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.

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

– Laurence J. Peter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expertise as Fog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.

– Aristotle

As Ayn Rand pointed out in her excellent book, Philosophy: Who Needs It, we are all philosophers.

We all have a certain attitude towards life, we all have different hypotheses regarding Flying Spaghetti Monsters, and we all have a standard by which we measure good and evil. The only difference, as Rand says, is “whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought…or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions.”

That you’re reading these words suggests you are most likely of the conscious, rational vintage. Even if you think my writing deserves no particular admiration, you are at least here to consume ideas and think critically about them, to improve your grasp on the art of living. This is what personal growth is all about.

But what if you’ve been involved in this whole personal growth thing for some time and it just isn’t working? What if you’ve read a lot of stuff from the self-help section–Tony Robbins, Tim Ferriss, Napoleon Hill, Stephen Covey, Rhonda Byrne, etc.–but now realize that you’re the same person you were a year ago? What if instead of losing weight, you’ve gained weight? What if instead of expanding your social life, you’ve made unwanted friends and influenced the wrong people? What if you’ve read all that Mars/Venus stuff but your relationship is still lost in space?

Getting Out of the Rut

There are three reasons to explain this:

The first reason is that you don’t apply what you learn. In that case, the ideas that follow won’t help either.

The second reason is that you apply what you learn, but incorrectly. The author knows how to “ask, believe, and receive” and the reason your intentions aren’t manifesting is because you don’t know the secret.

Or should I say, you don’t know The Secret.

But this is unlikely. Personal growth ideas are generally not that complicated. They are intentionally broad strokes, not intricate mathematical equations. The hardest part is applying what you learn. And, more specifically, applying it day in and day out for as long as is needed to achieve the desired outcome.

You don’t need a university degree to lose weight. There is no Ph.D. in social engineering. And relationship problems are hard to measure; emotions don’t fit in test tubes.

The third reason to account for a lack of success is that you are an earnest student with a capable mind, who is faithfully implementing what you’re learning, but it just doesn’t work. Despite the claims of the enormous power of the Hyper-Mega-Success Formula (TM), and the author’s assertions that “countless experiments” in “modern science” have proven its efficacy, the only thing it’s given you in a Hyper-Mega-Hole-In-Your-Wallet and an ever-present speech bubble floating over your head that reads:

         . o O (WTF???)
        O
       /|\
       / \

It is to this person that I am here speaking.

If you have a large library of self-help books, and you’ve learned from and applied their teachings with excellent results, then what follows probably won’t change much. Output is, after all, God.

But if you find yourself frustrated and in many ways poorer from your efforts–if self-help feels more like self-destruct–then I’d like to suggest an alternate course: Stop reading self-help books. And start devouring philosophy.

Questions Are Not the Answer

At a casual glance, self-help and philosophy appear to be almost the same thing. Both Tony Robbins and Aristotle are trying to help you live a fulfilling life. Both want to help you gain a better understanding of yourself and the world around you. But while the goals of these two fields are similar, the differences in implementation are not trivial.

One of the most fundamental problems with many self-help books is that they assume that questions are answers. For example, in his book Awaken the Giant Within, Tony Robbins, talking about how to come up with goals, suggests you ask yourself (pp. 289-290), “What would I want for my life if I knew I could have it any way I wanted it? What would I go for if I knew I could not fail?”

What’s missing from this solution for choosing worthy goals is…a solution for choosing worthy goals. A lot of people ask themselves this question and have no idea how to answer it. How do you know what you would do if you couldn’t fail? What do you consider “good” (a worthy goal) versus “evil” (an unworthy goal)? And by what standard?

Ethics: The Missing Manual

To answer this particular question, I advocate using your Weird Idea Radar, constantly saying yes to new experiences until you stumble upon something that you can really sink your teeth into.

But equally important is a tool with which to measure the value of your experiences, an instrument that will not only give you readings of “Bad”, “Good”, “Better”, and “Best” but that also explains why this is so. That instrument is ethics.

