By the end of the week, I’ll finish the final draft of a novel I’ve been writing. It will then go to a few people who’ve agreed to give it a first read for me, and unless one of them says something very surprising, The Bialy Pimps will be for sale on Kindle by the end of the month.

But there’s more to this story. See, I wrote the first word of that novel on October 15th of 1999. For the past twelve years, my previous “final” draft has been sitting in the back of my closet, forgotten.

So in case you’re keeping score, here’s what happened:

Man writes novel.
Man shops novel around to literary agents, to no avail.
Man puts novel away for over a decade.

Then, in the middle of his busiest time, with a shit-ton of “brand-aligned,” “profit-generating,” and “strategically sound” projects on his plate that have absolutely zilch to do with fiction, man pulls novel out of closet and begins spending thirty hours or more a week working on it instead of on his more important stuff.

Why? Because this project matters to me, and because it doesn’t make sense to dogmatically follow any rules about how things “should” be done — including your own.

Question your assumptions

Here’s something we believe: Making money is important.

I’m not going to argue with that. I love money. I want more of it. If you feel you have too much money, go ahead and send it my way. I’ll give it a good home.

But the assumption that follows the belief that making money is important is that we should spend a lot of our time on what we know will make us money, and fit things that seem less likely to make a buck into whatever spare time remains.

I don’t buy it. Not this time, anyway.

I have no idea if this book (which is humor, by the way… think Catch-22* and you’ll be in the ballpark) will make me any money. I don’t care. Several things happened recently that created a perfect storm of disobedience, compelling me to work on a long-forgotten and less-than-lucrative project instead of creating products and writing sales copy, regardless of what it meant for business as I know it.

For one, I’d always wanted to write fiction, but I’d given up on it. When I graduated college, I was trained to be a geneticist but my dream was to be a novelist. Unfortunately, everyone knows that you can’t actually make a living as a novelist. A few lucky people win the publishing lottery, and everyone else has to settle for doing it as a hobby.

But a new medium recently came into play. Kindle. The Kindle revolution meant that authors could publish in a meaningful way (and for no cost) without getting the approval of agents or publishers. You still had to write quality and it wasn’t a magic fountain of cash, but you didn’t have to jump through everyone else’s hoops, either. So long, gatekeepers.

It just so happened that I’d been investigating and talking about Kindle for a while now . You know, coincidentally.

I knew from talking to my friend Sean Platt that thanks to said Kindle revolution, it’s now entirely possible to actually make part (or all) of your living writing fiction, even if you’re not Stephen King. Unthinkable!

And there was one more thing. With a decade’s distance from the first drafts of my novel and a hell of a lot of practice writing, I finally knew how to rewrite my book in a way that pleased me (pleased me a LOT, as it turned out) and make it feel ready to ship.

A perfect storm.

But there was one problem, and you can guess what it was.

Ridiculous.

I’m a business guy. A marketing guy. If you’re really generous, maybe I’m a “thought leader.”

What I’m not is a fiction writer. Not in the eyes of the internet, anyway.

It makes no sense for me to release a novel. Once I finish this one, it makes no sense for me to begin another, which I’m going to do. And it sure as hell didn’t make sense for me to push back some very relevant, very current tasks and spend six or eight hours a day working on a project that I hadn’t touched in twelve years.

Or did it?

I’ve mentioned how I’m okay with being abnormal because the usual definition of “normal” sucks. In the same way, I’m okay with doing stuff that doesn’t make sense because “making sense” is just someone’s opinion.

Who says that if you’re a writer, you shouldn’t write whatever strikes you, even if it’s a departure from your norm?

Who says that you shouldn’t follow where inspiration compels you to go?

Who says that you can’t be a novelist and… and whatever I am currently?

I don’t care if this book makes me any money, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it just might do so anyway. I’ve got a track record. I’ve got a network. I’ve got a readership. I understand marketing and promotion. And, now that I’m remembering how much I love writing fiction, I’m going to keep writing books and keep putting them out, which gives me more chances to hit the big dartboard. I have a sneaking suspicion that given persistence and patience, there’s no reason that book sales couldn’t eventually be a significant portion of my business, just as it is for not only J.A. Konrath, but also a hell of a lot of the people who comment on his blog. I’ve never heard of most of these people, and yet they’re making hundreds or thousands of sales each month. That’s paltry in the old world of book publishing, but it’s entirely livable with Kindle’s 70% author royalties.

Twelve years ago, I wanted to make my living as a fiction writer. After a twelve-year detour, I might actually be able to do that. But this way, this time, it would be even better than I’d imagined in my twenties. Back then, I’d have simply been a novelist. Today, I’m a blogger/business guy. And going forward, I can be both.

Maybe it doesn’t “make sense” for someone like me to write and publish a novel.

But I’m the one defining the terms here, and I say that ignoring all of the above simply because some rule says I shouldn’t mix fiction with business is the thing that wouldn’t make sense.

Question the rules

You may remember my course Question the Rules. Well, I’ve been planning a 2.0 release — adding new modules and new interviews, spiffing it up for the new 2012 kids — for months now, but never quite got around to it. I even did a new interview with Julien Smith for it this summer that’s absolutely amazing, but I’ve been sitting on it. The QTR 2.0 project just never felt very urgent. But recently, while working on this novel that it doesn’t make sense for me to be working on, all of that stuff about how arbitrary rules hold us back started to resurface in my head.

It suddenly started to feel urgent.

As the world and work continues to evolve, we need to look harder than ever at the rules that we follow, and decide if we should be following them at all.

2011 was a tough year for a lot of people. The economy still sucks. Everything is made in China. Companies are still laying people off. Many people still hate their jobs. People are still spending more of their time doing stuff that they don’t like than they spend doing stuff that they do like. Depression rates are climbing.

That’s “normal.” That’s what you get if you follow all of the rules.

And while I was working on my novel that doesn’t make sense, setting aside my logical and profitable projects because 1) I believe that I can be both “a business guy” and “a successful novelist” and 2) because I fucking felt like it, I figured now was the time to start talking again about doing things in unconventional ways.

Question the Rules, which has the lengthy but rather descriptive tagline “The nonconformist’s punk rock, DIY, nuts-and-bolts guide to creating the business and life you really want, starting with what you already have,” will launch in its 2.0 version next month.

Existing QTR members will simply get the new content for free. New folks will be able to get it all for a steep discount during the launch. And dude… the amount of content we have up there is just getting stupid. It’s going to be nearly 50 hours of assumption-challenging, life-changing information before I’m done, from a lot of the best minds in the business. (And in life, and in art, and in travel, etc.) PLUS a bunch of bonuses. It’s kind of ridiculous.

And you know what? Fuck it. Here’s a signup form, right in the middle of this post. I’m questioning the rule that says I should put it at the end. Go ahead and drop your email address in the box below if you want to know when QTR 2.0 launches, so that you can get it at launch-week prices:

Email:

Here’s what I think might be true.

I think that if you’re failing, it may be because you’re playing by rules that you don’t have to play by.

