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

– Keith Olbermann

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

Hmmm…

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

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

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

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

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

Moving to Vancouver

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

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

The Itch

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

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

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

You Are What You Tweet

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

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

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

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

People like, erm, me.

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

From Thought to Action

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

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

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

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

The Magic of Just Friggin’ Doing Stuff

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

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

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

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

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

Single? Use Twitter? Awesome.

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

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

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

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

If You Build It…

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

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

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

The Present

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When in doubt, go for it. Good luck.

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

– Oscar Wilde

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RTR’ing Yourself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Challenging Negative Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Jim Carrey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Key(words) to Success

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fantasy Positions

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

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

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

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

Ask, Believe, FAIL

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

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

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

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

Back to Reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, BTW, Hi

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

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

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

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

– Laurence J. Peter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expertise as Fog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You might even get a raise.

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

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

Death by a Thousand Service Packs

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

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

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

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

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I don’t care how much power, brilliance or energy you have, if you don’t harness it and focus it on a specific target, and hold it there you’re never going to accomplish as much as your ability warrants.

– Zig Ziglar

Whether your goal is to start a company, meet an amazing guy or girl, or travel the world in a hot air balloon, there are few among us who wouldn’t want to get there more quickly. A powerful tool for speeding up your progress towards any goal is constraints.

A constraint is a rule, restriction, or boundary within which you must operate to achieve a goal. It might be a limit on the manpower you assign to a task, a fixed amount of time you give yourself each day to work on something, or a budget that helps you avoid going broke.

Sometimes constraints are forced upon you. Sometimes you impose them on yourself. Sometimes you inherit them as side effects of other choices. When chosen consciously, constraints stimulate growth by forcing you to take immediate action. They can also help establish consistency, to ensure that you keep moving towards your goal, even after your initial enthusiasm wears off.

Constraints Get You Moving

Without constraints, 30 sleeps would probably not exist.

Over the last several years, I’ve spent a lot of time “thinking about” doing things. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but my ideas never crossed the boundary from thought to action. When it came to making my business dreams come true, I was all talk and no action. I spent most of my time honing my procrastination skills: criticizing, aimless internet reading, linguistically flavourful internet flame wars, and other forms of mental masturbation.

As often happens in these situations, I finally sunk so low that I knew I’d have to change my approach if the Yet Another Idea I had–the idea for 30 sleeps–was going to become a reality. I decided to use constraints to get things moving.

I did this in two ways. First, I committed to working on 30 sleeps for one month. This rule gave me a temporal sandbox in which to play around and build something useful, without worrying whether I’d still want to be doing this in six months or a year from now. Second, after starting this site in June, I made the decision that, no matter what, it was going live on July 1, even if the entire website was just:

<p>Hello, world.</p>

Obviously, that would have been pretty embarrassing, but when it comes to achieving your goals, you’re better off doing a poor job than not doing at all. Constraints force you to Get Shit Done. You achieve goals much faster if you start with something bite-sized that you can accomplish in a few weeks, rather than going into hibernation for several months to plan something so big that it evaporates into thin air.

In my case, when July 1 came, I rolled out the site. It wasn’t much, but at least it was. For the first time ever, I finally translated a business idea into a living, breathing entity that people could actually use. Even cooler, exactly one month after I started, one of my articles hit the front page of reddit, and later did well on StumbleUpon, bringing me tens of thousands of new visitors.

Had I not forced myself to give birth to this site on July 1, I would never have known that such early success was possible. I probably wouldn’t even be writing this article. This is why I always say that “action is the nuclear weapon”: I think that most of us are capable of astonishing ourselves, if only we would get the hell out of our own way and dive in.

Constraints Create Momentum

Ironically, this article is the product of yet another constraint: the constraint that I must publish at least three articles per week, between Monday and Sunday, for the month of December. Note that the goal is that I want to create content that changes people’s lives, but the rule is to do so at a pace of at least three articles per week.

