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 networking that matters is helping people achieve their goals. Doing it reliably and repeatedly so that over time people have an interest in helping you achieve your goals, because they have a stake in it.

– Seth Godin

I wouldn’t call myself an introvert, but I am definitely a not-extrovert. I am reasonably good at meeting new people, but only for the same reasons that I am reasonably good at building websites or playing chess: I’ve treated it as a problem that can be solved through directed thinking and deliberate effort.

As a geek, I see getting one’s social life off the ground not as a lottery, but as a knowledge activity. Clearly there are wrong ways to go about meeting people, which means that there must be right ways to go about it too. I don’t believe in premeditated interactions — the only script I offer is “Hi”, with the rest left as an exercise to the reader — but there is a lot to be said for foundational knowledge: cultivating the right attitude, managing your expectations, embracing rejection, setting goals, and so on. Ultimately, problems in your social life are just like any other kinds of problems: they can be identified, characterized, and worked on.

One of the most common questions I get asked by social skydivers, both male and female, is: Where the heck do you meet people?

In fact, having recently moved halfway around the world — from Montreal to Berlin — it’s a question I’ve had to ask myself. But even though I arrived here less than three months ago, I’ve already started to weave my way into the fabric of Berlin life. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting some really interesting people and have enjoyed getting to know them.

In this article, I’ll share with you the approach I’ve taken, including a list of the specific events and activities that I find most useful for bringing me into contact with the kinds of people I want to get to know.

Developing the Right Approach

Before I list my favourite places to meet people, I’ll start by outlining the principles I use to come up with these ideas in the first place. Using these guidelines, you’ll be able to tweak my later list of suggestions to fit your own tastes.

• Who can you help? Not just in a humanitarian sense, but in any sense that involves enabling other people to achieve their goals. For example, if you’re a geek working at a startup looking for Ruby programmers, why not visit your local Ruby group and spread the word? If you speak French and English fluently, why not go to a language exchange group and help other people become fluent too?
• Go open source. Don’t try to copyright your connections. The best way to build your social life is by giving things away, including your knowledge, your time, and your support.
• It’s not about meeting people, it’s about building things. Or learning things. Or teaching things. Shared pursuits are the ultimate social lubricant. When you have a common goal, you don’t have to try to meet people, it just happens. If you actually care about the interest that brought you together, you will need each other to advance.
• Be flexible. Remember the Weird Idea Radar? Turns out this is more than just a tool for discovering your passion — it’s also a great way to meet people. If you want to maximize your social potential, then you’re going to have to be open-minded. If you’re wondering whether some group is really your kind of thing, do it. If looking at their website makes you wonder if you’ll be the only person who shows up at the next meeting, do it. If you’re unsure whether you even know enough about the subject matter to talk about it, DO IT! Be willing to act on uncertainty. I’ve discovered some of my favourite interest groups by plowing through my initial hesitations.
• Be creative. Meeting people requires a capacity for original thinking. You should always be thinking of ways in which you can offer value to others, not as an entertainment monkey of course, but as a volunteer, a connector, and an enabler.
• Be an initiator. A lot of people wait for others to make the first move. I’d be lying to pretend I’m not guilty of this myself at times. I know there are at least a few people I should know a lot better than I do right now, but I’ve been waiting for them to inaugurate our friendship. And I can tell they’re probably waiting for me to do the same. But building social connections is not a game of chess — in a stalemate, both people lose.
• It won’t happen overnight. Allow for at least a few months before you expect to start connecting with people outside of the groups that brought you together. This is especially true if the group meets only once or twice a month.

