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.

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.

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.

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.

Insist upon yourself. Be original.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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

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

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

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

Always Be Reading

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

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

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

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

Plug and Play

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

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

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

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

Build a Better Model

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

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

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

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

Create Hooks

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

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

Invert Your Beliefs

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

– Henry David Thoreau

We often think of personal growth as being top-down. You start by asking yourself the Big Questions (TM), followed by a moment of clarity which reveals your life purpose, and finally you’re captured by this irresistible drive which launches you into purposeful motion, and everything just falls into place from there.

Unfortunately, real life isn’t always such a Disney movie. The path to growth is less like a railroad, and more like a gravel road…that’s under construction. It’s full of potholes and ditches, the occasional tree planted right in the middle, and some stretches where there is no road at all, and there’s no map telling you where to turn. It’s no wonder that we all feel lost from time to time, wondering what direction we want to take with our lives, debating whether to leave our soul-sucking job, facing the reality of an unhappy relationship, even struggling to find a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

As I wrote about in Finding Your Passion, I advocate relying less on self-interviews and more on taking massive action across a wide variety of domains, using serendipity as a weapon to hunt down the things that interest you. But what if that hasn’t worked yet either? What if you tried a bunch of stuff but haven’t yet found anything that sticks?

Bottom-Up Growth

The top-down approach implies that you have a clear idea of what you want. But self-fulfillment has another another entry point. Bottom-up development focusses on building the framework you need for living a life of purpose. It’s all about installing good habits that are independent of any specific goal. It’s an action plan you can start on this afternoon or this evening, that allows you to do incredibly productive and useful things, even if you’re still unsure about the big picture.

You don’t need to have a grandiose mission statement to figure out that you want to quit smoking or that drinking seven nights a week is unhealthy. By taking a bottom-up approach, you can immediately go from feeling bored and lost to becoming a busy proactivist. Happiness requires a velocity and a direction, the pursuit of a meaningful objective, and we all have a list of personal challenges waiting to be tackled.

There’s all sorts of useful stuff we can do with ourselves that doesn’t require a sixth sense to see, yet these projects can still provide a gratifying source of challenge, inspiration, and meaning in our lives, while the big picture continues to take shape. Here are some suggestions for bottom-up tasks you might find useful and fun, taken from what I’m doing in my own life at the moment:

• Raise your standards. With whatever you do, ask yourself “Is this the best possible use of my time?” Is this the best possible book I can be reading? Is this the best possible tool I can be using to build a website? Do I need to read this mailing list? Raising your standards is more of a meta-goal, but consciously doing so will improve the quality of both your inputs and outputs. It may also result in ideas for bottom-up projects, like deciding to change your job when you realize that what you’re doing right now is a mediocre application of your skills, or choosing to leave a relationship when you finally acknowledge how much it’s pulling you down.
• Break an addiction. We’ve all got vices. At any moment, you can choose to command and conquer yours, even though it may require a lot of time and effort to do so. I recently gave up alcohol for 30 days when I realized that, while it was hardly an “addiction”, I was drinking a little too regularly. I ultimately got back into red wine after that, but in a couple-glasses-with-dinner sort of way, which is pretty standard in Montreal. :) And now I actually enjoy it again.
• Fix your sleep schedule. Figuring out the larger meaning of your existence is hard, but it’s ten times harder when you’re running on fumes. If you want a challenge, set a time in the morning that you want to wake up and commit to it. My own circadian rhythm was a mess until recently. I fixed it this month by committing to waking up every morning at 5:30 AM, and have since noticed a huge energy boost. The difference between sleeping poorly and sleeping well is the difference between Clark Kent and Superman.
• Go organic. I spent literally years of my life eating at Subway for lunch almost every day of the week. I usually ordered something low-fat, but it was still far from the best food choice. I recently decided to change that. I found an amazing organic food restaurant nearby, and it’s become my new home away from home. They actually make…food there. Learning how to fuel your body using top-quality ingredients, in combination with sleeping better, will give you such an energy advantage over the current You that it’ll almost seem like cheating.
• Hack reality. Spirituality is about hacking consciousness. Good spirituality, to me, provides tools with which to expand your awareness and renegotiate your contract with reality. It’s not about choosing to adopt someone else’s belief system, it’s about using first-hand experience to find an empowering perspective through which to interact with the world. Two books I highly recommend are The Power of Now and A New Earth.
• Establish consistency. You’ve probably had those moments where you have goals, but hit points where you feel unsure about your next step. For example, I’ve had moments with 30 sleeps where I wrestle between focussing exclusively on the blog, or scaling back my writing a bit to focus more on the application. In moments like these, it’s important to keep moving forward, and not get paralyzed by indecision. My solution was to commit to three articles per week, between Monday and Sunday, no matter what, for at least 30 days. When you have a goal, but it sometimes gets a little blurry, establishing consistency about some aspect of it will ensure you keep making progress.
• Become a social adventurer. No matter what your starting point, what day of the week it is, where you live, or what you look like, anyone can become a social adventurer. You don’t need a purpose in life to interact with the people around you. And this process will teach you far more about yourself than even the most brilliant “self-help” book. I’ve written more about this in Social Skydiving and How to Be Adventurous.
• Write about it. Whether you’re feeling bored with life, or trying to sort your head out after a rough breakup, writing your thoughts down is one of the best ways to clarify them. It won’t necessarily reveal your true purpose overnight, but writing can definitely shed light on areas you can work on right now.

