This blog post is a very special holiday edition of 5-Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter! For twice the fun, we have twice the number of bullets.

It features ten things I love, all of which make great holiday gifts. I also reached out to some of my favorite brands to get special deals for subscribers. I use all of these products on a daily or weekly basis. Each sponsored bullet is indicated with a star at the end of it, just like this sentence.* Literally everything in this email is in my home. 

As health has remained my number one priority this year, most—if not all—of the items below focus on sleep, nutrition, pain relief, and recovery. All good things stem from good health. As Confucius is credited with saying, “A healthy person wants a thousand things, a sick person only wants one.”

I dislike shopping, but I do love finding the perfect gift. Finding that gift, though, gets harder with time. Those damn adults seem to have everything. So… If you’re having trouble thinking up great options, here are some goodies that deliver.

What is helping me sleep

​​WAOAW Sleep Mask. This has become my favorite sleep mask. The WAOAW is a contoured mask that removes all pressure from the eyes, and it’s been added to my list of “things I didn’t know I needed.” The design also blocks much more light than conventional masks. Grumpy Tim is good for no one.

Sleep technology I’m using every night

​Pod 3 Cover by Eight Sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat is my nemesis. I’ve suffered for decades, tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, pulling them back on, and repeating ad nauseam. The Pod 3 Cover has been a game changer for the quality of my sleep and the quality of my life. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced (and user-friendly) solution on the market. I’ve been using Eight Sleep for more than two years. Just in time for the holidays, add the Pod 3 Cover to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temp. The Pod technology adjusts the temperature of each side of the bed based on your sleep stages, biometrics, and bedroom temperature, reacting intelligently to create the optimal sleeping environment. For a limited time, Eight Sleep is offering subscribers of 5-Bullet Friday $450 off(!) of their Sleep Fit Holiday Bundle, which includes my personal favorite, the Pod 3 Cover. Click here to get the exclusive holiday savings until November 30th.*

What I’m using with my dog

​Slow-Feed Stainless Steel Bowl. My dear Molly pup has a lot of superpowers, but eating slowly is not one of them. Every two weeks or so, she’ll manically Hoover her food and puke it onto the floor a few minutes later. Not my favorite. This new bowl has totally fixed the problem. No one likes the scarf and barf! For some recent Molly photos that don’t involve barfing, click here and here.

​​High-quality meat and fish I’m cooking

​ButcherBox! ButcherBox is my trusted source for high-quality meats and proteins (outside of venison). They deliver 100% grass-fed, grass-finished beef; free-range organic chicken; humanely raised pork; and wild-caught seafood directly to your doorstep at the frequency you choose. I love cooking with friends and family, and ButcherBox makes it easier to co-create delicious meals, whether a light fish dish or the best ribs you’ve ever had. ButcherBox also cares deeply about animal welfare, supporting the livelihood of farmers and treating ecosystems with respect. They’re B Corp certified, which means they prioritize meeting the highest verified standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability. This Black Friday, your search for amazing deals on high-quality protein ends with ButcherBox. ButcherBox is offering you one of their best steak deals: Get two 10 oz rib eyes FREE in every box for a whole year when you join, plus an additional $20 off!*

Wine I’m drinking with family and friends this holiday season

​Dry Farm Wines. Wines sold in the US can contain a hefty amount of sugar and up to 76 government-approved wine-making additives. Two of these additives are classified as acute toxins by the National Institute of Health, and 12 are classified as “health hazards.” Modern wine is like modern food; most of it is a processed product. And unfortunately, the government doesn’t require wine companies to disclose any of their ingredients. For that reason, most of the wine in my house over the past two years has been from Dry Farm Wines. In my experience, their wine means more fun with fewer headaches. Dry Farm Wines only curates wines that are organic, practically sugar-free (less than 1g/L), low-alcohol (less than 12.5%), low-sulfite, additive-free, and produced by small family farms. All Dry Farm Wines are laboratory tested for purity standards by a certified, independent enologist, and all of their wines are also backed by a 100% Happiness Promise—they will either replace or refund any wine you do not love. Dry Farm Wines has a special offer just for 5-Bullet Friday subscribers—an extra bottle in your first box for just one extra penny. Check out all the details at DryFarmWines.com/Tim.*

Two tools that have reduced low-back pain and tightness

​PSO-RITE for psoas muscle release. Recommended by multiple people in this Twitter thread on self-release. This is the easier to use of these two grouped bullets, but it’s not as surgically precise as the Hip Hook.
Aletha Hip Hook for relief of back and hip pain. This really gets into your psoas and can also tackle the hard-to-reach iliacus quite effectively. Often, what disrupts my sleep is lower-back tightness, so I end up having to flip-flop like a rotisserie chicken from side to side to side to side, which (surprise!) does not improve my sleep quality.

Premium teas I’m enjoying daily

​Pique! Pique is one of my go-tos for the best gifts for family and friends. Combining efficacy and quality with purity and taste, their fermented pu’er teas have become an essential part of my daily routine. I drink both their black and green pu’er every morning, and I take packets with me when I travel. Combining both allows me to get the full spectrum of active ingredients in one easy and enjoyable drink. Their teas are more concentrated in polyphenol antioxidants than any other tea—they support focus and mental clarity, healthy digestion, metabolism, hormonal health, and a healthy immune system. Another favorite is their Daily Radiance Liposomal Vitamin C maximized for absorption. It tastes so good, you might choose to take it once or twice a day, as I do. When I combine these teas with Vitamin C, I know I’m really setting myself up well for the colder days ahead. Pique’s products are triple toxin screened and sourced from some of the world’s most biodiverse areas. Their cutting-edge extraction technology maximally preserves antioxidants, so you reap the health benefits with zero prep, brewing, or waiting required. Pique is offering their biggest deal ever—an exclusive 15% discount on my favorites and more with code TIM15—only available until November 25th, 11:59 p.m. PST.*

What I’m using for recovery

​Marc Pro | Recovery Tool for Sore Muscles & Pain Relief. Last winter, I injured my shoulder snowboarding, and nothing seemed to stem the pain and inflammation, even after a week of recovery. Kelly Starrett (@thereadystate) of The Ready State recommended the Marc Pro, and it reduced the swelling more than 50% after two two-hour sessions. The transformation was incredible. Of course, your mileage will vary, but I plan on traveling with one such device from now on. Since I can’t help but constantly break myself, I am also watching How to Fix a Pelvic Fault or Tweak for skiing-induced lower-back and SI pain. Maybe I should just grow up, but that sounds incredibly boring. My most recent interview with Kelly can be found here.

Electrolytes I’m using daily

​LMNT. I’ve stocked up on boxes and boxes of LMNT, and I usually use 1–2 packs per day to add electrolytes to prevent dehydration symptoms like headaches, muscle cramps, and fatigue. I add electrolytes for many reasons: because I over-hydrate compulsively while stuck at a laptop (which dilutes electrolytes and leads me to feel tired), because I’m on a low-carb diet, because I’ve lost electrolytes through exercise, dry winter climates, etc. It’s simply cheap hydration insurance that tastes great. Each serving of LMNT delivers a meaningful dose of electrolytes without the garbage—no sugar, no artificial ingredients, no coloring, no junk. My favorite flavor is Citrus Salt, which, as a side note, you can use to make a kick-ass, no-sugar margarita. Find your favorite flavor with a free LMNT Sample Pack, included with any purchase for a limited time. And if you don’t love your purchase for any reason, my friends at LMNT offer a no-questions-asked refund policy. This special offer is available here: DrinkLMNT.com/Tim.*

Big relief in a little package

​Rubz ball. Meet one of my favorite travel partners, which can be thought of as a golf ball that won’t shoot across the floor when stepped on. Roll this uniquely designed ball under your feet (my go-to area) or over any sore or tired muscle to reduce tension. It’s small enough to fit in a pocket and easy to manipulate.

And there you go! Ten of my favorite things that make great holiday gifts. I love them all and hope you do, too.
​
Have a wonderful weekend and wonderful holiday season, everyone!
​
Much love to you and yours,
​
Tim

P.S. For those of you who need a break from the serious, I’m running a meme contest from now until 10 p.m. PST on Sunday. And closely related, my last podcast with Kevin Rose is designed to trigger giggles and belly laughs: “The Big Reveal: The Legend of CØCKPUNCH — Kevin Rose and Tim Ferriss on Tim’s New and Extremely Bizarre Art Project.”

The post 10 Gifts to Make Your Holidays Extra Fun, Relaxing, and Delicious appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

This blog post is a very special holiday edition of “5-Bullet Friday,” my very own email newsletter! For twice the fun, we have twice the number of bullets.

It features ten of my favorite things, all of which make great holiday gifts. I also reached out to brands I love to get special deals for subscribers. I use many of these products on a daily or weekly basis. Each sponsored bullet is indicated with a star at the end of it, just like this sentence.*

I dislike shopping, but I do love finding the perfect gift. Finding that gift, though, gets harder with time. Those damn adults seem to have everything. So… If you’re having trouble thinking up great options, here are some goodies that deliver.

“5-Bullet Friday” is a short email of five bullet points, sent out each Friday, and it has become somewhat famous for crashing websites (AKA “the hug of death,” as one reader put it). Each newsletter describes the five coolest things I’ve found or explored that week, often including books, gadgets, experimental supplements, tricks from experts, and weird stuff from all over the world. If the spirit moves you, subscribe for free here. 

Enjoy!

Gadget I’m loving —
Roost – Adjustable and Portable Laptop Stand. On the road, I spotted a coder using one of these in a Starbucks. I crept over and waved to get his attention. Once he’d taken off his headset, I asked him how much he liked the ultralight laptop stand. He answered with a dead-serious stare and a poker face, “I LOVE this laptop stand. My posture has immediately improved, and I complete many more actions per minute.” Gotta love engineers… and he was right. This is a fantastic device. I’m using it in combination with the wireless Apple Magic Trackpad 2 and Magic Keyboard. It’s the perfect size for on-the-go work or travel.

Eye mask I’m loving —
Alaska Bear® Natural Silk Sleep Mask. This was recommended to me by Dr. Peter Attia (@peterattiamd) on his 2019 podcast appearance. He takes one everywhere. I’ve tried many eye masks and was skeptical—aren’t they all basically the same?—but the Alaska Bear is an upgrade. The design checks a couple of basic but critical boxes: (1) it allows you to tighten the head strap, and (2) the soft material blocks light from entering under the bottom edge of the eye mask. If the ridiculous name isn’t enough, you can also choose many ridiculous patterns for your personalized sleep fashion needs.

High-quality meat and fish I’m cooking —
ButcherBox is my go-to trusted source for high-quality meats and proteins (outside of venison). They deliver 100% grass-fed, grass-finished beef; free-range organic chicken; humanely raised pork; and wild-caught seafood directly to your doorstep at the frequency you choose. I love cooking with friends and family, and ButcherBox makes it easier to co-create delicious meals, whether a light fish dish or the best ribs you’ve ever had. ButcherBox also cares deeply about animal welfare, supporting the livelihood of farmers, and treating ecosystems with respect. They’re B Corp certified, which means they prioritize meeting the highest verified standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability. ButcherBox is giving you early access to their best Black Friday deal ever: Sign up and you’ll receive two 10 oz New York strip steaks for FREE in every box you order for a year.*

Coffee I am enjoying —
Four Sigmatic. You’ve heard me talk about these guys for years. I love their mushroom coffee with lion’s mane. It’s delicious, I recommend it, I gift it to my employees, and I give it to my houseguests. It’s my solution when I need to recharge but want to avoid the jitters I sometimes get from regular coffee. Their Reishi Elixir has also been a game changer for sleep. In the spirit of the holidays, Four Sigmatic is giving “5-Bullet Friday” subscribers up to 44% OFF their popular mushroom coffee. Simply visit FourSigmatic.com/Tim44. In previous offers to this newsletter, Four Sigmatic products have sold out in less than 24 hours, so the early bird gets the worm.*

Tech tool I am enjoying —
Logitech BRIO Ultra HD 4K Webcam. I’ve always used my built-in MacBook lens for podcasting, Zoom, and so on. I looked into getting a prosumer setup with a great Sony camera, but I wasn’t motivated enough to fuss with lots of setup on a laptop that is by definition going to move a lot. This BRIO webcam was the middle ground I found, and I love it. What’s most remarkable and surprising is that, although I bought it to improve the other side’s experience, it makes my own experience of video chats much more enjoyable and much easier on the eyes. Here’s the official description: “Brio is a remarkable piece of technology that streams crystal-clear video with superb resolution, frame rate, color, and detail, including autofocus and 5x HD zoom. Brio delivers 4K Ultra HD video at 30 fps, HD 1080p at either 30 or 60 fps, and HD 720p at 30, 60, or an ultra-smooth 90 fps for outstanding clarity, smoothness, and detail.”

Sleep technology I’m using every night —
Eight Sleep Pod Pro Cover. This holiday season, give yourself or a loved one a gift that keeps getting better night after night with the Eight Sleep Pod Pro Cover. Good sleep has been one of my top priorities this year, and the Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep has been revolutionary. It’s helped me practically every night of 2021. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced (and user-friendly) solution on the market. Add the Pod Pro Cover to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. The technology adjusts the temperature of each side of the bed based on your sleep stages, biometrics, and bedroom temperature, reacting intelligently to create the optimal sleeping environment. I like to sleep cool, my girlfriend likes to sleep warm, and this is the best solution I’ve found. Eight Sleep users fall asleep up to 32% faster, reduce sleep interruptions by up to 40%, and get more restful sleep overall. This holiday season, give the gift of better sleep and a present that will keep on giving every day of the year. Go to EightSleep.com/Tim to get $250 off(!) of the Pod Pro Cover.* 

What I’m rereading and gifting —
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy (@charliemackesy). This short and beautiful book was gifted to me by my mom. “This book is for everyone, whether you are eighty or eight,” as the introduction puts it. It looks like a children’s book, and you can read it in 30 minutes, but it’s replete with wisdom for adults. To give you an idea of how popular this book has become, it has 86,166 ratings on Amazon and an average of 5 stars.

Wine I’m drinking with family and friends —
Dry Farm Wines. I love wine with friends, and I’ll be drinking during the holidays, but I hate hangovers. For that reason, and for the past year, most of the wine in my house has been from Dry Farm Wines. In my experience, their wine means more fun with fewer headaches. Dry Farm Wines only ships wines that meet very stringent criteria: practically sugar-free (less than 0.15g per glass), lower alcohol (less than 12.5%), additive-free (there are more than 70 FDA-approved wine-making additives), lower sulfites, organic, and produced by small family farms. All Dry Farm Wines are laboratory tested for purity standards by a certified, independent enologist, and all of their wines are also backed by a 100% Happiness Promise—they will either replace or refund any wine you do not love. Dry Farm Wines has a special offer just for “5-Bullet Friday” subscribers—an extra bottle in your first box for just one extra penny. Check out all the details at DryFarmWines.com/Tim.*

What I’m putting in my coffee and tea —
Laird Superfood. I love Laird Superfood products, especially their creamers, which turn any coffee or tea into a functional superfood latte in seconds. Laird Superfood creamers are incredibly rich and delicious, completely plant-based, and contain naturally occurring MCTs. These creamers are also shelf-stable, which means they last longer and travel better than your old creamer. They come in a range of amazing flavors, including original, unsweetened, turmeric, pumpkin spice, and cacao. I’m a junkie for turmeric and cacao. Right now and for a limited time, you can get 20% off of your order of $40 or more when you use code TIM20 at checkout. Laird products are real-food fuel and supplements with nothing artificial. Check out LairdSuperfood.com/Tim to see some of my favorite products and learn more. Some exclusions apply, and this offer cannot be combined with other offers.*

Tech gadget that I’m using daily —
Anker Nano II 65W (Amazon, official website). Tired of carrying around that gigantic brick of a MacBook charger? Check out the photos at either of the above links. This tiny replacement is incredible. Huge thanks to our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, Kevin Rose (@KevinRose)! Description: “Anker Nano II has the power you need to fast charge your phone, tablet, and USB-C notebook from a single, tiny charger. Charge a 2020 MacBook Air in less than 2 hours, a MacBook Pro 13ʺ at full speed, an iPhone 12 up to 3× faster than with an original 5W charger.…”

And, as always, please give me feedback on Twitter. Which bullet above is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Other suggestions? Please let me know. Just send a tweet to @tferriss and put #5BulletFriday at the end so I can find it.