I think that if you think you can’t have what you want, there’s a decent chance that you’re not actually pursuing what you truly want. Once you do some introspection, you may find that your goals are closer than you think.

I think that even if you’ve never realized it before, the fact that you read this blog means that you are seriously punk rock. If you keep trying to follow the normal, non-punk way of doing things, you’re going to be frustrated and bored.

I think that if you’re unhappy with the hand that you’ve been dealt, you can reshuffle, or you can play it a different way. Are you holding a five and a two of different suits in the card game of life? Fuck it. Start playing a new game. Call a five/two off-suit a “Royal Awesome” and declare yourself the winner.

I think that even though there’s no reason for an internet marketing, business coach, thought leader kind of a guy to begin publishing novels, that I’m going to fucking do it anyway.

There are rules that it makes sense to follow, but only you can decide which ones they are.

* In case you’re actually paying enough attention to notice that I have described my book in the past as “zombies meet Fight Club,” that’s a different book. That’s the next one.

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.

Sometimes I run into people I haven’t seen since high school, or I meet someone new, and they ask me what it is that I do for a living. And so I tell them: I’m a blogger.

I used to pussy-foot around. I’d try to explain the substance of what it is I do (“I’m a writer.” “I’m a coach.” “I create online courses.”), but all of those things invite further inquiry, and eventually we end up getting into more questions — Who do you write for? What kind of people do you coach? What kind of courses? — and so I sigh and say what I start with today: “I’m a blogger.”

And that’s a shit answer, because it frustrates people.

You tell people that you’re a lawyer, and they get it. A little drawer opens in their mind and you go into it. Or you say you’re a paper salesman. Or a drill press operator. Or a social worker. People understand these things. They may not know the details, but they have a basic understanding of where a drill press operator fits and what he or she does. You operate a drill press. Probably in a big factory. You come home from work dirty, you probably earn X, and you’re likely in a union.

You tell people you’re a normal, predictable thing, and their brain gets all happy because it doesn’t have to do any more work. It’s like there’s a form in their mind that contains the essential information about all of your stats, and knowing your occupation populates that form from start to end in one fell swoop. They may not be right about the car you drive, but they can be confident that they’re close. If you’re a drill press operator and drive a new Mercedes and like opera, they’re going to be shocked, for instance. Or if you’re a banker and spend your weekends BMX racing.

You give people a convenient handle and they know what to do with you. But “blogger”? What the fuck is that?

When you tell people you’re a blogger, they don’t know how to populate the form. They don’t know where you go, so they can’t slot you into the mental box they have for you. You’re not neat and tidy. You become an open loop, a loose end in their mind. And people hate loose ends. Loose ends require mental energy. The brain likes to tag things with sweeping judgments — good, bad, happy, sad, fun, boring, tedious, difficult, easy — and to not worry about shades of gray.

(Imagine having a huge pile of receipts at tax time, and having a corresponding set of file folders that match up with where those expenses go on the tax forms. You sort through the entire pile of receipts, putting each one in place… but then there’s one big receipt left that doesn’t fit on any line. You’re going to need to call your accountant or maybe the IRS about this receipt. You aren’t even sure how to explain the receipt to them. Maybe you’ll have to drive down and show it to them, or contact the merchant on a 3-way call. Now: How much do you hate that receipt?)

If you tell people you’re a blogger, you become that receipt. Nobody knows where to put you, and how to profile you. What are your political views? How do you spend your free time? Are you fun and outrageous or boring? What are your kids probably like? What kind of house do you live in, and what kind of car do you drive? Do you even have a car, or are you one of those hippies who bikes everywhere?

Personally, I kind of enjoy confusing people, but if you spend enough time around people with orderly life descriptions and don’t know enough about your own field, you can start to feel that way to yourself. Where do you fit? What’s to be expected in “the blogging life” and what’s not? What’s working? What’s not working as well as it used to? Who are the others like you… and what are they like?

If you’d even consider telling people “I’m a blogger,” you’re probably used to being weird and you’re probably comfortable outside of the normal nine dots, but there’s a limit. If you’re totally out there on your own — and are out there on your own all the time — then things just gets harder and harder.

So how to do you deal?

Well, you meet others. You learn your craft. You treat blogging like a business instead of a hobby. Even if you never answer other people’s nagging questions (“How do you know what to write about?” “How do you make money?” “How do you build your traffic and keep people coming back?” “Are others like you making a living at this, and how are they doing it if so?”), you’ll at least know the answers for yourself.

You can learn those things by poking around online, but because I’m in charge of BlogWorld’s Virtual Ticket this year, I’m shamelessly going to suggest you register for a conference instead.

Yeah. I went there. But keep reading.

Ahem. You might have missed an important bulletin.

I suspect you might have missed my big announcement about becoming the head and the face (basically everything above the neck) of BlogWorld’s online program. And if you did miss it, it’s probably because I haven’t made a big deal about it, but that was dumb, because this is something that I’m really proud of and really excited about. Go ahead and give that announcement a read. I’ll wait.

See, if you tell people you’re a blogger, most people will ask what that means. You might not have figured out yet how to answer that question, and when it actually comes up for me, I do a lot of hemming and hawing too.

But if I were honest with these people, my answer would always be, “It means I do cool shit with cool people.”

That’s why I love my job: I’ve met a lot of cool people, and I do almost nothing that isn’t totally fucking awesome.

And how did I meet these cool people?

By going to conferences and learning my craft.

And what’s totally fucking awesome?

The BlogWorld Virtual Ticket.

You see where this is going.

Totally fucking awesome.

So how did all this awesomeness happen, you ask?

Well, as with any success, it started with irritating the right people.

About a year ago, I did something that pissed off BlogWorld Dave, BlogWorld Rick, and I’d guess also BlogWorld Deb. I didn’t mean to piss them off, but I was totally naive (that was my old slogan: TOTALLY FUCKING NAIVE) and made a faux pas that resulted in a few phone calls.

Ultimately, we came to an agreement wherein I wasn’t a total asshole and then nine months later, Rick says, “Hey, you’re doing some cool stuff and we’ve already spent time determining that you’re not a total asshole, so how about you kick the Virtual Ticket up a notch?” And I was like Bam! and Rick was like Awesome! and then we high-fived and rode sharks through hoops of fire.

This is how I met BlogWorld.

And my task about kicking it up a notch? That’s the fun part.

I’m not going to go through the entire Virtual Ticket sales pitch here because I did it so well here, but suffice to say that this isn’t your father’s virtual event. When we started working on the VT project (we = Jess and I; you know Jess from The Badass Project?), we basically went through this thought process:

Most online versions of live events end up being “the event on tape.”

If the BlogWorld Virtual Ticket was simply “BlogWorld on tape,” that would be TOTALLY FUCKING LAME… and remember, what we’re shooting for is TOTALLY FUCKING AWESOME. So there was a gap. I don’t want to work on lame shit, no matter how well it pays.

So we said, “How do we make it awesome?”

And we said, “We make it as much like ‘being there’ as possible.”

(In other words, providing the content of a live event is not enough. We had to provide the experience as well.)