Last month I made the mistake of not forcing myself to be creative. I just let it flow…and published only five articles, or about 50% of my normal output. This go-with-the-flow mentality was exactly the wrong way around. In any creative pursuit, consistency is critical. Sure, sometimes a great idea just comes to you, but generating high-quality creative output regularly requires deliberate and continual effort.

Constraints are useful for establishing momentum. The more momentum you have, the faster you achieve your goal. I’ve already had a couple moments this month where my three-per-week rule has spurned me on to create new content, where last month, when I didn’t have any publishing quotas to meet, I might have slacked off and not written anything at all in the same situation.

It’s easy to be excited when you first start a new business, lose your first 10 pounds, or take your first shot at social skydiving. Well-chosen constraints give you the momentum to convert your initial enthusiasm into lasting changes.

Constraints and Self-Employment

For someone who’s never been self-employed before, it might seem like a dream come true. You’re your own boss, work on your own schedule, make decisions on all aspects of how things are done, and you don’t have anyone breathing down your neck.

But there’s no better way to stunt your entrepreneurial growth than by overdosing on freedom. Freedom is wasted without good constraints. This includes setting limits on your working hours, having deadlines that force you to focus on truly important features instead of losing yourself down the urgent-but-unimportant rabbit hole, and keeping your expenses in check.

I often use constraints when writing articles. I set a limit of between two and four hours and try hard to finish in the alloted time. This forces me to not only stay focussed when I’m writing, but also encourages me to improve my writing process in general, to create the best content I can in the most efficient manner.

Of course, you can use constraints to help you achieve goals faster regardless of your desired outcome. If you want to meet a great girl, but you’re also the early riser type, you could make a constraint that you won’t go to bars or nightclubs to meet people. If you want to give up alcohol, but aren’t sure you want to commit to that decision for life, you might constrain your obligation to a trial period of a few months and see how it goes.

There’s plenty of room for being creative with the constraints you choose. The key is that if you’re not using constraints to help you stay on track, you’re probably slowing yourself down.

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I’m not a big fan of employment. I haven’t had a “job” in three and a half years. But I also realize that entrepreneurship doesn’t make sense for everyone. Even for those pursuing the dream of starting a business, You Gotta Start Somewhere (TM) and that usually means working for someone else. Some people even like their jobs. They enjoy being part of something that is way beyond what they could accomplish on their own and their job might give them the chance to work with “rock stars” in their field.

I know because I’ve had one gig after another like that. When I started out as a Plone consultant, for example, my first client was Plone guru and author Andy McKay. I went on to work with other high-profile companies and ended up spending two years with Canonical, the company which funds Ubuntu Linux, arguably the most popular free desktop operating system today.

A year ago I changed disciplines and began working with a web development framework called Ruby on Rails. My first Rails project? The AT&T Williams F1 website.

Why am I telling you this? Because I’m an average, not-university-educated skateboarder who consistently finds “dream jobs” (contracts, in my case) that pay me exceedingly well to work with world-class geeks, and I believe that you are at least as capable as I am of getting paid well to do what you love. I was so confident about this that I wrote the first 20 pages of a book called “How to Make $100,000/year as a Consultant” and submitted it as a proposal to an awesome online publisher and he loved it.

But now that this blog is gaining mindshare I’d rather offer what I’ve learned about dream job hunting, piece-by-piece, for free. I apply the advice that follows as a software consultant, but everything in this article should apply as much to consultants as employees, whether your specialty is technology, science, PR, marketing, or stealing priceless artwork.

Know Your Worth

The foundation of gainful employment is self-respect. In your career this means realizing that you deserve to be doing work you love, to work with amazing people, to be treated with respect by your colleagues, and to get paid extremely well for the time you spend furthering other people’s business objectives. If you’re having trouble figuring out what kind of work you love, I wrote an article called Finding Your Passion which may offer some inspiration. If you’re wondering what getting paid “extremely well” means, check out How to Set Your Hourly Consulting Rate. The latter article applies as much to consulting rates as salaries.