Ethics is the branch of philosophy that illuminates the path to right action. It is not just about determining which actions which should be legal or illegal; any evaluation of bad, good, better, and best, whether on a personal, social, or societal level falls within the concern of ethics.

If your moral code is based on Marxist ideas, your life goals are going to be completely different from someone whose moral code is derived from Objectivism. Likewise, a hedonist’s ethics will result in a completely different day-to-day experience compared to someone whose moral guide is the Bible.

And here’s the thing: not all moral codes are created equal. If your moral code is broken, it doesn’t matter how you answer the goals question, because the answer will always point you in the wrong direction.

Ethics is the primary deliverable of philosophy. The rest–metaphysics (the nature of reality), epistemology (the nature of knowledge), and esthetics (the nature of beauty)–is interesting only because it all lays the groundwork for understanding how to conduct our lives.

And while an entire book on ethics is at the core of most contributions of those we consider great philosophers–Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, and Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason come to mind–the subject of ethics is conspicuously absent from self-help literature.

In most cases, it is conspicuously ignored.

Ideas – Ethics = FAIL

Since personal growth is all about action, and ethics provides a framework for right action, a solid understanding of ethics is the most important weapon in your arsenal of change.

What happens when you ignore ethics?

One risk, like the goal-setting example shows, is that you just get stuck.

The other risk is that your actions write a cheque that your sanity can’t cash.

The seduction community is ripe territory for causing such psychological fallouts. For example, the Mystery Method is probably the most well-known How-To manual on meeting women. Its premise is that seduction is a linear process. It describes each step of the process, from the opener, to getting a girl interested in you, to how and when to demonstrate interest in her, to getting her in bed and avoiding “buyer’s remorse.”

And, as someone who was involved in the seduction community a couple years ago, I can tell you this: it works. In fact, it’s almost frightening to realize that it works, to see an interaction with a girl unfolding before your eyes exactly like a book told you it would.

Sometimes word for word like the book told you it would.

But there’s a problem here. If you need money quickly, both mugging a blind man in a back alley late at night and selling off one of your five TVs to the local pawn shop will achieve that goal, but clearly only one of these alternatives is viable.

While the Mystery Method can answer almost all your questions about meeting women–why she needs to be interested in you before you demonstrate interest in her, why going for rapport before attraction will get you LJBF’d, why backhanded compliments will actually increase your appeal–there is one question for which no answer is provided: Is this right?

Is the right approach to meeting women to observe alpha males, identify the characteristics and behaviours that distinguish them, and then emulate those attributes in the hopes of producing the same results? Is posting and analyzing “lay reports” on the internet a sensible way to improve your skills with the opposite sex? Will 20 lays make you happier than 17?

The short answer to these questions can be found here:

• Seduction for Smart People: Should You Become a “Pickup Artist”? – Part I
• Seduction for Smart People: Should You Become a “Pickup Artist”? – Part II

The long answer can be found in Neil Strauss’s excellent book The Game.

Learning How to Learn

What do you know? How do you know that you know it?

This might sound like a cute little brain teaser, something to think about while you’re waiting for the bong to make its way in your direction, but it is a vital day-to-day enquiry. It is the primary concern of epistemology, the branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge: what it is, how to acquire it, and what its limits are.

Rendering the sharpest image of reality that your mental hardware can support means continually upgrading your mental software. But the only ideas worth “installing” are those that perform useful functions without causing your system to crash all the time.

It may seem like recognizing bad ideas is just common sense, but refined critical thinking skills are not innate. Looking through the history of the scientific method for example, you’ll find that the idea of using a controlled experiment with two identical populations and one variable is only 250 years old. Without that idea, many of the major medical breakthroughs we make today would not be possible.

Growth requires critical thinking skills. Ideas need to be resisted before they can be accepted. When you’re studying advice on personal growth, that resistance comes in the form of some necessary questions: What does this author know? How does he know it? And how do you know that he knows it?

Blurring Reality

There’s a lot of wisdom in self-help books that can never be considered knowledge, because it involves claims that are so general that they cannot be proven either true or false. As long as these claims are kept in a box labelled “beliefs”, that’s generally not a problem. There are a lot of areas in life that we aren’t sure about–and might never be–and beliefs provide us some way of wading through uncertainty.