Have a wonderful weekend, all.

Much love to you and yours,

Tim

P.S. If you’re looking for good causes to support this holiday season, I just used Endaoment (@endaomentdotorg) to set up my foundation to receive donations in cryptocurrency. Check out some of our projects here.

The post 10 Gifts to Make Your Holidays Extra Fun, Relaxing, and Delicious appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Note from the editor: The following is a guest post by Clive Thompson (@pomeranian99), a journalist who’s written about technology and science for two decades. Clive is a longtime contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired.

In his guest post, Clive outlines the most important lessons he learned teaching himself to code after interviewing 200+ programmers for his new book Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World.

Enter Clive…

So, you want to learn to code.

Join the club! We live in a time when, as the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen famously put it, “…software is eating the world.” So the people who know how to program are in a catalytic spot; they can make things happen. Maybe you’ve watched this from the sidelines and thought: Huh. Could I learn to do that? Perhaps you’re out of school; maybe you can’t afford either the money or the time to go back and do a four-year degree in computer science. You’ve seen a zillion of these online tutorials in coding. Could you just sort of, well, teach yourself?

The short answer is: Sure you can.

The longer answer is… the rest of this essay.

The reason why I think you can do it is that I’ve met tons of people who did. I’m a science journalist who spent three years interviewing about 200 programmers for my upcoming book Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World. The bulk of them had studied computer science, but a surprisingly significant minority were self-taught. They were artists or accountants or speechwriters or marketers or musicians or carpenters or stay-at-home parents or people from just about any walk of life, but they’d gotten interested in coding, buckled down, and learned.

They inspired me, frankly, to dive in and teach myself. I’d gone my whole adult career doing essentially no coding. As a teen, back in the ’80s (I’m old, people), I’d learned some BASIC on those computers you plugged into your TV. It was a blast—I made little (terrible) video games and insult generators and bits of computer music, but I didn’t get very far because my mother refused to let our family own a computer. (“He’ll just sit around playing games all day long,” she told my dad.) So I never studied coding and, instead, did degrees in English and political science. As an adult, I’d really only tinkered with a bit of HTML and some web pages. When I started thinking about learning to code a few years ago, I had a day job and couldn’t study full time.

So I decided to teach myself in my spare hours. I wasn’t looking to become a full-time coder, mind you. I had no visions of creating some app and scoring boatloads of VC money. I was just curious to find out: how learnable was this, as a skill? Could I do it well enough to make software that was, at a minimum, useful for me?

The answer was, on all fronts, yes.

I learned a ton, and now I very frequently write code to help me in my job as a journalist and book author. I’ve written little scripts and programs that make my work and personal life easier. I’ve also discovered I enjoy it—it can be an absolute blast, intellectually and creatively.

Along the way, I gathered some hopefully-useful lessons for you.  Some of them from my own experience and some from talking to experts—those who teach programming and some full-time coders who taught themselves.

So the advice I gleaned, in order, is:

#1) The online world is your friend. Start there.

It’s never been easier to get started learning to code because there are dozens of free-or-cheap courses online. If you’d tried to do this even a decade ago, the pickings were slim. Now, it’s a cornucopia. Within five minutes of reading my list, you could be starting an online course.

Me, I decided to learn some JavaScript, since it’s a language that powers the web. After reading reviews and canvassing some recommendations, I started with the JavaScript lessons at Codeacademy, which begin very much at zero, assuming a newbie knows essentially nothing about programming concepts. Each lesson gives you a bit-by-bit primer on some part of coding—like assigning data to variables and using if-then statements—then challenges you to do something simple with it. After a few weeks using it, I read some blog posts touting freeCodeCamp, a different site for newbies, which integrates JavaScript alongside learning HTML and CSS, the languages for making web pages. I bounced back between the two tutorials, finding that their different approaches to teaching the same thing helped to cement the basics in my mind.

I didn’t stick to one language, though. I’d also heard that Python was a good language for neophytes, easier to pick even than JavaScript; and it’s used a lot in data analysis, something I was intrigued by. This time, instead of doing an online tutorial only, though, I used a book—Zed Shaw’s Learn Python The Hard Way, which many coders highly praised online. Indeed, while doing these online courses, I also amassed a small collection of paper books, like Crash Course in Python, Automate the Boring Stuff With Python, and Eloquent JavaScript, all of which were really useful: They were fast to flip through and refresh a concept in my memory. There are a ton of resources online—the instant you forget how to reverse-sort a list in Python, you can Google it—but it turns out paper books are still very useful. A good book like Shaw’s has been organized specifically to structure info about a coding language so it makes sense.

A word of warning as you dive into online courses? Buyer beware: “Most of the stuff that says it’s ‘Great for a beginner’ is not,” as my friend Katrina Owen—a self-taught coder who works as an engineer for GitHub and founded Exercism, an open-source project that offers coding challenges to help sharpen your chops—says. She’s right. I’ve seen a ton of “tutorials” that are supposed to be for newbies but are written erratically. Half the time they’re great, patiently walking you through material, then half the time they assume you already know what an object or an IDE is. If you try these, you’ll wind up feeling frustrated and thinking that it’s your fault you don’t understand things, but it isn’t. So find recommendations: Read online reviews of a course, use my suggestions here, ask friends.

#2) Don’t stress over what language to pick.

Don’t get bogged down picking the “perfect” language to learn. Your goal in the early days is just to become familiar with the basic concepts of coding, which are similar across all languages.

“If you can learn one programming language, you can learn the other ones, and where you start doesn’t matter nearly as much as you might think,” as Quincy Larson, the founder of freeCodeCamp, told me. So pick one—the common ones for newbies are things like Python, JavaScript, Ruby, or, say, Microsoft’s C#—and dive in. You can switch around later or even, as I did, try a few and see which ones “take” better with your style of thinking. (Me, I prefer writing Python—it’s prettier, to my eyes—but JavaScript is more useful for building the web tools I use in my work, so I’ve stuck with both.) “Stop looking for the perfect coding course,” advises Madison Kanna, who taught herself programming at age 23. “Just pick a curriculum and stick with it.”

Actually, you may want to avoid Googling “What coding language should I learn?” because you’ll immediately find yourself deep in the sprawling flames wars that coders engage in over Which Language Sucks/Rocks. These arguments are a) frequently nuts and b) to the extent that they have any meaning, nothing you need to worry about right now.

Now, there’s one big exception to my rule here. If you’re learning to program specifically because you’re sick of your job and want to retrain for full-time coding work, as fast as possible? Then your choice of language does matter. You want to match it up to market needs—specifically, your local market, notes my friend Saron Yitbarek, a developer and the founder of CodeNewbie, a podcast about programmers. So research your local job scene: What types of entry-level coding jobs exist, and what languages and skills do they ask for? Then find tutorials and books that will lead to those skills. “Find the jobs that you want, and then reverse engineer your curriculum,” she tells me.“ Too many people go, ‘Oh, I heard about JavaScript. Now I’m going to learn JavaScript.’ And they realize there are no JavaScript positions anywhere where they live. Then they’re stuck in a community that really wants them to learn .NET,” a Microsoft framework, “and they didn’t take the time to learn .NET.”   

#3) Code every day.

This is a big one. You should try to do some coding every day—at least, say, a half hour.

Why? Because this is just like learning Spanish or French: Fluency comes from constant use. To code is to speak to a computer, so you should be speaking often. Newbies often try to do big, deep dives on the weekends, but that’s too infrequent. “Programming languages are still languages, so attempting to learn them only on weekends doesn’t train your ability to use them naturally. It requires daily practice and study,” as Zed Shaw told me. But you’re busy, so how are you going to find time to code every day? Well, Shaw argues, take the time you normally allocate for something fun—watching TV, going out with friends, video games, watching sports—and use it instead to code daily. “It’s better to do one hour a day then ten hours on Saturday,” argues Avi Flombaum, who runs the Flatiron School, one of the first coding bootcamps, and now a WeWork company.

They’re right—this was precisely my experience. When I was doing a bit of coding every day, I found I could much more quickly grasp key concepts. But if I stopped for a few days or, every so often, a few weeks, when a crush of work in my day-job and a load of personal-life responsibilities arrived, it was like wiping the slate clean. I’d come back to work on a coding project and I’d have forgotten a shocking amount of basic stuff.

Related to this advice, it’s worth noting that learning to code—to the point where you can build something useful for yourself or others—isn’t going to happen quickly. A while ago there was a vogue for books with titles like Learn Java in 10 Hours, which is frankly insane. It’s more like, “Learn to code in ten months,” (or, as the longtime Google programmer Peter Norvig once wrote, “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years”.) It was a few months before I was beginning to make little scripts and web tools that actually accomplished a useful task for myself.

And while getting a half-hour a day is useful, if you can do more, do more. Programming typically requires immersion: When you’re trying to understand a new concept, you’ll do a lot of staring at the screen, trying to grasp or visualize or apprehend the flow of logic or data through a snippet of code. Very often I’d find I would sit down to learn something in an evening, thinking I’d spent 30 minutes, then get stuck—and two hours would go by before I’d get unstuck. It isn’t always easy when you’ve got a busy life, but free up as much time as you can.

For sheer density of learning, one option to consider—if you have the money and time—is a bootcamp. These are crash courses, typically several months long, where you study programming all day (and often into the evening) in a formal schooling environment with instructors and classmates. (A good community college can offer similar courses.) Bootcamps aren’t cheap, averaging over $11,000 in tuition, though some defer tuition until you get your first coding job. Their great upside is that they give you a curriculum: “…it takes away ‘decision fatigue,’” notes Flatiron’s Flombaum. Teaching yourself to code on your own, requires endless decisions: Should I keep learning this language? Which JavaScript front-end framework should I try? “Whereas here you have someone making those decisions for you, so you can just focus on learning,” he notes.

The trick here is finding a good bootcamp. It’s an unregulated field, in which high-quality ones with solid track records of grads finding jobs exist cheek-by-jowl with dodgy, fly-by-night ones. In NYC where I live, some well-regarded ones are Flatiron (which also operates in eight other locations, including Houston, Washington and Atlanta), Grace Hopper (which also operates in Chicago), and General Assembly (which also operates in 19 other locations around the US, such as Austin, San Francisco and Boston). In San Francisco, it includes Hack Reactor and App Academy. It’s very much a city-by-city scene, though, so do your local research if you go this route; SwitchUp is a useful resource here.

#4) Automate your life.

When people think, “I’m going to learn to code,” they often assume it needs to end in making a product—some app like Facebook or Grubhub or Uber.

Sure, that could happen. But honestly, the more practical reason to learn to code is much simpler, more mundane, but much more personally powerful. You can very quickly learn to automate boring things in you life.

That’s because computers are amazing at doing dull, repetitive tasks. They’re also great at being precise. Since we humans are terrible at doing dull tasks and quite bad at being precise, this makes us a match made in heaven. So one enormous pleasure in learning to code is that you begin to see how you can automate many difficult, onerous tasks.

For example, when I’m reporting I often find a great speech on YouTube, and I want to copy and save the automatic transcription of it. The problem is, the transcriptions that YouTube generates are messy—every other line is a piece of timecode. So when I’d cut and paste them into a research file, the file would be long and hard to skim. I could go through and delete every other line, but yikes, what a hassle!

So instead, one evening I quickly wrote a dead-simple little web tool that lets me paste in a YouTube transcript, and, with a button-push, clean up the transcript, removing the timecode lines and rendering it into a single paragraph. It’s much easier to read that way.

I’ve written tons of other scripts to automate boring things. My youngest son once ran into a problem: He wanted to get his homework done quickly after getting home from school, and his teacher would post it to the school’s web site, but sometimes she’d delay. So he’d sit there, refreshing the page every so often, waiting for the homework to post. To automate that, I wrote a little web-scraper that would check the page every five minutes, and once it detected the homework was posted, it’d shoot a text message to me and my son—so he could now do whatever he wanted, knowing he’d get an automated alert. These days, I’m working on a little script that registers where I’ve parked the car on the streets of Brooklyn (where I live) and sends me an automated reminder when I need to move it before I get a ticket.

This is the secret value of coding, for me. I’m not going to quit my job to build a software company or get hired as a coder. But coding makes me more efficient, more empowered, at my job and in everyday life, often in weird and delightful ways. Odds are this will be true of you, too.

“Don’t learn to code, learn to automate,” writes the coder Erik Dietrich. This is bang on. Nearly every white-collar job on the planet involves tons of work that can be done more efficiently if you know a bit of coding. Maybe you can automate collecting info for reports; maybe you can automate dull, routine emails. (I’ve done that. Gmail makes it easy with built-in JavaScript.) Before Katrina Owen became a coder, she was working as a secretary in Paris and would build bits of software that automated parts of the office workflow: She made it so employees could upload their spreadsheets to a form, and it’d pick apart the spreadsheet and input the info into a database. It was insanely valuable—though, as she notes, “I had no idea what I was doing was coding.”

But it is. And, indeed, this sort of coding—tucked into the corner of your existing work—is insanely powerful. Rather than quit your job to become “a programmer,” learn some coding so you can become much more valuable at your existing career and maybe move up in pay. There are people who do that all the time, as Zach Sims, the founder of Codecademy, tells me.

“Coding,” he jokes, “is marketed poorly.”

#5) Prepare for constant, grinding frustration.

Coding is brutally, punishingly frustrating.

Why? Because the computer will do whatever you say—but only if you are perfectly, utterly precise in your instructions. One small mistake, one misplaced bracket, and odds are high the whole shebang stops working.

“Programming is a constant stream of failures thrown at you by a computer that does not care how you feel,” Shaw notes.

This is the fulcrum around which all coder experience, and all coder psychology, pivots. After interviewing scores of developers for Coders, I’ve come to an interesting conclusion: Being logical and systematic is not, at heart, what makes someone good at programming. Sure, you obviously need to be able to think logically, to break big tasks down into tiny steps. That’s a prerequisite. But if you asked me what’s the one psychological nuance that unifies all the coders I’ve interviewed?

They’re all able to handle total, crushing, incessant failure and roadblocks (at least, at the keyboard.) People think that programmers code all day long; you look at Hollywood movies, and the hackers’ fingers are flying, pouring out code onto the screen. Looks fun, right?

Nope. Most coding goes like this: You write a few lines of code, something intended to do something fairly simple, then you run a test on it, and… it doesn’t work. So you try to figure out what’s wrong, isolating sub-parts of the code and testing them, or Googling the error messages the computer spits up, in desperate hopes that someone else online has written about this particular problem. And quite often I’d discover, after long periods—minutes, certainly; often hours, sometimes days—that the problem was my own error, and an aggravatingly “how obvious” one: A tiny typo, a missing colon. Nothing has ever made me feel like an idiot so regularly, so routinely, than computer programming.

And this psychological storm doesn’t really let up, no matter how good you get or how long you code. I’ve spoken to top coders for places like Facebook or Google or Baidu, and they’ll tell you the same thing: They spend a lot of their time trying to figure out what’s wrong, why things aren’t working. They don’t make the stupid newbie mistakes I make, clearly, but since they now work on very complex systems, they run into very complex problems. Either way, they face grinding frustration, too.

Now, why would anyone endure such a grind? Because of the flip side. When you finally figure out the problem—when you fix the bug, and things start working—there’s a sudden, narcotic rush of pleasure that’s almost unlike anything you’ve ever experienced. It’s delightful, people. There are few things in life that give you that absolute sense of mastery and joy. My wife got used to hearing me give a sudden whoop when some busted piece of crappy code I’d been tinkering finally twitched its Frankensteinian eyes open and came to life.

It’s almost cheesy now to talk about the “growth mindset,” the idea that you should approach a new skill assuming it’s going to be hard, but it can be learned. But this is crucial with coding. The frustration will never let up; the better you get, the farther you’ll reach, and the more fiendish will become your bugs. But coding isn’t some mystical act. It’s just sheer persistence and work ethic. “It’s hard, but it’s not impossible,” as Owen says.

This is why, also, try not to get intimidated by other people’s code—or by programmers who breezily boast online, when you read a thread on Stack Overflow about how obvious some concept is. Ignore them. Everything in coding is hard the first time you do it. “Never compare yourself to others and don’t take online criticism personally,” says Lydia Hallie, a 21-year-old woman in Stockholm, who taught herself to code as a teenager. “The fact that you’re struggling when you’re teaching yourself how to code is completely normal and doesn’t say anything about how good of a programmer you’ll be later.”

