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 first is a TED talk by Jill Bolte Taylor. She’s a brain scientist who had a massive stroke and lived to tell the tale. In fact, she was fully aware of what was going on for some time after a blood vessel in her left hemisphere exploded. Her description of how her perception of reality changed after her left brain went offline is truly remarkable. This isn’t a story of medical emergency and chaos; it’s a story of enlightenment.

The second is from inspirational speaker Esther Hicks, author of The Law of Attraction. She claims to channel a group of non-physical beings called “Abraham”, translating their energy into words we can understand. In this video, she dives into a “Rampage of Invincibility.” This is one of the most powerful and clarifying six-and-a-half minute speeches I’ve ever seen.

Only with absolute fearlessness can we slay the dragons of mediocrity that invade our gardens.

– George Lois

Since I started 30 sleeps, I’ve always imagined writing to be just one of several mediums through which I speak to the world. The written word can transport a serious payload, but there’s nothing quite like reaching out to people face-to-face. I enjoy the atmosphere and energy of grassroots geek conferences, and I think it’ll be fun to organize and participate in that sort of thing for the “Open Source Personal Development” community.

In that vein, I recently decided to sharpen my public speaking skills. Last week, I attended my first ever Toastmasters meeting. It’s been a while since I’ve done public speaking. I was surprisingly nervous.

To familiarize myself with how it all worked, I spent some time on the website of the club I intended to visit. So by the time I was on my way downtown to where the meeting would be held, I knew that for this and the next few meetings, I’d be sitting in as a guest. I understood that I’d probably be encouraged to speak, but that such risks were optional.

That left me two choices for the evening ahead: I could either hide behind the comfort of my provisional status, watching members battle their nerves and imperfections to improve their speaking skills, or I could confront the mildly terrifying, but exciting possibility of doing my first public speech in a long while, in front of a group of people I’d never met, and who were obviously much better at this than me.

The choice was obvious. My heart rate was visible through my shirt.

Opportunity Meets (Lack of) Preparation

The meeting started a few minutes late. There were about 25 members present, and 5 other newbie guests like me. These gatherings are not what you’d call “laid back.” They’re focussed, highly structured, and run on a precise schedule. The atmosphere was fun but formal, positive but nerve-racking, entertaining but inherently intense.

Shortly after things got rolling, the guests were asked to introduce themselves. I stood up and gave a little spiel. My voice did a poor job of masking my nerves. I was caught off-guard by how shaky I was even just presenting myself to the group. I was even rustier at public speaking than I thought. I don’t feel even a fraction of this kind of fear when I talk to strangers. But when something makes me feel this apprehensive and unsettled, I know I’m in the right place at the right time.

Several minutes after introducing ourselves, the guests were given another chance to shine: Table Topics. Table Topics are impromptu speeches. You’re given a question and you come up with a two-minute speech on the spot to answer it. Three members are chosen to do a table topic, three speeches given, then everyone casts their vote into a box that later decides whose was best.

The Table Topics Master started by asking if any guests would be interested in giving it a try. Here was my chance to rise to the occasion…and I chickened out.

Fuck.

No guests volunteered, so the TTM instead chose a member, Don, to do the first speech. Don’s speech was amazing: charismatic, confident, masterfully unprepared, funny, well-delivered. It only emphasized how much I had to learn about public speaking.

In selecting the next speaker, the TTM decided to give the six of us newbies another chance, and again extended the invitation for us to participate.

There was a moment of hesitation. Then a voice broke the silence: “Alright, I’ll do it!”

That voice, apparently, was mine.

Confronting Fear

Fear is a funny thing. Where some people see a speed bump, others see Mount Everest. There are those who view talking to strangers as something deeply terrifying. Others consider it an entry-level social skill. Some people are so afraid of doing something “risky” like, say, moving to another country, that they’re incapable of even discussing such things outside the context of a joke.

