Everybody talks about it. Nobody does it.

If I’ve learned anything about the world by my age, it’s that most of the world, myself included, is composed of talkers, not doers.

There are very few exceptions to this rule. The good news is, you can be one if you want.

The ability to act is not something you’re born with. Change is a skill you can learn– as long as you have the guts to actually do it.

I’ve changed a lot in my life, but it’s not because I’m special. I just created special circumstances. Whatever you want is usually easier to get than you think, as long as you are willing to adapt and do what is necessary.

Now, most posts of this nature will give you little tips, maybe even 100 tips, in the hope that you’ll be impressed by how large the list is and just tweet the hell out of it. They do this because it works (my last one is currently getting 40,000 visits a day from Stumbleupon actually), but writing of that type also usually appeals to those who want simple answers, and that’s not what I’m interested in right now.

So I’ve decided to make this post ridiculously long instead. It weighs in at almost 5,000 words. You may want to go make some coffee.

By the way, I’m also going to say that I’m not going to be writing about this stuff for much longer. I’m starting to get referred to as a “self-help” guru, and honestly, I don’t like it at all. I also began to realize that once you start to talk about success, instead of be successful, you become a talker, and not a doer, which is counter to what I’m trying to do in life.

I’m starting to figure out that the way your time should be spent is largely like a pyramid, with a wide base of learning, with a smaller level of acting on top of it, which is directed by the learning, and then on top of that, an even smaller level of writing about it. If you begin to live your life differently than the pyramid should be built, it becomes unbalanced and topples over. But that’s another subject entirely.

Anyway, the point is, I can’t just snap my fingers and change you– nor would I want to if I could. But what I can do is give you guys a real primer on how change is done. This would be the learning part, as said above, but then you’ll need to go ahead and act in order for any change to occur. So I added in homework assignments. As long as you know this, and you’re willing to actually do them, then we can go forward.

Take the following as one guy’s experience, along with the proverbial grain of salt.

1. How to break bad patterns

The entire human brain is a complex pattern-recognition system that, at one point, was largely there to help you survive and reproduce. Patterns were recognized to help you react properly to a new stimulus, which kept you alive long enough to have as many kids as possible (after which, you could basically die as far as your genes were concerned).

The problem is, that’s no longer our biggest priority, at least as far as the conscious mind is concerned. Now we want to write books, and we want six-pack abs with only 4 hours of gym time, blah blah. We want to know ten languages and have a gorgeous, smart and successful significant other, etc. etc. Oh yeah, and we want to be happy.

The problem is that our whole brain is still largely designed to keep you alive until puberty, and then, when that moment happens you’re like “I’m a man” or whatever, your brain’s job is to get you to reproduce as often as possible, doing your part in the long-standing, subconscious war to stay in the gene pool.

In other words, your conscious brain is trying to do one thing, while the rest of your brain is trying to do another. Our brain is now maladapted to our goals, and its patterns are hard to break because, 100,000 years ago, learning about the world meant just surviving, which was fairly easy, and once that was under control, you could stop learning entirely because the forest you lived in wasn’t going to be changing anytime soon.

Now, our world is changing all the time, and in order to change ourselves, we need to ease into and embrace the coming chaos. Those that are most comfortable with change for change’s sake will adapt better to the future, and you can only get good at change by trying to do it, in small ways, on purpose.

In other words, you have to try and break your patterns and build new habits around them, constantly, because that’s how the world now works. You also have to gather infrastructure around you that helps you do this, because your brain is simply not built for it.

This, by the way, is central to my thinking about challenge, and how your reactions to any bet or dare will shape your future. You need to get good at challenges– in other words, at reacting to unexpected stimulus– if you are going to be capable of change.

Now, I know that some people would say that people’s problem with change is fear– I know that some people would argue that it’s the number one thing stopping most people– but I don’t actually think that’s true, on a conscious level. I think most people’s primary problems is that they literally forget to keep doing the thing they wanted to do. “Dammit,” they think, “I wanted to write today. I forgot. Oh well, tomorrow’s another day.” And then they forget tomorrow and they day after, and it’s all shot to hell until next New Year’s. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.

So while fear is a problem, building a habit of doing things that need to be done, whether you like them or not, is often a good first step. Let’s start by listing some ways to do that.

Find the moment where you have the most energy. For me this is usually early in the morning. I have a dog, so I may walk him, or my girlfriend may, but I keep all the lights turned off, launch Freedom on my computer (as it is on right now) and then write for one hour. I have no goal but to sit down and do it. This takes the pressure off. I know that if I don’t do it before I do anything else, it just doesn’t happen. I learned this the hard way.

Do the hardest things first. The way life works is that easy things will get done anyway. You look at your list of stuff and think, “what is going to be the most difficult thing to do?” If you work on this one first, you’ll discover that your day will get easier, and the rewards will get better as time goes on. So the first thing is hard, but next is easier, and then easier still, and so on until you have the most fun doing the easiest things on your task list.

Have a list of 5 things you want to do, maximum. Don’t start with 5 world-changing acts, though. Begin with one and do it for as little time as you can so it gets done. I know that Zenhabits recommends you start with 5 minutes a day, but I’ll often start with 15 or 30 minute chunks. It’s how I started drawing again, 10 years after dropping out of art school.

The goal is not to succeed. It is just to sit and do it. As I’ve said before, ugly is just a step on the way to beautiful. If you sit down and expect anything, you will freeze up. So just sit down with no expectations. Like the gym– the goal is just to go and do your best, not to deadlift 500 pounds, but to lift just a little more than last time. And even if you failed at that, it’s fine, because you’ll be doing it again next week. No rush. Just sit down and begin.

Homework assignment 1. I know you guys like homework, so here’s something for you to do right now. List the 5 most important things you can do to improve your day. Then, place them in order of difficulty, starting with the hardest. Next, set your alarm right now at one hour earlier than you’re used to waking up, and begin tomorrow morning with the hardest task you have.

DO NOT CONTINUE TO READ UNTIL YOU HAVE DONE THIS.

2. How to get back up again

While you are building habits, it is 100% certain that you will be failing, not just a few times, but often. This is because you’re doing new things, and new things are by definition hard to do.

But the point is never to look back at past failures, and even not to sulk in current ones, but to say “I’m going to start again right now.” In other words, it’s not about this current attempt and its success and failure. It’s about the process of doing it again no matter how horrible the previous attempt was.

I’m sure you know from experience that one of the most difficult things to deal with when making new habits is the realization that you have screwed up. A few days ago I was going out for a friend’s birthday and I was thinking “Ok, well I only have one more thing to do. I still have time though, I’ll do it later.” God, it’s amazing how often I still believe my own bullshit.

I know that, from reading this blog, some people seem to think that I am some paragon of industriousness. This is so far from the truth that it’s laughable. I’m actually one of the laziest people I know. I have the most excuses, among the most horrible habits of anyone I know, and I am sure that, in an alternate universe somewhere, I am either homeless, a janitor, or dead. I am not exaggerating. That I’ve gotten through all this is somewhat of a miracle.

I say this because I want you to know that I am not unlike you, and that you are not alone in your horribleness. We’re pretty much the same, I just happen to be observant enough to have learned a few lessons. One of the big ones is that I am no longer as concerned with failure.

The only real difference between you, the one that does nothing, and you the super successful multi-millionaire, is that the other guy gets up over and over again, like a boxer in the ring that needs to win the fight.

In life, you can just get knocked down and stay down forever with no real impending deadline. In sports, you can’t. There is a timer, and you can hear it as you are failing, and the only option is to get back up again. Since life does not work this way, I have taken an alternate stance, which is that no one is watching or even gives a damn. My failure is inconsequential and silent, so I can fail over and over again in my little cave while no one is watching, and then as I get better, I can get more public about my efforts and do better.

Produce horrible material on purpose. Whatever your work is, perfectionism is a killer. You just sit there thinking “I’m horrible at this,” totally paralyzed, unable to continue. *****

Give yourself several chances in a day. I read the book 18 Minutes earlier this year and it gave me a great tip to help me get up over and over again. I set up a timer now using the RE.minder app for iPhone that pings me once an hour to ask “Are you being productive?”