#6) Build things. Build lots of things.

When you’re learning to code, you need to start trying to build things—real pieces of code you can use.

Certainly, the online tutorials and books are good for giving you the basics. But what really teaches you how code works is when you try to make a piece of software that does something. That’s when you finally grapple with what you do and don’t know. It’s the difference between learning French phrases from a book or in class, then going into a restaurant and ordering a meal.

Now, when I say “build things,” I don’t mean: Build the next Facebook or Snapchat—heh, no. It can be something tiny, something weird, something small—but it’s something you can use, or show to someone else. For example, early on while learning JavaScript and HTML, I started building little web apps that would do funny things like autogenerate surrealist Pokemon names (to amuse my kids); the night of the 2016 election, I was so stressed out I wrote a little script that just flashed a variety of zomg messages on the screen, so I could externalize my nervousness and have the computer freak out for me. These were all small and silly, but they had to at least function, and when you have to make something function, that’s when you learn.

One extreme example of this “build stuff” approach is Jen Dewalt. Back in 2013, she was a designer with a background in fine art but no real experience coding, when, at age 30, she decided to teach herself programming. To make it serious, she decided to make a website a day… for 180 days. At first they were incredibly simple pages, like a button you could click to change the background color. But within a few weeks, she’d learned enough to make little interactive games or a clock that displayed the time in words. And by the last few days, she was doing complex stuff, like a mood analyzer that would count how often hashtags like “#awkward” were being used on Twitter, in real time.

“I highly recommend starting with small, tangible projects,” she told me. If she wanted to make something, she’d use snippets of code she found at coder sites like Stack Overflow, not worrying if she didn’t understand them very well, so long as they worked. (Though she’d always type in the code, herself, to work it into her muscle memory. Zed Shaw suggests this, too. Don’t cut-and-paste code if you’re borrowing it from someone else. Type it in yourself; it forces you to ponder it a bit more deeply.)

Dewalt’s main advice? “Just Fucking Do It (#JFDI)!” The sooner you start trying to make things, the quicker you learn. You certainly may not have the ability to do what Dewalt did; she saved enough to not work for months, so she could learn coding all day long. (Not an option for me.) But the general idea—do little, tangible things—is key.

#7) “View Source”: Take other people’s code, pick it apart, and reuse it.

If you wanted to learn how a clock works, you’d disassemble it and try to reassemble it, right? That’s how the pioneering programmer Grace Hopper’s mind worked. As a curious kid, she took apart so many clocks, her parents bought her one just to disassemble and reassemble.

So it is with code. When you’re building stuff, you don’t need to start from scratch. You can grab things that already exist, rip them apart, and see how they work. It’s a superb way to learn. For example, very early on in my coding tutorials, I wanted to make a little web page to decode and encode secret messages for my kids, but I honestly hadn’t yet done enough HTML or JavaScript to figure this out. So I went to Codepen.io—a site where people post little web doodads and where you can inspect and reuse any of their code. I found a couple of text boxes that worked more or less the way I wanted and added in some secret-code decryption scripts. Presto: I had my project done. And by poking around in someone else’s project, I learned a bunch of useful new things about using JavaScript and HTML.

Later on, when I was looking to learn how to set up Node, a type of JavaScript used to run web servers, I started using Glitch. It’s like a server version of Codepen: There are tons of projects you can grab, remix and tinker with. I wanted to make a Twitterbot that auto-generates haikus, so I grabbed an existing Twitterbot on Glitch and started poking around in the code. By now, I understood enough JavaScript to be able to figure out what part of the Twitterbot I needed to rewrite, injecting my own function that takes 1,000 lines of haiku, randomly picks three, and squirts that out to Twitter as an insta-poem. It was a terrific way to get started. If I’d had to start from scratch, I’d never have done it.

“That’s how open source works,” as Chris Coyier, Codepen’s founder, tells me. You see something great, and you reuse it. “You’re in the clear, not just legally but morally.” Indeed, the vast majority of software you use all day long relies heavily on reused, open-source code—something someone grabbed and modified for their own purposes.

Also, starting with an existing app and making it do something new, something you uniquely want, can help prime your pump and make it less intimidating to begin a piece of code that stretches your boundaries. “It’s good when you’re not starting from a blank page because whenever I’m getting into learning a new language or a design pattern, when I started from a blank page I was overwhelmed and paralyzed,” as Jenn Schiffer, the director of community engineering for Glitch, tells me.

#8) Build things for you—code you need and want.

As I learned more coding, I realized I could make a lot of little pieces of software that were useful for me.

Here’s a funny one: I made my own Pomodoro timer. You may have heard of the “Pomodoro” technique, where you set a timer for 25 or 15 minutes and work in a focused way—not checking email or distracting yourself—until the dinger goes off, at which point you take a short break. It’s a great concept, and I used to use various Pomodoro timers online. But they all had one problem: They generally forced me to pick a quantum of time that was 15 or 25 minutes.

And, well, my procrastination problems were worse than that. I wanted a Pomodoro timer that would let me work for… five minutes. Or three. Or one minute. When I was truly avoiding work, hell, working for one damn minute would be a victory, people! But none of the Pomodoro software was designed for someone as horrifically work-avoidant as me.

So I thought, to hell with it, I’ll code my own. I used Python to make a simple “command line” timer that lets me pick precisely how many minutes I could work. (I can even pick increments: 10% of a minute! Six seconds!) And to make it funny and witty to use, I wrote a ton of cheery, you-go messages for when I finish each work session and coded it so the robotic voice of my computer speaks it aloud. (“Rock and roll,” the computer intones. “Boo ya.”) It is a weird, crazy piece of software, utterly specific to my needs. That’s precisely why no one else on the planet was going to make something like this! And why I made it for myself. It’s a customized app for an audience of one: Me. And wow, was it useful! I started using it on a daily basis; I still use it a few times a week, when I feel myself starting to slack off.

The more I coded, the more I found things I could build to make my work easier. I made web scrapers that would auto-grab material I needed off websites for journalistic research. I made Twitter scripts that would archive any links I posted to Twitter every day and email me a summary. When I got worried that I was too frequently using italics while writing my book (it is a bad habit, stylistically) I wrote a Python script to analyze the text, pull out every italicized word, and deliver me a long and humiliating list.

The point is, one of the best ways to motivate yourself to learn coding is to build little apps that actually do something you need done. It’s deeply motivating. If you’re coding in an abstract way, doing tutorials, it’s easy—when you get stuck—to think, ah, screw it, and stop. But if you’re actually building a tool you’re going to use? It pushes you to go further, to work past the frustration and the blockages.

By the way, this isn’t just about utilitarian tools. I also discovered I loved using P5.js (a “library” of JavaScript) to make little bits of interactive art, merely for the pleasure of making something pretty or playful. This is as good a motivation as any for learning to code, says Daniel Shiffman, a professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, who makes fantastic learn-to-code videos (including some for P5.js that I learned from). Shiffman tells me that one great way in to coding is to take something artistic you like—music, drawing, games, wordplay and text—and learn programming that works within your field.

“It’s useful to learn programming in the context of applying it to something that you’re already passionate about,” he says. If you make music, try learning Sonic Pi, which lets you program tunes. If you dig art, learn P5.js or Processing. If you like games, make one with Phaser, also based on JavaScript. Approaching coding as a fun, creative hobby demystifies it. “It’s like the way you take up knitting or join a band. You find your local community of people who are hanging out in a coffee shop learning to code, just to have fun, and an experience where you don’t know where it’s leading—as opposed to, hey, I need to memorize the top five sorting algorithms so I can pass my Google interview.”

#9) Learn how to learn.

While researching my book, I visited with the programmer who’d created a Y Combinator company that had just landed its first series of funding. “What’s the secret to being a good coder,” I asked him? He laughed.

“It’s having good Google-fu,” he said. Sure, he’s a programmer, so he writes code. But what many programmers do much of the day is sit around Googling things, reading up, trying to figure out how to do something—how to solve a problem, how to kill a bug that has stopped them in their tracks.

And frankly, given how much there is to know, a lot of programmers tell me they’re constantly Googling even pretty basic stuff—like different ways to sort or chunk a list. They might have done it hundreds of times before, but there are so many little fiddly aspects of the languages they use that it feels weirdly inefficient to use their brains for rote memorization because they can just Google whatever rote knowledge they need to quickly recall. “I’d call myself a JavaScript expert,” as Glitch’s Schiffer tells me, “and I would say I can’t remember any string-manipulation function because I can just look it up.”

(I was so deeply relieved when she said that! Me, when I’m writing JavaScript and need to find the length of a string—i.e., how many characters in “Clive Thompson”?—I look it up. Every. Single. Time.)

So when you learn to code, your core skill is going to be constantly learning and constantly relearning. That’s true in the short term and the long term. Over the years, new languages and frameworks always emerge, and old ones evolve. “Being a programmer basically means you’ll be an eternal student,” as Lydia Hallie told me.

#10) Reach out to other coders.

Learning to code can be pretty isolating—it’s hours of just wrestling with the computer. And while it’s good to try to figure things out, yourself, sometimes the fastest way to get unstuck is to ask someone else, How the heck does this work?

So nearly everyone I know who taught themselves to code built some sort of social network around coding. freeCodeCamp’s Larson urges it: “Hang out with other developers. Go to tech talks and hackathons, and hang out at startups and hackerspaces. This will help you make valuable connections and stay motivated during the long process of learning to code,” he told me. If you live in a really remote region or don’t have the mobility to find people face-to-face, try them online; freeCodeCamp and Glitch both have active forums, and sites like CodeNewbie have everything from a Slack forum to regular Twitter chats, where neophytes talk and connect.

Frankly, I wish I’d done more of this socializing. I too often spent time grinding away at a problem, myself, instead of asking for help. When I did talk to other coders about problems I was having, inevitably they’d suggest an approach that helped.

###

Clive’s new book Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World will be available on March 26th. 

The post Ten Lessons I Learned While Teaching Myself to Code appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

What do roughly 1.5 million subscribers to my newsletter care about most? Or put another way, if they voted with clicks, what most caught their attention in 2018?

The 25 items below are good candidates.

They are the most-clicked links from my weekly “5-Bullet Friday” newsletter from January to December 2018. The most popular item received 75,000+ clicks and the 25th most popular still had more than 42,000 clicks.

5-Bullet Friday is a short email of five bullet points, sent out each Friday, and it has become somewhat famous for crashing websites (AKA “the hug of death,” as one reader put it). Each newsletter describes the five coolest things I’ve found or explored that week, often including books, gadgets, experimental supplements, tricks from experts, and weird stuff from all over the world.  

Enjoy!

[And if the spirit moves you, you can subscribe to 5-Bullet Friday here to see why it has one of the highest open rates in the newsletter world.]

Here is the top-25 list, from most to least clicked:

#1:

Most popular post on Instagram —

“I just bought a 40×30 print of this…”

[75,637 clicks, published in January 26, 2018 newsletter]

#2:

What I’m reading —

“On Needing to Find Something to Worry About.” I expected a fluff piece based on the headline. Instead, I got an incredible (and incredibly short) essay that I saved to Evernote and now read several times per month. It won’t apply to everyone, but for some of you, like me, it will have a pronounced “Oh… fuck” realization that could change things. Once you read it, I bet you’ll be able to guess which specific line carried the most weight for me.

[67,704 clicks, published in November 23, 2018 newsletter]

#3:

Article I’m rereading —

Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think. This remains one of the most empowering articles I’ve read in recent years. It’s hilarious and amazing. For double trouble, pair it with my interview with the author, Tim Urban.

[62,618 clicks, published in September 28, 2018 newsletter]

#4:

Tote bag I decided to purchase, and I never buy tote bags —

School of Life bag, which reads “No one…” 

[61,941 clicks, published in October 26, 2018 newsletter]

#5:

Resource I’m excited to explore —

How to Configure Your iPhone to Work for You, Not Against You by Tony Stubblebine (@tonystubblebine). My team has already found this article extremely helpful.

[59,474 clicks, published in December 7, 2018 newsletter]

#6:

Device that’s saving my back and neck —

The Body Back Buddy, recommended by Dustin Moskovitz (@moskov), co-founder of Facebook, in Tribe of Mentors. I woke up one day this week barely able to turn my head to the right, causes unknown. 10 minutes with this gadget did the trick and released everything. Here’s what Dustin had to say in the book, in response to the “best purchase for <$100?” question: “The Back Buddy by the Body Back Company is my favorite purchase from the past five years, bar none. Most basically, it allows you to administer self-massage anywhere on your back with the full leverage of two hands, but I’ve also really gotten to know and appreciate all the little knobs and other features over the years. I’ve even learned how to manipulate parts of my skeletal structure (i.e., self-chiropracty) and incorporate it into my yoga practice.”

[57,125 clicks, published in June 29, 2018 newsletter]

#7:

Backpack I’m loving —

Peak Design Everyday Backpack 20L. This was given to me as a gift, and, truth be told, I let it sit for months. This is because I stupidly tossed the literature aside and tried to use it like a normal backpack, which it isn’t. One day, when I sat down and actually read the instructions (yes, read them), I was blown away and embarrassed that I’d waited so long. Most of the features are non-obvious and incredibly helpful. Note: I load everything from the sides and only use the top latch (as cool as it may be) for stuffing in a sweatshirt or workout clothing. This was the key decision after reading everything.

[56,971 clicks, published in November 23, 2018 newsletter]

#8:

Most popular post on Instagram —

My standard low-on-time breakfast for early morning flights. Don’t let travel be an excuse to eat garbage…

[56,765 clicks, published in March 30, 2018 newsletter]

#9:

Purchase I’m enjoying —

Sundale indoor/outdoor floor chair. I use this for morning meditation, and its ultra-lightweight design makes it a breeze to move and store. I face it out a bay window towards grass and trees, as I’ve started meditating with open eyes occasionally per instructions from Sam Harris.

[56,229 clicks, published in August 17, 2018 newsletter]

#10:

Sleep aid that I’m greatly enjoying —

Gunnar Optiks VER-06701 Vertex Computer glasses, smoke/amber. These glasses were recommended to me by one of my favorite doctors and thinkers, Peter Attia, MD, after I noticed him wearing them at a group dinner. Among other things, these glasses block blue light from screens and elsewhere, and I (like Peter) have found them to substantially speed up falling asleep and reduce tossing and turning. What makes this new? Unlike most options, these glasses don’t make you look like a complete idiot, and you’re more likely to get compliments instead of laughs.

[56,211 clicks, published in February 9, 2018 newsletter]

#11:

Most popular post on Instagram in the last few weeks, which I also use as a reminder for myself —

“My favorite coffee mug I’ve found in a while. Also my first non-beverage purchase from Starbucks.” [54,513 clicks, published in February 9, 2018 newsletter]

#12:

What I’m watching —

Dealt documentary (Amazon, other options) directed by Luke Korem. This absolutely blew my mind, and I don’t want to spoil it with description. Trust me and watch the short trailer here. Truly amazing. I can’t remember the last time I finished a documentary, only to want to immediately watch it again. I also can’t remember a doc that made me as emotional as this did, pushing me from laughter to tears. It’s a masterful visual biography.

[53,993 clicks, published in April 20, 2018 newsletter]

#13:

What I’m reading (and going to listen to) —

The 50 Best Podcast Episodes of 2018. This is a spectacular list of great podcast episodes. The topics are varied, often unexpected, and hit the nail on the head for me in a bunch of cases. I’ll be listening to many podcasts I never would have found on my own.

[52,553 clicks, published in December 28, 2018 newsletter]

#14:

Most popular on social this week —

“I’ve been telling my mom to spend more time barefoot on the grass… so she got me these.”

[51,079 clicks, published in August 3, 2018 newsletter]

#15:

Most popular post on Instagram —

25 Principles of Adult Behavior.

[47,627 clicks, published in February 16, 2018 newsletter]

#16:

The coolest upside-down truth I’ve found, which I’m putting here to revisit often —

Here it is…

[46,842 clicks, published in February 2, 2018 newsletter]

#17:

Most popular post on Instagram —

Sometimes the graffiti says it all…

[45,964 clicks, published in March 23, 2018 newsletter]

#18:

New person I’m following on social —

National Geographic photographer Frans Lanting on Instagram. Here is the pic and description that caught my attention.