But if you’ve read the fine print on fear, you know this: Safety Kills. Opting out of a chance to confront your fears is no different than smoking a cigarette, eating a Big Mac, or taking a hard drug. Avoiding danger can be dangerous. The moment I offered to do a speech, I felt that surge of energy and emotion that comes from knowing that you’re taking a risk you need to take.

The question my speech had to answer was this: If a reporter and their camera crew approached you in the middle of a busy street, and they wanted to do an interview with you, what question would you most want to be asked and why?

As I walked up in front of the group, thinking of what to say, my body argued with my mind over the magnitude of the challenge before me. In my head, I felt fairly confident and on form, less concerned about how things would turn out, and more just happy with myself for throwing caution to the wind. On the outside though, I was vibrating like a tuning fork.

The moment you face a particular fear, you enter a kind of flow. Time goes away. Your worries are no longer worrying. Your fears dissolve. Your thoughts cease. It’s a blissful mode of being, where your every action beats with the pulse of existence.

The Speech

I stood up at the front and let the words come out:

If I were approached by a reporter in the middle of a busy street, and they wanted to interview me, what question would I most want to be asked?

I think that question would be: What makes you come alive?

To me, this is one of the most interesting questions to ask or be asked. It’s moments like this, giving this speech, that make me feel most alive. That feeling of vulnerability, uncertainty, having no idea what you’re doing and just doing it anyway–that, to me, is aliveness.

I can’t remember the rest of it, but I carried that train of unthought for another minute thirty, and closed by asking the audience the same question I wanted asked of me: What makes you come alive?

My stream of consciousness seemed to be a hit. At the end of the night, I was presented the award for the Best Table Topics speech.

Every worthwhile step forward I’ve taken in my life has been taken on these terms. It’s never easy. There’s no point at which you finally say, “Ah, I’m finally where I want to be.” It’s never comfortable. You never know how long a good thing will last.

The risks associated with living the life you want will never go away. The only thing that changes is how you choose to confront the situation. Will you run away from your fears or will you chase after them?

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

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

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

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

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

I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

– Henry David Thoreau

We often think of personal growth as being top-down. You start by asking yourself the Big Questions (TM), followed by a moment of clarity which reveals your life purpose, and finally you’re captured by this irresistible drive which launches you into purposeful motion, and everything just falls into place from there.

Unfortunately, real life isn’t always such a Disney movie. The path to growth is less like a railroad, and more like a gravel road…that’s under construction. It’s full of potholes and ditches, the occasional tree planted right in the middle, and some stretches where there is no road at all, and there’s no map telling you where to turn. It’s no wonder that we all feel lost from time to time, wondering what direction we want to take with our lives, debating whether to leave our soul-sucking job, facing the reality of an unhappy relationship, even struggling to find a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

As I wrote about in Finding Your Passion, I advocate relying less on self-interviews and more on taking massive action across a wide variety of domains, using serendipity as a weapon to hunt down the things that interest you. But what if that hasn’t worked yet either? What if you tried a bunch of stuff but haven’t yet found anything that sticks?

Bottom-Up Growth

The top-down approach implies that you have a clear idea of what you want. But self-fulfillment has another another entry point. Bottom-up development focusses on building the framework you need for living a life of purpose. It’s all about installing good habits that are independent of any specific goal. It’s an action plan you can start on this afternoon or this evening, that allows you to do incredibly productive and useful things, even if you’re still unsure about the big picture.

You don’t need to have a grandiose mission statement to figure out that you want to quit smoking or that drinking seven nights a week is unhealthy. By taking a bottom-up approach, you can immediately go from feeling bored and lost to becoming a busy proactivist. Happiness requires a velocity and a direction, the pursuit of a meaningful objective, and we all have a list of personal challenges waiting to be tackled.

