Pete Michaud » Getting your Mind Right

Commander in Chief

Pete — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 02:33:33 +0000

Ok, look, hippies. There’s something New Agey people need to understand.

We’re always busy looking for signs from the universe about our path, and shit like that. We say that when we’re following our path, it gets easier because the universe says “yes” and helps us. It’s more complicated than that.

There’s a danger here of learning helplessness, groping through the dark, frustrated at not being able to figure out the path that our mother universe has laid out before us. This sense that we’re doing it wrong because we haven’t discovered it yet, and that when we do finally discover it, the mysteries of the world will unravel before us in a divine cacophony of insight. We just haven’t been perceptive enough to see the signs that are waiting out there for us.

But that groping, that clawing at the door of an imagined mother figure, is the very force in our lives that holds us back. I asked myself why, with the red carpet out before me, could I not grow and maintain a roster of clients large enough to give me a livable income?

The fire in my chest for helping people burned true, I didn’t just imagine it. But it didn’t burn because I stumbled into the sign that unlocked my life for me.

It burned because I set it on fire.

There are no signs, but those you create for yourself. Your guides aren’t your parents, and you their hapless child. Your guides are your advisers, and you are their president. You set the course. You call the shots. By your singular vision and determination you will succeed. Or by your ambivalence and uncertainty, you fail.

Your doors slam shut in your face because you are ambivalent, not because they are wrong according to some external authority or plan. Stuff doesn’t work because you change your mind, your attention drifts, and soon you’re focused on something other than the path that you had been traveling on.

There’s no trick, there’s no sign, and there’s no plan, except the one you create.

If you want something through to your core, and you focus on it with a fire in your gut that the world can’t douse, then you will create whatever you’re burning for.

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How to Draw

Pete — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 18:41:14 +0000

The Last Psychiatrist just released an article that beautifully articulates a point I’ve made weakly several times in my writing.

The point is essentially that we project so much of our own meaning onto the world that we forget to see what’s actually there.

… Edwards calls this the “tyranny of the symbol system” because it dictates to us, forces our hand to draw symbols rather than what we see.

But it isn’t simply that we draw using these symbols; we perceive using them as well. I don’t bother to see the actual shape of a head because it was never important to; in order to see it for what it really is, I need to practice my perception. It is easy for me to see a news story as a manufactured construct, but it never occurred to me I was seeing every day objects wrong. My tilted computer monitor isn’t a rectangle; it’s a trapezoid.

You’ll never make the huge breakthroughs you want in your life if you don’t teach yourself to see what’s really there.

How To Draw (This Is Not An Article About How To Draw) →

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Enduring Value

Pete — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 16:50:46 +0000

I start working around 8 in the morning, and I’m normally done by 8 at night. Last week I took Sunday off, and built some games.

But what am I doing that I call work? How can I look back at the end of the day and know I was “productive”?

Hours worked are irrelevant. The real question is:

What have you built today that has enduring value?

I could argue that my photo readings have enduring value because they can change peoples’ lives, and who knows what value will come from that in the long term. But using that logic, sneezing at the right place and time has enduring value.

No, what I mean is producing something that didn’t exist yesterday, that is valuable now, and will continue being valuable for the foreseeable future. I always feel like I accomplished something when I release projects like my Energy Anatomy book, which will be helping people learn about energy work for years to come. I always feel productive when I’ve published a blog post that I know will inspire someone and continue inspiring people.

And I think, assuming you follow through, it’s productive to build part of a project that will be released. Most of my days are spent working on projects that are not yet ready to be released. When they finally are released to the world, all the “potential productivity” is transformed right then to actual productivity. Before that moment though, you’re just spinning your wheels.

Research is spinning your wheels. Thinking is spinning your wheels. Half completed projects are wheels that are spinning in place.

But let’s be honest. We all spin our wheels, and spinning is necessary. It’s like training for a triathlon. Sure, practice swimming and running and biking. But then show up to the race. Otherwise you’re just spinning your wheels.

Not only that, but sometimes we take a day off and play. If you’re just running for the joy of it, don’t worry about the race. I do photo readings because I love doing them, even though they don’t meet my definition of productivity. I write software most of the time just for fun, not to be productive.

The thing is I know the difference. When I’m doing something for fun, I let it be fun. When I’m doing something to be productive, that simple question is how I keep myself honest.

What have I built today that has enduring value?

10 or 11 hour work days are well and good, but they don’t mean shit except that I’m a masochist unless I produce something that has enduring value.

What have you produced today?

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Dominoes and the Price of Admission

Pete — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 19:00:17 +0000

I really wanted to quit my job. I was too afraid of the domino effect to do it though. Quitting my job meant not being able to pay my mortgage and take care of my family.

We get stuck because we start thinking about the domino effect. The fear that the changes we want are going to cause a cascade of changes we don’t want.

The sticking point here is that we spend all this time thinking about the aspects of our lives we want to change, but when we can’t figure out how to change those things without affecting anything else, we give up.

“Fuck yeah, fuck my boss! He can take my gray little Dilbert cubicle and shove it right up his ass!” sounds great until your car payment is due.

Leaving your verbally abusive wife sounds good until you think about finding a new place to live, and the reality of your growing waistline in the face of having to go out and date again. You stop thinking about it because it feels too painful.

Don’t do that.

Here’s what you do instead: write down the consequences of the thing you want to do and work backward to eliminate them. Get rid of the bills you’re afraid you can’t pay. While you can still afford to live in the bigger place, move into a smaller place. While you can still afford two cars, sell them and buy two bikes instead, or a clunker. Now you’re free to stay or quit without the fear of the domino effect.

It helps to think like the worst has already happened. Sit and imagine you’ve just been fired. What do you do? Do you start looking for ways to cut back expenses? Do you take some time off to relax? Do you look for a different job? Do those things now, before you leave your job: cut expenses like you’re destitute, take some time off, look for a different job (you really are a masochist, aren’t you?). Now those dominoes have no power over you.

Tah-dah! You’re free to quit your job.

Caveat: Price of Admission

There are circumstances in which you endure one thing in order to hang onto another thing, and that can be okay. I call it the “price of admission.” You might have a boyfriend who you love dearly, and he might drive you up the wall by constantly leaving his clothes on the floor. You pick them up and wash them. Price of admission.

If you’re facing something that you think might be a deal breaker but you’re not sure, then:

Ask yourself: What is causing my pain? I pick up dirty clothes because I want a clean room and my boyfriend leaves his shit everywhere.
Ask yourself: What do I get for my pain? In exchange for cleaning clothes on the floor and a small portion of my sanity, I get an intensely loving, sexy boyfriend.
Is what I get worth my pain? In other words, if someone proposed a deal to me to get the thing from question two in exchange for my pain, would I take the deal? Yes, I would take a kickass boyfriend in exchange for a life of uncertain laundry cleanliness.
No, the upside isn’t worth the downside. Then stop taking the deal: it’s a deal breaker.
Yes, the upside is worth the downside. Then you have two things to do. You must do the first. The second is up to your discretion and creativity:
1. Become 100% okay with whatever the bad thing is. Even if you wouldn’t generally choose to clean up clothes after a grown-ass man, you have chosen to clean up in this context. That word is important: cleaning the dirty clothes is now a choice that I made, not a situation that I’m victimized by. If you find it impossible to be okay with a situation, then stop kidding yourself: the upside really isn’t worth the downside, stop taking the deal.
2. Solve the problem in a different way. Hire a housekeeper. Problem solved.
Don’t let the domino effect stop you from making the changes you know you need to make for a life of passion and fire. Eliminate the power those dominoes have over you, or fully embrace the prices you deliberately choose to pay for the life you truly desire.

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You Suck At Everything

Pete — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 16:03:57 +0000

People are born with talents. You better hope you get one that’s impressive or lucrative, because otherwise you’re screwed.

Take these two artists for example:

Artist #1

Artist #2

I didn’t choose these two artists so I could pick on the first one though. I actually picked these two because they illustrate my point, and there’s something really interesting about both of these guys: they have the same name. It’s not impossible, but “Jonathan Hardesty” isn’t the most common name to share.

The Difference Between The Jonathan Hardestys

I want to show you another comparison. It’s the Jonathans’ self portraits.

Jonathan #1

Jonathan #2

What are the chances of these two artists’ names being identical?

100%

Jonathan #1 is from 2002. Jonathan #2 is from 2011, almost a decade later.

The Jonathans have the same DNA, the same mother, the same father. The difference between the two Jonathans is time, determination, and persistence. Talent doesn’t exist; get to work.

Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
-Calvin Coolidge

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Fundamental Needs #2: Hookers & Bombs

Pete — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 00:26:43 +0000

The Air Force sent Ed to the AFAFRICA component of Africom after decades of flying C-130 cargo planes all over the world. He retired while operating out of Angola after 24 years in military service.

He earned a reputation in the military for being ready, willing, and able to fly over the most dangerous territories, sometimes landing in hostile zones without adequate ground troops to protect him.

His antics off the field were equally legendary. He once took leave in a high-end Central African hotel where he drank like a fish, took his pants off, and began wandering around the lobby naked.

Fat on his pension, and free to relax, Ed immediately signed on with a paramilitary organization that contracted with the United Nations to move humanitarian cargo all over Africa.

He continued to fly, unarmed, over some of the most war torn parts of the world, on antiquated and poorly maintained prop planes when he could go anywhere and do anything.

This is the life he chose.

Uncertainty, or variety, is a fundamental human need. It’s directly at odds with certainty, another fundamental need. We want to be stable, but a completely predictable life quickly becomes unbearably monotonous.

Variety boils down to a change in emotional state. You want to have different, varied, and surprising experiences because if you don’t you’ll get bored, and boredom bleeds into depression.

We want to be surprised by our loved ones, we want to “let loose” after a hard week of slinging paper in a cubical. We dream about scuba diving in Fiji. We swoon at meeting the love of our life, and we keep falling just as hard for each love that follows.

We lose ourselves in the fantasies of books and movies, deliberately absorbing ourselves in fictions that make us feel happy, sad, hopeful—that change our state of mind.

We all crave it. We all need it. Some people are content with daytime reality shows. Others create drama in perfectly beautiful relationships, just to feel that ebb and flow, that tidal pool of emotion.

The people who value variety above all else will risk life and limb to get it.

Ed met his first wife Eun Jung when he was stationed in Korea. He knew her for five months before they wed, then he brought her to Utah. He spent a month in Utah with Eun Jung, then left again, only seeing her once every three months.

After a losing battle with gambling addiction, Eun Jung sealed her small house shut, opened the door from kitchen into the garage, and left the car running. The mailman found her body a week later when the unbearable smell aroused his suspicion.

Ed made it back after eight days to cremate the body and sign the paperwork. He was back out in the field within the week.

When uncertainty becomes a person’s primary value, health, relationships, finances, all go out the window. That’s true whether your state changes come from snorting cocaine cut with battery acid or doing low altitude supply drops over war zones.

And Ed’s thrill seeking didn’t stop at bomb runs and boozing. He also slept with perhaps thousands of women over the years, the majority of them prostitutes. AIDS epidemic be damned, he sowed his wild oats far and wide from Angola to Kenya, where he met his second wife, Muthoni, a financial analyst in Mombasa.

Ed was shocked as hell when Muthoni turned up pregnant. “I honestly thought I was shooting blanks after all the women I’ve fucked without any kids,” he told me. I didn’t clarify how he would’ve gotten all those African prostitutes pregnant if he was using a condom. You do the math. Thrill seeking. Uncertainty.

Muthoni left Ed years ago, but their son still gets post cards every couple years from one African dictatorship or another.

Filling the Need for Variety

The need for uncertainty varies according to how easy it is for a person to get aroused. I don’t mean just sexually, although sex is one major way people meet the need for variety (orgasms are one hell of a state change). What I mean is how easily our emotions arise.

If you’re the type of guy who rages when he’s cut off in traffic, and sobs like a school girl when your girlfriend dumps you after three months, then you don’t need to sky dive to feel uncertain. You’re fine with Monday night football. You’re fine with the same beer, over the same nachos, with the same buddies, and only slight variations on the same subjects. That’s enough variety for you to exercise your emotional range. Someday it may not be, but for now, it’s plenty.

On the other hand, if you’re cool-bordering-on-sociopathic then you need more extreme experiences to give you those big feelings you crave. You free climb 500 foot seacliffs. You have unprotected sex with thousands of prostitutes and drink enough to drown a marlin.

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to meeting your need for variety. But here are a few ideas:

Travel. See new places and meet new people, even if it’s locally. Fly to Fiji and SCUBA dive with giant sea turtles. Witness Machu Pichu in Peru. Visit the Hague. Alternatively, go to the earwax museum 20 miles away. Go to the giant tree or strange rock formation or notable cathedral, or anywhere. Make a day trip of it. All these new experiences will stimulate your mind and shift your emotional states, which is what variety is all about.
Meet interesting new people. Search Meetup.com and go check out the local Raw Food group. Get involved in the local music or art scene. Just go to a bar and strike up a conversation with the ugliest guy you find. It doesn’t matter; people are interesting. Interacting with them will give you new perspectives, new experiences, new changes to your emotional state.
Try new hobbies. I’m bad when it comes to hobbies because I feel like I try so many things that I rarely get good at any of them. I am not naturally talented at anything, but I’ve learned how to program, write, paint, maintain exceptional physical fitness, cook, build houses (carpentry, plumbing, electrical, HVAC, drywall, tilework, hardwood flooring). Show me a hard thing to do and give me a month or two. Each new hobby is a new perspective, new connections in my brain, giving me access to new experiences and emotional states.
Self experiment. I do experiments on myself all the time. I once went two days without speaking, seeing any language at all, or thinking in any language. I recently ended a 40 day No Orgasms trial (to explosive effect). I’m working now to gain 30 pounds in 30 days (so far so good!). I’ve done radical honesty trials, social experiments, and messed with my sleeping schedule ad nauseum. Each new experience gives me brand new perspective and often radically alters the chemicals in my body and brain.

Which, as you know, is exactly what variety is. A change in your physiological and psychological state. We all do it. The question is whether we do it in a way that lands us in a Congolese prison with Grade A jungle rot, or we do it in a way that enriches and expands our lives and relationships.

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Stress is Dirty

Pete — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 15:27:47 +0000

Stress seems unavoidable. But it’s a paradox because unavoidable as it may be, it also doesn’t exist.

Not exactly.

Your child is hit by a car, and totters between life and death. The morphine drip beeps as you hover over your broken son for weeks, hoping against hope that he’ll open his remaining eye and recognize you. A plethora of emotion overwhelms you, including anxiety and stress.

Everything works out as well as it can for him. Later that month you receive the first of many medical bills. Your modest, middle class income is dwarfed by the high six figure bill. How can you possibly pay this, and still survive? How can you provide your son with the ongoing care he needs? Stress.

Luckily you have a decent job with acceptable benefits. Your company can go to bat for you. Everything will be fine. Except a recent memo lets you and your coworkers know that times are tough, and there will be a round of layoffs in your department. What if you are laid off? How will you eat? How will pay those medical bills? Stress.

Stress is the fear you feel as a result of a persistent threat. You don’t know what’s going to happen, but you can imagine the dire consequences.

Your son dies in the accident, and you aren’t stressed any more. You’re distraught and grieving, but not stressed. Or maybe he survives, but you can’t pay the bills. Once you declare bankruptcy the way forward is clear, and you’re not stressed any more. Or maybe the layoffs happen, and you are passed over. No more threat, no more fear, no more stress.

No one has time to sit and chew their finger nails, wondering if it’ll hurt, as a fist is flying toward their face. You just get punched, and it hurts. It throbs, it swells, a deoxygenated blood fills the sack of broken skin, and a purple bruise forms. There’s no fear because it already happened. You’re just experiencing the clean pain of a punch to the face.