Unfortunately, in my experience, self-help books have a tendency to blur the line between fact and fiction, making scientific claims (statements that can be demonstrated as true or false) with insufficient, or even bogus evidence.

For example, to continue picking on Tony Robbins, in his book Unlimited Power, Tony talks about the power of writing down your goals and refers to the famous Yale Study of Goals. The story goes like this:

In 1953, researchers studying goal setting surveyed the graduating seniors from Yale University on their goals and aspirations for the future. They discovered only 3% of the graduating class had specific, written goals and objectives.

20 years later, when they tracked down the same graduates, the researchers were astounded by the results. They discovered that the same 3% who engaged in goal setting activity and had clearly written goals when they graduated in 1953 were more successful, and worth more in terms of wealth than the other 97% put together. The same 3% also tended to have better health and relationships than the other 97%.

Evidence like this is so powerful that it’s almost overwhelming. So it’s no wonder that the same story has been repeated by some of the most well-known self-help gurus, including Zig Ziglar and Brian Tracy. After all, if you had known the power of clear, written goals 5 or 10 years ago you’d probably be a millionaire many times over by now, right?

There’s just one problem with this story: It is complete bullshit. Total air. It never happened.

Eyes Wide Shut

This might seem like a small fib, but the problem with false claims is that they rarely travel solo, and hollow evidence leads to hollow conclusions. If the Yale story were true, then the power of setting clear, written goals would indeed be enormous. And if you hadn’t been doing that lately, it may actually be the missing ingredient to your success.

But even with razor-sharp, written goals, even with all your I’s dotted and your T’s crossed, you still have all the real work ahead of you. The decisions you make along the way will require refined moral judgement. Choosing the people with whom you’ll associate will require a keen sense of virtue. And making yourself equal to the work at hand will require learning from impeccable sources.

Becoming a student of philosophy will make you a more rigorous student of everything else. You will no longer have to squint when reading. When a scientific claim is made, you will insist on evidence to back it up. You will learn to spot logical fallacies that might normally have gone unnoticed. You will avoid the frustration of false expectations derived from false affirmations.

Self-help gurus make promises. Philosophers make arguments. The great philosophers are measured not by the cost of their weekend seminars, but by the quality of their proofs.

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.

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

– Barbara Sher

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

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

My comfort zone was complete. Or so I thought.

The Intellectual Cemetery

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

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

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

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

Throwing Out a Growing Business

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

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

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

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

Money and Happiness

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

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

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

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

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

The Benefits of Being Unreasonable

Why am I telling you all this?

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

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

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

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

Update (Sep 4, 2010): Due to the overwhelming, and ongoing popularity of this post (over 22,000 comments and counting!), I’ve recently started working on a new tool to make tracking and sharing your progress quitting drinking a whole lot easier and more fun.

It’s called Quitfest. Please feel free to check it out!

There are better things in life than alcohol, but alcohol makes up for not having them.

– Terry Pratchett

My maternal grandparents were both alcoholics. It’s for this reason that I can’t remember my grandpa’s funeral: I was only four. This is also why my grandma has meticulously avoided alcohol for over 20 years. If there’s anything to the rumours about alcoholism being influenced by heredity, I’m probably tagged.

My own consumption patterns change. Sometimes I’ll go through periods of several months having three or four drinks, three to five times a week. Sometimes I’ll restrict my consumption to social occasions. For about five months starting last December, in my quest to master the art of talking to strangers, my social life became two full-time jobs. I was constantly going out to social events, clubs, bars, museum parties, and everything in between. Despite temptation, I rarely drank.

Last month, I quit drinking alcohol again. I’d like to tell you that it was a struggle. I’d like to pretend that it’s almost impossible to stay sober at a social occasion where everyone else is burping bubbles. I’d like to imagine myself as more determined and disciplined than all the rest, and that’s what pulled me through.

