“Thank you my friend I have never met. […] I found your blog post “fuck the internet” on a day I was in a bad way.

[…] You know what the best part is? You didn’t even charge me a dime. Thank you so much. I could never have heard what you had to say if you were charging admission. I would be glad to pay you now but I’m currently broke. :) I’m going be doing real good real soon and I will help you out if you need it then.

I get a lot of emails from people, it’s true. But this one really hit home.

Some people I know charge $300 an hour for their time doing basically what I do on this site for free. I met a guy last week who charges $15,000 a year or something for mentoring a few people. I hear they’re very good at it too.

I actually could do these things. I know that I could because I kind of do already with some people that I know– I just do it for free– but I know that people would pay. Sometimes I’ll get an email going “are you coaching so-and-so? I can hear your voice coming out of his mouth,” and I’ll reply, “we talk every little while, yeah,” or “he reads my blog I think.” Not that I’m saying that I influence everyone with a voice like mine, not at all.

Anyway, I had a conversation with someone last week where they kind of hinted that I have “issues around money” or whatever (I’m paraphrasing) because I would rather get a great book out for free to 100,000 people than make a dollar or two per copy and sell 10% of that number. It’s the truth though, and I’m not sure it’s because I’m awkward about it, I just really believe that amazing stuff should be available for free. This is the internet, I figure you can charge if you want as long as you’re ok with competing with free.

I’m not making a secret out of the fact that I’m doing fine financially, and I understand that not everyone can experiment with this. That’s fine. But even if I had sold millions of books I would still probably give much of them away or find a way to give them away for free. I just think it’s the right thing to do.

Free worked for Paulo Coelho. He seeded torrents of his own work and it increased sales.

Free worked for Vice magazine– nobody would have paid for that– and now it’s ubiquitous.

Free worked for Angry Birds. Now people play it for more than 1 million hours per day.

But it’s not just about free. It’s more than that. Soon, it’s going to be GREAT + FREE.

And how in God’s name do you compete against that?

There’s something great about being asked to do your civic duty, either giving people directions or helping an old lady with her groceries. I have a feeling a lot of people like it. Yet in this society we are asked to do it less and less. This sense of duty and the muscle that accompany it are atrophying because we are rarely called upon to exercise it.

I think acting global, while still acting local, is possible and within reach for most people. They just have to shift their mindset when dealing with, for example, the web, and then shift again when dealing with a local merchant. The economics of each of those things is different, so your ethical compass should be different for each of them, too.

I have a feeling that the best models lie at the extremes of this line: very global, or very local. It’s just a feeling I have, though. Can’t support it– yet.

But in either place, global or local, you need to be a good neighbour. On the web it means to link to your sources, to ask permission, or to leave comments. In person it may mean picking up the mail when someone is out of town. There is a sense of duty in either one of these places.

As our sense of neighbourhoods change, our duties change. How is it changing for you?

If you’re looking for something new before you even begin, you may as well abandon the quest. You will probably fail.

Everyone has a voice now. Everyone has a camera, too. Every picture at every monument has been taken better by someone with better equipment. You’re screwed.

The picture itself is no longer interesting, because it has been taken already. Objectivity is not useful.

I just recently came face to face with the fact that almost everything I’ve ever done has been done better, before me, by someone else. Has this happened to you yet? If you ever do anything interesting, it will.

When it does, you will be faced with a moment of doubt that may crush you and prevent you from continuing– unless you have faced it before and seen that you can win.

But this fight is one that you can subvert and avoid entirely if you realize that the information is not what is interesting to most people– the story is.

The story is something that people can relate to. The subjective and personal is human. Human is relatable. Information is not.

The best storytellers are translators of information. They take an experience and create layers on top of it, like an onion, that get peeled and reveal deeper insight.

But the depths, of course, are dark. They are hard to map. They contain secret tunnels. They don’t reveal themselves to you instantly. They need time.

But time is not what most people have. They want quick and immediate insight. They want the information so they can move on.

Avoid the temptation to talk about information. Information is the realm in which the how-to rests, and the place where machines can easily replace humans.

If you want to stay valuable, you cannot stay where machines can replace you. The experience you provide has to be uniquely human.

But do you even know how to do that? If not, how will you learn?

You are born to go through puberty, reproduce, and die.

Exerting effort for any other purpose than producing more children is a deviation from the natural order. It’s against your programming.

Every push to improve yourself is an act of will against the universe.

So without effort, without willpower, you are just a shell for your genes.

How you behave, how you react to this, is up to you. Making safe decisions for yourself and your children is telling yourself (and them) that what’s important is to survive and reproduce for the next generation.

If you create unique experiences for yourself and your children, if you strongly deviate from the path, you are also creating someone unique, someone who can give back to the world in a singular and powerful way.

We need both kinds of people, of course. We can’t have all iconoclasts, all rebels, or all deviants.

Or can we?

As a child, you excelled at it. You snuck out at night, smoked when you weren’t supposed to, and made out with someone you weren’t supposed to.

None of this killed you. In fact, the more you disobeyed, the more interesting you became.

As time went on, your patterns became more rigid. You disobeyed less. You started “figuring things out.” You stopped falling and getting hurt, and started standing tall– perhaps a little too tall.