When a threat is bigger, and longer-term than just a punch to the face, you have time to stew over it. To pace back and forth. To let your mind run wild with the dismal possibilities.

Stress is the dirty pain of all the looming threats in your life. It’s the killer force that converts possible hardship, into definite health issues.

Remember that dirty pain is the pain you generate in your own mind, that is totally disconnected from your physical reality. You control whether you feel it or not.

Relax. Or you might end up like Mark Twain.

“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” – Mark Twain

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Tailgating

Pete — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 10:00:44 +0000

On Thursday morning I started driving from Florida to Austin, Texas. My Cadillac was as full as it could be while still being able to make a 1,000 mile journey. I was a little stressed because the lady whose house I had arranged to rent had backed out of the arrangement. I was headed to Texas with nowhere to stay, but the wheels were already in motion, as they say. Texas or bust.

Somewhere between Tallahassee and Pensacola I had an epiphany and I began tailgating other drivers.

1.

If you look the bottom left corner of my driver’s license you’ll see the phrase “Safe Driver.” I like to say that I drive like an old person. I’m not a skilled driver per se, but I am very careful. I have never had so much as a speeding ticket in all the years I’ve been driving. I drive slowly and defensively. I slow down at intersections to look for oncoming traffic, even if I have the green light. I leave plenty of distance between myself and the car ahead. I don’t want to risk any damage should something go wrong on the road.

I used to drive a Chrysler Gem to get around town, which is an electric car throttled by government mandate to only 26 miles per hour, which is slow even on residential streets. Other drivers would get impatient with me, they would tailgate me and overtake the car, even if it meant going into oncoming traffic to do it. They would always accelerate quickly from there, vindicated and free.

A minute later, without fail, I would pull up right next to them again, while they were stopped at a traffic light, or if they had hit slower traffic. I learned from my Gem that it never paid to be impatient on residential streets. Speeding and tailgating are pointless even if you value the extra 10 seconds you might gain from them, since the traffic system itself will prevent you from realizing those gains.

Just relax and go with the flow of traffic, you’ll get there in due time. Don’t stress out about jams or detours, just enjoy the moment, and get where you’re going when the opportunity presents itself.

2.

One of my rules with long distance highway travel is that I never exceed 9 miles an hour over the speed limit. Statistically, I’m unlikely to be pulled over for going only 9 miles an hour over, as many state statues have the threshold of “lucrative citation” set at 10 miles per hour over. I also tend to stick with packs of cars moving that speed, like a herd of gazelle hoping to avoid the blue and red flashing lion lurking in the underbrush on the shoulder of the highway.

When you’re traveling 17 hours, those extra nine miles per hour add up to about 150 miles over the course of the trip, which is about 15% of the total journey. In that case, it makes sense to push the limits in a calculated and systematic way.

I was driving West on I-10 through the Florida panhandle, with my cruise control set to exactly 79 miles per hour. Every time I would see a slower moving car in the fast lane, I’d either slow down the cruise control or just turn it off well in advance, so I could maintain several car lengths of space between us. The distance made me comfortable and ensured we wouldn’t disturb each other or collide.

I would be annoyed because I wanted to make good time, but these people were in my way, going more slowly than I wanted to go. And their speed determined my speed. You know those laws that were once enforced, that people know about, but that seem optional these days? I waited for the space I needed to pass the slow drivers on the right, so I could continue my 79 mile per hour cruise. And I would stew the whole time I was going only 67 or 71 miles per hour.

At the first available opportunity, I’d speed ahead with vindication and freedom.

I was approaching another slow-moving vehicle in the fast lane, and I couldn’t go around him. I reflexively reached for the cruise control switch, and I thought,

“Doesn’t this guy know that some people want to go fast in the fast lane?”

And as soon as I asked, a smart part of me retorted,

“No. You’re staying four or five car lengths back and matching his speed. How is he supposed to know you want to go faster?”

Oh shit. Tailgating as a public service: “Excuse me kind sir, I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m in an awful hurry, would you mind if I passed?”

So I didn’t flick the cruise control off. I edged out of my comfort zone, and sped toward his car. I got within a car length, and just as I was going to lose my nerve, he slid into the slow lane to let me pass.

And I was so grateful to him. Letting me pass in that moment held a strange emotional weight, like he acknowledged that I was driving forward at a speed he wasn’t comfortable with, and he accommodated my path forward just because I “asked” by pressuring him just enough for him to notice I was there.

From that moment on the panhandle forward, when I knew the other driver could get over for me, I would drive close enough for them to notice me and they would move. I would thank them in my mind every time. In heavier traffic, when movement wasn’t possible, I simply turned cruise control off and went with the flow. When other even faster moving traffic bore down on my rear bumper, I would happily move over for them as well: you’re going faster and taking bigger risks than I personally would, but best of luck to you!

By the way, I’m not talking about driving.

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Strong Man and Doer of Deeds

Pete — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 04:33:43 +0000

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

Theodore Roosevelt
“Citizenship in a Republic,”
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

Accomplish something today.

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Brand New Problems

Pete — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 21:53:13 +0000

“I’m sick and tired of these same old problems. Please universe, give me some new problems to deal with!”

If you feel like you’re in ground hogs day, experiencing the same problems over and over again— distant lovers, lukewarm career, friendships in tumult—then those things are not the problem. You are the problem.

Your needs are being served by being in pain, you are acting out the drama of your own limiting beliefs. You are creating situations that support your negative worldview so that you don’t have to face the risk that you’re not good enough, smart enough, ready enough.

When you let go of the problems you think define your life, you find that they fall by the wayside, and newer, more interesting problems arise. Your problem of paying the bills becomes a problem of growing your business.

Here’s how to get New Problems

Look at the ongoing problems you face in your life, and ask yourself: what positive purpose does having this problem serve for me?

For example, you battle depression because you “can’t” trust men and therefore ruin relationships. In return you get to reconnect with your feelings. Your friends and family make you feel important by coming to your rescue. You get a rush every time you switch mental states into that depression. The depression feels safe and comfortable and familiar.

You’re fulfilling four (!) fundamental needs by being depressed! Why would you really want to feel better when feeling like shit is working so well for you?

Identify the benefits you get from your problems, and generate new possibilities for yourself to get those same benefits in a way that isn’t a problem for you. When you start filling those needs in more healthy ways, your problem will evaporate.

And then you’ll have the golden opportunity to experience new and better problems.

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Fundamental Needs #1: Whipping the Ones You Love

Pete — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 16:12:22 +0000

Julie loves dogs. She is a member of PETA, and a vegan. When she was a kid she had a dog named Bella. Bella was her best friend because her mother resented her in a way that most children only think their mothers resent them, and her scam artist dad had pissed off years prior.

Julie moved every few months from one hovel to the next. Bella went everywhere with her. They slept in the same bed, and ate off the same plate.

Also, Julie beat Bella mercilessly, until she bled. Bella yelped and screeched in that way that instantly makes your heart pound when you hear it coming from down the street.

Human beings all share six fundamental needs. One of the needs is for certainty. When things get too ambiguous, too confusing, we look for refuge in people and situations that are sure things. Certainty is one of those needs that gets fulfilled no matter what because people can not and will not stand for too much uncertainty for very long.

We want to know that our friends will be there for us when we need them. We want to feel that we can predict what will happen to us if we follow the laws of the land, we want to have stable employment, and a steady girlfriend.

And when all else fails we want to be certain that the world really is as fucked up as it seems. When we’re buffeted around by parents who don’t give a shit about us, and have no stability from day to day, the only sliver of comfort we get is knowing that everything will always be fucked up, and everyone will always let you down. It’s a constant, so it provides certainty.

So when you get a dog that adores you and follows you everywhere, that dog is violating the only shred of stability you have in your life. It’s giving you hope, and hope hurts.

So you beat her. You know she’s going to leave eventually, or viciously attack you and be taken away, so you might as well speed the process along. She’s making you love her. The dog chain you use to beat her is stained red, she yelps when you touch her back from the deep bruises.

But still she stays.

The dog becomes a new anchor of certainty. She stays no matter what, even if you beat her mercilessly. And just to make sure it’s still true, and will always be true, you keep beating her. Just to be certain she hasn’t changed her mind.

And then some day, many years later, you attack your husband just as brutally. There’s no way he’s as loving or dedicated as he seems. You’ve been abandoned before, this is no different. The hope hurts too much, and you’re so in love, that you can’t stand the suspense of wondering when it’ll all end. So you throw your tantrums and your barbs, and all the vitriol you can muster. The longer he stays the more it hurts, because you’re so in love, and you so want him, but you can’t have him because having him gives you hope that he might stay, and that will never happen. So you push, and push, and push until he leaves.

Some people need more, some people need less, but you will create certainty in your life somehow. Whether the certainty comes from brutalizing those you love, or from a deep well spring of self confidence is up to you.

Filling the Need for Certainty

The shift required to go from beating your dog, to loving without fear is deceptively small.

Some people look to religion as their rock. Some to a respectable career. Become a doctor and you’ll always have a job and the respect of your community. Some create large networks of close friends who will be there, in aggregate, no matter what. Those are workable solutions that may even fall on the healthy side of the spectrum.

But the strongest, most poignant shift you can make is to certainty about yourself.

When you create yourself, that self is always present, and can never falter. When you are confident that you are strong and smart enough to make a perfect and complete life no matter the circumstances, then you are always there to rely on yourself.

I’m not advocating becoming an island—love and social connection is a whole different fundamental need that I’ll talk about later. What I’m advocating is cultivating the ability to trust yourself as a rock in the turbulence of your life to degree that your trust in other people (or lack thereof) is not crippling to you. Create yourself to be so strong that if every trust you ever created was broken, you would still be able to rely on yourself.

Counter intuitive: when you learn to rely on yourself above all else, your ability to trust other people blossoms. That’s because the trust isn’t plagued by anxieties about being broken. You don’t need the trust anymore, you just enjoy it, and deeply appreciate it while it’s there. It frees you to trust abundantly because you yourself become a deep spring of infinite trust.

What Julie went through as a child was not her fault, and Bella surely forgives her. Every child should have the opportunity to learn that those she loves can be relied on. When that happens the stage of development passes without fanfare into the stage where you cultivate self reliance.

But now you’re Julie, all grown up. You learned a coping mechanism when you were a child that worked—it got you through the time. Honor it, be grateful for your resourcefulness. And then let it go.

It’s time to cultivate new resources, it’s time to build deliberate, unshakable certainty in your life. From the ground up, starting with yourself.

Fundamental Needs #2: Hookers & Bombs →

Click here to reply to Fundamental Needs #1: Whipping the Ones You Love Pete enables those ready to set themselves on fire with passion and purpose by clearing out their energetic gunk and realigning their mind with core principles so the gunk can't come back. You should follow him on twitter @PeteMichaud.

Change the World, No Excuses

Pete — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 18:00:33 +0000

Thank you very much!!

Your blog was a little spark that ignite a fire inside me.

I don’t know if you remember, but my heart was destroyed, and the next day a I got an email from G8 (the best 8 universities in Australia) inviting me to apply for masters. It was something i have always wanted, but at that time, it could have been a sudoku or a puzzle, no difference.

I did all the paperwork to think of something else and now I’m leaving! I’ll get my master in crosscultural communication in USydney, with a scholarship that covers everything! I think it’s fate! or maybe the spark was always there and it just needed something to ignite.

Your blog did that to me. I looked for help and i found it in your blog. Thank you very much dude. Everything happens for a reason, I guess. Sometimes things need to be torn down and apart to build something new, better and more beautiful

I feel like super happy now

Thanks!

CB

Cristian Barrera has been a reader for a long time and this week he sent me that message.

When I get those types of messages my heart skips a beat, I feel a rush of blood in my neck, I feel alive. The effort I put into my work here on this site changes peoples’ lives. It empowers people to create themselves and build the reality they choose. I know I’m doing what I’m meant to do.

I could be a well-paid software engineer. My grandparents would be proud, they would understand what I do, and be able to explain it to their friends who would all be impressed knowing I had a Good Job™.

But I chose to build this site instead. I chose to do my breakthrough sessions instead. That wasn’t an easy choice, but it was the right choice.

Do you get messages like this from the people you work with? Are you changing lives? If not, then why the hell not?

Click here to reply to Change the World, No Excuses Pete enables those ready to set themselves on fire with passion and purpose by clearing out their energetic gunk and realigning their mind with core principles so the gunk can't come back. You should follow him on twitter @PeteMichaud.

The Art of Honesty

Pete — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 16:18:52 +0000

Honesty is something I’ve talked about here because being honest begins with self-honesty. You can’t “be authentic,” or build the life you want without self honesty because you’ll have no idea who you are or what you want to do if your entire mental life is walls and facades.

James Altucher is a good blogger because he’s honest. From Do You Have to be Rich to be Honest?

For 15 years I’ve been lying. Ralph (not his real name) used to call me up at 4 in the morning. He was a client of my first business. He needed advice about his job. I couldn’t stand him. In fact, at one point he borrowed a lot of money from me he never paid back. And he never paid his bills on time. I had to worry about payroll every month. So at 4 in the morning he’d call for advice and ask, “is now an ok time? I couldn’t sleep.” And I would always say, “of course it is.” When of course, it wasn’t. I was lying to him. And it made me hate him even more. And it made me hate myself even more.

The post goes on with specific, actionable advice about how to be more honest, and more happy. I highly recommend it.

Do You Have to be Rich to be Honest?

Click here to reply to The Art of Honesty Pete enables those ready to set themselves on fire with passion and purpose by clearing out their energetic gunk and realigning their mind with core principles so the gunk can't come back. You should follow him on twitter @PeteMichaud.

How to Choose Your Emotions

Pete — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 20:31:35 +0000

We think our emotions happen to us. The internal experience of an emotion makes it feel inevitable. Our language even tricks us: that phone bill made me angry.

But that’s an illusion.

To prove that our reactions and experiences are entirely within our control, I present one Thích Quảng Đức.

Thich Quang Duc Self-Immolates (Click to Enlarge)

Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist monk, burned himself alive in 1963. If you’re like me, your skin crawled and your heart jumped when you saw this picture. We project our expected internal experience on him, so we vicariously experience agony when we see him burning.

But look again, at his face, bubbling and flaking off his skull as it is. Serenity. Centered calm. Witnesses reported that he did not move a muscle or make a sound, until his burnt husk finally collapsed forward after about ten minutes of burning.

You should not expect that kind of adamantine self control from yourself. I’m sharing this with you to remind you that your experience of the world, and your reactions to it are entirely your choice.

The Script

Some asshole with chrome rims and no door handles cuts you off in traffic. The spurt of adrenaline constricts your chest, and your head throbs as you grip the steering wheel. Asshole, you yell.
Your room mate is playing his music at 1am again, and you’re frustrated.
A friend flakes on you for the second time in a row, you’re pissed, you feel disrespected.

All these are normal reactions. These are the kind of reactions your parents demonstrated to you while you were growing up. Your friends and family won’t think twice if you react like that.

But the normalcy and inevitably of these reactions is an illusion. You’re just running a script, a program, that’s been passed on to you, that you haven’t thought hard enough about to stop.

But now you will.

The Choice

The limbic system is the seat of emotions in the brain. Even though our internal experience as humans seems like it takes place in the frontal lobe, with language and rational thought, the limbic system is the older, more powerful part of us. It’s the reason we can’t resist chocolate. It’s the reason rape turns our stomachs, or turns us on. It’s the reason that guy cutting you off in traffic makes you so very upset.

