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.

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.

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.

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

– Elizabeth Drew

In my recent article, How to Read a Book, I offered some ideas for extracting value from dead trees. I focussed primarily on non-fiction in that article. Now I want to offer you an approach for fiction.

Fiction differs from non-fiction in only one necessary way: it’s made up. But that small variation in its linguistic DNA produces an entirely different organism. While the primary goal of fact-driven content is to extract the information you need, the primary goal of reading a story could be anything. A work of fiction is, essentially, an artifact of self-expression. There are as many motivations for writing a story as there are reasons for us to communicate with one another. Many authors write stories to explore issues they’re experiencing in their own lives. Others attempt to get us thinking about the good, bad, and ugly things in our world.

But if works of fiction are made up, why bother reading them? What value can we possibly derive from the people, places, and things that exist purely in our imagination? And how can those fictitious forces inspire us to push our own boundaries and do things we’ve never done before?

Why Read Fiction?

Obviously a question like, “Why read fiction?”, has many answers: for entertainment value, to improve your vocabulary, to be inspired, etc. For me the primary value of fiction, the one that is most beneficial from a growth perspective, is that it offers an experience.

What kind of experience? Whatever one I choose. The literary landscape is as diverse as a very diverse thing. If I want to live in a world full of robots, I’ll read Asimov. If I’m in more of an anarchist mood, I’ll reach for Orwell. When I wanted a taste of life in Soviet Russia, I read Ayn Rand’s We the Living. I immersed myself so completely in the story that I began to feel the agonizing boredom of waiting for hours in line for rations of stale bread and rancid butter. I came to understand the paranoia that people felt, how careful they had to be with their words towards the Party, fearing that one of their listeners might be a member, knowing the fate that came to those who begged to differ.

Several weeks after reading that book I found myself in conversation with a couple friends from eastern Europe, who’d lived under the Soviet regime. It was fascinating to discover how much their real-world experiences paralleled my not-real-world ones. A lot of what they said refreshed the mental images of what I’d read, almost as if they were things I’d lived through myself.

This episode is explained by more than just my overactive imagination. Even science has something to say about the ability our creative powers have to shape our reality. In an article entitled “Experiencing the Future”, in the June 2008 issue of Le Monde de l’intelligence, Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, talks about how our thoughts are processed in ways similar to real sensory experiences. Here’s a quote:

The pleasure that we feel when we imagine future events comes from the same parts of the brain as the pleasure we feel when we live events in the present.

The visual imagination activates the visual cortex, in the same way as our visual sense; the auditory imagination activates the auditory cortex, in the same way as our hearing, and the affective imagination activates the affective centers of the brain, exactly like affective experience.

So while we know that fiction is–obviously–quite fictional, diving deeply into a great story can be an almost visceral adventure. A decent novel can entertain you. A good novel can make you feel stuff. A great novel can change your life.

Read Only What Interests You

That a novel offers an experience is of no inherent value. Getting the most value out of a novel requires asking yourself: What kind of experience do you want to have?

My answer to that question is usually a reflection of where I’m headed with my life. I often use my intentions as a compass to point me to the right section in the bookstore. Since my primary relationship to a story is through its characters, I look for books populated with intriguing personalities: people I’d want to know in real life, or at least have a conversation with through a bullet-proof glass window. I used to choose books to read because they were “classics”, or recommended by so-and-so. I’ve since become wise to the folly of that approach.

There are so many words to choose from that knowing where to begin your search for a good book can be overwhelming. Here are my preferred sources, all of which can also apply to non-fiction:

• Bloggers. A great deal of what I read is stuff recommended by bloggers I respect.
• Online forums. Shared interests are a great source of reading ideas, particularly for novels, since their titles rarely give a clear hint at what they’re about.
• Other books. Not only those mentioned in the main text, but also those in the bibliography.
• Wikipedia → Influences. Many Wikipedia pages for authors include a list of authors that influenced them. You may also prefer to read stuff by authors they influenced.
• Bookstores. When all else fails, nothing beats spending an hour or two just wandering around a big bookstore, picking things off shelves and examining them.

Fiction as Vehicle for Growth

Great fiction expands your emotional repertoire and deepens your self-understanding. This makes it a particularly useful tool in the conscious pursuit of happiness. I prefer to choose a reading path that floods my imagination with images and ideas that are aligned with my present goals.