Realize that there are no consequences. Almost everything that sucks stays in the draft stage anyway, and the stuff that doesn’t (and is public) has almost no social consequences at all. I have a friend who’s one of those dating coaches, and he always says that the perceived social consequences of talking to strangers is always WAY worse than actually doing it. Whatever errors we make are diluted into the fabric of society, so the larger the fabric is, the smaller the error seems.

Homework assignment 2. Carry around a smartphone, or alarm, that reminds you every hour (9 to 5) to get your ass back to work. Sit down first thing in the morning and write, draw, go to the gym, or create something, no matter how bad the result is. Do it for a given time period, begin before you stress out about it, and continue until the anxiety has subsided.

DO NOT CONTINUE TO READ UNTIL YOU HAVE DONE THIS. SERIOUSLY.

Ok, we’ve gotten past the basic stuff.

You’ll notice so far that what we’ve been talking about is largely an issue of philosophy. The first assumption is something along the lines of: “You are naturally weak. If you want to become strong, use society’s infrastructures and your own willpower to strengthen the structure around you.”

The second conclusion you come to is: “If you fall, the environment you fall into is safer than it has ever been. If life was at one point nasty, brutish, and short, it is now long, diplomatic, and peaceful. Failing is therefore easier. So is getting back up.”

If you follow these, the next conclusion must therefore become “I have a structure around me to make things easier than they’ve ever been. And even when they are hard and I fail, nothing much happens. So there is really no reason for me to be afraid at all.”

I’ve actually written a whole free book about this (that you should download!) so I won’t elaborate, but one reason that many people can’t change is because they simply can’t handle the flinch– a reflexive almost physiological response to exiting the safe zone. This may happen even though they know, consciously, that their safe zone is huge. In this case, it’s not the conscious mind that matters. It’s the emotional one.

So you have to start convincing your emotional brain that beating the flinch is no big deal, and you can only really do this by having visited the other side. In other words, the intellectual part of the equation will only get you so far.

You can’t just think it. You need to feel it.

How do you do this? Each person’s methods will differ. I can tell you that having epileptic seizures, getting tattooed, pierced, and branded over and over again from the age of 18 until now (32), helped a lot. I can tell you that learning to talk to strangers helped a lot, as does (badly planned) travel, which helps me deal with unexpected circumstances as they arise. The more you leap into the unknown, the more you discover that the unexpected is rarely something you need to actually worry about. You ease into surprises and learn to deal with them as they come instead of reflexively avoiding them.

As you discover this, you’ll see that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, a virtuous circle that builds confidence upon confidence in layers, like armour or calluses.

But each type of armour is actually quite specific. You don’t lose your fear of getting jumped unless you prepare for getting jumped beforehand, and you don’t lose social anxiety unless someone teaches you what to do, and what not to do.

So losing the flinch isn’t just about jumping into the unknown; it’s also about learning what technique works in the new environment you’re leaping into. Swimming helps you deal with being in the water, but nowhere else, while fighting helps you learn to deal with fights, etc.

Write down the worst case scenario. I picked this one up from Tim Ferriss. While you’re in a safe place (i.e. not under pressure), look at what’s going to happen and ask yourself what the worst possible conclusion is. You ask someone out, they say no, or worse, maybe they laugh. You’re embarrassed, and in a few days you’re over it and laughing with your buddies. Or, you ask for a raise and your boss says no.

Recognize that pain evaporates quickly. The brain is wired to associate pain with death. Most pain, however, is insignificant and doesn’t last– either it vanishes quickly or, in the off chance where it’s longer-lasting, it’s dull and can easily be ignored. Realize that pain is a temporary, vestigial reaction created by evolution in an environment where a single scrape could mean death by infection. Then recognize that we have antibiotics and move forward anyway.

Deal with discomfort as it comes; don’t predict it. As I write this I have turned my internet connection off with an app called Freedom. I do this because it makes me more productive, but I also notice that being disconnected from the web feels awkward, and it makes me way more nervous than I should. I keep thinking “when is my hour up,” or “I’ll just check my phone,” etc., because this process of writing for one hour (minimum) per day leaves me struggling to find things to talk about. But it also means that I’m getting better at discomfort, every day, the same way you adjust to a cold shower after a few seconds of being in the water. And as the hour finishes, I can feel myself internally saying “thank God it’s over.” Now think about this: if I can’t deal with that tiny discomfort, how will I deal with anything else that happens out in the real world?

Homework assignment 3. Find several daily practice that makes you uncomfortable. Go to the gym and put yourself (safely) under as much weight as possible. Meditate every day for as long as you can stand it– no email, no phone, no clock– until your alarm says you can get up. Start with ten minutes and do it right after your biggest task of the day (as discussed above).

YEP… DO NOT CONTINUE TO READ UNTIL YOU HAVE DONE THIS.

4. Raise all hurdles.

I’m going to guess that, in your social circle, you don’t have that many people you hang out with that make you feel like utter, worthless garbage. I don’t mean a psychotic ex or something, I mean someone that is working harder than you, has more money than you, is happier and better with people than you, all that stuff.

A lot of change has to do with watching your blind spots. Returning to old habits is easy when you have no one watching you, calling you on your bullshit when you fall back into your old ways of thinking. You need someone, or many people, who’ll call you on it, who will tell you the truth when you need to hear it. If this is someone you hire, that’s fine, and if it’s someone close to you, like your spouse or friend, that’s fine too. But they have to be able to both tell you the truth, help you raise the bar, and be in your corner at the same time. This is not an easy person to find.

About a month ago my friend Mitch and I got together for sushi. He told me that it’s rare, for people at his level (and mine) to have someone call him out, to tell him he’s wrong. I feel the same way. People around you don’t want to rock the boat, but if you’re like me, you’re surrounded by supporters and no one is telling you you’re not good enough– which is actually what you want to hear. This, by the way, is why I love that I’m going to TED this month. Simply put, I know that five days of feeling like garbage about my accomplishments will do wonders for me.

Anyway, the point of this was that, the next day after I called him on his BS, as he had asked, he produced a 15,000-word book proposal. It was almost instantly sold to Hachette by our agent and became this book.

So the question is, what would it take for you to produce that much amazing material, that fast?

Stay in over your head at all times. If you’ve ever wondered why my blog has the name that it does, you now have your answer. “In over your head” should be the state you are always reaching towards– not knowing entirely what you’re doing, having taken on too much, being too ambitious because you’ve made ridiculous promises, etc. All these things are good because they will make you extremely resourceful. You need to find ways to over-promise so that you begin to freak out, at least a little.

Have regular meetings with people way above your level. I just got introduced to Paulo Coelho via my co-author Chris Brogan. I love his work, as many do, but unfortunately doesn’t make me feel like garbage because he is so above my level that I can’t even relate to his experience and success. So while I’m extremely pleased to be speaking to him (stay tuned for that), in terms of raising the bar, it doesn’t quite cut it.

What you need are people that are close enough to your level, in age, intelligence, and resources, but who have done much more with them. When I remember that Gary Vaynerchuk is only 35, for example, now that makes me feel like garbage. When Mitch gets more speaking engagements than I do, same thing. When Greg is flying to New York (again) to meet high-up VCs to get his company sold, and I suddenly remember that he’s fucking 23 years old, that makes me feel like garbage. So find people like this. Buy them lunch if you have to, whatever it takes.

Incidentally, I’d like to mention that accomplishments alone can’t carry you. After a while, I have a feeling you’ll get burned out on them– that the bar will get raised so high, and you’ll have done so much, that you simply don’t care anymore and just want to produce good work. That is a good thing, of course, and you shouldn’t just be driven by accomplishments, but it genuinely does help me, so that’s why I’m telling you that.

Expose yourself to ideas you don’t understand. People often write or produce ideas and then don’t draw them to their logical conclusion. You can often see people trying to emulate the Seth Godin style of post, for example, because they think that style works since he’s the most popular marketing blogger, etc. But the reality is that these people are having simple ideas, writing them down and going “wow! I’m done,” when they’ve in fact just begun.

