Many times I’ve debated — and have asked friends whose opinions I trust — some form of this question:

Is “follow your heart” good advice?

Because you know what? It sounds really compelling. We all like the notion of a kumbaya world where we can do exactly what we want to do, whenever we want to do it. We all really dig the idea that we can, should, and must ditch the bullshit in our lives and pursue our passions. If you’re stuck in a job you don’t like, it’s really appealing to have permission to quit doing it and to take to the road playing the harmonica if that’s what moves you.

There’s a million variants on this theme.

Do what you love. Follow your bliss. Pursue your passion. Turn your hobby into your vocation.

My friend Lee Stranahan says, “If you’re in a job where people don’t thank you for what you do on a regular basis, I think you should stop doing it.”

For most people, all of these usually amount to the same big question: Faced with a choice between doing something you love (which may not pay) and doing something you don’t love (but that pays), which should you pursue?

Speaking for myself, I have two answers to this question:

First of all, following your passions is an incredibly stupid thing to do.

And second, you absolutely must follow your passions, because not doing so is the stupidest damn thing you could ever do.

Let me explain.

Follow your heart

What terrible advice. I know people who say this, but I also know what they really mean, and “follow your heart” isn’t the whole story.

I would never tell anyone that they should always follow their heart. Passions come and go, and the trouble with passion is that it’s incredibly loud. It drowns out lesser preferences and desires. If you only listen to passion, that’s like listening to the one loud asshole in the crowd who’s complaining about the show you’re putting on and ignoring the quieter majority who are enjoying it just fine. If you follow your passions without thinking, you’re listening to the squeaky wheel and giving it all the grease.

Here’s what I mean.

Let’s say you really want to play the harmonica. It’s all you want to do, all the time. It’s your passion, in the purest sense of the word. You think about the harmonica constantly. You wake up and grab your harmonica. You go to sleep with your harmonica in your mouth. You make room when brushing your teeth so that you can play harmonica at the same time. You bought an electronic harmonica with headphones so that you can play it secretly at work. No sexual experience that does not include harmonica is worth engaging in.

So you should obviously quit your job and just play the harmonica all the time, right?

Wrong. Stupid. Because unless you’re very, very unusual, I’ll bet you have other, quieter desires that your harmonica-lust is drowning out.

For instance, I’ll bet you like to eat food. And I’ll bet you like that food to be a step above Ramen noodles on occasion.

I’ll bet you enjoy living under a roof. In fact, I’d further bet that the vast majority of you prefer to live under a decent, clean roof in a good part of town. And I’d go on to bet that well over half of you enjoy living where you are right now, or have ambitions to live somewhere better.

I’ll bet you enjoy your computer. Your iPod. Your iPhone. Your iPad.

I’ll bet you enjoy pleasing any family members you may live with or may support.

In other words, your harmonica passion isn’t your only passion. Each yin has a yang, and each thing you want has a price. Unless you get a harmonica sponsorship or unless Blues Traveller signs you up, leaving your job to play harmonica is going to involve a significant — possibly total — pay cut. Are you cool with that?

If you are, awesome. Quit your job, marry and fornicate with your harmonica, and have fun out there.

But because most people have those other desires too, my guess is that you aren’t going to be cool with it. Following your heart would net you a big win in the harmonica department… but would cost you in a lot of others.

It’s a recipe for a huge, foolhardy net loss.

But, follow your heart

Noticing some incongruity here?

I’m the guy who told you that you’d better carpe diem immediately because the universe doesn’t care about you, and hey, also, by the way, you’re dying, so you’d better get a move on.

I’m the guy who told you to schedule your fun stuff so that you can have more fun.

I’d also say that burning your days doing things you don’t care about or don’t want to do is akin to slow suicide. We only get one life, and this is yours. We only get one today, and you’re living yours.

Wasting your life doing things that aren’t in your heart is the stupidest thing you could do. It’s just as stupid as quitting the stuff you don’t like in order to do the things that are your heart.

Before I stop fucking with you, let me just incriminate myself a bit further.

I just finished writing a novel called The Bialy Pimps. (I’d very much like to link to it for you, but I can’t publish it until the cover art is ready.) I’m very proud of this novel. Creatively speaking, I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done. I can’t wait to have it out in the world. I can’t wait for you to read it, because I think you’ll really, really like it. I can’t wait to write another one. I can’t wait to do a few cool things to spread, market, and disseminate this novel and the ones I write next.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is my harmonica.

I’m writing and publishing fiction right now because I’m passionate about it. What other reason could there be? Yes, I might make some money on it, but I’m definitely not counting on it. I don’t expect to become a bestselling fiction author overnight. I don’t think it will help grow the business I’m currently in, because nobody reads a novel and then says, “Hey, that was great… let’s buy some of this guy’s info products!” And I’m certainly not planning to abandon what I’ve built in the business/blogging/rule-questioning space to follow my new bliss, because I like it a lot here.

I’m doing it because I want to do it. Because it’s in my heart. Because I think about it all the time and because I can’t not do it.

Ditto the Badass Project conference I hosted last week. Someone asked me why the team and I went to all that effort when there’s zero financial or business gain to be had from it. I didn’t (and won’t) make a cent off of anything the Badass Project does. I got some good exposure and connections by doing the conference, but that was a side effect. At root, and at its inception, I work on the Badass Project because I’m passionate about giving people props for saying, “Fuck you, world… I’m going to do this whether you think I should or not.” I’m passionate about making people who blame external circumstances for the crap in their lives feel like douchebags.

I think you should ditch the meeting to go to see your kid’s dance recital. I think you should tell co-workers you can’t work a certain time because you want to go see a movie. I’ve said that my mission statement in life is to “do cool shit with cool people.” I believe firmly in the doctrine of dicking off.

Passion. All passion.

So… now what?

Passion is overrated. Passion is underrated. Following your heart is usually a stupid idea. Not following your heart is the stupidest thing you could ever do.

You can believe all of those statements, because very few things in life are absolute.

As always, it comes down to self-awareness… and that means knowing which questions you’re really asking.

The question isn’t, “Should I follow my heart?” It’s “Should I follow this particular aspect of this thing that’s in my heart, now, in this way, in full awareness of both the positive and negative consequences that may or may not arise from my decision?”

Almost nothing is as absolute as YES or NO, regardless of qualifications. I say “It depends” a lot. You know why? Because it always fucking depends.

So, should you pursue your passions?

Yes, if.

No, if.

If you’ve ever asked that question in its naked form, you either aren’t paying much attention or are afraid of taking the scary, decisive action that might come from a legitimate answer to a legitimate question.

So, if you can get a handle on your fear, I’ve got something for you to try. The next time you’re trying to decide whether you should follow a passion, ask yourself five questions.

The first two are:

1. What do I have to gain by following this passion?

2. What am I losing by not following this passion?

These two are easy, because it’s what’s being screamed in your ear by that internal voice. That voice knows all the reasons why you should quit your shitty job and go play harmonica (#1) and it has many pushy opinions about how staying in your shitty job is sucking the life out of you (#2).

But then, keep going, and be honest.

Ask:

3. What am I gaining by not following this passion?

Think really damn hard about this one. Be honest in both directions, meaning that you’ve got to truthfully come up with things that you are gaining from staying right where you are even if you don’t want to admit it (self esteem, the perception of safety, the feeling that there’s safety in numbers) and that you can’t exaggerate the importance of not rocking the boat on your current situation (i.e., your job is not keeping you alive, and it’s pretty unlikely that it’s literally keeping a roof over your head unless you have no friends or relatives who would house you if there was no alternative).

Frame these things in the positive, because you’ve got to see the good in the situation, not just the bad in the alternative. So if you think that quitting your job would have you borrowing money and that would embarrass you, reframe it. Say that your current situation protects your dignity and makes you feel respected.

The next question is the hammer. Pay close attention to it.

4. What’s the price of following this passion?

Everything has a price. EVERYTHING. The price of a normal job is forty to fifty hours per week, a defined salary, and the need for approval of your actions, among other things. The price of playing harmonica all the time for no pay is that you may (may!) have to live in your parents’ basement and have no spending money and be called a loser. Everything has definite and potential upsides, and everything has definite and potential downsides. You’re going to pay the price for whatever you do, so make sure you’re okay with the price you’re choosing to pay.

There’s one more. And this is where things get really fun.

5. Are there other ways to get to where I want to be?

In other words, question the rules, because everything you’ve carefully reasoned out in questions 1-4 may be moot if you find an alternate way to satisfy your passion. The price may be far less in size, and far more appealing than you’d imagined.

I was talking with my buddy Benny Lewis yesterday. Benny travels. Like, that’s what he does, essentially for a living. He goes to different countries and he immerses himself in the local culture and he tries to learn the language. He’s from Ireland, but he really only goes back for Christmas. Everything he owns, all together, weighs fifty pounds. He’s a true nomad.

Benny said that people tell him all the time that they wish they could do what he does. And Benny told me that his response is, “So do it.”