Where to Meet People

With the above principles in mind, here are some of my favourite places to meet people:

• Philosophy groups. The more focussed, the better. You needn’t be a diehard adherent to the group’s philosophy to participate. For example, I’d hardly call myself an Objectivist, but I am a fan of Ayn Rand’s work. So I got involved in the Montreal Objectivist Club over a year ago and remained a member right up until I left for Berlin. Good food and great discussions which never failed to challenge my way of thinking.
• Couch surfing. CouchSurfing is a travel community that helps people wander the world by making it easy to find, and share, crash space. While this is particularly useful if you’ve just arrived in a new city, it’s also a great opportunity for locals. CS’ers organize regular parties and other events, and travelers are a fascinating bunch to get to know. I attended some CS events in Montreal. My polyglot buddy Benny travels the world acquiring new languages, and uses CS as a key part of building his social life in foreign places.
• Expat forums. This is also not limited to out-of-towners. Most people on expat forums are keen to mix with locals. In Berlin, I’ve made ample use of Germany’s most popular English-speaking expat forum and I’ve found many Germans present at the gatherings I attend.
• Meditation groups. You needn’t be New Age to sit quietly in a room with other people. I’m an atheist, but I find meditation to be a great way to relax and refocus.
• Language exchange groups. To language junkies, the benefits here are obvious. But even if you’re monolingual, you can still use your mother tongue to help others learn the language. It was through attending a language exchange group in Berlin that I met Lijit founder Stan James. He’s a brilliant guy to converse with, and we’ve parlayed our interest in German into discussions about startups, social media, the paradox of choice, “procrastiflation” (the idea that the likelihood of completing a task decreases exponentially with every day you put it off), and various other geeky subjects.
• Coworking. Coworking means sharing an office space with other people who would otherwise be working from home too. This is a great way to meet people who share the social challenges of self-employment. Coworking environments often bring together people with complementary skill sets — graphic designers, web developers, photographers, marketers, copywriters, etc. — which tends to create lots of opportunities for everyone involved.
• Take your online activities into meatspace. I did this a couple years ago with online poker. I started participating in real-life tournaments and met lots of people who were equally passionate about the game. Recently, I’ve replaced the time I normally spend playing go online with going out two nights a week to my favourite go clubs in Berlin.
• Toolchains are social objects. People love getting together and talking about the tools they use to build things. I’ve attended many different programming language groups in Montreal and more recently attended an Ubuntu BBQ in Berlin.
• Political change groups. I’m cheating a bit here, because I haven’t yet done this one myself. But I will soon be on my way to Vancouver and I am really looking forward to participating in ChangeCamp, which its website describes as “an open community and a set of tools and ideas designed to give citizens and governments the ability to work collaboratively in new ways to make change and to better address real-world challenges in our communities.” Wordy, but intriguing.

If you’re serious about getting your social life moving, I would encourage you to try every one of these suggestions, even if they seem a bit outside your range of interests. In the worst case, it might cost you an evening. But trying something that doesn’t work is never a waste of time if it brings you closer to finding something that does.

Exercises

So now that you have some ideas for developing the right attitude to building your social life, and several examples of where to meet interesting people, how do you put these ideas to work? Here are three ways to get started:

1. 30-day challenge. Make a commitment that, for the next 30 days, you will go to some kind of event or activity at least two nights a week. Be willing to stretch your definition of a good time if you have to. The priority is to get out of your house. I did this from the moment I arrived in Berlin (but more like four or five nights a week) and it is the main reason why I feel connected to this city, rather than feeling like an outsider who has a hard time breaking through.
2. Initiate, Initiate, Initiate. Make a list, either in your head or written down, of all the people with whom you have wanted to initiate a get-together (e.g. to hang out outside the gatherings where you normally see them), but have been too shy to do it. Then do it! Try for a minimum of at least three people to get started.
3. Where do you meet people? Add a comment below to share the specific activities that have worked best for you. While suggestions like “user groups” or “taking a course” are useful, it’s easy to overlook exactly what those might be. So the more detailed your suggestions, the better.

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Visualization works if you work hard. That’s the thing. You can’t just visualize and go eat a sandwich.

– Jim Carrey

I have learned the secret to getting rich in math and science. And now, for the first time ever, I am making these secrets available to you.

I can teach you everything you need to know to debunk Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, and help put you on the fast track to validating your proofs.

With my program, you will literally rewrite the book on formal logic.

Looking to untangle the origins of the universe? No sweat. I will show you how, in just 30 minutes a day, using simple techniques that anyone can learn, you will discover how you can create revolutionary new approaches to thinking about the Big Bang, string theory, and even the nature of God itself. (Did you know, for example, that God is neither a man nor a woman, but made up, in fact, of a fairly inexpensive set of ingredients that can be bought at almost any Italian food store?)

