help gurus make promises. Philosophers make arguments. The great philosophers are measured not by the cost of their weekend seminars, but by the quality of their proofs.

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A common recipe for personal growth is to start with what you have, identify what sucks about it, and try to make it suck less. Software developers call this “fixing bugs.”

“Fixing bugs” may seem like a natural metaphor for personal development, but in most cases this is actually an extremely limited, even harmful, perspective. When you focus on fixing what’s broken, the standard by which you measure your progress is whatever you started with. If what you started with was crap, then the standard by which you judge your results is crap.

If your software currently crashes 20 times a day, making it crash only 15 times a day is “good”, only 12 times a day is “better”, and a mere 10 crashes a day would be “excellent.”

You might even get a raise.

This way of thinking is its own worst enemy. Patching a bad situation often still leaves you in a bad situation. Even worse, you might get the impression you’re doing something useful. Sure, 10 crashes a day is a lot better than 20 crashes a day. Perhaps you even used your Employee of the Month bonus to upgrade to the 500 channel cable package that Bob and Alice have been raving about.

But it’s still a profoundly shit way to live. Fixing a bug doesn’t necessarily fix anything. You may think you’ve uncovered a solution, when all you’ve really done is found a rut and made it deeper–a little more like a grave.

Death by a Thousand Service Packs

If it’s been three years since your last promotion–if you’ve spent almost every day for as long as you can remember arguing with your girlfriend about absolutely nothing–if you’ve swallowed up the last six months going on about how hopeless you are with women, yet you’ve approached only a dozen girls in that time, then reality has a message for you: The data has spoken. There is no bandage large enough to cover this wound. There is no way to alter this cause to produce the desired effect.

You cannot fix what was built on this foundation. You have to replace the foundation entirely.

The day after my cousin died several weeks ago, I quit my job. I’d been working on a contract for the last several months, but it just wasn’t me. It couldn’t be me. And no amount of tweaking, tuning, or patchwork could fix that.

It’s always a little terrifying to shake things up, but there is no better way to live. Until last Thursday, I was scratching someone else’s itch. Now I’m scratching my own.

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Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom.

– Thomas Jefferson

Deception is cancerous. The first mutation of a truth charts a path to colonize its host. One fib demands another, two lies need the proof of two more, until eventually even the most innocent half-truth metastasizes into a falsehood requiring surgery.

A lie is a deliberate attempt to fake the nature of reality. So a scientist who reaches a flawed conclusion through an error in her experimentation method may hint at incompetence, but she is not lying. But a guy who trades his own happiness for a fat paycheque and calls himself “successful”, must be charged with first-degree bullshit. His deception may succeed temporarily but he has not altered the facts, and the moral transaction is still charged to his account.

Why is faking the nature of reality bad? Because reality exists. No matter how hard you try to treat things differently than they really are, they still are. A job that drains your will to live is a job that drains your will to live. A girl who doesn’t respect you, doesn’t respect you.

When the disconnect with reality comes from a genuine error, the mistake is open to correction. The evidence of a fallacy shows up in the form of contradiction, and logic and reason can help stitch things back together. But intentional deceit makes the perpetrator a fugitive; sometimes physically, always intellectually. For whenever a liar’s evidence contradicts itself, he must flee further and further from the facts to maintain his sliding grip on sincerity.

The safe haven from the perils of denying what is, is radical honesty. To commit to radical honesty is to take an oath sworn directly on the face of existence. It’s a pledge–in your work, in your relationships, and to yourself–to see things exactly as they are, to the best of your ability. It acknowledges that almost all things are small things and that nothing is bigger than the truth.

Radical Honesty at Work

Few relationships will last longer, or have a larger effect on your day-to-day life, than the relationship between you and the value-producing activity that is your work. Applying radical honesty in your work means creating things that are of value to you personally.