Ryan Holiday wrote a post a while ago which is relevant here (see How to digest books above your level). This is important because pushing things past their usual end point is the only way you will ever come across conclusions that others haven’t yet had. Last week I spoke to Gad Saad, who basically invented evolutionary psychology as it relates to consumer behaviour, by coming ideas that had been discussed elsewhere but had simply not been put together before. His work is considered a breakthrough in the understanding of how human beings make buying decisions.

Homework assignment 4. Start reading more. Read biographies of people you have heard of and respect– not necessarily Nobel laureates or geniuses, but people who are like you that you respect. If you’re from Iowa, pick someone else from Iowa. If you’re a web entrepreneur, find people at your level but that have done more with it.

DO NOT CONTINUE TO READ UNTIL YOU HAVE DONE THIS.

5. Change is cyclical.

We’ve come almost full circle at this point. You’ll notice that once your bars get raised, and you can build habits that help construct new skill sets to help you reach them, you will continue to expand your horizons exponentially compared to where they were used to.

I wrote this post, by the way, by using the exact set of things I wrote about here. I could not have written 5,000 words about this without having a daily writing habit. I could not have finished it without being ok with seeing this post fall flat (which it might). I’m ok with it falling flat because I have seen posts I have worked hard on fall flat before, and besides a little disappointment, I did not die… I was fine.

But you can definitely see the process, now, of how normal people become extraordinary through changing their behaviour alone. Then, after behaviour changes, the mind usually changes with it, leading to more confidence, which expands your reach even further, etc, all in a giant cycle.

The sad part about all this is that some people simply are not willing to put themselves inside the system to make it happen. Most people feel as if they are doing it, but they often are not. What they really need to be doing is stop listening to themselves as if they knew what was best for them. The reality is, they don’t. Only when you recognize this can you make change happen.

Conclusion

Ok, this is all fine and good, but the final question is, what should you really be changing towards? Maybe you’re not happy with where you are, and you want to go somewhere else, but why do you even want to go there? What’s the goal, and will you be happier when you get there? You don’t know, so you may not want to change.

I suspect that the real answer to this is that it simply does not matter where you go. Remember, you’re not looking to be perfect. You’re only looking for a small improvement over your current state, and as long as you’re ok with fumbling on your way there, you should just start moving immediately and deal with the decisions as they come.

With that in mind I should say that I really don’t know how to finish this post. It’s by far the largest post I’ve ever written, practically like a mini-book, and I’d just like to finish it so I can go ahead with my drawing, cleaning out my inbox, and everything else I need to do today before I can go out and see my friend Justin without any guilt on my mind.

So thank you very much for reading all the way through. I hope this helps. Please leave me a comment if you have any questions and I’ll do my best to answer all of them. Oh, and please subscribe using the form below. Thanks. :)

“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?

Sometimes I’ll walk into a bookstore and consider whether I’ll want to buy something. I’ll sit there, and consider it for a while.

What do the blurbs say?

Does it look like it’s an easy read?

Is it a bestseller?

All these questions enter your head.

Here, in Chicago O’Hare airport where I write this from, a book retails for about 25$. It also weighs a few pounds. So even if I’m interested in a few books, and I’m ready to spend $50 bucks, at most I’ll be buying one book.

As I’ve discussed before, ebooks turn this all around.

Last month, I put out a short ebook through Seth Godin’s Domino Project. The price was zero, and it was promoted by pretty much every blogger out there.

I’m told a book is a national bestseller when it sells around 15,000 copies. This is considered a phenomenon, causing at minimum a blip on the national radar, versus most books, which don’t blip at all.

So what happens when you put a promotion machine in place, and give people no resistance to buying whatsoever? Well, the results are dramatic.

In the past month and a half, more copies of The Flinch were sent out than copies of Trust Agents, our previous book, over a whole two years. In the first day alone, Amazon showed over 15,000 copies were released, and it’s now sitting around 75,000.

Today we’re going to try that again.

Colin Wright and Joshua Millburn, two friends of mine, are trying the experiment. Alongside the Flinch, their books will be free for the next three days only (click on their names to get them). Already, only a few hours in, Joshua’s book has hit #1 in the short story category. Who knows how far it’ll go?

So back to the question at hand. What is the real price of free? Well, it isn’t a dollar sign.

It’s an opportunity cost.

What would you give for the opportunity to be in front of fifteen, seventy-five, or even a hundred thousand people?

Think carefully. We’re actually in a very unique time. Soon, the market will be flooded. You won’t have this chance for long.

1. True wisdom and insight is always free.

2. Give your power over to no one.

3. Going into the unknown is how you expand what is known.

4. Get a library card.

5. Spend more time around people that both challenge and respect you.

6. Remain skeptical forever.

7. Fight for what matters.

8. There is a method that works. Find it.

9. Join a movement.

10. Drink your coffee black.

11. Never let anyone photoshop a picture of you. It creates a false sense of self-confidence.

12. Read more. Especially things you disagree with.

13. Get used to feeling stupid. It’s a sign of growth.

14. It’s easy for people to talk a good game, so watch how they behave instead.

15. Learn something from everyone.

16. Find things that inspire you and pursue them, even if there’s no money in it.

17. Starve if you have to, for as long as you need to.

18. Survive on a little just to prove you can do it.

19. Get one big success at an early age. It’ll help build your confidence for bigger things.

20. Do what you say you’ll do. No one is reliable anymore.

21. Be comfortable with abandonment, even of parts of your identity.

22. Learn a new language.

23. Eat more protein.

24. Keep people around you that will tell you the truth.

25. Genius gets you nowhere. Execution is everything.

26. If given the choice of equity or cash, always take cash.

27. Meet new people as often as possible. Offer to help them.

28. Don’t discriminate. Connect anyone in your network to anyone else.

29. If you can’t do a pull-up, you have a problem.

30. Nobody likes a know-it-all.

31. Get a passport. Fill it up with stamps no one has ever seen.

32. Quit your horrible job.

33. Read biographies. It’s like having access to the best mentors in history.

34. Go to bed, and wake up, early. No one will bother you, letting your best work emerge.

35. Scare yourself a little bit every day. It will expand your inner map.

36. Learn to climb trees.

37. Don’t buy a lot of stuff, and only buy the stuff you really love.

38. Be humble and curious.

39. Twitter followers don’t keep you warm at night.

40. Be as useful as you can in as many circumstances as possible.

41. Show up.

42. Repeat people’s names when you meet them.

43. Turn internet access off your phone. Wifi is fine.

44. Get a deck of Oblique Strategies cards. Use them.

45. Make your home a place where you feel safe.

46. Take people up on bets. Make more bets yourself.

47. Take cold showers. They’re better than coffee.

48. Learn to enjoy hunger.

49. Make everything either shorter, or longer, than it needs to be.

50. Always remember those who helped you. Deliver two or three times as much value back.

51. But also, help people who have never helped you, and can’t.

52. When you know that pain is temporary, it affects all of your decisions.

53. Get a tattoo. Don’t worry about regret.

54. Commit to things, regularly, that are far beyond your ability.

55. Meet with friends more often than you think you have to.

56. Learn to meditate. Go on a retreat if you have to.

57. Your stories are both more and less interesting than you think.

58. Learn to really listen.

59. Walk more.

60. Ugly is just a step on the way to beautiful.

61. Get to know your neighbours.

62. Don’t take anything personally, ever.

63. Consider avoiding school. Go to lots of conferences instead.

64. As soon as you can, buy some art.

65. Apologize more than you need to.

66. Find out if there will be food there.

67. A good haircut changes everything.

68. Read Man’s Search For Meaning.

69. Say no to projects you don’t care about.

70. Do things that are uncool. Later on, they usually end up becoming cool anyway.

71. Find your voice.

72. Have some manners.

73. Learn to play chess, go, and bridge. They’ll keep you from going senile.

74. Learn about the Tetrapharmakos.

75. Find ways to cheat the system– just don’t cheat people.

76. Be like Jesus, not like his followers. (This applies to all of them.)

77. At least once, date someone that’s out of your league.

78. Examine your jealousy. You’ll learn a lot about yourself.

79. Good connections are about people, not social networks.

80. Address small problems. They will become big problems.

81. Dress like a cooler version of yourself.

82. Yes, there is such a thing as bad press.

83. Add “adventurer” to your Twitter bio. Then, become one.

84. If the internet is the best thing in your life, you have a serious problem.

85. Give away your best work for free.

86. Find mentors. Just don’t call them that.

87. Actually write on your blog. Nobody cares if it’s hard.

88. Download Freedom. Use it for an hour every day.

89. Join a gym. Lift the heaviest you can. (This applies to girls too.)

90. Do some freewriting. It helps you think things through.

91. When you’re having supper with rich people, pick up the cheque.

92. Learn how to speak in public.

93. If you see someone who needs help, stop asking yourself if they need help. Instead, just help.

94. Bring a bottle of wine.

95. The best conversations are had side by side, not one in front of the other.

96. Protect your hearing. Trust me.

97. Do what’s most important first thing in the morning, before you check email.

98. Everyone feels like they’re not good enough. It’s not just you.

99. Courage is a learned skill.

100. Go to Iceland. It’s worth it.

Hi Chris. :)

You’ve traveled to almost 175 countries. You go to places where you don’t know the language over and over again, which tends to make people nervous. You also teach people to quit their job for a living, which almost everyone is anxious about.

