A common recipe for personal growth is to start with what you have, identify what sucks about it, and try to make it suck less. Software developers call this “fixing bugs.”

“Fixing bugs” may seem like a natural metaphor for personal development, but in most cases this is actually an extremely limited, even harmful, perspective. When you focus on fixing what’s broken, the standard by which you measure your progress is whatever you started with. If what you started with was crap, then the standard by which you judge your results is crap.

If your software currently crashes 20 times a day, making it crash only 15 times a day is “good”, only 12 times a day is “better”, and a mere 10 crashes a day would be “excellent.”

You might even get a raise.

This way of thinking is its own worst enemy. Patching a bad situation often still leaves you in a bad situation. Even worse, you might get the impression you’re doing something useful. Sure, 10 crashes a day is a lot better than 20 crashes a day. Perhaps you even used your Employee of the Month bonus to upgrade to the 500 channel cable package that Bob and Alice have been raving about.

But it’s still a profoundly shit way to live. Fixing a bug doesn’t necessarily fix anything. You may think you’ve uncovered a solution, when all you’ve really done is found a rut and made it deeper–a little more like a grave.

Death by a Thousand Service Packs

If it’s been three years since your last promotion–if you’ve spent almost every day for as long as you can remember arguing with your girlfriend about absolutely nothing–if you’ve swallowed up the last six months going on about how hopeless you are with women, yet you’ve approached only a dozen girls in that time, then reality has a message for you: The data has spoken. There is no bandage large enough to cover this wound. There is no way to alter this cause to produce the desired effect.

You cannot fix what was built on this foundation. You have to replace the foundation entirely.

The day after my cousin died several weeks ago, I quit my job. I’d been working on a contract for the last several months, but it just wasn’t me. It couldn’t be me. And no amount of tweaking, tuning, or patchwork could fix that.

It’s always a little terrifying to shake things up, but there is no better way to live. Until last Thursday, I was scratching someone else’s itch. Now I’m scratching my own.

On Friday night my 22-year-old cousin, Derek Sloboda, was out on a lake partying with his friends when the boat they were in capsized. In the ensuing frenzy, some of them, including Derek, left the overturned boat in 30-metre-deep water to swim to dry land and find help.

If anyone had the physical strength for heroism in this situation, Derek certainly did. He’s been an athlete all his life, and in recent years his efforts in the gym had shaped him into something resembling a Greek statue. But at some point during the chain of events, Derek disappeared.

There were as many as eight boats that went out to search the waters that night, and all of Derek’s friends were eventually recovered safely. But Derek was not. What began as a rescue mission ended as a recovery operation.

I’ve spent years shaping my voice as a writer. I’ve worked really hard to develop the creativity and precision to express my ideas in rich and interesting ways. But I have hit a dead end here. There is no sorrow of a magnitude greater than that which my aunt, my uncle, my cousin Kristin, our family and his friends are now facing. There are no words to describe the inside of a black hole.

It’s hard to believe we lost him. So to we lost that part of us which he held: as a friend, a family member, a coworker, a teammate, a brother, a son, a grandson, a cousin, a nephew, a student, a teacher, a boyfriend, a good kid. We will never forget his kindness and his innocence.

Derek had a healthy appetite for danger–the good kind. I personally will remember, among other things, my admiration for him moving to Banff to work there for several months, for his willingness to take a chance on something new in that way. I was even more blown away in hearing that while he was there, something made him reflect on how poorly he treated his sister at times, and how they often fought over silly things. When he returned from his trip he apologized to her and they became closer than ever. For a kid with such good genetics, he had every reason to be cocky and arrogant, but somehow managed to be exactly the opposite.

We love you and we miss you buddy. Because of your life, we will live differently.

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.

Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom.

– Thomas Jefferson

Deception is cancerous. The first mutation of a truth charts a path to colonize its host. One fib demands another, two lies need the proof of two more, until eventually even the most innocent half-truth metastasizes into a falsehood requiring surgery.