Disobedience, in the beginning, creates independence. But the later acts of disobedience that most of us perform don’t creating anything. They’re small and pathetic. They are useless acts of control performed to create an illusion of agency that no longer exists.

What you need now is a big act of disobedience.

You need to see how bad the consequences really are.

You need to see that you can live through it.

Whenever I’m in doubt and I don’t know where to turn, I turn to my idols, who never let me down: Brainiac, Two-Face, and Spongebob Squarepants.

Ok, just kidding about Squarepants. The rest is real though.

You know, until recently, if I were asked about my idols, I might have said someone like Marshall McLuhan, or maybe Hunter S. Thompson or something. Boring people. Real people.

Not any more. I have evolved. I now get my advice exclusively from imaginary criminal psychopaths.

It’s time you did the same. Here’s why.

What criminals get wrong

Let’s say a guy wants to rob a bank. He’s a normal guy like you or me. He doesn’t want to do a horrible job for 40 years, but he’s not qualified for anything either. He doesn’t think he has any choices in life, and society isn’t giving him of the upside he sees on television or anywhere else. He’s like “screw it, I’ve got nothing to lose.”

Now, let’s just say that this guy is like most people. He has reservations about killing people. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone. Thankfully, a bank isn’t people. If the bank gets robbed, nobody feels bad for it. After all, banks rob us every day; they just gradually introduce it so that they slowly get your consent. Besides, all the money is insured.

So our guy figures he’ll end up in a tropical country somewhere with a beautiful half-Latina half-Asian girlfriend or something. Who loses? Nobody. Exactly. Why would a bank losing a million dollars be a bad thing? Seriously, everybody would be happy. I’m not even kidding. Banks fuck over everyone.

So here’s the thing: if nobody feels bad for a bank, and all the money is insured and nobody gets hurt (in theory), why does nobody do it?

Well, simple. Too many things could go wrong, and the consequences for anything going wrong are massive and dangerous. In other words, it’s too high risk.

They deal in social deviance, doing things that most people aren’t willing to do in order to get ahead. This, by itself, is actually fine. There are lots of methods of social deviance that aren’t illegal.

So the problem isn’t social deviance at all. It’s that criminals do it in an old-school way, for which there are laws, and because of that, there’s collateral damage, death, destruction of private or public property, etc. In other words, the problem isn’t that they break the law, or that they’re criminals. It’s that, in doing so, they might harm you or your loved ones.

Criminals do what they do because they see it as a high-risk, quick, low-effort way of making a bunch of money. They go to the edge of what’s acceptable (and over) in order to get what they want. Some of them are horrible people, and others are doing the equivalent of cheating on their taxes– in other words, not much.

So not all criminals do things that are damaging to society. Some do things that average people consider totally fine, but that just happen to be illegal for larger, sometimes antiquated reasons.

So here’s our first distinction. Violent criminals go to the edges of acceptability. They do high-risk things in order to obtain large rewards quickly. They do this because they are impatient and fail the marshmallow test. This is why they end up in jail.

But hold on, there’s more.

What criminals get right

I was watching a movie the other week about Jacques Mesrine, the public enemy number one in France and Quebec in the 60′s and 70′s. He’s a sociopath if I’ve ever heard of one, but also an epic success in his own way. They literally had to ambush this guy in the middle of the Paris and blast him with automatic weapons in order to kill him. He was like a modern-day Rasputin. Epic.

It was while watching this movie that it really started to click for me.

Here’s a guy that flaunts the rules in a way that nobody else can. Seriously, this dude escaped from jail and then proceeded to return to jail with automatic weapons in order to help his friends escape.

As homicidal as this dude was, I have no words to describe how much guts he had.

So, in that sense, this is a guy we can learn a lot from. Not murder, not mayhem, rape, or anything else of that sort, but definitely what a few friends of mine and myself have now dubbed “skipping the line.”

Ok, imagine you’re going to a bar and the line is long. You stand at the back of the line like a good customer, and the hostess says your wait is going to be like 15 minutes. That time goes by but you still don’t get a table. You’re still waiting. You’re starting to get impatient.

Then, some guy walks in, goes right up to the hostess, whispers something in her ear and she nods and shows him to a table. How do you feel? Pretty annoyed, I’m guessing. WTF, right?

Now, another scenario. Imagine you’re at the airport. There’s a long line for security, as there was for my flight today, but this guy goes to another line, one that you hadn’t noticed, and just whizzes through everything. You watch him show people his iPhone, and he speeds past a giant line. Everything’s the same, except in this case, the system for skipping the line isn’t covert or hidden. He used a 3D barcode or something to get into a special category.

Now, here’s a trick question. Out of all the preceding examples, which one do you consider the most wrong? The bar, the airport, or the bank robbery?

All of these, done right, are victimless social deviance. They’re just deviance with different levels of risk, correct?

Let’s ask another question: If no one got hurt in either of those circumstances, from a one to a ten, how wrong are each of them?

What you need to do is not “play it safe”– which is downright idiotic– but to find is something as high-risk and high-reward as a bank robbery, but without the massive downside.

Let me give you another example. I end up in France fairly often, and since I mostly deal with Americans for work, one of my easiest conversation points revolves around a guy called Loic Le Meur.