But that’s not all. The normal price of this 24 CD, 2 volume course is $1,999. But if you order now, you will get the entire “MATHEMILLIONS” box set, that’s over 50 hours of groundbreaking material, a signed copy of my new book “Awaken the Giant Mathematician Within”, and I’ll throw in a coupon for 10% off my live, 3-day “1 + 1 = $1,000,000!!11!” bootcamp, a coupon worth over $3000, all for the incredibly low price of $119.95!!!

So don’t wait. This offer can only last a short time. Do me yourself a favour and CALL NOW.

Framed in the context of objective and rational pursuits, the above comes across as obvious drivel. But it’s amazing how much of the multi-billion dollar self-help industry is fueled by offers like these.

This mock sales letter may seem like an exaggeration, but in many ways it is not. If anything, I’ve gone conservative on the markup and punctuation. I only offer two bonus gifts, instead of the usual five or six. My discount may be a little exaggerated, but it is not that far from the truth. And, in the interests of time and space, I’ve kept the length of my sales letter to a mere fraction of the real spiel.

But the purpose of this article is not to rant about sales letters. I think most people can detect an infomercial when they see one. Instead, the purpose of this article is to declare war on the false premise that motivates people to write sales letters, the same belief that can undermine your efforts in the pursuit of happiness: The idea that there’s a secret to creating the life you want, and that some random person you’d never heard of until now can offer it to you at an unbeatable low price.

The Key(words) to Success

In no other realm of human endeavour are we so focussed on hugely unrealistic metrics as in the realm of personal growth. Here, for example, are the results of a keyword search I did in the self-help section of Amazon. The number in parentheses represents the number of matches as a percentage of the total number of items in that category:

• Secret: 21,287 matches (20.5%)
• Million: 18,223 matches (17.6%)
• Instant: 13,998 matches (13.5%)
• Unlimited: 7,727 matches (7.5%)
• Effortless: 3,620 matches (3.5%)

Compare that with, say, the Computer and Internet section. There are three times as many books in this section, so the most useful comparison is by percentages:

• Million: 30,939 matches (8.0%)
• Instant: 25,469 matches (6.6%)
• Secret: 23,602 matches (6.1%)
• Unlimited: 19,117 matches (4.9%)
• Effortless: 2,246 matches (0.6%)

In the vocabulary of false promises, self-help books dominate the competition. And while the statistical difference here is large, the cultural difference between these two worlds is even larger. Whereas books that offer instant results (”Learn Java in 24 Hours”) and “secrets” are generally laughed at in computer circles, they take center stage in the world of self-improvement.

In fact, one of the most popular self-help titles of all-time is called The Secret.

Fantasy Positions

My favourite chess book ever is Jeremy Silman’s How to Reassess Your Chess. One of the insights that stuck with me most from that book was the use of “fantasy positions.”

The idea was that you learned a set of principles for evaluating a chess position, and then you used them to imagine the ideal position you wanted to create on the board. The key was to forget about what it took to get there at first, and focus exclusively on the desired outcome. From there, you looked for moves in the current position that brought you closer to the fantasy position. Lather, rinse, repeat until you found a feasible course of action.

This technique was a great way of approaching chess strategy for me. I’d never quite thought in terms of fantasy positions before, and doing so gave me a much clearer sense of what I was doing. Of course, the fantasy position is just another name for visualization applied to chess.

The fantasy position, in other words, is chess’s version of The Secret.

Ask, Believe, FAIL

In the chess world–and this is true of most fields of human knowledge–there are some manuals written to teach you some things, and other manuals written to teach you other things. While I was blown away by how useful it was to think in terms of fantasy positions, I didn’t for a second think that this was the key that could unlock my potential as a chess player. I knew there were still hundreds of volumes of chess wisdom out there for me to consume–so many nuances of opening, middlegame, and endgame theory–and thousands of games yet to be played and analyzed before I would have any hope of being really good.

Visualizing was a nice little tool, but only a tiny part of the overall arsenal I needed to win.

But in the self-help industry, visualization is presented as decisive, a “key to success.” In fact, a search for “visualize” in Amazon’s self-help section turns up 9,170 matches, which is 8.8% of everything in that category, or more than double the total number of chess items for sale.

