From quitting bad habits to pushing through your blocks and reading a book a week, this blog has helped people like you achieve more personal and professional success, one step at a time.
Subscribe for free below and see why so many have done the same.
Just make this annoying thing go away.
Subscribe via email:
Just make this annoying thing go away.
The other day I was walking around my neighbourhood when a woman stopped me to ask for directions. “Where is de Courcelle street,” she asked. I pointed her in the right direction, and left with a spring in my step.
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?
Filed by Julien at 11:57 am under random
18 Comments
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.
I help people lead more productive, awesome lives— one day at a time. This is my blog. If you like it, please subscribe below.
Filed by Julien at 12:47 pm under risk
13 Comments
The list for what has never been done is very short.
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?
Filed by Julien at 11:47 am under random
34 Comments
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?
Filed by Julien at 10:07 am under taking action
30 Comments
You are not born to live a long life. You are not born to succeed.
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.
Filed by Julien at 9:51 am under random
17 Comments
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.
Filed by Julien at 11:32 am under social media
31 Comments
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.
Filed by Julien at 9:37 am under social media
35 Comments
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 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.)
Filed by Julien at 9:47 am under direction
51 Comments
You will not achieve anything unless you are capable of this fundamental act.
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.
Filed by Julien at 9:34 am under random
16 Comments
Look, here’s the truth.
Fundamentally, the real reason your company doesn’t grow has nothing to do with the marketing being right. The reason your idea falls flat is not about your follower count. Right now, your problem is more fundamental than that.
Go to any event and you’ll see sponsors. Get on any bus and you’ll see billboards. Go to any website and you’ll see ads. Yet nobody clicks on these things, and nobody admits to being convinced by advertising.
But they’re being convinced by something. They’re trying new drinks and looking at new websites. They’re watching new movies and switching providers. Why are they doing these things?
Fundamentally, the entire marketing industry is slowly working itself into a hole. Any effective tactic gets discovered by spammers and is affected by the tragedy of the commons. Soon, you have to move again because what you do isn’t working anymore.
Yet at the same time, some books become classics. Some companies get acquired. Some websites “go viral.” Why?
1. The best idea;
2. the simplest delivery;
3. the largest platform.
Anything else is secondary. FACT.
Filed by Julien at 10:37 am under marketing
24 Comments