And so we got all excited and said, “We can make it just like attending live!”

And then we corrected ourselves and said, “What are you, an idiot? No virtual event is like being there live, no matter how awesome it is.”

And then we got all mad about that and were like, “Don’t call us an idiot, idiot. We just meant that we can replicate a lot of the experience and that’ll be way cool.”

And then a fight ensued. Luckily, we won.

But the end result? I hope you’ll agree it’s totally fucking awesome.

Check this out, yo.

The Virtual Ticket already had content in spades. You get over 100 hours of recorded session content, and you have access to it for a full year. That’s the “BlogWorld on tape” part, and even though it wouldn’t be enough by itself in my opinion, it’s still an insane amount of material. What other info product has 100+ hours of professional sessions presented by the best minds in the business?

But then, on top of that, we added a ton of extras that will give you as much of the experience of BlogWorld as possible.

We’ve got:

• Live video from the conference hall floor (or quasi-live if the internet underperforms on us).
• Exclusive interviews with the bigwigs.
• Random behind-the-scenes footage, wherein I attempt to catch Sonia Simone in line at a Starbucks in an US Weekly style “Blogging stars: They’re just like us!” moment.
• Q&A with presenters via social media.
• Quasi-networking opportunities with other VT attendees through social media.
• Brief, on-the-spot interviews with every single presenter who isn’t able to outrun me.
• A host and MC for the whole event. (I propose myself as that host and MC, I accept, I congratulate myself.)

So yeah, I want you to sign up… but the reason you should is because it’s totally fucking awesome.

So, okay… brass tacks.

The price is $247. For 100+ hours of content and all that experience stuff I mentioned.

But in true internet marketing fashion, the price goes up $100 on Friday. Don’t ask me why we torture you like this. It’s just something we do, like playing checkers or setting fire to buildings. It’s a personality flaw or something.

So if you want in, best do it before Friday’s price hike.

Here’s the link. Click it.

If you went to BlogWorld live, it’d cost you thousands of dollars between travel and hotel and a pass. This is like 1/10th of what you might pay.

If you’ve thought, “I wish I could go to BlogWorld but I just can’t make it,” the Virtual Ticket your answer.

(“Answer to what?” you ask? Why, to the question, “What is totally fucking awesome and doesn’t smell like fish?” of course.)

Here’s the link again, because another thing we do on the internet is repeat links because we suspect you missed the one above or somehow feel that repeated exposure will weaken your resolve, like if we said, “C’mon, do it!” and you were like “Nah,” and so we said “C’mon” and this time you were like, “You make a good point” and then did what we wanted.

But if you want to sign up, I’d do it now, before the price goes up on Friday.

So… I hope to “see” you there.

(Oh, and if you’re going live, you’ll get an email in a week or two giving you the opportunity to add the Virtual Ticket to your registration for a stupidly cheap price. So you’re not out in the cold. Unless you live at the North Pole. And if you do, say, “Wassup?” to Santa for me.)

P.S: If you’re wondering why this post started with ruminations on being in an unclassifiable profession and ended with a pitch for a conference, I’m wondering the same thing. So I can’t answer your question. I started writing and this is how it came out. What… do you think I have a plan or something?

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.

For my August trial (bleeding into early September because I started late and because I’m all nonconformisty and stuff about things like trial start/stop dates), I limited myself to checking email twice per day.

Sounds simple, I know. So simple that it doesn’t feel worthy of a 30-day trial, even. Seems like it’s the kind of thing you just decide to do one day, like switch flavors of gum.

Well, it may seem that way, but this was a vital trial. More vital, even, than choosing gum flavors. And I’d just like to say one thing:

Everyone should do this. Immediately.

Email and internet fasting

What looked at first like a simple act of scheduling and discipline was actually something else entirely: It was a fast.

One of the reasons people fast is to find out what food means to them. When you fast, you start to realize that food is fuel first and foremost, and that all of the other things we attach to food are emotional hangers-on that have nothing to do with its real purpose.

You get popcorn when you see a movie because you’ve created an emotional hook between movies and popcorn and start to feel that joy comes from combining them.

Family meals come to mean bonding and love, especially in certain cultures.

Cookies or ice cream mean release from stress. And so on and so on.

A main reason for a lot of my trials has been to uncouple the true meaning of things from the emotional or social add-ons I’ve added to them. Most of the trials boil down to the question, “How much do I really need X?” When you fast, you find out just how much you truly NEED food, versus how much you’ve learned to WANT food. My quasi-minimalism trial was an attempt to clarify, in my own mind, just how much I NEEDED “stuff.” And this email trial was an attempt to clarify how much I NEEDED to monitor email, social media, and the internet in general.

So, for the past five weeks or so I’ve allowed myself to only check in on my various communication addictions twice per day. If you want to know the rules I set for myself and my reasons for doing this, they’re here, but the following are what I learned from my trial… and it’s some game-changing stuff as far as I’m concerned:

1. I was truly addicted to checking email and social media.

I’m not qualified, medically, to explain the psychology and physiology of addiction, but I think I’m qualified enough to recognize it in myself when I feel it.

During the first days, I felt itchy and nervous about not checking in on email, worried that I was missing something by not monitoring things more diligently. But even more than that, I simply wanted the activity. It felt like how quitting smokers say they want something to do with their hands in the absence of a cigarette.

The nervous feeling abated significantly after a few days, but this discovery alone was enough to make this trial a part of my life permanently. I don’t like the idea of being addicted to anything.

2. The vast, vast, vast majority of my email, social media, and internet activity seemed to be about distraction, procrastination, and the perceived need to fill my time — rather than actual accomplishment.

When I started checking my email twice a day, I found that I could get through that email — and Twitter, and Facebook, and the other online places I spend my time — in 45 minutes or an hour per day. I never tracked how much time I spent on it before, but I’d guess it was 3 hours per day or more… and I was still constantly behind and felt that I was never able to truly stay caught up.

So where did that time go? What did I cut out, if, during this trial, I was able to get through it in roughly a quarter of the time?

Answer: I cut out fluff. Distraction. Busywork. Totally and completely WASTED TIME.

I used email as a way of breaking up a harder task that I knew was important but that required concerted effort. “I’ve written a paragraph of this post,” I’d think. “Maybe I should check my email to see what came in.” And usually something fluffy would have come in, like a Remember the Milk reminder about running with my sister in the morning. So I’d note it and delete it, and then decide I might as well check Twitter while I was at it. And hey, speaking of running, I’d been getting curious about ultramarathons and wondered how you’d train for something like that, and so I’d do a few minutes of quick research.

Eventually, I’d return to my task. I’d write a few more paragraphs and then repeat my distraction as a reward.

In this manner, I’d finish a piece of writing in, say, five or six hours. Of that time, two hours might have been solid effort. One or two hours were distraction time, in which I didn’t even make serious headway on email but instead dealt only with the simplest messages and then got sidetracked. And the final one or two hours was in re-gaining my momentum — getting back on track with my writing after mentally careening off in the opposite direction.