A lie is a deliberate attempt to fake the nature of reality. So a scientist who reaches a flawed conclusion through an error in her experimentation method may hint at incompetence, but she is not lying. But a guy who trades his own happiness for a fat paycheque and calls himself “successful”, must be charged with first-degree bullshit. His deception may succeed temporarily but he has not altered the facts, and the moral transaction is still charged to his account.

Why is faking the nature of reality bad? Because reality exists. No matter how hard you try to treat things differently than they really are, they still are. A job that drains your will to live is a job that drains your will to live. A girl who doesn’t respect you, doesn’t respect you.

When the disconnect with reality comes from a genuine error, the mistake is open to correction. The evidence of a fallacy shows up in the form of contradiction, and logic and reason can help stitch things back together. But intentional deceit makes the perpetrator a fugitive; sometimes physically, always intellectually. For whenever a liar’s evidence contradicts itself, he must flee further and further from the facts to maintain his sliding grip on sincerity.

The safe haven from the perils of denying what is, is radical honesty. To commit to radical honesty is to take an oath sworn directly on the face of existence. It’s a pledge–in your work, in your relationships, and to yourself–to see things exactly as they are, to the best of your ability. It acknowledges that almost all things are small things and that nothing is bigger than the truth.

Radical Honesty at Work

Few relationships will last longer, or have a larger effect on your day-to-day life, than the relationship between you and the value-producing activity that is your work. Applying radical honesty in your work means creating things that are of value to you personally.

Can each of us really do work that is of value to us personally? On what planet would we ever find someone to specialize in the manufacture of, say, toilet paper? Someone who would claim that such work is of value to him personally? You’d find that guy on the planet where ass-wiping technology doesn’t yet exist, where there’s a guy who’s sick of using his bare hands for the task, and where he is the only man alive annoyed enough to scratch this particular itch himself.

The things that are of value to you personally are entirely dependent on your environment and how you relate to it. For example, I couldn’t care less about growing my own food. There are lots of lots of people–”farmers” as they’re called–who already do this. And they’re willing, with the aid of an elaborate supply chain, to take my money in exchange for their food. If I didn’t have access to anyone who was willing to grow food, maintain livestock, and sell me either when I needed them, then I’d pretty quickly become interested in this problem. I value my own life and I need food to live.

What most frustrates you about the world? Almost every answer to that question is a business idea with your name written all over it. And when the work you do pays the bills both financially and spiritually, you have truly become your own boss.

Radical Honesty in Relationships

There’s a strong tie between your work and your relationships. Asking “What most frustrates you about the world?” is not only a means of identifying opportunities to create value in your life, it’s also a compass that directs you towards the people that will help make those dreams come true.

Radical honesty in relationships–whether platonic or intimate–requires self-respect. Self-respect is a seed planted by the standards you set: How do you treat people? How do you let them treat you?

Purpose is also paramount. In geek terms, your mission is like an Uninterruptible Power Supply, a primary source of energy and the motive power behind all the moving parts of your life. The relationships worth having are those with a voltage high enough to match your own, not those that cause a power failure.

Maintaining integrity in relationships means addressing problems that come up in real-time. Emotions are not chess pieces, and love is not a game of strategy. If you sense that something might be wrong, seek to identify and resolve the issue on the spot. If you’re constantly met with responses like the Solemn Downward Stare, followed by the Evening of Awkward Silence, and the Night Without Sex, then be warned: the game you’re playing isn’t worth winning.

Radical Self-Honesty

The hardest person to be honest with is yourself. Really, the only person you can be honest with is you. All delusion is ultimately self-delusion.

Radical self-honesty requires a matching dose of humility. Whatever score you give yourself in any category is almost surely inflated. If the currency by which we measure others is pounds, the currency by which we measure ourselves is yen. Some of these feelings of superior knowledge, skill, or judgement are no doubt justified. But many, if not most of them, aren’t. The moment you become conscious of this, your self-awareness expands. You begin to ask yourself more honest questions and give yourself more honest answers.

I find journalling to be an effective way to keep myself honest. I reach for my journal whenever I feel there’s an idea or milestone–good or bad–worth documenting. For example, I’ve got an overwhelming appetite for change. So when several months ago I started getting bored with my day-to-day routine, I made a journal entry about it. I even made a list of specific adjustments I wanted to make to shake things up. Looking at that list now, I’ve installed about 60% of those tweaks so far with more currently in progress.