But the truth is that I’m ruthlessly normal. And if you want to end your relationship with alcohol, right here, right now, It’s Not That Hard.

I’m guessing that most people who choose to quit drinking are not alcoholics. My intent is to offer here an action plan that anyone can apply, whether you’re nursing an addiction or just want to enjoy the benefits of uninterrupted sobriety.

Why Stop Drinking?

The long-term effects of bad habits are rarely sufficient to motivate people to change their lives. The near-term benefits of giving up alcohol are much more useful and interesting anyway. Here are the changes I experienced:

• Productive socializing. Talking to strangers is a great way to build character, but its benefits are greatly reduced when you’re drunk. The alcohol represses much of the social anxiety, which inhibits lasting change. But the only thing more terrifyingly fun than getting drunk and meeting a bunch of new people is staying sober and meeting a bunch of new people.
• Avoid the McPilgrimage. Clearly, there’s a conspiracy between the fast food industry and the liquor industry. Free will collapses under the weight of insobriety and convenience. With enough alcohol in your system, even the most wretched burger joint becomes an irresistible sanctuary.
• Reclaim lost time. Let’s say you have a few drinks around the house, three times a week, and that light touch of drunkenness costs you three hours of productive thinking each time. Within one year, you’ll have shaved about one full month off your life. That’s a lot of lost CPU time that could have been put towards reading a book, writing a speech, playing a sport, or even starting a business. And this doesn’t even count the time lost waiting for your brain to resolidify the morning after a night on the town.
• Get rich quickly. You don’t have to party that hard to spend $100-$150/week or more on alcohol and related expenses. If you quit drinking today, you could reasonably expect to convert that choice into a bankroll for backpacking around the world in about six months.
• Become an early riser. I’m currently readjusting my sleep schedule to wake up at 5:30 AM, seven days a week. Alcohol, and the lifestyle that often accompanies it, work against this process. Alcohol makes me feel tired when I want to feel energetic and awake. Ironically, it also increases wakefulness during sleep.

You can probably think of other instantly gratifying benefits to life beyond the bottle. The important thing is to actually have a reason that is important enough to you.

Make It Priority Number One

Giving up alcohol is one of the easiest and hardest changes you can make in your life.

It’s easy once you’ve established the right rules, configured your environment to support you, and set up useful boundaries of pain and pleasure to help direct you towards your goal. The hard parts are the social implications and fighting off the One Man Army that is your ego, with its barrage of self-limiting beliefs and drink requests.

Giving up alcohol must be made priority number one in your life. A partial commitment is a commitment to failure. Even if you already don’t drink that often, it will be tempting to break your own rules when your friends call you up and invite you out. You’ve got to be willing to prioritize this decision in every situation where it’s relevant, even when that means Just Saying No to pub night.

It’s Not a Big Deal

Ever notice how some people act as though the end of their relationship is the end of the world? It’s as if there’s no point in living if they can’t be with that person any longer. Yet other people come along and date that person who left them, eventually break up with them, and see it as hardly more than a blip on the radar.

You may feel that it’s pretty easy to give up drinking. Or you may feel that it’s an addiction with a stranglehold on your life. Either way, there is no inherent magnitude to this task. It’s as big or as small as you make it.

No matter how much you want to tell yourself how hard it is, nobody’s ever going to claim that learned helplessness was the secret to their success. The most effective way forward is to not only make quitting drinking a top priority, but to think, talk, and act like it can be done.

Become the Impartial Spectator

Whether you view it as a spiritual separation, or merely conceptual, we all have more than one self. There’s the “Mmmmm…beeeer…” self, and the impartial spectator that can detach from and observe this desire.

Let the latter voice be your authority. You’re allowed to want a drink as much as you’re allowed to choose not to have one. There’s tremendous power in observing your thoughts as a third party. The impartial spectator can feel the heat without getting burned.

When in doubt, let it be there. No matter how bad the storm seems, it will pass.

Commit to 30 Days

If you’ve never done it before, it can be hard to think of giving up drinking forever. It’s discouraging to commit to permanent change, only to back out a few days or weeks into it. Some people will face social friction and lifestyle changes for which they’re unprepared.