Some of you may know Loic, but you’re probably not French, so you don’t know his reputation in France– a country where the majority view government work as being amongst the highest forms of service and status. Where Loic comes from, he’s considered socially deviant as well. So is my French friend Erwan Le Corre (Movnat is doing a workshop in Montreal, btw, which you should check out).

Guys like this, and they differ by country, have labels that their homelands consider fringe or weird. They aren’t easily accepted. They trot the edge in their own way, and are willing to take risks that others aren’t. They’re skipping the line as well– defining themselves differently and placing themselves at the top of their categories.

Normal people are not willing to do this. We don’t have models if we want to be out on the edge. For most people, they have no one that can relate to their need to be that far out.

Entrepreneurs won’t do. They are too acceptable. Politicians won’t do. They are too criminal and unethical (no, seriously, they are). We need someone else– a group we can look to and emulate, the same way people think “What would Jesus do?”

Society is far too boring. There is no one we can look to, so we have no choice. Magneto, Moriarty, and Mr Freeze– that is who it has to be.

Acting like a criminal for fun and profit

Let me ask you a question: according to Rotten Tomatoes, 94 out of every 100 critics thumbed up the Dark Knight. Why do you think that is?

Is it because of Batman? Guess again.

It’s the Joker.

The Joker is the personification of risk, something the average person finds thrilling. He does things that others would never dare to do, but everyone sees inside themselves. Why is that?

Modern society is stifling. The options for how to behave are limited and unfulfilling. Max Weber called it the Iron Cage because it eventually stifles and crushes anything polarizing. We have no choice but to submit in the majority of our lives.

What we start realizing if we spend enough time in cities is that this society breeds sheep. This isn’t even necessarily bad– it’s largely responsible for the stability of the age we live in. And these people can’t even be held responsible for it– the pressure of our society is so crushing that you have no choice but to submit, even at the cost of your long-term happiness.

The thing is, society also seems to have taken a wrong turn. When you combine it with the technological advancements we’ve had in the past several years, what we have turned ourselves into is a giant garbage production factory that is throwing itself off a cliff. There’s a fucking giant continent of plastic in the Pacific ocean for Christ’s sake, all made possible by the modern division between our actions and their consequences (Marx would have had a field day with this).

Clearly, social deviance is necessary at this point.

So who’s here to save us? Who’s here to make us feel alive once again, like a normal human being whose soul longs to be free and able to live without the crushing consequences of a drone-filled modern environment, where you can’t seem to make a difference and often don’t even know how to muster up the energy to care?

The only people who are capable of doing this are those who have lived outside society, those who have no place inside of it, and who ignore society’s rules.

The Joker is the personification of anarchy and freedom, and those feelings, when expressed to us in theatre or film, are deeply moving. It awakens a part of us that yearns to be free, but doesn’t quite know how.

But no modern hero exists for those that want to figure this out.

Now, here’s the thing: We don’t have to deface property, kill people, or rob banks in order to find edges. There are lots of modern edges to explore. They are valuable because they’re risky, and only through learning from criminals can we truly know what the edge is.

Finding an edge

Imagine a map of the world, but flat like it was thought to be a long time ago. At the edges, you fall off and die. But what about right before that, the places before these giant imaginary waterfalls? What’s there?

These are places nobody knows about because no one returns from them, or because no one even goes. If you go there, it changes you. You come back different.

But there’s a problem. The map doesn’t exist for these places. You don’t know how to get there. You need a guide.

Here is my suggestion. If you are looking for an edge and you can’t find one, ask yourself what you would do if you were a criminal, or a sociopath, or had delusions of grandeur, didn’t think you could fail, or that there would be no negative consequences. Ask yourself how you would act if you thought no one had the balls or brains to stop you.

The trick is to take on a personality. Play a character– one with no fear whatsoever, no conscience and no understanding of society’s rules.

Play a total sociopath. Find things with high reward, and act towards them as if there were no negative consequences.

Hard decisions will suddenly seem easy.

Fears that have no consequences will reveal themselves for the mirages that they are. Barriers will vanish.

My guess for what happens next? Your hurdles will have to be set a whole lot higher.

Guts are composed of two parts: GUTS and GUT. Both are equally important to the whole.

GUT is where you should start. Gut requires you to have instinct, and listen to it. When you need to know what to do, gut should respond with an appropriate direction– even if you don’t understand why. More often than not, it should be right.

GUTS is the second part of the equation. When you have guts, you can do what is necessary. You can do what GUT tells you to do. Without guts, you can’t go where you need to go, no matter how drawn to it you are.

So both parts, GUTS and GUT, are necessary. But how do you get them?

I believe it comes down to environmental pressure. So the question is not “why was I not born with a good instinct” (GUT) or “a huge set of balls” (GUTS), but rather, “how can I set up my environment so these things develop naturally?”

For some people this happened as children. For others, not so much– it needs to be groomed into you, and nobody else will do it for you, because nobody else really cares that much whether you have them.

I just finished a piece of work (stay tuned) that tries to address the problem of GUTS. But I suspect I have only just begun to truly understand it. Then, GUT, its twin, needs to be figured out as well.

A guy could spend his whole life on these things, if he were so inclined. Once you develop these two, I suspect anyone with even an average level of intelligence could do amazing things.