[45,646 clicks, published in March 23, 2018 newsletter]

#19:

Most popular post on Instagram —

This is me for most of this week…

[45,349 clicks, published in March 2, 2018 newsletter]

#20:

App I’m using daily —

The new Sam Harris Waking Up meditation app. I absolutely love this app and have recommended it to nearly all of my closest friends. I was a beta tester for months and provided feedback, but I have no stake in it whatsoever. What makes it different? This app offers a guided meditation progression that builds multiple skills as you move from one class to the next. It’s a logical sequence, instead of a collection of ad-hoc readings. Sam has succeeded at producing a world-class program for mind training, IMHO.

[43,592 clicks, published in October 5, 2018 newsletter]

#21:

Genius video I’m once again sending to friends (I never get tired of this one) —

Apple Engineer Talks About New Macbook Pro.

[43,578 clicks, published in September 7, 2018 newsletter]

#22:

Gadget I’m experimenting with —

DCT ProFlex for strengthening, prehabbing, and rehabbing my lower legs and ankles, especially the right ankle, in which I recently tore two ligaments (disgusting pics here). I learned about this device from the amazing Ryan Flaherty, nicknamed the “savant of speed.”

[42,534 clicks, published in March 23, 2018 newsletter]

#23:

P.S. — If you’re looking for an OUTSTANDING book to read, here is one to order. I got an advanced copy, and my quote on Twitter says it all: “Not to sound like a mullet-wearing Long Island boy (which I’ve been), but Michael Pollan’s new book is going to make a HUGE fucking impact. Mark my words: tide shift.”

[42,506 clicks, published in February 23, 2018 newsletter]

#24:

Article I’m reading —

“How to win the Tour de France, in one image” (Fast Company). I was led to this piece by Dr. Peter Attia (@PeterAttiaMD), and here’s a short preview: “Practically speaking, the energy savings is the equivalent of pedaling 9.3 miles per hour while actually flying down the road at 33.5 miles per hour.”

[42,431 clicks, published in July 27, 2018 newsletter]

#25:

What I’m reading —

“The Risk of Discovery” essay by Paul Graham (@paulg), which is only a few paragraphs long. It’s worth rereading a few times.

[42,068 clicks, published in June 1, 2018 newsletter]

###

Want to see more? Take 10 seconds and sign up for 5-Bullet Friday here. Each Friday, you’ll get a short email of five bullets, sending you off to your weekend with fun and useful things to ponder and try. If you dislike it, it’s easy to unsub. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

The post The 25 Most-Clicked Links from My Newsletter in 2018 appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Note from the editor: The following is a guest post by Steven Pressfield (@spressfield), the best-selling author of The Legend of Bagger Vance, Gates of Fire, The Afghan Campaign, and The Lion’s Gate, as well as the cult classics on creativity, The War of Art, Turning Pro, and Do the Work. His Wednesday column on stevenpressfield.com is one of the most popular series about writing on the web. You can also read his profile from Tribe of Mentors by clicking here.

The following is a sampler of chapters from Steve’s new book, The Artist’s Journey (coming out July 11th), and they comprise a mini-version of the full book.

Enjoy!

Enter Steven…

We are all artists—whether we realize it or not, whether we like it or not—and we are all on an “artist’s journey.”

What is the meaning of your life? You can assess it the same way you’d evaluate a writer’s life, or a musician’s or a filmmaker’s—by considering your “body of work.” What “material” have you generated in the past? And, more importantly, what will you bring forth in the future?

The artist’s life is defined by the works he or she produces. The artist has no choice in this. A calling from birth impels him. You have that same calling. Your life is unfolding according to the template of a “hero’s journey” that is unique to you. You can’t escape it. You can’t run away from it.

Whether you’re toiling in a cubicle or wheeling and dealing in high finance, you have an artist’s journey just like the filmmaker or the dancer or the novelist. Will you embrace this adventure consciously and morally, or will you deny it and reject it? Either way, that journey remains alive inside you. It will not sleep and it will not go away. It insists on being lived out.

THE ORDINARY WORLD AND THE EXTRAORDINARY WORLD

The artist has a subject, a voice, a point of view, a medium of expression, and a style.

But where do these come from?

How do we find our own?

In my experience the process is neither rational nor logical. It can’t be commanded. It can’t be rushed. It is not subject to the will or the ego.

We are born, I believe, with everything we are seeking—a subject, a voice, a point of view, a medium of expression, and a style.

But these reside in an area of the psyche outside the range of conventional consciousness.

The artist’s journey is like the hero’s journey in that you and I, the artist-in-embryo, must leave our zone of comfort (the conscious mind) and cross to alien shores (the unconscious) to find and acquire our golden fleece (the knowledge of, and access to, our gift.)

The process, like the hero’s journey, involves time.

It involves suffering.

It involves folly.

Its crisis takes the form of an All Is Lost moment.

Once you have given up the ghost [wrote Henry Miller], everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos.

The ghost that we give up is the ego. The illusion of control.

The “everything” that follows is our artist’s power—our subject, our voice, our point of view, our medium of expression, and our style.

THE SHAPE OF THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY

Consider the course and contour of this artist’s journey:

Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.

The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle

Born to Run

Darkness on the Edge of Town

The River

Nebraska

Born in the U.S.A.

Tunnel of Love

Human Touch

Lucky Town

The Ghost of Tom Joad

Working on a Dream

Wrecking Ball

High Hopes

Or this artist’s:

Goodbye, Columbus

Portnoy’s Complaint

The Great American Novel

My Life as a Man

The Professor of Desire

Zuckerman Unbound

The Anatomy Lesson

The Counterlife

Sabbath’s Theater

American Pastoral

The Human Stain

The Plot Against America

Indignation

Nemesis

Clearly there is a unity (of theme, of voice, of intention) to each of these writers’ bodies of work.

There’s a progression too, isn’t there? The works, considered in sequence, feel like a journey that is moving in a specific direction.

Bob Dylan

The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

The Times They Are a-Changin’

Highway 61 Revisited

Blonde on Blonde

Bringing It All Back Home

Blood on the Tracks

Desire

John Wesley Harding

Street-legal

Nashville Skyline

Slow Train Coming

Hard Rain

Time Out of Mind

Tempest

Shadows in the Night 

You too possess an artist’s journey.

Even if you have never yet written a song or completed a short story, that body of work lies dormant inside you.

It is percolating. It is exerting pressure—whether you feel it or not, whether you believe it or not.

Like the hero’s journey, the artist’s journey demands to be lived out. It demands to be expressed.

WHAT IS THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY?

The thesis of this book is that the artist’s journey, which follows the hero’s journey chronologically, comprises the true work, the actual production, of the artist’s life.

From that moment, the hero is no longer a free-range individual.

She has become an artist.

As Rosanne Cash declared in her memoir, Composed:

I had awakened from the morphine sleep of success into the life of an artist.

Everything in her life that is not-artist now falls away.

On the surface her new life may look ordinary, even boring. No more catastrophic romances. No more self-destructive binges. No more squandering or disrespecting her gift, her voice, her talent.

She is on a mission now.

Her life has acquired a purpose.

What is the artist’s life about now?

It’s about following the Muse.

It’s about finding her true voice.

It’s about becoming who she really is.

On her artist’s journey, she will produce the works she was born to bring into being.

She will be on that journey for the rest of her life.

What, then, are the characteristics of the Artist’s Journey?

THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY IS INTERNAL

I used to write at a desk that faced a wall. My friends would ask, “Why don’t you turn the desk around so you have a view outside?”

I don’t care about the view outside.

My focus is interior.

The book or movie I’m writing is playing inside my head.

Dalton Trumbo wrote in the bathtub.

Marcel Proust never got out of bed.

Why should they?

The journey they were on was inside themselves.

THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY IS PERSONAL

The novels of Philip Roth are completely different from those of Jonathan Franzen.

Neither author, gifted as he may be, can do what the other does.

In fact, neither can write anything except what his own gift authorizes, that which is unique to him alone.

THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY IS UNIVERSAL

And yet millions of people can read Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen and be touched and moved and illuminated.

What is personal to the artist is universal to the rest of us.

THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY IS SOLITARY

Yes, artists collaborate. And yeah, there is such a thing as “the writers’ room.”

But the work of the artist takes place not on the page or in conversation or debate, but inside her head.

You, the artist, are alone in that space.

There is no one in there but you.

THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY IS ABOUT SELF-DISCOVERY

I’ve read many times that art is self-expression. I don’t believe it.

I don’t believe the artist knows what he or she wishes to express.

The artist is being driven from a far deeper and more primal source than the conscious intellect. It is not an overstatement, in my view, to declare that the artist has no idea what he’s doing.

As Socrates famously declared in Plato’s Phaedrus:

… if a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.

The artist is not expressing himself, he is discovering himself.

THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY IS DANGEROUS

The artist, like the mystic and the renunciant, does her work within an altered sphere of consciousness.

Seeking herself, her voice, her source, she enters the dark forest. She is alone. No friend or lover knows where her path has taken her.

Rules are different within this wilderness. Hatters are mad and principles inverted.

The artist has entered this sphere of her own free will. She has deliberately unmoored herself from conventional consciousness. This is her calling. This is what she was born to do.

Will she come out safely? 

A BODY OF WORK 

This is my nineteenth book.

Looking back, here’s the Big Takeaway:

I never had any idea, before I wrote a book, that I was going to write it. Or, perhaps more accurately, that I was going to write that specific book. The book always came out of nowhere and always took me by surprise.

Let me express this a different way.

No matter what a writer or artist may tell you, they have no clue what they’re doing before they do it—and, for the most part, while they’re doing it.

Or another way:

Everything we produce as artists comes from a source beyond our conscious awareness.

Jackson Browne once said that he writes to find out what he thinks. (Wait, it was Joan Didion who said that … no, Stephen King said it too.)

I do the same, and you do too, whether you realize it or not.

The key pronoun here is you.

Who is this “you?”

The second and third theses of this book are:

“You,” meaning the writer of your books, is not you. Not the “you” you think of as yourself.

This “second you” is smarter than you are. A lot smarter. This second “you” is the real you.

WHERE DO BOOKS/SONGS/MOVIES COME FROM?

My long-held belief is that an artist’s identity is revealed by the work she or he produces.

Writers write to discover themselves. (Again, whether they realize it or not.)

But who is this self they seek to discover?

It is none other than that “second you”—that wiser “you,” that true, pure, waterproof, self-propelled, self-contained “you.”

Every work we produce as artists comes from this second “you.”

This “you” is the real you.

THE WORLD THE ARTIST LIVES IN

Here’s my model of the universe in a nutshell:

The universe exists on at least two levels. (It may exist on an infinite number, but certainly it manifests itself on two.)

The first is the material world, the visible physical sphere in which you and I dwell.

Then there’s the second level. The higher level.

The second level exists “above” the first but permeates the first at all times and in all instances. This second level is the invisible world, the plane of the as-yet-unmanifested, the sphere of pure potentiality.

Upon this level dwells that which will be, but is not yet.

Call this level the Unconscious, the Soul, the Self, the Superconscious.

THE ARTIST’S SKILL

What exactly does an artist do?

The writer, the dancer, the filmmaker … what, precisely, does their work consist of?

They shuttle from Level #1 to Level #2 and back again.

That’s it.

That’s their skill.

Twyla Tharp in her dance studio, Quentin Tarantino at his keyboard, Bob Dylan when he picks up a guitar or sits down at a piano. They perform this simple but miraculous act a thousand, ten thousand times a day.

They enter the Second World and come back to the First with something that had never existed in the First World before.

A machine can’t do that. A supercomputer packed with the most powerful A.I. system can’t do that. A dolphin or a whale, even an elephant or a great ape, no matter how advanced their cerebral capacities may be, can’t do that.

In all of Creation, only two creatures can do that.

Gods.

And you and I.

THE MATTER OF FACT PLANE OF THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY

In the sphere we call the artist’s journey, we “get down to business.” Crazy-time is over. We have wasted enough years avoiding our calling.

Our aim now is to discover our gift, our voice, our subject. We know now that we have one—and we are driven passionately to identify it and to bring it forth in the real world with optimum wallop.

THE BLANK PAGE

We hear (and we know, ourselves) of the terror that writers experience when confronting the blank page.

Rather than face this, they will delay, dilate, demur, procrastinate, rationalize, cop out, self-justify, self-exonerate, not to mention become drunks and drug addicts, cheat on their spouses, lose themselves on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and in general destroy not only their bodies and minds but their souls as well.

Why?

What’s so scary about an 8 1/2 X 11 sheet of uncoated bond?

ENCOUNTER WITH THE UNCONSCIOUS

What’s scary is that, in order to write (or paint or compose or shoot film), we have two choices:

1. We can work from our ego-minds, in which case we will burst blood vessels and suffer cerebral hernias, straining only to produce tedious, mediocre, derivative crap.
2. We can shift our platform of effort from our conscious mind to our unconscious.

Can you guess which one we’re most terrified of?

THE MISNOMER OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

The Unconscious (to use the term as Freud originally defined it) is unconscious only to us.

We are unconscious of its contents.

But the Unconscious mind is not unconscious to itself or of itself.

The Unconscious is wide awake.

It knows exactly what it’s doing.

(And it’s pretty pissed off at being called “the Unconscious.”

THE AMAZON MIND

In Last of the Amazons, I tried to imagine on the page the ancient race of female warriors.

Here’s a description of the Amazon mode of thinking, offered by one of the characters in the book, a young Athenian who has traveled to the Amazon homeland near the Black Sea and lived for a time among this legendary all-female culture.

The Amazons have no word for “I.” The notion of the autonomous individual has no place in their conception of the universe. Their thinking, if one could call it that, is entirely instinctual and collective. They think like a herd of horses or a flock of swallows, which seem to apprehend and respond with one mind, acting intuitively and instantaneously in the moment.

When an Amazon speaks, she will pause frequently, often for long moments. She is seeking the right word. But she does not consciously search for this, as you or I might, rummaging within the catalog of our mind. Rather she is waiting, as a hunter might at the burrow of her quarry, until the correct word arises of itself as from some primal spring of consciousness. The process, it seems, is more akin to dreaming than to waking awareness.

To our Greek eyes, this habit of pausing and waiting makes the speaker appear dull-witted, even dense, and many among our compatriots have lost patience in the event or, concluding that these horsewomen of the plains are a race of savages, have given up entirely on attempting to communicate with them.

To the Amazons, of course, it is we Hellenes who are the witless ones, whose “civilized” consciousness has lost access to the well of wisdom and sense upon which the plainswoman readily draws, and who as a result are cut off from the immediate apprehension of the moment, immured within our own narrow, fearful, greedy, self-infatuated minds.

The Amazon mind as imagined in this passage is not far off from the artist’s mind when she is at work.

THE ARTIST BELIEVES IN A DIFFERENT REALITY

Did you ever see the Meg Ryan-Nicholas Cage movie, City of Angels?

In City of Angels (screenplay by Dana Stevens), human characters go about their lives, oblivious of the cohort of angels—all handsome, male and female, dressed in stylish, duster-length coats—who attend upon them and are present about them at all times, often standing invisibly directly at their shoulders.

That’s my world.

That’s what I see.

Everything I do is based upon that reality.

THE SURPRISE OF FINDING OUR VOICE

I have a recurring dream.

A good dream.

In the dream I’m in my house (or some place that I recognize as my house even though technically it doesn’t look exactly like my actual house) when I realize that I’m occupying a room that I had never realized was part of the edifice. An additional room. An expanded room.

Sometimes it’s an entire floor. I’ll be standing there, looking at crystal chandeliers and rows of pool tables extending for half a block, with music playing and people partying, and I’ll think to myself, “Wow, I had no idea this part of the house even existed. How could I have missed it all this time?”

That house is my psyche. The new rooms are parts of me I have never, till I dreamt them, been aware of.

We find our voice that same way. Project by project. Subject by subject. Observing in happy amazement as a new “us” pops out each time.

THE HERO’S JOURNEY OF THE HUMAN RACE

If the individual has a hero’s journey, does the race collectively possess one as well?

If it does, what is our “call?”

What “threshold” do we seek to cross?

What “home” will we return to?

What “gift” shall we bring?

Here’s what I think:

I think the race’s journey began in the Garden of Eden (which is of course a myth, but a myth common in one form or another to all humanity.)

Our inciting incident was a crime, the eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

Act One ended with the Almighty casting us out of the garden.

We entered the Inverted World then, humankind’s collective Act Two, and we’ve been there ever since, suffering trials, undergoing initiations, encountering creatures of wonder, while our hearts, as Homer wrote of Odysseus through all the seafaring, ached with an agony to redeem [ourselves] and bring [our] company safe home.