How Honest Is Too Honest?

In the honesty business, there’s a fine line between radical and reckless.

Reckless honesty is the result of pushing the authenticity envelope so far that you shoot yourself in the foot. Radical honesty is having the balls to walk up to a girl and say “Hi” because you think she’s attractive and you want to find out more. Reckless honesty is walking up to the same girl and saying “Wow, you are absolutely gorgeous. There’s nothing I’d like to do more right now than to take you into the nearest bathroom, rip all your clothes off, and fuck you to God.”

Both approaches are, technically speaking, completely authentic. But one is obviously somewhat more productive. The border between radical and reckless must be patrolled by your intuition. Sometimes that line is obvious (like in the example above), but sometimes it’s not. As a general rule, accuracy is more important than precision.

If you have a habit of stopping short of saying what you really think, turning things around will take time. But there is no challenge more worth tackling. Authenticity accrues a compound interest, and even a few extra cents of veracity today could become a large down payment on your happiness tomorrow.

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

– Ezra Pound

I run a One Man University.

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

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

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

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

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

Reading for Growth

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speed Reading

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

Or, even worse, photo reading.

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

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

Slow Reading

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

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

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

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

One Book at a Time

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

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

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

Relentless Curiosity

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

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

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

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

Three Big Ideas

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

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

Act Quickly

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

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

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

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

– Author Unknown

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

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

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

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

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

There Is No Secret

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

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

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

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

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

Shared Interests Are Everything

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

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

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

Which brings me to how I met Mary.

Seduction Secret #172: Live Your Own Life

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

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

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

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

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

Girl Approaches Guy, Film at 11

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

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

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

Opportunity Will Knock

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

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

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

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

– Leonardo da Vinci

I need every word I write.

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

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

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

Simple Is Hard

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

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

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

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

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

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

Complexity and the Ego

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prioritize Simple Solutions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Insist upon yourself. Be original.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Original ideas are like UFOs: They attract attention, the pilots are often assumed to be from another planet, and they usually have rounded corners.

An original idea is just a thought expressed in a way that no one has expressed it before. There is no such thing as an idea made from scratch, but there is plenty of room for using existing concepts as a foundation for creating new pathways through reality.

The value of an original idea is in its ability to allow us to experience things in a different way. Steve Pavlina’s idea of 30-day trials, for example, totally altered my path to personal growth. There are a much wider range of commitments I’m willing to make for a month than, say, forever. This technique has been such a catalyst for change in my own life that I even decided to create a website around it and document my adventures.

The chemical compound formed by a unique thought mixed with purposeful action is highly explosive. When you’re building to change the world, that’s the kind of energy you need.

There’s just one problem: How do you think what no man has thought before?

Always Be Reading

Like gourmet food, original ideas are the product of good ingredients. The more ideas you consume, the more you have to cook with.

I consider reading a top-level priority. It’s so important to me that if I have one hour left in my day and haven’t yet done any reading, I’ll choose a book over anything else, if possible. I commute with public transport and taxis, so I usually use that time for reading too.

The most important things to me for extracting useful ideas from what I read are:

• Choose the best sources. Consciously choose the best content you can find on subject matter that interests you.
• Take notes. I usually carry around a journal with me that’s small enough to fit in a handbag. When reading non-fiction, I jot down everything I want to retain. I haven’t yet tried this with fiction, but I’d imagine it could be useful for noting key events, character descriptions, and other plot cookies.
• Do what you read, as you read it. Every good non-fiction book I read alters my external world in measurable ways. I prefer to walk the walk as soon as I start learning new ideas. I find it much easier to retain them this way.

Plug and Play

They say the key to generating cool ideas is to spot links between things that no one else sees. I use an even simpler formula:

1. Pick two endpoints and connect them.
2. Describe that relationship.

I do this all the time to connect the dots between software development and personal growth. It’s not that I have a keen eye for spotting relationships between two seemingly disparate ideas. It’s that I create the link and then try to figure out if it can make sense.

