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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The first is a TED talk by Jill Bolte Taylor. She’s a brain scientist who had a massive stroke and lived to tell the tale. In fact, she was fully aware of what was going on for some time after a blood vessel in her left hemisphere exploded. Her description of how her perception of reality changed after her left brain went offline is truly remarkable. This isn’t a story of medical emergency and chaos; it’s a story of enlightenment.

The second is from inspirational speaker Esther Hicks, author of The Law of Attraction. She claims to channel a group of non-physical beings called “Abraham”, translating their energy into words we can understand. In this video, she dives into a “Rampage of Invincibility.” This is one of the most powerful and clarifying six-and-a-half minute speeches I’ve ever seen.

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?

Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.

– Erica Jong

Every so often, somebody writes me an email or a comment for which a simple reply would be inadequate, and which I feel is too important to ignore. It’s not just that they’ve got a serious problem and they’re trying everything they can think of to deal with it. It’s that, on some level, they’re speaking for all of us.

While I imagine that relatively few fans of my writing have had serious problems with alcohol, like the following reader does, many of you will have waded through a similar darkness at some point in your life.

Whether you’re gripped by liquid demons, can’t get laid to save your life, hate your job more than anything else on earth, or feel incredibly isolated from the world and just can’t seem to make friends, the underlying agony has a familiar weight and texture. The causes may be different but the symptoms are the same: depression, despair, hopelessness, and nothing can seem snap you out of it.

Welcome to Rock Bottom. Population: Far too many.

The Question

hi all im 39 and an alcoholic im not proud of it but alcohol has come part of my life i drink 8 cans every night even more on weekends, ive had councelling before but that never worked i lost my driving license through drink ive just completed a drink drive rehab course and i get my license back on my 40th birthday, ive been to my doctors and asked for help he said you need counselling i told him that doesnt work for me he refused to give me antabuse im just waiting for my liver test results to come back i know my liver will be damaged but even my own doctor wont help me,when i try to stop drinking i get so stressed and moody i take it out on everyone, all i want is someone to help me.. its my daughters 3rd birthday today ive been awake since 3 am and ive decided im gonna try again just for her and her sister.. any advice from anyone would be helpful

– kev, in reply to How to Quit Drinking Alcohol

My Thoughts

Again, I hope that even those who have a serious problem that has nothing to do with alcohol will see some relationships here. Misery comes in many flavours, and the same general ideas for digging yourself out of a rut can apply to a wide variety of pain.

@kev:

First, thanks for writing in. It takes balls to own up to your shortcomings. I’m glad you did. You’re obviously serious about looking for help, and even willing to go public with it by asking the 30 sleeps community for insight. And thanks for consenting (via private email) to having me respond to your question by writing it as an article.

I’m not a psychologist and my advice on this is not professionally certified in any way. But I think that unless you happen to stumble upon a particularly passionate, world-class specialist in the kind of torture you’re inflicting on yourself and your family, you’re probably wasting your time. You’ve said yourself that counseling doesn’t work, so we’re fast approaching a dead end. Literally.

I’m also not a doctor, and I don’t know the first thing about the drug Antabuse. But as a general rule, if I seek help from a medical professional and am unsatisfied with their assessment, I shop around for a second opinion.

Darkness and Light

I’ve lived through darkness. Dark fucking darkness. In some cases, it was caused by how I reacted to things going on around me. In other cases, it was 100% self-created misery. It’s through the latter that I think we share common ground. My issue wasn’t alcoholism, but alcoholism is the same kind of problem.

Unpleasant external experiences tend to dissolve into the past and the pain eventually gets forgotten. A totally different algorithm is required for troubles that start on the inside and flow outward. There comes a point with internal conflict where you become the only person that can help yourself. You end up going as low as you can possibly go and have no choice but to sink or swim. At some point, you have to ask yourself:

• Do you want your daughters to grow up surrounded by love or surrounded by misery?
• Do you want to be a source of darkness in your family or a source of light?
• Do you want to be alive or not?

The verbal responses you give to these questions mean absolutely nothing. The real answers come from your actions.

Every swig you take is a very loud NO to love, light, and life.

*Gulp* The buzz I get from this lager is more important to me than my daughters growing up healthy and happy.

*Gulp* I can feel the shadow of evil expanding around me, but damn this beer has a nice finish!

*Gulp* Shit, are my eyes turning yellow? Whoa, cool.

The freedom to live your life exactly how you want includes the freedom to self-destruct. If you want to destroy your life and the world around you, no one can stop you, not even those closest to you. Likewise, if you’re unshakably committed to turning things around and getting healthy no matter what it takes, no one can stop you from being successful there either.

Ifs, Ands, and Buts

Don’t use stress and moodiness as an excuse to keep drinking. The only way you can help yourself is to start by assuming full responsibility for your entire reality. Until you can honestly admit to yourself that every dimension of this problem is something you’re creating, you’re unlikely to make lasting changes.

If you were to go to a psychiatrist and tell them that you get stressed and moody when you don’t drink, they’d give you some pills and usher you out the door. That’s messed up and inhuman.

The solution to stress, moodiness, depression, aggression, anxiety or almost any other negative psychological tendency does not involve trading in one drug for another. It starts by acknowledging that there are some serious flaws in the life you’ve created for yourself, and everyone in your orbit is taking the heat for that. You can change that by gradually installing habits that will have you sleeping better, eating as healthy as humanly possible, spending quality time with people that are important to you and being 100% open in your communication with them, and settling for nothing less, career-wise, than to work on projects that you’re absolutely obsessed with.

Forget pills, I’m writing you a prescription for self-respect.

An important part of breaking one negative pattern is to replace it with another, more positive and productive one. While you’re giving up alcohol, why not cook your family a decent meal tonight too? Go for a walk. Take your daughters out to a movie. Or even just take some time to step back and take stock of your life. Start with what you’re thankful for and gradually work your way towards being brutally sincere about what sucks. And focus most of your energy on the solutions, rather than the problems.

Is this easy? Fuck no. This is war. When it’s you and your family’s lives that could all be seriously affected, degree of difficulty isn’t even a consideration. Every time you hold a beer in your hand, you’ve got a choice to make: Your driver’s license or your beer? Your daughters or your beer? Your life or your beer? Your actions are your answers.

It’s a little new to me to be this honest with someone I don’t really know. But fuck it, I want to help you, and I live for the truth.

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.