Safe home to the Garden, that’s the return we seek. That alone will complete the circle and make mankind whole.

The artist is the herald and the medium of this passage.

THE SOUL’S CODE

Have you read The Soul’s Code by James Hillman? I highly recom­mend it.

In The Soul’s Code, Mr. Hillman introduces the concept of the daimon. Daimon is a Greek word. The equivalent term in Latin is genius.

Both words refer to an inhering spirit. We are born, each of us, (says James Hillman) with our own individual daimon. The daimon is our guardian. It knows our destiny. It kens our calling.

James Hillman makes an analogy to an acorn. The totality of the full-grown oak is contained—every leaf and every branch—already within the acorn.

THE DAIMON IN ACTION

My friend Hermes Melissanidis won the gold medal at the ‘96 Atlanta Olympics in the floor exercise of men’s gymnastics. Here’s a story of his daimon.

When Hermes was eight, he saw gymnastics for the first time on TV. He knew instantly that this was what he wanted to do. He went to his parents and asked them to arrange for a trainer so he could study gymnastics and compete for Greece on the Olympic team.

Hermes’ family is a family of doctors. His mom is a doctor. His dad is a doctor. They’re all doctors in Hermes’ family. They were horrified when they heard their son’s passionate conviction that he wanted to be a gymnast. “Absolutely not!” The family would never condone Hermes wasting his youth on this prepos­terous endeavor.

Hermes went on a hunger strike.

For four days he ate nothing.

Finally his distraught parents agreed to discuss the issue. The family and eight-year-old Hermes came to a compromise. Hermes would be allowed to study gymnastics full time. His parents would arrange it and pay for it. But Hermes must promise that he would also become a doctor. He agreed. And in fact he did graduate from medi­cal school along with becoming an Olympic gold medalist. Today he’s an actor, by the way.

Do you see Hermes’ daimon in this story? The daimon knew Hermes’ gymnastic destiny. It seized him. It compelled him to act. Why else would an eight-year-old boy go on a hunger strike? The daimon knew.

We could easily cite a thousand other such stories—Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackson Pollock, Colette, Hemingway, on and on—of in­dividuals whose sense of their own destiny was so strong in them that nothing including their own fear and self-doubt and even their com­mon sense could stop them from living it out.

DO YOU HAVE A DAIMON?

It took me nineteen years to earn my first dollar as a pure creative writer and twenty-eight years to get my first novel published.

I had jobs in advertising. I had work in other fields. I always quit to write. Bosses, with the best of intentions, would call me into their offices and urge me to listen to reason: stay here, you’ve got a future with us, don’t throw your life away on a dream that’s never going to come true.

Every time I would agonize. Am I crazy? How can I go off again to write another novel that nobody will want to read and that no pub­lishing house will want to publish?

But I always left the job. I always went off to write.

That’s the daimon.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE DAIMON

What follows is founded upon no science. I can cite no studies; I have no evidence. These suppositions are purely idiosyncratic, based only on my own experience:

1. The daimon is immortal.

I can’t prove it. I just feel it. When you and I shuffle off this mor­tal coil, our daimons will step down to the shoulder of the highway as lightly as a hitchhiker being left off at the end of a ride. Our daimon will trot off into the underbrush, like the Bengal tiger in Life of Pi, without a backward glance. It will pick up the next iteration of “you” and “me” and move on.

2. The daimon is divine.

The daimon arises from and dwells upon a level beyond the ma­terial. It is governed not by the laws of the physical plane, but by the precepts of heaven.

3. The daimon is inhuman.

Mother Teresa had a daimon. Martin Luther King had one. But so did Hitler. So did Stalin. And so do you.

There’s a reason why daimon looks a lot like demon. The con­cepts of right and wrong are foreign to the daimon. The daimon op­erates by higher laws. The daimon is nature. An oak will grow through solid concrete. A butterfly will cross hundreds of miles of open ocean.

4. The daimon is monstrous.

The human race lost something, I believe, when it passed from the ancient world to the modern. The ancients understood the mon­strous. They were not appalled by it, as we are. The legends of the ancient world are packed with monsters—Medusa, Cerberus, the Mi­notaur. Even the human characters—Medea, Agamemnon, Ajax, Clytemnestra—often embody the monstrous.

The ancients recognized that nature herself contains the mon­strous. The world as the Almighty designed it is populated by mon­sters.

5. The daimon is creative.

The daimon’s role is to carry the new. It is the Big Bang. It bears the future.

6. Your daimon is closer to you than anything or anyone in your life.

Your daimon shields you, protects you, counsels you. It kicks your ass. It will drive you crazy if you ignore it, and yet it is insepara­ble from you. Nothing in your life is as loyal. It will never leave you, never betray you, never abandon you.

No creature of humankind—not your spouse, your mother, your sainted aunt—understands you like your daimon.

You will never understand yourself to the depth that your daimon understands you.

7. You are not your daimon.

And yet you are not your daimon, and your daimon is not you. You are the vessel for your daimon. You are the latest edition in a long line. You are the raw material with which the daimon works.

8. Ignore the daimon and it will kill you.

Are we nobler than our daimons? Are we “kinder”? “Better”? Perhaps. But our daimon is far more powerful.

9. The meaning of your life is contained in your daimon

PUT YOUR ASS WHERE YOUR HEART WANTS TO BE

The great secret that every artist and mystic knows is that the pro­found can be reached best by concentrating upon the mundane.

Do you want to write? Sit down at the keyboard.

Wanna paint? Stand before an easel.

Wanna dance? Get your butt into the studio.

Want the goddess to show up for you? Show up for her.

WHO YOU ARE IS WHAT YOU WRITE

The artist discovers herself by the work she produces.

Who are you?

Dance and find out.

Sing and find out.

Write and find out.

Writing, like life itself, [Henry Miller again] is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical one: it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe. The writer lives between the upper and lower worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become that path himself …

From the very beginning almost I was deeply aware that there is no goal. I never hope to embrace the whole, but merely to give in each separate fragment, each work, the feeling of the whole as I go on, because I am digging deeper and deeper into life, digging deeper and deeper into past and future. With the endless burrowing a certi­tude develops which is greater than faith or belief. I be­come more and more indifferent to my fate, as writer, and more and more certain of my destiny as a man.

There is a dimension of reality above (or below) the material dimen­sion we live in.

If you’re an artist, the search for that dimension is your life.

THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY IS THE HERO’S JOURNEY OF THE HUMAN RACE

You may wonder as you sit in your cubicle designing a gundown scene for Call of Duty Black Ops IV if you’re really advancing the cause of humanity.

You are.

Your artist’s journey is unique to you. You alone are on your path. Your job is only to follow it and be true to it.

Who knows what heights it may eventually bear you to?

You’re an artist. Your journey—however humble, however fraught, however beset with thorns and thistles—is part of a noble, cosmic cause. It is not meaningless. It is not in vain.

It is a portion of a grand adventure.

The artist’s journey is the hero’s journey of the human race.

THE GREAT ADVENTURE

What is “the benign, protecting power of destiny,” if indeed there is such a thing?

I think it’s the evolutionary pull of all humankind, which seeks, like the hero, to return to the start of its journey—in other words, the great-circle trajectory of the race arcing home to Eden.

If mankind is indeed on a collective hero’s journey, then Creation itself is on our side.

The Ego is the enemy.

Resistance is the force that it uses against us.

These foes are mighty indeed. But opposed to them always, and equal if not greater, is this great-circle “destiny,” to use Joseph Campbell’s word. That is the wind at our backs.

Therefore be of good cheer, brothers and sisters.

A powerful destiny lies coiled inside you. This force is neither a dumb, robotic tape or some dusty hieroglyph left from millions of years ago, but an active, dynamic, intelligent presence—-endlessly creative, ever-mutating, responsive-in-the-moment—supporting and guiding you as you evolve and advance.

Nor does this force operate only inside your mind. It is not solely cerebral or abstract, nor is it bound by the limits of your consciousness or your physical body.

It operates in real time and in the real world. It is connected to forces unconstrained by time and space, by reason or by nature’s laws. It is capable of summoning allies and assistance and of concentrating them on your behalf and in your cause. These forces are not only of the imagination—ideas, insights, wisdom, breakthroughs in your life and work—but also practical and material apparitions like friends and allies, connections, places to stay, money.

Flesh-and-blood individuals will enter your life at precisely the time and place you need them. These persons will play the role of archetypes—mentors and lovers, boon companions, even animal spirits, tricksters—as will corresponding foes and antagonists, tempters and temptresses, enemies, shape-shifters.

The hero’s journey and the artist’s journey are real. They come with the promise of change, of passion, of fulfillment and of self-actualization, and they come with the curse of Eden—”henceforth shalt thou eat thy bread in the sweat of thy face”—which mandates unrelenting toil and labor. The struggle never ends. It never gets easier.

This is what you were born for.

Nature has built you for this.

The artist is a role ordained by Creation. Even if you know nothing of this mandate, or refuse to believe it, or have forgotten it entirely, even if you flat-out reject it, this living force remains vital and irresistible inside you. You cannot run from it. You cannot stand against it. It is more alive inside you than your own blood and more impossible to resist than the urge to survive or to procreate or to find love.

A great adventure awaits you.

Ready or not, you are called.

The post How to Undertake the Artist's Journey appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.
— Lin Yutang

Discipline equals freedom.
— Jocko Willink

This post will attempt to teach you how to say “no” when it matters most.

At the very least, it will share my story of getting there. It’s a doozy.

Here’s the short version:

I’m taking a long break from investing in new startups. No more advising, either. Please don’t send me any pitches or introductions, as I sadly won’t be able to respond. Until further notice, I am done. I might do the same with interviews, conferences, and much more.

Now, the longer version for those interested:

This post will attempt to explain how I think about investing, overcoming “fear of missing out” (FOMO), and otherwise reducing anxiety.

It’s also about how to kill the golden goose, when the goose is no longer serving you.

I’ll dig into one specifically hard decision — to say “no” to startup investing, which is easily the most lucrative activity in my life. Even if you don’t view yourself as an “investor”—which you are, whether you realize it or not—the process I used to get to no should be useful…

[Warning: If you’re bored by investment stuff, skip the next two bulleted lists.]

Caveat for any investing pros reading this:

• I realize there are exceptions to every “rule” I use. Most of this post is as subjective as the fears I felt.
• My rules might be simplistic, but they’ve provided a good ROI and the ability to sleep. Every time I’ve tried to get “sophisticated,” the universe has kicked me in the nuts.
• Many startup investors use diametrically opposed approaches and do very well.
• There are later-stage investments I’ve made (2-4x return deals) that run counter to some of what’s below (e.g. aiming for 10x+), but those typically involve a discount to book value, due to distressed sellers or some atypical event.
• Many concepts are simplified to avoid confusing a lay audience.

Related announcements:

• I will continue working closely with my current portfolio of startups. I love them and believe in them.
• I will be returning all unallocated capital in my private Stealth Fund on AngelList. If you’re an investor in that fund, you’ll be getting your remaining money back. My public Syndicate will remain in place for later re-entry into the game.

So, why am I tapping out now and shifting gears?

Below are the key questions I asked to arrive at this cord-cutting conclusion.  I revisit these questions often, usually every month.

I hope they help you remove noise and internal conflict from your life.

The Road to No

ARE YOU DOING WHAT YOU’RE UNIQUELY CAPABLE OF, WHAT YOU FEEL PLACED HERE ON EARTH TO DO? CAN YOU BE REPLACED?

I remember a breakfast with Kamal Ravikant roughly one year ago.

Standing in a friend’s kitchen downing eggs, lox, and coffee, we spoke about our dreams, fears, obligations, and lives. Investing had become a big part of my net-worth and my identity. Listing out the options I saw for my next big moves, I asked him if I should raise a fund and become a full-time venture capitalist (VC), as I was already doing the work but trying to balance it with 5-10 other projects. He could sense my anxiety. It wasn’t a dream of mine; I simply felt I’d be stupid not to strike while the iron was hot.

He thought very carefully in silence and then said: “I’ve been at events where people come up to you crying because they’ve lost 100-plus pounds on the Slow-Carb Diet. You will never have that impact as a VC. If you don’t invest in a company, they’ll just find another VC. You’re totally replaceable.”

He paused again and ended with, “Please don’t stop writing.”

I’ve thought about that conversation every day since.

For some people, being a VC is their calling and they are the Michael Jordan-like MVPs of that world. They should cultivate that gift. But if I stop investing, no one will miss it. In 2015, that much is clear. There have never been more startup investors, and–right along with them–founders basing “fit” on highest valuation and previously unheard of terms. There are exceptions, of course, but it’s crowded. If I exit through the side door, the startup party will roll on uninterrupted.

Now, I’m certainly not the best writer in the world. I have no delusions otherwise. People like John McPhee and Michael Lewis make me want to cry into my pillow and brand “Poser” on my forehead.

BUT… if I stop writing, perhaps I’m squandering the biggest opportunity I have—created through much luck—to have a lasting impact on the greatest number of people. This feeling of urgency has been multiplied 100-fold in the last two months, as several close friends have died in accidents no one saw coming. Life is fucking short. Put another way: a long life is far from guaranteed. Nearly everyone dies before they’re ready.

I’m tired of being interchangeable, no matter how lucrative the game. Even if I’m wrong about the writing, I’d curse myself if I didn’t give it a shot.

Are you squandering your unique abilities? Or the chance to find them in the first place?

HOW OFTEN ARE YOU SAYING “HELL, YEAH!”? 

Philosopher-programmer Derek Sivers is one of my favorite people.

His incisive thinking has always impressed me, and his “hell, yeah!” or “no” essay has become one of my favorite rules of thumb. From his blog:

Those of you who often over-commit or feel too scattered may appreciate a new philosophy I’m trying: If I’m not saying “HELL YEAH!” about something, then I say no.

Meaning: When deciding whether to commit to something, if I feel anything less than, “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!” – then my answer is no. When you say no to most things, you leave room in your life to really throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say “HELL YEAH!”

We’re all busy. We’ve all taken on too much. Saying yes to less is the way out.

To become “successful,” you have to say “yes” to a lot of experiments.  To learn what you’re best at, or what you’re most passionate about, you have to throw a lot against the wall.

Once your life shifts from pitching outbound to defending against inbound, however, you have to ruthlessly say “no” as your default. Instead of throwing spears, you’re holding the shield.

From 2007-2009 and again from 2012-2013, I said yes to way too many “cool” things. Would I like to go to a conference in South America? Write a time-consuming guest article for a well-known magazine? Invest in a start-up that five of my friends were in? “Sure, that sounds kinda cool,” I’d say, dropping it in the calendar. Later, I’d pay the price of massive distraction and overwhelm. My agenda became a list of everyone else’s agendas.

Saying yes to too much “cool” will bury you alive and render you a B-player, even if you have A-player skills. To develop your edge initially, you learn to set priorities; to maintain your edge, you need to defend against the priorities of others.

Once you reach a decent level of professional success, lack of opportunity won’t kill you. It’s drowning in 7-out-of-10 “cool” commitments that will sink the ship.

These days, I find myself saying “Hell, yes!” less and less with new startups. That’s my cue to exit stage left, especially when I can do work I love (e.g. writing) with 1/10th the energy expenditure.

I need to stop sowing the seeds of my own destruction.

HOW MUCH OF YOUR LIFE IS MAKING VERSUS MANAGING? HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE SPLIT?

One of my favorite time-management essays is “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” by Paul Graham of Y Combinator fame. Give it a read.

As Brad Feld and many others have observed, great creative work isn’t possible if you’re trying to piece together 30 minutes here and 45 minutes there. Large, uninterrupted block of time — 3-5 hours minimum — create the space needed to find and connect the dots. And one block per week isn’t enough.  There has to be enough slack in the system for multi-day CPU-intensive synthesis. For me, this means at least 3-4 mornings per week where I am in “maker” mode until at least 1pm.

If I’m in reactive mode, maker mode is all but impossible. Email and texts of “We’re overcommitted but might be able to squeeze you in for $25K. Closing tomorrow. Interested?” are creative kryptonite.

I miss writing, creating, and working on bigger projects. YES to that means NO to any games of whack-a-mole.

WHAT BLESSINGS IN EXCESS HAVE BECOME A CURSE? WHERE DO YOU HAVE TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING?