But while I had my “no email or other internet distractions” rules in place, I couldn’t go there. So I’d write the piece straight through and finish in two hours.

That’s not an exaggeration. At all.

3. I realized I don’t actually like email as much as I thought I did.

This is where this trial really began to resemble a fast, where I truly found out what email meant to me, the way fasters often discover that food is fuel.

I’d always thought that I enjoyed email, and no wonder — I used it as a constant reprieve, a place I went to over and over and over again when what I was doing was difficult or unpleasant. Email and social media were vacation destinations I could visit whenever I wanted, for a quick escape.

Once email could no longer be that vacation, I realized that I don’t actually enjoy the “guts” of email… i.e., the part that is about reading and responding to messages, divorced from the emotional high of “taking a break” or “checking to see what good stuff has shown up.” Stripped to its utilitarian core, email became a chore rather than a fun vacation.

Now, don’t get me wrong… I do enjoy communicating with people and shooting the breeze, but I started to look at new messages in terms of the time they would take to reply to rather than as constant “time candy.” You know how sometimes your best friend will call, and you enjoy talking but know it’s going to take up a crapload of time if you go too deep or do it too often? That’s the basic idea.

4. I realized I had way, way more time than I thought I did.

This has been a busy summer, and there have been days where I worked from 6-9am, did email from 9-9:30, and then accomplished absolutely nothing else. And yet, despite a number of days like this, I keep getting more and more important stuff done, and getting it done faster.

When you know how to make the best use of your time and prioritize your most important tasks and then can focus, totally uninterrupted, on those key tasks for only a few hours a day, it’s amazing what can happen.

With email confined to specific focused times and removed as a distraction, I began to realize that I could probably consistently run my current business in only 4-5 hours a day.

And because I haven’t yet found more epic shit to fill that time that I didn’t know I had, I found myself using it in one of two ways: Sometimes I’d work on projects that had been back-burnered forever, and sometimes I’d simply play or read, either alone or with my kids.

So what does this mean to you?

It means you should do this. Seriously. For real. Honestly. Fo sho.

If you’re worried about missing important stuff, ask those likely to bring you key stuff to call you or text you when something is red-hot instead of emailing. Start using a good appointment calendar (Google’s calendar and others will alert you to upcoming events with popups). Don’t “keep your to-do list in your inbox,” which is one of Charlie Gilkey‘s pet peeves; instead, write one on paper for the day or use something free like Nozbe.

Remove your email and social media shortcuts from the desktop of your smartphone so that you’d have to dig for those applications if you wanted to use them. Close mail windows in your internet browser or on your computer, and force yourself to find and open the required windows or apps each time you want to use them. Put obstacles in your own way.

Batch email and social media. Do it, but do it only during certain times and do it all at once.

For at least a while — for as long as it takes you to learn this lesson — make rules for yourself about when is and is not an appropriate time to check email. Stick to these rules. You’ll find yourself saying things like, “Well, I can’t check email… so I might as well finish this project” or even delightfully indulgent things like “If I’m not allowed to check Twitter or browse time-waster blogs, I guess I might as well go play Rock Band.”

You will not regret this. Give it a shot and let me know what you find out.

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.

NOTE: This is the fifth in a series of six 30-day trials I promised to do in 2011. Don’t get impatient if you just read the title and want to know how to have a crapload more time. I get to that at the end. What are you, anti-suspense? I’m trying to be a compelling writer here. 

—

When it first occurred to me to do some sort of an “unplugging from the internet” trial, my first thought was that it was a totally unworthy trial.

I mean, look at the string I have going here. For my first trial, I played with the essential biological need for sleep. My second trial was a radical change in diet. The third (releasing resistance) wasn’t terribly mind-blowing, but the fourth, on quasi-minimalism, was a hell of a thing and forced me to flat-out get rid of 310 of the things I owned.

So when I thought, “Maybe I’ll force myself to only check email once or twice a day,” I figured that I was being a huge pussy. I mean, there’s nothing to that. I’m not doing without the internet. I’m not doing without anything. I’m not forging a new skill or breaking a paradigm. I’m hardly being epic. I’m just… being slightly less neurotic.

But as time wore on and I thought about it more, I realized how afraid I was of actually doing this trial. I started to notice how often I pop into my office just to check my email. I realized how much time I spend distracting myself by opening gMail and closing it again, having accomplished nothing. When I’m out doing errands, it struck me just how often I pulled out my phone to check first one email account, then the other, then Twitter. And then, when everyone started having wet dreams about Google+, I added that to my set of browser tabs and to my phone too, despite the fact that I didn’t give a shit about it and still don’t. Why? Because it was one more thing to check in on, and one more way to distract myself.

I’ve heard theories about email and social media being addictive, and actually triggering an endorphin response in the brain. I have no idea if it’s true. But if it is, I’m no longer feeling the high. You know how they say that addicts eventually stop trying to get a rush from their drug of choice and instead have to use simply to feel normal? Yeah. I can relate to that.

As I started to think more and more about this “unworthy” trial, I saw how obvious it was that I use “checking in” as a way to deal with stress. Having a bad day? Check email more often, because email sometimes brings good news. Feeling beaten? Maybe there are some new @ replies on Twitter that will give me a hit of love. During periods of waiting, it gets even worse. For the past few weeks, I’ve been waiting to hear about something that really excites me. Each time I’d check email, I’d get a burst of anticipation followed by a little downer when nothing cool had arrived.

Checking email and social networks compulsively is, for me and I imagine for a lot of you, a way of willing something to happen. When I was waiting for my news, I thought on some level that the more often I checked in, the more I was helping it to happen faster. I’ve known people who get slow on business, and so they will business to come their way by constantly checking to see if any is arriving.

We’re not stupid. We know that if some kind of good news is to come, it’s going to come no matter how often we check to see if it’s arrived. And if we’re awaiting possible bad news, we know that it’s going to come whether we know it the second it’s knowable or not. But that’s not how we act. We act like rats pressing buttons in a laboratory, to get a reward.

This trial may not sound impressive, but it scares the bejesus out of me, and I seriously wonder if I can do it.

Some people try to quit smoking. This… this technology… is my cigarette.

The plan

I’ve decided that starting next Monday and continuing through September 8, I’m going to only check email and social networks twice a day. (August 8 is the day that my assistant Amy comes back from vacation, and I’ll be able to let go more easily if I know someone is kind of keeping an eye on things.)

In the meantime, I’m making preparations. What are my fears and neuroses, and how can I address them? How can I make sure I don’t cheat? How will I make sure that the right things get done at the right times?

Here’s some of the thoughts I’ve come up with:

Q: Will less work get done?

A: No way. I’m sure that much, much more will get done. The excess time I spend answering emails and dealing with email stuff doesn’t make my business better or make profits richer any more than looking at your car’s gas gauge makes the tank fuller. It’s busywork in the truest sense of the term. It distracts me from writing and doing other important things.

Q: Will my service levels and communications suffer?