There’s all sorts of useful stuff we can do with ourselves that doesn’t require a sixth sense to see, yet these projects can still provide a gratifying source of challenge, inspiration, and meaning in our lives, while the big picture continues to take shape. Here are some suggestions for bottom-up tasks you might find useful and fun, taken from what I’m doing in my own life at the moment:

• Raise your standards. With whatever you do, ask yourself “Is this the best possible use of my time?” Is this the best possible book I can be reading? Is this the best possible tool I can be using to build a website? Do I need to read this mailing list? Raising your standards is more of a meta-goal, but consciously doing so will improve the quality of both your inputs and outputs. It may also result in ideas for bottom-up projects, like deciding to change your job when you realize that what you’re doing right now is a mediocre application of your skills, or choosing to leave a relationship when you finally acknowledge how much it’s pulling you down.
• Break an addiction. We’ve all got vices. At any moment, you can choose to command and conquer yours, even though it may require a lot of time and effort to do so. I recently gave up alcohol for 30 days when I realized that, while it was hardly an “addiction”, I was drinking a little too regularly. I ultimately got back into red wine after that, but in a couple-glasses-with-dinner sort of way, which is pretty standard in Montreal. :) And now I actually enjoy it again.
• Fix your sleep schedule. Figuring out the larger meaning of your existence is hard, but it’s ten times harder when you’re running on fumes. If you want a challenge, set a time in the morning that you want to wake up and commit to it. My own circadian rhythm was a mess until recently. I fixed it this month by committing to waking up every morning at 5:30 AM, and have since noticed a huge energy boost. The difference between sleeping poorly and sleeping well is the difference between Clark Kent and Superman.
• Go organic. I spent literally years of my life eating at Subway for lunch almost every day of the week. I usually ordered something low-fat, but it was still far from the best food choice. I recently decided to change that. I found an amazing organic food restaurant nearby, and it’s become my new home away from home. They actually make…food there. Learning how to fuel your body using top-quality ingredients, in combination with sleeping better, will give you such an energy advantage over the current You that it’ll almost seem like cheating.
• Hack reality. Spirituality is about hacking consciousness. Good spirituality, to me, provides tools with which to expand your awareness and renegotiate your contract with reality. It’s not about choosing to adopt someone else’s belief system, it’s about using first-hand experience to find an empowering perspective through which to interact with the world. Two books I highly recommend are The Power of Now and A New Earth.
• Establish consistency. You’ve probably had those moments where you have goals, but hit points where you feel unsure about your next step. For example, I’ve had moments with 30 sleeps where I wrestle between focussing exclusively on the blog, or scaling back my writing a bit to focus more on the application. In moments like these, it’s important to keep moving forward, and not get paralyzed by indecision. My solution was to commit to three articles per week, between Monday and Sunday, no matter what, for at least 30 days. When you have a goal, but it sometimes gets a little blurry, establishing consistency about some aspect of it will ensure you keep making progress.
• Become a social adventurer. No matter what your starting point, what day of the week it is, where you live, or what you look like, anyone can become a social adventurer. You don’t need a purpose in life to interact with the people around you. And this process will teach you far more about yourself than even the most brilliant “self-help” book. I’ve written more about this in Social Skydiving and How to Be Adventurous.
• Write about it. Whether you’re feeling bored with life, or trying to sort your head out after a rough breakup, writing your thoughts down is one of the best ways to clarify them. It won’t necessarily reveal your true purpose overnight, but writing can definitely shed light on areas you can work on right now.

You’ll notice that, even though none of these suggestions necessarily has a direct relationship to your life purpose, they all provide a starting line for forward progress. As you can tell, I’ve found 30-day trials to be an effective vehicle for bottom-up projects as much as for top-down pursuits.

Of course, it’s not hard to generate new leads for things that could use your time and attention right now. Just ask yourself, “What sucks about my life right now?” and let the bug fixing begin.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

– Bertrand Russell

A belief system is like an API for personal growth.