I am unique

I hate when people quote Fight Club– really I do. It’s one of those movies that’s good, but that people consider a religion when it was really just meant as entertainment (think Star Wars). But it’s true that you aren’t a beautiful and unique snowflake– what you are is a piece of meat.

When you die, nothing will happen. No one will arrange a 21-gun salute, and even if they do, guess what? You’ll be dead. So it won’t matter.

So you aren’t unique. But should this deter you from believing that you are? No. Our brains are pattern machines that detect omens where there are none and make stories out of everyday, mundane events. And your right brain must believe these stories even if your left brain thinks they are bullshit.

So believe that you are unique if it helps. It will keep you going. It must.

We are meant for each other

No, no, and no. You probably would have been fine with at least 5 other people on the planet, maybe even 50 or 500. This one happens to be the one you’ve ended up with, in a combination of circumstance, determination, and will.

It’s sad that people end up believing “meant for each other” stories. Like many of the beliefs here, they are based on humans having an amazing capacity for standing outside of themselves to look for meaning. Yet this one in particular needs to be wiped out because it is juvenile and detracts from the real quality of the relationship.

That we choose to be in a relationship with our significant other is so much more important, and so much more valuable, than us being “fated to come together.” It implies will in a world of chaos. It implies coming together to build something and strength in the face of adversity. It implies choice.

I can do anything I set my mind to

A mixed bag that is partially true and partially not. For example, I am lifting more weight now in the gym than ever. I am also writing more than I ever have in my life. I am flexible and can recreate myself every day, and so can you if you choose.

But there is a limit to this. So of course you can’t literally do anything, but you must believe you can, or you will set limits on what you can do. Because you won’t try, or because you won’t try as hard, you won’t get where you could have. And that failure will discourage and keep you down.

So this is false. But for the benefit of your future, you must believe it anyway.

There is a higher force guiding me

God, should such an entity even exist, does not care whether Natalie Portman wins the Oscar. He or she doesn’t care, either, if you get a raise. In fact, even if you were a “part of God’s plan” or whatever, that plan may end up getting you killed in a car accident or dying on the toilet. Oops.

People use the will of God as an extension of themselves. Have you ever noticed how it’s only people that hate gay people whose God also hates gay people? This “oh I happen to agree with God on everything, what a coincidence” attitude is so moronic I barley know how to put it into words. People assume that if they are a part of God’s plan, then they must be a BIG part of it. Whatever.

Yet as we said before, people need to believe in their own stories. People that do epic shit, when young, believe they are meant for something. Not those who believe they are mediocre. This lie is necessary to keep your eyes on the bigger picture.

It’s too late

This one is a favourite of people who have never done anything with their lives and have given up on achieving anything great. It sounds like a call from a fellow soldier on the battlefield– go on without me!!!– except, excuse me, but it was up to you what you did with your life. It wasn’t too late for you then, and it still isn’t now.

Too late, once again, implies a preset path of fulfillment that you missed. Personally, I was in fine arts school in college, and I dropped out to get a job at a failing dot-com right before the crash. I consider that very stupid. Yet here I am, a bestselling author with a widely-read blog who basically travels the world for a living. Not too shabby.

The truth is that there are many paths we can take, and we’re coming across them all the time. Too late for the NBA? Fine. Go solve world hunger instead, idiot.

Why? Because we are soft. We have become so through a series of coercion methods that have been used on us since we were infants. So we are eased into it by our parents and our peer groups, and by a variety of authorities that claim control over who we are, what we do, what we spend money and time on, and more.

No is a fundamental act of control– maybe the most basic one there is. I suspect that children begin to say no once they begin to recognize that they are a separate person in the world. It is significant, then, that we learn to say no again as adults. But it’s difficult.

Previously on this blog I wrote a short, introductory guide to saying no to basic 21st century things that take up our time, including email, mobile phones, mail, and more. But that is not enough.

The easiest things to say no to in this world are the most distant. The hardest ones are the closest. So we end up being able to treat our weak ties poorly, while our close friends end up thinking we’re pushovers.

This is not the way life is meant to be. You need to own what you are by not letting others control your life. That starts today.

The art of saying maybe

I actually don’t believe in saying maybe (although I might click that Facebook button sometimes) because I feel like it’s the most wishy-washy, annoying thing you can do to someone. Will you show up? Will you not show up? Who fucking knows!

It sucks to have someone like that coming to your party. Don’t be that way.

This is why I discourage the use of the word maybe, but for the purpose of this exercise, I would like you to start saying maybe every time you want to say no, but usually end up saying yes anyway, often because of guilt.

Try I’ll see how I feel, or let me see if my girlfriend’s doing anything that day. Now, make no mistake, these are cowardly things to do when you don’t have the balls to say no, but they’re better than outright saying yes. These are baby steps.

If that’s still too big for you, see below, you big wuss.

The art of limiting the yes

Being even minutely internet famous means getting a lot of random requests from people. This means that anyone in this situation gets very good at limiting their commitments (or end up overworked). You know who you are.

The first step towards limiting this, or anything that’s too demanding, is to say “yes I will help,” but being very specific about how. This is particularly helpful if you want to say yes, but if you think it’ll be a lot of work or you’ll end up too spread out.

I got asked to help an acquaintance with their blog the other week and they wanted to know if I could help by publicizing it, etc. So I said, sure, but then I said “You have three tweets. Use them wisely.” Very clear, no?