But people don’t think they can do it. They’ve decided that the “price” of doing what Benny does is different from its true price, because they’re “pricing” a traditional, inside-the-box model. Benny’s model is outside the box. Most people think of travel as consisting of an expensive plane ticket, a week or two in a hotel (which is usually expensive), and then all sorts of other vacation expenses. But Benny doesn’t fly in and fly out. He flies in and stays for months. That’s several plane tickets a year, not several a month. He rents a place for the long term. His current place in Taiwan costs $300 a month. And if that’s too pricey? He couch surfs, and gets his accommodations for free.

Benny told me that most people have this mentality that says, “Work hard, save up a big chunk of money, and then travel the world.” But if you hack the system, you can start now. With just a bit of planning, you could do what Benny does for a pittance. So don’t wait. Travel, and earn that pittance as you go along.

The bottom line

I think that you should pursue your passions. I think that you should follow your heart.

…if, that is, you decide what it’s going to cost you, and decide that you’re honestly okay with paying that price.

Anything is possible. The only questions are how, where, when, and at what cost.

Following your heart isn’t bad. Staying where you are isn’t bad. What’s bad is inaction. Malaise. Inertia. Apathy. Unconsciousness.

Decide, then do.

Go.

So you like the idea of being a badass? You’re sold on badassery? You admire people who are badasses, and you want to become more badass yourself?

Are you sold on the idea that excuses suck, that most excuses are bullshit, and that the minute we learn to master our own true abilities is the minute our lives become amazing and virtually unlimited?

Well, lucky you. By joining us online for the Badass Project Conference 2012 next week, you can immerse yourself in an insane amount of badassery — taught by 18 amazing speakers — for FREE.

Here are the details on the conference.

So, I just want to make sure we’re clear about this.

This is virtual (online), meaning that you can attend from anywhere with an internet connection.

18 amazing who believe in our cause are joining us: Leo Babauta, Carole Brown, Brian Clark, Jonathan Fields, Charlie Gilkey, Maggie Ginsburg-Schutz, Matt Glowaki, Seth Godin, Joe Hall, Thor Holt, Warren MacDonald, Anissa Mayhew, Jon Morrow, Amber “Miss Destructo” Osborne, Amber Rae, Julien Smith, John Unger, and Tommy Walker.

They’ll be speaking about topics that will help you achieve your maximum level of badass… things like getting through fear, overcoming resistance, and eliminating excuses.

And IT’S ALL FREE.

Check it out, then block off the time on your calendar. You absolutely don’t want to miss this.

We’ve put together something I’m very, very proud to be a part of. I hope you’ll join us.

If you’re one of those nitpicky assholes who likes to try to catch people screwing up and then tell them Nyah-nyah, you did this wrong, you probably noticed that I’ve fallen short on my promise to try six 30-day trials during 2011 and were all set to yell at me.

I tried biphasic sleep, the Slow-Carb diet, releasing resistance, quasi-minimalism, fighting email addiction, and… and?

And nothing. And 2011 is almost over.

Well, ha-ha! I did a sixth trial already and just haven’t said anything until now… with eleven days in the year to spare.

Here’s what it was: from mid-November until mid-December (to embrace the holiday spirits of both Thanksgiving and Christmas, I suppose), I did a favor each day for friends… with the requirement that they did nothing for me in return.

A little background

I have a confession to make. I’m a little selfish.

I try not to be, but I’m driven and I have big goals, and one of the ways you maintain drive and make progress on big goals is to keep your eye on the prize — which means watching what YOU do and the results YOU are getting very closely, often to the exclusion of other people’s concerns. I think that the vast majority of achievers are in danger of being overly selfish — without meaning to be or wanting to be — for this very reason.

(In fact, if you’re thinking that I’m wrong and that there are a lot of selfless achievers, I’d argue that they’re selfish too… but in a very specific way. A person who wants to feed a million people has a plan to make it happen, and has to stay focused on that plan just like any other goal. Think there are any great world-changers and philanthropists whose families sometimes felt neglected while said philanthropists were out doing good for others? Think any of those great people were sometimes seen as bullheaded or unyielding? I sure do.)

So sometimes, I’ll be trying to go after something, and I’ll look back too late and I’ll say with regret, “Ooh, I didn’t really even thank that person for helping me.” Or, “That person really cheered me on, but I don’t think I’ve ever cheered them on.”

I’ve even been mad at people who haven’t dropped everything they’re doing to be impressed by something I’ve achieved. How selfish is that, when they had a big thing last month that I didn’t even notice?

So, noticing this trend, I thought about trying to reciprocate more and be a better team player from now on.

But that didn’t feel like enough. The karmic scale was out of balance thanks to all the times I’d inadvertently taken without giving.

For a change, I wanted to do a bunch of stuff for people and get nothing back.

What’s in it for me?

A lot of the people who knew I was doing this experiment nodded their heads with understanding when I told them and said something like, “So it’s a networking thing. You’re strengthening your connections.”

And that would have made sense. I think that keeping your network karmically balanced is a good plan (see how my client Ben Rubin explains it here), but that’s not what I was doing. Doing good turns so that people would “owe me one” is honestly not what I was after… especially since a lot of the people involved weren’t business connections anyway.

That said, there’s a lot here that’s splitting hairs.

After doing 30 favors for people and asking nothing in return, might I expect to have better connections, and might I benefit from said connections later on? Sure. But that’s not why I was doing it.

This is something Seth Godin talks about in his book Linchpin: giving gifts. The linchpin gives gifts of him- or herself, and that creates an economy based on art and generosity. But the linchpin doesn’t give gifts in order to receive. The idea is to give freely, and to receive freely.

So yeah, I suppose I might receive. I kind of hope I don’t, though, because I have enough without these favors coming back to me, and I’d rather not mar the intention of the trial.

How I went about it

The idea was super-simple. I sent the following to a bunch of people who have done generous things for me in the past:

At the beginning of this year, I decided to do six 30-day challenges. To end the year, I want to do one unreciprocated favor for a friend for 30 days.

So, as a friend, I’m asking you to let me do a favor for you… and I specifically ask that you do nothing for me in return regarding this favor.

It can be pretty much anything you’d consider to be a “favor” if you asked someone to do it. I can’t walk your dog or pick up your mail or water your plants while you’re on vacation if I don’t live where you live… but I can look over something you’ve written, connect you with someone else I know, make a testimonial or give you a review, participate in your XYZ, give you my recommendation re: the latest widget, give you advice on something I know well… whatever.

If this seems like a strange request to you, then you don’t know me very well. I’ve done much, much stranger things.

A few wiseasses replied with joke requests, like “no more naked photos of you in my email,” and a few more replied that they didn’t need anything. Some didn’t reply at all, necessitating some creativity (more on that in a minute) and a second round of emails.

I did get a few “Nothing, thanks” replies, but because people could tell that I was seriously trying to do this, I tended to get a variant on the theme: “I don’t know what I need. Let me think about it.”

I even had to talk one person into it. He didn’t feel comfortable receiving without giving, which really proved the point of the whole experiment. This guy ALWAYS cheers for and supports me, and wanted nothing. What the hell?

I had to remind a lot of people, too. Hey, remember this email? What can I help you with? And after sending a few emails like that (not to the same people, though. I didn’t want to be a pest) I started trying to be creative and suggest things I could do for them until we came to something that felt right.

What I did

I didn’t explicitly say whether or not these favors would be confidential, but I figure it’s better safe than sorry. So with the exception of a few public cases, I won’t say who requested what.

But that said, here’s the kinds of things I ended up doing:

• Telling others about their good stuff
• Giving advice (I gave a lot of advice)
• Reviewing people’s writing or projects and giving testimonials to people who’ve done good work for me
• Reading/looking through people’s stuff and giving my opinion
• Various personal tasks for the non-businessy people on my list
• Brainstorming with them
• Creating something amusing. One person wanted a funny photo and one wanted a funny video. I can tell you about one of these because he shared it on Twitter; Tony Clark asked me to draw him a picture of Lumpy Space Princess and Lady Rainicorn from the cartoon Adventure Time. OMG the resulting artwork was a masterpiece.
• I also decided to do a favor for my email list as a whole, because those are the clients and friends who make my business possible. So I did a no-strings-attached and zero-promotion Q&A call for them, and told them to ask me anything.
• One person said that he had all he could want, so he asked me to do something for someone else without that person knowing it was me.
• Two people hemmed and hawed but couldn’t really come up with anything, so I told them I’d make a donation to a charity I knew they supported.
• I did some technical fix-it jobs.
• Sonia Simone’s request was for me to record a Third Tribe seminar. I couldn’t believe this didn’t qualify as her doing me a favor.

That last one was interesting, and really brought the issue of reciprocation and synergy back to the fore. How could I not benefit from a Third Tribe seminar? But Sonia needed the content as much as I could use the exposure, proving that some of the best arrangements really do benefit everyone.

What happened

Nothing, and that was the point.