Are you nervous about these things? Do you remember a time where you ever were?

Yes and no. In some ways, I’m a nervous wreck with everything I do… I just do it anyway.

In other ways, I’m the world’s most nonchalant and unprepared traveler. It would actually be good if I prepared more than I do, since I’m always forgetting things, booking the wrong tickets, leaving my iPhone in coffee shops, and so on. But again, I just keep pressing forward, for better or worse.

As for teaching people to quit their jobs, that originally began from my own lack of experience at holding down any sort of job. I was a terrible employee and not good at working for anyone other than myself.

I feel like I can relate a lot to that. A lot of other people probably do too, but they’re not in the situation where they just say “screw it” and buy the ticket/get on the plane/quit. What helps you get through that moment?

Well, there are a lot of popular stories of people saying “screw it” and making big changes all at once, and they can be inspiring. But as you mention, not everyone can do that, and some people have legitimate obstacles or concerns that may take a while to resolve.

On my book tour last year I told a lot of different reader stories and tried to pay attention to which ones resonated the best with audiences. Probably the most popular story was about a guy in North Carolina who had a family and a “good” day job. He wanted to make some changes but couldn’t just abandon it all and move to Thailand, you know?

So instead of jumping ship, and instead of just going on with his self-described boring life, he started making a series of small changes. They began with what he called “Life Experiments”—just doing things differently, like going to the art museum during his lunch break, taking up a new hobby of photography, and so on.

Then he started traveling for work, and instead of going to Paris for a three-week commitment on his own, he found a way to take his wife and their three daughters. This way, the whole family had a fun and interesting cross-cultural experience.

Upon returning to the U.S., he eventually started consulting and is now completely self-employed. But the moral of the story, at least how he told it to me, is that the greatest change actually came from the beginning, the life experiments that helped him become more comfortable with doing things differently. With this story in mind, I always encourage people who can’t say “screw it” to start saying “What small things can I change right now?”

There’s a great book about that out there, I think it’s called One Small Step Can Change Your Life. It’s about small changes being more effective because they don’t set off alarms.

When I talk about it in the Flinch, I actually say the opposite. Let your alarms go off and realize that they’re not working well for you at all. They’re ineffective. Your fear is supposed to protect you, but it chokes you instead. For most things, our internal alarm system is defective.

During your book tour, how did you make people feel that they were capable of changing their programming?

Yeah, that’s good—I agree that fear can be a deadly force. When we’re being honest, I think most of us would admit that we’ve let fear make too many decisions for us. That’s certainly been the case for me, at least until I became aware of it.

I don’t think anyone can make people feel they are capable of changing their programming, or at least I don’t think I can. But it does help to provide examples: hey, look at this guy. He used to be just like you, but now he’s a totally different person. What did he do to bring him to this new place?

Especially when you’re a writer or otherwise doing something publicly, the danger is in assuming that everyone wants to be you. Sometimes this is self-inflected, other times some people may actually phrase it that way themselves: “I want to do what you do.” I always try to put the emphasis, and therefore the burden of change, back on that person: “Really? What exactly do you want to do? What’s stopping you?”

Right, what they actually want to be is just an idealized version of themselves, and you try to help them see that.

Just a final question: what is it that’s currently stopping you now? What is that thing that you still have some kind of anxiety about, if anything? How do you fight it?

Good question. I’m coming to the end of my quest to visit every country in the world, and that fact scares me a little. It’s funny because my wife, along with several other smart people, have been asking me for a while now: “What are you going to do when this is over?”

And for a long time, I didn’t understand the question. “What do you mean?” I’d say. “I’ll keep traveling, keep writing, and keep working on my business stuff.”

All of these things are true, but I think the people who asked were right in assuming that there is still a bigger question. In one way or another, I’ve been on the road for much of the time over the past decade. It’s become a big part of my identity. So all of a sudden, I feel a sense of loss and uncertainty, along with the anxiety you mention.

It’s certainly a good problem to have, compared to sucking down candy bars in a cubicle somewhere, but I honestly don’t know what I’ll do to fight it. For now I just keep traveling. ***

—

PS: I get inspired a lot by conversations I have with people. The Flinch was inspired by a moment I had with Jonathan Fields. This conversation actually helped me put together an idea for a book I’d been kicking around. Stay tuned.

Btw, Chris just came out with a guide to publishing (not an affiliate link). Check it out, I found it extremely informative. :)

Hey, you. Yes, you.

Do yourself a favour. This year, for once, I have a suggestion, and I’d like you to take it.

This year, this once, it’s time you used your New Year’s resolution properly for a change.

Stop screwing around with your I’m-going-to-lose-10-pounds, buy-a-treadmill bullshit. Stop with the 7-Minute-Abs, the “I’m going to blog every day” thing that everyone is doing right now. And your “I’m going to quit smoking for real this time” is not convincing anyone.

It is time for you to recognize that what you’re doing is not working.

“Great,” you may be thinking. “I agree.” Now, perhaps you will go and find people in your life who can give you a gentle talking to, such as your spouse or friends. They’ll set you straight. They can say, “come on man, you can do it,” and that’s helpful and good.

But there’s a problem. None of these people can really tell you the truth. They can’t call you on your bullshit right to your face, because that would be rude, and you might get angry at them. There are social consequences, shockingly.

But here’s the magic. On the internet, I can do whatever the hell I want. I can tell you the truth, because you don’t know me, and you probably never will. That, my friends, is freedom. I’m going to use it.

It’s time you snapped the fuck out of it. I’m here to help.

Enough screwing around. Let’s start with a few questions.

Q1. Do you know which five opinions of yours, right now, are 100% wrong?

Have you ever noticed how no one ever thinks they are wrong about anything, ever? “But I might be wrong about that” may just be the most rarely uttered sentence, ever– and when it is, it’s never about things that matter. Yet at any given moment, you can examine your opinions and ask yourself “which one of these am I wrong about?”

Of course, most people will answer “none.” Most people never think they’re wrong about anything.

Now ask yourself, is it truly possible that I am totally right about everything I think, right now?

Or is it more likely, and stick with me on this one, that you are totally wrong about a lot of things all of the time, but that you never examine your blind spots so you have no fucking clue what you’re doing right or wrong at all?!

Somewhere out there, there is a man or woman just like you, just as smart as you are, just as clever and good-looking, who has the exact opposite political views, or who thinks that Ayn Rand is the greatest philosopher of our time, or something.

Yet, these people are not idiots. In fact, it is highly possible that, quite counter-intuitively, the idiot is you. So the first step in all of this is to consider that it’s possible that you are wrong– not a little, but a lot– in fact, that you’re fucking everything up and that you need a wakeup call. You need to get bitch-slapped, regularly, and put your arrogant ass in its place.

I include myself in that group, of course.

Q2. Hey, so how’s that method working out for you?

I know! I’ve got this new habit I want to implement and I’m going to try it the exact same way that I tried it last year, except harder! Super good idea brah, let’s do it.

If you’re the average dude, with an average system and average efforts, how do you think your results will be? You got it: average. Should this surprise you? No.