I also think it’s important at the outset to think of your ideal job as a profile of characteristics rather than a specific post in a specific company. I’ve never been a “company man” as I think this mindset boxes you in and gives foolish priority to corporate loyalty over happiness and self-respect.

Bankroll Management

Parallel to the other suggestions, being a picky employee/consultant means practicing good bankroll management. Ideally you want at least one year’s savings in the bank at all times. The point of this article is not to give financial advice, but suffice to say, for many people this could take some time, perhaps even a couple of years.

Some of you will read this and think, “What? A whole year of savings? Is this guy crazy?” But being debt-driven is a choice. Saving money is as “impossible” as losing weight and I’ve done a great deal of both. Even on a salary of $30,000/year a few years ago, I built my bankroll up in about six months by, among other things, choosing to live in a shared house for $280/month. Living below your means greatly increases how picky you can be when looking for a job.

If you insist on living paycheque-to-paycheque, don’t worry. I appreciate that it can be hard to get out of that bind once you’ve gotten into it. You can still greatly improve your job situation by applying the other ideas in this article and that could easily result in significant improvements to your financial situation.

Overwhelming Force

90% of my secret to repeatedly finding really cool, good paying gigs can be summed up in one sentence: Send out 10 CVs every day.

This is the job hunting equivalent of social skydiving. If you’re willing to apply overwhelming force to the task of finding a great job or contract, the world truly is your oyster. All those questions about how much you should charge, whether your CV is fit for the real world, and if there are any jobs in your field just disappear. You’ll find the answers to all these questions by simply measuring the response you get. Whatever you do, do not listen to industry trendsters. All that secondhand smoke about how the job market in your field is drying up is bullshit when you’re prepared to contact every man, woman, and child on earth if that’s what it takes to get paid to have fun.

I also find that “résumé bombing” completely changes the job interview dynamic. I tend to interview a prospective client at least as much as they interview me. With extremely high standards, a decent life bankroll, and an almost insane capacity for lead generation and followup, you deserve to be picky in choosing who you’re going to work with.

Keeping Your Dream Job

A discussion of finding your dream job would be incomplete without some discussion of keeping a good thing going after you get it. How do you make yourself hard to replace? How do you stay happy even after working there for a while? Here are some things that work for me:

• Carve your own niche in the company. Take ownership of a project as soon as you can. At Canonical, for example, I almost immediately became the Lead Developer of the bug tracking system used by Ubuntu. I wasn’t hired for any role in particular but I saw the obvious value of having expert knowledge on a particular system. Not only is being proactive a key ingredient to being fully engaged at work, it also gives you a lot of leverage in the company.
• Treat your colleagues as friends. I apply the same basic rules to all my relationships, business and personal. I interact with my bosses and other colleagues exactly the same way I interact with friends. I’m sociable and laid back, I joke around, I’m honest, and if you’re being stupid I’ll let you know. This isn’t just some clever trick I use to make people like me. I just have a lot more fun without the smoke and mirrors that “professionalism” brings. And as a lot of bosses will tell you, it’s a lot harder to fire someone you like.
• Love thy users. In my view, software development is all about making people happy. I think most businesses should try to create a loveocracy. By developing a strong connection to your userbase you will do much better work, feel much happier doing it, and be much less replaceable than someone who hides behind the curtain.
• Be willing to walk away. Staying happy in your job requires being willing to walk away when things go sour. This includes speaking the truth even when you risk getting fired. I’m an expert at walking away from unfavourable situations, but I’ve made some big mistakes too and stayed around when I shouldn’t have. And when I did, it made me terribly unhappy and I ended up leaving later on anyway.

A lot of people treat their jobs like they treat the rest of their life: It’s supposed to suck…right? But being a corporate inmate isn’t a life sentence. If you’re unhappy with your job situation, now is a great time to raise your standards and start looking for something better. The most important job hunting skill is “résumé bombing”. An animal-like devotion to finding your dream job allows you to shift from suffering through your workday to doing what you love for a price that’s right.