The self-help form of visualization takes on an entirely new dimension, and an entirely new name: The Law of Attraction. And the Law states that all you need to do is place your order with the universe and the universe will respond.

Back to Reality

If you’re not careful, the vastly overstated claims of self-help literature can make you feel ripped off, and even downright cynical about personal change. After all, if you were one of the many people who spent hundreds of dollars on a course that claimed it would triple your reading speed, but it made no difference at all, how could you not feel let down?

In the case of someone trying to start a business, whose 30 minutes a day doesn’t *gasp* turn into a million dollar company, the worst that happens is they keep their day job. A tad unfortunate to see all that effort wasted, but not the end of the world. But the consequences of deception can get much worse than that. For someone trying to, say, quit drinking, following a trail of false hope can lead to disaster.

As the chess example shows, a good way to gain perspective on the strange and sometimes mystical advice of self-help authors is to frame those ideas, where possible, in terms of something concrete and familiar and see how they measure up. I’ve found this to be an effective way to manage my expectations.

The other thing I do is follow a simple rule of thumb: Don’t read stuff by people who got successful by telling other people how to be successful. This is especially true when I can find no other evidence of their past achievements in the real world. There are just too many insanely smart people out there, whose claims are supported by reasoned argument and scientific evidence to waste a single minute on stuff that isn’t.

I haven’t always followed this rule, but since I have I’ve been able to fully engage with what I read. No more having to ask myself why an author would include a well-known email chain letter at the end of his book and claim it was written to him by a dying young girl, or wondering why I can find no trace of their history on Google outside of their promotional campaign.

These ideas are both pretty common sense, but not always common practice. It’s so easy to start out with a genuine desire to live a better life, and end up confused and disappointed when met with the junk science (Law of Attraction, NLP, “Power of the Subconscious Mind”, etc.) and made-up anecdotes (Yale Goals Study, claims of winning some world championship somewhere that no one is able to verify) that are so painfully common to self-help literature.

If you want to improve the quality of your life, self-help is the wrong route to take. But the growth mindset itself is vital. Things like visualization, gratitude, early rising, and all those fuzzy things are truly wonderful ideas. They do work well. But even if you add them all together and multiply by 42, you still won’t find the key to success.

Oh, BTW, Hi

Speaking of personal growth, welcome to my blog. It’s been a while. You might not remember me. Brad?…Ring any bells?

My life has changed a lot in the last few months and, in case this article (and this article) hasn’t made it clear enough, so to has my take on the art of living. I am writing to you no longer from Montreal, but from Berlin. I will soon be on my way to Vancouver. And I recently became the world’s most eligible bachelor.

I’ve made a lot of useful mistakes since we we last spoke. But I’ll save those stories for future posts. In the meantime, it’s a pleasure to be writing to you again. It’s good to be home.

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Competence, like truth, beauty and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.

– Laurence J. Peter

The World’s Fastest Man in 1980, Allan Wells, would not have made the podium in the 100-metre races at the Beijing Olympics last year. In fact, his winning time of 10.25 would not have even qualified him for the semi-finals.

If you were a trailblazer in the world of personal computing in 1983, you’d be bragging about how your team had just shipped a product that offered a 5 MHz processor, a 5 MB hard drive, dual 5.25 inch floppy drives, support for up to 2 MB of RAM, a graphical user interface, and a mouse.

You’d be bragging, of course, about the Apple Lisa, a machine that sold for the ridiculously low price of $9,995.

And in 1984, one of America’s most influential consumer advocacy groups, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), launched an all-out war on fast-food restaurants. According to their own press release, their goal was “to pressure fast-food restaurants and food companies to stop frying with beef fat and tropical oils, which are high in the cholesterol-raising saturated fats that increase the risk of heart disease.”

By 1990, their campaign had succeeded. Most fast food chains had significantly lowered the amount of saturated fats in their foods, and replaced them with a substitute that the CSPI had been arguing for since 1987: trans fats.

You know that type of mutated fat this is so dangerous to humans that governments around the world are seeking to ban it? Yeah, that one.

Looking back not even 30 years ago, these people were leaders in their field, the best of the best, “experts.” Today, we’d more likely refer to them as unemployed hacks.