Here’s the thing: average is bullshit. You think it’s fine because you’re also surrounded by average dudes, so any small difference makes you feel good about yourself. But you need to stop fucking around. It’s still average, you know it, and you’re better than that.

Get yourself a goddamn system. Read 18 Minutes, or Making Ideas Happen, or Getting Things Done, or Bit Literacy (free!), or anything else for that matter. Get a fucking clue. Get out of your usual habits and do something different or you will get nowhere.

Q3. Do you know what effort feels like?

This is a call-out to all of my friends on Twitter who are doing the same thing they were doing three years ago. You know who you are.

Here’s a question. When was the last time your body and your mind were totally screaming because you didn’t want to do something? When was the last time you felt that you had to do something, because you knew it was important, but it was too much work, too much emotional labour, and further, even if you did do it, you don’t even know how?

Then, how did it feel when you did it anyway? Yes, exactly.

This, my friends, is the ideal state. I call it the ring, because it’s the place where the fight actually happens. Those that enter are fighters, challengers, and champions– people who push their boundaries and make things happen. You cannot remain in the ring forever, because it is immensely difficult, but if you never go there, you will never have breakthroughs. Otherwise, your life will be a comfortable carriage ride all the way to the grave.

Q4. When was the last time you questioned your direction?

I just recently tested my genetic code on 23andMe. The results came back, and one thing that popped out is that I have higher possible chance of living to the age of 100 than most people. In other words, I have a long life to lead. I eat really well, exercise, fast 16 hours a day, and generally inform myself about health, so I have a feeling I’ll be doing alright and have a lot of time.

I do not believe, however, that this potential long lifespan (or anything else) allows me to feel like I have the right to fuck around and waste my life. You can choose to ready, fire, aim if you want, but remember to adjust afterwards because you may be going in the totally wrong direction.

My father, a career counsellor, used to tell me that people had on average 7 careers in your lifetime. In other words, there’s plenty of time to change and you should consider it! For example, after 15 years or so off and dropping out of art school, I am spending more time drawing, sculpting, etc, than I have in a decade. It’s challenging but it feels good, and good accidents can happen. Haruki Murakami, one of the most respected living writers in the world, started off writing while he owned a bar. He was just trying it out.

This should also be a sign to those of you who are choosing careers based on their potential future earnings. Stop being such a tool. Go do something you actually care about– trust me, I’ve had enough conversations with successful yet miserable people. Success and money are ruts that are just as hard to get out of as being in a miserable job for 5 years.

Q5. How are you going to be changing the world?

Here’s my final point– for now, at least. I’ve spent a lot of time around authors over the past little while and I’ve started to figure out that almost all of them have one primary thing to say, a single idea that they are really about. Seth Godin could be “be remarkable,” applied to multiple different formats. Tim Ferriss: “most effort is wasted– do what matters.” Pema Chodron: “Drop the storyline.” I could do this all day.

Here’s the thing: authors have to write down their ideas and express them differently. It’s their job and they have to work at it, so they get many ideas in their head and stick with those that matter to them (or sometimes those that sell– sigh). Point being, even non-authors need to figure this one thing out. But most never think about it. They plod along without much direction or grand goal at all– and if it is, it’s often rather selfish.

Again, I include myself in this.

Here is my suggestion: If you had a TED talk, or some other grand idea, how would you present it? Think about it. This is your one chance. How would you use it?

Or, optionally, if you had to leave something behind, if you were going to die and be entirely forgotten but could change one thing, what one thing would that be? Would you be like Bill W and start something to help alcoholics all over the world? Would you solve a technical problem or a social one? Think about it. Or write about it, it’ll help you figure it out.

Ok, now that you have the answer, or at least you’re thinking about it, here’s the real focus.

Q6. Why would you work on anything else but what actually matters?

I leave you with that. Please subscribe below.

For most, the man needs no introduction. But in case you do, here’s one anyway.

Leo Babauta is the founder of ZenHabits, a massively popular blog that is considered by Time Magazine to be one of the top 25 blogs in the world. This is already enough to make him interesting, but actually, there’s more.

In November of 2011, Leo completed the Goruck challenge, a 15-20 mile behemoth that pushes you to every limit you thought you had.

The connection to The Flinch seemed natural. If you read it, you’ll definitely love this.

Tell me about the Goruck challenge, and why you decided to do it.

They say if you have to ask, it can’t be explained. And so of course I’ll try to explain it: if you hear about the challenge — 12+ hours of grueling physical tasks with a 55-lb. backpack on your back — and you think it sounds like fun, you’re probably right for it.

It’s kind of like getting a taste of what the Special Forces guys do in training, but without the weapons. Weighted pushups, lunges, bear crawls, hiking, running, carrying logs, carrying your teammates … this is the kind of thing I wanted to try. I’m not into the military aspect, but I am into physical challenges, and especially into mental challenges. This was, at its deepest level, a mental challenge: you have to find it in you to not quit when it sucks really bad, to help your teammate when he’s falling down, to motivate your team to meet its missions. I found out a lot about myself.

I know they say “it’s all mental,” and I know from Crossfit, walking the Camino, etc, that it’s true, but there’s also real physical challenge there. How do you know you can do it?

You don’t know, and that’s the scary part. You should be able to run/hike with a weighted backpack (let’s say 30-lbs.) for a couple hours at least. You should be able to do a bunch of pushups, squats, lunges, and bear crawls. You should be able to sprint and run up hills. It requires strength, so practice carrying people on your back and shoulders.

If you can do all that, you should be OK physically. But it will still suck at times, and you’ll want to quit, no matter how physically prepared you are. You have to make it through the suck. You have to embrace the suck.

Now we’re talking. Ok, describe the moment where the suck occurs. How does it feel when it happens? How do you convince yourself to go on?

You’re cold and wet and you’ve been crawling on the sand for hours with your heavy pack biting into your shoulders and your knees are bloody and your shoulders want to collapse, and you don’t know when this will end. Your mind has been complaining constantly, “Why are we doing this? What’s the worst that would happen if we just quit and walked away? What are we trying to prove? Is it worth it? You could go home and sleep. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

And it’s incredibly tempting to give in to your mind, because it is very convincing. We are very very good at rationalizing, especially in the face of pain. It’s painful, and you want the pain to end, and you want to just rest. This is what happens when it starts to suck. And that was just the beginning of the suck — there were many other such moments along the way.

I would convince myself to go on first by being aware of what my mind was doing. I would watch my mind as an outside observer, and laugh at my mind and its rationalizations. Then I would pay attention to the ground in front of my face, the waves on the beach washing up near my body, the incredible view of the Golden Gate Bridge lit up at night, and think, “I am incredibly lucky.” I would feel the pain and the tiredness, and think, “What a wonderful thing it is to feel.” And then I would say, “Just one more step. We can re-evaluate after one more step.” Then I’d repeat that after that one step. It also helped that I had a team relying on me, and that I couldn’t just quit or I’d let them down.

I lived in a Japanese temple for a while where I did that. To delay the decision to stop meditating, I would say, “I will decide in exactly 30 minutes.” And then after that time: “Well, that wasn’t that bad, I could do that again.”

True, it works for anything. It helped me too when I started marathon training — you inevitably want to stop running, but if you just go a few more steps, you’ll be fine.

What I’m trying to figure out is how to make people resistant to the BS of that inner voice. To do it, you need a certain distance from yourself. How did you learn to do it? Were you born that way?

I learned it when I wanted to quit smoking, and the urges would be so strong and the rationalizations would nearly always beat me. I would tell myself, “Just get past this one urge.” I didn’t even need to go the whole day, just that one urge.

Before I learned this, I would give in to any urge. But when you realize the urge is there — you become self-aware — you learn that you can watch it, and listen to your inner voice. The inner voice is extremely intelligent, and the worst part is that we are usually not aware that it’s speaking. We just listen to it without being conscious of it. And it is talking all day long. Most people don’t realize how persistent and powerful it is.

Running really helped me to learn to listen to it, but not heed it. I run without an iPod, which means it’s just me, the outdoors, and my mind. So I pay attention to the nature around me, but also I have nothing to listen to but my mind. So I listen. And it talks, constantly.