When people talk about choices, they usually mean a rational choice: analyze your options, then choose the one that makes the most sense. You don’t feel like emotions are a choice because they aren’t… a rational-level choice.

Emotions are a limbic-level choice, and you can’t make a limbic-level choice the same way you’d make a rational level choice. If you try to rationally choose not to be upset at your loud room mate, you will fail. The limbic system doesn’t respond to reason. The limbic system only responds to sensation and chemistry.

Think of your limbic system as a machine that you can put an experience into, and get a feeling out of. Loud noise in, frustration out.

Training Your Limbic System

Before you can train your limbic system, you have to know that experiencing, remembering, and imagining are virtually identical cognitive processes.

So a dog scares you when you’re a child, and every time you remember that experience, you are scared as if it’s happening to you again. That reinforces your limbic-level idea that dogs are scary. That’s how phobias develop: an early experience gets trapped in an echo chamber until it becomes an overwhelming emotional burden.

The good thing about how this works is that just like your early experience planted an emotional seed, you can deliberately choose new experiences that will plant a similar emotional seeds that can “echo” and grow in your mind.

If that’s not feasible for your situation, you can imagine or remember differently—remember that those are almost identical to experiencing.

Desensitization

The first option I mentioned is to deliberately experience your fears in a safe context. People afraid of spiders can conquer that fear by looking at pictures of spiders, then video of spiders, then real spiders. Then touching the spiders.

People afraid of approaching hot women cure their fear by approaching anyone at all, then women they aren’t interested in, then hot women.

What’s happening is that your limbic system is learning that nothing bad happens in these contexts. The more you do it, the more that safety is anchored, the more that well-being is associated with the experience.

It doesn’t matter that you already “know” that spiders are mostly harmless. You have to feel it.

Emotional Anchoring

This is a big topic that spans most of NLP, but I’ll give you a broad overview. The goal is to use “anchors” to trigger a desirable emotional response.

Anchors can be any action or thought. Maybe for you, going back to your parents’ house and eating a meal your mom cooked triggers a deep sense of safety and love. An NBA star might feel a rush of confidence and competence as he steps onto the court.

These are rituals that trigger emotional responses because of past experiences.

The basic steps to creating an anchor are:

Choose an emotion you want to be able to call up at any time.
Relax deeply by breathing and clearing your mind.
Remember a time when you truly felt the emotion you chose. Put yourself back in that moment, remember how you felt, how did everything look to you? how did it feel, smell, taste? Don’t skimp here, you must really feel this emotion deeply.
While fully in that relaxed state of remembering and imagining, perform some ritual. Squeeze your left hand into a fist, say some unusual combination of words, imagine yourself bathed in light. Whatever you want, it’s up to you.

Perform the steps again for the same emotion and ritual, but this time with a different experience. The more you do it, the more heavily the emotion will be anchored.

So you’ve anchored serenity and joy into a phrase: the world is beautiful. Next time a jerk cuts you off, the adrenaline still spurts, but you focus and you say: the world is beautiful. You feel better instantly.

Over and over, on your commute, you’re cut off, and each time you say: the world is beautiful. Eventually you’ll condition your mind to react with serenity and joy when you’re cut off in traffic, without even invoking the anchor.

If you don’t think that’s possible, remember Thích Quảng Đức. A lifetime of anchoring serenity and detachment through meditation. Not even being burned alive could shake him. You can choose to be joyful in your life.

Click here to reply to How to Choose Your Emotions Pete enables those ready to set themselves on fire with passion and purpose by clearing out their energetic gunk and realigning their mind with core principles so the gunk can't come back. You should follow him on twitter @PeteMichaud.

The Awesome Power of Forgiveness

Pete — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 22:04:47 +0000

I wept like a heart broken child just now. It’s not a cute and shocking metaphor. I was literally wracked with sobs, convulsing in the fetal position on this couch in the San Francisco Bay Area until about 30 seconds ago. This requires some context.

I’ll tell the whole story some day, but here’s a summary.

The Fall

My dad was a great guy, and a perfectly normal 9-to-5 suburban suit. That’s why the news that he had died of a cocaine overdose hit me like a ton of bricks. Actually he mixed coke, a $20 bottle of Merlot, and a shitload of Percocet.

I had been on the phone with my mom all week from Florida, because he had gone missing after a fight with her. I hoped he was driving across the country to sleep on my couch and cool off. Instead the Ohio Highway Patrol found his sun-baked body in the back of his wine-red Denali at a rest stop just a few miles away from his house.

I was 21 when I traveled to Ohio for the funeral, and to take care of my Mom. My wife and children were perfectly supportive, but that kind of loss is like an abyss. And my heart, tattered as it was, ripped through when I found my mother emaciated and covered in boils from the aggressive staph infection.

The faster a drug takes effect the more addictive potential it has. Both my mom and dad had been injecting a water and cocaine solution into their arms for many months. They used clean hypodermic needles (available at pharmacies for diabetes injections), but one can only perforate one’s skin so many times before introducing infection. I’m told my dad was close to death just from the infection alone.

Mom spent the first few days I was there for the funeral completely inconsolable and bed-ridden. When she came downstairs at a decent time one morning, chipper as June Cleaver, it scared the shit out of me like watching a zombie lurch across the room headless.

She aggressively declined to acknowledge her drug use. After looking into interventionists, we had to depart after the funeral, leaving her behind with her coke and my two teenage siblings.

Without her consent, there was nothing I could do, so I went home and went about the business of grieving for my dad and for them as well.

A month later, she called.

The Tempest Approaches

“Pete, I want to go to rehab. Will you come watch the kids for me?”

I was standing on her porch 36 hours later. But after a week, mom still wasn’t in rehab and had changed her mind completely. I took my brother and sister aside.

“Guys, Mom’s doing bad, I don’t know when she’ll get better, but she can’t take care of you anymore. We have to take care of each other.”

With tears in her eyes, my mother allowed me to fly both the kids home to Florida.

So at 21, I bought the only house I could afford that could fit me and my wife, our two kids, and my siblings, plus my home office. And I started tearing at the walls right away.

The worst year of my life followed. I dropped out of the honors program in college, tanked my first company, went into deep debt, drove my marriage to the brink of destruction. My brother was days away from college, but my sister was out of control. Mom undermined my efforts to help the kids at every turn. She was deteriorating into a paranoid waste case, with freely available life insurance money to fund her decent into delusion and misery.

Then one day I could not find my brother or sister. They had disappeared. After many hours searching that day, I called mom.

“Mom, I haven’t heard from the kids all day, none of their friends know anything, I’m worried. Did they call you?”

“The kids are with me here.”

“Here? Where’s here, are you in town?”

“Here in Ohio.”

I hear my sister laugh at me in the background, as I realize what’s happened.

Fuck you Pete: all you did? Fuck you. Marriage in shambles? Fuck you. Boys all confused and fucked up? Fuck you. Crushing debt? Fuck you. Can’t finish school? Fuck you.

I can’t explain the utter despair I felt in that moment. I knew my siblings were rightly and truly fucked. I knew my brother would never make it through school. I knew Mom would be an addict from then on. And I knew that my idea that love mattered and doing the right thing made a difference was bullshit.

If I hadn’t had a family to take care of, I might have killed myself after that. I felt so completely empty, like I wanted to cry forever but I had no emotion left to spare. Emotional rock bottom.

After a few days staring a wall, I wrote my mom a letter. I said she had destroyed me, and I was cutting her off until she was clean and sober. That was 5 years ago, and I haven’t been in contact with any of them since then (more or less, summarizing here).

New Dawn

In those years I’ve gotten over things. I talk about my mom with a shrug: she fucked me over, but whatever, that’s what addicts do. I’ve moved on, built a better life for myself.

This year in particular has seen me accelerate down this path of allowing my light to shine brightly from within.

I’m here in the Bay Area doing sessions, and staying with my grand parents. My now-adult sister happened to choose now to send my grandmother a nasty e-mail that I think is out of line. So I stew for a day, then write her. I poured out my story and my feelings to her, a harrowing but compassionate e-mail. And I was on a roll, so I did the same to my mom. Totally candid, totally from a place of longing and love.

And today my exchange concludes with real forgiveness. Here’s the very end of what I wrote to my mother. Truer, more sincere words have never been written:

I forgot to mention something that’s important. I love you, completely and unconditionally. I’ve let go of whatever hurt and heartbreak I harbored. There’s no room in my heart for that anymore, I’m too full of gratitude and love.

I wrote to you once that what you did almost killed me and I wasn’t sure if my heart would ever recover. It did feel like it almost killed me, but my heart recovered, stronger and more fierce than ever. There’s a fire inside me, an intense passion and love that devours sadness and fear. It’s hot and bright like the sun inside my chest. Just like when I was a kid, I want to save the world. I’m working on it now.

But I just want you to understand that I forgive you, and I love you.

And then I pressed send.

And then I stepped aside, and I wailed like a black-laced widow. I clutched my chest, and felt the pain clawing its way out through my throat. Between choking and sobbing, “I love you… thank you…”

I love you, thank you.

My heart overflows with love, with gratitude for my lessons, for my blessings. Today the black gunk buried deep behind my heart was overwhelmed by the unconditional love I feel. By a raging, unstoppable torrent of utter gratitude.

A voice told me months ago, Healer, Heal Thyself. Today I’ve been baptized in tears.

Thank you. I love you all.

Click here to reply to The Awesome Power of Forgiveness Pete enables those ready to set themselves on fire with passion and purpose by clearing out their energetic gunk and realigning their mind with core principles so the gunk can't come back. You should follow him on twitter @PeteMichaud.

Words Have Power

Pete — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 10:00:10 +0000

“Tiff’s a chocolate whore.”

Ben is Tiffany’s husband, and he’s a well-meaning guy. He has a bit of a way with words.

The three of us are walking into a Godiva store to pick up a treat for Tiffany. Ben says “Tiff’s a chocolate whore.”

“Aficionado? Chocolate princess, maybe?” I offer.

Ben doesn’t care about word choices, it’s all the same to him, and he’s a person who chooses the wrong words anyway, so there’s no use. What difference does it make anyway?

“Well, one way Tiff’s a skillful, and elegant lover of fine foods. The other way you called your wife a prostitute.”

Facts about Word Choice

Tory Higgins, William Rholes, and Carl Jones wanted to see how impressionable people are.

They asked two groups of people to read about, then pass judgement on fictional test subjects. One group was subconsciously exposed to words designed to “prime,” or influence, their judgement. The researchers flashed words like “hostile” or “persistent” to the participants in the experimental group, then both groups read the description of the fictional subject.

The primed participants were very likely to characterize the subjects according to whatever word they had been exposed to. Perfectly lovely people were painted as hostile and reckless. Cads became persistent.

They published their results in 1997 in the The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

A year earlier The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology had published a similar study in which some participants were shown the word “elderly.” They walked and performed their tasks more slowly than the control group who had not seen “elderly.”

These are just two examples of from a large body of psychological literature that all lend themselves to the same basic conclusion:

Words have power.

Choosing New Words

The point is that when we choose to describe our wives as whores, that affects us. And her. When we choose to call ourselves idiots when we make a mistake, that sinks in. Facts about idiots become facts about us.

This is the “L” in NLP: the language we choose triggers our brains to think in certain patterns, and cast our perceptions in certain light, rosy or shitty.

Choosing positive words will create a positive impact on you and those around you.

It’s just a simple choice to begin saying “princess” instead of “whore,” but you will fail at first. Don’t be discouraged, it’s just a habit, and you need to retrain your mind.

When you catch yourself speaking or thinking in a negative or derogatory way, just consciously choose a better word to replace it. At first you’ll think negatively, and have to constantly correct yourself. Within a few weeks, the positive words will flow naturally.

When it occurs to you after-the-fact that you transformed, you’ll try to think of a negative word or phrase and it’ll hit you like a cat puking. Dirty and wrong. You can barely think it, never mind say it.

Ben’s a good guy, and he can choose better words when he’s ready, with only an ounce of effort. It might make all the difference. Insightful.

(Thanks to Wes Tansey for the help with the psych literature!)

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You’re Right

Pete — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 10:00:00 +0000

“Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” – Henry Ford Click here to reply to You’re Right Pete enables those ready to set themselves on fire with passion and purpose by clearing out their energetic gunk and realigning their mind with core principles so the gunk can't come back. You [...]

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How to Break Your Limits

Pete — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 10:00:20 +0000

Gema is 23 years old and might be gay. She’s not sure. (Not news.)

The problem about being maybe-gay is that Gema lives with her hyper-conservative parents, and has no legal rights as an unmarried Muslim woman in Indonesia.

She was in a bind. Her parents expect her to find a nice boy (of their choosing probably), get married, and make lots of babies. At 23, she’s older than any of her sisters or cousins were when they all got married, and the family is starting to look bad to their friends.

But Gema wants to get educated, wants to experiment with girls, wants to be her own person. Then, and only then, she might consider settling down with a nice boy. Or girl, maybe.

But she’s stuck. She must live with her parents until she’s married to a boy. She’s never had sex with a boy, nor will she be able to until marriage. But she’s also never felt attracted to a boy. The couple of times she’s had sex with girls have been fraught with shame and doubt.

Most countries expect immigrants to have a college education, something out of Gema’s reach. Even if that weren’t true, any visa she could get would require parental consent.

She has no options.

You knew there was a punchline…

When Gema told me her story, the first question I asked her was what the age of majority is in Indonesia. She didn’t really know what that meant, but she knew that people were considered adults at 18 in Indonesia.

I told her I had good news for her.

First, I told her, you are a legal adult in your country. I know you think your parents have control over you legally, but they actually don’t. The idea that you stay with your parents and listen to them until you’re married is purely a cultural constraint, not a legal constraint. That means that if you choose to, you may leave your parents’ house whenever you want. You are free.

I also told her that an Indonesian adult does not need parental consent to obtain a visa. Again, she’s free to make her own choices.

Finally I told her, you are not responsible for the choices or feelings of your family members. You cannot make them happy, and you also cannot make them sad. The way they respond to your actions is entirely their choice. If they choose to feel shame as a result of you living the life you want, that is not your fault. It is entirely up to them. You are only responsible for your own choices, not for the choices of your family.

Then, she lived happily ever after.

Just Kidding

Gema politely thanked me, but restated her position:

There’s no law, she said, that specifically prevents me from moving out. But there’s also no law that specifically frees me. She said Indonesia just doesn’t have any law about the parent/child relationship as it relates to the age of the child. She told me that if she said “I’m over 18, so I’m free to decide my own life,” her parents tell her to shut up, they are an Eastern family, and she’s talking nonsense.

So I do what I always do when faced with an inscrutable question: I scrute it. I dug into the Indonesian constitution and law.

I told her that Chapter 10 of the Indonesian constitution guarantees that all citizens (Gema is an adult citizen) have the right to choose education, work, citizenship, and where they live. They also have the right, according to chapter 10, to express their opinion, to have freedom of thought and conscience, religion, and they have the right to not be falsely imprisoned or enslaved.

I explained to her that “age of majority” is the age when children legally cease to be minors and assume control over their persons, actions and decisions, thereby terminating the legal control and legal responsibilities of their parents over and for them.

That hit her like a ton of bricks. I saw the light flash across her face. She looked confused for a moment before widening her eyes. The law is on her side. She is not stuck. She is an autonomous person.

Gema immediately applied and was accepted for a work visa in Singapore. She might even meet a cute girl there.

You Are Gema

Gema had been “stuck” for years, laboring under this false restriction. She had a limiting belief, that her parents could control her every move, and that she was powerless to stop them.

For Gema, freedom was one google search away—just a quick glance through the actual laws she thought chained her down. Just a few minutes and Gema’s old chains were broken. Those chains were in her mind the whole time.