But life is a laboratory. It’s an adventure that takes shape through hypothesis and experimentation, and most decisions can be reverted. When it comes to making big changes like this, live before you leap. Promise yourself that you will commit to this 100%, but only for 30 days, and see how it goes.

This is exactly what I did last month. I promised myself that November would be alcohol-free, and it was. Truth be told, I had a few drinks on day 31. But I broke the negative pattern that was creeping up on me and gained back the energy to spend on more important activities. And I’ve repeatedly proven to myself that I can give up alcohol whenever I feel like, whenever it seems like the right thing to do.

Dump Your Existing Stash

Any goal that’s important to you is important enough to start on right now. My 30-day challenge to give up alcohol started at about 3:00 AM on a Saturday morning. I had just gotten back from a post-nightclub McPilgrimage with some friends. I had a great time. I met lots of people. I even ended up dating a girl I met that night.

But I was really annoyed by how much I’d poured into me that night, at succumbing to the resulting Big Mac temptation, and at how much I was going to regret the hangover. As soon as I got home, the challenge was on. I had one last beer in my fridge, which I ceremoniously poured down the kitchen sink.

If you’re serious about doing this, get rid of your alcohol. If you’ve got $300 worth of spirits in your cabinet and you’re not yet sure if you want to empty it all down the drain, only to change your mind in 30 days, then store it at a friend’s place during your probation period. Preferably a friend that doesn’t drink.

Advertise Your Decision

I told most of my friends about what I was doing. Not only only does this add accountability to your goal, it also drops the hint that if your friends are planning on going out and getting wasted, you’re probably not interested.

Of course, you don’t have to avoid social situations where you’ll be the only one not drinking. I’ve gone out stone sober many times–even on my own–and met loads of people. Once you get used to social skydiving, you no longer need alcohol’s permission to talk to strangers and have a good time. You can get to that place by either getting hammered out of your face, or by learning to just not care what other people think. Frankly, the latter is way more fun.

Fire Your Drinking Buddies

Alcohol may be so tightly integrated into your social life that it seems almost impossible to go an entire weekend without drinking. If the only thing you have in common with your friends is that you like the same lagers, you might want to consider finding new friends.

I’ve let go of people in my social circle before and I know it’s not easy–but that doesn’t make it unnecessary. This might be the hardest thing you do in choosing a life without alcohol. The key is to remember that friends are an abundant resource. Having a strong social circle is purely a function of the effort you invest into it. That includes choosing to associate only with people who are aligned with your purpose, while avoiding the energy vampires.

This is another benefit of a 30-day commitment. Instead of permanently downsizing your social life, you can choose to be busy only for the next few weeks. Observe how it affects you when you stop spending time with your beer buddies. Join a local user group for something you’re interested in to bring yourself into contact with people with whom you share more than just a bar tab.

Bribe Yourself

I haven’t used this specific technique for giving up alcohol, but I have used it with much success in bulldozing my way through a wall of social anxiety.

Associate massive pain to backing out. To create that pain, visit your nearest bank machine. Withdraw an amount of money that you’d feel uncomfortable losing. Give it to a friend you trust. Tell them that you get your money back if, and only if, you don’t have a drop of alcohol until your 30 days are up. You’ll be surprised at how even the most difficult tasks become doable when you associate massive pain to breaking your own rules. Money can be a great way to make it hurt. If you can think of an even better form of self-bribery, go for it.

The stronger you feel that alcohol is a part of your life, the more of these techniques you may want to apply. My most recent alcohol-free challenge didn’t require bribery or letting go of any friends. But I did find it extremely useful to limit the challenge to 30 days, to give myself permission to live the lifestyle before leaping to a permanent decision.

I also think that making this a top priority is key, no matter what your current consumption habits. It’s so easy to let yourself slip for just one night, and then feel guilty about breaching your own contract later on.

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

– Isaac Asimov

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

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

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

What is Personal Development?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Success Doesn’t Just Happen

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happiness Is a Skill

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

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

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

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

Living by Coincidence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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