“API” is computer geek speak for Application Programming Interface. It refers to the set of abstractions on which a piece of software is built. Ruby on Rails, for example, provides an API atop which you can build dynamic websites. It provides abstractions for building dynamic web pages, talking to databases, caching content to make your site run much faster, and a whole bunch of other things.

Your beliefs are the set of abstractions through which you experience and create your life. Your belief system influences your decisions, and your decisions influence your actions.

For example, you might have a belief that “I can do whatever kind of work interests me, if I send out enough CVs.” When it comes time to look for work, this belief will influence you to take massive action to find a gig that interests you. And you’ll probably keep contacting new leads until you close the deal.

Someone else might have a belief that “Ugh, there are no jobs in my field!”, in which case they may send out few CVs or even none at all, and instead resign themselves to cocktail waitressing or return to university to learn a more “employable” skill.

Each belief represents an abstraction that models some aspect of your reality. Like a software API, each abstraction in your belief system may itself be composed of other abstractions. For example, your belief about getting any kind of work you desire might be an abstraction of beliefs such as “I am extremely good at what I do”, “I have a solid track record of experience in this field”, “I am dedicated to my work”, and so on.

Creating Your Own Belief System

The best frameworks are in my opinion extracted, not envisioned.

– David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails

There’s a somewhat unfortunate tendency in some software circles to create APIs out of thin air, rather than extracting them directly from living, breathing solutions to problems. Ruby on Rails was extracted from a project management product called Basecamp. This real world anchoring is one of the primary reasons for RoR’s success.

Likewise, the best belief systems are extracted from your own experience, rather than relying on the borrowed wisdom of others. A religion could be an example of a belief system based on borrowed wisdom. Rather than someone relying on verifying their beliefs through their own experience, they might adopt a belief system through “blind faith”.

Like a software API, the implementation of your personal growth API doesn’t really matter. There is no “correct” or “incorrect” belief system. In most cases, it is extremely hard to know what is true. The important question to ask about your beliefs is: Is this giving you the output you desire?

Refactoring Beliefs

Refactoring, in software terms, is the process of rearranging or rewriting parts of the code, without changing the way it behaves. Software is an organic entity, which goes through a maturity process. As new insights are gained, the API may be refactored to make it easier to understand, easier to use, and more efficient.

And just like a software API, belief systems require merciless refactoring. The thing to remember about beliefs is that they are abstract models of reality, but not reality itself. As new information is gained, we need to be open to changes in our belief systems: adding new beliefs, removing stale ones, or modifying our current understanding.

Mercilessly refactoring our belief systems requires continuously asking ourselves questions like “Is this belief still empowering me?” If not, a change is probably in order. For example, if you wanted to start a blog, a belief like “I am hopeless with computers!” will probably have to be dropped and replaced with a new belief like “I can learn anything that I put my mind to.”

The purpose of our belief systems is to help guide us through the world to create the kind of life we want. Any time our beliefs are not serving that objective, it may be time for a refactoring.

You 2.0

Software APIs go through minor and major revisions. Minor revisions are things like: 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, etc. Major revisions are generally numbered like: 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and so forth.

Your belief system will likely require constant “bug fixing” as you test your beliefs against the real world, have new experiences, and gain new insights. The major revisions in particular often require passing through a lot of fear and taking a lot of action to get to the next level.

For example, about 10 months ago, I experienced a major API upgrade through social skydiving. I challenged a lot of my limiting beliefs about meeting new people, took massive action to battle my way through them, and emerged with a very different and much more empowering set of beliefs. Before this revision, I had beliefs like:

• Meeting women is hard.
• Talking to strangers is embarrassing.
• It is really humiliating to get blown out.
• It’s easier to meet women online than in real life.

After the upgrade to “Me 2.0″, my beliefs were refactored to look like:

• Meeting women is purely a function of taking action.
• Talking to strangers is no big deal.
• I’m willing to get blown out, because embracing rejection propels me towards my goals.
• It’s way more fun to meet women in real life than online.