Can each of us really do work that is of value to us personally? On what planet would we ever find someone to specialize in the manufacture of, say, toilet paper? Someone who would claim that such work is of value to him personally? You’d find that guy on the planet where ass-wiping technology doesn’t yet exist, where there’s a guy who’s sick of using his bare hands for the task, and where he is the only man alive annoyed enough to scratch this particular itch himself.

The things that are of value to you personally are entirely dependent on your environment and how you relate to it. For example, I couldn’t care less about growing my own food. There are lots of lots of people–”farmers” as they’re called–who already do this. And they’re willing, with the aid of an elaborate supply chain, to take my money in exchange for their food. If I didn’t have access to anyone who was willing to grow food, maintain livestock, and sell me either when I needed them, then I’d pretty quickly become interested in this problem. I value my own life and I need food to live.

What most frustrates you about the world? Almost every answer to that question is a business idea with your name written all over it. And when the work you do pays the bills both financially and spiritually, you have truly become your own boss.

Radical Honesty in Relationships

There’s a strong tie between your work and your relationships. Asking “What most frustrates you about the world?” is not only a means of identifying opportunities to create value in your life, it’s also a compass that directs you towards the people that will help make those dreams come true.

Radical honesty in relationships–whether platonic or intimate–requires self-respect. Self-respect is a seed planted by the standards you set: How do you treat people? How do you let them treat you?

Purpose is also paramount. In geek terms, your mission is like an Uninterruptible Power Supply, a primary source of energy and the motive power behind all the moving parts of your life. The relationships worth having are those with a voltage high enough to match your own, not those that cause a power failure.

Maintaining integrity in relationships means addressing problems that come up in real-time. Emotions are not chess pieces, and love is not a game of strategy. If you sense that something might be wrong, seek to identify and resolve the issue on the spot. If you’re constantly met with responses like the Solemn Downward Stare, followed by the Evening of Awkward Silence, and the Night Without Sex, then be warned: the game you’re playing isn’t worth winning.

Radical Self-Honesty

The hardest person to be honest with is yourself. Really, the only person you can be honest with is you. All delusion is ultimately self-delusion.

Radical self-honesty requires a matching dose of humility. Whatever score you give yourself in any category is almost surely inflated. If the currency by which we measure others is pounds, the currency by which we measure ourselves is yen. Some of these feelings of superior knowledge, skill, or judgement are no doubt justified. But many, if not most of them, aren’t. The moment you become conscious of this, your self-awareness expands. You begin to ask yourself more honest questions and give yourself more honest answers.

I find journalling to be an effective way to keep myself honest. I reach for my journal whenever I feel there’s an idea or milestone–good or bad–worth documenting. For example, I’ve got an overwhelming appetite for change. So when several months ago I started getting bored with my day-to-day routine, I made a journal entry about it. I even made a list of specific adjustments I wanted to make to shake things up. Looking at that list now, I’ve installed about 60% of those tweaks so far with more currently in progress.

How Honest Is Too Honest?

In the honesty business, there’s a fine line between radical and reckless.

Reckless honesty is the result of pushing the authenticity envelope so far that you shoot yourself in the foot. Radical honesty is having the balls to walk up to a girl and say “Hi” because you think she’s attractive and you want to find out more. Reckless honesty is walking up to the same girl and saying “Wow, you are absolutely gorgeous. There’s nothing I’d like to do more right now than to take you into the nearest bathroom, rip all your clothes off, and fuck you to God.”

Both approaches are, technically speaking, completely authentic. But one is obviously somewhat more productive. The border between radical and reckless must be patrolled by your intuition. Sometimes that line is obvious (like in the example above), but sometimes it’s not. As a general rule, accuracy is more important than precision.

If you have a habit of stopping short of saying what you really think, turning things around will take time. But there is no challenge more worth tackling. Authenticity accrues a compound interest, and even a few extra cents of veracity today could become a large down payment on your happiness tomorrow.

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It’s not who you are that holds you back, it’s who you think you’re not.

– Author Unknown

If your primary goal in life is to meet an amazing woman, you probably won’t.

Setting out on a mission to find a girlfriend is like starting a company to get rich: It focusses you on the wrong things and you eventually realize that the game you’re playing isn’t worth winning.