Meditation helped strengthen this skill. Meditation is the same as running — you have nothing to pay attention to but your breathing, your body, and your mind. And your mind is very active. So you watch it, and you learn to be this observer, and it’s fascinating if you stick with it.

I’ve started to think that people should be doing difficult things on purpose, if only to train them to be able to push past their usual habits and internal programming. Do you agree? What other internal walls have you been able to push past?

I haven’t found this to be necessary myself, though I’m not saying you’re wrong. I do things in baby steps, so that change is easy. I find it much more sustainable than trying to do things that are really difficult.

I also think people are already doing difficult things in their routines — it’s incredibly unpleasant to be in a job you hate, to be overweight and unhealthy, to be deeply in debt. I know because I’ve done those things, but I felt stuck in this difficult life. The baby steps helped me to get out of the routine, to change my internal programming with micro changes.

As for other internal walls … one that I’ve been exploring is giving up goals. I’m very much programmed to be goal-oriented, and I think a lot of us are. When I first considered giving up goals, I thought it was impossible and stupid. But slowly I’ve been learning that it’s a much better way of thinking, at least for me.

Explain “giving up goals.” Did it help you complete the Goruck or was that something separate?

As I looked deeper into what’s necessary and what’s not, I started to question the need for goals — are they really essential? What would happen if you gave them up? Are they really the driving force behind what we accomplish? I’ve found that they are unnecessary — without goals, you’ll still work on things you’re passionate about, and do fun fitness activities and other things that excite you.

Goals take credit for our accomplishments, but our passion and interest is what really make things happen. Goals also add a lot of administration — goal setting, tracking, making sure you’re sticking to the goal, finding next actions, etc. Goals stress us out — if we’re not on track or don’t reach them, are we failures? Goals also fix us on a certain path, when in truth there are many possible paths and staying on one predetermined path with a fixed destination is an artificial limitation that’s completely unnecessary and unnatural.

When you remove this limitation, you are freed to do anything.

When I did the Goruck Challenge, I didn’t have “finish challenge” as a goal. I just wanted to have fun doing a new challenge. It didn’t matter to me if I finished or not. However, when I felt like quitting, I decided to stick it out through the urge to quit, to explore what that’s like. I think it’s a really interesting experiment, pushing past these urges to quit, and so that’s what I did. So yes, it did help me to finish.

“Free to do anything.” That is the perfect final sentence.

Last question: After all this progress you’ve made, is there anything you still feel any anxiety about? What do you still have problems with, if anything?

Sure, I have all the same insecurities as anyone else. I get anxious about unfamiliar social situations, public speaking, will people like my writing, am I good enough to write fiction? I have fears, about financial security and being alone and whether my life is meaningless.

The key I think is whether I let those insecurities and fears stop me from doing the things I love. I’m learning to watch those feelings, like an outside observer, and realize that they are not a part of me, but just something that happens. They are natural phenomena, like the sun rising or leaves changing color, but they are not who I am. So I watch, and let them happen, and don’t let them define me or what I do.

Find out more about Leo here.

Read The Flinch, for free, here.

Today my new book, The Flinch, is launched on Seth Godin’s Domino Project.

It’s about how to push your own barriers and how to do things that scare you.

Writing the book was hardest thing I’ve ever done, and as an experiment, it’s available for free.

With the help of Seth, Chris Brogan, and many others, I made something so far beyond my usual capacities that it actually shocks me.

Godin called it: “a surprise, a confrontation, a book that will push you, scare you and possibly stick with you for years to come.”

If it’s even that good, the question then becomes, how can you, the reader, make something so great that even you are unsure of how it was made?

7 Steps to the Best Work of Your Life

1. Burn your bridges. I was conscious of the fact that I would never get a chance to publish under Godin’s Domino Project again. I knew that if I screwed it up, I was done. You do your best work with your back against the wall, when you are uncomfortable and you put yourself in freefall, on purpose.

2. Grow an eye in the back of your head. Your blind spots, whether they are laziness or settling for anything sub-par, will kill you. I had people the entire way telling me to make it better, over and over again, until I practically cried and didn’t know how.

3. Be willing to suffer. Forget about the “starving artist” myth. Starving is easy– deprogramming is hard. Because you are a human being, you are programmed to settle in one way or another, and breaking that programming will hurt. Get used to it– it’s the only way to make something exceptional.

4. Be comfortable making something that people will hate. No one will love your work unless it has an opinion– and with an opinion come those that disagree. The first person outside of our little circle that saw the work did not like it at all, perhaps even hated it. This is also how I knew that I had something that some people would fight for.

5. Consider the future. In the future, books either cost $50 or $0. They are frictionless and those that travel the fastest and spread the widest, win. Make your work as close to the future as possible– but only 6 months, not 18 months. If you’re too far in the future, it’s possible no one will get it.

6. Sharpen your idea. This part is damn hard. Only when the idea became “the flinch” did I know that I had an idea that was sharp enough to travel. Every other idea had too much friction, too much difficulty to be expressed. When the idea marketplace is saturated (and it is now, more than ever), your idea needs to be more graspable than ever before, because you only get one chance.

7. All content must be spreadable. Quotes in 140 characters. Links in the text. New phrases that stick in people’s minds. Everything must be a part of your “marketing campaign”– even in a book that’s basically unsellable. The best quote from Godin on this was, “make it a poem that doesn’t rhyme.” There is so much information out there now that your work can no longer simply be commerce– it must also be art.

As of today, you can download the Flinch for free. I hope it you like it– if you liked this post, you will definitely enjoy it.

Every little while, technology is democratized to a point where everyone is once again put on equal footing.

It happened at the printing press. It happened with blogs. It happened with podcasting, and it happened with Twitter. It happens a little bit at a time, and as it does, I’m amazed by the average person’s ability to step up to the plate. Normal, supposedly non-qualified people become journalists, entertainers, or musicians. Everyone proves themselves capable, often despite the misgivings of those in the ivory towers.

Well, it’s about to happen again. I’m starting to see it now, and you probably are too.

The iPhone iPod has been out for ten years, and it’s reached a point of such ubiquity that everyone now also has an e-reader. They can push any text to their phone pretty much instantly.

So, this is about the time everyone starts to write books.

This is the time we all become authors.

I can start to see it already. The Domino Project is in full gear. I just received word that Chris Moore published his first book on his experiences in Cuba, direct to Amazon, for three bucks. Joshua just published his own, of short stories, since quitting his job. James Altucher continues to self-publish his work instead of going through mainstream publishers. And let’s not forget Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff, whose most recent, Transistor Rodeo, got its movie rights optioned recently.

So, I was sitting having breakfast with Greg Isenberg the other day when this gem occurred to me: at one point, the internet was nerdy and uncool. Now it is hip and super popular. Those that got in early on the web, won. Those that got in late, not so much.

So our job is now to find the new uncool thing immediately. And right now, self-publishing via Kindle is definitely one of those uncool things.

No prestige, no money, no gatekeepers. Everything that goes the way of the vanity press is supposedly low-quality, but is it really? Soon, we won’t think so. Everyone will be doing it, and you’ll wonder why you never got in on it back then.

We’re all going to be peers. It’ll be about sales and reviews, not about advances. It’ll be about cutting out the middleman. Bloggers, and others with powerful platforms, will realize they don’t need the middleman at all (or rather, that Amazon has become the new middleman, and they do a better job).

Now onto what happens to authors themselves, and their work.

First, friction for a purchase is drastically reduced by a deeply discounted price point. $2.99 for fifty thousand words will significantly impact sales.

Second, a book no longer sits there on your desk. Anyone with an iPhone can hold 1,000 of them. So your most recently read/opened books become your RSS reader, with new things popping up all the time.

Third, add numbers 1 and 2 above and you naturally get many more unfinished books than you’re used to seeing– that is to say, readers not bothering to finish books. You don’t see the unfinished books at the bottom of your Kindle list, so you never finish them, and the price point means you didn’t waste much. New books on the top of the pile end up being tried out instead of old ones getting finished.

Fourth, this means shorter books end up dominating. Seth Godin has it right here.