For example, reading Atlas Shrugged taught me a lot about self-reliance. I was so inspired by the characters in Ayn Rand’s epic novel that I decided to devour her other well-known works of fiction: The Fountainhead, We the Living, and Anthem.

This kind of tunnel vision is a healthy thing, for short periods. It gives the ideas a chance to soak in, for the mindset to really rub off on you. Unlike most non-fiction, a novel takes an idea and wraps it in context so you can see how it might play out in the real world. By focussing your reading around a particular theme, you build up a database of reference “experiences” related to that subject. Of course, fiction is no replacement for real life, but like the example I gave earlier about We the Living, it can still offer profound insights.

Invite the Characters Into Your Life

Every so often, you’ll meet someone who changes your perception of the world. You might work alongside a brilliant computer geek who redefines your notion of competence, or you might connect with someone in your social life whose ability to deal with a rough situation inspires you.

This same reservoir of human potential is available in paperback form. It requires only the force of your imagination to be extracted. So when you read a novel, really read it. Invite the characters into your life. Think about them even when you’re not reading. Weigh the events in your life against the events in theirs. What might they be doing right now? How would they handle the situation that you currently find most challenging? How is your personality different from theirs and in what ways do those differences shape your lives differently? Experiment with all the ways you can think of to weave the story and characters into your own existence–without getting arrested.

Only fiction can provide such a broad context in which to think about life, the universe, and everything. Use this to your advantage. Just like we exercise caution in who we choose to associate with in real life, so we should be picky about what we read. Read deliberately, with your mind wide open. Use fiction to live; not as a replacement for the real world, but as an extension of it.

Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.

– Ezra Pound

I run a One Man University.

I’m the Dean, the Professor, and the entire student body of OMU. My major is the conscious pursuit of happiness; my minor, everything else. My tuition is paid in regular installments of hard work, self-determination, and persistence in the face of failure and rejection.

I’m an able student even though I’ve never gotten high marks in my courses. In fact, I’ve never gotten any marks at all. I have no GPA. And there is no shiny piece of paper at the end of this educational rainbow. My progress is measured exclusively by the tangible results my research and experiments produce to make my life an adventure worth living.

Much of my learning takes place along the intellectual highways paved by great works of literature, both factual and fictional. There are few places the written word will not go. For virtually every branch of human knowledge there is a book offering to start me down that path.

So it should be no surprise that the heart of my university is its library. From Ayn Rand to Aristotle, Tim Ferriss to Henry David Thoreau, I’ve got access to a universe of interesting people and fascinating ideas to help me navigate the murky waters of reality.

But building my library of good books is pretty easy. The hard part is knowing how to read them.

Reading for Growth

All deliberate action is prefixed by an idea. Books provide a rich source of intellectual leverage. Knowing how to read is one of the most important skills you can learn on your path to personal growth.

So when you look down and notice yourself holding a good book in your hands, what do you do next? Assuming you picked it up accidentally, you’d probably want to put it back down. But if it arrived there by intent, you’d probably want to flip to the first page, fix your eyes on the first word in the top left corner, and continue in a left-to-right, top-down fashion until you reached The End.

Unfortunately, if your goal is to actually learn something from your efforts, things get a little more tricky. Reading is to acquiring knowledge as typing is to building software: it’s merely data entry. The challenge is to extract maximum value from what you read.

Personal growth books require particular consideration. There’s a fundamentally different process involved in reading a book about, say, starting a business versus reading a book about the emerging sex toy industry in China. The only reason to read a book about starting a business is if you actually intend to start a business. Likewise, reading a book about losing weight is pointless unless you have some pounds to shed.

So what’s the best way to read a book whose sole purpose is to get you to do something?

While the ideas in this article are biased towards the study of books on subjects like starting your own business, eating healthier, getting your finances in order, and other growth-related topics, most of these ideas should apply to non-fiction in general, and even fiction to some extent.

Speed Reading

There are two kinds of reading. The first kind of reading treats a book like an integer, like the N in “I’ve read N books on subject XYZ.” This is the quantitative hunger fed by technologies like “speed reading.”

Or, even worse, photo reading.