When money is your center of gravity, you make decisions based on dollars rather than sense. Instead of being a Merchant of Wow, you become a Merchant of Ow, building boring, ugly, and painful things, hoping you might flip before you flop. By trading passion for profit you confine yourself to mediocrity, blazing a trail to unhappiness and unwealth as you sink ever deeper into spiritual overdraft.

Likewise, when you make women your focal point, you let go of your I. Instead of asking what you want most in life, you ask what women want most in life: What traits do women find attractive in a man? What kind of social events do hot women go to? What kind of hobbies do women consider sexy? What should I say to a girl when I approach her? Will she be turned off if I do XYZ?

Questions are like shovels: they unearth the truth. But when you ask questions like these, you dig your own grave.

There Is No Secret

In How to Meet Women Without Really Trying, I suggested that the best way to meet women is by talking to them. This advice is so simple that it’s almost impossible to understand.

I’ve experienced the entire spectrum of success with women, from being a chess-playing, virgin, overweight cookie monster in high school all the way to where I am now, where I don’t even think about meeting girls anymore and It Just Happens. I know how easy–and, more importantly, how hard–it is to accept and apply the idea of meeting girls by talking to them.

What do I mean by “talk” to women? What do you say? What’s the best opener? What do you say after that? Where do you meet them? How do you get them interested in you? How do you ask for their number? How can you possibly meet hot girls without using magic potions and super sekrit seduction techniques?

To demystify the mechanics of making a connection, I’ll describe exactly how I met the girl I’m currently dating. I’ll include some philosophical context to paint the bigger picture that led to us finding, meeting, and connecting with each other.

This story is only coincidentally about seduction. It’s really more a tale of me just living my life, and how that inevitably leads to meeting charming and beautiful creatures.

Shared Interests Are Everything

I never go out to meet girls anymore. The success or failure of my social engagements is never measured by how many approaches I did (ugh), how many numbers I walked away with (ugh!), or how many kisses I got (UGH!@#*!).

Every activity I’m involved in is fueled by self-interest. For example, I organize a personal growth group in Montreal because I want to surround myself with like-minded, positive people, and create an environment that promotes the conscious pursuit of happiness. The more I care about that goal, the better the group gets. I’m helping organize BarCamp Canada, a geek conference coming up later this year, because I’m interested in helping smart people talk to others about what they’re working on. And every article on this blog is, first and foremost, a letter written to myself. Writing helps me crystallize my thoughts and make sense of my experiences. I use my content to build traffic, rather than letting traffic build my content.

The natural consequence of defining your own hierarchy of values and pursuing them to your utmost ability is that you meet people who share those interests. For example, by stepping up to volunteer for BarCamp, I’ve created the opportunity to work with smart hackers. My choice to start a personal growth group has resulted in forming friendships with some hot girls and cool guys. From there I get invited to parties and other social events, which leads to meeting more interesting people. And, of course, starting this blog has added a whole new dimension to my world.

Which brings me to how I met Mary.

Seduction Secret #172: Live Your Own Life

Mary was yet another girl I crossed paths with while doing something that mattered to me.

You may remember that a few months ago I did a 30-day trial on learning to cook. Since I started from almost zero, I had to make regular trips to a funky little kitchen boutique nearby for crockery and cookware.

I was in there a few times a week during the challenge. The girls that worked there were really sweet and we started talking more and more. My requests for kitchen advice eventually led to discussions about the rest of our lives. I told them about 30 sleeps and how I was learning to cook, and we all got more interested in each other.

There was one girl in particular there who caught my eye. She had dark hair, a pretty face, a gorgeous body, and radiated an irresistibly feminine sparkle. We never got around to exchanging names, though I couldn’t help but make a mental note of her.

Eventually, I completed the 30-day challenge and my culinary needs died down. Time passed. Life went on. I didn’t get around to the store much anymore, but I kept bumping into that cute girl around the neighbourhood.

