Pete Michaud

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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Sick and Tired

Pete — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 22:57:56 +0000

I’m alive! It was touch and go for a while, but I made it through about a week of being sick. Aside from a persistent cough, I got better yesterday, which was my birthday, so this is the first day I’ve had to catch up on things. I owe people some readings and phone calls, you know who you are, I’m on it!

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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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Sweet Release, Energy Anatomy

Pete — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 18:33:39 +0000

Beginning in July I did a 40 day no orgasm trial. When you go from orgasming every day to orgasming never, it may seem that the energy and ecstasy of the orgasms is somehow lost. Like if you don’t use it that day, it’s lost.

What I found out is first that that energy ends up being redirected into more intense emotions and into a spectacular creative flow. Second, when the release finally does come, so to speak, it’s as if that energy, pent up for 40 days, releases all at once in something more beautiful and intense than 40 smaller orgasms.

I haven’t been posting essays for a couple weeks. You may think the energy and ecstasy of those posts is lost. But actually their creative energy was redirected powerfully into a single, explosive work that’s far greater than the sum of a couple weeks of essays.

A labor of love has kept me very busy. I’ve actually been working on this way longer than a couple weeks. I mentioned starting this book quite a while back, but as with all major projects the first 90% takes a lot of time, and then the second 90% takes a lot more. I always forget how much blood and sweat goes into these things.

Without further ado:

I’ve learned a lot over the decades and in my practice as an energy worker, but there has always been one source of frustration for me. I’ve been interested but skeptical of the information available about energy work.

“Let’s assume I believe all this stuff,” I’d say. “What does it mean? How does it work in real life? Why doesn’t anyone know about it like they know about buoyancy and genomes?” I won’t just believe whatever some hippy writes on the internet. Most of it is just hand waving that amounts to “because god!”

Where is all the information about energy work for people who are intrigued but want information that’s grounded in reality?

I wrote Energy Anatomy to be that grounded guide. I say that because I was the interested skeptic you may be now, and I wrote the book I wish I had when I began this journey. What that means to you is that your questions about energy work will finally be answered in a clear, accessible way, with minimum hand waving. What that really means to you is that you’ll be able to tap into the infinite joy and gratitude available to anyone who really gets this stuff. Your own unlimited wisdom and intuition.

This was especially labor intensive because every spread in the book has a painting, illustration or photo, most of which I painted from scratch. The visual work is so extensive and high quality that I’m going to release an entire separate package of posters and illustrations later on. Check out a few low resolution samples:

Illustration of the Nervous System showing major Nervous Plexi

Diagram of a well-functioning Heart Chakra. There are diagrams for each chakra, and one of the full system interacting.

Visualization of the Solar Plexus chakra (there's one of these for each major chakra!)

Now instead of just slogging through walls of text, you’ll be able to connect what you’re learning to a visual cue so you learn faster and more deeply, and so you actually remember what you learn. It means you’ll be able to put what you learn into practical action.

Get Your Copy

It’s easy to buy the book because you can choose either Paypal or Google Checkout to pay with a credit or debit card, or Paypal balance. Then you can download the book instantly. Doesn’t get easier!

Click here to Buy Now

Other Cool Stuff

One thing that I think goes without saying is that I’m not some slimy snake oil salesman. Even if I was, you know where I live, so to speak, because I have this blog. My point is that if you don’t like the book, then I don’t want your money. Just let me know, and I’ll give you a (fast) refund, no questions asked. I think that’s obviously how it should be done, but I want to be crystal clear, so I wrote it out.

Something I think is cool about this e-book format is that there’s an awesome navigation bar that allows you to instantly navigate to any part of the book:

That makes reading the book super fast and easy, but it also makes it awesome as a reference that you can refer to again and again.

Deal for my Readers

I think this book will help a lot of people, and I definitely think you should check it out. In order for it to help a lot of people though, a lot of people need to see it. So I set up a special discount code for anyone who Tweets, Likes, Recommends, +1s, snail mails, carrier pigeons, or just plain shares this with other people.

Those people will get over 50% off the cover price, making the purchase a no-brainer. You might as well steal my underwear while you’re at it. No, actually I don’t wear underwear.

Anyway, instead of making some complicated system, I’m just going to give you the discount code and trust that you’ll do your part by spreading the word. Simple!

Click this link to go to the checkout page

Once you’re at the checkout page, type the following code in the “Discount Code” box on the bottom left: SharingIsCaring

Win!

I’m looking forward to all your awesome feedback on this book. I poured myself into it, and you won’t be disappointed. Let me know what you think!

ps. If this kind of book is your thing, and you have a tribe to spread it to, let me know so I can set you up as an affiliate. That way you can help your friends and help yourself at the same time!

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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 →

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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?

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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?

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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.

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The Psychiatrist’s Last Stand

Pete — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 10:00:53 +0000

The Last Psychiatrist is a blog I read because his way of thinking excites me and his way of writing impresses me. He recently wrote an article about Second Life, and I think it may be one of the last I read from him. Not because it’s bad, but because it’s so very good.

There comes a time as a regular reader, that you just outgrow a writer. Not because they are worse, but because you’ve fully assimilated their perspective into your own, and their writing isn’t the challenging journey it once was.

It’s like your kids going to college on their own, or like a student who bests the master. There’s no greater honor for a writer.

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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?

Click here to reply to How to Break Your Limits 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.

See-thru Purple Panties

Pete — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 10:00:13 +0000

See-thru Purple Panties.

Not only are they transparent, but they are embarrassing. It’s not just unadorned nakedness, it’s a type of nakedness that’s deliberate and unabashed. It begs to be seen, it calls attention to your most vulnerable self, and says, Yes, this is me. You know you want me.

Wearing see-thru purple panties will either make someone hot or disgust them. And you’re fine with either.

That’s authenticity. Anything less is limp bullshit.

(Nice one, Bones.)