You’ll notice that, even though none of these suggestions necessarily has a direct relationship to your life purpose, they all provide a starting line for forward progress. As you can tell, I’ve found 30-day trials to be an effective vehicle for bottom-up projects as much as for top-down pursuits.

Of course, it’s not hard to generate new leads for things that could use your time and attention right now. Just ask yourself, “What sucks about my life right now?” and let the bug fixing begin.

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.

– Isaac Asimov

Happiness is hard work. While personal development sometimes gets a bad rap, it’s nothing more, and nothing less, than the process of curiosity, self-education, and hard work, that gives you the knowledge and skills to make your life as juicy as you want it to be. When done right, it scares the shit out of you, and that’s what makes it so worthwhile.

It was only a couple of years ago that I made the transition from skeptic to student myself, but personal development has since become a central part of my life, having used what I’ve learned to meet women, start a business, and find my passions, among other things. If you don’t take a conscious approach to creating the life you want, you risk relegating yourself to being busy, but unproductive, living a life full of answers for which there are no questions.

In this article, I’ll explore the role that personal development can have in your life: what it is and what value it adds. I’ll also offer my own perspective on the art of happiness and how a healthy curriculum of philosophy, spirituality, health, money management, productivity, and other personal growth topics can expedite your journey to a productive, intense, and interesting life.

What is Personal Development?

I define personal development as the conscious pursuit of happiness. It’s not about jumping on the latest multi-level marketing scheme, or a miracle investment technique that will “guarantee” you a 25% return year after year. It’s not about super sekrit sexual techniques or effortlessly earning $10,000/month with a generic “home-based business” that requires just 15 minutes to set up.

Everything you do that involves creating value in your life for yourself and others is personal growth. This includes playing sports, learning a new programming language, reading, writing, losing weight, travelling, expanding your social circle, bankroll management, etc. It also includes exploring the very nature of who you are, what you want, and even asking questions about existence itself:

• Why am I here?
• What are the things I value most in life?
• What kind of life am I going to create for myself?
• What would my ideal job look like?
• What kind of relationship do I want?
• What kind of friends do I want?
• How much money do I need to finance the lifestyle I want?

If it’s clever, tricky, or can be done in 24 hours, it’s not personal development. If it’s a revolutionary new system that was discovered on a remote island in the South Pacific, it’s probably snake oil. If it’s available at an amazing 75% discount, but only for the next hour, it’s probably snake venom.

But if it’s a book, an article, an audio program, or a workshop that forces you to ask tough questions about your life, makes your brain hurt a little, pushes you outside your comfort zone, and takes several months or even years to start seeing the results you desire, but produces incremental improvements along the way, it’s probably worthwhile.

It’s all the Ayn Rand books that offer insight into the central role of values and mission, and inspire you to become part of the motor of the world. It’s the Eckhart Tolles and Wayne Dyers that offer new paradigms through which to interact with the world and experience reality. It’s Thoreau and Emerson, Chopra and Osho, Tony Robbins and Tim Ferriss, and everything in between.

It’s the secret that is no secret, because there is no secret to success.

Success Doesn’t Just Happen

I’ve known guys whose biggest time management problem was figuring out how to schedule dates with all the girls they met over the weekend. I’ve worked with guys who have a higher net worth than some countries. I know lots of geeks with an incredible capacity to retain and recall information, solve complex software design problems, or craft impossibly easy-to-use, elegant UIs. I’ve even met one guy who has three hot bisexual girlfriends–what he calls an “interdependent circle.”