As a life hacker and computer geek, I’ve gained a lot of insight from thinking of my system of beliefs as an API for personal growth. Belief systems abstract and model the world as we’ve experienced it and function as the mental software with which we create our lives.

If you want to know your past life, look into your present condition;
if you want to know your future life, look at your present actions.

– Padmasambhava

You are not hard working. You are not lazy. You are not a World Champion. You are not an underdog. You are not a player. You are not hopeless with women. You are not a brilliant leader. You are not a floundering employee.

You are what you’re currently doing. Others will constantly be labeling you, categorizing you, and dividing you up into politically correct chunks. But from your inner spirit looking outward, the only meaningful identity you have is the Now Identity.

Death by a Thousand Labels

Labels are a convenient communication tool. In just a few words they tell someone a lot about you. More specifically, they tell someone a lot about your past. Unfortunately, describing ourselves based on past events often binds us to these definitions in the present, even when aligning with those labels is to our disadvantage. A guy who thinks of himself as a “loser with women” is not only saying something about his life so far, but influencing his present actions.

When we let our labels lead us, we live a lie. Our needs and interests change, but our labels stay the same, so our actions stay consistent to help preserve the myth. We start swimming against our own current, and slowly get dragged under.

Choosing instead to define yourself by your actions in the present moment is a powerful statement about how you interact with the world. It vaccinates you against the deadly power of labels, as others apply them. It means that anything you wish to be, you are, if you do it right now. In fact, the only way to be anything is to be it in the Now, because anything outside this moment is a figment of your imagination. If you want to be a person who is deeply engaged in their work, then dive into a task right this moment. If you want to be “good with women”, then be that right now by getting out of your house and meeting people.

The expression “Do It Now!” gets repeated a lot in personal development literature. In the context of the Now Identity, this isn’t just a suggestion to get off your ass. It means, literally, that the only useful definition of “being [anything]” means being it right now.

The Now Identity vs. The Egoic Identity

You are likely the only person aware of your Now Identity. For example, if someone asks you, “Who are you?”, you wouldn’t respond “I am eating a Big Mac!”, even if that’s what you’re currently doing. The Now Identity is a tool meant to serve only you. Other people probably won’t notice the moment-to-moment shifts your Now Identity makes, so they’ll still refer to you by your past actions. If you made a $500,000 mistake a few months ago, they’re still going to see the cloud floating over your head and talk to you in lowered tones. If you’ve spent the last several months unemployed, and stumbled your way into a half-ass job that makes your university degree look like wasted effort, your family might still be upset with you.

This label collection–you as the sum of your previous actions–is your egoic identity. But it is not real, and it doesn’t help you in any way in the present moment. While relating to people in egoic terms is practical (to avoid weird Hamburglar comments like above, for example :) the egoic identity is useless on the playing field. The label of “World Champion” does not guarantee you a win. And being called a “ladies’ man” is irrelevant if you grew a 50 pound beer gut and haven’t had a date in a year.

You are a hard worker the moment you start working hard. You are an entrepreneur as soon as you take action–any action–that leads towards your business aspirations. Of course, this also means that you’re a procrastinator the instant you take action to avoid more important actions. That “eternal instant” is all there ever is.

Identity vs. Achievements

So what if you want to become a wealthy Web 2.0 entrepreneur? How do you make that your Now Identity?

Your current actions define only the qualitative aspects of your identity. If you’re on stage performing in a play, you are an actor. If you’ve got a text editor open and you’re writing some code to build your business website, you are a geeky entrepreneur.

The quantitative aspects of your identity–specific measures of wealth, fame, or ability–are measured by the sum of your actions and various environmental influences.

Other People’s Now Identity

When you expand your awareness to include the Now Identity, you start recognizing other people’s Now Identity too. You stop relating to your friends and loved ones by what they have been and start seeing them as they are right now. You don’t cling to the idea that your boyfriend is “faithful”, “honest”, and “caring”, even when his present actions don’t line up with these labels. Instead of resisting the past, you dive deeply into the Now. Your interactions are informed through clarity and acceptance, rather than anger and resistance.