A: I seriously doubt it. This is a sad world if someone who emails me with even a relatively pressing matter can’t wait a few hours for a response. And let’s not forget that my old habits didn’t have me answering emails in a timely way anyway. “Hard” emails still sat in my inbox for days. All I’d do when checking in frequently was to handle the “easy” emails that required only a very fast (and usually unimportant) response and to weed out all of the junk. But somehow, deleting reminder emails and archiving things that didn’t require action felt good, as if I were cleaning up a mess on the floor. Chances are that I’ll respond slower to unimportant email, but will actually respond faster to the things that matter.

Q: How can I make sure I don’t miss anything vital?

A: Email has always been my home base. Because I check it so compulsively, I know I won’t miss anything that goes into it. Having reminders of timely events emailed to me is akin to having a jester jump on my desk and shout things at me. I wasn’t going to NOT see something in my email. Because of that, I’ve always counted on Google Calendar email notifications and Remember the Milk email reminders to keep me on top of things. So, to prep for this trial, I’ve removed super-timely reminders from Remember the Milk and placed them into Google Calendar. I’ve changed the calendar notifications from emails to pop-ups, so as long as I’m in front of my computer or phone, I’ll know when an appointment is coming up.

Q: How will I plan?

A: Charlie would kill me, but lately I’ve fallen into one of his pet peeves, which is to keep at least part of my to-do list in my inbox. Now, I do use a system that helps me stay on top of to-do’s, keeps my eyes on the prize, and keeps me very productive, but thanks to entropy, we all slip. I slipped into email. With things like my reminders going to email, I have in part relied on email access to keep me on task. So, I’m simply changing that and reinforcing my other planning methods, and simply being more conscious about what needs to be done, using methods that work offline.

Q: How can I make sure I won’t cheat?

A: I’m not a willful cheater at anything, so the only cheating I’d do will come out of habit. So, I’m putting some roadblocks between me and my habits. I have a gMail, Twitter, and Google+ icon on my phone’s desktop, so I’m removing them, meaning that I’ll have to dig through the applications to check any of the three — something I hope will kick me in the teeth with its obvious cheating nature. I need a web browser often for my work, because I work on my own site and on other people’s sites, as well as do other online stuff. So I’ve closed all of the gMail and social network tabs in Chrome, along with a few other time-wasters. (Remember this post? The Facebook “share” buttons across the internet seem to be broken, so if you want to know how many times something has been shared, there’s a URL you can use to check it manually. That post has been a major sharing whore, and I’m obsessed with the numbers. As of yesterday, it had been shared on Facebook almost 2300 times. Leaving that tab open is an invitation to refresh every time I go online for anything. Ditto several affiliate tracking consoles I like to refresh often in an effort to magically make more commissions appear.)

The rules

Here’s the way this is going to go down:

1. Twice (and only twice) each day, I’m going to check and respond to and/or deal with email. This will happen at approximately 10am and 5pm.

2. I will not check email first thing in the morning. I usually get up at 6am, so this means that I’ll put in 2-3 hours of solid “important” work before checking email and then will take some time to do my morning stuff and play with the kids. The “no first-thing email” rule trumps the rough email-checking schedule. EX: If I sleep in until 10 for some reason, email has to wait until noon or later.

3. Email-checking is email-checking. If I check it on my phone at a red light in the car, that’s my check, and I can’t then do email on my laptop when I get home. The one exception to this rule is if I know I have a drive ahead and want to respond to emails using this awesome but sometimes hilarious service I’ve started using called Voice on the Go. Using VotG requires a few minutes of pre-screening and prep to ensure that I’m not listening to receipts or blog comments during my whole drive. In that case, I’ll allow myself just those few minutes on my laptop before my drive, and the drive and voice transcriptions are my actual check.

4. I’m going to tentatively allow myself to post to social media from my phone only. Because this could be a slippery slope, I may yank this one if it becomes a problem, but for now I’m going to let myself tweet and post to Facebook from my phone pretty much whenever as long as I don’t check my replies on either. The reason for this is because social media is at least a little asynchronous, meaning that I’m unlikely to ever talk to anyone if I only use it twice a day. I’d tweet and someone would reply 5 minutes later, but I wouldn’t see the reply until half a day later. And you know Twitter… when someone responds to an hours-old tweet, hell opens up or something. It’s odd. But I’m only doing this from my phone. Having a browser tab open is too dangerous.

5. I’ve told (or will tell) the people who may legitimately need to get ahold of me in a timely manner to call or text me rather than emailing. There’s very little that can’t wait a handful of hours, but both Amy and Jess often need to ask me something or let me know something that shouldn’t wait. Also, because I’m asking Amy to keep a closer eye on my email than normal, she can let me know of anything red-hot that I might miss… not that there’s likely to be anything that red-hot.

That’s it. Those are the rules of the game.

The challenge

I’d like to invite you to do this with me (as long as you’re not Amy!)

If you’re reading this blog, then chances are excellent that you’re a modern, electronically connected person. Few casual internet users read blogs, and even fewer read nichey, sweary blogs like this one. I’d bet that you have played with Twitter or are possibly on there all the time. I’d bet you’re on Facebook. I’d bet that you have an email account you actually use, that people know to reach you at, and that you keep a close eye on. I’d bet, in short, that you do some of the compulsive stuff I do, too.

Once I really started paying attention to my email and social media habits, I realized how much time I waste DOING NOTHING. I’m not working; it just seems like I’m working. I’m not accomplishing anything at my desk; I’m just sitting at my desk. Once I really started analyzing my habits, I realized that I never do something (and especially not anything important) from A to Z without stopping or being interrupted. I realized that even though I’ve always thought of myself as an easy-going, relaxed person, that my ability to truly relax had atrophied horribly. The other day, I was sitting at Barnes & Noble, reading something that had nothing whatsoever to do with work. It was, simply put, pure pleasure reading. And even after thinking through all of the above — even after deciding that I’m going to do this trial and I’m going to do it now — I was unable to leave my phone in my pocket or on the table for more than 10 minutes. I’m not at all kidding.

That bothers me. That bothers me a lot.

We spend so much of our time nowadays in anticipation, waiting for the next thing to happen. We need to be entertained all the time, so when things are quiet, we need to manufacture tasks. Check email. Post on Twitter. Sometimes it matters, but usually it doesn’t. The way I do it, probably 10% of it matters. The rest is just lost time.

And here’s something else.

Today, just to try it out, I’ve followed this schedule. I got up at 6, did some important writing, and didn’t check email or my social networks until 10. After I’d finished, I’ve made myself wait to check in again. It’s now 4:30, and when I finish this post, I’ll check email again.

What did I experience?

Well, I got a hell of a lot of important stuff done. But I also watched some nature shows with my son, did some reading, bought some presents for people, played The Sims, and had two leisurely meals with my family.

I realized: All that pretense and effort to feel busy was robbing me of HUGE amounts of time that I didn’t know I had.

I was totally out of sorts today… but in a good way. I kept wanting to check email, to see if there was more stuff I could add to my to-do list, but I couldn’t. So, I… well, hell, might as well write that thing I’ve been wanting to write. And when I was done, I’d want to check email, but I couldn’t. So, hell, I guess I can do this other thing. I guess I can read with Austin. It doesn’t seem right, but I guess I can play video games.