The speed reader assumes that reading twice as fast makes him twice as productive. The best speed readers are so good that they can read a book by simply farting in its general direction. And they’ll even score 60% or better on a comprehension test while the smell lingers patiently in the air.

Of course, a reader who thinks that doubling his reading speed makes him twice as productive is like a programmer who thinks that doubling his typing speed will halve the amount of time he takes to finish a project. Effective reading is not measured by how fast you can vacuum words off a page. It’s measured by how well you integrate new ideas into existing conceptual frameworks, and how you use those ideas to do things you haven’t done before.

Slow Reading

The second, much more effective way to read, is to treat every book as an opportunity to expand your reality. The main variable in this equation is not speed, but change: How did this book change my life? What actions did I take as a direct result of reading this book? What were my results? What did this book teach me that I didn’t expect to learn? How have I applied that knowledge in my day-to-day life?

Reading well means going slow and making your brain hurt. It involves asking tough questions that push you outside your intellectual comfort zone, and being willing to explore unfamiliar ideas until you understand them, no matter how long that takes.

During the four years that I played chess seriously at a fairly high level, I probably read no more than 10 chess books cover to cover. It wasn’t because I didn’t like reading them or because I was too lazy. I just needed that much time to explore the ideas they gave me to a depth that satisfied me. The first two or three books I read were fairly basic. But by the time I started studying books of the great masters, I could read the same book over and over and gain new insights every time.

While my book consumption habits were well below those of the average player, my tournament results well exceeded them.

One Book at a Time

I eat, sleep, and breath every book I read. I find there’s no better way to absorb new ideas than to carry them around with me wherever I go.

When I read Never Eat Alone, for example, I completely immersed myself in the relationship building mindset. I spent a great deal of time implementing what Keith Ferrazzi was talking about as I learned it. I reached out to “aspirational contacts”, went out of my way to volunteer my time and effort for projects that interested me, and planted the seeds of mission-centered relationships. It was during this flurry of activity that I even met my current girlfriend.

Had I speed read my way through this book, or diluted my efforts by juggling three or four other books at the same time, I doubt any of this would have happened. I’d have worn my four-minute literary mile like a badge of honour: N = N + 1. Next.

Relentless Curiosity

The Perl programming language has the notion of a “taint” flag. When set, this flag adds a rule to the interpreter saying that, roughly speaking, any data that enters your program from the outside world (files, user input, environment variables, etc.) cannot be used to affect anything else in the outside world, unless you explicitly untaint it.

This is a useful model to apply to your research. Trust your own mind above the author’s, no matter who he or she is. Question every chapter, every page, every paragraph, and every sentence you read. Practice relentless curiosity. Start with the most basic questions you can ask and work your way up from there. For example:

• Why am I reading this book? What problem am I trying to solve?
• Is this the best source of information I know of on this subject?
• What is the author’s solution to this problem?
• What are the advantages of this solution?
• What are the disadvantages of this solution?
• What ideas from this chapter/section/exercise can I apply to situations in my own life?

Reason is the primary means by which we “untaint” ideas. Relentless curiosity is not just some cutesy Dennis the Menace personality trait, it’s a basic tool of survival.

Three Big Ideas

Even if you read every book slowly and deliberately, you’re still going to encounter far more interesting ideas than you’ll ever hope to remember. The penultimate step to thoroughly devouring a good book is to extract the Big Ideas out of it. I read a lot so I tend to limit this number to about three, but feel free to tweak as you see fit.

I’d encourage you to write the summary in any format you want, whether as bullet points or more coherent prose. The goal is to simply create something that you could look at in several months and be able to regurgitate the most important lessons the book had to offer.

Act Quickly

The last step is the most important: Act immediately on what you read. Take action as you read the book. Do the exercises, if possible. As I’ve mentioned previously, the idea for 30 sleeps came from one of my answers to an exercise in The 4-Hour Workweek.

The call for timely action applies to almost any book you read to acquire a new skill. For example, when I read books about the Ruby on Rails programming framework and spot a useful feature that I didn’t know about before, I try to immediately update all of my code, where applicable, to use this feature. This helps me commit the new idea to memory and ensures that I actually use the idea in my code, rather than deferring it to an ever-elusive “someday.”