We all have two identities, one that comes from our past, and one that is defined by our present actions. Our past identity, rooted in the ego, is the one we usually refer to when we talk to or about other people. But it is the Now Identity that serves you most, in terms of changing your life. If you change something about yourself right now, then you have changed.

You’ve probably heard the expression, “You’re only as good as your last game.” But if that were the case, a World Champion would never lose. The truth is you’re only as good as the game you’re playing right now.

This article was inspired by two fantastic books: The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle and Radical Honesty, by Dr. Brad Blanton.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

– Albert Einstein

I’m pretty geeky. I like facts. I like things I can take apart, understand, and put back together, sometimes modifying the original in interesting ways. I prefer to discover the truth by proving it to myself, rather than taking someone else’s word for it. When you start talking to me about things like spirituality, God, meditation, reincarnation, the Pain Body, polarization, the Law of Attraction, and holistic anything, you’ll lose me quickly.

At least, that’s how I used to be.

While I called myself “agnostic”, my inner voice had a much more blunt opinion: This stuff is bullshit. I was completely awestruck that anyone of even moderate intelligence could believe any of this crap. To me, God came from the same place as the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy.

And then a few months ago, everything changed.

Self-Induced Repression

As much as I disqualified spirituality, I never felt quite right about my ignorance of it. It wasn’t my awareness of mortality that had me looking for something to grasp onto. Rather, from the perspective of personal development, it was the ultimate problem to solve: What is the true nature of reality? I’d given this question so little serious thought, despite the profound effect the answer would have on how I interact with the world.

I started learning about spirituality as a purely practical matter. Having spent several months in a “self-induced repression” of being really shy about meeting new people, I determined that the root of the problem was my ego. I was living so “in my head” that I would almost always talk myself out of approaching people. I was so wrapped up in preserving my identity that my fear of rejection was paralyzing. I had so many questions:

• How do I stop talking myself out of approaching people?
• How can I not care what other people think?
• How do I get over my dreadful fear of rejection?
• How can I avoid being so nervous talking to people I don’t know?

These were deep-rooted issues for which I’d already learned and implemented superficial solutions. While they worked for a time, they were masking the problem, rather than solving it. The results were temporary. My approach anxiety would return even if it had been only a few days since my last social appearance.

Thinking about problems rooted in the ego reminded of a book I’d heard of called The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle which, from what I understood, had the answer to the questions I was asking, told from a spiritual perspective. I decided to check it out.

This would become the book that helped me realize that, just like you can take apart a piece of software, study its code, and understand on a deep level how it works, you could do the same to reality. Spirituality, for me, would become a geek thing.

Hacking Reality

I don’t view spirituality as something you “believe in” or “don’t believe in”. I will believe only things that I can verify through my own experience. I view the great spiritual teachers as reality hackers whose teachings represent a model for interacting with the world. It’s up to me to do my research and evaluate their work by putting it into practice in my own life and measuring the results.

Even spiritual teachers aren’t exempt from “showing me the money”, so to speak. It all comes down to output.

Flirting Lessons from a Spiritual Guru

So I read The Power of Now, intent on finding out what I could learn about overcoming my issues with talking to strangers, and then putting this knowledge to the test. Tolle’s message was so simple that it was almost hard to grasp. Using terms like the “Pain Body”, the “Unmanifested”, the “Eternal Now”, “Surrender”, and “Being”, it boiled down to:

• All problems are rooted in time. For example, you’re either dwelling on something that happened to you in the past, or worried about something that might happen in the future.
• The present moment is all there is. The past and future don’t exist, except in our minds.
• You are not your mind. The real you is part of the ocean of consciousness, that indestructible energy which illuminates your being.
• The ego is useful, in moderation. Setting and achieving goals is fun. Relating to other people is fun. The ego is a useful tool, as long as you aren’t controlled by it.
• To control your ego, observe it. Tolle calls this becoming the “silent watcher”, the impartial spectator that observes your mind’s thoughts without judgement.
• Resisting reality is not only painful, but insane. The path to avoid suffering is to fully accept the present moment. If you are unhappy with the situation, you can then either leave the situation, change it, or choose to not change it. Acceptance allows you to act with clarity and focus, rather than anger and resentment.