Girl Approaches Guy, Film at 11

One day I got an email from a reader of my blog. She told me that my articles inspired her. She confessed a little embarrassment to be writing me out of the blue, but said she had just read my article How to Get a Life and found it really interesting. One of the points I make in that article is how powerful it can be to just email someone you want to get in touch with. That’s exactly what made her decide to email me.

But it wasn’t until I reached the bottom of the email that I finally put two and two together.

“I hope you haven’t stopped cooking!” she said. Signed Mary.

Opportunity Will Knock

When opportunity knocks, you either answer the door, or you light up your internet connection and spank away your sorrows. So a few days later, I invited her out to a social gathering and things took off from there.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that pursuing your goals will make the women you desire chase after you. In most cases, you’ll have to make the first move. But shared interests plant the seeds for a healthy social life, and a healthy social life plants the seeds for a healthy sex life. 99% of the girls you meet will never end up in your bedroom, and that’s fine. Mary is the one girl I did connect with out of the dozens and dozens (and dozens) that I didn’t.

You don’t need pickup skills to meet girls; you need goals that have absolutely nothing to do with girls. Attracting worthwhile women into your life happens only when you throw the entire force of your existence into creating a life that matters.

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Insist upon yourself. Be original.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Original ideas are like UFOs: They attract attention, the pilots are often assumed to be from another planet, and they usually have rounded corners.

An original idea is just a thought expressed in a way that no one has expressed it before. There is no such thing as an idea made from scratch, but there is plenty of room for using existing concepts as a foundation for creating new pathways through reality.

The value of an original idea is in its ability to allow us to experience things in a different way. Steve Pavlina’s idea of 30-day trials, for example, totally altered my path to personal growth. There are a much wider range of commitments I’m willing to make for a month than, say, forever. This technique has been such a catalyst for change in my own life that I even decided to create a website around it and document my adventures.

The chemical compound formed by a unique thought mixed with purposeful action is highly explosive. When you’re building to change the world, that’s the kind of energy you need.

There’s just one problem: How do you think what no man has thought before?

Always Be Reading

Like gourmet food, original ideas are the product of good ingredients. The more ideas you consume, the more you have to cook with.

I consider reading a top-level priority. It’s so important to me that if I have one hour left in my day and haven’t yet done any reading, I’ll choose a book over anything else, if possible. I commute with public transport and taxis, so I usually use that time for reading too.

The most important things to me for extracting useful ideas from what I read are:

• Choose the best sources. Consciously choose the best content you can find on subject matter that interests you.
• Take notes. I usually carry around a journal with me that’s small enough to fit in a handbag. When reading non-fiction, I jot down everything I want to retain. I haven’t yet tried this with fiction, but I’d imagine it could be useful for noting key events, character descriptions, and other plot cookies.
• Do what you read, as you read it. Every good non-fiction book I read alters my external world in measurable ways. I prefer to walk the walk as soon as I start learning new ideas. I find it much easier to retain them this way.

Plug and Play

They say the key to generating cool ideas is to spot links between things that no one else sees. I use an even simpler formula:

1. Pick two endpoints and connect them.
2. Describe that relationship.

I do this all the time to connect the dots between software development and personal growth. It’s not that I have a keen eye for spotting relationships between two seemingly disparate ideas. It’s that I create the link and then try to figure out if it can make sense.

I’ve used this algorithm to unearth some interesting concepts. For example, it’s how I came up with the concept of beliefs as an API for personal growth.

Build a Better Model

Approach anxiety is a big problem for someone trying to practice talking to strangers. I’d done a fair amount of reading on this subject to learn to deal with it. The best answers I found involved focussing on “qualifying” a girl, instead of worrying about her being interested in you.

But I still found this model wasn’t enough. It made me think about talking to girls as a linear process: First you approach, then you open, then you qualify… I didn’t want to do anything. I wanted a model that would let me profit from authenticity.