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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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Apple Announces iUniverse

Pete — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 10:00:58 +0000

Press Release
Apple announces the latest and greatest product from the research lab on Infinity Loop. The iUniverse will revolutionize the way we learn, work, love, and grow. The iUniverse offers a totally immersive alternate reality—simply plug the device in to find yourself in any environment, having any experience of your choosing. From dragons to star ships, everything is possible with the iUniverse.

Customers buy the new device in droves, and plug in. They choose from among the myriad environments available—everything from sex fantasies to flight simulators. They get lost in the worlds created by Apple’s elite environment designers.

So they think.

Having a cadre of designers was Apple’s initial plan, but production schedules were falling behind and the exquisite detail of each environment was too much for the team to handle. Luckily the company had made serious headway on a separate device, the iTelepath. The iTelepath is a device for reading minds. It wasn’t production ready because it was limited to reading paleomammalian urges—thoughts from the subconscious mind only.

But that was enough for the iUniverse engineers, because now they could define generic situations, situation archetypes—beach front condo with smoldering hot foreign woman. The designers used to face issues like: what will the average person consider sexually attractive? How can we design a woman who is foreign to everyone? What is “ideal” beach weather?

Now they didn’t have to design those aspects that are different for everyone. They can just use the prototype iTelepath to “ask” the customer’s subconscious mind what they really want, and generate that. One customer experiences full sun and mid 70s temperature (24°C), with a bronzed Moroccan woman. The next sees light afternoon showers from beneath a romantic canopy that she shares with a fair-skinned Irish woman who has hair like fire.

And it works marvelously: create the essential structure of the experience, and let the customer fill in the details.

Unleash What You Will

Many customers absolutely love the iUniverse because it gives them exactly what they want, and surprises them with more richness and detail than they realized they could get.

But trouble started as soon as the iUniverses were in customers’ hands. One man returned the device after finding his mother in the romantic beach getaway environment. A infertile woman had to be committed after giving birth to a demon in the pregnancy simulation. All manner of nightmare creature, personal agony, and abject humiliation skittered from the hell hole that the iUniverse had turned out to be for many.

The shared experiences were marginally better. When more than one person plugged into the same environment, monsters tended not to erupt from the ground to devour people. The software would take an average of all the participants’ thoughts, so the environment tended to be more stable. Sharing was safer for those who gravitate toward terrorizing experiences. But customers also reported that their experiences tended to be bland and stifling—that their preferences felt crowed and ignored. They wanted to connect with people, but they also wanted to have their thoughts and desires come to fruition in the environment.

The Solution

The official word from Apple on the shared experience fix was: Form a clear, strong vision for the environment so the device can read your intention clearly, and connect with like-minded people. Cocreate your environment with people you like and trust to add value to it.

People were pissed because they just wanted Apple to fix the damn issue. Apple created the iUniverse, and the customers wanted to connect to people and just have their experience work perfectly, they didn’t want to go through the effort of changing environments and changing who they connect with. Of clearly specifying what they wanted from the environment. That meant effort.

Different Demographics

Some customers just couldn’t muster the effort to strongly create their environment, so they settle for sharing the “lowest common denominator experience.” With all the other mainstream users.

Some people were comfortable on their own so they went off into a corner of the iUniverse that was so very different from the shared iUniverse that they could scarcely interact with the mainstream customers at all.

Certain groups of power-users really figured out how to push the limits of the iUniverse software to create radically alien environments and modes of being that mainstream users could barely recognize as an environment or fellow customer at all.

Whatever the customers subconsciously expect is exactly what they find to be true in the environment they’ve chosen, and the more they find of that, the more strongly it’s reinforced.

The Central Question

Some people don’t believe that Apple designed it this way. Some people don’t read the company press releases, so they think the iUniverse just has prebaked environments and that what you find there is what was put there.

Whether a customer is limited or unlimited, and no matter what environment they choose to experience, the whole simulation is running on the same underlying software that operates with knowable and essentially predictable rules.

Remember that customers will only give themselves permission to have experiences that fit into their current subconscious beliefs about their environment. The fundamental assumption of science is that objective reality exists without regard for us observing or experiencing it, so we can do experiments to figure out what that objective reality is like.

For those iUniverse customers who strongly expect that the environment is immutable, scientific experimentation is how they will accept new information. Ironically it seems that whatever experiments they do in an iUniverse environment will spontaneously generate exactly the result they expect: proof that the environment is objective and stable.

Still, scientific reasoning is the bridge over the gap between those who think the shared iUniverse is immutable and those who powerfully create their own environment.

Here’s the question I want you to really think about and then leave a comment to answer: If you were plugged into the iUniverse, how could you tell? How would you demonstrate through experiment that the device does indeed generate experiences from your subconscious mind?

Hint: I’m not talking about an Apple product.

Click here to reply to Apple Announces iUniverse 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.

Breakthrough Session June Tour

Pete — Mon, 30 May 2011 10:00:48 +0000

I recently came out of the closet (to the internet) as an energy healer. To celebrate, I’m doing a tour of the lower half of the US to spread the love. I’m traveling throughout the month of June and into early July (keep reading for a list of cities and dates). I’ve already booked several breakthrough sessions, and I want to book more.

Breakthrough Sessions

Here’s how to know if you need a breakthrough session.

You’re stuck spinning your wheels, and you’re unsure of what to do next.
You have lots of ideas, you have spurts of passion that never amount to anything, but you can feel the fire trying to get out.
You feel doubt and fear creeping in, and you’re just not sure you’re good enough or smart enough to build the life you envision.
Your emotions are running all over the place. You’re on top of the world, then you’re in a dark hole without warning.

You need a breakthrough.

My role is to reconnect you with joy and possibility. I have run sessions anywhere between one hour and two days long, and I’m going into this trip with an open mind. My method combines face-to-face listening, conscious-level psychology, NLP, elements of hypnotherapy, intuitive reading, and pranic energy work. I’m coming with a big bag of tools that I’m prepared to make full use of.

As a certified NLP Practitioner, I will dive into your subconscious mind and align those basic instincts to serve you. As an experienced healer, I will help you clear the grime and goop you’ve built up over the years of heartache and hard work, and ignite the fire you have inside you.