Have I seen any effect from the favors I did? No. I don’t want effects. People have asked me how it went, and my answer has been, “Well, I did the favors.” Sometimes I add “It was interesting” or “It felt good,” but that’s not the answer people are looking for. They want to hear what I got out of it.

When I did the biphasic sleep trial, I could point to something that affected my life: Interesting, but not for me. When I did Slow Carb, the same was true: It was close to a good fit, and it eased me into Paleo — and Paleo is a game-changer.

But this? What did it do? What has occurred? Nothing.

Well, nothing tangible. Maybe it’s realigned the karmic scales, and maybe it will improve my friendships. Maybe it’s shifted my perspective, and maybe it’ll make me more aware of reciprocity in the future. And I guess that’s not nothing.

Happy holidays, everyone. May you give as freely as you receive, and appreciate the joy of both.

Anyone who reads this blog has probably noticed that I really like the work of Julien Smith. And really, if you like my writing, you’d probably like his.

Let’s drill it down a bit further. Remember my post “You are dying, and your world is a lie“?

Well, if you liked that specific post of mine, you’re going to like Julien’s new Kindle book The Flinch. It’s incredibly expensive at $0.00, so you might as well go ahead and grab it. I don’t think Amazon discounts much below that point.

If you’ve been revved up and motivated by some of my recent, “big thoughts” posts but weren’t quite sure what to do, this will fill in some of the missing pieces for you.

Here’s the idea:

When we’re aware of impending pain or suffering, we have an inborn instinct to flinch away from it. This is all well and good in things like protecting your head when you take a fall and in flinching away from a hot stove (or if someone like the Incredible Hulk throws a hot stove at you), but it falls apart when the thing we’re flinching away from is something we need to do.

In other words, it’s that persnickety issue again. The one we all love and hate.

Remarkable things are often uncomfortable by definition. If they weren’t, everyone would be doing them. So in order to be remarkable, you have to get used to discomfort. But we flinch from it. Just as we’re hard-wired to flinch away from actual, physical, destructive impending pain, so too do we learn to flinch away from ridicule, rejection, discomfort, and bad feelings.

Your body says: This thing that’s about to hit us is going to suck. Let’s get the fuck away from it like, now.

Julien says that before champion boxers can become champions, they have to learn to do one thing that novice boxers can’t do. They have to learn how to take a punch.

They have to learn to see the impending pain or discomfort, and not flinch.

Champions in anything are the same way. If you want to achieve anything great, you have to learn when it’s truly appropriate to flinch and when you need to hold your ground and take the hit.

That’s the theory. But there’s practice in here, too.

Want to learn how to get past the flinch? There’s specific strategies in this book. And I’ll admit, they were tough. They all made me want to flinch.

You want to learn how to do big things, start with small things. Start getting intimate with your flinch, and learn how to push through it.

The Flinch was written by Julien Smith for Seth Godin’s Domino Project. It’s free. With that particular combination of attributes, it’s kind of hard for me not to recommend it wholeheartedly.

Julien sent me an advance copy, and I read it in a day and loved it. I think you will too.

Check out The Flinch at Amazon for free. You’ll thank me.

Today’s post is over at my nonprofit, The Badass Project. You should read it.

Read it here.

P.S: My last post was short. This post is short. This one doesn’t really count, though, because the post I’ve linked to isn’t short at all. And it’s bad ass.

P.P.S: Don’t get used to short posts from me.

1. Begin.

2. Do the work.

3. Ship.

4. Repeat.

Almost nobody truly does all four. Those that do inevitably become great.

This post contains a lesson about life, about your job, and about being human. Hang in there with me with through the intro, because whether or not you’re an athlete, this applies to you.

—

This summer, over a two-month span of time, I did an Olympic triathlon, a bike century, a half Ironman, and a marathon.

That’s not bragging. Bragging carries the assumption that I did it with a purpose, to prove something to others. I did neither. Only after completing the second event did I ask myself what the hell I was doing it for. I’m not fast. I’m not going to finish in the top third of any event I enter. I’m not trying to impress anyone. Yet it took a huge amount of effort, required me to repeatedly get up around 3am, and had me going for up to seven hours at a time. So why was I doing it?

At first I thought it was to see if I could do it, but then I realized that the intent was subtly different. “Seeing if you can do it” comes with a positive expectation. It’s a carrot. You train, and hopefully you accomplish.

What I was doing was a bit more masochistic. I was trying to see how much I could take.

My empire of dirt

There’s a song by Nine Inch Nails, called “Hurt.” The lyrics go like this:

I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel.
I focus on the pain… the only thing that’s real.

It’d be really easy to dismiss this as the ramblings of a morose kid who grew up to become an idol for depressed teenagers, and that’s what most adults do. Kids do dumb shit, and as adults, it’s our job to explain away said dumb shit so that we don’t have to try to understand it. Dumb shit doesn’t require an explanation. It can simply be dismissed, because it’s dumb.

Why would pain have any value? Pain is real, sure, but so is the budget deficit, and we don’t want either of them in our lives. Pain isn’t “the only thing that’s real.” You know what’s real? This deadline. These bills. The fact that we haven’t done our Christmas shopping yet. Oh, and the Patriots game.

This is what we tell those whiny teenagers. But interestingly, it’s what we tell ourselves, too.

So what if you hate your job? It gives you genuine security. You can keep a roof over your head. You can even buy that new plasma TV you’ve been wanting. So turn in your work on time. Listen. Advance. These things are real, and important.

But if you think your deadline is real, go out in the woods and get a grizzly bear to chase you. Which of your pressing concerns seems more real now?

If you think your job is real, get cancer and be given six months to live. Then see if you give a fuck about your job.

The fears that come with your job, your finances, or your social standing are fears of things that aren’t real. If you lose your job, life will go on. This isn’t the way it used to be with the objects of our fears. Used to be, we were afraid of being eaten by tigers. That was a legit fear. You get eaten by a tiger just one time, and things change dramatically for you.

In first world societies, we’re not really in danger anymore. Sure, you can still get hit by a car. You can get a disease. You can get shot. You can get home-invaded or robbed or raped. But comparatively, today, true threats are almost nonexistent. Cave people got a cut and it got infected and they died. They twisted their ankle and lost some of their speed and died. They drank bad water and died. Food became scarce, so they slowly starved and died.

Those things don’t really happen much nowadays, but we’re wired to fear pain. So to compensate, we promoted the things we found moderately unpleasant to “pain” status and began fearing those things instead.

Stress. Discomfort. Awkwardness.

We used to make the choice not to cross a plain based on fear of the pain of being eviscerated. Today we make the choice to not start a new venture based on fear of the pain of failing.

We started saying things like, “This stress is killing me” and “Those people are exercising themselves to death!” and “I was so embarrassed, I could have died.”

That’s not pain. That’s not true discomfort. That’s not the peril to life and limb we evolved to avoid.

We’re not the fragile beings we’ve been trained to think we are. We’re not as weak (of body, of mind, of will) as we’ve hypnotized ourselves into thinking. But the only way to truly learn that — and to open the entire spectrum of human experience we’ve buried beneath the shiny veneer of modern existence — is to meet our own personal limitations and boundaries head-on.

It’s ironic. Letting yourself experience what you most don’t want to experience is the only way to truly be human.

What’s real?

Think about how we live today.

We live in television and on the internet. (I’m scorning neither and I love both, so there’s no finger-pointing here.) Sometimes our friends are people we only see once or twice a year, who we might have physical contact with only half a dozen times.

We go from place to place very quickly without having to wear down our shoes or the soles of our feet, thanks to fast cars and fast trains and fast planes.

We spend a lot of time accomplishing very little. The work of a human life might be the movement of one set of papers or one group of numbers from one location to another.

We have kids, but then we go to work and they go to school (so that they can later go to work, thus closing the circle). Often, our lives cross only briefly, like ships in the night.

We’re shaped by fashion and consumerism. Instead of desiring and chasing food, we desire and chase iPads and iPhones… present company included.

We check email and social networks compulsively. Are we lonely? Or are we just looking for some urgency that we can pretend matters — a surrogate for the survival requirements we used to spend our lives pursuing, but which are now handed to us?

We have fast food. We have video games so real you could step into them. We have reality TV that isn’t very realistic, so that we can vicariously live the lives of Jersey kids and celebrities. And even though we may never visit Australia if we live in New York, we can video chat with Australia, live, for free, whenever we want.

Old-fashioned, unfiltered reality worked for a while, but it was untidy. It was really time-consuming. It had some great positives, but it also came with some shitty negatives.

Move over, reality. Now there’s Reality 2.0.

The good old days

Used to be, things were different.

Used to be, you had to be strong, fast, and smart to survive. That was how evolution proceeded. Those with an advantage leading up to reproductive age passed on their genes, so humans got stronger and faster and smarter.

Then we started getting so smart that our bodies didn’t have to evolve quite as quickly to keep up.

We stopped needing to be strong when machines were invented.