The more I talked to people and the more I thought about what was going on, the more I saw ways in which I could mold the existing models into the shape I wanted. This is how I came up with social polarity. I felt this model better explained the instant attraction or instant revulsion you tend to experience when you approach strangers. It also suggests that authenticity is the best policy. And it requires no effort to implement. This new model was a perfect fit for me.

Because models are abstractions, they’re lossy. This makes them ripe territory to be remapped.

Create Hooks

Talking to strangers is a timeless concept. But “social skydiving” was a hook that stuck in people’s minds. Different words trigger different emotions. A new label gave it new life. Finding a distinct way to express an old idea can make it seem original all over again. Anyone who reads personal growth literature knows that sometimes you need to hear something said in the right way for it to really click.

There’s no magic potion I use to create catchy. I just spend a lot of time wrestling to express myself with words that people will remember.

Invert Your Beliefs

Here’s another little formula I use for idea generation:

1. Take one of your existing beliefs or opinions.
2. Completely reverse your position.
3. Try to justify this point of view.

You can also apply this formula to public opinion. A good example of this is DHH’s recent post Fire the workaholics. It’s hard not to want to read that.

But this isn’t just a way to generate blog article ideas. The guys at 37signals have built an entire business around doing the opposite of what most small development shops do, including four-day workweeks, business credit cards for employees, even giving them personal expense accounts to fund their passions.

Sometimes the smaller your operation, the more you’ll have to flex your creative muscles to stay alive. The good news is that inspiration and originality needn’t cost a lot of money; they’re a natural byproduct of directed thinking and deliberate effort.

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Only with absolute fearlessness can we slay the dragons of mediocrity that invade our gardens.

– George Lois

Since I started 30 sleeps, I’ve always imagined writing to be just one of several mediums through which I speak to the world. The written word can transport a serious payload, but there’s nothing quite like reaching out to people face-to-face. I enjoy the atmosphere and energy of grassroots geek conferences, and I think it’ll be fun to organize and participate in that sort of thing for the “Open Source Personal Development” community.

In that vein, I recently decided to sharpen my public speaking skills. Last week, I attended my first ever Toastmasters meeting. It’s been a while since I’ve done public speaking. I was surprisingly nervous.

To familiarize myself with how it all worked, I spent some time on the website of the club I intended to visit. So by the time I was on my way downtown to where the meeting would be held, I knew that for this and the next few meetings, I’d be sitting in as a guest. I understood that I’d probably be encouraged to speak, but that such risks were optional.

That left me two choices for the evening ahead: I could either hide behind the comfort of my provisional status, watching members battle their nerves and imperfections to improve their speaking skills, or I could confront the mildly terrifying, but exciting possibility of doing my first public speech in a long while, in front of a group of people I’d never met, and who were obviously much better at this than me.

The choice was obvious. My heart rate was visible through my shirt.

Opportunity Meets (Lack of) Preparation

The meeting started a few minutes late. There were about 25 members present, and 5 other newbie guests like me. These gatherings are not what you’d call “laid back.” They’re focussed, highly structured, and run on a precise schedule. The atmosphere was fun but formal, positive but nerve-racking, entertaining but inherently intense.

Shortly after things got rolling, the guests were asked to introduce themselves. I stood up and gave a little spiel. My voice did a poor job of masking my nerves. I was caught off-guard by how shaky I was even just presenting myself to the group. I was even rustier at public speaking than I thought. I don’t feel even a fraction of this kind of fear when I talk to strangers. But when something makes me feel this apprehensive and unsettled, I know I’m in the right place at the right time.

Several minutes after introducing ourselves, the guests were given another chance to shine: Table Topics. Table Topics are impromptu speeches. You’re given a question and you come up with a two-minute speech on the spot to answer it. Three members are chosen to do a table topic, three speeches given, then everyone casts their vote into a box that later decides whose was best.

The Table Topics Master started by asking if any guests would be interested in giving it a try. Here was my chance to rise to the occasion…and I chickened out.

Fuck.