But I didn’t tell you this story because I think you particularly care about an Indonesian woman named Gema. I told you this story because you are Gema. We are all Gema, in our own ways.

Consider your desires, and think about why you haven’t fulfilled them yet. What limitations have you built for yourself that prevent you from being fulfilled?

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Make it Obsolete

Pete — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 10:00:05 +0000

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” - Buckminster Fuller

Fuller was, among many other interests, a systems theorist. When he said you have to make parts of a system obsolete to change anything he was talking about social change, and perhaps market changes.

You can’t just kill the Big Four record companies by beating them at their own, rigged game. If you want to replace them, you have to invent file sharing.

But this insight doesn’t only apply to society or markets. You are a “system” too.

If you want change, don’t fight yourself.

The parts of you that procrastinate and overeat are part of the system because they serve a useful function. If you want to replace those parts, you have to discover what their purpose is, and deliberately fulfill that purpose in a new and better way.

Once you do that the old part will fall by the wayside effortlessly. You may not even notice it happening because once you’re successful, you’ll be a whole new person; your new way of being will feel perfectly natural.

If procrastination is a defense mechanism against failure, and overeating is a surrogate for self-esteem, then embracing failure and finding a real reason to love yourself will make those symptoms evaporate.

To really change you can’t fight who you are, you just need to replace the old parts by making them obsolete.

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Stop Apologizing

Pete — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 10:00:30 +0000

This is a note to self. I’m pretty good at not apologizing for who and what I am, but this whole energy work thing got my panties in a bunch.

Half of my friends think energy work is obvious. A fact of nature, and of life. The other half unsubscribed from my e-mail list after the essay went out. That’s okay.

Jenny Bones linked me to a discussion that I really needed to see between Susan Johnstone and Bridget Pilloud about the term “woo-woo” which is identical to my term “hippy shit.” It means “out there” stuff like energy work.

They agree that the term is self-apologetic. A preemptive pejorative that we apply to our own model of the world—after all, if we look down on ourselves first, we hope to rob others of the power to look down on us as well. It’s hard to make fun of someone who is trying so hard to make fun of themselves.

Authentically Weird

We think authenticity sounds noble because we imagine we’ll be authentically brave, smart, strong, compassionate. Authentically successful. Authentically palatable.

But authenticity is trickier than that. If you’re a smart person you will inevitably come to conclusions that will confuse, alienate, and upset some other people. Smart people end up on fringes because they ask a lot of questions and demand the answers. That’s how business coaches begin offering astrology services.

If you’re not pissing people off, you’re not trying hard enough. Or you’re not honest enough with yourself. Don’t apologize for who you are.

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Fear Doesn’t Stop

Pete — Mon, 23 May 2011 15:56:20 +0000

If you live in the fantasy that life will start once you are no longer afraid, you will be playing the waiting game forever.

That’s a quote from the beautiful and brainy Dr. Brenner of A Flourishing Life. She touches on a hugely important point in a recent post: fear isn’t conquered by forcing yourself to stop feeling it, then getting on with your life. Fear is conquered by feeling it, looking straight into its eyes, and moving forward anyway.

What have you been waiting to feel secure about? Stop waiting, just jump in.

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Authenticity Alienates (That’s Okay)

Pete — Sat, 21 May 2011 03:18:14 +0000

I could brand myself as a business blog and I’d be credible since my retirement story is the the kind of thing that the blogosphere loves to jerk off to. I could talk about technology like I did when I was Ken Sharpe. I could talk about cognitive biases, or philosophy. The list continues.

I’m not comfortable branding myself in any of those ways. I keep revisiting my about page because it causes me dissonance—my most popular posts are practical, about customers, procrastination, entrepreneurship, but my about page makes me sound like a self help hippy.

But I never change it because I read over those words and they ring true. It turns out that I secretly am a hippy.

I do have a fire.

My deepest desire is to ignite that fire in others, and I want them to break out of their generic existence to spread that fire to others as well. Every time I write a productivity essay that gets a bunch of traffic from StumbleUpon, I’m disappointed because I know I’m missing my real target.

But the posts I write that hint at passion and fire don’t go anywhere. A few people read them and don’t comment, and Google doesn’t like them either. And for good reason: they are tepid. They only hint at what I’m talking about. They don’t bust out of your monitor and scream: “look at me motherfucker! Here is my blazing fury, feel it!”

My Fear

I’m not powerless or ignorant though, I know exactly why this is true. I’m afraid of alienating the people who love to hear productivity tips.

I think they won’t appreciate my thoughts about Prana and Chakras and energetic beings. Energy work.

What a fucking crackpot, this guy believes in that hippy bullshit.

I feel defensive even publicly admitting I am involved with it. Wait a minute, before you judge me, let me remind you that I’m a rationalist at heart, and I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t have evidence.

Energy Flow

Energy work is the kind of thing that you’re right to be skeptical about, but that you can’t deny once you’ve seen it. Even my woman, who is already into New Age crap, didn’t really believe it as more than a convenient metaphor for body chemicals.

Then I did a session to clear an energy block in her solar plexus.

If you had been in the room watching, you would have seen me speaking soothingly to a very relaxed woman, running my hands on and over her body. Because of the size of the block I cleared for her, my soothing talk and gentle touch was followed by her labored breathing, then painful moaning, and eventually agonized writhing and crying.

She felt the energetic cruft and goop breaking up, spreading through her body, and blasting out of her pores, her mouth, her ears. As the healer, I felt the dark brownish, goopy energy infect my own, and I worked to clear it from both of our energetic bodies as it was expelled from the block. I heaved and wretched, my heart felt like it was being stabbed, I cried.

Then, like a kidney stone fully passed, it stopped. The block was clear, her energy body shined brightly from the light within once more, and my woman, no worse for the wear, felt an otherworldly calm and lightness like she’d never felt. The feeling of well-being persists, we talked about this morning. She apologized to me for ever doubting.

This shit is real.

Of course there are bullshit artists ready to sell you ear candles and palm readings. Much of the New Age movement is fluff, and I’ll be the first to call them on it. Conspiracy theorists think the government is run by alien lizards, but that doesn’t mean the government doesn’t exist. Phone psychics may be trained in cold reading, but that doesn’t mean your energetic field doesn’t have information that some people (like me) can perceive.

I don’t pretend to know the mechanisms at play, or even to have a full picture of how it all works in practice, but I know that the basic ideas of prana and chakras are correct because I am able to see, feel, and manipulate them. I can check with similar people who confirm what I’m seeing. When I’m given permission, I look into a person’s mind and see what they thought were dark secrets, and I lay them out in the light.

Hypernatural

It began as insight into other peoples’ thoughts, progressed to seeing visible energy move across and between living things, and blossomed into a more robust understanding of human beings.

I’m not talking about souls or duality at all (I don’t believe in the supernatural, the concept is incoherent), I’m talking about hypernatural phenomena.

Stuff that exists in reality, along with rocks and cell phones, but that we don’t really understand yet. Stuff that a huge and growing population knows is out there from personal experience, but that hasn’t quite been connected to modern science yet (for a number of reasons that I expect to explore here).

The dissonance and fear have festered long enough. I’ve been beating around the bush since very near the beginning of my writing here. Now it’s out.

Alienating with the Truth

I’m sure that owning my unusual beliefs will alienate some people. I’d encourage regular readers who are put off by this to at least give me the benefit of the doubt: you’ve read from me in the past because you think I have some insight, so if I push you past a comfort zone, stay with me to see where I’m going. I think I’ve earned that. If nothing else, ignoring my thoughts on “energy” means missing out on a tremendously useful tool for harnessing the power of your mind, even if I’m totally out to lunch on the real mechanism at work (I’m not, but that’s for you to decide).

I’m also sure that sharing my beliefs and knowledge will attract many others who otherwise would not have resonated with my work—it will be the kick that many long-time readers need to see that they aren’t alone, and it’ll bring other readers into the fold.

My Fire

When I say there’s a fire inside me, that I’m ignited, I’m not being poetic. I’m saying that I literally have an energetic fire burning in my chest, pushing its way out, inspiring and compelling me to spread it.

When I tell you to throw yourself onto the fire, I mean that inner fire of love, passion, and courage that has the power to scour your bones of fear, doubt, and pain. I’m talking to about setting yourself on fire with possibility, connecting to your purpose, and creating a meaningful life.

If you’re with me, I have so much gratitude for you. If you’re not sure, stay here and watch, see what happens. I have amazing things in store.

Throw yourself onto the fire. This is your sign.

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Thinking and Feeling

Pete — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 19:01:34 +0000

A bunch of people are pissed off with me about saying drugs are cool, which is a perfect opportunity to write about thinking and feeling.

I’ve talked about the paleomammalian brain before: the part of us that evolved before our frontal lobe. The part that’s ruled by passion, and won’t let you eat Chinese food anymore even though your comparatively emaciated neocortex wants you to.

Introspective humans like you live in your neocortex. That’s why your life experience feels essentially rational and coherent from the inside. That’s an illusion. The reality is that “you” are perhaps hundreds of competing “yous.”

Despite the persistence and intensity of the rational “yous,” those “yous” are perhaps the easiest to knock off kilter. The you that wants to lose weight is no match for the you that wants to consume carbs at all costs. The you that panics in tight spaces can crush the you that knows the best thing to do is breathe and be calm.

The Feeling You is antiquated and sometimes counter productive, but it’s powerful. It has access to modes of thinking can process massive and varied input—far more our puny neocortex. It takes all this input, and it outputs what is often the best answer. Except it never tells us what to do exactly, just how to feel.

The Thinking You also has strengths and weaknesses. It can disconnect us, it can get us stuck in a loop of dysfunction, and if we rely on it too much it can lead to a life of doing the “right” things but still ending up miserable. On the other hand, it is also the only part of you capable of forming and executing an analytical plan, of building the technology upon which we’ve come to rely, of consciously choosing a path that you find meaningful.

The trick is to get the Thinking you and the Feeling you to cooperate.

Your Brain as a Rocket

Thinking is like the steering wheel that can point you in the right direction. Feeling is the rocket fuel that pushes you in whatever direction you’re pointing.

A perfect example is one of my more popular essays, 5 Steps to Overcome Procrastination Forever. The gist is that you:

Choose a task you want to accomplish but that you’ve been putting off.
Imagine that the task is complete.
Take the time to really feel great about the completed task.

If you do those steps, you find that you’re literally unable to stop yourself from completing the task. Why? Because you’ve consciously chosen your goal, then you harnessed the power of your limbic system by taking a moment to associate a warm and fuzzy feeling with the concrete goal you thought about.

I hadn’t gotten into brain stuff much at that point in this blog, but that is the logic behind what I wrote.

The thing about rockets is that once they’ve started they aren’t going to stop. If you steer correctly you’ll end up in higher orbit. Good for you. But if you misfire, you end up disintegrating in the atmosphere over the Pacific. We’ve all experienced a couple disintegrations.

Just like you can’t help but clean your messy desk once you’ve harnessed the Feeling Rocket, you also can’t help but gorge on a gallon of ice cream, waste another day playing video games, or read yet another self-help article that makes no tangible impact. Unless you take control of that powerful limbic system, it will push you down paths your rational mind knows are hurtful.

Personal Development and Pathology

Entire classes of psychological issues and personal development roadblocks can be explained by the conflict between the thinking mind and the feeling mind.

You want to get fit, but you can’t motivate yourself to exercise. You know germs won’t kill you, but you still need to disinfect your kitchen counter three times daily. You know the worst possible outcome is “no,” but you can’t force yourself to chat up that hotty.

Coaches make buko bucks just keeping people on track to achieve goals that they’ve already chosen and already know how to complete.

Why?

Because steering yourself toward a goal that you think is worthwhile isn’t enough. You need that emotional fire under your ass to actually push you there. Push as in “push motivation.”

Firing the Rocket

Activating your limbic system is a wide topic, but let me leave you with one actionable technique called Heart Breathing.

You can use Heart Breathing to either:

Produce a sense of calm wellbeing when that seems difficult or impossible.

Anchor an emotional response you want to encourage. If you go out of your way to feel gratitude for your life, you can heart breathe to anchor that gratitude so it comes to mind effortlessly in the future.

How to Heart Breathe:

Relax each part of your body in turn, beginning with your legs, until you finally relax all the muscles in your face.
Put your hand over your heart, and gently rub it in a small, circular motion.
Take about 4 seconds to inhale through your nose, then release the breath through your mouth for another 4 seconds.
As you breathe, visualize your breath going into your heart, instead of your lungs.
Continue slowly breathing into your heart, fully relaxed, except the small circular motions with your hand. Do this as long as you want, but for at least two minutes.

When you’re finished breathing, the stew of happy chemicals swilling around your brain will overwhelm your rational mind with well being.

Back to Drugs

It’s not enough to think “my perception isn’t reality.” Some people need that emotional jolt of realization, when the fact that the world you live in is mostly unknowable becomes emotionally real, not just a theory.

That’s why learning theories can never replace real experience for humans: we have to absorb the entire emotional process of the experience before we can truly understand what it’s like to be disfigured, or rich, or poor, or whatever. Anything less and we just don’t fully believe it.

Drugs are a powerful and dangerous way to anchor feelings into your limbic system. Powerful when you use MDMA to anchor feelings of self worth and gratitude. Dangerous when you use cocaine to anchor feelings of invincibility and intense longing.

Drugs allow you to make what your frontal lobes have thought about emotionally real.

And for that, they are invaluable.

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Positive Psychology

Pete — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 18:42:09 +0000

People who are trying to improve themselves by thinking about the way they think often ask the questions:

What’s wrong? and How can I fix it?

Which is a more useful tool than thinking about nothing and doing nothing. So honor yourself for that.

But they say what we focus on becomes our reality. So when we focus on all our problems, our self image becomes a collection of problems in various stages of being solved. Our eating disorder, our confidence issues, our personal finances: all problems that we work to solve and that come to define us.

But you and I are not really a series of shortcomings. We are perfect and complete. So let’s shift our focus by first getting really clear about what we want.

1. Create a vision for what you want in your life: love, adventure, money…

Then…

2. Look at examples of people who have what you want. Find out how they got there, find out how they live their daily lives.

Finally…

3. Do that.

Instead of trying to figure out what you’re doing wrong, look at what successful people are doing right, then do more of that.

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Expectations as Mirrors

Pete — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 12:05:01 +0000

Epiphany: you can learn what to expect from people by finding out what they expect from people.

1.

Everyone models other people as anomalous versions of themselves.

I once walked from the tower by the river where I used to work to get sushi with Brad, the guy who sat in the cube across from me picking his nose all day instead of writing software.

We passed a craggy-faced man who smelled like a rancid orange soaked in engine grease. He tried to start the conversation that normally goes: Hi guys, beautiful weather, how are you? Say, I love Jesus, and my puppy has leukemia, and by the way I need bus fare to get to Kuala Lumpur, so could you spare $20?

You know the kind.

But Brad stopped him with a clever zinger: “Hey, quit bugging us, and get a job lazy ass.”

He chortled and nudged me with his elbow I guess to underline how clever he had been.

“You’re an asshole,” I said. The sushi was good though, I had the deep fried kind that it would only occur to an american to eat.

Brad’s thought process went something like this: I, Brad, am a smart and virtuous person who works hard and contributes to society. In order to end up in the situation that rancid guy is in, I’d have to be profoundly lazy. Therefore, that man’s situation can be explained by him being lazy.

To Brad, the homeless man is nothing more than Brad + lazy. Himself + an anomaly.

2.

Susie was the kind of girl who draws a guy in because of, not in spite of, the mental turmoil boiling beneath the surface of an earnest smile and batting eyelashes. Issues do nothing for me, but Dan was powerless against her wiles.