We stopped needing to be fast when chariots, buggies, bicycles, and cars were built.

We no longer had to hunt for food. Others created food in such surplus that certain populations would never want for it. We even manufactured cheap superfoods that were so calorically dense, the poorest among us ended up being the fattest.

Even battling your enemies can now be done largely with the push of a button.

We found a cure for pain. A cure for sleeplessness. A cure for emotional upset. Some cures were medical, and some were behavioral. A cigarette could cure nervousness. A trip to the mall could cure sadness. Eating could cure fear. Drinking could cure shyness.

And that’s all fine and dandy until you realize that we’re hard-wired to experience all of those so-called “negative” things.

A lot of people today, they like to ride roller coasters. As time goes on, roller coasters get bigger and faster. The logical explanation for this is that progress must march on, and a bigger and faster roller coaster is the next logical step, but I think it’s because as our lives become less and less genuine, we require bigger and bigger thrills to scare us, for just a moment, into feeling human again.

Horror films get more and more frightening for the same reason. Those stop-motion sequences of Japanese kids in movies like The Ring? Holy fuck. I don’t need an iPad anymore; all that matters is that you keep those things away from me. Or the breed of intensely grotesque movies that started with the likes of Hostel and Saw — nothing supernatural about those at all, just stuff that could actually happen via ordinary everyday evil. Those movies were huge hits because the more you can feel yourself as being there, being in it, the more you realize, for just a little while, that what your neighbor thinks of your car is irrelevant.

This is the society that embraced Fight Club.

This is a society that spawned real-life fight clubs.

We all go about it in different ways and succeed to different degrees, but every one of us has a part inside us that wants to feel discomfort, because it’s visceral. It’s human.

Remember what Agent Smith said in The Matrix?

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world, where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program; entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world, but I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. That perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrums kept trying to wake up from.

We’ll never create a utopia, because it’s impossible to define good without having bad to compare it to. There is no pleasure without pain. There is no Heaven without Hell.

The more we try to eliminate the negatives in life, the more we consequently eliminate the positives.

Modern society has tried very hard to be safe and secure, to keep us in the soft and protected center of our experience spectrum, and away from the perilous edges.

The problem is that the edges are where all of the really good stuff is.

Edgework

The way to expand your joy is by expanding your capacity for discomfort and failure.

We spend all our time trying to insulate ourselves from negative sensations and emotions, and we end up stunted on both ends. If the experience of modern life feels dim and muted to you, you’re not alone. We’re seeing the world through a protective wrapping. The reason people seek out extremes is so that they can, for once, truly experience something that they know is unblunted and real.

This is a legit sociological concept. It’s called “edgework.” (And thanks again to Julien Smith for introducing me to the concept.)

There are two sides to every coin. If you want to experience real emotion, you get the gamut. If you experience a level 8 emotion in one area, you get access to all emotions at level 8. And if you seek out a negative experience at level 8, you master it. Fear doesn’t blindside you because you went after it. Pain doesn’t overwhelm you because you went into it willingly, step by step. If you wanted to back off, you could have.

Whatever level of discomfort you reach, you reach deliberately. You’ve met the negative head-on, on your own terms. You own it, and you’ll own it forever.

And your world gets bigger. Your spectrum of experiences broadens in all directions — positive and negative. We don’t grow in a line. We grow in a sphere. If you master X, you get access to Y. That’s how it works.

We seek out edges so that we can reconnect with who we really are.

We are not averages and statistics.

We are not the upper, middle, or lower class.

We are not citizens, or constituents, or the governed.

We are not megaplex Christmas shoppers.

We are human.

Tick… tick… tick…

A few months ago, I wrote a post that part of me wishes I hadn’t written.

It was called “The Universe Doesn’t Give a Flying Fuck About You,” and it was exceedingly popular. It went viral and got me a lot of attention, and it might just be the best thing I’ve ever written. But it came with a price.

The price is that I didn’t just write it. I read every word of it, over and over and over and over. I lived it. And so now, every day, almost without exception, I’m hideously aware that the clock is ticking. We all get older. We never get younger. And we all know this, but think about it. If you’re 30, do you look back longingly on your 20s? Good. Because they’re over. They’re fucking OVER. You’ll never be there again. Never. This is also true of the age you are now. You have exactly one chance to enjoy it… and then it’s gone.

I guess my new intense awareness of time is a gift. I guess it means that I know not to sweat petty details or to waste time. A lot of people haven’t figured that out yet and continue to squander what few days, weeks, months, and years we’ve been given.

I just watched the movie In Time which, in spite of being a ripoff of Logan’s Run, was still pretty entertaining. In it, the currency is time. The more time you have, the longer you live. When you go broke, you don’t move into a box in an alley. You just die. And that’s a great premise for a sci-fi movie, where you could live each day in a terrifying struggle to earn a few more minutes or hours, but that’s how we live too. You could punch out tomorrow. Nobody knows.

Every day now, I wonder if I’m spending enough time with my family. If I’m having enough fun. If I’m enjoying my work, and if I’m making a difference. I feel like a man who’s been given a death sentence. I’m not kidding. Someone asks me to spend an hour doing something stupid and I resent it. That’s an hour I won’t get back.

What are you doing with the time you have?

Are you watching life through a protective bubble? Are you afraid to leave that bubble, to feel the true pain of effort, of exertion, of something that you’ve never dared to try before? And as you succumb to your fear of the unreal, do you have to settle for experiencing fake joy, fake excitement, fake victory?

Life isn’t meant to be lived through a filter. When you walk into pain and discomfort willingly, and you feel it, unblunted, you know you’re beyond the filter. You know you’re finally experiencing the real.

I don’t know about you, but if I only have so many years here (we’re all born with a terminal disease, after all), then I want to experience the real.

Don’t be stupid, but test your boundaries. Do what bothers you. Do some things that hurt. Let yourself be afraid, and uncomfortable, and at your limit. If you’re scared of something, dive in the next time you experience that fear and revel in it, sampling it like a rare delicacy. Look at everything you’ve been trying not to feel and say, “Let’s try this on for size.”

I don’t know about you, but I want to see what’s out there in the world. And within limits, within reason, I don’t mind if it hurts.

This past weekend, on Sunday, I participated in a half Ironman triathlon. For those of you unfamiliar with triathlon, that’s a 1.2 mile swim followed by a 56 mile bike ride followed by a half marathon run (13.1 miles).

I spent much of the previous day getting my stuff ready, crossing off checklists, and planning.

I got up at 4:30am.

I drove nearly 3 hours.

I set up, got into my wetsuit, and, at the signal, began two large laps around buoys in a cold, muddy lake.

I got out, swapped gear, and rode the first 18.6 mile loop on my bike.

And then, after completing the second loop, totally out of gas and nauseated, out of metabolic fuel but unable to make myself eat or drink anything, I decided that this event had beaten me.

I packed up my stuff, unceremoniously returned my timing chip (which hadn’t been working anyway, I found out), and walked back to my car several hours ahead of schedule.

After months of preparation, many, many hours of work, and a $130 entry fee, I’d failed.

Not. Fucking. Cool.

How to deal

The entire trip home, I alternately steamed, pondered, and tried to decide what to do next.

We all fail. I’ve written repeatedly about failure, and typically my advice is the same coachy-sounding stuff that, this time, wasn’t helping my mental state at all: Learn and adapt. Dust yourself off and get back on the horse. If it means something to you, don’t give up. But somehow this felt different. This wasn’t my normal breed of “try and see” failure. This was deeper. Somehow it was worse. I had to process it. I had to fight past my initial reaction (anger) and get at what was beneath it.

My situation around this bit of failure was, of course, unique to me, but the process is something that anyone can use. So hang in there, and maybe you’ll learn how to deal with something that’s been eating at you, too.

Failure sucks. And when we face it, our choices ultimately come down to two:

1. Try again.
2. Bail.

Sometimes trying again is appropriate. Sometimes quitting is appropriate. The trick is to figure out when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.

So here, in non-random order, are my six steps to processing and overcoming failure.

STEP 1: Determine the reasons for your failure.

You’ve got to know your enemy.

Why did you fail?

Answer that question. Be honest. This is no time to worry about looking like a jerk for making excuses. Go ahead and make excuses, but call them “reasons” instead. If you were sick, that’s a reason you might have failed at a physical endeavor. If you didn’t have enough money, that’s a reason a business might have flopped. If you simply weren’t in good enough shape to run a race, that’s probably the reason you didn’t win.

A “reason” becomes an “excuse” when you mentally claim victory in a magical, nonexistent world where the excuse didn’t get in your way and, as a result, you didn’t fail. We’re not doing that in this step. We’re admitting we failed, but figuring out why.

(Spoiler: Later on, you get to try again after the reason/excuse is eliminated… or you get to accept the failure regardless of the reason/excuse. You don’t get to say, “I failed because of X, so without X, I wouldn’t fail.” That’s claiming victory in fairy world. That’s where a reason becomes a bullshit excuse. Don’t do that. It’s a douchebag move.)