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It’s one of the most common questions a consulting newbie asks: How much should I charge?

I was a software consultant for three and a half years. First I was into Plone, then I worked on a big Zope 3 project, and more recently I’ve done some Rails stuff. I still do the odd gig here and there as I make the transition to running my own company.

If you’re currently looking for contract work, the rate you charge will be one of the most important decisions you make. The more you get paid, the more freedom you have to either work fewer hours now, or save up and run around the world later. Your hourly rate is also an important part of your self-marketing strategy.

Here are four simple tips for determining what your skills are worth:

1. You’re probably aiming too low.

Contrary to what you might think, selling yourself as an “affordable” consultant is not a good thing. The same client who turned you away at $50/hour may have hired you for $90/hour. If that seems strange, think of it this way: If you were going to pay someone by the hour to operate on your heart, would you go with the guy who charges $30/hour, or the guy who charges $300/hour?

Clients that look for really cheap consultants tend to be a pain in the ass when it comes time to collect, and they often squirm every time your estimate changes.

Don’t feel guilty about going for the gold. Take comfort in knowing that whatever someone is willing to pay you, they intend to make back at least tenfold. On my first contract, I asked for and got an hourly rate that was four times what I was making as an employee. Later, I even doubled that rate for some projects.

Also, don’t look at what other people are charging. First, they’re also probably aiming too low. Second, their skills and experience might be very different from your own.

2. Don’t do fixed-rate contracts.

(My experience is biased towards software consulting. This point won’t necessarily apply to all types of consulting work.)

Creative work is organic and somewhat unpredictable, which makes it a poor fit for fixed-rate contracts. In these types of projects, someone always gets burned: either the client gets shoddy work, or the consultant does a great job but ends up working for $5/hour.

The best way to balance the risks on both sides of the equation is to bill by the hour and give your client regular progress updates. If a task is taking longer than expected, let them know right away and offer options for how best to proceed. Rather than resisting the organic nature of creative work, learn to use it to your advantage.

If for some reason you must do a fixed-rate contract, think very, very long and hard about how many hours it will take you to complete the work, and multiply that by the figure you came up with in #1. Then triple it.

3. Keep it simple.

I’ve heard of some people billing by the hour for the analysis and design phase, then doing fixed-rate for the implementation. Others wonder if they should charge interest on late payments, or offer incentive packages for clients that offer you more work.

Keep it simple. Have one standard hourly rate, and increase it by 50-100% for really short-term work.

4. Use the Wisdom of Crowds (TM).

Your skills are worth no more and no less than what somebody is willing to pay for them. To figure out your true market value, send out 10 CVs every day, and test different rates. Do this every weekday for at least one month. If yours is the kind of work that can be done with just a laptop and a latte, there are probably plenty of online jobsites and company websites you can use for leads.

For example, it was only five or six months ago that I got into Ruby on Rails consulting. Having no professional experience with this specific framework, I knew it would be an uphill climb. But two weeks and 80 CVs later, I landed a contract working on a high-profile website with a team of Rails geeks distributed around the world. Over the next couple months more responses from my “shock and awe” campaign kept trickling in, even though I’d sent out no more CVs. I found another client at a rate that was even better than what I’d been working for in my area of expertise pre-Rails.

If you’re serious about getting paid what you’re worth, “shock and awe” should be your bread and butter tactic for finding work you enjoy at a rate you’re happy with.

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Authenticity and subordination are totally incompatible.

– Jean Baker Miller

How much time do you spend each day furthering the business objectives of other people?

Which days of the year are you allowed to be away from the office? How far in advance do you have to ask for permission?

At what time of the day are you allowed to eat lunch? When are you permitted to go home?

How much money are you allowed to make? Who has control over your financial fate?

Working for The Man is one of the biggest compromises to your personal happiness you will ever make. And it’s not just the reduced income, schedule restrictions, or soul-crushing decisions made by middle management. Those are the residual downsides of a much deeper issue.