“I didn’t think you’d show up,” was one of the first things Susie said to Dan on their first date. They had spoken on the phone, gotten along, planned a date, confirmed the date, and he showed up at her place at the right time for the date, and that’s what she said to him.

Apparently a big fan of the color red, he galloped through a field of flags, and each time he and Susie would reach a new and higher milestone in their time together, it would be marked by the same thought.

I didn’t think you’d see me again.
I didn’t think you’d support me through my emotional time.
I didn’t think you’d propose to me.
I didn’t think you’d marry me.

I didn’t understand why Susie didn’t believe Dan would follow through on the things he said. Dan was a pretty stand up guy, and he’d never given Susie any reason to think otherwise.

But of course, the things people believe about and expect from others have very little to do with the others, and a whole lot to do with themselves.

Susie was always there for Dan. Unless she was busy.
Susie was always thoughtful toward Dan. Unless she was distracted.
Susie always showed up for planned events with friends. Unless she didn’t want to.
Susie stayed with Dan no matter what. Until she left him.

Dan was a wreck for a long time after that. He’d expected Susie to be true to her word because Dan is a guy who says what he means. Guys who say what they mean expect that others mean what they say as well.

Susie expected Dan to let her down at every turn because Susie’s mental model of other people is based on herself. To her, Dan was just Susie+penis. And Susie lets people down.

3.

What happens if we learn to recognize the pathologies in others before we get hurt by them? People really do tell us what to expect from them if we’re paying attention.

On the other hand, what happens if we ourselves stop using a paleomammalian strategy to understand other people, and start being present to witness them as they actually are?

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Trapped in the Cave

Pete — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 16:06:42 +0000

I think everyone should do drugs at least a couple times. It’s not super important which drug you choose, but maybe MDMA or psychedelic mushrooms would be a good choice. (Do your research if you take me seriously, these are relatively safe drugs, but they do interact badly with certain preexisting conditions just like any medicine).

The reason is that the world we live in is so terribly convincing. Our perceptions are eerily consistent, and if we run in a fairly “normal” crowd, those beliefs and perceptions are even consistent across the many people we know. So they “must” be true.

And Hard Facts™ have gravitas, so we make them important. Your mortgage, your job, they exist objectively, in reality, so you react to them, you stress about them. Your depression, your anxiety, they are fundamental, objective facts about reality. You have the option to deal with them, tolerate them, or try to ignore their omnipresence.

Except that’s bullshit, of course. Those things are figments even moreso than the chair you’re sitting on is a figment. Anyone who has done drugs not to escape reality but to see it in a different light knows how arbitrary and capricious “reality” can be.

It’s humbling to find that your perceptions, beliefs, and emotional states are entirely arbitrated by the chemical stew you happen have in your brain. It makes you realize that if evolution had produced us with a little more of this chemical, or a pinch less of that chemical, the sky might really be green, happiness might be our default state, or fear might be wholly outside of our emotional repertoire.

I think it’s a fundamental life lesson that perception is, in fact, not reality. It might correspond in some limited way with reality, but probably not. Take it easy.

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TV Creates Cowards

Pete — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 00:01:47 +0000

This is the first episode of a British show called How TV Ruined Your Life. I’m sharing it because it drives home the point that the influences we subject ourselves to deeply influence our perception of the world. TV is the pet example here, but remember that it’s one of many.

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Don’t Find Happy, Be Happy

Pete — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 05:00:03 +0000

You are perfect and complete.

This has happened to me twice now, so I need to share it. The first time was with a Christian missionary in Kansas City. The second time, exactly like the first, was with a Hare Krisha devotee in St. Augustine. I like the second version better.

Giorgio (like Giorgio Armani, he said. I met him once, in Rome, he said.) approached me on the street and told me I should consider being a Hare Krishna devotee (there is a longer story here, I’ll tell it soon). I towered over him, which is unusual for me. The teeth he still had were the color of corn. He was wearing the kind of baseball hat you see tribal natives wear on national geographic. He said I had the “devotee” look about me. I took his pamphlet and listened to him talk about being “really” Italian, not like those guys in New York, he said.

Eventually he popped the question. He said, you know I’m a healer. I once healed a woman with stage 4, terminal cancer, he said. She had days to live, and I prayed over her, then she was better. How can you explain that, he asked.

I’ve heard this before, I know where he’s going.

I could pray over you, completely restore you, he said. That’s when I cut him off.

I earned this eye patch. I love my scars. You can’t buy body modifications like this. These are like tattoos from god.

If I could go back through time, I would push my cute, little, seven-year-old self right under that truck tire all over again. I’d leave my shattered skull and cheek bones ground into the dirt of my drive way. I’d retrace my steps as a child through suicidal depression, through the private hell of not having the guts to off myself when I was eight, even though I desperately wanted to. I’d trace those steps straight back out into the light of perspective. I’d dive again into deep well of compassion, empathy, and self-knowledge that I had to cultivate and draw on to come out the other side.

My scars represent all that to me, and I wouldn’t want them any other way. My scars are perfect, my vision is perfect, if different.

Contentment is something you choose, not something you obtain. Chase dreams, by all means. If you don’t match yourself, then strive if you want. But don’t chase faith healers because you think you need a magic nose job to make yourself happy. Look at that picture above and ask yourself: is that the picture of someone who needs a miracle? Plastic surgery?

Or is it of someone who is perfect and complete in himself?

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Brené Brown on Vulnerability

Pete — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 22:31:30 +0000

This video is awesome because Brené teaches you how to be vulnerable and fearless, empathic and passionate. It touches on most of the subjects I talk about on this blog.

She teaches us to love ourselves and create deep connections with other people. She’s talking about basic human needs, she’s talking about our reason for existing.

You need to watch this, it’s 20 minutes well-spent. I’m going to follow up with several essays that dive into these subjects further in the coming weeks.

Let me know what you think!

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Placebo

Pete — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 05:00:50 +0000

What you believe becomes your reality. When all women are bitches, and all guys are assholes, and money is nothing but stress, and business is hard, then you’re going to end up a stressed out bitch surrounded by assholes slogging through a hard business.

But it works the other way too. My expectation that the people in my life will fill me with light and energy is a self fulfilling prophecy because when people fall short of my expectation, they stop spending time in my life.

The words we use and expectations we have, both positive and negative, create the reality around us in mundane and magical ways. Believing I was capable of becoming a good painter enabled me to spend the countless hours that built up to the Labyrinthine Garden. Believing I could become a good writer allowed me the patience to write hundreds of thousands of words over the past few years, some of which are even good.

What I’m talking about are Placebos.

Placebos are the triggers, the rituals, the scripts that plant the expectation of some outcome in your mind. Those expectations can’t help but become your reality.

The expectation that a woman will dance with you makes the type of man a woman wants to dance with. The expectation that you will close a sale makes you the type of provider that customers want to buy from.

When you believe you are a creator, your creation will be that much more artful. When you believe you are a born lover, your love will burn that much more brightly.

You can see it in the drug addict who is surrounded by drugs, and the entrepreneur who is surrounded by whatever brand of business lifestyle they personally believe is the “true” one, whether that’s the leisurely brand, or the high strung brand. There’s enough for everyone.

First congratulate yourself. Look at your life and all the positive forces in it, and say thanks to yourself for attracting those things.

Now look at your life and think about the parts that don’t electrify you, and realize through to your bones that all those shitty things are mirrors. Your life reflects the placebos you give yourself by making your expectations your reality.

We don’t have a choice but to give ourselves placebos, it’s just how our brains are wired. Just make sure you’re giving yourself medicine, not poison.

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When To Lie To Get Ahead

Pete — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 00:00:59 +0000

Summary
Honesty is more difficult than you think, and the naive approach to honesty will sink your business. Lie to get ahead.

It was painless and it only took 15 minutes. The only disturbing part was watching the smoke rise from my testicles while an early-20s blonde trainee watched everything. Dr. Stein had pulled my vas deferens out of a small incision in my scrotum and used a red hot clamp to bisect and cauterize them. The rising smoke meant I would never have children.

Mine was the nearly 17,000th vasectomy Dr. Stein had performed, not including the 30 he performed the same day he snipped me.

I don’t know how many men had lied to him like I had.

The thing about vasectomies is that they are considered irreversible, so no doctor who wants to keep his license will perform them on a man under 30, especially not one who has no children.

At 23, I had been married for nearly 5 years, and I had two kids. That they are step children is an irrelevant detail to me. My mother and her sister were adopted by my grandparents, so half my family isn’t genetically related to me (or to each other) anyway. Those boys are mine, sperm or not.

As rewarding as raising children can be and has been, I do not want more. I dodged more (genetic) bullets than Keanu Reeves in a trench coat. Although I am personally fit, healthy, sane, and capable, I am carrying enough genetic crud to populate an asylum. Pathological addiction, clinical depression, schizophrenia, Tourette’s syndrome, obsessive compulsive disorder, liver disease, and crooked teeth. The list continues. The ability to get a gnarly tan doesn’t make up for that. I have no interest in playing genetic roulette.

I told Dr. Stein I had two kids, but didn’t mention that they are my step kids. I capitalized on my receding hairline to add 10 years to my age, claiming I was 33, and of course I “forgot” my ID that day. I had cash, so they didn’t ask questions.

I don’t consider my actions dishonest in a meaningful sense, even though they share superficial similarities with dishonesty.

What is Honesty For?

Honesty is marvelously useful. In many ways the ability to establish trust makes our history as a species and current society possible. It’s such a useful concept that we’re all indoctrinated into believing it’s a fundamental good, so we do it by default, which normally works well in aggregate.

The reality is that honesty is useful because it fulfills specific purposes depending on the context, not because giving everyone completely accurate information is always better.

Dr. Stein doesn’t care how old my testicles are or how many children they’ve spurted out. Dr. Stein is constrained by regulatory pressure to only treat men in a certain demographic because if he treats the wrong person, he can be sued later. I talked to him in some detail about this while he fondled me: he believed he was saving the world. That every baby he stopped from being born was one less baby destroying the environment. In a vacuum, he would be delighted to snip a 23 year old kid before he had a chance to inflict his crotch fruit on the world.

The only reason he would decline to treat me is because of the liability he faced. By materially misrepresenting my age and paternity status to Dr. Stein, I had relieved him of that liability, fulfilling the underlying purpose that honesty would normally serve in that context, while getting what I wanted in the process.

No kids for me, no lawsuit for him.

Information vs. Message

You agree with me even if you think you don’t. You may feel guilty about it, but you lie all the time in order to tell the truth.

Information-level Conversation
Her: Do these ’80s leggings make me look old?
You: Of course not dear, you haven’t changed since ’82.

Message-level Conversation
Her: Will you support my ego by affirming my continuing attractiveness?
You: I think you’re attractive, I love you, and I plan to continue loving you.

The interesting thing about the exchange isn’t that the information was a lie while the message was the truth. The really interesting thing is that if you chose to answer the information-level question with accurate information, the message-level conversation would become:

Her: Do you still desire me and love me?
You: No.

Which is a hurtful lie, and you’re an asshole for saying it. Where’s your “simple” truth now?

Honesty in Business

You absolutely must tell the truth in business. If your partners and customers can’t count on you to deliver, then you won’t last more than a transaction or two. However, if you deliver accurate information you will stagnate as an employee and fail as a business owner. What you need to deliver is deeper, message-level truth.

The saying goes that you should never see a professional sweat. Everyone agrees with that because it sounds noble, but actually it means you need to lie to your customers. And you should still agree with it.

It means that even if you’re barely holding things together and you have no idea how you’re going to make good on your contract or if the lights will be on in your office by the close of business, you need to tell your customers that everything is under control because what they need is peace of mind. When you deliver (like you always do) all will be well. You’re a professional, so don’t let them see you sweat.

There are people who can’t figure out the difference between information-level and message-level honesty. They are the gray beard programmers who are proud to be “blunt,” but who stagnated in their career 15 years ago, and now maintain legacy systems from the boiler room. They are the naive entrepreneurs who write boring drivel on their ghost-town blogs and make a pittance before giving up on business entirely in favor of a paycheck from Acme.

Stop “saying it like it is” and pretending that’s a virtue.

Honesty has its uses, but use it wisely.

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What Is Your Freedom For?

Pete — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 21:08:30 +0000

You spend a great deal of time working for freedom. Or at least hoping for it. Financial freedom, personal freedom, schedule freedom.

You want complete freedom—and when you get it, you will use it to conform to very ordinary standards of living that you impose on yourself.

Bill Gates goes for a pee in the morning. Kanye West tweets something from his phone in a bored moment. Oprah eats a salad for lunch.

I wanted freedom, and I worked for it, until I finally got it. But what was it for?

I have a notion of what I want to do, but no clear map to get there yet.

I’m free in the sense that so many people struggle to be free, and I go for a pee in the morning, I tweet things occasionally, I eat salad sometimes. I go see my friends just like you do, I feel stressed sometimes just like you do.

You’re working so very hard. What will your freedom be for?

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Priorities

Pete — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 19:32:50 +0000

In half an hour I’m going to Atlanta to watch my older son compete in a major karate tournament. Some things are more important than your art gallery. Click here to reply to Priorities Pete enables those ready to set themselves on fire with passion and purpose by clearing out their energetic gunk and realigning [...]

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Randy Pausch: Make Your Dreams Reality

Pete — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 04:42:44 +0000

Randy Pausch, pancreatic cancer victim, reminds us in his last lecture to stop our whining because happiness is a choice we make day by day.

You only have one chance to make your dreams a reality, so do it.

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Ritual Creates Change

Pete — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 03:59:10 +0000

Some days I try to inspire you to make you feel like success is within reach (it is). Other days I tell you to just do something, anything, every day. I go on about showing up, and adding one stroke to your gallery, even when it’s hard, even when the stroke sucks.

That emotional oomph that fills your chest and makes your mind race with possibility isn’t enough. If the oomph is all you have then you’re bound to fail.

That euphoric feeling you have just after being inspired is a window of opportunity that’s valuable but brief. You can’t possibly start that company, quit your job, lose the weight, gain the weight, or meet The One™ during that brief high of inspiration. If you try, you’ll lose steam very shortly and you’ll end up with no business, a job you hate, too fat, too skinny, and alone. That sucks.

Here’s the trick: the window is just long enough to establish a new ritual.

To create meaningful, lasting change you must create rituals. That doesn’t necessarily mean doing the same things all the time, but it does mean having a certain time for doing a type of thing.

If you want to lose weight, you know you need to walk on that treadmill for 30 minutes every day, and you’ll damn well do it too, because that’s your ritual. It’s just what you do. You do it when you’re busy. You do it in the hospital. You do it unless you’re dead. You just do it, until it’s done.

And when you’re all done just doing your ritual, then you win. You make the change you want, you get the result you want.

So think about why you read my blog. You want something. You want to change something about your life. What is it?

Now ask yourself: what ritual do you have in place, right now, today, that is bringing you closer to the change you want?

(Hint: if you don’t have even one ritual, then you’re just jerking off. What are you going to do about it?)

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Everybody is Alright

Pete — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 00:38:46 +0000

“Tigger is alright, really,” said Piglet lazily.
“Of course he is,” said Christopher Robin.
“Everybody is, really,” said Pooh. “That’s what I think.”
“But I don’t suppose I’m right,” he said.
“Of course you are,” said Christopher Robin.

Everybody is alright, really. Every person does the best they can at the time with the resources available to them. Forgiveness and patience is the only way, for others, and for yourself.

Thanks Pooh, you’re a pal.

(Full HD wallpaper, share and enjoy.)