Ultimately, every growth-related book is a 30-day challenge in disguise, limited only by your creativity and willingness to transform thought into action. You’ll know the quality of your reading habits not by how many books you can claim to have read, but by how many of the good things in your life can be traced back to a spot on your bookshelf.

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

– Author Unknown

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

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

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

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

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

There Is No Secret

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

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

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

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

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

Shared Interests Are Everything

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

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

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

Which brings me to how I met Mary.

Seduction Secret #172: Live Your Own Life

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

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

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

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

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

Girl Approaches Guy, Film at 11

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

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

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

Opportunity Will Knock

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

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

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

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

– Leonardo da Vinci

I need every word I write.

The titles of my articles are descriptive but unflashy. I strive for short sentences. I formulate simple concepts, act on their hint, and document my experiences in the hopes of inspiring others. I use technology as an instrument of reach, rather than as an intellectual stairmaster. I’m a preacher of straightforward ideas because straightforward ideas kick ass.

My mission in life is to pursue personal growth and to help others grow. My business plan is: 1. Create high-quality content. 2. Tell people about it. 3. Profit.

My path to personal growth is shaped in large part by one tightly-guarded secret: Keeping Things Simple. This isn’t a secret because no one knows about it; it’s a secret because you can scream “Keep it simple!” as loud as you want and no one will hear you.

Simple Is Hard

Simple isn’t easy. Easy means achieved without great effort. Simple means easily understood. I can bang out a complicated article in half the time it takes me to produce a simple one. I never had to learn how to build convoluted software either–it was a natural talent, you might say–but I did have to make a conscious effort to build stuff that didn’t hurt.

But why is simple so hard? How do you start out wanting to build a text editor and end up building an entire operating system instead? Why do guys spend thousands of dollars on ebooks and workshops that promise to teach them the secrets of meeting women instead of taking the direct, cost-free, and equally rejection-prone route of just walking up and saying hi?

In my experience, there are two primary reasons why we overcomplicate things. The first is a loss of focus. When you lose touch with why you’re doing what you’re doing, you inadvertently sentence yourself to trivial pursuits. As a software developer, I see this all the time with frameworks, particularly frameworks that were created out of thin air instead of extracted from working applications. Using them is like going to church: you pray to a higher power to help you make it through the day, you beg forgiveness for your sins, and they keep pestering you for donations. The tagline for software built from these foundations usually ends with “…but the code is really good.”

Whether you’re creating a product, working on expanding your social life, or trying to find a better job, avoiding the thorns of distraction involves regularly asking yourself these questions:

• What’s my goal?
• How will I know when I’ve achieved it?
• How am I measuring my progress?
• How well is my current approach working?

It also helps to write down your goals when you set them. Not only does recording your dreams help you flesh out your desired outcome, it also helps remind you of your original intent.

Complexity and the Ego

The other major reason we flock to complexity is a problem of a very different nature, that requires a completely different solution. It’s rooted in our psychology. It comes from the imperial nature of the human ego.

The ego’s primary lubricant can be summed up in one word: More. 10 features are better than 1. 1000 lines of code is better than 100. $500,000/year is better than $100,000/year. Big is better than small. To the ego, Less is kryptonite.

Making things more difficult than they need to be can also be induced by fear. Our ego relies on fear to protect itself and complexity is a great place to hide. Saying hi to a girl is an incredibly simple and direct way to improve your success with women, but the range of potential negative responses could pose a serious threat to who you think you are. A much easier path for the ego to follow is to read about approaching women instead of actually doing it. Not only does this remove the possibility of embarrassing social fumbles, it also quenches the ego’s thirst for more. If you’ve read five seduction ebooks, you’re obviously better off than if you’d only read one.

Of course, all that information is just a diversion. You end up realizing that no matter how much you read about meeting women instead of actually meeting women, the terror of rejection still remains. And no matter what you do, your first several dozen, maybe even several hundred approaches will be as painful as they are instructive.

Dealing with the ego is a complex subject, which I’ve already written much about. To learn more, try these articles:

• The Joy of Living Dangerously
• Social Skydiving: The Art of Talking to Strangers
• Embracing Rejection
• How to Just Be Yourself
• Facing Your Fears

Reading in itself is obviously not a bad thing. Losing yourself in unnecessary details to avoid doing what you already know needs to be done is a bad thing.