Pricing

→ Sessions cost $2,496, and run loosely between four and eight hours depending on your situation. I book by the session instead of by the hour because the nature of the session I have with you will determine how long we actually need. I find it awkward to be on a clock, and I want the people I work with to be focused on the breakthrough at hand, not minimizing billable hours.

→ In addition to the money, I also require alumni to pay it forward. Do a kindness in proportion to the kindness I give you. Make an impact on someone in your life. Then tell me about it.

Also…

For me this tour represents my plunge from energy work being a thing I do, to the thing I do. My goal is to lay the foundation for a wider family, people who have felt the impact of my coaching and energy work, who can spread the word. People who can tell others that yeah, I’m legit, and by the way, holy shit.

With that in mind, I’m changing two of my normal policies:

1. Open Schedule

I normally only do two sessions per week because I pour my heart and soul into each session. It’s physically, emotionally, and energetically exhausting. But that schedule would only leave eight slots for the tour, three of which were taken before I even posted this (two in San Francisco, one in Austin, and one that’s not finalized in Las Vegas).

So for this month, I’m going to open it up: if there’s time in my schedule, I will see you.

2. Testify

My fee is not negotiable. It’s the product of supply and demand, and I can’t justify the substantial time and energy these sessions cost me without maintaining the fee.

However, this trip is different because I’m going to be present in these cities (see below), already doing sessions, so the cost to me isn’t as high for an individual session. Also, the primary goal of the trip is to add to my growing list of alumni, and obviously not everyone can afford $2,496, no matter how profound or life changing the experience is. The math just doesn’t work for them.

That’s why I’ll work with people to adjust my fee for this trip according to a sliding scale. In exchange, you will allow me to tell your story to others, in your own words, about the impact my work had on you. You testify in your voice, and I’ll make a special concession.

My mission in life is to heal people—to help them break through—and these two things will serve my mission right now.

Travel Schedule

Click to View Full Size Map

Itinerary:

June 2^nd – Jacksonville, Florida → Dallas, Texas
June 5^th – Dallas, Texas → Austin, Texas
June 9^th – Austin, Texas → Dallas, Texas
June 12^th – Dallas, Texas → Las Vegas, Nevada
June 19^th – Las Vegas, Nevada → San Jose, California
July 5^th – San Jose, California → Jacksonville, Florida

Book a Session

You’re ready for a monumental shift in perspective. You’re ready to make this month the month you look back at and say “That’s when everything changed for me.” Click below to book your breakthrough session right now.

If you’re ready to ignite the fire inside you, but my fee makes it economically impossible, click here to book a Breakthrough Session on a sliding scale →

Next Tour

If this tour missed you, my next tour might not. I’ll be going from Jacksonville, due West beginning July 31^st. Here’s a map of the planned route. I’ll be passing through Tallahassee, Pensacola, Mobile, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Houston, and finally landing in Austin. Hope to see you then!

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Your House Is a Reflection

Pete — Fri, 27 May 2011 10:00:00 +0000

I used to live in a cozy, three bedroom bungalow. It didn’t look like much, but the size was acceptable. And even though it wasn’t mine, it felt homey, if temporary.

I moved out of that house when I was 21 and I took my teenage brother and sister in. I already had two children of my own, and the bungalow couldn’t fit all six of us. That’s why I bought a giant old house with 6 bedrooms. It needed a little work, but it had potential.

Famous last words.

What began as cleaning up, painting, and some minor repair, quickly spiraled out of control. I used a crowbar to yank wood veneer panels from the 1970s off the walls, which revealed more wood veneer underneath, followed by a layer of floral-print vinyl, followed by wallpaper, followed by plaster that could only be described as “disgruntled.” And hot pink. Actually, the parts of the wall behind the cabinetry which turned out to be rotting from the inside were not pink, they were bright orange.

In a bathroom upstairs I pulled away ancient linoleum to reveal loose tile work underneath. It was loose because the tile had been laid on top of carpet. I can’t make this stuff up. I could go on for hours about what I found in that house.

By the end of month two, I had removed 18,000 lbs (8,200 kilos) of debris from the house. I know because I had to pay by weight to have it hauled away.

Good Bones

Neighbors who had been in the neighborhood to recall said it had been the worst crack house in the area. All the renovations done to it in the 1970s had been atrocious in every sense.

Two important things:

First of all, it looked fine on the surface. There were visible problems, but nothing that a weekend and some elbow grease couldn’t fix (it seemed). It’s not until I put in the effort to dig down that I realized anything was wrong at all.

Second, after I had discovered that looks can be deceiving by digging past the surface to the core of structure, I saw how it had originally been built in the 1920s. It was incredibly solid, arranged in a time before the flimsy metal brackets that hold walls and floors together now were invented. The studs were so dense that it was impossible for a human being to hammer a nail into it—only a pneumatic framing nailer could do it. The subfloor was made of two by eight lumber of the same density, not the plywood crap they use now. The outer walls were brick that had stood strong against countless tropical storms as well as hurricanes Donna and Dora.

This was fundamentally solid home that had been ravaged by misuse and sloppy workmanship.

The Reflection

Four years later the house was livable, but still a work in progress. The vaulted stair well walls were smooth and solid, but the historic central railing still needed repair, and there was no hallway railing at all. The hole in the first story floor went straight to the crawlspace below, as the secondary foyer awaited tile work that I never quite got around to. Baseboard lined only half the walls. Still marred and splattered with almost 100 years of history, the hardwood floors had still not been sanded or refinished.

I had once felt hopeful and optimistic about the house, as if I was conquering it and making it beautiful. Years later, I walked down the hallway feeling frustrated and limited by it—a testament to inability to finish anything. A reminder that everything in my life was in a constant state of “almost,” and “just a little more.”

Just a few more credits for my degree, just a couple more issues to solve for a happy marriage, just a little more money to do what I wanted.

Oh. Oh shit.

The story about the house I bought when I was 21 isn’t about the house at all. It’s a story about me. It’s about my mind, my emotional state.

The house is my naive optimism made material: I’m fine except a few cosmetic issues. I’m all about improving myself, so I’ll just jump in there and give myself a little spit shine and the job will be done.