This trick is a great way to make sure you’re not too indebted to someone by saying yes to them unconditionally. It also ensures that someone knows the value of your time.

Feeling like less of a spineless jellyfish yet? Awesome.

Let’s move on to practical tips.

How to say no to your boss

Of course, the ultimate in saying no to your boss is quitting. We’ll talk about how to do this some other time. For now, some good methods to say no to extra work and staying late.

Display your workload and schedule. Does your boss even know what you do, really? How long added tasks take needs to be clear to your boss, and it’s up to you to tell him. If he knows what you do and why it’s important (as well as what other deadlines you have), you’ll be one step closer to having him respect them.

Make clear your personal commitments. Do you have sculpting on Tuesdays, or the gym on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at lunch? Cool. Let him know your personal plans matter and make them obvious ahead of time. Maybe even explain how they help you work better or somesuch nonsense.

Verbalize how long each task will take. Ok, that sounds like it should take about 5 hours, does that sound right to you? If you’re continuously clarifying this, your boss will stop underestimating the workload of each task he assigns you.

Ask when each task should be completed. When you show your deadlines to your boss, and he knows what you have on your plate, and he knows how long each of them take, the next thing is to ask when you should fit them in. Try this: cool, would you like me to put that between Herp project A or Derp project B? I want to make sure they can all get done on time.

How to say no to your girl, boy, spouse, lover, or donkey

I knew a girl one time whose boyfriend showed up super late at her door, and she was upset so we had talked about it. I told her to call and say it was unacceptable. She did this. He brought flowers and apologized the next day.

Whatever form of life you’re currently mating with, you need to get really good at keeping your boundaries clear with them. What’s acceptable and what isn’t needs to be obvious for the sanity of the relationship or you’ll become resentful, “whipped,” or just get walked all over and get no respect.

A wise person once told me that when you tell people where the line is, they know not to cross it. Saying no in your relationship requires you knowing what is right or wrong, and to communicate it– just not at that moment. Just like any social contract, it needs to be discussed before or after, but not during, a negotiation (otherwise known as an argument). And discussion of any contract always works better when you include the word because.

Because is a magic word that helps people see your inner workings. Saying no works well with it– in fact, because may be the secret sauce that helps people see each other’s patterns, and avoid stepping on their toes.

I suspect the essence of keeping happy relationships is essentially clarity and boundary negotiation. So don’t be afraid to step up to the plate, especially since no one can read your mind.

Stop feigning guilt

Now we’re getting into the hard stuff. I know that when I say no, it’s very easy to couch it with things like “I’m sorry” and “maybe next time.” We do it because we want to make clear that we want to help, etc, but this is really just a vestigial reminder of our previous, spineless self.

It’s ok not to feel guilty, and we don’t need to fake it, either. In fact, in some cases it’s disrespectful to our current engagements, in the sense that oh I really wish I could do this, but I have to do that instead, as if a parent is forcing you.

Guilt is often implied more than spoken, so if you’ve stopped implying guilt through your words, you next do it by changing your tone of voice. Try saying I can’t the same way you might say a sandwich when someone asks you what you had for lunch. Practice it.

Saying no for real

I read an article in Esquire magazine last month (I think) that talked about a guy who was just answering no instead of doing the usual rigmarole of I can’t, I’m sorry, etc. He said it was freeing, and that’s because it’s what I would call an act of control– something that makes you feel like you have personal power that you can wield to keep your life in your own hands.

This is an important step, if only to experiment with it. You don’t want to become a douchebag, but you do want to see how a straight NO just shuts people down amazingly quickly.

When I was young, I remember my father doing this to homeless people. I found it deeply embarrassing then and I’m not sure I could do it now either, but you should find someone to subject this to that won’t hate you. A sales clerk or someone who is paid to talk to you (customer service, etc) works well.

Another way of doing this is to interrupt a sales/telemarketing call (that we now apparently get from our own mobile phone companies and banks, ugh) by just saying “I’m going to hang up now,” then doing it. Again, these are just experiments, but they’re worth trying.

When you should say yes

Now, one more thing– this post is to help you say no for when you know you should be doing so, not to help you say no to everything. Whenever you’re uncertain, you should be saying yes to speed up the learning process. This ensures that next time, you’ll be sure to say no. That’s when the above applies.

Next: How to get children to shut the hell up

Am I kidding? Who knows! But please subscribe just in case.

I have one purpose: to manufacture interesting, thought-provoking objects.

I do this every day, diligently. If I succeed at this task, my owner will make more of me. If I fail, I will be dismantled, put in a warehouse, and replaced by a more effective machine.

I take concepts from many different places. I digest them, reassemble them into different shapes, and spit them out into an object someone can use.

How do I become more effective and, as a result, stay alive and able to make more?

My materials are different, of course– and I am more delicate with the process. I am more precise. My guarantee is better, so I will last longer.

Every other machine in this factory makes ideas, too, but I am better.

I am special.

Renovating a house requires either your handiwork or someone else’s. Getting a charity off the ground requires legwork or funding. Often a combination of both is required. Sometimes you have more of one than the other, or you have no choice which to use.

But somewhere along the lines of industry, digital, and social, things broke down.