Prioritize Simple Solutions

Of the four major social media websites (Digg, StumbleUpon, reddit, and del.icio.us), I’ve done pretty well on three of them. The final frontier for me was Digg. If you read about how to get attention from these websites, you’ll see people saying you have to create an account, vote up and comment on articles that other users submit, add everyone who votes up your content to your friends list, and so on.

But my goal with 30 sleeps is to write content that changes people’s lives, not to be a social media power user. To increase my presence on Digg, I asked myself “What’s the simplest way to get on the Digg front page?” I came up with the following algorithm:

1. Write great content.
2. Visit the front page of the relevant section on Digg. Lifestyle/Education, in my case.
3. Find out who’s submitting content that makes the front page of that section.
4. Contact them directly, with links to my best articles.

I found a few such power users who provided their email address in their profile, and specifically said that they’re hungry for interesting links. I contacted each one directly. I made it clear that I don’t spend a lot of time on Digg, but that I do spend a lot of time writing content dealing with personal growth, and provided them with links to some of my best work.

I did this only a few days ago. The results were amazing. My article on information addiction got submitted and was dugg 135 times. That wasn’t quite enough to push it to the front page, but the article got far more attention than anything I’d tried before. (By the way, if you have a Digg account and liked that article, your votes would be greatly appreciated.)

Remember step #2 of the business plan I described earlier? It really is that basic. The more complex your strategy for achieving your goals, the more you’ll slow yourself down. The simplest thing that can possibly work often does.

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 great arises out of small things that are honored and cared for. Everybody’s life really consists of small things. Greatness is a mental abstraction and a favorite fantasy of the ego. The paradox is that the foundation for greatness is honoring the small things of the present moment instead of pursuing the idea of greatness. The present moment is always small in the sense that it is always simple, but concealed within it lies the greatest power. Like the atom, it is one of the smallest things yet contains enormous power. Only when you align yourself with the present moment do you have access to that power. Or it may be more true to say that it then has access to you and through you to this world.

– Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose

An average person is someone who thinks that the past and the future are more important than the present. Approach anxiety, procrastination, risk aversion, poor concentration, absent-mindedness, and virtually every other form of self-created misery are possible only when you let your thoughts and actions be dominated by something outside this eternal instant. When you direct your attention to the needs of this moment, every action unfolds into the field of intention. It’s hard to articulate the energy behind this flow, but you know it when you feel it.

It’s easy to sense when somebody’s living outside the present moment. When you talk to them, all they ever say is, “Oh yeah…Yeah…Uh huh…Cool…Haha…Yeah.” When you walk by them on the street, the look on their face adopts a kind of pedophilia: zoned out, morose, disconnected, an undercurrent of anger and frustration pushing its way out through their bulging eyes. They complain and criticize as if talk without action were something that mattered. And they spend a lot of time talking about a day that exists on nobody’s calendar: Someday.

Every big problem is really just a large collection of tiny problems grouped together and labeled. Success isn’t about doing big things, it’s about doing small things. When every fibre of your being is invested into solving this little problem in this little moment, you haven’t just increased your chances of reaching your goal–you’ve already achieved it.

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

– Thomas Edison

Life, to me, is a series of experiments. Achieving a goal is fun, but every finish line is really just the start of a new adventure. Most of my time is spent mixing together magic potions, blowing things up, breaking stuff, and failing my way forward until reality starts looking like what I had in mind.

Success is really just a checkpoint on a road graveled by mistakes. The only way to get what you want out of life is to screw up in so many different ways that you finally reveal the path to success. You need to know how to not just mess things up, but mess things up intelligently.

Managing Complexity

Intelligent failure begins by breaking a problem up into manageable pieces. The most instructive screwups are those that happen while working on a small, self-contained puzzle. I like to smallchunk problems along two different axes: time and scope.

These two variables go hand-in-hand. Setting a time constraint usually helps control the scope of a problem. For example, as I mentioned in How to Achieve Your Goals Faster, I gave myself a hard deadline of one month to get this site up and running. Had I not done that, I’m sure I’d still be “thinking about” doing it or I’d have lost myself down the rabbit hole of feeping creaturism.