For the typical full-time employee, your career will constitute at least half of your waking life, or more, once you factor in commuting time, end-of-day exhaustion, and bitter dinner conversations with your spouse about how much your job sucks. Spending more than half your life living under someone else’s command is incompatible with living every moment as the full expression of who you are.

Authenticity and the Workplace

This is the true joy of life, the being used up for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. Life is no “brief candle” to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

– George Bernard Shaw

Have you ever been part of a project that you cared deeply about, but felt like you had no real say in the final result? Ever come up with a creative new feature to add to your product, gotten really excited about it, and had it shot down by management before you even had a chance to begin explaining it? Ever had a really cool idea that gained traction with the higher-ups, only to be dragged into a meeting about it and have it smoothed over and mediocritized into something completely different than what you intended?

Me frickin’ too.

There’s nothing more frustrating than being passionate about your work, in a position to apply your unique perspective to building something that could help change the world, and ending up thoroughly subordinated into the equivalent of a data entry clerk for your bosses ideas.

To feel fulfilled in our careers we don’t need an amazing salary, several weeks holidays, and a very flexible schedule (though these don’t hurt. :) Personally, I’ve had all of those at once, and still felt like my work was draining my life force.

What we really need is for our jobs and careers to act as vehicles for self-expression. We need to be allowed to bring authenticity to the workplace, and get paid to be unique. A good manager is more than just someone who delegates tasks. A good manager will figure out how to ignite and inspire their employees to apply their own unique perspective to coming up with a creative solution to the problem at hand.

Of course, in the Real World (TM) most managers are the boss they would hate to work for. Though there are a lot of job adverts looking for people who have an entrepreneurial spirit, your creativity and originality is often discarded, unless it happens to match what the boss already had in mind.

Fortunately, the only person who can claim responsibility for you working at a job you hate is you. Though you may feel helpless and unhappy at work, you can condition yourself to a higher standard.

Career = Passion + Income

If you find yourself wanting more from your career, try changing the way you define it. Think of a career as what you do to monetize the pursuit of happiness. It sounds simple, and perhaps naively ambitious, but ask yourself: How many hours of each day do you spend taking action to live your ideal life? For most people the answer is either “None”, or a list of excuses about why now is not the right time. No action = no output = no results.

For example, I’m really interested in personal growth. I consume an enormous amount of material on the subject, participate in some online discussions related to personal growth, and am constantly applying interesting ideas to my own life, measuring the results, and writing about the experiences I’ve had.

I often find myself directing conversations I have with people towards understanding what the other person really wants in life, and what action they’ve been taking lately to get it. I recently helped a friend of mine land a consulting contract at a rate that is much more worthy of his talents than what he currently makes. A few weeks ago, I convinced my little brother to come visit me in Montreal to experience life at a higher frequency. When he got here, I helped him develop the habit of talking to strangers. He had the time of his life, and now spends a lot of his time aching to return. :)

Making the Leap

The natural next step for me was to create 30 sleeps which is both a blog and a companion website to help dream chasers unite. I wanted to create an online community of people who need help finding their purpose and/or are driven to realize their full potential. 30zzz was my own 30-day challenge, to go from thinking about starting a company to actually starting a company.

I had such a difficult time taking action at first that I literally had to sit down at my computer and force myself to start writing code. The initial cut was ugly and painful–so bad that I started over a couple times. But now it’s real. It’s still full of uncertainty and risk, and if I do fail, a lot of people will know about it, but the only way to live is dangerously.

You will likely spend over half your waking hours earning your living, and unless you make a concerted effort otherwise, you’ll probably spend that time forwarding someone else’s goals and living by someone else’s rules. The biggest downside to working for others is that it holds you back from living an authentic life. By thinking of your career as a way to “monetize the pursuit of happiness”, you will condition yourself to recognize and create opportunities that allow you to follow your bliss and get paid at the same time.

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