But that’s not what happened.

With my siblings I embarked on the most harrowing year of my life, which would shake me to my core and reveal truths, both dark and light. As I dug more and more deeply, I discovered the dirt and grime and shoddy repair work of my past. Linoleum over tile over carpet over hardwood.

Every step of the way she begged me to stop—to just leave the wood vaneer and paint over it. Covering things up will look fine, no one will know the difference. You’ll even forget what was under there after a while. And anyway we didn’t know how to repair and reroute the ancient wiring we’d find in there.

But I was driven. I had to do it. I had to keep ripping and tearing and clawing at that house—at myself—until I found a solid core. Whatever I found in there, I would learn to fix.

And when I fixed things, I was meticulous. It would drive her crazy—I would sit there for hours and days to make every part of the project just so. I would scrap a day worth of effort because what I had built wasn’t precisely right. It’s good enough, she’d say. We don’t have the money to do it again, I think you’re being obsessive.

But I had to get to that solid core.

Then I had to choose what I built on top of that, and do it carefully so the end result lived up to the picture in my mind.

New Beginning

And that’s what I did for the most part, but the job just never quite got done. One thing or another would stand in the way of making anything but painfully slow progress.

The tension between change and stability finally boiled over, and I ultimately left that house and that life behind.

After a few weeks of floating in isolation, I moved into a house within walking distance of my old one so the elements of the old life that I wanted in my mental space (my children) could enter freely. But I didn’t want to buy another house in the same area, and I’m only one person, so I found a place I share with a room mate.

Like my old house, it’s large, but this one has tall ceilings and plenty of light. I like the bones. What I didn’t like when I moved in was the utter chaos. Furniture in disarray, trash strewn everywhere, (truly cosmetic) projects visibly half finished.

Then there was my room, a pristine oasis. Everything in its place, my shirts arranged perfectly by color in the closet. In that still center, I could breathe.

Boundary Issues

For a few months I felt trapped. I liked the house (in theory) and I liked my room mate, but I hated the clutter, and I was sick constantly because of the malevolent dust monsters lurking in every corner. But I didn’t feel right cleaning the common areas. I felt like an interloper in this new space, a guest who was free to roam among the debris, but not make too much of a mark. I was powerless to change my situation.

Just kidding, that’s bullshit. Of course I had the power. I didn’t have to live in another person’s filth, it was just a choice I was making by being meek and passive. I could choose to let another person create chaos in my space, or I could set a boundary.

So one weekend when I had the house all to myself, I cleaned. I cleaned everything. The serene core that had been my room expanded outward as trash and boxes moved, carpets were shampooed, a year of dust was wiped from the floor and baseboards, debris found its way to shelves or the trash. The kitchen counter was cleared of months-old bread and unused appliances.

I cleaned the shit out of that place.

As a fig leaf, in acknowledgement of my choice to share this space with others, I left a singular corner of the dining room in full, cluttered glory. Sharing mental space with other people means introducing a little chaos, which is fine.

The people sharing my space (physical and mental) were pissed. Their debris, insofar as it was in my space, had been moved from carefully selected shadows and crevices into the trash, or else fully into their private space. And they weren’t having it.

They both told me they were ejecting themselves from my “space,” and previously I would have felt guilty. I had made too much of a mark, rippled the water too harshly, I should backpedal. It’s my responsibility to make sure everyone stays calm and happy, even at my own expense.

But instead I said, “It’s your choice. I’ll make reasonable accommodations, but I have my boundaries.”

Remember, I’m not talking about my living arrangement. I’m talking about my mind.

Look Around

This whole thing about the place you live reflecting what’s in your mind may be a metaphor, but I suspect it’s not. Now that I know to look for it, I see it time and again. Have you ever seen a suburban palace with a manicured lawn that felt cold inside? Every architectural detail manufactured and installed haphazardly, each piece of furniture hinting at elegance, yet cheap and drab?

Similarly, have you experienced a small home in the wrong part of town that seemed to glow with warmth, that invited you in to stay and be comfortable, like a warm hug? Everything in its place, and all working together to say: be joyful?

Why is that? What do you see when you look around your house?

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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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Goal Orientation: Action vs. Outcome

Pete — Mon, 16 May 2011 16:47:08 +0000

Summary: To achieve an outcome, you have to take action, and that action should be your goal. You can’t directly choose an outcome, but you can always choose to take action.

Jason wanted to lose 20lbs. His “goal” was to lose 1.5lbs per week, and he started by just doing “a little” more exercise and “trying to eat better.” He started strong, with a big push of enthusiasm. He would lose a pound or two sporadically, but he gave up a few weeks in when he actually gained two pounds. He had failed at his “goal,” so he quit, disgusted.

Why did he fail? Why do I keep putting “goal” in quotes?

Because, Jason eventually realized, losing 1.5lbs per week isn’t a goal at all. It’s the outcome of an action, and the action is the goal. You can’t just decide to lose 1.5lbs per week, but what Jason figured out is that you can decide to work out for a fixed time every day.

To reach his desired outcome, Jason made a critical shift in his thinking. He worked backward to figure out that a pound of fat stores 3500 calories, so in order to lose a pound per week he’d have to burn 500 calories per day. He knew that 45 minutes on the treadmill burned 500 calories.

He shifted his goal. Action: run 45 minutes on the treadmill everyday. Outcome? He lost 20 pounds.

Critical Shift

To make the critical shift in your mind from a “goal” that leaves you powerless and frustrated, simply ask: is the goal I have in mind an action or an outcome?

Most goals are an outcome because outcomes are what we’re concerned with when we work hard to achieve. That’s understandable, but wrong. To achieve an outcome, you have to take action, and that action should be your goal. You can’t directly choose an outcome, but you can always choose to take action.

I started writing a book recently, and my desired outcome is to have the first draft fleshed out in four months. I want the manuscript to be 80,000 words. I need to write 5,000 words a week. 1,000 words per weekday.