No guests volunteered, so the TTM instead chose a member, Don, to do the first speech. Don’s speech was amazing: charismatic, confident, masterfully unprepared, funny, well-delivered. It only emphasized how much I had to learn about public speaking.

In selecting the next speaker, the TTM decided to give the six of us newbies another chance, and again extended the invitation for us to participate.

There was a moment of hesitation. Then a voice broke the silence: “Alright, I’ll do it!”

That voice, apparently, was mine.

Confronting Fear

Fear is a funny thing. Where some people see a speed bump, others see Mount Everest. There are those who view talking to strangers as something deeply terrifying. Others consider it an entry-level social skill. Some people are so afraid of doing something “risky” like, say, moving to another country, that they’re incapable of even discussing such things outside the context of a joke.

But if you’ve read the fine print on fear, you know this: Safety Kills. Opting out of a chance to confront your fears is no different than smoking a cigarette, eating a Big Mac, or taking a hard drug. Avoiding danger can be dangerous. The moment I offered to do a speech, I felt that surge of energy and emotion that comes from knowing that you’re taking a risk you need to take.

The question my speech had to answer was this: If a reporter and their camera crew approached you in the middle of a busy street, and they wanted to do an interview with you, what question would you most want to be asked and why?

As I walked up in front of the group, thinking of what to say, my body argued with my mind over the magnitude of the challenge before me. In my head, I felt fairly confident and on form, less concerned about how things would turn out, and more just happy with myself for throwing caution to the wind. On the outside though, I was vibrating like a tuning fork.

The moment you face a particular fear, you enter a kind of flow. Time goes away. Your worries are no longer worrying. Your fears dissolve. Your thoughts cease. It’s a blissful mode of being, where your every action beats with the pulse of existence.

The Speech

I stood up at the front and let the words come out:

If I were approached by a reporter in the middle of a busy street, and they wanted to interview me, what question would I most want to be asked?

I think that question would be: What makes you come alive?

To me, this is one of the most interesting questions to ask or be asked. It’s moments like this, giving this speech, that make me feel most alive. That feeling of vulnerability, uncertainty, having no idea what you’re doing and just doing it anyway–that, to me, is aliveness.

I can’t remember the rest of it, but I carried that train of unthought for another minute thirty, and closed by asking the audience the same question I wanted asked of me: What makes you come alive?

My stream of consciousness seemed to be a hit. At the end of the night, I was presented the award for the Best Table Topics speech.

Every worthwhile step forward I’ve taken in my life has been taken on these terms. It’s never easy. There’s no point at which you finally say, “Ah, I’m finally where I want to be.” It’s never comfortable. You never know how long a good thing will last.

The risks associated with living the life you want will never go away. The only thing that changes is how you choose to confront the situation. Will you run away from your fears or will you chase after them?

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Flow with whatever is happening and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.

– Chuang Tzu

95% of everything you’ll ever need to know about meeting women can be summed up in four words: Go with the flow. Instead of trying to meet girls, focus entirely on yourself. Create a life that’s interesting and worthwhile to you, not because that’s an attractive quality to women, but because it’s your life and you are all you have. If you can’t live your own adventure, you’ll never be happy.

Funnily enough, doing things to impress women is pretty unimpressive. Neediness will bury you. The only way to attract the types of girls that actually belong in your life is to direct all your energy into being a world-class chef, rock star computer geek, champion race car driver, or whatever else lights your fire.

And then just talk to the people that show up on your path. Whether that path is the sidewalk on the way to the grocery store, the poker table, the front row of the audience at your show, or a bar or club that you’d be going to anyway, even if you already had a girlfriend. No matter what you do, there will be people all around you. The guy who asks, “Where’s a good place to meet girls?”, assumes that he can’t say hi to the gorgeous girl picking tomatoes beside him at the grocery store, or that he can’t walk up to a girl in a room full of seated people and just start talking to her.

Believe it or not, you can. It’s not the situation that stops you. It’s your ego that stops you. Getting rejected by a girl poses a serious threat to who you think you are. But here’s a little secret: If you’re constantly getting rejected, you’re constantly getting laid.

