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

– Laurence J. Peter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expertise as Fog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Aristotle

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

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

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

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

Getting Out of the Rut

There are three reasons to explain this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is to this person that I am here speaking.

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

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

Questions Are Not the Answer

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

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

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

Ethics: The Missing Manual

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In most cases, it is conspicuously ignored.

Ideas – Ethics = FAIL

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

What happens when you ignore ethics?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The short answer to these questions can be found here:

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

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

Learning How to Learn

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

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

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

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

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

Blurring Reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eyes Wide Shut

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

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

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

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

The 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.

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.

Information is not knowledge.

– Albert Einstein

I have a confession to make: I’m a crack addict.

On the information black market, my drug of choice goes by the name of email. The good stuff is laced with social media and RSS. The better stuff also includes mailing lists, website statistics, IRC, and 500 TV channels. The best stuff adds both Facebook and MySpace accounts, instant messaging of every kind, and a pony made from Ajax.

My dealer calls himself Unread. I caught a glimpse of his driver’s license once though, when his wallet spilled all over the ground while we were shooting up in an airport lounge. Turns out his real name is Unimportant Bullshit. That’s a pretty funny name, when you think about it.

But I haven’t thought about it. I’m usually too strung out to notice. I just keep buying more product.

How much do I buy? Well, it’s available only by the truckload, even though you have to squeeze it into your veins with that measly little needle called your attention span. This is less than convenient. I’m stocked for at least the next three U.S. presidencies. Come to think of it, that might be a good thing.

Oh, and another oddity: My dealer won’t take cash. He demands that I pay him only in Yeses:

Do you want more email? Yes.

Need another hit of RSS? Yes.

It’s been 10 minutes since you last checked your visitor count for today. Aren’t you going to see if it’s been updated? Yes.

There’s poker on TV right now. Shouldn’t you be watching it? Yes.

How’s about checking if there’s anything interesting on the reddit front page? Yes…master.

But I haven’t even mentioned the worst part: version 2.0 of this drug is coming out soon, and apparently it must be administered anally.

I used to be the consumer. I’m now the consumed.

It Can Happen to You

This (mildly exaggerated) description of my own dependence on unimportant information is not uncommon. But why does it happen? When you drill down to the deepest layers of information addiction, what do you find?

You might have thought you hit bottom when you saw chunks of job disinterest, aversion to boring tasks, and a substance resembling Nothing Better To Do. But a few inches below that, you find the real crust wrapped around the core of an information junkie: Fear. Fear of failure, fear of success, fear of rejection, fear of life itself.

The beauty of aimless internet reading, linguistically graceful internet flame wars, and social media popularity contests is that you can’t fail at them. Even if engaging in these activities causes you to fail at whatever you were supposed to be doing, you can just blame it on all that wandering around the Web 2.0 theme park. It certainly sounds a lot better than, “I tried everything I could to fix this bug, but I still can’t figure it out.” And it’s way easier to just drag your feet through the mud known as your Day Job (TM), than to risk giving your notice and heading off into the unknown in search of a better life.

Information is an analgesic. It not only dulls the pain involved in actually Getting Shit Done, but if you do it right, it actually feels like you’re doing something, instead of avoiding doing something.

My Story of Addiction

I’m exaggerating my information addiction slightly. After all, every man, woman, child, and fetus has a Facebook account, but I don’t. I’m not on MySpace either. I don’t do instant messaging at all, except to talk to paying clients on software consulting gigs. And while I’m usually found on IRC, I rarely pay attention to it.

But I’d be lying to pretend that I don’t throw a few balls down the gutter every now and then. My most recent slip-up came about a month ago, when I ordered Food Network as a way to help me learn cooking.

What started off as awe and admiration at Jamie Oliver’s ability to create amazing dishes from fresh ingredients grown right in his own backyard, morphed into an interest in Australian Open tennis and World Matchplay Darts. Oh, and what’s that? A documentary series on sex workers in California? And lookie here, it’s even running right after Poker After Dark on another channel. How convenient!

The distraction began with TV and, as my brain started getting accustomed to idleness, snowballed into other non-activities. Before I knew it, I was spending entire days swinging from one vine of useless information to another.

The Solution

The irony of information overload and addiction is the sheer volume of information available on these topics. For example, when I Google for “information overload”, I see over 1.5 million matches.