This is like Jason deciding to burn 500 calories per day. It’s better than “lose 1.5lbs per week,” but it’s not quite fundamental enough either. He took it a step further by figuring out what 500 calories being burned looked like, and his goal was to run for 45 minutes per day. He can’t directly control how many calories he burns, but he can directly control how long he tries to burn them.

I started with 1,000 words per day goal. The problem is that 1,000 words can mean filler words, or it can mean densely packed, heavily-researched material. So for the first few days I worked really hard on the book. More than full time. But I wasn’t hitting my 1,000 word goal because a lot of the work was research, and writing a book is always front loaded with a lot of reading and fucking around before words go down. So I was frustrated that I wasn’t reaching the goal, and I started to slip, and after a few days of slipping, I stopped working on the book.

That pattern of failure is classic, it happens to people all the time. Good thing I knew.

So, I shifted again. It takes me an average of two hours to write 1,000 polished words. So that’s my goal: write my book for 2 hours per weekday. In 4 months, the outcome will be a first draft.

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How to Make Everything Better

Pete — Mon, 02 May 2011 17:57:45 +0000

The ability to deliberately manipulate the way our own minds work and the degree to which they work is maybe what separates us from other animals. That’s the reason our ineffective, pornographic education system wrankles me the way it does.

But that’s not the only reason I’m sharing this excellent video of Ken Robinson’s talk about education.

The real reason is that his way of thinking about the system is exactly what I’m trying to teach through my writing here.

He tackles the issues by throwing out the dogma and cultural memes, and simply asking: why do we do it this way? What historical forces led to a system like this? What present interests keep it this way? Does this system serve its intended purpose? Can we do better?

It’s more than just education. This method of reasoning can and should be applied to every part of your life. It’s about how we feel about ourselves. It’s about why we react the way we do. It’s about our relationship with money, our lovers, our friends.

Throw out the assumptions that came from outside you, and ask yourself:

What led to me doing it this way?
What keeps me doing it this way?
Am I getting what I want by doing it this way?
Is there a better way?

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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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Erica Douglass: Success in Vulnerability

Pete — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 13:31:40 +0000

Update: I called Erica “a millionaire entrepreneur” in this interview, but she corrected me, clarifying that while she did sell her hosting company for $1.1 million when she was 26, she is not a millionaire. Buying companies is more complicated than buying a candy bar in which you get a whole candy bar for cash up front. She’s still damned impressive, but some people are pedants, so consider it disclosed!

Erica inspires me and many others with her story of how she became a millionaire entrepreneur by age 26. Her effort to enlighten readers as well as build new successful businesses like WhooshTraffic, a service that helps you rank high for keywords continue to impress today.

What Erica shares in this interview is gold. Everything from the traits you need to be a successful entrepreneur, to learning when to pivot, to how and when to find a cofounder, and even how to woo investors. You don’t want to miss this.

Click below to listen, or scroll for a complete transcript!

Erica Douglass Audio Interview, Success in Vulnerability

Transcript Contents

Traits of Successful People
Transparency Contributes to Success
Strength in Vulnerability (Grow Your Company Fast)
Keep on Failing
When to Pivot (Market Research)
Value of a Cofounder
Where to find a Cofounder
How to Get Money from an Investor (Failing Fast)
Focus or Fail

Pete Michaud: Hi, this is Pete Michaud from PeteMichaud.com and today I’m talking to the lovely and talented Ms. Erica Douglass, who sold her first company for $1.1 million when she was 26, right Erica?

Erica Douglass: Yes.

PM: When she was 26. And then started her successful business blog Erica.biz, and is now killing with her latest venture WhooshTraffic. It seems like everything she touches turns to gold, and maybe today we’ll find out why. Erica, thank you so much for being here.

ED: Thank you.

PM: Great, so something I am always intensely curious about is what factors separate people who are consistently successful from those who struggle. So I want to start by asking you: what traits or habits do you attribute our continuing success to?

ED: I think success comes down to a couple of different qualities. The first thing is you’ve gotta be really persistent. I see too many people give up so quickly. They go do a business for a month or two, it doesn’t make them their million dollars, then they go do something else for a couple months, and before they know it several years have passed, and they’re still not getting anywhere with their business and they’re still trying all these new things.

I mean, it took my hosting company 3+ years of me running it to achieve a six figure annual income, and that was company revenue, not my personal salary either. I was basically living on a subsistence wage. Not very much. I lived with roommates, and made ends meet just barely, and had credit card debt and all that good stuff… ok, not so good stuff [laughs].

PM: [laughs] All that bad stuff. No but in a way it is good stuff though, because being willing to go into that sort of bad situation made you able to preserve and have the tenacity you needed to succeed, right?

ED: Right, I was just talking about this with a friend last night actually. I think every successful entrepreneur had this point in their life where they have to make a decision. And they have to succeed, and the only other option is to go home and live with your parents which is a terrible option for a lot of people, including me. I mean, I love my parents, but I don’t want to live with them.

PM: Right, or go back and get a job at Acme.

ED: Right, well in my case I started my company during Silicon Valley’s hugest recession during 2001. So it was really a terrible time to start a business, it was really a terrible time to be in Silicon Valley, there were no jobs. So I basically had to make it work. And I think every entrepreneur who’s been successful faces that reality, where you either have to succeed, or the alternative is living out on the street or living on somebody’s couch, or going back to live with your parents. None of which seems particularly appealing. And it’s having that strength within yourself to be able to, at that decision point, say I’m going to make this business successful, and I will succeed. And just making that decision that you will make it is a huge difference.

PM: Right, so what you’re telling me is that the pressure kind of makes you hungry, and that hunger drives you through the difficult part.

ED: Absolutely.

PM: it interesting how sticking with it is a big part of it for you. And I’m always impressed by how consistently you deliver value on your blog, Erica.biz, and I’m guessing that you also did the same–even though I wasn’t a customer with you at your hosting company—I’m guessing you were also good at consistently delivering value to your hosting customers.

In addition to that, one aspect of your writing that I really have always admired and that I think sets you apart is your ability to be authentic and transparent.

ED: Yeah.