You can pay someone to tweet for you, but consistent participation is expensive and doesn’t work very well if it’s outsourced. Being clever is hard (impossible?) to pay for, but personality plays such an important role that often, it’s best just to do it yourself. You can’t pay to keep passion going, either; instead, it often gets snuffed out just as you’re trying to encourage it by paying for it.

Now, the web might be one of the only places where spending time trumps money. If you don’t care, you’ll drop out. If you get paid, you’ll phone it in. The only thing that will make the grade is to really care about it– only if it’s your ass on the line will you really be able to put in the time. It’s the only reason you’ll care enough to compete.

If it’s just a job, others will out-sweat you. And sweat is what built the web.

10 years ago, the web was expensive, or complex, to work on. Now, infrastructure is in place, so it’s easy. The only remaining factor, the one that can’t be bought or commoditized, is the human one.

Robots will get faster. Information will get faster. But human will stay human. That is why you must put your effort there.

I could be wrong, but don’t bet on it.

An MP3 used to be a concert. A Kindle used to be a bookstore.

Is this you? You listen to music personally on your MP3 player. You read books by yourself and watch your TV on your laptop or iPad. You eat alone at least 50% of the time, rarely go to concerts, and watch more movies at home than in theatres.

Do you recognize yourself in this profile? ;)

A side effect of the digitization and portability of cultural artifacts is that they have also been brought from the public to the private. A gramophone used to be expensive, and a community might have had only one, so they shared it. Now we all have iPods, so we have our own music collection. We can download our favourite songs privately, so we don’t have to talk to a record store clerk– or anyone, for that matter.

What was once necessarily public has become private. What used to belong to a community has become private property. This might be a normal process of commodification– food becomes affordable, so we have snack foods or protein shakes instead of feasts. Stuff get cheaper, more portable, and private.

Interestingly enough, this also leeches value out of the public domain and into the pockets of corporations. This may, or may not, be an accident. But that’s not the point. The privatization of culture is a fact, and we have to deal with it. Though it fuels a sense of personal power, if we’re not careful, it also feeds loneliness.

Collective activity is a pillar of connection inside a community, helping people laugh together and share good conversation. It fuels a sense of belonging and happiness. How much of it are you doing?

If this is a normal phase of cultural and technological evolution, then it might be unstoppable. But your personal choice will reflect your priorities and decide the kind of life you live. The more public, the better you are at conversation and the more you feel a sense of kinship with others. The more private, the less conformity, but at the expense of belonging. You are either a wolf or a sheep, but the choice often happens without your consent.

Creative Commons people and programmers tend to get this, and bloggers often do too– the more you give stuff away, the more you get back. But often we live this only in regards to the web, and miss out because of it. Dungeons and Dragons has become World of Warcraft– an impression of being public, but without the actual increase in satisfaction or happiness. It is a trompe-l’oeil that mimics depth.

My strategy to trade favourite books with people, to have weekly ‘dates,’ and to have people over for supper. These are not exciting things.

They are not about technology. They are about people.

But if you’re part of the social web, and all you get excited about is the New Twitter, you do not see the big picture, and you are mistaken about why it matters.

Take a step back and look again.

You may not have had the pleasure yet, but trust me: Cooking for friends is actually pretty great.

I did it yesterday while I had some friends over to roll some dice and, man, was it different than ordering pizza. I also put down some charcuteries out on the table and we devoured that stuff. Really happy about the result. A++ would buy again.

For a long time I resisted the basic skill of cooking while people around me learned about it. I figured if I could afford it, what was the harm? As it turns out, there can be a lot. If you cook for yourself, you know what goes into your meals. By definition, you eat healthier. You learn how to welcome people at home. You put yourself closer to the source and know what you’re supporting. These are all good things.

So I’ve decided to throw myself headlong into this by eating at home for 30 days, and I recommend you do the same. Here are my ground rules– feel free to make up your own.

1. Drinks = Ok; Tupperware = No

I’m not a big drinker, so this shouldn’t be a big deal. I am allowing myself to have coffee or tea, but not to consume any calories, so no food can be eaten outside my house. If I’m not at home, no big deal, I just won’t eat.

2. I will keep previous engagements.

I travel a lot for work, and if I look at my calendar over here, it has a few engagements I’ve agreed to already. I don’t intend to break them, but I’m also not making any new ones. So this will be 30 days of eating at home while I’m at home in Montreal, obviously.

3. I will invite people over at every opportunity

I happen to be in the process of trying to make my house more welcoming, so this will be a good way to apply pressure to that goal, too. I just invited three acquaintances from Twitter over for breakfast. I intend to do it again. This will help me spend more time with people I want to get to know better, rather than having superfluous lunch dates with them.

4. I am taking requests

I eat a paleo diet, so as long as what you offer me can be eaten that way, I’ll make it for myself and/or for others. Have a favourite recipe? Send it my way, as long as it’s grain- and sugar-free, and I’ll try it and let you know how it went.

5. It’s very easy to do this, and you should too.

You will probably lose weight, learn a lot about food, and make your significant other, children, and/or friends very happy. Blog it, tweet it (#eatingin), and tell your friends– the social pressure will help you make it. See you in 30 days.

So I took the advice of this book last week and made a To-Stop-Doing list.