Fear of Rejection

You can’t do anything to change what a girl thinks of you. The moment you try to change someone’s opinion of you, you’ve conceded to their reality, instead of living life on your own terms and letting social polarity work out the details. The vast majority of guys who think they have no idea how to meet girls are really just making excuses for having a lethal fear of rejection.

How do you meet girls? By talking to them.

If you have the balls to talk to girls anywhere, anytime, you’ve nailed down a crucial 20% of the secret to attracting women that belong in your life. The other 80%, of course, is to be doing something so interesting with your life that women become an enjoyable diversion, rather than the foundation of your happiness. If you don’t respect yourself enough to approach girls that appeal to you, and find it hard to ignore being laughed at sometimes by the sexually frustrated masses, then you’re going to have to settle for whatever girl decides to allow you to have sex with her.

There Is No Try

The girls I meet are interested in me right away. If they aren’t, I’m not going to try and change their minds. In fact, I usually don’t even respond to anything less than a smile. If her reaction was anything but warm and receptive, I’m already talking to someone else. No hard feelings, but at the same time, life is too short to waste on the Nos. If Montreal weren’t full of astoundingly beautiful women, I might have to reconsider my wholesale approach. Thankfully, natural, high-fashion beauty is available here in bulk.

In fact, these days, I get approached more and more. The most recent example of this was New Year’s Eve. I was out with my buddy Yas, partying it up, when this girl came up to us and asked for a light. My buddy started talking to her really interestedly. A few minutes later, we all walked back inside. As I walked towards the dance floor, the girl grabs me from behind and pulls me over to introduce me to her friend. Here we go again…

This seemed pretty fun, so I stayed tuned in for several minutes. Then a good song came on so I headed to the dance floor once again. I noticed that the girl didn’t join me, but it didn’t matter either way. The Now moment is the only moment that counts, especially when it comes to social interactions.

During the next hour or two, I met a bunch of other people, and lost track of my buddy. This happens just about every time I go out to large social gatherings with friends. It’s also why I can have such a great time, even when I go out on my own.

By midnight, I was on the dance floor, dancing with these girls I had met outside about 20 minutes earlier. When the New Year hit, the girl who approached me and my buddy earlier finds me on the dance floor to come wish me Happy New Year–with a kiss.

We start dancing, and she ends up inviting me to her place afterwards. Rather, she didn’t invite me, but was saying things like, “Yeah, when you come to our place later on…” Hmmm, okay.

But apparently that kiss was a commitment. This girl eventually starts getting possessive towards me. She gets visibly jealous seeing me talk to other girls. Fast forward to a couple hours later, and I’m outside talking to a couple dudes about Quebec’s equivalent of Woodstock, how awesome Montreal girls are, and various other things, when this girl taps me from behind.

“Bye Brad. We’re leaving.” Whoa, she’s pissed now.

“Okay, have a good night!” I reply, with a goodbye cheek-to-cheek. And back to the conversation…

The more people you meet, the more you’ll see patterns emerge, and the less you’ll take it personally when things go sour. Sometimes the drama takes a few days, weeks, months, or even years to unfold, but it all boils down to the same ego-based insecurities. And it’s no big deal. Just go with the flow, and be thankful when you find things out up front.

No one is good or evil. We’re all just a bunch of egos passing judgement on other egos, to help keep our own ego intact. Strange but true.

Self-Created Problems

A guy who gets both legs amputated has a walking problem. A guy who loses his front teeth in a hockey fight has a dental problem. A guy who says, “I can’t approach that girl! What if she rejects me!?” does not have a problem meeting women. He’s created the problem in his head, but it isn’t real. So at any moment, you can delete this self-destruction from your life.

What do you say to a hot girl when you see her? Anything you want. Even asking that kind of question is just an excuse to not be alive, out there in the world, making yourself vulnerable, speaking your truth, and living with the consequences.

If there’s anything good about self-inflicted misery, it’s that only you can change it, and the present moment is always giving you permission to let go.

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