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Techzing Panel with Rob Walling

Create Your Core

Pete — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 22:31:07 +0000

“Create Thyself” -Pete Michaud

Your core is built out of the fundamental facts that make you an individual. They are principles and values that never vacillate, that guide you through your life.

I see questions from people all the time about how to find themselves. I have news. You don’t “find yourself.” You create yourself.

You don’t need to agonize over whether you’re altruistic or not. You just have to decide to be altruistic. The same goes for being strong, brave, loyal, or whatever you want to be.

It’s easy to lose track of what’s real if you don’t hold on to your core, and strongly create your own reality.

People will try to drag you down. They’ll tell you you’re selfish, weak, cowardly, and treacherous. If you have no core, nothing you’ve consciously created that is fundamentally true about you, then those people will make you self-destruct in doubt and pain. You will begin to see yourself through their eyes, because you have no eyes of your own to see yourself through.

But if you know your core because you built it, then you can remember that those people aren’t talking about you. They are probably talking about themselves. At best they are talking about an aspect of you reflected through themselves. You’ll be sure you really are altruistic, strong, brave, loyal, et al.

The sword cuts both ways too. How can you know if you really are true to the core you’ve created, or if you’re deluding yourself? If you really are terrible?

If you’re really true to your core, and if you are truly seeing through people’s negativity instead of ignoring valid criticism, then you will also be able to see through people’s positivity.

Some people will tell you that you’re amazing, talented, and wonderful. They are just as wrong as the naysayers. What you are is exactly what you create yourself to be.

If someone says you are hateful, but you are not, then you are not, and you know it, so it doesn’t affect you.

If someone says you are brilliant, but you are not, then you are not, and you know it, so it doesn’t affect you.

Pleasure or pain, treat both impostors the same. Above all, create your core, and be true to it.

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Dealing with Setbacks

Pete — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 23:42:29 +0000

Summary
Setbacks, even minor ones, send most people packing. The people who stick with it always win.

I haven’t really had a place to live for a few weeks now, since my ex-wife is staying in the house. So I’ve been traveling and floating between hotels and friends’ houses. I haven’t had a reliable connection because my computer requires a 47,000 square foot facility and a team of PhDs to keep from launching into low orbit.

Despite that, I showed up and you saw my essays every day you were supposed to. I think that’s a good example of what I mean when I tell you to show up no matter what.

On Friday I finally moved into a house near my other house, so my boys can walk back and forth whenever they want to. The house I found is awesome, but it doesn’t have the internet yet. I knew that going in, but I had talked to the neighbors who are also awesome, and they gave me the password to their wireless network. Score.

I moved in, set everything up, and presto! The net didn’t work.

Damn.

My plan had been to get set up in the afternoon, and have an essay ready that evening. It would have been later than usual, but it would still exist, which is what counts.

There was nothing I could do. I didn’t have a laptop, it was too late at night to buy one or call a friend. I was exhausted from moving, and I had a billion things flying through my head, from custody to how I was going to fit my giant desk through the door, but if I had had an option to be able to write, I would have done it.

Sometimes your plans don’t work out. Sometimes your milestones fall through.

That’s the moment most people give up.

Didn’t land that big client for your business? Didn’t get as much excitement from the viral launch as you’d hoped? Someone you were relying on flake out? Guess it’s a sign. Might as well give up.

Except the people who you see succeed are the ones who kept trying, even when it was hard, even when the universe seemed bent on stopping them.

Maybe writing an essay one day late, on a laptop borrowed from a stranger isn’t such a huge stretch. But those moments add up, especially early on. Those simple moments when it takes just a little more effort and self-discipline to add to your gallery.

Those are the moments when you have to choose: do I give myself a break then blame “the economy” when I fail, or do I show up everyday (even when it’s hard) and do it until it’s done?

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Information is a Drug

Pete — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 19:28:02 +0000

When I was considering leaving my wife my stomach was always in knots. I had to process protracted issues that felt overwhelming in their intellectual and emotional complexity.

When my mind was awash in stress and confusion, one of the most reliable ways to switch off was to plug in: to consume information.

I would feel adrift among my thoughts and to stop the wave, I hooked myself into news and trivia.

I wanted to drown my sorrows in a stream of endless information.

They say knowledge is power, but when you consume information to prevent you from feeling or acting, then information becomes your drug.

When you soak up endless relationship advice instead of processing your emotions, you’re taking a drug. When you read online marketing blogs for hours a day instead of building a company to market, you’re taking a drug. When you educate yourself about making money but have never lifted a finger to actually put cash in your account, then you are definitely taking a drug.

Are you using information to block yourself in, or set yourself free?

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9 Ways to Change For Good

Pete — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 04:35:21 +0000

Achieving freedom means changing the way we interact with and experience the world. You don’t think yourself into freedom, only actions can take you there. You may think I’m telling you something you already know, but are you sure you know how to truly change your behaviors in the long term?

Most people don’t know how to motivate themselves to act toward their passion without any lunch bells, office hours, or stern authority figures. That’s why the Persuasive Tech Lab at Stanford University shared the top 10 mistakes people make when they are trying to change their behavior. The presentation is insightful, but lacks actionable advice or concrete examples. The information is important enough to explain more fully, so read on for a full treatment.

Willpower Isn’t Enough

It’s a mistake to rely on willpower alone for long-term change. I know a brilliant girl named Jeanine who is also a chronic yoyo dieter, with dreams of a svelte figure and a perfect 22 BMI. When she’s on a diet, she scrapes by without her habitual Caramel Macchiato, without her Ton of Fun sized Luncherito, without her double chocolate Sara Lee cheesecake. Finally, after a long and stressful day of making her boss a lot of money, she succumbs to the open bag of Cheetos that her son left in the pantry.

Her heart is in the right place, but she was doomed from the start. I’ve already explained in detail why she cannot fight her urge to consume sweets over the long haul. But more than that, she hasn’t set herself up to succeed. She hasn’t asked herself a critical question:

How would I achieve my goal if will power simply didn’t exist?

Make the Change Easy by Default

Boulders don’t have will power, but they roll down hills because gravity compels them to. Girls who have packed a few too many ribeyes around the midriff won’t lose their wobble by hoping really hard. But Jeanine is a busy woman. She’s going to just grab whatever is available.

So she should make it easy for herself. When she shops for groceries, she should buy only healthy foods. Those cheetos should never have been in front of her. She can’t eat food she doesn’t have. That’s just one small example of making the good behavior (eating healthy food) the default behavior.

Think of yourself as that boulder. Don’t struggle to move, because you can’t. Ask yourself instead: How can I create a hill that I can’t help but roll down?

Change Your Context

The key lesson from the question of how to create a “hill” around yourself is that your environment shapes your behaviors. Sometimes “environment” refers to your social environment, as in the five people you spend the most time with. Other times it really is your physical environment, like an alcoholic bartender.

You’re surrounded by familiarity in both situations, so your brain will automatically try to act the way it’s been trained to act in that context. When I quit smoking a month before my 21^st birthday (telling myself I could pick it back up when the big day came), the only difficult moments were when I was drinking with my friends. I learned to avoid that context while my addiction subsided because it triggered my addiction.

Harness the Power of Triggers

No behaviors happen without a trigger. Drinking and spending time with friends causes a cascade of chemicals that triggered my desire to smoke. A momentary lapse in stimulus in the context of unstructured access to the internet triggers my obsessive need to check e-mail.

But I got some benefit, however small, from smoking and checking your e-mail. Those actions met some primal need that I had. That’s why avoiding bars isn’t enough to make an alcoholic stop drinking. It’s not completely about convenience or opportunity. Maybe it’s about coping with emotional distress. Maybe it’s about relaxing after a stressful day at work.

To change behaviors in the long term you must address the underlying needs your reptile brain is trying to fulfill. When I’m triggered to check my e-mail, I acknowledge my urge, and fulfill it with a positive behavior. I do 10 pushups instead.

Create Positive Behaviors

Shift your focus from avoiding bad behaviors and triggers by creating positive behaviors that fulfill the same need. When triggered by a negative self image to down a gallon of ice cream, call your BFF instead, she’ll make you feel like a million bucks. Instead of smoking to relax, try breathing deeply. Instead of checking your e-mail to get that dopamine rush, try 10 pushups.

Whatever behavior you have and whatever triggers it, develop a plan for a better, alternative behavior, and stick to it when the time comes. It’s not that you’re trying to “quit smoking.” It’s that the very next time you’re tempted to smoke, you will choose to do something else instead. You’ll choose to spend 5 minutes on your exercise bike, maybe. It’s one trigger at a time that you’ll conquer until you’re behaving the way you’d like to.

Take Baby Steps

It’s one tiny success after another that adds up to big changes. Your goal isn’t to build a wildly successful blog, your goal is to write your next blog article and post it when you scheduled yourself to post it. Do that a few hundred times, then maybe you’ll be successful.

Building a profitable company is not about eight or nine figure paydays, it’s about showing up, building one more feature, providing one more service, solving one more problem, selling to one more customer.

No one knows how to “be successful.” Lots of people know how to show up and take one more step in the right direction.

Focus on Concrete Behaviors instead of Abstract Goals

The problem is that “be successful” sounds like something you can do, but it’s not really actionable. “Take one step” may not be a fast track to fame and fortune, but it’s something you can actually do.

We fail at goals like “get in shape” because they are contentless. You can’t “get in shape,” even though your brain thinks you can. What you can do is walk 15 minutes every day. You can do 50 pushups before bed. You can drink water instead of sugary drinks.

Translate goals like “have a successful business” to actions like “get one more customer today.” But be careful not to fall into the trap of thinking you need to read about how to get that customer.

Know When to Stop Thinking and Start Acting

We believe that if we have more information we can take action, but humans aren’t that rational. We normally use information gathering as an excuse not to start a business “yet” or not to chat up a cute girl “yet,” as if some esoteric insight is going to fundamentally change our approach to these situations.

You don’t need to research another fad diet, you know damn well that limiting portions and exercising will make you lose weight. You don’t need to research yet another online business model when you know damn well that you need to just create something, and iterate.

Don’t use information gathering as an excuse not to act.

There is a reason you’re trying to stall though. Change can be overwhelming, and in the same sense that tackling huge challenges is untenable whereas taking small steps is workable, changing forever could seem hopeless, but anyone can make a change for a little while.

Choose a Timeframe for the Change

Changing for a set period that you decide in advance takes the pressure off. Instead of imagining a dismal future, devoid of soda, you can tell yourself that you’re doing something good for your body and you can have soda again in a week. Or two weeks. Or whatever you decide.

Probably the most well-known application of this rule is Steve Pavlina’s “30 Day Trial” concept. His idea is to commit to a new action for only 30 days. At the end of the 30 days you can do whatever you want, but you promise yourself (and maybe others) that for those 30 days, you’ll stick to it.

This helps overcome the indomitable concept of “forever” by only committing to a little while, but it also keeps you going long enough to actually instill the action as a habit. That way you can make a conscious decision about whether to continue with the now-habitual action, or whether the action really doesn’t meet your needs and expectations.

Keep the Change

So now you know how to make a change and maintain it.
Willpower isn’t enough. You have to rearrange your life so that the behavior you want becomes the default behavior. You do that by changing your context to create new triggers and get rid of your old ones. When you can’t get rid of the triggers that lead to bad behavior, you replace those bad behaviors with positive ones that fulfill the same basic needs.

You take baby steps toward concrete actions, instead of fantasizing about abstract goals. You stop thinking and just do it. And finally, you choose a timeframe for whatever goals you may have.

Changing behavior doesn’t have to be difficult. Use these findings to set yourself up for success.

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I Create My Reality, Thank You Steph

Pete — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 10:00:24 +0000

My former wife thinks everything happens for a reason, and that we’re put in situations meant to test us. If we learn from the situation, we graduate beyond it. If we don’t learn, we repeat the situation until we get it.

A more plausible explanation is that we get stuck repeating negative patterns and getting shitty results. If we’re introspective enough to realize there’s a negative pattern, and then we’re creative enough to figure out how to stop the pattern, and then we’re strong enough to implement our solution, we can grow and move on.

The resources we draw on to notice, create, implement and grow are by definition the ones we happen to have around us. So in retrospect it seems like those were the perfect resources we needed at exactly the right time to solve the issues we faced.

That’s like a puddle thinking a divot in the road was made for it because the puddle fits perfectly inside it.

Regardless of whether the lessons are designed or just discovered, to a introspective person living consciously, life feels like a series of lessons that were put here specifically for us to overcome.

Creating Reality

The most powerful lesson I learned during my time with Steph was how to create my reality.

Steph is a woman who creates what she wants.

As a young girl, Steph used her iron will to perform the impossibly bratty feat of holding her breath until she passed out and hit the floor.
She decided as a young woman in Britain, that being a factory worker wasn’t going to be her life, even though she was lower class and almost totally uneducated. No, she was going to come to America. It took 10 years from the time she decided that’s how it was, to when it happened, and she doggedly pursued it for all 10 of those years. Today she’s a citizen and has served in the US Navy.
When she wanted her undergraduate degree she had the small issue of literally not having attended high school. No matter, she got in anyway and graduated despite never having been exposed to algebra or structured writing. She figured out what a variable was during a Calculus lecture. It helps that most grown men could not bench press her IQ.
She decided that being 35 and a single mother of two young boys was no reason to settle. She had extremely exacting physical and mental criteria for her future partner, and shortly found herself with a hot, 18-year-old boytoy, who would later become her sugar daddy as well, and then her nurse.
Steph fancied herself artistic, and had always hated math because she didn’t understand it. She decided that that wasn’t acceptable, so she earned a master’s degree in math and began teaching it. She earned a 4.0 and was hired immediately upon graduation. One of the most successful books we ever produced is the Practically Cheating Statistics Handbook. (So easy, it’s practically cheating. I find myself very clever.)
She decided she wanted to make a serious run at writing novels. She then spent four hours every morning for two years writing two novels that were extremely well-received and became agented.
The agents never sold those novels. Undeterred, she decided to earn her second Master’s degree, this time a terminal degree: Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. She wrote a third book during that time, followed by dozens of others, then founded her own publishing company.
She decided she wanted to save whales, so she submitted five separate entries into the sea shepherd video contest. When she only came in third place, she immediately booked a flight to Taiji, Japan, home of The Cove, did good work there and was noticed by the sea shepherds. She was offered a place on the ship next season.

Manifesting Reality

When Steph decides something will happen, you can bet your ass that thing will happen. I always admired that about her.

I needed to see that because when I met Steph I had huge energy but zero focus. My hard drive is a wasteland of unfinished paintings from years ago. I have lost count of the websites I’ve started and never finished.

I needed a role model who could set her iron will to make something true, and then forge that truth from the fire of her life, come hell or high water.

I think that’s what it takes to live a courageous, satisfying life. Without her I would be jerking off to fantasies of accomplishment, unable to maintain focus or optimism long enough to produce anything of value.

After watching her for eight years (and 12 days), I get it now. You just do it. You decide what’s going to happen, and that becomes your reality.

If something goes wrong you don’t even blink. You just forge ahead.
If your first strategy fails, you try 100 more.
If you feel tired, shut the fuck up, no you don’t.
If someone tells you you can’t do it, they stop existing to you.

You don’t expect help, you don’t expect pats on the back, you just slap the shit out of the reality until falls to its knees and begs to conform to your exacting standards.

I know this now, and I do it. I have built businesses, I have forged careers, I have created value, and I’ve done it with the focus and fire that I gained by being around Steph.

So, thank you Steph, I know you’ll rock the world.

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Orgasms are Better When You’re in Love

Pete — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 01:03:14 +0000

I work about 12 hours a day, most days. I write, I program, I build, and I think. I also value my free time highly, and because I work at the edge of my ability to work, I understand my body and brain well enough to know when to stop. When my mind hits the wall of “you’re spent, hang it up,” I oblige. I go take a shower. I go for a walk. I go play video games.