I’d trained myself to think that if I was pretending to work, that I was working. But the only thing that was being done was that I was throwing away all of my time.

Try saving that time, just to see what it’s like. Who knows? You might like it.

I figured I owed everyone an update on my 30-day trials.

I’ve been slow on reporting on these because it seems kind of self-centered whenever I report my findings, but hey, I guess you can learn from my experience. I know Vic Magary seems to have gotten a hell of a lot out of them.

Anyway, here’s the recap of the last few:

April: Releasing resistance

I wouldn’t say this one was a failure, but it felt totally neutral to me, almost as if it made no difference. And that’s a bit disappointing, because I really wanted it to “unstick” me on some things.

The idea was that I’d spend 30 minutes meditating or “releasing” in the Sedona Method style each day. So I did. I tried to tell myself to chill out, to stop caring if I achieved X result, to stop trying to beat my goals into submission.

The idea, I hoped, was that some of the things I’d previously tried to achieve by blunt force (“i.e. I will get my six pack back if I have to beat myself with a brick to do it!”) would start to happen on their own.

But that didn’t happen.

In general, I guess I kind of relaxed a little, but that was about it. No breakthroughs to report.

For what it’s worth, I know from past, sporadic, as-needed use, that this kind of “release” or meditation has really helped me untangle some emotional knots, and I think it’s a good stress-killer in general. I also have seen how roadblocks do sometimes disappear when you stop focusing so much on beating them and getting past them.

But this month, with focused, disciplined effort? It was kind of an anticlimax.

May: Quasi-minimalism

By contrast with April, May’s trial was a huge success.

During the month of May, I pledged to give away, throw away, sell, stop using, or generally get rid of 10 things a day. I wanted to test my attachment to “things,” and to see what it was possible to do without. And, because I suspected that I might be able to find even 310 things to part with easily, I wanted to discover just how much useless shit I had in my life.

The results were really, really interesting. Here’s a few things I found:

1. It was not at all hard to find 10 things a day to get rid of. Some days were actually total no-brainers: the days I got rid of 6 old phone books (who uses phone books nowadays anyway… let alone needs more than one?); the days I got rid of broken electronics that I had kept for some reason. Other days gave me a bit more pause but were still very easy.
2. Which led me to realize that, as Adam Baker once told me, I had a lot of crap. Just… crap. It wasn’t hard to get rid of because it was just garbage. It was clutter, with no real redeeming value. (Baker emailed me during the trial, and mentioned that his family found that this happened in stages. The first stage was easy — shedding superficial crap. Then you started to let go of some things that you kept for a reason, but that you realized served no purpose anymore. And each time, you’d go deeper, like peeling off the layers of an onion.)
3. As I cut a few services out of my life (cable TV, satellite radio, etc.) I found myself starting to think in terms of “worth it” with things I had to pay for. This is NOT the same thing as budgeting. When you budget, you try to spend less because you want to save money. What I found myself doing was weighing purchases to decide if it was truly worth it to me, or if I was on autopilot. It wasn’t about saving money; it was about being respectful to my money and only spending it on things that gave me value. So for instance, I bought a $6000 lawnmower a few years ago, but as expensive as it was, I’d still make the choice to buy it today because of the huge value it’s given me: I mow the lawn in under an hour instead of the nearly four hours it used to take me; I enjoy doing it; I get to spend more weekend time with my family. That’s value. But the $100/month on cable was not.
4. I could recover a bit of money from stuff I wasn’t using. So far, this money has been really minimal. For instance, I could sell DVDs for around $2-3 apiece to the local CD Exchange. That’s a big loss when you consider that most of those DVDs cost $12-$15, but considering that the DVDs were just sitting on my shelf getting zero use, it made sense.
5. I found myself wanting to get rid of stuff for the sheer sake of getting rid of it. I’d have a stack of books in the basement, and I’d pull out three books that were totally pointless and put them in a Goodwill pile. And it didn’t matter that I’d gotten rid of the books, because the remainder of the pile (often Robin’s books, which I didn’t feel I should get rid of for her) was still there and still taking up room. The pile was only a bit shorter, but I still wanted to get rid of the books. “Because it’s not in the way” no longer became a reason to keep something.
6. In some small way, I am coming more to appreciate the things I keep. Because more and more of my things are going through a conscious screening about whether they should stay or go, more and more of those things are coming to be where they are through deliberate, conscious choice. It’s like I’ve acquired them anew, and they’ve earned their place. BUT…
7. … I’m still a rank amateur at minimalism. Getting rid of 310 things in May didn’t make a dent in my pile of possessions, and I still have a ton of stuff — much of it pointless. I’m looking at the shelf in my office right now, and there are easily ten more things right there that should probably go, but which I haven’t graduated to being able to get rid of yet. They’re objects that serve no purpose other than to sit there and be looked at, but I can’t bring myself to toss them for sentimental reasons. And maybe that’s enough reason to keep them; I don’t know. For now, they stay. We’ll see if I change my mind. But at least I’m now aware of them, and am, for the moment, consciously deciding to keep them.

I didn’t make an exhaustive list of what I got rid of in May, but here’s some of the more interesting stuff:

DVDs
I used to hoard these. If I really liked a movie, that movie got the honor of being purchased on DVD so that I could add it to my collection. I also liked to collect TV series on DVD, and I even sometimes re-watched that series, thus successfully using the DVDs. However, it dawned on me that many of my favorites were available to stream off of Netflix at any time. Example: Futurama. The entirety of what I had on DVD was available for streaming, plus a handful of episodes I didn’t know existed. Others weren’t available to stream, but I could order the DVD off of Netflix and have it in a day or two. In the end, I decided to keep DVDs that: 1. I truly enjoyed and weren’t available on Netflix at all, or 2. That weren’t available to stream and I wouldn’t want to wait to order as a DVD from Netflix (i.e. movies that I watch often on impulse, like Constantine and 30 Days of Night). This reduced my collection substantially. I sold what I weeded out for maybe $60. Not much, but it was free money at this point.

Books
At one point, I decided I wanted to own all of Stephen King’s books. Why? There were only a few I ever re-read. It was collection for the sake of collection. I re-read The Shining frequently and know I’ll re-read the Dark Tower series, but I didn’t think From a Buick 8 was very good and I thought Gerald’s Game was total shit. Yet I was saving all of them. So I got rid of anything — Stephen King or otherwise — that I didn’t think I’d ever want to read again… and there were like 60-70 or so of those.

The expensive health club membership
I belonged to two gyms. One I go to several times weekly, and the other is the fancy-pants gym where Robin and I sometimes play tennis and racquetball, and where the whole family goes swimming. I also used to do gymnastics there. (If this is the first time you’ve heard about my gymnastics, don’t choke on your coffee. Yes, I am a 195-lb, 6-foot, 35-year-old man who decided he wanted to be able to do aerials and handsprings. And I can do them, too, so ha-ha!) Anyway, membership there was around $120/month. Why was I paying this? All we reliably used it for anymore was the pool. I found out that the rec center lets you purchase guest passes on an as-needed basis for whenever we wanted to swim, so the big club got the axe.