While you’re at it, go ahead and also list the reasons you felt like hell after failing. Knowing your emotional triggers will help you separate fact from gut reactions.

In my case, here are the reasons I believe I failed at my half Ironman:

1. I was riding the wrong kind of bike.
2. It was a really windy day.

Remember, I’m not making excuses here. I’m not saying, “I consider myself to have won this if I mentally eliminate the wind and give myself a better bike.” I’m simply analyzing the reasons I believe things went sour. If I don’t know these things, I can’t attempt to correct them.

See, 99.99% of people who do triathlons (especially the longer ones) use a road bike or a tri bike. I, because I’m new to the sport and not eager to spend $2k yet on a fancy-ass bike, decided to fit the hybrid bike I already owned with slick tires and use that. I knew I’d be slower, but I didn’t care about placing well… and besides, I’d trained on that bike for months.

What I hadn’t counted on was how bad a hybrid is in the wind, meaning that my two reasons for failure were working together synergistically. We had 20 MPH winds on the day of my tri, and sitting upright on a hybrid (instead of low on a road bike) was like putting a sail to the wind. Add to that the increased rolling friction and the extra weight and you’ve got a disaster. The people on road bikes were having a hard time, but I, on my hybrid, was being lapped on a 19-mile course. That’s a huge difference.

STEP 2: Imagine trying again while mentally removing the reasons for your failure, and determine your level of confidence under those revised conditions.

Still being careful not to cross the line between objective analysis and douchebaggy excuse-making, ask yourself, “If I changed or eliminated the things I just listed, do I think I could do it?”

You don’t get to tell people that you could do it. You only get to figure out how confident YOU feel that you could do it.

In my case, the answer to “Do I think I could do it on a better bike and/or with less wind?” was a big yes.

If you’re a big yes, begin working on convincing yourself.

I had three big reasons why I felt certain I could do it under those revised conditions:

1. Failing was a total surprise.
The biggest reason this failure hurt me so bad — much worse than the many failures I have regularly in the course of doing business — was because I didn’t see it coming. It honestly never occurred to me that I might fail. Mentally I was there.

And why was I so there mentally, you ask? Well…

2. I had done much harder workouts many times.
On Sunday, I dropped out after riding 37 miles. Combined with the swim, this meant that I was quitting after about 3.5 hours of effort. That’s a long time, but I’d done several workouts longer than 5 hours in recent weeks, including a 100-mile bike ride (on the hybrid bike!) that took me almost 7. I’d swum 1.2 miles several times. I’d ridden over 56 miles repeatedly. I’d done back-to-back “brick” workouts where I did one sport right after the other. All of this together made me feel like Sunday’s conditions of bike + wind + hills (did I forget to mention the hills?) were a sort of perfect storm of ineptitude that was unlikely to repeat itself.

3. I’d never quit before.
The worst part of all of this was I hadn’t been pulled off the course. I hadn’t sustained an injury. I simply became incapable of going further, and had had to make the conscious decision to throw in the towel. But as a convincing reason to move forward, this had punch because I have never before quit a long run or bike ride or any endurance activity because it was hard. I’ve quit if I’ve felt an injury, but never before due to fatigue. And the fact that it had never happened before in workouts up to 7 hours long meant that it wasn’t terribly likely to happen again as long as I was uninjured.

With all of my data gathered, my objective opinion (well, as objective as can be expected) was that given the right bike and at least reasonable winds, I could do it.

STEP 3: Determine if it’s worth trying again.

Seth Godin’s short book The Dip is all about knowing when and which endeavors to quit. Quitting isn’t bad in and of itself. Quitting things that matter because they’re hard is cowardly, but quitting pointless things that consume energy you could use better elsewhere is wise. You just need to know which applies to your situation.

My answer wasn’t straightforward. It involved asking a very hard question: Why do I do this stuff, anyway?

I didn’t hope to win. I didn’t think I’d ever get a medal, or a plaque. When I did an earlier, shorter triathlon with Joel Runyon, we hadn’t even paid attention to the closing ceremony. We just ate and left. I’m not in it for the glory, the fame, the money, or the adulation or respect.

This is still something I’m figuring out, but as near as I can tell, I do it because I want to find the edges of my own abilities. I want to know what it feels like to push until it’s uncomfortable, because I think that your life’s edges are where you learn what your life is all about.

Which meant, basically, that I was doing it to see if I could do it.

So if I knew I could do it, I could let myself off the hook and not actually repeat the half Ironman. But how can you know if you can do something you haven’t done? I could feel confident, yes. But I couldn’t KNOW.

I had two choices: Quit and be satisfied with not knowing, or remove the obstacles and try again… and know for sure, one way or the other.

The answer to this is simple. I want to know.

STEP 4: Decide.

The inelegant way to sum up this step is: Shit or get off the pot.

In other words, if you determine that you want to try again, book it and do it. If you decide to quit, make your peace with that decision and quit. Don’t stay in no-man’s land.

For me, I decided that I’m going to do it again, on my own if I have to. I don’t get to waffle. I get to find a date, get it together, and do it. Find out. Then let it go.

The worst thing you can do with a failure is to leave it hanging, undecided and unfinished, like an open wound. Either heal the arm or amputate it; don’t simply ignore it and let it fester. That’s what Heroin Bob did in SLC Punk, and you saw how much it fucked him up.

The following two steps apply only if you’ve decided to forge on and try again.

STEP 5: Remove the reasons for your failure.

In step 1, you listed the reasons for your failure. In this step, you get to mitigate, remove, lessen, and overcome those reasons.

Failed because you were out of shape? Get in shape.

Failed because you ran out of money? Get more money.

Failed because you went right when you should have gone left? Remember to go left.

In my case, I’d failed because I was using a heavy, upright hybrid bike with wide tires, and because it was an extremely windy day. Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I don’t think my physical capability was a damning factor.

Solution? Somehow, I need to get my hands on a proper road bike. Oh, and I want to be sure that I don’t reschedule my event during a hurricane.

STEP 6: Just do it.

Try again. Try version 2.0.

If you fail again, run through the steps again. Maybe you’ll want to try a third time, or maybe it simply isn’t worth it.

Each time, it’s up to you.

And me? I’m going to do my half Ironman again. Soon. I still don’t totally understand why this matters to me, but it does, and the cost at this point is low. Really, my only cost is the time it takes to try one more time, and in light of that, I’m not ready to stand up yet, after all this effort, and decide consciously to quit.

If I fail the next time, using a road bike on a less windy day, I’ll have to go through this process again and — without a bike or the wind to blame for my failure — will only be able to conclude that I’ve failed because it’s simply beyond me.

I hope that won’t happen. I don’t believe it will.

Wish me luck.

…

POSTSCRIPT

I wrote the above on Tuesday.

Wednesday night, I drove out to a bike shop an hour away and rented a road bike for $50.

Thursday, four days after my big failure, I tried again. I made my own half Ironman — an unofficial combination of 42 1/4 laps in a 25-yard pool, a 56-mile bike loop, and a 13.1 mile run loop — and I had another go at it.

It’s now Friday night, and I’ve just made final edits to the above and written this little P.S.

This time it didn’t beat me. And I feel much better.

One question people ask a lot when trying to start or improve their fledgling businesses — or when they’re generally trying to do anything epic — is, “But… what should I DO?”

Loosely translated, this usually means that they’re more than capable of getting all pumped up and inspired, but then just sort of sit there with that energy, unsure what to do with it. Imagine pulling back one of those matchbox cars so that it’s wound up tight and ready to fire off the minute you put it down… if only you knew where the racetrack was.

The root of this problem is that you want someone to tell you what to do. And while you can get advice and guidance and tips when setting out to do something amazing, nobody can tell you what to do because what you’re setting out to do, if it’s to matter and be remarkable, is new. Nobody has been there before — at least not coming from your exact situation and in the exact same way, with the exact same ideas and ambitions.

And what’s more, if you read this blog, you’re probably setting out to do your amazing thing in part because you don’t like other people telling you what to do. So you’ve set out to do your own thing, all the while looking back over your shoulder and asking, “Psst! How should I do my own thing?”

Let me explain.

You are on your own

Got that? Good, because it’s important.

There are two components to forward motion in anything awesome or interesting or truly worthwhile that you do.

The first component is nuts and bolts and even strategy, or what we commonly think of as knowledge. Knowledge is what you look to mentors for, or what you look up in books or courses. If you want to know how to replace a muffler on a 2010 Ford Fusion, there’s no point in stumbling through trial and error when you can simply look it up, or ask someone how to do it. If you want to know how to create a marketing campaign, someone who’s been there before can tell you, more or less, how to structure it.

The other component is intuition, which is the big-picture stuff. This is the stuff of blue-sky creation, of stepping out in faith with only an inkling (but without any real knowledge) of what’s going to happen next.