I’ve used this algorithm to unearth some interesting concepts. For example, it’s how I came up with the concept of beliefs as an API for personal growth.

Build a Better Model

Approach anxiety is a big problem for someone trying to practice talking to strangers. I’d done a fair amount of reading on this subject to learn to deal with it. The best answers I found involved focussing on “qualifying” a girl, instead of worrying about her being interested in you.

But I still found this model wasn’t enough. It made me think about talking to girls as a linear process: First you approach, then you open, then you qualify… I didn’t want to do anything. I wanted a model that would let me profit from authenticity.

The more I talked to people and the more I thought about what was going on, the more I saw ways in which I could mold the existing models into the shape I wanted. This is how I came up with social polarity. I felt this model better explained the instant attraction or instant revulsion you tend to experience when you approach strangers. It also suggests that authenticity is the best policy. And it requires no effort to implement. This new model was a perfect fit for me.

Because models are abstractions, they’re lossy. This makes them ripe territory to be remapped.

Create Hooks

Talking to strangers is a timeless concept. But “social skydiving” was a hook that stuck in people’s minds. Different words trigger different emotions. A new label gave it new life. Finding a distinct way to express an old idea can make it seem original all over again. Anyone who reads personal growth literature knows that sometimes you need to hear something said in the right way for it to really click.

There’s no magic potion I use to create catchy. I just spend a lot of time wrestling to express myself with words that people will remember.

Invert Your Beliefs

Here’s another little formula I use for idea generation:

1. Take one of your existing beliefs or opinions.
2. Completely reverse your position.
3. Try to justify this point of view.

You can also apply this formula to public opinion. A good example of this is DHH’s recent post Fire the workaholics. It’s hard not to want to read that.

But this isn’t just a way to generate blog article ideas. The guys at 37signals have built an entire business around doing the opposite of what most small development shops do, including four-day workweeks, business credit cards for employees, even giving them personal expense accounts to fund their passions.

Sometimes the smaller your operation, the more you’ll have to flex your creative muscles to stay alive. The good news is that inspiration and originality needn’t cost a lot of money; they’re a natural byproduct of directed thinking and deliberate effort.

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.

– Dale Carnegie

Positive relationships are the foundation of an interesting life.

Regular readers of my blog know that I advocate talking to strangers as a fantastic way of shaking up reality. But that’s not the whole story. If your interactional energy is misspent, you can end up in a repetitive cycle of drive-by friendships, random sexual adventures that are as fun as they are meaningless, and a general sense of wondering why you seem to always end up back where you started.

Making your own introductions is a life-changing force. But how do you channel this bravado into building relationships that last? How do you find friends that will raise the ceiling of your potential rather than criticize you for your passions? How do you meet girls that belong in your world and not just in your bedroom?

How do you get a life?

Love Being Alone

The prerequisite to building a healthy social life is, ironically, being comfortable by yourself. If you’re starting from zero, the reasons for this are obvious: you don’t have much choice. If you have a few friends but find that they drag you down, withdrawing from that crowd and starting anew will probably require staying in more frequently. Also, being too desperate for the company of others will hinder authentic interaction. You’ll be more worried about external validation instead of just letting it flow and being open to discovering connections.

Appreciating aloneness starts by consciously acknowledging the freedom it brings. When you enjoy your own company you can be flexible about who you choose to hang with, instead of letting the ego’s fear of being alone suck you into social scenes you don’t really like.

It also helps to have interests that can be pursued on your own. I’m fortunate to have many: reading, writing, cooking, software development, and online poker, among others. I’m just as happy staying in as going out, as long as I keep a good balance between the two. You can even use your alone time to apply the ideas in this article to help build your social life.

Start With Who You Already Know

Getting a life means becoming a person who initiates interactions, instead of always waiting for others to make the first move. A great place to start is with the people you already know. Most of us can probably think of one or more people that we’re horrible at keeping in touch with. These might be former acquaintances, people you met while travelling, someone you enjoyed working with in the past, old friends, or even current friends. When making this list, reach as far back into your past as you can, as long as you keep finding examples of people you wish you’d stayed in touch with.