Which brings me to the first point I want to make about becoming an expert: Experts aren’t really experts. They suck at what they do. They just suck a little bit less than everybody else around them at the time.

Expertise as Fog

The other point I want to make about pursuing expertise is this: Expertise does not exist.

Sure, it’s a nice label to be given if you’re being interviewed on CNN, or if you’re being introduced into a debate on the existence of God, but it is not something you can achieve. If you’ve set yourself the goal of becoming “a Ruby on Rails expert”, “a blogging expert”, or even say “a fluent French speaker”, you haven’t set a goal at all.

What is a blogging expert? Someone who makes a lot of money blogging about how to make a lot of money blogging? Or perhaps someone who achieves 20,000 subscribers by churning out list posts and other linkbait that do an excellent job of growing traffic, but a poor job of growing the reader?

And if you apply for a job that requires a “Ruby on Rails expert” and you get hired, does that mean that you are an expert? Maybe all it really means is that you know just enough to convince the person that hired you. Which doesn’t actually mean you know a lot about the framework.

The best way to achieve expertise in your chosen field is to eliminate the word “expertise” from your lexicon. As my seven-language-speaking friend Benny Lewis put it, in an email exchange I had with him on the subject of attaining language fluency:

If you really want to be fluent, I recommend abandoning the thought process of “achieving fluency” entirely. Setting a goal of “speak $language fluently” is too vague to be achievable. It implies that some day you will reach the point where you can finally say, “I speak Klingon fluently!” But that day will never come.

You need to have more concrete goals spread across a small number of days or weeks that eventually add up to something tangible, such as, “This week I will learn vocabulary related to objects in the house” or, “Today I will work on my consonant pronunciation.”

If you think about it, isn’t all learning really language learning? Whether you’re trying to achieve fluency in Italian, or building websites with Ruby on Rails, or baking designer cakes, every skill set is really just a vocabulary for self-expression. The more you know, the more you can say.

Just like spoken language, the language of the Builder has no beginning and no end. So the best way to improve yourself in any pursuit is to forget about “becoming an expert” and to instead focus on expanding your range of communication. Ideally in a way that is clearly measurable by an outside observer.

If you want to be a “competent Rails hacker”, then set a goal to get one of your patches landed in the Rails trunk. If your dream is to be a “successful blogger”, bring it closer to reality by aiming to publish, say, three posts per week. And if want to be a “world-class chessplayer”, make it actionable by playing 10 blitz games per day in a specific opening you’re trying to master, and analyze each game afterwards.

Be less concerned with the adjectives of success–good, great, world-class–and more concerned with taking a worthwhile next step. The path to expertise is the path to nowhere in particular. When you get specific, you get results.

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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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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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The first step is to find out what you love–and don’t be practical about it. The second is to start doing what you love immediately, in any small way possible.

– Barbara Sher

There have been three key moments in my life so far that have, more than anything else, shaped who I am today. In every case, I gave up something significant. In every case, I had people telling me I was crazy, stupid, or otherwise trying to talk me out of it. Sometimes those “people” included myself.

The first moment was in June 2002. I was working at one of my first programming jobs out of school. I’d gone from working for $6.50/hour in a restaurant kitchen, to making $25/hour working at a job from which it was impossible to get fired: I was a Systems Developer for the Department of Justice. I’d just bought a brand new car. At 23 years old, I was already making more money than my parents. I’d even gone from being a virgin loser with women to effortlessly meeting and dating hot girls, using online dating.

My comfort zone was complete. Or so I thought.

The Intellectual Cemetery

It turned out that what other people called a “dream job” was no dream to me. The office I worked in was more like an intellectual cemetery. I had some extremely smart colleagues, but the work-is-optional vibe of a government job drained me of my will to live. My motivation to produce, in an environment that rewarded seniority rather than productivity and ingenuity, was gone. And while I really enjoyed the car, I hated the city I lived in, and I knew how much paying off my wheels was tying me down.

So what did I do? I quit the job, sold the brand new car–losing a few grand in the process–packed my bags, and ran away to Europe. My Dad didn’t believe I’d do it. And it took the actual sale of the car for my Mom to realize that I was serious.