PM: About your struggles and emotions, and I’m wondering what led down this path of making yourself able to be vulnerable that way?

ED: Well, you know when I started my blog—I’ve been blogging for quite a while, I actually have blog posts dating on my blog dating back to 2004. It wasn’t until 2007, after I sold my company, that I bought my domain name Erica.biz and starting blogging for an audience as opposed to just my hosting customer and friends. But on my early blog posts I used to write about my personal life. And for me, I’ve always been very open about my personal life, and a lot of people were very surprised and even a little taken aback by it. Like, why would you disclose that your company isn’t as successful as you want it to be?

And I said, well, because someday I’m going to look back on that and really be excited that I wrote about my company when it wasn’t successful. It seems somehow more true to me to write about your company as it’s growing, rather than to write about it only after it’s been successful.

And also some of the things I’ve written about honestly have gotten some amazing responses, and have connected people better to me.

Like the fact that I wrote about my hosting company while I was running the hosting company—this was back before blogging was even a well-known thing—the fact that I was even doing that attracted people to my company, and a lot of people said that I really like the fact that you’re talking about the business and I like following your business’s success. It makes people feel like they’re involved.

I like to analyze why things are popular, and the psychology behind it. The most popular show on TV right now is American Idol and I can tell you the reason why it’s popular is that the music industry for so many years has seemed like it has some sort of gate keepers that determined success, and we don’t really know who those gatekeepers are, they’re kind of these invisible figures with hands behind the scenes that control which music artist make it and which ones don’t. American idol brings control into the hands of the voters. If a person is playing good music but they don’t get the votes, they don’t move on. And the reason American Idol is so popular, and so many artists from American idol have gone on to become #1 hits is because we feel like we have a say in their popularity, and we feel like we contributed somehow to their success, even though our biggest contribution is probably a text message saying “vote” to 5 digit number. It still makes us feel like we’re a part of their success.

PM: Right, so it’s transparent and I guess the equivalent to the text message would maybe be a blog comment.

ED: Exactly.

PM: Or an e-mail reply or something.

ED: Exactly. And my blog readers feel like somehow their either contributing to my success or they are sharing in it somehow, and it’s really a powerful thing.

PM: Yeah I completely agree, and that’s been my experience reading you and I try to do that myself. But I’m wondering why is it that if it’s such a powerful thing to be vulnerable, why is it so rare in other business bloggers?

ED: [laughs] I think it’s because it’s an ego thing. You don’t want to admit when you messed up. It’s really hard, sometimes when I want to talk about something I really messed up on or something. It can be difficult because a lot of times there are other people involved, so how do you say “my team screwed this up” or “a partner that I worked with screwed this up,” because you don’t necessarily want to shine a bad spotlight on anybody else, and it’s sometimes difficult to know where that line is. So what I try to do is make all the screw up stories as personal as possible. I talk about my screw ups from the story and the lesson they gave me and I try to remove the focus from the other people or other parties involved in the situation.

PM: Right. I guess it would be ideal if everyone had your same mindset, like it’s a growth opportunity to be able to say “hey I screwed up, and here’s how I screwed up, and here’s how I‘m not going to screw up again.” A lot of people don’t feel that way, and I’m wondering, do you think that your willingness to expose yourself to that kind of risk has been big a factor in your business success? Not only in your blogging, but in your business success as well?

ED: Yeah, I absolutely do. People identify with the companies that I start because of my blog and my brand. I mean, when I started WhooshTraffic I didn’t expect it to grow so quickly because I thought: ok, I know SEO is a big market , but we’re in a niche of that market, you we backlink build from other sites to our clients websites, and it’s a niche of the SEO market. I didn’t want to start one of those all-encompassing SEO agency sort of things where we do your design, and your development, and your this, and your that, and the marketing—it’s very heavy feeling to me. I wanted to start a really light, agile company that just did one thing, and did it really well, and as we grow we can expand into other service areas.

But I can tell you, five months after we launched the company, it’s already pushing five figures a month in revenue. And I’ve been very open about that too, and we’ve done zero marketing for the site, no ads, no anything like that. We’re starting to market now, but the cool thing is that the blog community and the people that I knew, my network, made that possible. It made us grow to the point where we’re profitable now and now we can start real marketing campaigns, but we can pay for those marketing campaigns out of revenue, so that’s been pretty amazing.

PM: Yeah, that’s huge. And I’ve actually been watching you, and I’ve been really proud of you. I always love it when people that I kind of know are totally killing it, so I’m really, really happy for you.

ED: Thank you.

PM: You’re welcome. I think though that you’ve been so successful that many beginners in not only writing but business as well, kind of feel intimidated when they hear your story. Like, hey I was 4 years old when I made my first billion, or whatever.

ED: [laughs]

PM: So maybe it seems to them that you have some kind of magic that they can’t possibly reproduce. So I’m curious, have you ever had a false start on a business or project that didn’t work out, and did you learn anything from that?

ED: Yeah absolutely, if you go back through my blog archives, after I sold my business I wanted to start a new business. The first thing I wanted to do was take a year off because I felt like that was really important. Of course I didn’t take the year fully off, because about 3 months after I sold my business, I started Erica.biz and I was blogging. But back then my blog wasn’t very big, it wasn’t nearly a full time job, and it was just a couple hours a week.

But I got to the point where I was exhausted all the time, and I realized that I wasn’t really taking some time off. Then I started considering that maybe this wasn’t a psychological exhaustion that would be solved that would be solved by me selling my business. When I was still running my hosting company I was tired a lot. And everybody just told me, ok you just gotta stop working so much, it’s just because you’re working so hard. Well it actually turned out that I had celiac disease, which is an auto immune disease where your body can’t digest the protein found in wheat which is called gluten. So you have to go on a special diet which is a gluten free diet, and even then you don’t heal right away.

But it wasn’t until late 2009 that I was actually diagnosed with celiac disease so I doing all these different thing in 2008/2009, you’ll see all these sites that I wanted to start that never really got off the ground, including the main site which was called Inspiring Innovators which was designed to be an interview series with successful entrepreneurs, and it was going to be a membership site where I could do webinars with the customers and things like that. A great business idea, in fact I’m encouraging one of my friends to do the exact same business idea.