In excess, most things take on the characteristics of their opposite. Thus:

Pacifists become militants.

Freedom fighters become tyrants.

Blessings become curses.

Help becomes hinderance.

More becomes less.

To explore this concept more, read up on Aristotle’s golden mean.

In my first 1-2 years of angel investing, 90%+ of my bets were in a tiny sub-set of startups. The criteria were simple:

• Consumer-facing products or services
• Products I could be a dedicated “power user” of, products that scratched a personal itch
• Initial target demographic of 25-40-year old tech-savvy males in big US cities like SF, NYC, Chicago, LA, etc. (allowed me to accelerate growth/scaling with my audience)
• <$10M pre-money valuation
• Demonstrated traction and consistent growth (not doctored with paid acquisition).
• No “party rounds”—crowded financing rounds with no clear lead investor. Party rounds often lead to poor due diligence and few people with enough skin in the game to really care.

Checking these boxes allowed me to add a lot of value quickly, even as relatively cheap labor (i.e. I took a tiny stake in the company). Shopify is a great example, which you can read about here (scroll down).

My ability to help spread via word of mouth, and I got what I wanted: great “deal flow.” Deals started flowing in en masse from other founders and investors.

Fast forward to 2015, and great deal flow is now paralyzing the rest of my life.  I’m drowning in inbound.

Instead of making great things possible in my life, it’s preventing great things from happening.

I’m excited to go back to basics, and this requires cauterizing blessings that have become burdens.

WHY ARE YOU INVESTING, ANYWAY?

For me, the goal of “investing” has always been simple: to allocate resources (e.g. money, time, energy) to improve quality of life. This is a personal definition, as yours likely will be.

Some words are so overused as to have become meaningless.  If you find yourself using nebulous terms like “success,” “happiness,” or “investing,” it pays to explicitly define them or stop using them. “What would it look like if I had (or won at) ___ ?” helps. Life favors the specific ask and punishes the vague wish.

So, here: to allocate resources (e.g. money, time, energy) to improve quality of life.

This applies to both the future and the present. I am willing to accept a mild and temporary 10% decrease in current quality of life (based on morale in journaling) for a high-probability 10x return, whether the ROI comes in the form of cash, time, energy, or otherwise. That could be a separate blog post, but conversely:

An investment that produces a massive financial ROI but makes me a complete nervous mess, or causes insomnia and temper tantrums for a long period of time, is NOT a good investment.

I don’t typically invest in public stocks for this reason, even when I know I’m leaving cash on the table. My stomach can’t take the ups and downs, but—like drivers rubbernecking to look at a wreck—I seem incapable of not looking. I will compulsively check Google News and Google Finance, despite knowing it’s self-sabotage. I become Benjamin Graham’s Mr. Market. As counter-examples, friends like Kevin Rose and Chris Sacca have different programming and are comfortable playing in that sandbox. They can be rational instead of reactive.

Suffice to say — For me, a large guaranteed decrease in present quality of life doesn’t justify a large speculative return.

One could argue that I should work on my reactivity instead of avoiding stocks. I’d agree on tempering reactivity, but I’d disagree on fixing weaknesses as a primary investment (or life) strategy.

All of my biggest wins have come from leveraging strengths instead of fixing weaknesses. Investing is hard enough without having to change your core behaviors. Don’t push a boulder up a hill just because you can.

Public market sharks will eat me alive in their world, but I’ll beat 99% of them in my little early-stage startup sandbox. I live in the middle of the informational switch box and know the operators.

From 2007 until recently, I paradoxically found start-up investing very low-stress. Ditto with some options trading. Though high-risk, I do well with binary decisions. In other words, I do a ton of homework and commit to an investment that I cannot reverse. That “what’s done is done” aspect allows me to sleep well at night, as there is no buy-sell choice for the foreseeable future. I’m protected from my lesser, flip-flopping self. That has produced more than a few 10-100x investments.

In the last two years, however, my quality of life has suffered.

As fair-weather investors and founders have flooded the “hot” tech scene, it’s become a deluge of noise. Where there were once a handful of micro VCs, for instance, there are now hundreds. Private equity firms and hedge funds are betting earlier and earlier. It’s become a crowded playing field. Here’s what that has meant for me personally:

• I get 50-100 pitches per week. This creates an inbox problem, but it gets worse, as…
• Many of these are unsolicited “cold intros,” where other investors will email me and CC 2-4 founders with “I’d love for you to meet A, B, and C” without asking if they can share my e-mail address
• Those founders then “loop in” other people, and it cascades horribly from there. Before I know it 20-50 people I don’t know are emailing me questions and requests.
• As a result, I’ve had to declare email bankruptcy twice in the last six months. It’s totally untenable.

Is there a tech bubble? That question is beyond my pay grade, and it’s also beside the point.

Even if I were guaranteed there would be no implosion for 3-5 years, I’d still exit now. Largely due to communication overload, I’ve lost my love for the game.  On top of that, the marginal minute now matters more to me than the marginal dollar.

But why not cut back 50%, or even 90%, and be more selective?  Good question. That’s next…

ARE YOU FOOLING YOURSELF WITH A PLAN FOR MODERATION?

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

– Richard P. Feynman

Where in your life are you good at moderation? Where are you an all-or-nothing type? Where do you lack a shut-off switch? It pays to know thyself.

The Slow-Carb Diet succeeds where other diets fail for many reasons, but the biggest is this: It accepts default human behaviors versus trying to fix them. Rather than say “don’t cheat” or “you can no longer eat X,” we plan weekly “cheat days” (usually Saturdays) in advance. People on diets will cheat regardless, so we mitigate the damage by pre-scheduling it and limiting it to 24 hours.

Outside of cheat days, slow carbers keep “domino foods” out of their homes. What are domino foods? Foods that could be acceptable if humans had strict portion control, but that are disallowed because practically none of us do. Common domino foods include:

• Chickpeas
• Peanut butter
• Salted cashews
• Alcohol

Domino triggers aren’t limited to food. For some people, if they play 15 minutes of World of Warcraft, they’ll play 15 hours. It’s zero or 15 hours.

For me, startups are a domino food.

In theory, “I’ll only do one deal a month” or “I’ll only do two deals a quarter” sound great, but I’ve literally NEVER seen it work for myself or any of my VC or angel friends. Sure, there are ways to winnow down the pitches. Yes, you can ask “Is this one of the top 1-2 entrepreneurs you know?” to any VC who intro’s a deal and reject any “no”s. But what if you commit to two deals a quarter and see two great ones the first week? What then? If you invest in those two, will you be able to ignore every incoming pitch for the next 10 weeks?

Not likely.

For me, it’s all or nothing. I can’t be half pregnant with startup investing.  Whether choosing 2 or 20 startups per year, you have to filter them from the total incoming pool.

If I let even one startup through, another 50 seem to magically fill up my time (or at least my inbox). I don’t want to hire staff for vetting, so I’ve concluded I must ignore all new startup pitches and intros.

Know where you can moderate and where you can’t.

YOU SAY “HEALTH IS #1″…BUT IS IT REALLY?

After contracting Lyme disease and operating at ~10% capacity for nine months, I made health #1. Prior to Lyme, I’d worked out and eaten well, but when push came to shove, “health #1” was negotiable. Now, it’s literally #1. What does this mean?

If I sleep poorly and have an early morning meeting, I’ll cancel the meeting last-minute if needed and catch up on sleep. If I’ve missed a workout and have a con-call coming up in 30 minutes? Same. Late-night birthday party with a close friend? Not unless I can sleep in the next morning. In practice, strictly making health #1 has real social and business ramifications. That’s a price I’ve realized I MUST be fine paying, or I could lose weeks or months to sickness or fatigue.

Making health #1 50% of the time doesn’t work. It’s absolute — all or nothing. If it’s #1 50% of the time, you’ll compromise precisely when it’s most important.

The artificial urgency common to startups makes mental and physical health even more challenging. I’m tired of unwarranted last-minute “hurry up and sign” emergencies and related fire drills. It’s a culture of cortisol.

ARE YOU OVER-CORRELATED?

[NOTE: Two investors friends found this bullet slow, as they’re immersed in similar subjects. Feel free to skip if it drags on, but I think there are a few important novice concepts in here.]

“Correlated” means that investments tend to move up or down in value at the same time.

As legendary hedge fund manager Ray Dalio told Tony Robbins: “It’s almost certain that whatever you’re going to put your money in, there will come a day when you will lose 50 percent to 70 percent.” It pays to remember that if you lose 50%, you need a subsequent 100% return to get back to where you started. That math is tough.

So, how to de-risk your portfolio?

Many investors “rebalance” across asset classes to maintain certain ratios (e.g. X% in bonds, Y% in stocks, Z% in commodities, etc.). If one asset class jumps, they liquidate a part of it a buy more of lower performing classes. There are pros and cons to this, but it’s common practice.

From 2007-2009, during the “real-world MBA” that taught me to angel invest, <15% of my liquid assets were in startups. I was taking a barbell approach to investing. But most startups are illiquid. I commonly can’t sell shares until 7-12 years after I invest, at least for my big winners to date. What does that mean? In 2015, startups comprise more than 80% of my assets. Yikes!

Since I can’t sell, the simplest first step for lowering stress is to stop investing in illiquid assets.

I’ve sold large portions of liquid stocks—mostly early start-up investments in China–to help get me to “sleep at night” levels, even if they are lower than historical highs of the last 6-12 months. Beware of anchoring to former high prices (e.g. “I’ll sell when it gets back to X price per share…”). I only have 1-2 stock holdings remaining.

Some of you might suggest hedging with short positions, and I’d love to, but it’s not my forte. If you have ideas for doing so without huge exposure or getting into legal gray areas, please let me know in the comments.

In the meantime, the venture capital model is mostly a bull market business. Not much shorting opportunity. The best approximation I’ve seen is investing in businesses like Uber, which A) have a lot of international exposure (like US blue chips), and B) could be considered macro-economically counter-cyclical. For instance, it’s conceivable a stock market correction or crash could simultaneously lead fewer people to buy cars and/or more people to sign up as Uber drivers to supplement or replace their jobs. Ditto with Airbnb and others that have more variable than fixed costs compared to incumbents (e.g. Hilton).

WHAT’S THE RUSH? CAN YOU “RETIRE” AND COME BACK?

I’m in startups for the long game. In some capacity, I plan to be doing this 20+ years from now.

The reality: If you’re spending your own money, or otherwise not banking on management fees, you can wait for the perfect pitches, even if it takes years. It might not be the “best” approach, but it’s enough. To get rich beyond your wildest dreams in startup investing, it isn’t remotely necessary to bet on a Facebook or Airbnb every year. If you get a decent bet on ONE of those non-illusory, real-business unicorns every 10 years, or if you get 2-3 investments that turn $25K into $2.5M, you can retire and have a wonderful quality of life. Many would argue that you need to invest in 50-100 startups to find that one lottery ticket. Maybe. I think it’s possible to narrow the odds quite a bit more, and a lot of it is predicated on maintaining stringent criteria; ensuring you have an informational, analytical, or behavioral advantage; and TIMING.

Most of my best investments were made during the “Dot-com Depression” of 2008-2009 (e.g. Uber, Shopify, Twitter, etc.), when only the hardcore remained standing on a battlefield littered with startup bodies. In lean times, when startups no longer grace magazine covers, founders are those who cannot help but build a company. LinkedIn in 2002 is another example.

HOWEVER… This doesn’t mean there aren’t great deals out there.  There are. Great companies are still built during every “frothy” period.

The froth just makes my job and detective work 10x harder, and the margin of safety becomes much narrower.

[Tim: Skip this boxed text if the concept of “margin of safety” is old news to you.]

Think of the “margin of safety” as wiggle room.

Warren Buffett is one of the most successful investors of the 20th century and a self-described “value investor.” He aims to buy stocks at a discount (below intrinsic value) so that even with a worst-case scenario, he can do well. This discount is referred to as the “margin of safety,” and it’s the bedrock principle of some of the brightest minds in the investing world (e.g., Seth Klarman). It doesn’t guarantee a good investment, but it allows room for error.  Back in the startup world…

I want each of my investments, if successful, to have the ability to return my “entire fund,” which is how much capital I’ve earmarked for startups over two years, for instance. This usually means potential for a minimum 10X return. That 10X minimum is an important part of my recipe that allows margin for screw ups.

For the fund-justifying ROI to have a snowball’s chance in hell of happening, I must A) know basic algebra to ensure my investment amounts (check sizes) permit it, and B) avoid companies that seem overpriced, where the 10x price is something the world has never seen before (i.e. no even indirect comparables, or tenable extrapolations from even an expanded market size).

If you throw low-due-diligence Hail Mary’s everywhere and justify it with “they could be the next Uber!”, you will almost certainly be killed by 1,000 slow-bleeding $25K paper cuts. Despite current euphoria, applying something like Pascal’s Wager to startups is a great way to go broke.

Good startup investors who suggest being “promiscuous” are still methodical.

It’s popular in startup land to talk about “moonshots”—the impossibly ambitious startups that will either change the world or incinerate themselves into star dust.

I’m a fan of funding ballsy founders (which includes women), and I want many moonshots to be funded, but here’s the reality of my portfolio: as I’ve signed the investment docs for every big success I’ve had, I’ve always thought, “I will never lose money on this deal.”

The “this will be a home run or nothing” deals usually end up at nothing. I’m not saying such deals can’t work, but I try not to specialize in them.

These days, the real unicorns aren’t the media darlings with billion-dollar valuations. Those have become terrifyingly passé. The unicorns are the high-growth startups with a reasonable margin of safety.

Fortunately, I’m not in a rush, and I can wait for the tide to shift.

If you simply wait for blood in the streets, for when true believers are the only ones left, you can ensure come-hell-or-high-water founders are at least half of your meetings.

It might be morbid, but it’s practical.

My Last Deals For A While

It’s still a great time to invest in companies… but only if you’re able to A) filter the signal from the noise, B) say no to a lot of great companies whose investors are accepting insane terms, and C) follow your own rules. Doing all three of these requires a fuck-ton of effort, discipline, and systems. I prefer games with better odds.

There are a few deals you’ll see in the upcoming months, which I committed to long ago. These are not new deals.

They are current companies in which I’m filling my pro-rata, or companies postponing funding announcements until they’re most helpful (e.g. launching publicly). Separately, I work closely with the Expa startup lab and will continue to do so. They are largely able to insulate themselves from madness, while using and refining an excellent playbook.

Are You Having a Breakdown or a Breakthrough? A Short How-To Guide

“Make your peace with the fact that saying ‘no’ often requires trading popularity for respect.”
— Greg McKeown, Essentialism

If you’re suffering from a feeling of overwhelm, it might be useful to ask yourself two questions:

– In the midst of overwhelm, is life not showing me exactly what I should subtract?

– Am I having a breakdown or a breakthrough?

As Marcus Aurelius and Ryan Holiday would say, “The obstacle is the way.” This doesn’t mean seeing problems, accepting them, and leaving them to fester. Nor does it mean rationalizing problems into good things. To me, it means using pain to find clarity. Pain–if examined and not ignored–can show you what to excise from your life.

For me, step one is always the same: write down the 20% of activities and people causing 80% or more of your negative emotions.

My step two is doing a “fear-setting” exercise on paper, in which I ask and answer “What is really the worst that could happen if I did what I’m considering? And so what? How could I undo any damage?”

Below is a real-world example: the journal page that convinced me to write this post and kickstart an extended startup vacation.

The questions were “What is really the worst that could happen if I stopped angel investing for a minimum of 6-12 months? Do those worse-case scenarios really matter? How could I undo any potential damage? Could I do a two-week test?”

As you’ll notice, I made lists of the guaranteed upsides versus speculative downsides. If we define “risk” as I like to—the likelihood of an irreversible negative outcome—we can see how stupid (and unnecessarily painful) all my fretting and procrastination was. All I needed to do was put it on paper.

Below is a scan of the actual page.  Click here for an enlarged version.

Further below is a transcribed version (slightly shorter and edited). For a full explanation of how and why I use journaling, see this post.  In the meantime, this will get the point across:

Transcription:

“The anxiety is mostly related to email and startups: new pitches, new intros, etc.

Do a 2-week test where “no” to ALL cold intros and pitches?

Why am I hesitant? For saying “no” to all:

PROS:

– 100% guaranteed anxiety reduction

– Feeling of freedom

– Less indecision, less deliberation, so far more bandwidth for CREATING, for READING, for PHYSICAL [TRAINING], for EXPERIMENTS.