But I’ve never met anyone for whom success “just happened.”

The rock star developers and UI designers I’ve worked with are the same guys who work from morning till midnight, turning their thoughts into reality through the awesome power of maniacal determination. The guy who’s into circle relationships has literally made a full-time job out of his lifestyle, teaching other guys what he knows, but only after first investing years into studying dating, sex, and relationships, and consuming a wide range of literature on those and other subjects, in the conscious pursuit of his ideal life.

While I know lots of people who are extremely successful in at least one aspect of their life, I’ve never met someone who really “had it all”, who couldn’t use serious work in at least a couple areas of their life, whether it was fixing a broken relationship, or learning to replace 14 hours of busy-work with 8 hours of essential, creative production.

There’s a socially conditioned myth that “success” means some combination of rich, famous, and powerful. But for anyone who’s actually tasted these things, you’ll know that they don’t make you happy. One of the most unhappy periods in my own life was a time where I was earning a healthy six figure salary, travelling all over the world, and had just bought a beautiful condo in a trendy Montreal neighbourhood. I was very “successful”…and terribly unhappy day-to-day. Worse, I was so busy shifting the blame for my unhappiness to everyone around me, that the negative energy eventually turned into stress and anxiety that actually distracted me from my work.

That experience taught me that the things that bring the deepest joy in life can be purchased only through massive action and unshakeable intent, and in that realm, knowledge is king.

Happiness Is a Skill

As much of a nails-on-chalkboard cliché as it is to say that money can’t buy happiness, most people live as though it can.

We equate money, power, and fame to success because we think they’ll give us permission to be who we really are, to finally live the life we want. If you were rich and famous, you could approach any girl you wanted without feeling intimidated. You’d deserve a super hot girlfriend because of your big…apartment. You’d have tremendous freedom. You wouldn’t ever have to take shit from your boss again. You could live by your own rules without needing anyone’s approval.

But, guess what? You already can live this way.

You already can approach any girl, anywhere, anytime, without being intimidated. You deserve a super hot girlfriend the moment you start believing and acting like you do, the moment you actually have something better to do with your life than meet women, the moment you stop trying to find your happiness in a relationship. You already are free to choose what you work on. Even if you do have a boss, you don’t have a master. You always have the choice to leave. And you already do live by your own rules, but unfortunately, most people’s rules include the desire to please other people, even complete strangers that they’ll never see again.

Living by Coincidence

A computer programmer who doesn’t actively think about their code is said to be “programming by coincidence.” They don’t really understand what they’re doing or why, they just mindlessly plod their way through a task until the code runs. In that sense, a lot of people are “living by coincidence” as well.

The value in personal development, the reason I think it adds a lot of value to people’s lives, is that once you start digging, you can’t help but challenge almost everything you know about who you are, where you came from, where you’re going, and why you do what you do.

When you hack on the intarweb, you get to ask interesting questions like, “How can I make a page that requires 80 separate requests to load, load in one second?”

When you get into personal growth, you get to hack your entire reality: Is reality objective or subjective? How do I know? How do decide on a moral code to live by? How can I turn a 14-hour day of busy-ness into an 8-hour day of productivity? How is it possible that a guy can approach a group of 10 girls like that? And how the hell did he actually get the number of the girl he was interested in?

You can’t explore the circumstances of your life on any meaningful level without changing them. Every question magnifies the facts and the bigger the truth gets, the harder it is to ignore.

My own experience with personal development has been one of tremendous growth and change. My experiences with social skydiving completely changed my world view, as much or more than any experience I’ve ever had, and in ways that extend way beyond just meeting women. 30-day trials, an idea I picked up from Steve Pavlina, have become an integral tool for me in installing good habits and phasing out bad ones. And I’ve had all kinds of fun experimenting with spirituality and various philosophical lenses.

I think the biggest misconception about personal development, one which causes people to avoid it, is the idea that it’s a specific industry populated only by people who make their living teaching people how to be successful, whatever that means. But personal growth is nothing more than purposeful motion, the intellectual pursuit of happiness. And whether you find value in studying the advice of a marketing “guru”, a spiritual teacher, or a CEO-turned-author, it all comes down to listening to the voices that improve your results.