PM: Sure, it sounds like mixergy.com.

ED: Exactly, and this is before Andrew came out with mixergy.com.

PM: Right.

ED: So it was definitely something that I really wanted to explore but I was so sick all the time that I couldn’t get the site up, and I couldn’t get the interviews done because I was exhausted. So that was a real issue and so that site never really came to fruition, so if you go back through my blog archives, you’ll see some posts where I wrote: oh I’m so excited, it’s going to be launched next month, etc, etc. Well it launched and we did even have a few paying customers, but it never really got off the ground.

And actually WhooshTraffic wasn’t WhooshTraffic to begin with. When Parnel and I started working together—Parnel is my cofounder for WhooshTraffic—when he and I started working together, actually what I wanted to do was create as community site for bloggers. Another idea that I think is really strong because bloggers don’t really have a community site, that we could do forums, we could do a directory of all these different blogs, a directory based on traffic rank, we were pulling Alexa’s API data, which is a unique way to measure blogs against each other. We had all sorts of things planned for that site—I’ll spare you the 20 page business plan, but that didn’t come to fruition either.

We actually launched that site, got some traction and we got some members, and then I did a promotion for a product that was all about building these little niche websites, and my readers really wanted to know how to rank these niche sites in search engines. And this was going on at the same time we were launching, bestblogs.net was what it’s called, if you go there now it just redirects to WhooshTraffic. But I paid $500 something dollars for bestblogs.net domain name too, so there was definitely investment involved. And of course I paid Parnel to work on the site, he’s been paid full time for nearly a year now, since mid 2010.

So I had all this invested in it, and then my list was e-mailing me, well you just promoted this great product on how to create niche sites, so now we want to know how to rank our niche sites in Google, and I thought ohhh… I actually know how to do that. That’s something I know how to do a lot of. I really get it. I really know how to do that: I’ve been in SEO since 1997, so SEO is something I’m super, super familiar with.

So I sent out an e-mail to just the people who had bought the product. There were about 300 of them, I think. And I said, can you do this quick 5 minutes survey for me? And at least 70 or 80 people filled it in in the first couple of days, so we had a good idea of what was going on. And I asked, wold you pay for a site that just did interviews and webinars and stuff, and 30% of the people said yes they would pay for that, and I said would you pay for a site where we build the backlinks to your site for you? And like 70% of the people said yes to that, I thought: this is it. I told Parnel at that point—it was July 2010—and I said Parnel, I think we gotta pivot, [laughs]. The word pivot was just coming into swing then—there was a big thing about pivoting your startups. And I said I think we’ve gotta stop the community site—not that the community site was a bad idea, not that it even wasn’t going to make money, it was just that our trajectory to make money for that site was like a year, and our trajectory for WhooshTraffic—what became WhooshTraffic—to make money was like 3 months.

PM: Yeah, you know what I love about that is that I encourage people to just do something. Do something and it doesn’t matter if you fail, because you’ll learn something and you’ll meet people, and you’ll be in a better position to do your next thing. And thing I love about what you just said is that you did something, and it could’ve worked out fine, but it actually didn’t turn out to be the thing that you wanted to do, the WhooshTraffic, and you would’ve never stumbled upon WhooshTraffic if you hadn’t undertaken the previous project.

ED: Exactly. And I feel strongly that—Parnel and I have been such great cofounders, and we’ve become best friends too, he and his girlfriend and I hang out a lot, and we live like ten minutes from each other. So I feel very strongly that that working relationship was really meant to be. I think the bestblogs.net wasn’t a bad idea but the real key with that idea was to help me find Parnel right when he needed to find work that paid him, and right when I needed a programmer or somebody to turn my ideas into reality. So we really hit it off right away, and we’ve been working together ever since, and it’s been absolutely fantastic.

It’s funny, I never really wanted a cofounder. I always thought I could just hire people because I have the money, I could use seed capital. But I have to tell you, it’s been a much better relationship to have a cofounder than it would be to just have people working for me. And especially the fact that I could throw it some seed money myself—I’ve put about $50 or $60,000 into WhooshTraffic of my own money, that has not recouped in terms of my salary yet, but will probably recoup by the end of 2011, in terms of my salary. So it’s a good payback for me.

PM: Right, that’s a great return on investment. And I’m curious, a lot of people face this situation—a lot of nontechnical people face this situation where they’re deciding, should I hire someone on odesk and hope for the best, or should I find a technical cofounder, or—they’re looking different options. And I’m wondering, where did you meet him? How did you connect with him?

ED: Ok, there’s a great question, I love that question. I think that’s so important because there are so many people out there who want to know, how do I find a cofounder? Should I get a cofounder? That’s been something that’s been on my blog to-do list to write for a long time, and it’s probably something I should talk about—let me write that down actually.

PM: See, if you hadn’t have done this interview, you wouldn’t have been reminded to write that down.

ED: That’s right!

PM: And it’s going to be your next blockbuster post.

ED: It is!

PM: Synergy.

ED: How to find a cofounder. Or not find a cofounder. And originally I did find somebody from odesk to do what I call a working comp of the bestblogs site where I hired a designer and developer from odesk both, and we got the site up and looking good. I wireframed it, and then I scanned the wireframe in. I literally wrote it out with pen and paper, scanned it in, showed them what I wanted, and they turned it into reality. But the problem with hiring someone on odesk, although it was cheap, and although I think if you just need a mockup, a prototype, to send to investors or to show to your 3 Fs—family, friends, and fools [laughs]. If you just need a mockup, I think odesk is definitely the way to go. If you want a long-term relationship with someone who’s going to do projects with you, I think you consider hiring someone full time or getting a cofounder. And I think you need to pay them. That’s really important. Parnel couldn’t work for free because he didn’t have, you know, a bajillion dollars saved up. He’s young, so that’s totally reasonable. So I paid him a salary to begin with, and that’s where you’d going to want to either consider investors or in my case I had the money, so I just paid him outright. But that’s key.