The first week I arrived in London, I met a girl. We ended up going out for most of the 7.5 months that I was travelling. I slept in trains and airports as I moved from place to place, had sex in the bushes in Hyde Park, went to a squat party in Berlin, thwarted a pickpocket in Paris, worked as a telemarketer in a little town in the North of England, briefly took an off-the-grid programming gig in Eastern Europe, and even got pulled off a bus at 2:00 AM one morning, travelling between Lithuania and Poland, for not having the right entry visa. Hilarity did not ensue.

It was wonderful and terrifying. But fuck me if life is meant to be lived any other way.

Throwing Out a Growing Business

My second defining moment was September 2004. Six months earlier, I’d left a day job as a web programmer to immediately quadruple my income as a consultant. Since then, I’d grown my company to seven clients, including a few high-profile names in the Plone community. I began interviewing other Plone consultants to help me handle the workload. Things were going well, and only seemed to be getting better.

But then a friend of mine, who I’d met while travelling a couple years earlier, contacted me. He was working for Canonical, the company that created Ubuntu Linux, and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

So I made calls to Vancouver, Toronto, Los Angeles, Rotterdam, Cambridge (MA), and a few other cities, and “fired” all my clients. It was a pretty big risk to throw away a great client base for what was only guaranteed to be a three month contract to work with some guys on some up-and-coming Linux distro, but hey, why not? As a computer geek, it was a chance to work with rock stars and to develop with the web framework that most interested me at the time: Zope 3. My first assignment was to show up in Mark’s flat in London to hack on something they called Launchpad. It sounded like fun.

And it was. I was getting paid good money to work on things that interested me. Every couple months, they flew us off to some exotic location like Spain, South Africa, Brazil, or Australia, to participate in development sprints. I learned a lot from the people I worked with. And I was always amazed by Mark’s dedication to Ubuntu. He was usually the first one to show up and the last one to leave. He exemplified the maniacal determination I’ve written about previously.

Money and Happiness

But, for various reasons, I became increasingly unhappy with the job. Even a healthy six-figure salary and jet set travel schedule was nowhere near enough to keep me interested. I already knew intellectually that money couldn’t buy happiness, but now I’d learned that lesson by living it. My heart just wasn’t into it anymore. However crazy it sounded to other people, I had to leave.

Which brings me to the third time in my life that I started over. In September 2006, I gave one month’s notice to my employer and left what was, to that point, by far the coolest and highest-paying job I’d ever had. I had no other job lined up. There was no specific incident that set me off. But when you work at a job you don’t like, you throw away eight hours of every day.

For the third time in a row, my intuition was right. I decided to spend the next six months focussing on building my social life, specifically on practicing the art of talking to strangers. It was a life-changing experience. I had no idea how easy it was to meet girls by just talking to them anywhere, anytime.

All those social experiences, and the other things I’d studied and applied in the realm of personal development during the same period, eventually led to the creation of 30 sleeps.

Fast forward to now, and life is pretty interesting. These days, I’m getting emails from people all over the world about how this site has helped changed their life. Articles like How to Quit Drinking Alcohol seem to have inspired a lot of long-time drinkers to sober up. Guys write in telling me how something I wrote inspired them to finally break out of their bubble and take the risk of getting blown out. People are realizing that vulnerability pays off. A female expat living in Saudi Arabia wrote in to tell me how she’s used my advice to meet an “extremely hot” younger man. I even had someone write to me the other day wanting to translate some of my articles into Russian.

The Benefits of Being Unreasonable

Why am I telling you all this?

In each of the above situations, I gave up everything–jobs, cars, big salaries, security, even my own businesses–and started over. Every time, it was never the right time. I never knew how it was going to turn out. Every major change I’ve made has presented me with plenty of obstacles of its own.

And every time, it was the best damn thing I’ve ever done.

This, to me, is what it means to be alive: passion, vulnerability, uncertainty, and a healthy disregard for what other people think. The only way to live is dangerously. Life minus risk equals death.

When you give up everything, you really aren’t giving up anything. If you’re terrified of change, then change is your only option.

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Slow down and remember this: Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of mental laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.