Satellite radio
I followed Howard Stern to Sirius, and I really liked listening to him. I also really liked the variety of not-usually-heard music on Sirius — particularly the Punk Channel on channel 29. But then Sirius decided to ditch the punk channel (Why? There was seldom a DJ they’d have to pay; a computer ran the channel. What could it be costing them, with their huge bandwidth and many channels?), and I started to realize that because Stern is uncensored, I could only listen when the kids weren’t in the car. Which was NEVER. I very seldom drive without one of my kids in the back… let alone for long enough to hear any appreciable portion of the show. I know I can stream Sirius on my computer or phone, but that doesn’t fit my way of doing things. I only listened in the car, so Sirius got the axe.

DirecTV
This is the one I’m most proud of. We turned off DirecTV and bought a Roku. If you’re not familiar with Roku, it’s a small box that hooks up to your TV and lets you play streaming content from the web, through services you subscribe to separately like Netflix and Hulu Plus. It has a simple remote and an intuitive interface, costs around $80, and sets up in just a few minutes. Most of our old favorites are available through one of the two services, and pretty much ALL of our old favorites are available if we include the possibility of getting DVDs from Netflix instead of just streaming. We can’t easily get local content like the news, but I abhor the news and haven’t watched it in years and am frankly delighted to have it out of our house. That said, there are drawbacks: Due to some obscure licensing issue, not all of the shows available through Hulu.com are available on Hulu Plus, like The Simpsons and one of our seasonal favorites, So You Think You Can Dance. Luckily, the only-slightly-inconvenient solution is to simply hook a laptop up to the TV and stream fullscreen that way. I LOVE this modification to our lives. It saved us almost $100 per month, and we’re now very deliberate about what we watch… i.e., because we can’t “flip around,” we only watch something if we actively choose to watch it — and watch it, by the way, usually totally commercial-free. As a side-effect, the TV is off more often because the inability to flip means you can’t simply “leave a channel on.”

Insurance
Did I say DirecTV was the one I was most proud of? Okay, I guess it’s actually this one that I’m most proud of. You can read about it here. Gross savings is around $1200/month, but even if I assume that I’ll have $500 per month in ongoing medical costs plus spread-out, once-in-a-while accident costs, that’s still a savings of $700/month. I’ll take it.

Landline phone (almost)
We decided we didn’t need landline phones, either, and tried to cancel ours. However, our ripoff phone company, Frontier, decided THE WEEK I CALLED THEM that they would no longer offer DSL service without an accompanying basic phone plan. They claim it’s for our own protection (the old “what if you need to call 911 and neither of your cell phones work and all of your neighbors are out of town and you can’t text or skype or email or shout at anyone to help you and YOU NEED A PHONE YOU STUPID FUCKER” excuse), but really it’s because too many people have figured out they don’t need landline phones and the company wants to screw you into paying for something you don’t need. We did manage to save some money on this one, but not as much as I had planned.

My car (okay, not really)
I didn’t get rid of my car, but I’ve gotten to thinking if it’s possible. We live in the sticks, so it’s unrealistic for us to go carless as many minimalists do. Even if we were willing and able to bike 45 minutes into town and somehow haul back ten bags of groceries, this is Ohio and winter makes errands like that even more fun for half of the year. However, we do have two cars – my sedan and a minivan. I started watching how often both cars were out of the garage at the same time, and realized it isn’t often… and that pretty much all of the times both cars were out, it wasn’t necessary. For instance, I often take my laptop and go to Panera on Mondays to get out of the house, and my mother-in-law watches the kids while Robin goes to work for one of the two days she does so. If we only had one car, I’d stay at home instead of going to Panera. And on Wednesdays, I currently go to the gym while Robin’s working her other day. If we had one car, I’d go to the gym another time, or work out at home. I’m not ready to ditch one of our cars quite yet, but I definitely think it’s possible.

Okay, so that’s one hell of a summary.

Suffice to say that the minimalism thing is something I’m continuing to work on and think about (I went down to getting rid of TWO things a day once June hit, though), and that while I see value in relaxing and releasing and meditating and chilling out, I didn’t get a huge result from making it a ritual.

So, okay. I’m done now.

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Note: I’ve done this before, and I’m doing it again. The below is something I sent to my list, but it’s an excellent topic for discussion so I’m posting it here too. Let’s discuss!

So I’ve had this concept stuck in my head recently.

(And it’s also super-relevant to just about everyone. Are you kind of stressed? Busy? Do you worry about things slipping through the cracks as you try to accomplish everything you want to or need to accomplish? Want better results in SOME area of your life? … Yeah, that’s pretty much all of us.)

Anyway, if you read my blog, you’ve seen said concept come out in a few blog posts recently, including the last one. And it’s essentially this:

We all strive to do better in business, in our relationships, in our health and fitness, in our families and/or marriages, and in a dozen other areas. And there’s too much to do. Too many different things to keep track of. We do our best to be “awesome” in each of those areas, but there are too many variables. Too many tasks. Too many loose ends.

There’s too much to do, and not enough time in the day.

• If we focus on money, we neglect fitness or family.
• If we devote time to fitness, something has to give… and we do things like miss time with the kids or forget Grandma’s birthday.
• If we devote a ton of time to the kids, we have less time for strategic business work, so that suffers.
• And if we try to be Superman or Superwoman and do it all, it’s too much. There’s not enough time. So, we totally stress out, miss sleep, and spend all of our time managing urgent priorities and demands, which has us pulling our hair out.

So we’re content to focus on one area and just acknowledge the sad “truth” that you can’t have it all.

You say, “Well, everyone gains weight as they get older. I just have to accept that.”

You say, “There was a time when I could have started my own business, but I guess I missed it.”

You say, “I wish I could meditate or volunteer, but I just don’t have the time.”

Sound familiar?

I think that “I don’t have time!” is the war cry of the modern era. (Some close seconds in terms of war cries are “I can’t right now” and “You can’t have it all.”)

What a load of crap.

LISTEN: You CAN have it all. You DO have time.

This is what I’ve been thinking about obsessively lately. We’re so self-limiting. We put barriers in our own way, stare at those barriers, and say, “Someone stopped me from getting what I want.”

YOU stopped YOURSELF from getting what you wanted.

YOU decided that you don’t have time, because everyone (including the people who have what you want) gets the same amount of time. Think about it: We all get 24 hours each and every day.

YOU decided to focus on some things and not others.

But if you approached life differently, you could focus on different things.

And if you knew what to do — if you had a system that you trusted that allowed you to set goals and to keep track of ALL of the loose ends in ALL areas of your life, then you could focus on what served you best. You could start moving toward what you want.

Luckily (enter Johnny with the solution!), this is what I’ve been teaching clients (and teaching myself) for years.