I don’t resist, even if I have things that “have to” be done. I know that when my body and brain are spent, they are spent, and the best thing I can do is respect the boundary I’ve discovered and enjoy the ebb in activity.

If you find yourself resisting your ebb that means you live in your ebb.

See, there’s a difference between flow punctuated by ebb, which is where I live, and ebb punctuated by flow.

If you have ebb punctuated by flow, then you’re familiar with the rush of inspiration hitting, with the excitement of an idea taking over your mind completely. Then all at once, it’s gone. You can’t bring yourself to work on it anymore, so you go back into hibernation. You go back your default state of “ebb”—reading your RSS feed, watching Hulu some more, passing the days feeling hopeful in that distant, “tomorrow will be better” kind of way.

That’s ebb. You resist it because it consumes you instead of refreshing you. The flash of inspiration you sometimes feel is an orgasm of flow. You fantasize about some starry future, and it makes you come.

Orgasms feel great, but they don’t last, and you’re spent once they are over. Some of the robust among us are capable of having multiple orgasms in a row, but they are still just orgasms—unconnected spurts of creativity, followed by a flaccid aftermath.

Most people orgasm periodically and that’s enough to leave them spent enough to tell themselves they are satisfied. That is, until the energy builds again for their next empty and unproductive spurt.

Living in flow isn’t a series of orgasms. It’s an intense relationship filled with love and respect, in which penetration and creation are expressions of a deep and abiding passion.

Find the passion in your life that awakens your desire. Let it kindle the fire you have inside you. Make love passionately with your life and your actions. Orgasms will still happen but they will at once take on a whole new dimension of power and meaning, while also becoming secondary to the ongoing richness of your relationship with life.

Stop jerking off to pornography of success. Find a life you can love.

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Now is the Time for Risk

Pete — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 15:25:30 +0000

“We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood — it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.”
Martin Luther King Jr.

There are so many reasons you don’t move forward like you want to. So many fears that make action just a little bit out of reach. So many soft surfaces and warm feelings that keep you fat and happy… just a little bit longer.

Those perilous risks will always be there. The cold comfort of mediocrity will never stop calling. The torrent of reasons not to act will rush headlong against you for the rest of your life.

No one looks back and thanks their lucky stars that they played it safe. In retrospect everyone including you will look back and regret not taking risks.

Imagine yourself as an elderly person on a park bench, thinking back to this moment. Imagine feeling the regret of having had the opportunity as a young man or woman to grab life and live the hell of it, but letting that opportunity slip away into the deluge of life’s fears and temptations.

If only I could go back for one moment, you think, to tell myself: go live it, don’t wait. Do it now, or you will grow to old age with regrets in your heart and not enough time to make it right.

Wish granted: here’s the second chance you yearned for on that park bench. Don’t wait for regret to hit. Come back to this moment, right now, and grab it.

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Behavior Change Grid

Pete — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 15:46:39 +0000

Much of what I write is about changing behavior to get the results you want. I try to inspire you to action by telling stories about what’s possible if you consistently trudge forward.

Today I’m sharing a more analytical approach. This approach breaks behavior change into 15 categories according to whether you want the behavior to start or stop, and the period over which you want to change the behavior.

Each of the 15 types of behavior change requires a different mix of psychological strategies to succeed.

BehaviorWizard.org has a fantastic matrix that clearly explains all 15 of the behavior change categories and drills down into the specifics of of how to succeed with each one.

So here’s your Blue Dot behavior for the day: click the link below to learn about the different types of behavior change, and how to succeed at them.

Click me.

Click here to reply to Behavior Change Grid Pete enables those ready to set themselves on fire with passion and purpose by clearing out their energetic gunk and realigning their mind with core principles so the gunk can't come back. You should follow him on twitter @PeteMichaud.

Akrasia, or How to Stop Checking E-mail

Pete — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 10:00:06 +0000

My calendar says I should write today from 8:00am until noon. I began thinking about possibly writing at 9:28, and I’ve been glancing back and forth between potential titles, hacker news, and my e-mail since then. It’s 10:31.

I like writing. I want to write. The moment I get stuck on a word or I’m not sure how to structure the essay, I “give myself a minute to think” … by checking my e-mail.

The good news is that I only have 10 e-mails left in my normally bulging inbox. I have my inbox configured to show 100 messages per page, and this is the first time I’ve seen a 1 page inbox in about 2 months.

The bad news I’ll never get any writing done at this pace, even though I know I should be writing, and I want to write.

I’m the only person in the world that this happens to. I’m lazy and unfocused, and if I were serious about success like all those serious writers out there, I wouldn’t be going through this.

Akrasia

Ancient Greek ἀκρασία, “lacking command (over oneself)”

The state of acting against one’s better judgment.

Ok, I’m the only one in the world aside from Socrates and Aristotle. And Plato. And sometimes Einstein. And I heard Feynman also. And Twain, and Douglas Adams.

Maybe this actually happens to everyone.

Why Akrasia?

Why do I check my e-mail when I know I should write and when I, in fact, want to write?

I just checked my e-mail again.

Here’s my theory about akrasia.

Dopamine

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter responsible for cognition, voluntary movement, motivation, punishment and reward, lactation, sexual gratification, sleep, mood, attention, working memory, and learning. And some other stuff.

It’s a complex issue, but for our purposes know this: dopamine is a happy chemical, and your brain is a dopamine fiend.

You have receptors hungry for those delicious, microscopic squirts of happy juice, and there’s hardware deep in your brain that’s been there since your mom was a gila monster, that drives you to get more of that succulent dopamine at almost any cost.

But there’s will power right? You can bring to bear the mighty weight of your rational mind to overwhelm your animal urge to fight and fuck and check your e-mail for the 54^th time today.

Glucose

It turns out that will power is mediated by another molecule you may have heard of called glucose, which is blood sugar. Glucose is the simplest sugar, and almost everything your cells do require a glucose molecule to make it possible.

Lots of researchers have found that you can’t stop yourself from doing things you kind of want to do if there’s not enough glucose in your brain.

Reptile Brain

The thing you have to understand about your brain is that it’s made of layers that were evolved at different times, and they are stacked one over the other, oldest on the bottom, newest on top.

Basic functions are controlled by the hindbrain, sometimes called the reptilian brain or the lizard brain. Much like Tom Selleck’s mustache, the hindbrain is nearly unstoppable. You can be legally dead, and still that lizard brain will pump your blood, and suck air into your lungs. That’s why it’s nearly impossible to hold your breath until you pass out: your conscious mind (which holds breath) cannot overwhelm the basic urge to breath.

A layer that sits above the hindbrain is the limbic system, sometimes called the Paleomammalian brain. The limbic system that controls emotions and long-term memory.

Remember the time you walked into a Chinese buffet and noticed the fish tank was a little skanky? But you ate the chunky shrimp and crusty rice anyway? Do you remember shitting your guts out and wishing for death a couple hours later?

And now your sphincter quivers a little when you see a Chinese place, even though you know the food probably won’t make you sick?

That’s the limbic system telling you that no, week-old-shimp is not your friend. Even if your conscious mind wants cheese wantons, your limbic system makes you feel like you just ate a dirty sock if you so much as think about going there again.

The final layer I’ll talk about is the frontal lobe, seat of the rational mind. It’s woefully underdeveloped by many, but even in the best case, its ancient cousins easily overwhelm it. It can’t be blamed, it’s only been evolving since a few million years ago, which is when monkeys figured out that lying and cheating was a great way to get laid.

It feels the most real since that’s where our sense of self sits, but it’s actually the least integrated and flimsiest part of the brain.

That’s why starving a child of oxygen at birth will render him unable to speak or do math, while he’s perfectly capable of feeling happy (limbic system) and certainly has no trouble keeping his heart beating (hindbrain).

Hence Akrasia

That anatomy lesson is my geeky way of telling you that even though:

Your sense of self and conscious control of your actions is seated in your forebrain,
and even though you want to write instead of checking your e-mail,
the deeper portion of your brain had a couple billion years extra to make sure it will almost always win.

The end result is rationally wanting to run a mile a day because you know it will make you feel better in the long run, but stuffing your face with greasy potato chips to get that dopamine rush in the short term.

You’re a slob because evolution told you so, and there’s nothing your flimsy upstart forebrain can do about it! Essay over.

How to beat Akrasia

Actually, not so much. Like a woolly mammoth versus a cro-magnon man, the hindbrain will win in a fair fight against the frontal lobe. But mammoths don’t have strategies and sharp spears, and men don’t fight fair.

It’s possible to outsmart a mammoth, and it’s possible to outsmart your hindbrain.

It wants dopamine. You need glucose.

I just checked my e-mail again.

Give your Body Glucose

Glucose is easy: eat. If you’re one of those no breakfast and coke for lunch people, then knock it off.

Keeping your blood sugar up and even will make a huge difference in your ability to control your own behavior.

Pure glucose (called dextrose on food labels) takes 15 minutes to enter your bloodstream. Cheap carbs like white bread will take between 30 minutes and an hour. Better stuff like whole wheat will take between 1 and 2 hours, and up to 3 hours for a food like hard wheat pasta.

The food that takes longer to absorb will also take longer to break down, which means you won’t burn through your energy and feel like you’re starving again 15 minutes after eating (McDonalds).

Eat a solid meal with good, slow release energy about an hour before you plan to work. Don’t stuff your face until your stomach is distended, just eat until you’re not hungry.

The next step is to flood your system with happy juice.

Give Your Brain Dopamine

Much like sexual urges ebb and flow as you satisfy them, your need for dopamine can be stronger or weaker. You can time your productive periods during an ebb in your dopamine cycle.

Aside from vigorous coitus, by far the most effective method of flooding your brain with happy juice is exercise.

A run, a swim, a spin on a bike, anything to get your heart rate up. Keep your heart rate high for 20 minutes and you will feel like a million bucks because of the dopamine and other happy chemicals now swilling around in your brain.

Sweet Productivity

You’ve eaten enough good food to support your exercise and your brain power for the next few hours, and you’ve satiated the inner beast by giving it the dopamine it craves.

Now, sit down and enjoy the clarity of an amazing mood, and the will power to stay laser focused.

Before I let you go, let me also throw in that it’s important to move around and eat light snacks throughout the work day to maintain the effect. I have a system that I use to do exactly this (that I should’ve been using today). When I use it I am a well-oiled machine of productivity. I’ll share the system with you soon!

ps. There is some controversy about the glucose/willpower link. However, even the people who say there’s no link say that eating right and exercising produce marked improvements in willpower, so my advice stands even if my physiology lesson is wrong.

Click here to reply to Akrasia, or How to Stop Checking E-mail Pete enables those ready to set themselves on fire with passion and purpose by clearing out their energetic gunk and realigning their mind with core principles so the gunk can't come back. You should follow him on twitter @PeteMichaud.

Get Off Your Cross And Fight

Pete — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 10:00:06 +0000

On Friday I attended the first Jacksonville PB&J (Party, Benefits & Jam). PB&J brings people together every two months to raise money for a local charity. This time we raised money for The Sanctuary on 8th Street, a place to develop inner city youth.

Al Letson was a speaker there, and he talked about the poetry slams he has been doing for years. I’d never really listened to one before, but he quoted several other poets, and the power of those words blew me away.

The writing is punchy, taut, visceral—everything I aspire to as a writer.

One quote in particular spoke to me, so the next morning I scoured the internet for the poet and the poem. Roger Bonair-Agard, an accomplished poet originally from Trinidad, had spoken the words in 1999 at a national poetry slam in Chicago.

I uploaded the video for the audio I eventually found, and I wrote a transcript so you can hang on every delicious word.

At 31 I learned that Lena is short for Magdalene, one of those enigmas of biblical lore. Whore found religion.

I have often questioned her motives, this love of Jesus Christ, this holy supplication to the son of man. And I think about Lena, my grandmother. Great big woman, skin of ashy obsidian, and hair whitened with the burden of conviction—and I wonder about this business of weeping and foot washing.

But I can only remember her iron hand and rigid schedules—her admonition on catching me day dreaming on the outhouse roof:

“Get down off that thing, boy, you have your book to study. What kind of man do you expect to become?”

I recall her jacking up of my equally stern grandfather, informing him of the folly of any repeated attempts to hit her—never does Mary Magdalene come to mind. Not in the helpless, weeping for the crucified way, not in the convenient Catholic depictions of feminine frailty, of morals and spirit.

I know of a Magdalene with fight. More Joan of Arc than Maid Marian, more Sojourner Truth than damsel in distress.

And I want to tell the withering, two-dimensional ghost crouched and crumpled at the foot of the cross:

“Get up and fight, woman. Wake up and live, if you love him. Jack up the Pontious Pilate and refuse surrender.”

At 3 I was beaten for disrespect of my grandfather. At 8, because I was satisfied with only a 75 in math. Because she knew, having fought battles based purely on conviction, that she was preparing a man for the holiest of crucifications. There would be no washing of feet here. No flimsy eruption of tears. Only the austerity of a warrior, and a Puritan insistence on perfection and effort.

The creases through her aged jowls softening only when she thought I needed to eat to get strong.

“Son, you look thin, come and get some food. Eat something.”

A name orients one to his universe, the Lakotas believed. So a change of name meant a chance for improvement in the lot of a child who was not doing well.

So having learned the root of my grandmother’s name, I cannot summon the sympathy for Mary Magdalene, cannot help her weep tears of distress. Only wish I could retroactivate a name change for her. Show her my grandmother dragging 30 pound sacks of coffee, her swollen leg behind her, and rising from her death bed to fight her daughter’s battles.

One day, if I am worthy of her expectations, I will become a man worth crucifying. And all her beatings, her lessons, her Puritanism and superhuman strength will have taught me that surrender is not an option.

On that day, I expect to see standing at the foot of whatever urban cross they fashion, all 5’10″ of Lena, pointing one huge, gnarled finger at me. The shining authority of her eyes coming from the black forest of her flesh, the white electricity of her hair, lips trembling in rage:

“Get down off that thing, boy, and fight! What kind of man do you intend to become?”

Sometimes we all need a reminder to get off our crosses and fight to become a person worth crucifying.

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What is the Key to Success?

Pete — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 10:00:48 +0000

You have goals and projects that you want to be wildly successful. You’re a writer who wants to be published. You’re a programmer who wants your weekend project to turn into a company.

You’re hoping you meet the right people, learn the right things, have the right ideas. You’re waiting for the day that you are in the right place at the right time to grab and opportunity and run with it.

And you’re wondering what the key to success that you’re missing is.

The answer is simpler than you think.

Revisiting Your Work So Far

I’ve been connecting with people in the local print media lately. I wrote a featured article about blogging for Advantage Small Business Magazine, and they are about to run my second piece about giving away expertise to build a customer base. I’m the cover story this month for the Jacksonville Observer. An interview I did with Dirk at UpgradeReality.com will be posted in a week or two. I have several more appearances in the pipe that haven’t come to fruition yet.

Part of my process for writing and being interviewed is reviewing my past writing. I do that to get a sense of the story as I’ve told it so far, and to prime me to be able articulate whatever ideas I’ve published.

In light of that, I’ve noticed how atrocious my writing was, even a year ago.

The Bomb and the Bystander is one egregious example of embarrassing writing.

Original
One moment calm, the next an enormous sound shook the building, making the plates and light fixtures shudder; a flash of bright light, all the electric lights popped and went dark…

Updated
One moment the restaurant buzzed with a lunch crowd talking over mariachi music piped in from overhead speakers, the next moment an enormous blast rocked the building, shuttering the plates and light fixtures. A flash of bright light, all the electric lights popped and went dark, the music fell silent with a crack, everyone in that restaurant jumped from their seats at once to run.