– Timothy Ferriss

“Work smarter, not harder” is one of the ultimate clichés. Like most clichés, few people actually do it. The busy outnumber the productive by a wide margin. Whether you’re a boss, an employee, or working for yourself, we’ve all had our treadmilling moments. Here’s the difference, from a geek perspective:

Busy-ness is impressive. It puts you in the heat of the action. It gives you an elevated sense of importance. You’re always late for social engagements, barely have enough time for family get-togethers, and hardly get a moment’s sleep. Emails get exchanged, meetings fill up your schedule, worldwide teleconferences become the norm–there’s even the occasional hope of revenue exceeding expenses. You’re like a rock star without the music.

Of course, it’s all just an illusion. A commitment to anything more than your standard workday is a commitment to work harder, not smarter. There are only so many hours per day that you can produce world-class, creative output. Building something that changes people’s lives is extremely hard, but looking like you’re part of something big is much easier.

Want a challenge? Remove a feature. Cut your deadline in half. Deliver rather than debate. Instead of being the devil’s advocate, be the user’s advocate. Eliminate half your RSS feeds. Stop making it pluggable and start making it work.

If you had to come up with one action you could take to put less time and effort into something and still get the same, or better results, what would it be?

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According to the article, the secret to being more productive on the job is to, well, work:

“Our findings are astounding: By simply sitting down and doing work, employees can dramatically increase their output of goods and services,” said Deputy Undersecretary of Labor Charlotte Ponticelli, who authored the report. “In fact, ‘working’ may revolutionize the way people work.”

I’m not one to just believe what I read, but I have to admit that the research blew me away:

The results showed across the board that working is 100 percent more productive than listening to music and checking e-mails, 100 percent more productive than meandering around the office socializing with coworkers, 100 percent more productive than playing online Sudoku, 100 percent more productive than watching YouTube videos of nostalgic childhood television programming, 100 percent more productive than reading celebrity-gossip blogs while chatting with friends on Instant Messenger, 100 percent more productive than napping, and 98.2 percent more productive than not showing up to work.

This piece was obviously meant to poke fun. It ended up being non-fiction.

Donald Knuth, the renowned computer scientist, once said that “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” He was warning computer programmers about taking it too far with getting their code Just Perfect. The same principle applies to meeting women, finding a job, starting a business, increasing your productivity, managing your time, getting your finances in order, and a swath of other daily concerns.

Personal development is a need-to-know pursuit. The fastest way to achieve your goals is not to spend your time learning about goal achievement; it’s to write code, talk to women, register a business number, write the first chapter of your book, or do whatever else you know you need to do to get where you want to go. There’s no point learning about time management before first figuring out what you want to do with your life. And spending endless hours on seduction forums when you’re not actively going out to meet people is time well wasted.

A great way to learn a programming language is to build something with it. The same applies to personal growth: Start with a specific problem to solve. Knowledge is best draped over a scaffolding built from trial and error. Having trouble finding your passion? What kinds of things have you tried already? Not sure how to ask a girl for her phone number? How did “Why don’t we exchange numbers?” work out? Personal development literature picks up where your own logic-driven, but unsuccessful attempts leave off.

Of course, the faults we recognize in others are really just a reflection of our own shortcomings. I probably wouldn’t have picked up on this nasty habit if I hadn’t already shaved a couple hundred hours off my life doing it too. But over the last while, I’ve become ruthlessly picky in my consumption habits.

For example, a few months ago, I virtually abandoned my participation in seduction community forums. It wasn’t only that I considered the highly analytical approach toxic and vastly subordinate to experience, it was also the simple question: Do I actually need to read this stuff? How would my life change if I didn’t? Would my results get better or worse?

Action provided the answer. My results improved. I met higher quality women with almost no effort spent on trying to push the right buttons, and reduced my forum participation from a couple hours per day to a couple hours per month. I felt a lot happier being authentic instead of “working the room” with stupid robot tricks.

A simple question I use to help me avoid premature optimization is: Is this the best possible use of this moment? Should I read this book on goal setting or should I just set some goals instead? Do I really need to ask about good places to meet women or should I just start saying hi to some of the dozens of women in my surroundings every single day? Any action that is not an ideal use of this moment is a waste of time.

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