CONS (i.e. why not?):

– Might find the next Uber (<10% chance) — Who cares? Wouldn’t materialize for 7-9 years. If Uber pops (IPO), it won’t matter.

– Not get more deals. But who cares?

* Dinner with 5 friends fixes it.

* One blog post fixes it. [Here’s an example from 2013 that helped me find Shyp and co-lead their first round]

* NONE of my best deals (Shyp, Shopify, Uber, Twitter, Facebook, Evernote, Alibaba, etc.) came from cold intros from acquaintances.

If try 2 weeks, how to ensure successful:

– I don’t even see interview or [new] startup emails

– No con-calls. [Cite] “con call vacation” –> push to email or EOD [end-of-day review with assistant]

– Offer [additional] “office hours” on Fridays [for existing portfolio]?

I ultimately realized: If I set up policies to avoid new startups for two weeks, the systems will persist. I might as well make it semi-permanent and take a real “startup vacation.”

What do you need a vacation from?

My Challenge To You: Write Down The “What If”s

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

– Mark Twain

“He who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary.”

– Seneca

Tonight or tomorrow morning, take a decision you’ve been putting off, and challenge the fuzzy “what if”s holding you hostage.

If not now, when? If left at the status quo, what will your life and stress look like in six months? In one year? In three years? Who around you will also suffer?

I hope you find the strength to say no when it matters most. I’m striving for the same, and only time will tell if I pull it off.

What will I spend my time on next? More crazy experiments and creative projects, of course.  To hear about them first, sign up for my infrequent newsletter. Things are going to get nuts.

But more important — how could you use a new lease on life?

To surf, like this attorney who quit the rat race? To travel with your family around the world for 1,000+ days, like this?  To learn languages or work remotely in 20+ countries while building a massive business? It’s all possible. The options are limitless…

So start by writing them down. Sometimes, it takes just a piece of paper and a few questions to create a breakthrough.

I look forward to hearing about your adventures.

The post How to Say No When It Matters Most (or “Why I’m Taking a Long ‘Startup Vacation'”) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

“Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.” – Mae West

In this post, we’ll look two alternatives to monogamy: an “anything goes” sex club and living with three lovers at once.

It’s very graphic, definitely not suitable for work (NSFW), and guaranteed to offend most of you.

If you’re chomping at the bit to express mock outrage, please check this out instead. For the rest of you, I’m hoping the below is hilarious and somehow helpful.

Lifestyle design is, after all, about a lot more than work.

And if anything below shocks or appalls you, please ask yourself: why does this make me so uncomfortable? Dig into the discomfort. Looking inward before lashing outward is good for the world.

Now, on to the taboo.

Context

As some of you know, I’ve been conflicted about monogamy for a long time. I love intimacy, but my biology craves novelty…

So, what the hell is a guy to do? There is reality as we’d like it to be, and then there is reality.

This is where Neil Strauss often enters the picture. I’ve known Neil for years. He’s a seven-time New York Times bestselling author, arguably best known for The Game. In that book, he enters a subculture of pick-up artists as a hopeless nerd and comes out able to conjure threesomes on demand.

Not surprisingly, Neil went on a tear of sexual hedonism after his transformation, and many men read his book hoping for the same.

Then… Neil fell in love. Things got complicated once again.

On this blog and in the podcast, he and I have talked about kickstarting creativity and his genius writing process. But at night over drinks, we still discuss what two guys usually discuss: women. The same questions come up a lot:

Neil has spent the last six years attempting to answer these questions, and the result is a brand-new book called The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships. I’ve been reading drafts for months.

This post includes two of my favorite stories from his experiments, adapted and embellished for this blog.

It’s written from the perspective of a male, of course, but many women grapple with similar questions. These are challenging times.

MY SELFISH REQUEST: Please share in the comments what has worked for you! I’m a simple animal living in a confusing world. How have you navigated the above questions?

AND ONE IMPORTANT NOTE (added after much confusion): The below is written by Neil Strauss! It covers his adventures, not mine.

Now, enjoy the debauchery…

Enter Neil Strauss

Several years ago, I was in a relationship with a fantastic person. She was great. Yet I was miserable. I felt trapped. Being romantically and sexually with one person for the rest of my life–at least four decades, barring any cruel twists of fate–made no sense.

First, there was the science: I had interviewed evolutionary biologists, anthropologists, historians, geneticists, and more. I could not find a single shred of evidence supporting the theory that monogamy was natural. And when I talked to a professor who wrote the only major research paper I could find suggesting monogamy was good for civilization, even he admitted, “If humans, just by nature, mated for life and there were a very tight pair-bond, then we wouldn’t need all these marriage customs.”

As Stephanie Coontz, the world’s leading marriage historian, explained when I spoke with her: ”…Now you don’t have to [accept traditional marriage and family as a package deal]: It’s literally pick and choose. Cut and paste the kind of life you want. Family life and love relationships are essentially becoming a build-your-own model.”

So I decided to build my own relationship, and after some thought, this is what I came up with:

1. It can’t be sexually exclusive, which rules out monogamy.
2. It has to be honest, which rules out adultery.
3. It has to be capable of developing romantic and emotional attachment, which rules out being a permanent bachelor.
4. It has to be capable of evolving into a family with healthy, well-adjusted children, which rules out unstable partners and lifestyles.

Then I started experimenting. Some turned out far better than others. Let’s start with one of the winners.

THE “ANYTHING GOES” SEX CLUB

Everywhere I look while traveling to Paris, I see young couples pushing sleeping children in strollers, carrying blanket-wrapped babies in their arms, hurrying along superhero-backpacked toddlers.

Each family makes me think of Ingrid, the girlfriend I broke up with, and the future I ruined. I wonder what Ingrid’s doing, who she’s doing it with, and if she’s happier living without my wandering eyes and ambivalent heart.

In Paris, however, everything will change. I will finally find the freedom I’ve been looking for.

First, there is Anne, a woman who’s been flirting with me on Facebook. She’s waiting in the hotel room when I arrive. She’s slender and toned, with dirty blond shoulder-length hair, minimal makeup, and boyish clothes. As I approach her, she looks deeply and mutely into me with quivering brown eyes. I take a step toward her, brush her hair aside, and we kiss.

We disrobe. Get in bed. Make love. Spoon. And then she says salut. It’s the first word we’ve exchanged.

Then, there’s Camille, an open-minded Parisian who some new swinger friends made me promise to get in contact with.

“Hi Neil. I’m meeting my friend Laura, who’s American just like you,” she texts. “She wants to go to a great switch club and I promised I’d get in trouble with her. Do you want to come with us?”

“Is it okay if I’m with a date?”

“Dump the girl. There’ll be plenty of dates for you there! And they all want to have sex :)”

This switch club sounds like a goldmine of open-minded single women. The only problem: I want to bring Anne.

“If you have to bring her, use the ‘We’ll just have a drink and watch’ technique,” Camille relents. “That’s how my boyfriend got me there in the first place, and look at me now! The club is by Montmartre. Give me a call after dinner.”

In my monogamous relationship last year, my credo was to say no. Only by saying no to others could I protect Ingrid’s heart. But now, I am saying yes—to everyone, to everything, to life. Because every yes is the gateway to an adventure. Whatever I am heading toward, it is a relationship that operates out of a place of yes.

At dinner that night, I do exactly as Camille instructed. Anne and I are with two women I met on a European press tour a few years earlier: a German fashion photographer and a Swedish designer. They spend most of the meal gossiping about people I don’t know.

“We don’t have to do anything,” I explain to Anne. “Let’s just plan on having a drink and watching, and we can leave right away if it’s lame.”

“I’m a little tired,” she replies, her voice barely audible. Throughout the day, she’s barely spoken. Instead, she’s attached herself to me energetically, gazing at me almost constantly with big, vulnerable, barely blinking eyes. I get the sense that she wants something from me or may already be getting it from me. “Is it okay if I go back to the hotel?”

“Can we come?” the fashionistas interrupt.

“You can go with them if you want,” Anne tells me softly.

It’s hard to read Anne. I’m not sure if she’s legitimately tired or just uncomfortable with the suggestion. “Are you sure it’s all right for me to go?”

“I don’t mind,” she replies.

I study her face to make sure she’s sincere, that it’s not a test to see if I’ll choose her. She appears placid and unconcerned. I ask three more times just to make sure.

“She said you could go!” the German photographer snaps at me.

We drop Anne off at the hotel, and she gives me a deep kiss and walks off. It’s a good sign: Letting your lover go to a sex club alone is actually a much more open-minded feat than going with him. As the taxi speeds away, the German photographer loops her arm in mine.

I’m determined not to wreck this orgy like all the others [Editor’s note: elsewhere in the book].

We arrive at the club just after midnight. I spot Camille instantly. She has long brown hair worthy of a shampoo commercial and skin so smooth and flawless that a metaphor to an inanimate object, like a pearl, would hardly do it justice.

She’s standing with two other women: Laura, her American friend, who looks like a burning candle—long and narrow, with a white pantsuit and a shock of short blond hair. And Veronika, a haughty beauty from Prague with lips like cylindrical sofa cushions, flowing brown hair, an overdeveloped nose, and a tall, thin, sensuous frame that reminds me of the actress Jane Birkin.

“Do we have to put on robes or towels when we go in?” I ask Camille, unsure what protocol is for places like this.

Camille looks at me like I’m crazy. “No, we just wear our clothes.”

That’s a relief. Despite my desire to be open, evolved, and shame free about sex, I’m still not totally comfortable with the sight of my own body. The first time I ever had sex, I was too embarrassed to remove my shirt. And the second and third times as well.

Behind us in line, there’s a Frenchman with a shiny suit and slicked-back hair. He looks like a shady businessman who snorts a lot of cocaine. “Since you have so many girls, is it okay if I come in with you?” he asks.

The club has a rule that all males must enter with a female—and I’m standing there with five of them like a glutton. I suppose this is what I missed when I was dating Ingrid: options, variety, adventure, discovery, novelty, the unknown.

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “It’s my first time here.”

As we wait, Camille and Laura discuss sharing toys, by which they mean boys. “Is your boyfriend coming?” I ask Camille.

“No.”

“Does he know you’re here?” I’m asking not to judge her, but because I’m curious how their relationship works.

“No.” She smiles guiltily. Clearly, having an open relationship is no cure for infidelity. Almost everyone I’ve met in the scene so far has transgressed even the minimal rules of their supposedly open relationship.

Perhaps the problem with most relationships is that the rules start to become more important than the values they’re supposed to be representing.

Eventually two of Camille’s toys arrive, both in designer jackets and skinny ties. They introduce themselves as Bruno and Pascal. Bruno looks like a clean-cut college athlete, while Pascal, with thin-framed glasses, tight curls, and slow, well-mannered gestures, looks like an intellectual dandy.

Unlike the highly sexualized crowd at Bliss [another sex party], the men and women here aren’t divorced weekend warriors dressed like porn stars. Aside from the slick-haired businessman behind us, everyone here seems young, hip, well dressed, and silicone free. They don’t look much different than the crowd outside an exclusive nightclub. Evidently, after a night on the town, they come here for dessert. As the line starts moving, Laura takes pity on solo slick guy and invites him to come in with her.

“Do you know how I can tell these people are barbarians?” the German photographer says to her friend. “Look at their shoes. I wouldn’t wish a single pair on my worst enemy.”

I glance back nervously and think about ways to slip away from them. But it’s too late: We’re being let inside.

When we enter, a hostess asks us to check our jackets (which for some reason leads to sniggers from the fashionistas), then gives me a card that she explains will serve as my tab for the night. Veronika removes her blazer to reveal a loose-fitting backless dress that, when her stride is long, would get her arrested. “She will be my first fuck tonight,” Pascal tells me confidently as I stare mutely at the tan expanse of Veronika’s back.

We walk downstairs to an empty, low-lit dance floor dotted with stripper poles. The twenty or so people in the room are clustered against a bar, drinking away their inhibitions. Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” is playing. It seems so . . . obvious.

At the end of the anteroom, there’s a black door that leads to the fun. After her friends have drifted into the rooms behind it, Camille takes my hand and offers to show me around. “What about my friends?” I ask.

“They’ll be fine. Are you coming or not?”

I look over and they seem deep in snide conversation, concealing their discomfort by increasing their arrogance. I should invite them to join us, especially since I brought them here. The last thing I want to do, however, is walk around the orgy with them making obnoxiously loud comments about how everyone’s sexual techniques are so last year.

• • •

Behind the black door, Camille and I slowly wander through sunken living rooms and small porthole-fitted chambers, all in copious use, until we arrive at a space that consists of just an enormous bed and a narrow walkway along the front wall.

Most of the women on the megabed are completely naked while the men are still wearing dress shirts, ties, and pants. However, their pants are all unzipped or lowered and their junk is hanging out. Dicks are everywhere. Even the guys who aren’t with women are walking around the room with expectant cocks dangling in the air in case someone has a need for them. I’m the only guy who’s zipped up.

In the bottom right corner of the bed, Laura is on all fours with her dress up. Bruno pulls out of her and parks in Camille’s mouth while Pascal, true to his word, fucks Veronika against the wall. She’s standing up, facing frontward with one leg raised and her face flushed, in a pose that, if photographed, would incite a million sticky nights.

I don’t know what to do, how to get involved, or what the rules are.  This is the closest to a free-for-all I’ve ever seen.

So I sit in the empty space on the mattress in front of Laura, who’s still posed on her hands and knees expectantly. “Thanks for letting me come here with you guys,” I tell her, because I feel like I need to say something.

“Is this your first time at a switch club?” she asks astutely. This is probably the stupidest place I’ve tried to make small talk since the last orgy.

“Pretty much.”

As we’re talking, the creepy businessman from outside the club materializes behind Laura and rubs her pussy. Then he scoots under her like he’s repairing a car and starts eating her out.

“Is that cool with you?” I ask her. “I can tell him to stop if you’re not comfortable.” Here I go again: taking care of everyone’s needs but my own.

“That’s so American of you to say,” she laughs.

“What do you mean? How is that American?” I don’t even understand the comment: She’s American herself.

“No one’s ever asked me that before.”

“But I thought maybe—”

“I just want a cock in me.”

This is the kind of woman I fantasized about as a teenager: an indiscriminate one. And more than anything I’ve experienced so far, this seems like free sex–because there’s no spiritual baggage, drug baggage, or even much relationship baggage around it. In fact, there’s no baggage or encumbrances whatsoever, just randomly intersecting body parts. And now that I’m in the midst of it, I’m terrified. It’s so shockingly . . . open.

It’s not society that holds us back, it’s ourselves. We just blame society because not only is it easier but it’s a nearly impossible weight to move. This way, we don’t actually have to change. I thought I was fighting the system, but perhaps all I’ve really been doing is fighting myself.

Meanwhile, the slick-haired guy stops licking Laura and appears to be going for a home run.

I realize this is very crude, but the story takes place in a sex club. What else am I supposed to describe? The chandeliers? There’s nothing going on here but sex.

“Can you make sure he puts on a condom?” Laura asks.

“Okay,” I reply over-enthusiastically, grateful for the opportunity.

I have a job to do now. A purpose. I am the condom police. I watch him carefully to make sure he puts the rubber on. Then I worry that I’m creeping him out. But I won’t be swayed from my very important duty: no protection, no service. That’s right, sir, roll it on all the way. Otherwise I’m going to have to ask you to step out of the bed.

“It’s on,” I tell her with an air of authority,

As he thrusts inside her, Laura’s face swings closer to mine. Now’s my chance, I think, and I start making out with her.

And that’s when I realize: No one else here is making out. How many dicks has she had in that mouth tonight?

So I pull away. It’s time to say yes and unzip. I kneel so that my crotch is level with her head. And sure enough, she takes it in her hands, guides it into her mouth, and starts sucking.

“What do you like?” Laura pauses to ask.

Good question. I like this. What’s better than a blow job? Or does she want more specific instructions? Perhaps they have names for different blow jobs here—the spit-shine, the round-the-world, the confused American.

Like anything, I suppose sexual freedom is a learned art. I still need more experience to get comfortable.

Suddenly, I see Pascal’s head appear over mine. He whispers in my ear, “Veronika wants you.”

It’s music to my ears, especially since things with Laura feel awkward. I know she has an any-cock-will-do attitude, but I have a sneaking suspicion that my cock isn’t quite doing.