A short timeframe helps you design for failure. If your plan for achieving a goal requires two years of work before you’ll even start to see results, your cost of failure is huge. Small mistakes accrue a compound interest. Left unchecked, they can easily magnify into massive blunders over time. Breaking up your personal growth strategy into shorter iterations allows you to fail quickly and integrate real world feedback early on.

Narrowing the scope of your goal allows your failures to be more precise. When you try to do too much at once and something goes wrong, it can be hard to narrow down the cause. The smaller the piece of a puzzle you try to solve, the better the feedback you get from your trials and errors.

To break up any goal into manageable pieces, and identify useful time and scope boundaries, ask yourself this: What’s the simplest thing that could possibly work? This approach is borrowed from a software development methodology called Extreme Programming, but it applies just as much to planning a trip around the world, learning a new language, or even getting a girlfriend.

Discovering Your Values

A value is something that is important to you. Some things are probably more important to you than other things, so your values tend to organize themselves in a hierarchy.

Having a strong sense of your hierarchy of values will help you channel your energy into important problems. I’d even say that if you don’t consciously identify and act upon your values, the best you can hope for is mediocrity. It doesn’t matter how good you look on paper, how proud your parents are of you, or how hot your girlfriend is–if you trade a more important value for a less important one, you will suffer. If you make really good money at the price of hating what you do for a living, it will gnaw at your soul. If you trade trust for good sex in your relationship, your peace of mind will implode.

Failure can teach you a lot about your values, if you know what to look for.

One of my recent “failures” was learning to play Go. I committed myself to 30 days of learning the game, no matter what, and I gave up after only a few days. The reason I gave up was simple: I had a values conflict. While the challenge and symphony of the game appealed greatly to me, it failed to respond to an even higher value of mine: creative self-expression. Being a good Go player obviously requires great skill and creativity, but it wasn’t a medium through which I could express a meaningful message to the world. There was something about spending a great deal of time on Go that just didn’t feel right. That feeling arose via a disconnect from the things which I considered most important.

A failure like this is a good chance to ask yourself: Why did I give up? In many cases, the underlying reason is that your values hierarchy is out of whack, and you gave up because the pursuit lacked appeal in some critical dimension of your self-actualization needs. In many cases, giving up, or even just flunking out, teaches you a lot about what really matters to you. With a rage to master, you operate like a star-powered Super Mario. But a of lack passion usually breeds incompetence.

I believe that a lot of people get fired from their jobs, not because they aren’t smart enough to do the work, but because they’re doing work that isn’t aligned with their highest values, and that makes them into poor performers.

Changing Your Approach

The most important part of learning from failure is that you try something different on each attempt. A lot of dream chasers get really discouraged when they don’t succeed right away, as if really successful people don’t fail. Successful people fail constantly; the difference is that they keep moving forward anyway. Just like any guy who does a lot of social skydiving knows that meeting hot girls is almost guaranteed once you learn to embrace rejection, so it is that virtually every goal is achievable once you start treating failure as a lesson instead of a stop sign.

Most people understand intellectually that failures are just lessons in disguise, but few people act that way. The fear of failure often arrests their ambition. But the only thing crazier than worrying about something that probably won’t happen is worrying about something that will. And if you’re taking action to achieve your goals, failure is almost guaranteed at some point. The main question is how you’ll respond when shit hits fan.

I find that the trial and error lifestyle is best organized around short bursts of time in which you start making big changes. In any given 30-day period, I’m usually in the midst of installing a couple new habits, removing some old ones, experimenting with new ways of driving traffic to my blog, learning to eat healthier, tweaking my creative process, and whatever else. Most of these adventures are documented on this blog.

To master the art of competent failure, try living your life as a series of small experiments. Set clear goals to execute on a time schedule that keeps you on your toes. At the end of every action cycle, ask yourself:

1. What result did I expect?
2. What was the actual result?
3. If expected and actual don’t match up, what went wrong? (Try to come up with at least two or three reasons.)
4. What one variable could I change next time to have a better chance of achieving the desired result? (Again, try to think of a few possibilities.)

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Any goal worth achieving has at least 10,000 reasonable solutions that may or may not work, but most people give up after trying the first 2 or 3. Your capacity to stop living by coincidence and start living on purpose can be measured by answering just one question: How many failures does it take to keep you down?