Then contact them. I prefer email, especially when it’s someone I haven’t talked to in a while. If you don’t have the person’s email address, try Google. Alternatively, you might have a mutual friend who can put you in touch.

I did this several weeks ago. It was easy for me to think of many people with whom I’m horrible at keeping in touch. I ended up sending over a dozen emails to former coworkers I enjoyed working with, friends in other cities, and even local buddies who I don’t talk to nearly enough, often because I rely on them to always ping me.

I got responses from all but two people. I ended up going for lunch with one girl I’d never socialized with outside of a party setting. I reconnected with a former boss of mine from Quebec City who travels to Montreal frequently, and plan to have lunch with him next time he’s in town. And I reestablished contact with some friends I was starting to lose touch with.

The ROI on this simple gesture made me wonder: Why the fuck haven’t I been doing this all along?

Generosity Is Golden

It’s one thing to take the social initiative with people you already know, but what about with someone you’ve never met?

Sometimes I’ll get an email from a fellow blogger who wants to “network” with me. This is the greasiest way to introduce yourself to anyone. When making a new connection, start with generosity. Focus on how you can help the other person get where they’re going. This is an idea I got from Keith Ferrazzi’s excellent book, Never Eat Alone.

Do you have information that may interest them? Do you know someone whom they could benefit from knowing too? Can you volunteer to help their cause?

For example, I recently moved into a coworking space in Montreal called Station C. It’s a group of independent consultants and entrepreneurs who don’t like working from home. I think Patrick and Dan have done a fantastic job setting it up. It’s an amazing workspace with a great mix of people.

One of the first things I did when I moved in was volunteer to help build the office’s scheduling application. I have a lot of respect for the project and, now that I’m involved as a member, it can only be a good use of my time to make it even better. I also introduced myself to most people in the office early on and asked them to show me what they were working on. I wanted to get a sense of what skills they had and consider ways in which I could give them more work. In showing my own interest, I found others naturally reciprocating. I’ve already been getting work offered in my direction.

One of the best investments you can make in yourself is to take a genuine interest in other people.

User Groups

The best places to plant the seeds that will improve your social life are user groups. A “user group” might be a professional association, a political party, an orchestra, a yoga class, or any other gathering of people who have a common passion.

To start down this road, make a list of keywords for everything you enjoy and every issue that matters to you. For example, mine looks like:

• personal growth
• spirituality
• private health care in canada
• cooking
• longboarding
• grassroots geek conferences
• design
• usability
• eco-friendly housing
• etc.

Do a complete brain dump. If you haven’t got at least 50 lines of output, you aren’t trying hard enough. When finished, head to Meetup.com and see what you can find. Alternatively, add the name of your city to each line and you’ve got a Google search query. This will help you find local user groups, bloggers, discussion forums, businesses, and other organizations related to these topics.

What if you can’t find a group that fits your needs? Organize it. This is exactly how I started a personal growth group in Montreal. The downside of being an organizer is that it takes a little more time and energy. The upside is everything else.

Finding a great group of people that like what you like may require some detective work, but it’s worth it. A shared interest is the active ingredient in building positive relationships.

Don’t Limit Yourself

When I was doing my 30-day trial on learning to cook, I took inspiration from Laura Calder’s show French Food at Home. I think she has a unique charm and her enthusiasm for cooking is contagious.

Then I thought: Why not email her?

So I did. And she replied.

Next thing you know, we’re exchanging email about The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle, spirituality, and general thoughts on the art of happiness.

Don’t limit yourself. Take a look at your bookshelf, for example, and ask yourself: Which of these authors might I like to get to know? Email them. Authors in particular seem to have more easily accessible email addresses than other public figures. It’s unlikely that you’ll meet or even get a personal response from most of the people you contact this way, but it’s still fun to make a connection with someone that inspires you.

I’ve turned this last one into a 30-day trial. Every day I email one person I want to know more about, whom I might normally consider out of reach. I find some of the most fun 30-day trials are the ones related to meeting new people. If you feel like you could use some help in the social arena, why not make now the time you choose to break out of your bubble?