My solution to dealing with this mess is what I call a 30-Day Information Fast.

You’ve probably already heard the term “Low-Information Diet”, popularized by Tim Ferriss. As the name implies, an Information Fast takes things a step further. The key behind this solution is to completely cut off all attention-draining inputs with no exceptions, but to do so for only a limited period of time. The point of total withdrawal is, obviously, to reclaim the time and attention lost to unnecessary diversions, but also to help you discover which of those things are actually important to you. You’ll know you gave up something important when you keep wanting to reach for it to help you solve a problem you’re working on, or when, even after a full 30 days without it, you’re eager to catch up on what you missed.

The rules during the 30-Day Information Fast are as follows:

• No blogs. No reading RSS feeds nor any direct visits to blog websites.
• No TV. Not one second of the boob tube is allowed.
• No social media sites. My only exception will be for submitting my articles, if applicable. Sometimes you guys beat me to it, which is always appreciated.
• Check email only twice per day. I’m not going to hardcode the times when I’ll be checking email, but it must be no more than twice, unless absolutely necessary.
• No Facebook, MySpace, or instant messaging. This is a non-issue for me, but I know a few people for whom this alone would add years to their life. Feel free to also include IRC here, if it eats up a lot of your time.
• Check web stats only once per day. I’ll bet almost every blogger has been bitten by the stats demon at some point. I’m no exception. I’ve had days where it seems like all I’m doing is following my stats.
• No internet forums. There’s currently only one forum I read regularly. Still, I’d like to see what happens when I pull the plug on it for a while.
• No mailing lists. Another non-issue for me, but it’s not hard to imagine that some people will benefit greatly from turning off this fire hose.
• Exceptions. DVDs, books, magazines, music, all social activities, conferences, seminars, user groups, and, in the interests of self-preservation, this blog. This 30-day trial takes aim at attention-draining inputs. I usually consider these exceptions to be a solid use of my time.

Feel free to tweak this list to suit your needs, in particular by adding things that I haven’t mentioned, but which affect you. If you want to remove things from this list because you “can’t live without them”, that’s a sign that you’re probably cheating. :)

Of course, I’m still going to publish new content during this time. In fact, this 30-day trial is intended to improve my chances of attaining my goals for expanding the quality and reach of my writing over the next month.

This challenge is not particularly meant to extend beyond the 30 days. It’s merely an attempt to create a space in which to think deeply about your life and your purpose, to replace distraction with action, and to let the truly meaningful uses of your time bubble up to the surface of your attention.

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

– Zig Ziglar

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

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

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

Constraints Get You Moving

Without constraints, 30 sleeps would probably not exist.

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

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

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

<p>Hello, world.</p>

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

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

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

Constraints Create Momentum

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

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

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

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

Constraints and Self-Employment

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

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

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

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

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

Slow down and remember this: Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of mental laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.

– Timothy Ferriss

“Work smarter, not harder” is one of the ultimate clichés. Like most clichés, few people actually do it. The busy outnumber the productive by a wide margin. Whether you’re a boss, an employee, or working for yourself, we’ve all had our treadmilling moments. Here’s the difference, from a geek perspective:

Busy-ness is impressive. It puts you in the heat of the action. It gives you an elevated sense of importance. You’re always late for social engagements, barely have enough time for family get-togethers, and hardly get a moment’s sleep. Emails get exchanged, meetings fill up your schedule, worldwide teleconferences become the norm–there’s even the occasional hope of revenue exceeding expenses. You’re like a rock star without the music.

Of course, it’s all just an illusion. A commitment to anything more than your standard workday is a commitment to work harder, not smarter. There are only so many hours per day that you can produce world-class, creative output. Building something that changes people’s lives is extremely hard, but looking like you’re part of something big is much easier.

Want a challenge? Remove a feature. Cut your deadline in half. Deliver rather than debate. Instead of being the devil’s advocate, be the user’s advocate. Eliminate half your RSS feeds. Stop making it pluggable and start making it work.

If you had to come up with one action you could take to put less time and effort into something and still get the same, or better results, what would it be?

The best time to start was last year. The second best time to start is right now.

– Seth Godin

A New Year’s Resolution is an oath of mediocrity. They’re a big favourite with the One More Crowd: One More book, One More blog post, One More hour of internet forums, One More paycheque, One More day to relax, One More month to clear their head is all they need before getting started. To the chronic procrastinator, one plus one somehow keeps equalling one, but there’s no better time to break out of the rut than January 1st.