I normally say “systems” are crap, but when I’ve said that, I’ve been talking about bogus money-generating schemes. In life, you NEED a system. You NEED a way of organizing your priorities and planning your days and weeks.

You’ve heard the expression, right? “If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail.”

So you need a plan.

And in this case, I DO have a plan. I DO have a system. It’s done nothing short of revolutionize my life. I get to work at home, do what I love, connect with awesome people (like you!), spend a ton of time with my wife and kids, train for marathons and triathlons, and a dozen other things, all at once. And it’s all possible because I have a system to manage all of the areas of my life.

Aaaaaand (no surprise here), I’ve got a course for you that will teach you that system. I can help you create, implement, and follow through on that plan — a plan that encompasses all of the things you want to do, that addresses all of your demands, and that allows you to manage it all WITHOUT undue stress.

Now, you may have noticed my stuff is usually expensive. This course isn’t.

It’ll sell for somewhere between $70 and $97 eventually, but during its debut, it’s only $39.

That deserves some special text effects, I think.

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ONLY $39! HOLY CRAP!
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The course is called The Tao of Awesome: A Stress-Busting, To-Do-List-Destroying Guide to Kicking Ass in Your Life, Business, Finances, Relationships, Body, and Health.

It’s an email course, delivered twice weekly over a six-week period.

(I’m doing it this way because you’ll need to do stuff with me as you learn. Each email ends with a task, and each task gets you that much closer to Awesomeness. A “drip” approach gets you actually doing things instead of listening/reading passively.)

So… let’s get awesome!

Today’s post is about self-improvement.

But more specifically, it’s about marginal improvement. Small improvements. Progressive stuff; the kind you can actually see yourself doing.

It’s about forgetting about the big picture, “someday” goals you have, and forgetting about becoming the end-all, be-all as you go through your daily life.

Not forgetting them entirely, but forgetting them day-to-day, as you work and play and live.

Meaning: forget for just a moment about being great. Instead, let’s focus on getting better.

Why ambition is annoying

I’m still not where I want to be. Not ultimately.

And the thing is, I don’t actually think it’s possible to be one hundred percent, without question, indubitably satisfied where you are if you ever have a shot at being a whole and fully actualized person. Because an actualized person always strives, always looks for what could be better.

If your relationship with your spouse is good, you want to make it great. If it’s great, you want to make it outstanding.

If you’re in shape, you wish you were just a bit leaner, faster, stronger, whatever. You wish your ass was smaller. You wish your ass was bigger. Big guys want to be lean enough to have a six-pack and curse their slow metabolisms. Skinny guys want to pack on bulk and curse their fast metabolisms.

No matter where we are in just about any area of our lives, we wish that area of our lives was better. It’s human nature. So you’re at 98 out of a hundred? Well, what would it take to get to 99?

And if you don’t want to improve X area of your life, you want to improve Y. In fact, maybe you’d let X slide a bit in order to focus more on making Y better. And of course, once you do that, you’d want X better again, because settling for a trade-off is a crock of shit. Why can’t both X and Y be excellent?

Whether you’re a go-getter or a couch potato who pretends to want nothing, the truth is that we all wish we had more, or had it better. Things are never, across-the-board good enough.

So when I say I’m still not where I want to be, I mean it… but I think that nobody ultimately is. Everybody is always looking to improve something, which means that they’re trying to get somewhere else. (And this isn’t the same thing as not liking where you are, by the way. It’s about aspiring.)

Even people who are big on practicing acceptance and “going with the flow” ultimately always want to accept more, go with the flow better. Remember: silence, deliberate poverty, nonjudgment, and nonresistance are disciplines too. If you think they’re not something you have to work very hard at, try asking a monk.

For me, I’m trying very hard to move south, and it’s a lot harder than I’d hoped, so it’s taking longer than I wanted it to. I have a great lifestyle right now, but there are things about it I’d like to change that are taking some time to change. I haven’t gotten that six-pack back yet. And while my plan is to unschool my son next year for first grade, we still haven’t ironed out how that could work yet, either.

So no, I’m not where I want to be, and I doubt I’ll ever get to a stage where I say, “Okay, I’m finished. Nothing needs work here.”

Once you stop having a reason to strive for something, you’re kind of “done” in life and really don’t have much reason to keep on existing.

How to deal

So, try this:

1. Forgive yourself for wanting more than you currently have. Go ahead and be okay with wanting more money, better relationships with your kids, or to fit into those pants. It’s okay to want those things. It doesn’t mean you’re ungrateful for what you have now, or that the status quo necessarily sucks. It just means you’re human, and will always want more as long as you keep being human.
2. After giving yourself permission to be greedy and want more (I’m being facetious. It’s cool; be greedy), go ahead and start forgetting about the end result you want. Only: “forget” in a specific way. Make note of the goal, but then stop worrying about getting or having the goal and start worrying about moving closer to it.
3. Repeat. Forever.

Small steps

I once heard about a Japanese concept called “kaizen,” which Tony Robbins, in his imminently cheesy style (a style I like, by the way) bastardized into “CANI,” which stands for Constant And Neverending Improvement. And of course, “CANI” is a play on “I CAN,” which is so hokey that I’d rather not use it and would prefer to use “kaizen” instead, but “CANI” really sums it up better and we can all understand it.

Sigh.

So your objective each and every day is to Constantly And Neverendingly Improve. To, in some small way, get further down the path toward that idealized, fully and totally perfect version of your life and yourself.

Don’t worry about having the perfect business. Instead, concentrate on making your business BETTER — even if it’s just in some tiny way.

Stop worrying about being rich. If you want to be rich, begin working on ways to become RICHER — which, by the way, may mean doing things that won’t pay off for a while, but which are necessary to make cashflow BETTER in the long run.

Me, I want to move to North Carolina. There’s a lot of things that need to happen before we can make that move, but a few are preparing the house to sell, finding a house to buy (both of those are hard, by the way. We have unique needs on both ends of the move), and making a shitload of money or finding a loan workaround on the buy end because my credit totally sucks thanks to my real estate foibles of a few years ago.

So I can let it bother me that we’re not there yet or that it’s taking too long, or I can start heading down the road that will ultimately, eventually lead there. Robin’s halfway through painting the kitchen, which helps make the house more sellable. I’m working on new income streams. My in-laws are scouting properties, and every once in a while I make some calls, talk to a mortgage broker, or do other research.

Are we there yet? No. But we’re heading in that direction.

And that’s how I think you should approach everything. Find out where you want to be. Get a picture of it, and do some thinking on what it will take to get there. And then start moving in that direction. Forget arriving at the destination, because the destination is a mirage. By the time you get there, you’ll have thought of other things you want to do, other ways in which you wish life was better, and what used to be the finish line will disappear before you cross it.

Instead, ask yourself: Am I closer to my ideal life or goal than I was last year? Last month? Last week? Hell: yesterday?

And if the answer is “yes” most of the time, then you’re doing well.

The saying goes, “Life is a journey, not a destination,” so let’s plan and act accordingly. Stop beating yourself up over not arriving at the destination, and instead start making sure you’re making the right journey.
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