The existence of this second element, of intuition, means that in any worthwhile venture, nobody can tell you what to do. Nobody should tell you what to do. If the thing is yours, you have to figure it out. If you don’t figure it out, the thing isn’t yours, and you don’t get to claim any of the awesomeness that goes with it. If you don’t solve the puzzle, you don’t get to do the victory dance.

For example.

If you want to be an amazing parent, you can read books and talk to friends and watch Supernanny and hire a child psychologist to get a bevy of tools with which to deal with individual circumstances (your kid won’t eat; you wonder if he should get an allowance), but it’s then up to you to do the rest — to fill the gap between “knowing a lot of stuff” and the nebulous goal of “being an amazing parent.”

If you want to build a great small business, you can hire coaches to help you figure out individual strategies for how to attract more clients or how to handle customer service. If that business is online, you can hire people to handle the technology or you can learn it yourself. But nobody can tell you how to be the most engaging you that you can be. Nobody can totally teach you the fine art of pleasing clients. Nobody can, with any real degree of specificity, show you how to find a boundary out there and push against it until people react, and react in the way you’d like.

It’s tempting to say that people don’t realize this and that that’s why so many people are paralyzed in their efforts to do some of that epic shit we talk about, but I think most people do know it… and THAT is why they’re paralyzed.

There is no map

Working without a map, or a blueprint or a guide or an instruction manual, can be terrifying.

If you’ve ever tried to go against the grain enough to do something truly awesome or revolutionary (both of which are relative terms; small things that affect only you can be awesome and revolutionary), you already know that nobody can tell you what to do. And that’s fucked up and scary.

Stepping out and doing just about anything worthwhile is kind of like being a kid heading off to summer camp with a bunch of people you don’t know yet. You stand there in front of the camp bus, all nervous, and you look back over your shoulder and your mom or dad or whoever is standing there, urging you to go on, and you realize that if you’re going to go on your awesome camp adventure (or what you hope will be awesome; right now it’s scary as hell), that only you can step up onto that bus. You look back and ask what to do, knowing that it’s up to you but somehow hoping for one last instruction, one last bit of hand-holding, one last chance for someone else to take that next step with you or for you — but that’s all just delay tactics and hand-wringing. You know nobody can take that step for you. Bringing mom along to camp is not the way to create an epic summer. You have to do it on your own.

So many people on the verge of starting a business, writing a book, starting a movement, asking someone on a date, launching a product, coming out of the closet, breaking out of a bad relationship, leaving a job, starting a job, making a stand, questioning norms, or being who they truly are stand on the edge of the known, looking back at their friends, their mentors, their teachers, their reference materials, and societal standards and ask what they should do next.

And their friends, their mentors, their teachers, and the rest, if they’re good and positive, kind of nudge them forward, saying “Take the step.” But nobody can do it for you.

If something is new and awesome and worth doing — whether it’s moving from being an adequate parent to an excellent parent or whether it’s writing a blog post that puts you out there, raw, in uncharted and unexplored emotional territory — then it will require that you step into uncertainty.

If it’s not uncertain, it’s not amazing

Things that are predictable and known and plotted and mapped are not amazing.

I can tell you how to write Shakespeare. It’s easy. Go pick up Romeo and Juliet and copy it word for word.

But the problem is, Romeo and Juliet has been done. Shakespeare beat you to it, only it was amazing when he did it because nobody showed him how.

Or maybe you’d like to invent the iPhone.

Sure thing. Somewhere online, I’m sure someone can show you exactly how to do that, to recreate the iPhone piece by piece, but it’ll be about as amazing as building a model airplane.

And if you’re thinking, “Well, that’s idiotic. Nobody would do that. What they’d want is to invent something like the iPhone, but better.”

But how do you do that? That version of the task, which might be amazing, isn’t certain. Nobody can show you how to do it, and you could fuck it up. Probably will, in fact, since Apple has a serious market lead on you at the moment.

People, books, the internet, and teachers of all kinds can give you the exact steps to make a cake, build a couch, give a technical report on a topic, set up a website, and wire your house for surround sound. But nobody can show you exactly how to improve on a cake, draft a new design for a new type of couch, analyze and deduce information about a topic, design a beautiful website, or create a truly theatrical experience in your home.

And I think this is what has always bugged me about the mentality that surrounds internet marketing. (It surrounds everything, but it’s really prominent here.) Potential customers and students want to believe that a guru can tell them exactly how to make money, and gurus and teachers of all kinds are really eager to agree that they can do exactly that.

“Turn this crank and the internet will shoot cash into your lap!”

“Here’s my surefire, no-brainer system to creating a business that will make you rich!”

Hell, just do a Google search for “make money online.” Go ahead. I’ll wait.

This is what I’ve had to wrestle with every time I’ve created a course. How do you explain that a course is full of great techniques and strategies and things to learn but that the final, magic piece is always intuition — and that it’s that final step that you must, by definition, devise and take on your own that turns a great plan into something with a shot at revolutionary success?

Meaning: Nothing I ever create will ever, ever, ever guarantee success. BY DEFINITION.

Everything I’ve created in the past few years has been missing one thing. Every time I’ve begun something, I’ve asked myself, “But what does this need to have in order to assure that someone has success with it?”

And the answer is always, “Magic fucking pixies.”

No advice, no course, no instruction, no bullshit “blueprint for guaranteed success” will ever work for someone who is unwilling to take their knowledge and then make that brave step out into the unknown and unknowable that is required.

This is what I was trying to say with my post promoting Question the Rules, about building a barn. The idea was that we could never give you a blueprint for your dream house, so we were instead trying to arm you with hammers, saws, and the knowledge of how to draft a blueprint.

The knowledge of how to draft your own fucking blueprint.

It’s why, when I originally wrote the sales page for my no-longer-available course Zero to Business, I included in the FAQ at the bottom the question, “Will this course make me rich?” and the answer “Absolutely not.” In bold.

Having a body of knowledge, advice, and mentorship — no matter how good it is — makes you this robot that is excellently equipped to respond in defined ways to defined stimuli. Only guts, bravery, and a general willingness to step into the unknown and unknowable can provide the necessary soul… the ghost in the machine.

Robots never do epic shit. Remember that.

If you’re never afraid, you’re fucked

Tony Robbins has a quote I really like. He says, “The quality of your life is in direct proportion to the amount of uncertainty you can comfortably live with.”

What this means is, the more often you aren’t sure what might happen next, the more epic and awesome and amazing and just plain wonderful your life will ultimately be.

So the question arises: Does this mean that you should blindly and stupidly step into things that you know nothing about, simply because you know nothing about them?

No, don’t be an idiot.

Remember knowledge, research, and strategy? Those are part of the equation too. You need to ask for advice. You need to learn stuff. You need to have teachers and coaches and mentors and knowledgeable friends. You need to research, and experiment, and read.

But then the next step — the big, scary, next step out into what’s never been done before in your world — is up to you.

If you don’t take the step and don’t feel the uncertainty that comes with it, you’re doomed to a I-say-jump-and-you-say-how-high kind of a life. You’re doomed to forever fill in paint-by-numbers instead of painting masterpieces. You’re doomed forever to regurgitate what has been done before, to mindlessly repeat the past.

The world of the known, the step-by-step, is stale. It’s been done. If you forever want someone to give you the next step, you’re forever in need of someone to tell you what to do. And if someone is forever telling you exactly what to do, what you do will forever be unremarkable.

The world of the uncertain is the fog of all possibilities. Anything can happen when you are uncertain — yes, including total failure. But if you never step into the uncertainty, you never have the possibility of evolutionary, awesome change, either. So you do your research. You hone your techniques. You plot your strategy as much as you’re able. You assess your chances and your readiness and your risk as much as you can, but then you have to leap.

Don’t worry. It’s worth it.

School starts today. Not for my son Austin, though.

I’m finishing writing this at 6am. At a little before 8am, the school bus is going to pull up in front of our house, and because we just got around to notifying the district that we’re not doing the school thing this year, the bus driver won’t know and will honk. I’ll be working. Austin will be asleep. The dogs will go nuts, because the dogs always seem to go nuts when such things happen, generally taking the attitude of, OH NO YOU DIDN’T JUST HONK IN FRONT OF THIS MOTHERFUCKING HOUSE, BITCH.

Then the bus will go away and sometime later Austin will wake up, and we’ll hang out and maybe watch a science show on TV or something. Afterward, we’ll do our normal Wednesday thing, which is going to my gym, then to Target to window-shop the new toys, then to Chipotle for lunch. He’ll spend the afternoon drawing and reading these old, used Mario Bros books I got for him on Amazon (or possibly browsing the Mario Bros wiki — noticing a trend here?). He may play a game with me (I’m working on both The Sims and Sim City), play outside, or opt for some actual Mario Bros on the Wii.

Then, around four in the afternoon, the bus will go past again. And when it does, we’re both going to laaaaaaugh at it. We’re going to think about the people who did what they were told today, and about how every day from here on out, thanks to a defiant little decision we’ve made, we’re going to have a hell of a lot more fun doing our own thing.