PM: Right, it’s key. And I’m curious, you had the money, and you say you could get investors, but for a lot of people investors seem alien and out of reach, so what do you suggest to people who are listening right now who maybe don’t have the kind of platform that you have—how do they connect with the kind of investors that would make it possible for them to pay somebody?

ED: That’s a tough question to ask me because I’ve actually never had an investor in any of my companies before.

PM: [laughs] Ok, so maybe you’re not the right person, but if you have any insight… because you go to a lot of conferences and that sort of thing.

ED: I think what you have to have to get investors, as an investor—although, I don’t invest in companies, disclaimer—but I do a lot of analysis of why I would or wouldn’t invest in a company because I just think that’s going to be valuable later for me, as well for the company owners who contact me and ask me, hey can you invest in my company—to which I always say no, by the way, because I don’t do that. But I also look at their business model. What investors really want to see is they first of all really want to see a good team, so you have a little bit of a cat and mouse game. You have to find a good programmer, but to get the programmer you’ve got to get investors so it’s a little bit of the chicken or the egg problem.

But the second thing they want to see is an idea that actually has traction, and in my particular case, if I was investing in any companies, I wouldn’t necessarily invest in companies where the modus operandi is to get as many eyeballs as possible into your website, and then we’ll figure out how to make money. I really, really hate that model personally. I’m more of a B2B type of person. I think the B2b model is very, very simplistic, because either people are paying you or people are not paying you. If people are paying you, you’ve got something. If they are not paying you, you’ve got a problem. [laughs]

So for me, I would want to invest in that type of company, just because first of all it’s what I know, it’s where I’ve been. I’ve never started a consumer internet company, or been part of a successful consumer internet company. I’ve always either worked for or started business to business companies. And secondly you can see pretty quickly whether it’s going to have traction or not. If it’s not going to get traction—if nobody’s paying… you set up the buy button, you send it out to your list, and nobody bites, nobody buys anything, then you know you have a situation where you’ve gotta pivot.

PM: Right, either pivot or go back to the drawing board.

ED: Right.

PM: They say “fail fast,” is what the term is in the startup community.

ED: Exactly, and as a potential investor I’d want to see that you have contracts on the table. If you have a customer that saying, hey we’re a head honcho in this industry, and we’re willing to buy your stuff if you can build it for us by this date, that’s what I’d be looking for as an investor. Because if you’ve got it in writing on the table, like we’ll pay you $10,000 a month for this service if you can build it for us by this date, and it has these feature specs, that’s investor gold right there.

So as a potential founder, you need to go out there and make sure—make damn sure—that people are going to buy your stuff. And if possible get it in writing. The more in writing contracts you have, where people have signed on the dotted line, saying yes I will buy this if you build it with these features, then the more likely you are to get an investor.

The worst type of companies to invest in—and this is going to pop a lot of people’s bubbles in their heads—but the worst type of company to invest in are where somebody’s like I’ve got this great idea and if you just give me money, then I can implement it. I would always, as an investor, say heck no to that, because I want to see you go to prototype, and I want to see you going out there. Customer development type things—Steve Blank, if you don’t know who he is, read his books, he’s amazing. Go out there and do your market research, and make sure that you’ve got people, in writing—the bigger the stack of contacts you have, the most likely I will be to give you a check.

PM: Right, and I think I want to emphasize for people listening, that when you say go out there I think you literally mean put on your shoes and walk out your door, and get in your car and go somewhere and talk to people, because e-mail can only take you so far.

ED: Yes, exactly, and you really want people to sign these contracts. And also, if you’re a company founder, you want these people signing the contracts to actually know who you are, so you don’t e-mail them tomorrow, and they go: who is that guy again? So you want them to be able to say, oh that’s this person, we talked about that, I’m really glad you’re starting to build this, and then of course you keep those potential customers in the loop.

And you know that even if they give you a contract not all of them are going to be willing to hand you a check, but that also helps if you go to meet them personally. If you see that their working out of a shack or their garage, and they’re driving an old beater car, and they say they’re going to hand you a $50,000 check, you may be going ehhh… I want to make sure that you’ve got the $50,000 to give me. If they have a nicer office, they’ve been in business a little bit longer, they’ve got some employees, they’ve got some traction, and it’s clear that they have the $50,000 to give you, then it’s going to be a lot easier sell on your part too, so as a founder you want to know that sort of thing about your customers.

PM: Well Erica, do you have anything else you want to add before we wrap it up?

ED: I’d just like to say, as a founder, get as clear on your idea as possible, and go out there and seek customers. And also I would say the biggest mistake I see a lot of early stage founders make is that they want to be everything to everyone. We set up WhooshTraffic as a backlink building service. We are not an agency, we do not design your website, we do not set up your website, we do not rearrange your website for you. When we have customers ask that, we refer out to people we trust who do that sort of thing, but we don’t try to do everything, and I see that as a common mistaken. The problem is that if your company tries to do everything, then it’s not sellable because then you get to the point where you are doing a whole lot of stuff or you have to hire very specialized people. What we do is very sellable because we do one thing and we do it very, very well, and then we provide customers with great technology to track their ranks over time and stuff like that. But our business is infinitely sellable because it’s not required that one of us do all of the high end, specialized work.

PM: Right, and customers can immediately qualify themselves. They know if they have a website and they want to rank high for a particular keyword, they know that they are your potential customer.

ED: That’s it.

PM: But if you can’t explain to them why they are your potential customer then they’re probably not going to give you money.

ED: That’s it.

PM: Yeah, I love it, that’s a perfect thing. Well Erica, it was awesome talking to you, and I really appreciate you taking the time to share your story and experiences. And I hope you stay vulnerable, and hungry, and I wish you success in everything that you do.

ED: Thank you Pete, I appreciate it so much.

PM: Thanks for listening everyone, go rock the world.

Click here to reply to Erica Douglass: Success in Vulnerability 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.

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!

Click here to reply to Brené Brown on Vulnerability 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.

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.

Click here to reply to When To Lie To Get Ahead 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.

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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