The idea is to notice what activities are sucking your energy, wasting your time, and making you feel horrible– the opposite of a to-do list. Anyway, social media activities, in their various forms, made the top 5. Interesting right?

Blogging I felt was awesome, and lifted my spirits almost every time I did it. Reddit tended to waste more than 2 hours of my day if I let it, and checking Twitter while waiting for a subway generally didn’t do my mood any good, either. Pretty remarkable.

I did a talk at Jeff Pulver‘s 140 Conference the other week that discussed this– how fundamentally human social activities such as play and work get our spirits up by their very nature, but social networks themselves don’t really leave us with any lasting happiness. I relate this to a general thesis that makes a lot of sense to me. Here it is:

If we trust for the same reasons we always have, and we are made healthy by the same food we have always been, then we should also be made happy by the same stuff we always have. The puzzle then becomes to assess what those things are, and do more of them instead of the stuff people are telling us.

On a similar note, I was in a funk all last week until I started exercising. Miraculously, when that began, I suddenly felt better. Know what else works? Going to bed early. Amazing huh.

My point is that this happiness that we want so badly, the basic purpose of our existence is often unrelated to grand things like career, money, etc. and often far more related to basic human needs such as sleep, food, and exercise. In fact some of the best advice I ever got was just that: If you’re ever in a bad mood, try doing one of those things before lashing out at someone. More often than not, the mood passes.

So I’ve been reading the Happiness Project with this in mind– the idea that basic things that make other people happy will probably also do the same for me, and that the fundamental building blocks of a good life are often the things we see in commercials for mutual funds– you know, walks on the beach, sunsets, that kind of thing.

We visited my friend Dan (also my tattoo artist) a few weeks ago in Belgium and I noticed how much waking up to his gorgeous backyard, with trees, a well, etc and how much it impacted my mood to have that kind of space as a backdrop instead of concrete. We don’t want to believe in how easy it is, and we’d like things to be different, but they aren’t. Very fundamental things work– complicated plans do not.

The photo above is one I took yesterday of some graffiti I saw on Notre-Dame here in Montreal. It says, in French, “Perdre sa vie à la gagner,” which roughly translates as “Wasting your life trying to make a living.”

It’s a good thing to think about. What do you actually need? What do you want? And finally, what are the (often free) alternatives that no one is telling you about?

I was checking out some graffiti in my neighbourhood the other day and thinking about gentrification.

It seems natural that those that are poor would be able to see opportunity in places (neighbourhoods) where the rich are not looking yet. This is how startups get profitable and why artists move into sketchy areas of a city.

As these same areas become profitable, though, big organizations move in and build condos, or Facebook gets into location based social software. This eventually crowds out the poor or small as the rich lean into the problem with their increased resources. Depending on laws (anti-monopoly, rent control, etc.), this may take longer, but it can’t really be stopped entirely. This is “fine” (not really), as long as there are new places to go.

When the poor of Europe took boats to America to have access to new land and to stop oppression of their people, they had to work hard in order to make it livable for their families, but their hard work was rewarded. They had more opportunity and freedom than their class normally allowed. They became rich in a new way by changing the pond they swam in.

This is all fine and good… until you run out of land.

I’m asking myself where settlers go now. When all neighbourhoods become gentrified, when all areas of business become monopolized by larger enterprise, where do the disenfranchised go to seek new opportunity? Do they have to move out to the North of Canada, the wilderness where no one really wants to be, in order to find something new for themselves?

Another question to ask yourself is where you are on the spectrum. Do you seek out opportunity by finding strange, uncomfortable places, or do you look for areas where risk is lower? This is the spectrum from angel investor > venture capitalist > shareholder in a blue chip company. Each has methods of profit but they are based on ability to understand risk. (Of course it all comes back down to this.)

Wherever you are, it seems inevitable that someone bigger will eventually come in and crowd you out. This force exerts its influence wherever you are on the chain.

So, everyone must become a settler again in order to find better land. Best that we adjust to discomfort now and find new ways to increase our liberty and profit– before the tides turn.

Voting, food, career, spending, success– all of these and more are political acts.

We don’t realize it while we’re doing them, but all are meaningful in terms of who they help– ourselves, our families and communities, or the world at large. The mere act of paying rent to the stranger who owns your apartment building, for example, is a behaviour that enriches someone you don’t know instead of you and your loved ones. This is the same for every dollar we spend or every minute we pay attention to something.

We all live in a web of relationships and attention that include friends, family, and co-workers, but you also choose the web you live in, and the ones you decide to help. Every time you choose one web over another, it can change your quality of life for the better.

By deciding to optimize your health by eating at home, for example, you are already deciding not to participate in the McDonald’s and Olive Gardens of the world, choose better quality food for yourself, all while increasing your own competence. By taking part in a farmer’s co-op you are enriching your own neighbourhoods instead of the Wallmarts and Carrefours of the world who would rather shut down stores than allow unions.

Every time you take part in a scheme that favours the rich, you also increase their power over the poor. This also happens every time you talk about Twilight over some other (less popular) movie. Even more important: If you are part of the attention- or capital-poor class, you’re also impoverishing yourself.

Making the choice to be healthy only benefits you and those around you. But if you choose not to care, you take part in a massive web of insurance companies, take out restaurants, and doctors who count on your apathy to profit. Then, the choice of what to do is theirs, not yours.