Aside from awkward phrasing and vague waffling, the whole essay wanders. Leadership. No, a Mexican restaurant, then to a college class, oh wait, a different college class, then there’s a seizure, and maybe an ice sculpture? What the fuck am I talking about? I had a point, but it drowned in the puke I set it swimming in.

The result is flaccid. No one has ever read that essay. I couldn’t understand why because I wasn’t a good enough writer to notice how vapid it was.

But the point isn’t that I was bad. The point is that I’ve improved.

How do I improve?

I write.

I post essays on Mondays and Fridays, even when I really don’t feel like it. I write articles for other publications. I also help other people with their writing, and I read authors who are better writers than I am. But the main factor that makes me a better writer than I was a year ago is that I write.

This site is my art gallery that exists.

Daily Progress

Readers, interviewers, and acquaintances ask me almost every day for the sound bite that makes my story of freedom possible. They want the key to unlock their own potential, and they want it to fit neatly into their sweaty, outstretched palm.

Good news: the key to success really is easy to grasp. I’ll give it to you right now, and I hope your wildest dreams come true:

The key is doing it. You show up every day and you add one tiny, ill-placed paint stroke to your art gallery.

You don’t think about doing it, or dream about doing it, or read about doing it, or plan about doing it. You do it.

Thinking, dreaming, reading, and planning are all worthwhile, but do those after you do something.

The Power of Retrospect

You know you’re making progress when you are embarrassed of your art gallery that exists. When you’re good enough to notice how bad you used to be, you’ll realize the incredible power of just doing something—anything—daily.

Looking back at your progress will motivate you to continue moving forward because it provides a frame of reference for your improvement.

Taking small actions toward your goal every day will build the history, experience, and body of work that are fundamental to creating success. Those people you want to meet, and the brilliant ideas you want to capture will come to you as you hammer away, day after day. Having a schedule and sticking to it will also build the discipline you will definitely need to push past the difficult parts of that process.

Too many people are stuck thinking and dreaming about the life they want to build. Those people are waiting for the day they are good enough to bust onto the scene in a blaze of glory and take over the world. But that’s not how success works.

I admonish you to post your shitty writing, to sell your crappy product, to add that tiny paint stroke to your art gallery. That’s how success works.

That is the key to success. Whatever you do, show up and do it.

Click here to reply to What is the Key to Success? Pete enables those ready to set themselves on fire with passion and purpose by clearing out their energetic gunk and realigning their mind with core principles so the gunk can't come back. You should follow him on twitter @PeteMichaud.

How to Stick With It

Pete — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 00:46:13 +0000

I like my wife, but she makes my life miserable kind of frequently. And I feel shitty because I let her do that.

I was inspired by Penelope Trunk’s intense honesty to write this. I read certain authors even though I don’t give a shit about their subject because they are just too good to ignore. I feel like reading their words makes me a better writer. Penelope is one of those, and one of the main characteristics that makes her writing great is how intensely honest and vulnerable she is.

A Break in Creativity

The reason I stopped writing around March last year, just as my blog was taking off, was that my wife was sick and I had no mental energy left after taking care of her to write. It wasn’t just that she was ill with cancer or something. We had no idea what was wrong. This sickness turned my wife into an emotionally abusive maniac who required constant care to feed herself and take care of her basic needs.

The thing is that the mania came and went. She’d make breakfast with a smile, then, sometimes only minutes later, walk past me into the bedroom. She had a certain way of walking that was close enough to “normal” for plausible deniability, but that really meant a shit storm was approaching.

Mouth a little tighter than usual, steps a little quicker than usual, eyes cast downward just slightly. No one would have noticed but me.

She’d walk past me in “that” way and I would dutifully follow. If I didn’t, it meant I didn’t love her.

She’d flop down on the bed and tell me to leave her alone, even though if I actually did that she’d be devastated and accuse me of not loving her.

She’d stay silent while I tried to get her to talk. If I stopped trying, I didn’t love her.

When she finally did talk it was to tell me the particular way I was a bad or unreasonable person, and that I didn’t love her.

She’d say something to get a rise out of me, then scurry away before I could respond. If I didn’t chase her out of the room, I didn’t love her.

The conclusion would be that I was deliberately making her miserable for my own nefarious purposes. Probably because I didn’t love her.

The real answer was always that she needed to get her chemistry balanced again, which required eating glucose tablets for the sugar spike then protein for staying even (this was the wrong thing to do, but it was the best we knew at the time).

Most of the time between 20 and 45 minutes after eating, she’d cry and tell me she was sorry, that I was the best husband in the world, then go back to whatever she had been doing. We’d go out that night and hang out with friends like nothing had happened at all.

Should I be mad? sad? understanding? How about just numb.

Meanwhile my mind is in shambles. Should I be mad? sad? understanding? How about just numb. Too confusing to think about, so I just keep trucking.

Eventually the good moments were just a break in the clouds in the storm of misery. Good hours turned into good minutes, and eventually disappeared altogether.

At some point, I couldn’t work, I couldn’t write, I couldn’t think. I lost touch with good friends, I lost a bunch of weight that I shouldn’t have lost. I haven’t weighed this little since I was 15.

A Break in the Clouds

In August 2010 she was finally diagnosed with a combination of reactive hypoglycemia (we knew that), and candida which is a systemic yeast infection (we didn’t know that). Yeast had overgrown her digestive tract, at first sucking up all the nutrients she ate which exacerbated her reactive hypoglycemia. Eventually the yeast began eating the villi in her small intestine, making it impossible to absorb nutrients even if the yeast were under control. In the final stage of the illness, which can be fatal, small holes in her intestinal lining allowed whole proteins to enter her blood stream and brain undigested. Essentially, the food she ate was poisoning her to death.

After she was diagnosed and began to improve, it was like the sun coming out again. I could work and write and think again. But without that pressure cooker to keep me busy and panicked, I began to realize that I had never been remarkably happy in the relationship. I realized that the year she hid her illness from me after we first met had been long enough to reel me in. That by the time she spewed her first hateful words and told me I should move out for a reason neither of us understood, my hero script was primed and ready to endure hell to prove that I was the type of person who could endure hell. The worse it got, the more determined I was to make it work no matter what happened.

That’s how real world problems work. Your husband doesn’t just beat the shit out of you out the blue. He breaks your vase first, and that’s not over the line, right? Your boss doesn’t threaten to fire you if you don’t pull an all nighter on the first day. He attaches a blackberry to your scrotum first, and builds up from there.

At some point, you find yourself a frog in water that’s starting to bubble. What do you do then?

Out of the Rolling Boil

You might imagine ahead of time that you’ll be courageous and decisive, and that it’s a matter of making a choice not to let people cross your lines. But when she crosses the line, she crosses a different part of it than you expect. And she crosses it just a little, so you’re not sure if she actually crossed it at all, or if maybe the line was actually farther back than you thought.

It’s normal to feel bad when you read advice that makes everything sound easy, then fail to act on it because the situation is actually more complicated. The reality is that the advice really is simplistic and your situation probably is more complicated.

How do you keep moving forward toward your dreams when it seems that the world is conspiring to hold you back?

Get out of bad situations. If you’re in a miserable situation like a dead end job or relationship, get out of it. Just leave. It will suck your life away until you have no will left to even fix it. I can’t tell you when you should leave, but if you’re asking yourself if you should leave for a long time, you should leave.
Create time for yourself. If you’re in an overwhelming situation, you must create time for yourself. I didn’t do that, and I let my writing slip. You must give yourself mental space. Get out of the house, spend daily time alone, recuperating. If you can’t do this for some reason, see #1.
Have a schedule. I post on Mondays and I post on Fridays. Those are the days I post come hell or high water. If I didn’t have the schedule, it would be easy to put everything off in favor of the distraction du jour. That’s why I haven’t produced any movies since the first one, I have no schedule. Wednesday. I just decided this very moment, as I typed this: my videos go out on Wednesdays.
Incorporate your struggles. When I don’t have the energy to write because things are weighing on my mind, I write about those things. Today is unusual because most of the time I write about them without actually saying so. I ask myself: what advice would I like to hear in the situation I’m in now? Then I write that.
Do it. Look, all this advice boils down to this: if you want to do something, then you have to do it. Just do it. You want to write but you can’t because you’re distraught? Write anyway. You want to paint, program, build, or plan, but you can’t? Yes you can. Just do it.

My wife has been working really hard for the last couple weeks to be sweet, kind, supportive, helpful, and all the things a loving partner should be. I appreciate that, even if it doesn’t always work.

No matter what she does though, I’ve learned my lesson from 2010: I have goals, and I will reach them. I will maintain a positive environment, I set a schedule and I will damn well stick to it. I’ll write even if it takes all damn day typing a few words at a time between staring at the wall, just like this post did.

Click here to reply to How to Stick With It Pete enables those ready to set themselves on fire with passion and purpose by clearing out their energetic gunk and realigning their mind with core principles so the gunk can't come back. You should follow him on twitter @PeteMichaud.

Today You, Tomorrow Me

Pete — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 13:47:22 +0000

Rhoner shares a story about the kindness of strangers. It’s a little rough around the edges since it’s essentially a forum post, but it was enough to make me misty.

Just about every time I see someone [stranded on the side of the road] I stop. I kind of got out of the habit in the last couple of years, moved to a big city and all that, my girlfriend wasn’t too stoked on the practice. Then some shit happened to me that changed me and I am back to offering rides habitually. …

This past year I have had 3 instances of car trouble. A blow out on a freeway, a bunch of blown fuses and an out of gas situation. All of them were while driving other people’s cars which, for some reason, makes it worse on an emotional level. It makes it worse on a practical level as well, what with the fact that I carry things like a jack and extra fuses in my car, and know enough not to park, facing downhill, on a steep incline with less than a gallon of fuel.

Anyway, each of these times this shit happened I was DISGUSTED with how people would not bother to help me. I spent hours on the side of the freeway waiting, watching roadside assistance vehicles blow past me, for AAA to show. The 4 gas stations I asked for a gas can at told me that they couldn’t loan them out “for my safety” but I could buy a really shitty 1-gallon one with no cap for $15. It was enough, each time, to make you say shit like “this country is going to hell in a handbasket.”

But you know who came to my rescue all three times? Immigrants. Mexican immigrants. None of them spoke a lick of the language. But one of those dudes had a profound affect on me.

He was the guy that stopped to help me with a blow out with his whole family of 6 in tow. I was on the side of the road for close to 4 hours. Big jeep, blown rear tire, had a spare but no jack. I had signs in the windows of the car, big signs that said NEED A JACK and offered money. No dice. Right as I am about to give up and just hitch out there a van pulls over and dude bounds out. He sizes the situation up and calls for his youngest daughter who speaks english. He conveys through her that he has a jack but it is too small for the Jeep so we will need to brace it. He produces a saw from the van and cuts a log out of a downed tree on the side of the road. We rolled it over, put his jack on top, and bam, in business. I start taking the wheel off and, if you can believe it, I broke his tire iron. It was one of those collapsible ones and I wasn’t careful and I snapped the head I needed clean off. Fuck.

No worries, he runs to the van, gives it to his wife and she is gone in a flash, down the road to buy a tire iron. She is back in 15 minutes, we finish the job with a little sweat and cussing (stupid log was starting to give), and I am a very happy man. We are both filthy and sweaty. The wife produces a large water jug for us to wash our hands in. I tried to put a 20 in the man’s hand but he wouldn’t take it so I instead gave it to his wife as quietly as I could. I thanked them up one side and down the other. I asked the little girl where they lived, thinking maybe I could send them a gift for being so awesome. She says they live in Mexico. They are here so mommy and daddy can pick peaches for the next few weeks. After that they are going to pick cherries then go back home. She asks if I have had lunch and when I told her no she gave me a tamale from their cooler, the best fucking tamale I have ever had.

So, to clarify, a family that is undoubtedly poorer than you, me, and just about everyone else on that stretch of road, working on a seasonal basis where time is money, took an hour or two out of their day to help some strange dude on the side of the road when people in tow trucks were just passing me by. Wow…

But we aren’t done yet. I thank them again and walk back to my car and open the foil on the tamale cause I am starving at this point and what do I find inside? My fucking $20 bill! I whirl around and run up to the van and the guy rolls his window down. He sees the $20 in my hand and just shaking his head no like he won’t take it. All I can think to say is “Por Favor, Por Favor, Por Favor” with my hands out. Dude just smiles, shakes his head and, with what looked like great concentration, tried his hardest to speak to me in English:

“Today you…. tomorrow me.”

Rolled up his window, drove away, his daughter waving to me in the rear view. I sat in my car eating the best fucking tamale of all time and I just cried. Like a little girl. It has been a rough year and nothing has broke my way. This was so out of left field I just couldn’t deal.

In the 5 months since I have changed a couple of tires, given a few rides to gas stations and, once, went 50 miles out of my way to get a girl to an airport. I won’t accept money. Every time I tell them the same thing when we are through:

“Today you…. tomorrow me.”

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The Bomb and the Bystander

How to Get Your Wallet Back

Pete — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 10:00:31 +0000

This is a story of empathy brought you by StoryCorps, a radio show that shares stories from ordinary people. Julio Diaz, the storyteller, gives us a shining case in point about choosing love over fear, just like in “No Such Thing as Monsters”. The acceptable response was anger and violence, but Julio chose love and empathy. Listen to his story below, or read the transcript.

Julio Diaz gets his wallet back 2 minutes, 14 seconds "Julio Diaz gets his wallet back"

Transcript of the audio:

So I get off the train, I’m walking toward the stairs, and this young teenager pulls out a knife. He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, “here you go.”

He starts to leave and as he’s walking away, I’m like, “hey, wait a minute, you forgot something. If you’re going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm.”

He’s looking at me like, what’s going on here? He asked me, “Well, why are you doing this?”

I’m like, “Well, I don’t know man. If you’re willing to risk your freedom for a few dollars then I guess you must really need the money. I mean, all I wanted to do was go get dinner, and if you really want to join me, hey, you’re more than welcome.” So I’m like, “Look, you can follow me if you want.” I just felt, maybe he really needs help.

So, we go into the diner where I normally eat, we sit down in the booth, and the manager comes by, the dishwashers come by, the waiters come by to say hi. The kid was like “Man, you know everybody here, do you own this place?”

I’m like, “No, I just eat here a lot.”

He’s like, “But you’re even nice to the dishwasher!”

I’m like, “Well, haven’t you been taught you should be nice to everybody?”

So he’s like, “Yeah, but I didn’t think people actually behaved that way.”

So I just asked him in the end, I’m like, “What is it that you want out of life?”

He just had almost a sad face. Either he couldn’t answer me or he didn’t want to.

The bill came and I look at him, and I’m like, “Look, I guess you’re going to have to pay for this bill, because you have my money and I can’t pay for this, so… If you give me my wallet back, I’ll gladly treat you.”

He didn’t even think about it, he’s like “Yeah, okay, here you go.” He gave me my wallet back.

And I gave him $20, I figured maybe it’ll help him, I don’t know. And when I gave him the $20, I asked him to give me something in return: his knife. And he gave it to me.

It’s funny because when I told my mom about what happened, no mom wants to hear this but, she said, you were always the type of kid that if someone asked you the time you’d give them your watch. I don’t know, I figure that if you treat people right, you can only hope that they treat you right. It’s as simple as it gets in this complicated world.

Click here to reply to How to Get Your Wallet Back Pete enables those ready to set themselves on fire with passion and purpose by clearing out their energetic gunk and realigning their mind with core principles so the gunk can't come back. You should follow him on twitter @PeteMichaud.