I wasn’t always like this.

I used to be a good boy. I really did.

When I was growing up, I always did what I was told. I followed all of the rules; I did well in school; I was home by curfew; I hung out with the other good, rule-abiding kids. I asked for a hall pass before going to the bathroom. I raised my hand before asking a question. I never got into any trouble, never went to the wrong parties, and never ingested the wrong substances.

I graduated first in my class, with a perfect 4.0 GPA. Gave a speech at commencement. Went to college and graduated from there summa cum laude, With Distinction. I wasn’t sure what to do when that was finished, but I did know that the more academic credentials a person got, the better and more fruitful his life would eventually be. So I applied for a grad school fellowship, got it, and began work on a Ph.D.

I followed all the rules that our society gives us, because that was clearly, demonstrably, indubitably the way to achieve a great and successful life. In high school, they even verified that I was on the right path by announcing that I and my friend Gretchen were “Most Likely to Succeed.” We wore suits and covered ourselves in money for the yearbook photo of that accolade, because there was going to be a lot of green in our bright futures.

Out of everyone, I was the most likely to succeed. Me. And you know what? Damn skippy. I’d earned it. Life is hard. You have to work to get what you want, and I was willing to work. I wasn’t going to be one of those lazy people who just kind of let life happen. I was going to make life happen.

So every step of the way, I said to the world, “What should I do?” and the world answered back, “Here’s what you’ve gotta do to have a rocking life… but dude, I should warn you, it’s fucking hard as motherfucking FUCK!” But then I gave this dismissive wave and I was like, “World, bro, it’s cool. I got this. I’m a hard worker. Consider it rocked.”

So I worked. And I worked. I had been given guidelines, so I proceded through them. The exact recipe for awesomeness, I followed it. The exact steps to take for a rockstar life, I took them.

But, to my surprise, a few years later I found myself in that Ph.D. program and was starting to lose my mind, and so I said, “World, dude, that path sucks.” The world said, “Okay, try this,” and I retooled my efforts and worked hard again, following the plan and the steps again, in a different direction this time, and found myself working hard for mediocre pay and mediocre rewards, doing mediocre work that bored me but that I felt I shouldn’t complain about. But still I’d say, “World, man, this is hardly the high life. When do the fireworks start?” And the world said, “Keep working.” And so I did.

Eventually, after more work and more waiting and more doing of the mediocre work that bored me but that I felt I shouldn’t complain about, something happened that wasn’t supposed to happen. Suddenly, as the economy tightened, all of my clients all began to fold or just stop using me. And what was worse, it happened at the same time as my extracurricular real estate investments began to eat me alive.

I stopped worrying about the rockstar life I was promised and decided that simply surviving would be pretty damn rockstar in the short term. I would have been happy simply treading water, but that didn’t happen. Instead, things got worse. Clients receded even more, then vanished. No new clients were forthcoming. The real estate thing got bad. Very bad. Values plummeted. Tenants didn’t pay, then destroyed the properties. The city, desperate for money, turned on its property owners and assessed more fees, more fines, more taxes. Someone would set the garbage out a few hours early and I’d get a bill for $150. The city would decide the grass was a tad too long on one of the postage-stamp-sized lots and would cut it for me, then send me a bill for $600 or more, no exaggeration. The spiral began.

I entered a few years of constant panic, always worried about what was going to happen next. It was terrible, and totally unanticipated. None of this was supposed to happen. None of this was in the plan. I couldn’t sleep. I was having panic attacks. I earned much less than I was spending, and there was no light at the end of the tunnel.

When I asked the world how long I could expect this to go on for, the world was like, “BWAAAAAHAHA… suck-er!”

Eventually, the banks decided they were tired of me and kindly asked for their properties back, so one by one, they went. It was a significant defeat. I’d always honored all of my commitments. I’d always paid what I owed. Now I was one of those guys, one of those deadbeats, one of the people who was part of the problem instead of part of the solution. Deal-breaker. Welcher. Pariah.

I waited for financial ruin. I waited to wake up on the street, in a box, begging for change. I waited for someone to show up on my doorstep and toss a bag over my head and carry me away, never to be seen again.

But nothing happened.

The sun rose. Flowers bloomed. People even continued to talk to me as if I weren’t a complete failure, as if they didn’t know or possibly — unthinkably — didn’t care.

Life went on.

I think that’s when I realized that it’s all bullshit.

The truth about rules

Rules, guidelines, and even laws are someone’s opinion about how things should be done. Nothing more.

For example: There is no absolute, must-happen decree that says that if someone steals, he must go to prison. Not in the way there’s an absolute, must-happen decree that says you can’t divide by zero or that for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction, anyway. Some people in our society believe that theft is wrong and that those who steal should go to prison, and right now those people are in the majority and have the means to enforce their opinion… but it’s still just an opinion.

Similarly, the predominant opinion right now is that marrying your cousin should not be allowed.

There’s a big consensus of opinion from those at the top that says that if you make X dollars, you must pay Y dollars in taxes.

If the crosswalk light says “Don’t Walk,” the currently stated, recorded, and sporadically enforced opinion is that you shouldn’t cross the street even if there are no cars coming. Same deal with red lights on deserted roads at 3am.

During Lent, Catholics have the opinion that members of their faith aren’t allowed to eat meat on Fridays.

We used to fuck with our Catholic roommate during Lent, trying to determine exactly how specific God’s opinion was about that one. What if you ate something that you didn’t know contained meat? What if you were driving east at 11:30pm and unknowingly crossed into a new time zone right before biting into a cheeseburger? During an airline flight, did God go by departure time, arrival time, or local time when determining the Hell- or Heavenbound nature of your meals?

“What if you’re a butcher,” I remember saying, “and you’re slicing up a side of beef on Friday when a stray bit of flesh becomes airborne and lodges itself in your throat. You begin to choke. You can’t cough it up, but you could swallow it and save your life. What then, when your life is at stake?”

Ridiculous? Sacrilegious? Okay, here’s another:

What if you steal a car… but then sell it to a chop shop and use the money to buy a heart transplant for a kid who was days from death and had no other options?

What if you kill a man who was plotting to shoot up a McDonald’s? What if you commit one murder to prevent a dozen murders?

The “obviously correct” judgment of the law starts to sound more and more like an opinion when a new variable is introduced, doesn’t it?

And okay, these “what if this?” exercises may feel like cerebral game play, but you don’t even need to look to extreme examples to see the tenuous, opinion-based nature of laws. Abortion. Gay marriage. Determining fair use in a copyright infringement case. Every time a law is applied, it is applied as a matter of opinion.

And those are the laws — the biggest and baddest rules we have. So think about the littler rules. Club rules. Social standards. Values. “The way things are normally done.”

Opinions, every one. Yet we live our lives as if they’re immutable truths.

Change the game

Conform to a rule, and good things don’t happen so much as the system plods along, undisturbed. Break one, and you’ll get a reaction. If it’s a big rule, the reaction is big: Arrest. Scorn. Excommunication from the church. If it’s a small rule, the reaction will be small: Criticism. Funny looks. Or simply anticipation of a response that turns out to be nothing at all.

Stimulus, response. That’s all rule-following and rule-breaking — or conformity and nonconformity — is.

As the punk rock thinkers in Operation Ivy once said, “Success is obedience to a structured way of life.”

“Success” means nothing more than playing a certain game well enough to receive whatever high accolades exist within that game. The problem with my early attempts at following “the usual rules” to achieve “the usual success” was that those weren’t the rewards I wanted.

I wanted a different kind of success. Freedom. Happiness. And yes, some money to make the way a bit more interesting. Different rewards, different game. Meaning I’d have to play by different rules — applying different stimuli in order to receive a different response.

The second half of that Operation Ivy quote is, “You can’t ignore the structure because we’re all within its sight.” And it works because it’s a good rhyme, but also because we live in the world of the “normal” — something which I’ll attack in a bit if you’ll hang in there with me — as a people who are not homogeneously normal. Yet the normal world has its rules, and it wants everyone to play by them. And so it tries to enforce them, and it’s up to you to see the system, to recognize that its structure is just opinion, and to act accordingly.

In other words, you can’t ignore the structure… but you can weigh it, measure it, and decide just how disobedient you can get away with being.

You choose

I’m not an anarchist. I’m glad there are laws in place that will prevent people from killing me and taking all of my stuff. I think our society needs order. It needs structure. But it’s wrong to assume that every guideline that rises out of a structured society is right for every person in it. I wouldn’t choose to break many laws, but I would and do choose to not buy into a lot of this world’s bullshit.

Case in point.

The numbers are growing, but our choice to homeschool our son is still an oddity. Unschooling, as a type of homeschooling, is even odder. All of our neighbors send their kids to school. All of Austin’s friends from Kindergarten and daycare before that are going to school. All of my relatives’ kids go to school, and so do the kids of all of my own high school friends. And when we tell any of those people that we’re homeschooling, they assume we’re doing it with textbooks and exercises and chalkboards and worksheets, not games and regular books and discussions and field trips.