Fifth, the ebook (or whatever we end up calling it) ends up becoming the midpoint between the blog post and the book. Some authors (many, actually) may stay here since it’ll provide them with enough income to survive and a direct connection to their audience. I’m thinking the Ev Bogue and Gwen Bell types.

Sixth, publishers naturally need to adapt– and they end up at the top of the market, grabbing the best of the ebook markets and offering them great deals (the way publishers like Wiley do with bloggers now).

Sidenote, all of these things are happening already. This post isn’t about the future at all; it’s about the present. Hope you’re ready!

Games are useful. Games are fun. Yet, somehow, gamification itself has become the butt of almost every internet joke I’ve heard recently.

It isn’t because games aren’t useful. They are and they can change the world. It’s because gamification is being wasted on the most useless, time wasting crap I’ve ever seen.

Because of this, I feel that gamification is perhaps the most offensive thing to hit the internet in the past couple of years. I will attempt to explain why in the next few paragraphs, hopefully inspiring you, the reader or game designer, to do something better with games than more foursquare logins, Farmville XP, or any other nonsense you are currently hoping to ensnare your users with.

First, my qualifications: I have been a player of video games, RPGs, city-wide games of tag, iPhone games, and more for almost my entire life. But more importantly, I have been a D&D Dungeon Master (™) for over 20 years. In this, I am an eternal student, but I have hopefully developed some sense of what makes things fun, and why people keep coming back. So I am “qualified” to talk about games, as absurd as that statement should be.

But this is actually about more than that. It isn’t about designing better games, or saying that gamification is dead or alive or whatever statement can help sell papers. It’s about saying that gamification is a mercenary industry/profession that sells itself to the highest bidder, when what they should be doing is changing the world.

Are you a gamer? Are you a game designer? Are you currently designing bullshit badges for users that don’t give a fuck, or worse, that they care so much they’re ignoring real life? In that case, I have a clarion call I hope you will hear.

Stop trying to make games better. They are fine. It’s life that is broken. Start fixing that.

Our schools are broken. They churn out people with little initiative who can’t find jobs anyway. The system is no longer levelling people up properly.

Rewards are being disproportionately placed in the wrong hands. Our smartest people go into banking because they receive massive compensation and no downside. They are the min-maxers, the munchkins of our world; they have found the loopholes and been led down the wrong path because of it.

Occupy Wall Street is full of people who want the game world to work better. But no one is fixing it because they’re too busy on their own personal World of Warcraft. This is bullshit and it’s killing us.

Our games are rigged in the wrong direction. This is so obvious is needs no further argument, so I will move on to people that are doing it correctly, and what further steps we can take to solve this.

There are people whose understanding of games is helping real life in small ways– helping understand behaviour and guiding it towards more useful things. Chore Wars or my friend Kyle’s company High Score House is an example. They help people do better at the thing they suck at most right now– life.

Yet the majority of our institutions are broken, giving us no way to get better at the things that matter most. We are natural pattern recognition machines that get very good at understanding and hacking simple systems, so when we’re given a new job, we immediately figure out how much we can slack off, for example, the same way we know how to get a good report card by doing the smallest amount of work possible.

We are naturally detecting which games matter and which don’t– and we are figuring out that most of our life is the fundamental equivalent of gold farming. It’s pointless and it’s fucking sad.

FACT. No one has a fundamental method for teaching people what matters in life and what does not. No one knows how to teach people what the important games are, and how to win at them. Most people on the internet are still buying bullshit $47 make-money-online programs, time and time again, or spending time trying to vote their dog up on cleverly designed marketing campaigns. (Even I’m guilty of this.)

Very few people are doing this for doing something that’s fundamentally good.

No one is systematically guiding people through the dungeon of life, intelligently and for free. Everyone is trying to turn gamification into the thing that helps keep their website stickier. It’s disgusting.

However, there is a culture out there, one that has survived for a long time, in which people are designing games and running people through them, for free. These people take hours, sometimes dozens of hours out of their weeks in order to help their friends have fun. This culture is largely non-profit and runs like Wikipedia. Most attempts to monetize this audience fail because they just want to help their friends have fun.

These people are role-players and the people who design for their world: Dungeon Masters. But even they spent their time in imaginary worlds, making fun stuff for their friends, yet mostly sit on the sidelines in helping to make a difference in their community around them.

The reason this is important is because it proves that there is an initiative in human beings to design things for their friends, to help them enjoy themselves week after week.

But if there are people who do this around the world, everywhere in every language, for free, why are those who are trying to improve the game of the real world relegated to its backwaters, with social workers, teachers, and after-school program leaders being paid nothing, given no social status or benefits?

We need actual mentors, but backed by systems that we know function well because of our experimentation inside of the game systems we have come to know and love.

We already know that some people want and love to teach others, but their systems are broken. Gamers understand how to create and fix system.

Gamers love to create mazes and run people through them, but the points don’t matter. We need to put them in a place where what they do makes a real difference.

What we need are Dungeon Masters for the real world.

Edit: Let me give you an idea of what I mean. The world is filled with systems that children need to go through in order to level up. They are fundamental and easy and everyone knows them.

Swimming: Most people who learn how to swim learn wrong and couldn’t save themselves in a bad situation if they tried. This is a fundamental skill that has a curriculum, but is no longer serving people properly.

Math: Math is a basic set of skills that everyone needs. They’re given it in school and yet many people can no longer do calculations in their head, if they ever could. Another life skill that people are lacking yet don’t know they need.

Advanced skills: And this is just the beginning. Most people don’t know how to see a profitable business idea if they spot one. They don’t know how to make good habits stick. They don’t know to build confidence. They don’t know how to meet a nice girl. They basically don’t know how to learn many of the most important skills, and there is no guide for helping them learn.

Here are skills I’d be more than happy to learn from a qualified person in a game environment.

• Investing
• Swimming
• Cooking
• Advanced social skills
• Writing

The list goes on and on.

In a game world, you start with something easy, and you learn as you go on. You gain experience points, and you progress along a pre-set path that will eventually guide you to be able to get through the next level, use your skills in a better way, etc.

Some people have succeeded at this, but most have not. It is those that have had some success in life (whatever form it takes) whose job it is to design the game for those yet to come.

Watching big-time bloggers put out books really is something else.

Case in point: yesterday, Mark Sisson, a huge paleo blogger, released a book called the 21-Day Total Body Transformation. Naturally, he was trying to hit the New York Times bestseller list, and offering bonuses for buying multiple books, etc, as many people have before. The strategy works, I don’t blame him and I wish we had done it for Trust Agents (we ended up doing “free” speaking deals instead).

So naturally, as an author, I end up looking at the reviews of this book; as an author, reading Amazon reviews is what I do when I should be working. I read other people’s reviews to give me either an inferiority or superiority complex, depending on the situation. I’m sure many of you do the same.

Anyway on Mark’s book, there they are, sitting there, all 5-star reviews, except this lone 1-star review sitting there at the bottom, voted “least useful” of all the reviews (at this point, it’s sitting at 138 “downvotes,” or 93% “unhelpful”). Then there’s the giant comment thread that accompanies it in which the reviewer is put down, insulted, etc.

Now before I continue, I’d like to mention that I read Mark’s last book, liked it, and passed it on. I’m sure this one is fine too, and I hope he hits the list (it’s sitting at #6 overall right now).

But that aside, some of the internet’s superfans are starting to drive me nuts.

I first began to notice this trend a long time ago on Gary Vee’s book Crush It, which I also read when it came out. There’s this crazy comment thread attached to a two-star review over there, which due to its inflammatory nature has been voted up to “most helpful” of all reviews. Gary (who I consider an friend/acquaintance) answers really helpfully in the thread, and then, unbeknownst to him I’m sure, all the devils in Hell are unleashed in his defense.

Here’s how it happens. First, a guy with a huge blog audience puts out a product, book, or what have you. This author probably polarizes quite effectively, leading to a number of zealots who judge him not by the quality of his content (though they could– Gary, Mark, etc. write quite well), but by who they are, leading to anyone who disagrees becoming a kind of enemy of the state, a traitor, or what have you.

The weird thing is that, often enough, the authors themselves have nothing to do with this. They don’t intentionally create cults– they’ve just helped a lot of people, and those people personally identify with the lifestyle or personality who leads them.

