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

– Keith Olbermann

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

Hmmm…

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

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

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

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

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

Moving to Vancouver

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

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

The Itch

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

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

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

You Are What You Tweet

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

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

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

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

People like, erm, me.

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

From Thought to Action

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

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

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

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

The Magic of Just Friggin’ Doing Stuff

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

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

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

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

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

Single? Use Twitter? Awesome.

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

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

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

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

If You Build It…

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

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

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

The Present

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When in doubt, go for it. Good luck.

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.

– Erica Jong

Every so often, somebody writes me an email or a comment for which a simple reply would be inadequate, and which I feel is too important to ignore. It’s not just that they’ve got a serious problem and they’re trying everything they can think of to deal with it. It’s that, on some level, they’re speaking for all of us.

While I imagine that relatively few fans of my writing have had serious problems with alcohol, like the following reader does, many of you will have waded through a similar darkness at some point in your life.

Whether you’re gripped by liquid demons, can’t get laid to save your life, hate your job more than anything else on earth, or feel incredibly isolated from the world and just can’t seem to make friends, the underlying agony has a familiar weight and texture. The causes may be different but the symptoms are the same: depression, despair, hopelessness, and nothing can seem snap you out of it.

Welcome to Rock Bottom. Population: Far too many.

The Question

hi all im 39 and an alcoholic im not proud of it but alcohol has come part of my life i drink 8 cans every night even more on weekends, ive had councelling before but that never worked i lost my driving license through drink ive just completed a drink drive rehab course and i get my license back on my 40th birthday, ive been to my doctors and asked for help he said you need counselling i told him that doesnt work for me he refused to give me antabuse im just waiting for my liver test results to come back i know my liver will be damaged but even my own doctor wont help me,when i try to stop drinking i get so stressed and moody i take it out on everyone, all i want is someone to help me.. its my daughters 3rd birthday today ive been awake since 3 am and ive decided im gonna try again just for her and her sister.. any advice from anyone would be helpful

– kev, in reply to How to Quit Drinking Alcohol

My Thoughts

Again, I hope that even those who have a serious problem that has nothing to do with alcohol will see some relationships here. Misery comes in many flavours, and the same general ideas for digging yourself out of a rut can apply to a wide variety of pain.

@kev:

First, thanks for writing in. It takes balls to own up to your shortcomings. I’m glad you did. You’re obviously serious about looking for help, and even willing to go public with it by asking the 30 sleeps community for insight. And thanks for consenting (via private email) to having me respond to your question by writing it as an article.

I’m not a psychologist and my advice on this is not professionally certified in any way. But I think that unless you happen to stumble upon a particularly passionate, world-class specialist in the kind of torture you’re inflicting on yourself and your family, you’re probably wasting your time. You’ve said yourself that counseling doesn’t work, so we’re fast approaching a dead end. Literally.

I’m also not a doctor, and I don’t know the first thing about the drug Antabuse. But as a general rule, if I seek help from a medical professional and am unsatisfied with their assessment, I shop around for a second opinion.

Darkness and Light

I’ve lived through darkness. Dark fucking darkness. In some cases, it was caused by how I reacted to things going on around me. In other cases, it was 100% self-created misery. It’s through the latter that I think we share common ground. My issue wasn’t alcoholism, but alcoholism is the same kind of problem.

Unpleasant external experiences tend to dissolve into the past and the pain eventually gets forgotten. A totally different algorithm is required for troubles that start on the inside and flow outward. There comes a point with internal conflict where you become the only person that can help yourself. You end up going as low as you can possibly go and have no choice but to sink or swim. At some point, you have to ask yourself:

• Do you want your daughters to grow up surrounded by love or surrounded by misery?
• Do you want to be a source of darkness in your family or a source of light?
• Do you want to be alive or not?

The verbal responses you give to these questions mean absolutely nothing. The real answers come from your actions.

Every swig you take is a very loud NO to love, light, and life.

*Gulp* The buzz I get from this lager is more important to me than my daughters growing up healthy and happy.

*Gulp* I can feel the shadow of evil expanding around me, but damn this beer has a nice finish!

*Gulp* Shit, are my eyes turning yellow? Whoa, cool.

The freedom to live your life exactly how you want includes the freedom to self-destruct. If you want to destroy your life and the world around you, no one can stop you, not even those closest to you. Likewise, if you’re unshakably committed to turning things around and getting healthy no matter what it takes, no one can stop you from being successful there either.

Ifs, Ands, and Buts

Don’t use stress and moodiness as an excuse to keep drinking. The only way you can help yourself is to start by assuming full responsibility for your entire reality. Until you can honestly admit to yourself that every dimension of this problem is something you’re creating, you’re unlikely to make lasting changes.