Without question, we’re weird in this choice.

And that was a concern for Robin when we first started thinking about this whole homeschooling thing. She knew homeschool kids growing up, and they were always weird.

My response was: “Robin… we’re weird.”

I mean, you read this blog, right? The fact that neither Robin nor I have normal jobs is just the tip of the iceberg. I’m fucking WACKO.

But that’s really not entirely fair. “Weird” sounds bad, but it actually just means that something is outside of the normal nine dots. If the majority does one thing, the outliers who do something else are “weird.”

“Normal” is a consensus, nothing more.

If tomorrow, ninety percent of the world’s population started scooting around on its collective asses while wearing dead raccoons as hats, people who walked on two feet and were visibly raccoonless would be called “weird.”

So before I decide if it’s a problem that my kids may be weird, I have to know what we’re comparing that to. I have to ask what’s normal.

It’s pretty “normal” nowadays for 13-year olds to text each other sex photos. Not everyone’s doing it, but it’s not at all unusual. And come to think of it, 16-year-old virgins are really considered a rarity. Sure, there’s still a lot of them, but usually they take shit for it.

Kids lose their innocence and naiveté early.

Teenagers are difficult and argue with their parents.

Kids party. Kids drink. Kids screw. Kids get into trouble. And I know what you’re thinking: Can’t fight human nature. Kids will be kids, right? Can’t stop it. It’s how they are. It’s totally and completely… normal.

Ah. Ding ding.

I had a good relationship with my parents (and even teachers!) all through my teen years. I didn’t drink. I was totally naive; I once reflected that there were no drugs in our school and whoever I said it to looked at me like I had two heads because it was so ridiculous that I’d missed it.

I was so…. non-normal.

Normal. Ugh.

Normal. Awesome, revered, unassailable and celebrated normal. As if the way we’ve stumbled into living is the way things should be because it’s what everyone has always done. As if the well-traveled path is the best path. As if social proof is an unquestioned and absolute good; as if the fact that five hundred people have used this plumber over that one means that the first is the best. As if doing what the guy in front of you did — which is what the guy in front of him, did which is what the guy in front of him did — is a good strategy.

They’ve done experiments, where a few people will stand in line in front of a door that leads into a building like a post office or a grocery store. The door can be a side door or a back door — an illogical line in an illogical place. But what happens? People stand at the back of the line. And as the line gets longer, more people will stand in it. They could be standing in front of a locked door to a storeroom and they’ll wait for hours, but nobody asks why. People just conform. They figure that if there’s a line, everyone in front of them must know something they don’t.

Mindless conformity is what turns us from humans into sheep.

People have been beaten to death in front of crowds that could easily overtake the attacker. The bigger the crowd, the more likely it is that nobody will intervene. The principle is called “diffusion of responsibility,” and boils down to the pressure for conformity overwhelming the need to act. Any guilt over not acting is shared between the people not acting. You didn’t stand by and watch someone get killed, after all. It was a crowd of 1000. You only stood around to the tune of 0.1% of the incident as a whole.

If your friends jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you jump too?

Why do we look to everyone else to see what to do? Why don’t we understand that they’re all as lost and scared as we are? Why do we look at a random consensus, shaped by opinions and powers that drift like dunes, as an absolute truth? If “normal” could change tomorrow, why are we such slaves to it? And where has “normal” gotten us, anyway?

We live in a society that can’t stop pollution or environmental destruction, that can’t raise educational standards, can’t stay healthy and non-obese, can’t balance a budget, has no sense of fiscal responsibility, is in an economic tailspin, and is rife with crime and murder and violence. Most people in this “normal” society of ours begin sitting still in a room for six to eight hours beginning in childhood. They continue that for twelve years and then begin sitting still in a different room for another forty years, at which point they hope to retire and sit still in a chair in front of the TV until they die. Most people prioritize other people’s demands and needs over their own and choose work over fun. Most people choose THINGS over HAPPINESS. Most people spend more time disliking what they’re doing than they spend enjoying themselves.

We work ourselves into a set of financial demands and spend our lives trying to maintain those demands. We’re trained to believe that if we’re having fun, we’re doing something wrong, and kids learn that it’s not cool to be kids, and that they should strive to be as adult as possible as early as possible. We live in a society where it’s strange to show too much joy, where we get love for our failures and are scorned if we’re too successful.

And all of this normality? It’s hereditary. It’s passed from generation to generation to generation, like an obscene and distorted game of Telephone.

If you’re black, you’re judged by the prejudices of generations that came before you. If you’re white, you’re scorned for the actions of your ancestors. If you’re a woman, you’re judged as less-than based on attributes that haven’t mattered since survival depended on the ability to throw a spear. We hate people from other countries because our governments are at war. We’re told X is bad — hate X. We’re told that Y is good — love and consume Y. Someone, somewhere, gives an opinion and we’re all expected to jump, to conform to that person’s view of the world.

All of us, every day, inherit problems we didn’t create. Motherfuckers get greedy with oil, and everything we buy gets a lot more expensive. Motherfuckers get uppity in another country, and we and our friends and family are expected to leave home to fight and die. Motherfuckers make management mistakes in distant offices, and the house of cards collapses, leaving everyone to scramble to make a living and feed our families. Motherfuckers botch a drilling operation in the ocean and fuck up the environment for the rest of us. Motherfuckers go crazy and shoot up a McDonald’s, or a bank, or a school. Motherfuckers do dumb shit, and we have to deal with it. Every day, we’re asked not just to take responsibility for our own actions, but for those of everyone around us. Every day, we’re asked to deal with problems we didn’t consent to create. We’re told to clean up messes we didn’t make. We’re told to toe the line in conditions we had no hand in.

Well FUCK. THAT. SHIT.

I’ll make up my own damn mind, thanks.

You have nobody

You’re on your own, baby. I’m sorry.

Being a good and reasonable person in a good and reasonable and awesome life has nothing to do with following rules. It has to do with assessing rules, and guidelines, and norms, and prejudices, and ways of doing things, and established procedures, and prerequisites, and prejudices, and suppositions, and paradigms, and doing what the Oracle in The Matrix advised one do in the absence of proof or instructions: To make up your own damn mind.

If you’re at least a somewhat rational human being, my guess is that you’re going to find most of the rules we have really do make sense. Don’t murder. Don’t steal. Don’t rape. Don’t beat people up. Don’t be an insufferable asshole.

But if you’re similarly rational, you’re going to realize that some of the rules and norms don’t feel as black and white to you. A few that I decided didn’t jibe: Everyone must be insured, so pay $1200 per month for it. Tattoos are for wackos and frat boys. Never renege on a past choice that is ruining your life.

You have nobody to look to when making these choices. Not in an absolute sense, anyway. Every person you know who has done something one way gives you a piece of data, not a decision. Look to your mentors, parents, friends, and people you respect for input if you must, but then compile that data and make a conscious decision. Ultimately, the choice is yours.

You make your own decisions, and you will face the consequences of those decisions. If you defy rules, sometimes the consequences are big. Sometimes they’re small. Sometimes, there are no consequences at all. And often, often, often, the consequences are not what you think they will be. Those things you think will end your life are not going to end your life.

You create your own reality. So create it already.

Disobey

I’ll proudly be weird, and show others how to do the same. I’ll proudly wave the flag of the minority. I’ll hold a book, hold a torch.

Give me your screw-ups, your freaks, your huddled masses yearning to be fucking awesome.

You don’t have to be an anarchist. Anarchy would suck. But you can look at the rules that you live by. You can look at the standards you’re keeping. You can see if you’re doing what you do because it’s always been done that way, and decide that’s an idiotic way to go through life. You can choose something better.

Tired of being an accountant and want to go to clown college? Fuck it. Be a clown.

Think your kid is suffocating in school? Fuck it. Take him out of school.

Bills killing you and keeping you from sleeping? Fuck it. Stop paying them and see what happens. Would you rather be busted down to a shitty apartment and enjoy your days, or live in an expensive house and hate your life?

Quit that stupid job. Learn that sport that enthralls you. Choose fun over work. Wear that ridiculous hat that you like. Take up ballet no matter what your contractor buddies say. Ask for the date. Commit too early. Do the idiotic. Follow your heart. Try the impossible. Do something crazy.

I live in this world, and I choose to follow most of its rules because I consciously choose not to face what would come from defying them. But I opt out of more and more, as my opting-out muscles grow.

Less stuff. Less TV. Less news and world events. Less bureaucracy. Less indoctrination. More freedom. More fun. More choice. More self-determination.

I live with the rest of you, and I love you guys, but you can’t choose for me any more than you’d want me to choose for you. I’m not ready to be Amish, but I’m going to make my own cocoon within this society as much as I can. My own personal bubble. Like normal society, with a few enhancements. Society 2.0.

There’s a quote that says, “If you can’t win the game, change the rules.”

So change some rules. Decide on your own game, the kind of game you might actually like to win.

And win it.