Don’t get me wrong. I want to be popular, and I want to hit lists as much as the next guy. But the weird part is, every author I know, even those who would recognize the insanity of this phenomenon, probably also think it’s be the best thing that could ever happen to them.

I don’t have a conclusion to this because there is none. It’s something everyone thinks is nuts, yes, but only as it regards someone else’s audience, and never theirs, because polarizing is good and helps drum up attention. However,

• It’s not good for the public.
• It ruins the trust people have in Amazon’s rating system.
• It artificially inflates the apparent popularity of books.

In short, it is a perfect example of the tragedy of the commons.

Have a solution? I’m open to hearing it. I honestly don’t think there is one.

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?

1000 years ago, the amount of moves a peasant could take were limited. He understood the risk in his world well, but it isn’t because he was super smart. It’s because his world was small.

The world is now too big to understand how risky a single action can be. Still, some people are more adept at understanding risk than others.

How adept you are at assessing risk has a lot to do with how much practice you have. If you’ve never done it before, you don’t truly know what the consequences will be. This either prevents you from acting entirely or it changes what moves you will make.

One of the best ways to understand this is to watch parkour videos, or skateboarding videos. Here’s one that my friend Julie Angel made.

As you can see, risk is relative. These guys are not born geniuses with their bodies, they were made geniuses through scars and experience.

So, being able to assess risk does not mean you are special. More often than not, it just means you are practiced. And because most people are not willing to practice, most people are not good at assessing risk.

Meanwhile, those that get good at it get very good. Their understanding of the world grows. They see shortcuts where others do not. They take advantage of them. This is what parkour is all about: finding shortcuts through the environment.

Sometimes this is ok, and it’s moral. Some find loopholes, disrupting using technology which, at the core, helps make the human experience better. Other times, it’s largely about personal gain, and not about the human experience at all.

Everyone has to decide what place they want to occupy on the slider. Nothing is entirely black or white. To some people, getting a job through your connections is a lot like skipping the line at the airport. It pisses people off and seems wrong. To others, it seems perfectly fine.

As these Occupy Wall Street protests spread, I’ve been thinking a lot about risk and how it is misunderstood. I originally ended up in school and, had I not found it horribly boring, I probably would have graduated and tried to find a job in my field (likely social sciences). At 32 I would probably be making ok money and feeling like I was making my way in the world. Little would I know that dropping out and working horrible phone jobs for 5 years would eventually lead me to where I am today.

The situation is a bit the same for those who feel that the social contract has been broken for them. They were told to go to school and that it would make them more employable, but little did they know that the infrastructure beneath them is largely about money and risk avoidance, and designed for a factory system that is already filled to the brim with people who do not want to (or can’t) leave their jobs. They feel screwed, and I can relate. It could have been me.

You also see people who moved through the world and, through a series of coincidences and smarts, ended up making millions by finding loopholes that allow a disproportionate reward in comparison to the risk they’ve had to take. These people worked hard, and they’re probably smarter than average, so they feel they deserve what they got. After all, they found the loopholes and saw the world as it was, maybe. There will always be loopholes, after all, so there will always be people like this.

It’s almost like a game of snakes and ladders. Some people got bad directions from people they trusted and went in the wrong direction. Others happened upon ladders that got them places fast.

The problem is that we need to understand risk much more completely than we currently do– and there is no concrete method for doing so.

Imagine that you’re a child and that you’re afraid of the dark. This fear is in fact quite logical, and for millions of years, humans who did not fear the dark got eaten. Now, however, it’s useless. So your parents explain to you that you don’t need to be afraid, etc, and as time goes on, you are no longer afraid.

This system is what we need to understand the rest of the world. It needs to be organic and it needs to be complete, because the modern world is too unlike the world we evolved in. The system either needs to be taught to us, or we need to develop one.

Right now, it’s all about lucking upon the right answers– this is not how a fair, modern system should work.

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?

This is the information age. Anything you want to learn how to do, you can.

If you want to ride a bike, there’s a 26 step process for doing it right here.

Yet every day, people look at the steps of what they want to do and say “no.”

Those who want to go for an early morning run sleep in, instead.

They say they’ll write 1000 words but end up watching television.

They decide that they can have one last one (no matter what that is).

And you are one of these people. We all are. Why?

This leaves one of two options:

ONE. The information is right. The steps are right there in front of you. You just aren’t doing them. This is simply a willpower issue. Point final.

TWO. Part of the equation is missing. It’s about more than the information. Some of the steps are missing; not just from riding a bike, but everywhere. There is a big X in the equation, an unknown– maybe several of them– and they are stopping you, me, and everyone.

Which is it?

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?

Many generations ago, long before Blackberries and Starbucks, there was a time when we could only interact with other people while they were still alive.

Things now are not so simple.

First, writing was invented; then television, and now the web.

The whole environment has changed, but our brains have not. We are still made for jungles and savannahs but we interact more with iPhones and computer screens than anything else. Surely, this has had an impact.

A long time ago, the only things we interacted with that we couldn’t see were ghosts and gods. Now, we interact with more invisible people than we ever have. What happens as a result of this is indescribably complex and will likely take generations to truly understand. Marshall McLuhan figured a bit of it out, but media keeps changing, so it’ll take much more than that.

But there’s something else. This is the first generation when most of us have interacted so much with our own media. We used to think of Dan Rather as exemplifying trust. We believed in his story, had faith in his myth. But now it’s ourselves we’re seeing on a screen. What happens then?

I know that when I interact with a blogger or a celebrity of any kind, I am interacting with a blurry, half-constructed version of a person, with only what I’ve read or seen to base the interactions on. I engage with the construct instead of the person, and only later discover who the real person is. I know people do this with me too– I can see it by the emails I receive.

My question is this: are we starting to believe our own myths? Is producing, and watching our own media leading us to believe the images we create? I don’t know the answer, but I do have a feeling about it.

Comments on blogs lead us to interact with people who believe in our myth.

We get calls from media talking to us as though we are experts instead of people.

This was rare before. Now it happens to more of us than ever.

What happens now? I don’t know, but I believe that what we need more than ever is to see through our own bullshit, as well as everyone else’s.

School will not teach us this. Our government will not tell us either. It is up to us.

We need to build a resource that will show us what our own lies really are.

Tweeting is not a business model.

Rainbows and unicorns will not cut it.

The universe doesn’t care about you. Its natural state is to want to wipe you off the planet. You are temporary. In fact, for a large portion of the planet, you are food.

Is social media is the new real estate? Everyone’s in it, and no one can lose.

Or can they? Hours of your life, attempting to get attention to stuff that isn’t even that interesting in the first place. Why?

Give up on hope and luck. Abandon faith in yourself. Have faith only in the system. (Don’t have one? Try this.)

Yesterday I was asked in an interview whether “passion” was enough of a business model on the internet. The picture on the right is my answer.

Don’t let me catch the rest of you talking like this. This is war, and I will personally eat your fucking heart.

If this isn’t the slogan for your life, it should be.

You were born extremely dumb. There is no question about it. So the first side of the equation is set; it’s the second you have to worry about. Will you die very smart?

Smart is relative. Yes, humans read more than they ever have. They have more schooling than ever. Yet most of it leads to nowhere. If this is all you do, you will not die very smart.

Let’s make a giant list.

Let’s try and figure out how to die smart, right here and right now. Not a little smart– how to die being the smartest person you know. I’ll start, and you can add to it by leaving a comment below.

Start by reading a book every week. Most people read a book a year. If you do this, you get more in a year than most will read in their lifetime.

Next, travel as often and as cheaply as possible.

Consider avoiding school entirely– you’re looking to learn at your pace, not be slowed down by others or be sucked dry by fees.

Meet smart people constantly. You end up learning a lot from conversations if you’re good at listening. Set up meetings with them to learn what they know.

Don’t be afraid of failure. Remember the process of learning to ride a bike. You can’t pick it up from a book. You have to try and fail. It’s integral to the process.

Test perceived boundaries. Make sure there are no assumptions in terms of what is important and what is not, or what is dangerous or safe.

Now you. Show me what to do.

(Or, check the comments if you want to see what others wrote.)

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.