A New Year’s Resolution is a call to inaction. It’s a commitment to change your life…later. Why do we do this? Why do we all choose to point our procrastination at the same day, and even still miss the target?

First, it may be a sign that your goal is too big. Losing 100 pounds is pretty frickin’ hard to do, but it’s no problem for a tomorrownator. Delayed action is a psychoactive drug. The knowledge that you’re going to change your life in amazing ways, starting in a few weeks or months, deposits an effortless euphoria into your consciousness. Consider, for example, how many people say things like “I plan to be a millionaire within five years”, as if their business plan were built on aimless internet reading and empty Coke cans. But, hey, it sure sounds good.

On the other end of the spectrum, it may be that your goal is too small, or that it’s a goal for which you’re insufficiently motivated. For example, you might want to start a business in the new year. It’s hard to get motivated by an abstraction though. Inspiration requires a high-definition visual of the compelling reality you wish to create, a mental movie so enticing that you can’t wait to get started. What kind of business do you want to start? Where do you plan to be a week into it? A month? Three months? How many users/customers/clients are you aiming for at each stage? How will you monetize it?

The delay of putting things off till New Year’s is often followed by another time gap: the entire 365 days you give yourself to achieve your goal. This is where Parkinson’s Law exerts its downward pull, and virtually guarantees that it will take you at least that long to reach the finish line, if you even show up for the race.

It’s no fun when your target lays beyond the horizon. Immediate action requires a bullseye within arrow’s reach. A better alternative to a New Year’s Resolution is a Now Resolution. Anything worth doing was probably worth doing a year ago, which means you’re already several thousand acres of rain forest behind. Or a few dozen pounds. Or a few thousand civilian deaths. Or a whole lot of whatever unit measures your success.

Instead of thinking of your goal as something that you’d like to achieve in the future, think of it as a chain reaction you invoke in the present, strung together by intention, initiated by living your life as though you’ve already achieved it, and are now just letting all the pieces fall into place. Of course, there’ll no doubt be a lot of hard work to “letting” those pieces fall into place, but the present moment becomes an almost gravitational force for your desires when you configure your Now to look and feel as much like your intended future as possible.

Holiday Productivity

Contrary to what Santa Claus might tell you, the holidays are a great time for introspection, exploration, and test driving various pursuits to see which ones make you come alive. It’s a time of the year that brings us back to our highest values: family, friends, food, alcohol, and–for those of you who take time off–an uninterrupted chunk of quality time to do whatever you want.

This temporarily stress-free lifestyle provides an ideal litmus test for our passions. One of the best ways to figure out what you love to do is to consider what you spend your holidays doing. If you’re not obsessed with something enough that you need be almost physically pulled away from it to eat Christmas dinner, you haven’t yet found your life purpose. “I wouldn’t even think of working on that over the holidays!” is the stuff of which 9-to-5 jobs are made.

If you can’t yet think of an activity that consumes you that deeply, that’s okay. What better time than now to spoil yourself on some new toys to see what really lights you up? This kind of treasure hunting doesn’t have to cost a lot of money, though the rewards just might break the bank.

For example, two years ago, when I was visiting my parents for Christmas, I had some time off to relax, and some attention to expense. I decided that poker looked interesting. I would have never imagined myself taking an interest in gambling, but my Weird Idea Radar knew I was onto something. I quickly became fascinated with the idea of waging a war against chance, and with how I could learn my way into positive expectation.

I gave myself a Christmas present of a poker book for about $30 and it was love at first sight. I immediately started playing online and continued learning and improving from there. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that this diversion, which captivated me during the holidays, also ended up consuming every minute of my waking life–when I wasn’t working on Ubuntu’s bug tracker–for the next year. Two years later, poker remains a casual interest of mine, though it has taken a back seat to other priorities.

Of course, you don’t have to celebrate Christmas to find your true passions. These ideas apply to any time of the year where you’ve got some time off to kick back and relax, whether it’s a holiday tradition or just some random work vacation. Times like these can provide the deepest insights into what you really enjoy doing. If you don’t already have activities that absorb you when you don’t have to worry about work the next morning, this can also be a great opportunity to let your curiosity run wild and see where it takes you.