This was a powerful message to me. Not only did it give me an interesting model for regaining control of the ego, but it had profound implications for meeting people:

• You are already perfect. It’s not that you’re tall enough, good looking enough, smart enough, or strong enough. It’s that the real you is not your body at all, but rather a part of the infinite ocean of consciousness that keeps you lit. Even the most frigid scientist will tell you that the human body is nothing more than energy.
• Attraction is not your goal. Screening for a good match is your goal. When you’re still worrying about feeding your ego, you try to get other people to like you. Sometimes one bad reaction from a stranger will ruin your entire night. When you accept yourself as already perfect, you stop seeking reactions and start gravitating towards only those that amuse you.
• What you say is irrelevant. If I need to say anything fancier than “Hi” to start talking to a girl, I’m not interested. And if me saying “Hi” creeps her out, I’m definitely not interested.
• Social dynamics are irrelevant. If I can’t ask for a girl’s number in front of her friend because she’s worried that her friend will think she’s a “slut” for giving a guy her number, then I don’t want it anyway. The more you understand the ego, the more aware you become of those who are still prisoners of their own mind.
• Clinging is suffering. I’ve found the most happiness by simply letting women flow into and out of my life. Rather than trying to project onto a woman what I want her to be, or having expectations about what will happen next, I prefer to let nature run its course.

After reading the book, I went out almost every day to parks, nightclubs, outdoor festivals, and other venues that had lots of opportunities to meet people to see what would happen when the rubber met the road.

Measuring the Results

The first thing that struck me is how empowering it is to observe your ego, rather than be enslaved by it. The idea that “you are not your mind” is one of the most powerful lessons that anyone can ever learn about meeting people. While I still sometimes needed revving up to get into “state”, I drew my energy from simply saying hi to people. Even if they ignored me, I still felt the surge of excitement that comes from knowing you’re doing what you need to do to create your ideal life.

I gave absolutely no thought at all to what I was going to say when approaching. I just said whatever came to mind. I’d be skating through the park, see a couple of cute girls sitting together on the lawn and walk up to them and say “You guys look interesting”, and within seconds the conversation was well underway. An hour later I’d walk away with the phone number of the one I was interested in.

At a nightclub on the dance floor I’d approach two unapproachably hot girls dancing together and say “I like your guys’ vibe. I’m going to dance with you.” One of them giggled and replied “Hehehe, okay!” Within a couple of minutes the other one was chatting me up, interview style: What’s your name? Where are you from? Do you live around here?

Any guy with experience will tell you that the dance floor is a trap. It’s the worst place in a club to meet people. But I didn’t care. When you stop trying to feed your ego, none of this matters. You’re just out there radiating, being receptive to discovering a connection with someone, rather than calculating the social logistics and coordinating with your wingman to distract the “obstacles”.

I was happy with the results I got from this experiment. It took me two weeks to go from zero to dating. I’ve since integrated Tolle’s model of reality into my everyday life.

Having previously spent a lot of time studying and practicing the art and science of seduction, I learned that through meditation you can bypass all of that garbage and feel a lot better doing so. The “game” is fundamentally designed to attract girls that are prisoners of their own mind and make you even more a prisoner of your own.

The shortest path to success in meeting people, whether you’re a guy or a girl, is through spirituality. Don’t look for something to believe in or something that promises you rewards for blind faith and Sunday contributions. Look for something that gets you results, verified by your own experience. Accept that it is extremely hard to know what is true but, through your own experimentation, you can determine what is true for you.