If you were to go to a psychiatrist and tell them that you get stressed and moody when you don’t drink, they’d give you some pills and usher you out the door. That’s messed up and inhuman.

The solution to stress, moodiness, depression, aggression, anxiety or almost any other negative psychological tendency does not involve trading in one drug for another. It starts by acknowledging that there are some serious flaws in the life you’ve created for yourself, and everyone in your orbit is taking the heat for that. You can change that by gradually installing habits that will have you sleeping better, eating as healthy as humanly possible, spending quality time with people that are important to you and being 100% open in your communication with them, and settling for nothing less, career-wise, than to work on projects that you’re absolutely obsessed with.

Forget pills, I’m writing you a prescription for self-respect.

An important part of breaking one negative pattern is to replace it with another, more positive and productive one. While you’re giving up alcohol, why not cook your family a decent meal tonight too? Go for a walk. Take your daughters out to a movie. Or even just take some time to step back and take stock of your life. Start with what you’re thankful for and gradually work your way towards being brutally sincere about what sucks. And focus most of your energy on the solutions, rather than the problems.

Is this easy? Fuck no. This is war. When it’s you and your family’s lives that could all be seriously affected, degree of difficulty isn’t even a consideration. Every time you hold a beer in your hand, you’ve got a choice to make: Your driver’s license or your beer? Your daughters or your beer? Your life or your beer? Your actions are your answers.

It’s a little new to me to be this honest with someone I don’t really know. But fuck it, I want to help you, and I live for the truth.

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

– Thomas Edison

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

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

Managing Complexity

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

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

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

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

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

Discovering Your Values

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

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

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

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

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

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

Changing Your Approach

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

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

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

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

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

Lather, rinse, repeat.

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

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A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

– Henry David Thoreau

Much of who I am today grew from seeds planted by interesting literature. As a 12-year-old magician, I consumed a large part of the history and practice of the art form by way of written word. A few years later, as an up-and-coming chess player, I met Bobby Fischer in the pages of My 60 Memorable Games. Jeremy Silman’s How to Reassess Your Chess virtually revolutionized the way I looked at the game. Eckhart Tolle’s words of wisdom helped me let go of the ego, which instilled in me a social fearlessness that has made meeting women a non-issue.

I am a writer today because of what words have done to me, and because delivering a message that changes people’s lives is, to me, a worthy challenge.

There is one downside to being a book lover though: I want to own them all.

The Road to Hoardom

I think Maslow’s Hierarchy needs another rung: Books–just above Safety and below Love.

As much as I love to read, my shelves are full of books I haven’t gotten around to. When a blogger I admire recommends an interesting book, I can’t help myself. They’re smart. They like this book. Maybe if I read it, I’ll be smart too. Sometimes I’ll drop everything and head directly to the bookstore, because clearly this book contains secrets I must know to make my next move. I bring the book home, glance through a few chapters while sitting on the can, put it on the coffee table for later indulgence, and get back to whatever I was doing pre-bookstore-run.

I don’t have time to actually read my new book yet. I’ve got a lot of work to do, and I’m already part way through a couple other ones, so it’ll have to wait.

But then a strange thing happens: Over the next couple weeks, I’ve done it again. I’ve bought another must-have book, given it some “can time”, and the last book, the one that was waiting for me on the coffee table, has silently migrated to my bookshelf, without ever getting read.

My name is Brad, and I’m a book hoarder.

How to Have Your Book and Read It Too

If you’re like me, and you love to buy far more books than you can read, how do you stop the insanity? After all, we’re not going to just stop buying books. Sometimes I hear of a book so intriguing that I’m not willing to wait until I’ve finished my current library. Giving our old books away won’t fix the overcollection problem. Even a strict book budget can be worked around by buying cheaper books. As for buying the audio version, no thanks. I learn much better with a dead tree in my hands.

Here’s the solution I came up with: Make a rule that you will read X number of books you currently own before buying another one. I call this the read-to-purchase ratio.

This solution works well for me because it lets me control my book purchasing habits without requiring that I wait several years until I’ve consumed my existing selection. Had I done that, I’d still not have read the books that inspired me to create 30 sleeps. It also encourages me to read more, particularly to make more time for books than for blogs or mailing lists, knowing that I can reward myself with a new book soon enough, and not feel guilty about it.

My own read-to-purchase ratio is 5-to-1. Choosing a ratio that’ll work for you involves finding that sweet spot between how much time you have to read, how quickly you read, and how many shelves you’ve still got to get through.

Using this simple rule, you can make steady progress at taming the literary beast, without having to give up your Amazon adventures.

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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.

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