All acts of purposeful ignorance or negligence enrich others instead of yourself. All acts of learning empower you and those you care about. This is why you should learn to read more, be more crafty, and know how to fix your own car and bike. The sense of competence it comes with is like gold, and you will wonder why it took you so long to get it.

I know I did.

You worry what people think about you because they won’t like you, or they’ll talk behind your back. But really, they’ll admire your courage and adjust just fine.

You’ll question yourself at the last minute, maybe think you’re crazy, but sometimes, you need to be uncomfortable and make mistakes. Jumping this far will give you the strength to jump further next time.

Sometimes, I like to think about all the people who almost made the right decision. They got to the edge and then just… stopped. These are the almost-Steve-Jobs, the almost-Vivienne-Westwoods, and the almost-MLKs. They all had very good reasons. There are millions of them, and you know none of their names.

Where are you right now? What is the worst case scenario? How likely is it? What about the best?

Either way, you’re going to be dead soon. You might as well do something fun, in the meantime.

At worst, you’ll laugh about it later. At best… well, you know.

It was recommended to me by Chris Penn a long time ago, and basically talks about how women can deal with creepy guys and/or stalkers. Chris said I couldn’t understand trust until I understood how people abuse and manipulate trust.

He was right. I learned a ton. But here’s something amazing I read that has more to do with fear than trust– something so fundamental you have probably never thought about it.

Fear means it isn’t happening.

Think about it. If you’re afraid you’re going to get raped while walking home at night, you clearly are not being raped. If you were, your animal instincts would kick in (if you listen to them) and you would try to escape, hurt your attacker, etc. But if you’re worried about it, you’re probably in the clear.

This was an amazing thing for me to think about. Just like everyone, I worry about regular daily stuff, I sit next to assholes on the subway, etc., and sometimes I think that something could happen. Since realizing this simple thing, though, I have relaxed significantly.

Let’s say you’re worried about not having a job, or going hungry. If that’s the case, then you are clearly not going hungry. If you were, you would find a way to find food. It’s that simple.

You can apply this to a lot of your life. If it’s happening, you deal with it. If you’re just worried, you’re already probably doing fine.

On the back of the book (which I have recommended so far to at least 5 people), it says: “Fear is a gift, but unwarranted fear is a curse. Learn to tell the difference.” How true– and how vital to the way we live our lives.

All the inmates want to escape. Of course the guard does not. He stands up on a wall with a rifle and fires at anyone trying to climb it to take him down. If one prisoner tries it, he fails and dies. If they all do, they win.

This is the essence of web businesses. Low startup costs increase reduce the cost of failure, break down barriers to entry and provide opportunity to many more people than previously possible. This reduction in friction leaves you more of a chance, with your stronger opponent being taken from all sides.

So, all that is required to destroy monopolies and hierarchy is for more people to allowed to try. That’s because it doesn’t matter if YOU succeed, as long as they do not.

You can apply this to any circumstance: social coercion, politics, writing, or art. In all cases low cost of failure reduces risk and makes trying plausible. This distributes success more widely across the population (though outliers will still exist).

Here’s what I’m thinking: the society (or individual) who makes the cost of failure the lowest, while retaining the ability to reap rewards, gets the greatest increase in productivity and living quality. In a sense, this increases the biodiversity of a society and therefore, its ability to survive disasters.

This quality could be defined, by your society or yourself, as a right to play, and it’s probably the most important thing you can allow yourself, as a creative person in the web age. Google does this with their 20% time, paying employees for what may result in nothing but could also result in huge hits. They make this viable by defending their cash cow (defense, or the game of the old) while embracing innovation (offense, or the game of the young).

Strategically, I think this means you’re supposed to look for a big hit, then move it into your portfolio when it’s maxed out and look for another blue ocean.

This is turning into one of those posts where I just seem to be rambling, so I’m just going to stop here. Hope this makes sense to you.

Children have two ways of discovering how the universe works: one is to experiment, and the other is to ask “why.” The result is a complex series of if-then conditions that tell a child what can be done, and what can’t, creating flags that are used later to navigate the environment.

We’ve already talked about the first type– now let’s talk about the second.

Children don’t ask why to be careful with a knife if they’ve already cut themselves– they only ask with something that is outside their experience, that is abstract. This is the evolution of because, an if-then condition that is outside of experience, and that we don’t really understand.

The danger of because is that we take things on faith because it comes from an authority. As time goes on and our understanding advances, more of our questions now have actual answers, but the because remains anyway.

God is because. Zeus is why the lightning strikes and good people die but God has a plan for them.

Science can be because. We have faith in doctors who reflexively prescribe medicine instead of get to the root cause, and don’t get second opinions.

Dogma and rules are because. Gay is wrong because it is against nature, and you need to eat breakfast because it’s the most important meal of the day.

Everytime we don’t understand something, because takes its place and we stop there instead of testing. We have faith in the system, even though its purpose is to sustain itself, not to help you.

This is a way that the social system has protected itself since the beginning of time, ensuring that we can work together to build a better world. This works for the system that we live in and can make our lives better, but if you don’t want to be a middle manager, it may leave you feeling incomplete. It isn’t the only way.

You can be outside the system, and you can live well doing it. But your first step will be to ignore because… and to start asking why again.