When the businessman finishes, Laura makes her escape. But instead of Veronika appearing, Camille kneels in front of me and takes Laura’s place with more enthusiasm. I’m not fully present because I’ve been stuck in my upper head, so I look around the room and notice a woman lying spread-eagled in front of me. I take her hand and start massaging it, and she massages my hand back. I move my hand between her thighs and start playing with her.

I’m starting to get comfortable here. Finally, I’m actually part of an orgy—awake, accepted, alive. I rear up tall and look around. Everyone is fucking and sucking.

Perhaps my previous disasters in CNM (consensual non-monogamy) have actually been necessary experiences to get comfortable at these things, learning lessons on the road to orgy mastery.

Suddenly I hear a guy’s voice exclaim loudly, “Tu es sur ma jambe.”

Nearly everyone on the megabed starts laughing.

Evidently I’m kneeling on some guy’s leg. I slide out of his way and notice Veronika crawling toward me on the mattress. I drink in her unique amalgamation of devastating beauty and awkward innocence, and I instantly harden.

I make out with her passionately. I don’t know why I keep touching people’s filthy lips, but I crave the intimacy and connection more than the anonymous sex. Maybe I am polyamorous—because it’s not just free sex I’m searching for, it’s free romance, free connection, free relationships, free getting-naked-with-someone-you-enjoy-and-who-enjoys-you-and-then-getting-to-know-each-other-even-better-afterward.

I seriously need to gargle with Listerine when I leave this place.

Meanwhile, Bruno has appeared out of nowhere and started having sex with the spread-eagled woman.

I pull back and look at Veronika’s face, and she bites her lower lip in response. There’s so much heat between us and we’ve only just met. I hope it isn’t because she was abandoned by her father (long story).

I run a finger across her lips and she sucks it into her mouth and . . . oh god, I feel like I’m about to . . .

But I don’t want this to end, so I pull out of Camille’s mouth.

“Let me suck you!” she begs.

This is the best night of my life.

I’ve finally entered the world I’ve been reading about in porn magazines and watching in adult movies since puberty. Just as women are trained by the media and society to look for their Prince Charming, men are conditioned to look for their nasty slut. Not for a marriage, but just for an adventure. Both are fairy tales, but a Prince Charming is nearly impossible to find, because it’s a lifetime illusion to sustain. It takes only a few minutes to play the role of nasty slut.

The only thing keeping me from fully enjoying this sexual paradise is the guilt: that Anne is in the hotel worrying, that the fashionistas are angry, and that because I’m liking this so much, it means I’m a sex addict, as is everyone else here. The counselors back at rehab have really done a number on my head. I used to be worried just about sexually transmitted diseases, but they’ve turned sex itself into a disease. And now, any time I’m giving myself over to pleasure, I hear a therapist’s voice in the back of my head telling me I’m avoiding intimacy.

Just as I promised my friend Rick Rubin I’d go all in on addiction treatment without doubt, I need to go all in on freedom without guilt. The answer will become clear over time: Either I’ll hit bottom, as others predicted, or I’ll find a solution that works for my life, as I hope. I need to get out of my head and be present for this experience. And to remember why I’m here: not just to have a lot of sex, but to find my relationship orientation and like-minded partners.

As my eyes meet Veronika’s again, I notice a dick hanging in my peripheral vision like a cloud covering the sun. Its owner says to me in a thick French accent, “All the girls here, they have been sucking your dick.”

“I guess so.”

“Do you like having your dick sucked?”

It seems like an obvious question, but I reply anyway, “Yes.” I try not to make eye contact. This conversation definitely isn’t helping my staying power.

“Would you like that I should suck your dick?”

“Oh, no thanks.” I don’t know why, but the situation seems to call for politeness. “I’m good.”

I suppose if I technically wanted total freedom, I’d let him go to town. But, I realize, the goal isn’t sexual anarchy. It’s that I want the rules around my sexuality to be self-imposed, not externally imposed. That’s the key difference—perhaps in everything.

The goal, then, is liberation: to be the master of my orgasm. I don’t want my partner to own it, which would be monogamy, but I also don’t want the orgasm to own me, which would be addiction.

My new admirer has inadvertently given me a gift. Though he doesn’t say anything else, I keep seeing his dick—on my right side, then my left, then a foot above me—as if he’s hoping that by just dangling it around me, at some point I’ll decide to show my appreciation. That seems to be how things work here. Maybe this is where all the women hang out who actually like it when guys text photos of their dicks.

A Valkyrie with long blond hair and missile breasts clambers onto the bed with her boyfriend. I eye-fuck her to get back into the spirit of the orgy. She holds my gaze. But before I get a chance to do a thing about it, Bruno appears out of the blue and starts fucking her.

I don’t know how he does it. This must be his tenth woman. Suddenly I remember that Camille has been down there sucking me for half an hour straight. I put on a condom, lie down, and move her on top of me.

Camille rides me as Veronika positions herself over my face. I am smothered in woman. If this is happening right now because my mother smothered me, then I owe her a serious thank-you.

Suddenly, a loud, condescending German voice fills the room: “Where is he?”

I tilt my head back and see an upside-down image of the fashionistas standing against the wall, staring into the mass of bodies.

“It’s just like him to do this to us!”

I try to shield myself underneath the women so the fashionistas don’t spot me.

“Let’s just leave without him.”

Their voices cut through the room, killing all sexuality in their path.

“So selfish.”

For a millisecond, I consider stopping. I should probably get back to the hotel and check on Anne anyway.

Then I think, No. This is amazing. I don’t want to stop this. So I’m selfish. Let me be selfish. They can leave and I’ll deal with it later. I’m learning how to take care of my own needs for a change.

In moments like these, the true nature of one’s soul is revealed.

“Let’s switch,” Veronika suggests. This is a switch club after all, so I slide out of Camille so she can swap places with Veronika. However, as soon as Camille’s lower orifice is free, Bruno is in there. The guy never misses an opportunity. I’m sure he’s a great businessman in the outside world.

Veronika slides her body over mine, her skin rubbing against my clothing, her back arched so we can see each other’s faces. I switch condoms and slowly enter her. We move against each other sensuously. Time slows. We fall out of sync with the rest of the club and into each other.

I gaze deeply into the world in Veronika’s eyes and she into mine—and it feels like love. Not the love that is a thought that comes with expectations of commitment and fears of abandonment, but the love that is an emotion that makes no demands and knows no fear. I’ve found, for a moment, love in a swing club.

Connected sex is a spiritual experience, but not in the way new-age western Tantra devotees describe it. It is spiritual because it’s a release from ego, a merging with the other, a discorporation into the atoms vibrating around us, a connection to the universal energy that moves through all things without judgment or prejudice.

Thus, orgasm is the one spiritual practice that unites nearly everyone on the planet, and perhaps that is why there’s so much fear and baggage around it. Because they were right both in rehab and the pseudo-religious sex cults: It is sacred.

And every orgasm. Is in itself an act of faith. An attempt to reach out. And just for a moment. Relieve our separateness. Escape from time. And touch eternity. And, yes!

As she drenches the mattress, I fill the condom.

Not only did I find love at an orgy, I think I found enlightenment.

ENLIGHTENMENT COLLIDES WITH “REAL LIFE”

A MONTH LATER, IN SAN FRANCISCO

“I moved in with three girlfriends and it’s been a complete disaster. No one’s getting along.”

That voice is, unfortunately, mine. I am making an emergency call to the smartest person I know in the world of polyamory. I would caution against, however, judging his level of intelligence from the name he goes by. It is Pepper Mint.

Really.

Months have passed since I made the decision to find a free relationship, and I eventually found three of them. So with a relationship roster that looks like a visit to Disney’s “Small World” ride–Anne, from France; Belle, from Australia; and Veronika, from the Czech Republic–we all decided to move into a house in San Francisco together.

And while months have passed since my decision to broaden my relationship horizons, unfortunately only a day has passed since we all moved in together. Problems came up that I just couldn’t anticipate, that weren’t covered in any books on the subject, that even the experts didn’t mention.

Like this one: The four of us traipse down the stairs, hungry and excited for a good meal. I get in the driver’s seat of the car. And… three women stand in front of the passenger seat of the car, looking confused and uncomfortable. They look to me to make a decision. But how can I pick favorites? That’s not going to help us live in equality this weekend. Eventually, we decide on a rotational system for the front seat: Alice will take the front seat now. Next time, Belle gets the front seat. Then Veronika.

It’s as ridiculous as it sounds.

The automobile was clearly designed by monogamists.

And that was just the beginning: Even though all three women were excited about being in a group relationship, and two of them had already had related experiences, by the end of that first night all together, I felt like I was on an episode of The Bachelor. Competition reared its ugly heads at a party that night, at which all three of them wanted to leave at different times, Anne became jealous when anyone else touched me, Belle became upset when I told her to be careful about touching me because of Anne, and Veronika was irritated with all the drama.

There’s a term popular in the poly world: compersion.

It was coined supposedly at the Kerista commune in San Francisco decades ago. And it’s the idea that if the person you love is with another partner, rather than feeling jealous, you can feel happy for them because they are happy. And if you love someone, you should be glad that they’re happy, whether or not they’re experiencing it with you, right?

Compersion is evidently a lot harder to feel than it sounds. And it already seems pretty difficult to feel.

So that night, in light of the clear and total absence of compersion, I ended up sleeping on the couch so as not to hurt anyone’s feelings.

The moral thus far: Be careful what you wish for.

So now, the next day, I was on the phone with Pepper Mint, begging for help. Things could only get better from here.

“You’re trying to run before you can walk,” he informed me.

“What do you mean?”

“How many people are in the house?”

“Four of us.”

“So mathematically that’s six relationships. And it’s hard enough to make one relationship work.”

I had thought of it as a single relationship, or three at most. But I do the math—n(n-1)/2, with “n” being the number of lovers in a poly pod.—and he’s right.

“But there was this guy Father Yod,” I protest, “who had fourteen wives and it worked for him . . . I think.” I realize I don’t know much about how Father Yod managed his relationships. In fact, I just looked at the pictures.

“Who’s Father Yod?”

“He’s like Charles Manson, but without the killing.” Actually, that’s not totally true. I recall reading online afterward that Father Yod was a judo expert who murdered two people with his bare hands in self-defense.

“What I can tell you is that a shared living situation is what we call an advanced skill,” Pepper says, unfazed. “But trust me, it can work. I just went on a weeklong vacation to Hawaii with my partner and her boyfriend. And it was totally smooth because the three of us had spent so much time together.”

“Right now, I can’t see us ever getting to that point.” I suppose after a few years, one can get used to anything.

“Do you want me to come by and talk to them?”

“Please!”

When Pepper arrives an hour later, we gather in the living room, desperate for a miracle. I dare not sit on the couch in case it looks like I’m favoring whichever girl drops down next to me, so I take an armchair instead. Veronika and Pepper sit in the other chairs while Belle and Anne share the couch.

I introduce Pepper to everyone and list all the problems we’ve had so far. He listens carefully, then responds as if telling preschoolers to play nicely with each other. Unlike with monogamy, our culture offers no schooling on how to make a group relationship work, no real role models to look up to, and few—if any—friends to turn to for advice. Even in movies, when couples decide to open their marriage, the results are usually disastrous and the moral of the story is to stick with what you’ve got.

“Here’s your first lesson in going out together,” he begins. He is a sharp-featured, pale creature with long black hair, a black choker, and a slow, measured voice. I wonder if he was always this calm and deliberate or if it’s something he learned from years of managing multiple relationships. “You need to talk before you leave and have a plan for party protocol. If someone gets tired, do they take a cab home alone or do you all leave together? And if it’s a sexual situation, decide ahead of time whether you want to watch or leave or join the sex pile.” This makes perfect sense, yet it never occurred to me: The art of group relationships is logistics. “I want to encourage you to do little check-ins with one another constantly, with the knowledge that you don’t know each other very well. This way you can start to build a team feeling together.”

We nod in agreement. I suppose I was naïve to assume we would all just instantly become attached and live in relational utopia together. I’ve made mistakes in every monogamous relationship I’ve had, but I learned from them and that made the next relationship better. So it makes sense that my first multiple-partner relationship isn’t going to be a runaway success. It takes experience and failure to get good at anything. This is my opportunity to learn.

“I want to add something that’s important,” Pepper continues. “You”—he points to me—“are the fulcrum. This is a long-known poly situation. The fulcrum is the only person in a relationship with each partner, but because of that, you end up torn in a lot of different directions. It’s a very uncomfortable thing, because you’re empowered and disempowered at the same time.” He turns to the women. “So I would like to recommend that you all try to de-center Neil a little.”

I heave a hopefully imperceptible sigh of relief. I watched several documentaries on poly pods before coming here, and many were led by people with a pathological need to be the focal point of everyone’s love. They didn’t seem to care whose feelings got hurt as long as the empty space in their own hearts was kept filled. But for me, it’s no fun being the center of attention when it results in collateral damage to other people’s feelings.

“So how do we de-center me?” I ask Pepper.

“The three of you”—he gestures to my partners—“should hang out without him and also start negotiating decisions that don’t have to go through him first. The easy part of the situation is you and Neil, and you and Neil, and you and Neil”—here he points to each woman. “The hard part of the situation is your relationships with each other. I have a saying: Poly works or fails on trust between metamours.”

“What’s a metamour?” Veronika asks.

“A metamour is a partner’s partner. So if Neil and I were both dating you, then Neil would be my metamour. And it succeeds between him and me, because we have the hard part but not the good stuff. So when you build trust among metamours, everything comes together and the group starts functioning. Does that make sense?”

We were in the dark before. This pale Goth guy is the light. He’s a relationship pioneer, mapping new realms in interpersonal space.

He tells us about the burning period, which is the length of time (usually two years) it takes couples who open up to deal with the issues and challenges that occur as a result. I learn about the joys of theoretical nonmonogamy, which is when two people say they’re in an open relationship—but instead of actually sleeping with other people, they just get to feel free knowing they have the option to do so. There’s the jealousy test, which you pass if you’re able to have a serious relationship with someone who’s sleeping with other people or in love with someone else. Then there’s fluid bonded, which refers to partners who feel safe having unprotected sex with one another, and veto power, which means that one partner can ask another to end an outside relationship—an agreement that Pepper feels can cause more problems than it solves. Finally, there are the wearisome cowboys and cowgirls who get into the poly scene, date someone’s partner, and then try to rope that person into a monogamous relationship.

“So what do I do if I want to spend time with Neil alone?” Belle eventually asks. “Every time I try to do that, he says it’s rude to someone else.”

“Try not making the request to Neil. Make it to Anne and Veronika. And if they both say it’s okay, then you can do whatever you want with Neil.” The corners of Belle’s mouth turn up in an unsuccessfully repressed smile. Pepper spots this and adds sagely, “But be willing to hear a no.”

Veronika sighs and uncrosses her legs. “It’s so hard to share a person,” she says. “It would be easier if we didn’t have strong feelings. But there’s always going to be this mental fight to have him.”

Although having three attractive women fighting over me may seem like an ego trip, in reality it’s nerve shattering. Whatever interest they had in me before they arrived seems to have been exacerbated by the competition. According to a copy of O magazine I once read, polygamous men live nine years longer, on average, than monogamous men. But I wonder how Oprah could possibly be right. Because this is definitely not good for my blood pressure.

Pepper turns to me: “What you can do to get them past that point is reassure them. I’ve seen really jealous people and people with a lot of abandonment issues get past their shit once the fear of loss goes away. A good nonmonogamous group is like a flock of geese, which is to say it separates and comes back together.”

Anne opens her mouth to speak. The words escape soft and unsure. Everyone leans in to make sure they catch them. “For me, I was really surprised last night because when everybody was touching, it was hurting me.” She takes a pause so long it seems like an intermission. “I have a complicated family history, so maybe I get more possessive. But I understand now that we have to make things work so this can be a relationship.”

Pepper’s talk seems to be straightening everyone out. The metamours are remembering that they didn’t come here to be in some reality-show competition, but to live, learn, and grow in a mature relationship together. “I would recommend letting go of expectations and trying to get to a place of comfort with everything,” Pepper tells her. “If things get weird, let them be weird. If you can all get to a high communication level, and learn the process of negotiation and setting boundaries and talking through discomfort, this will start working much better for all of you.”

Before Pepper leaves, the girls and I agree to hold house meetings every day, during which each person gets a turn to speak uninterrupted–like in the talking-stick circle I made fun of back in sex rehab.

As a sense of calm and understanding descends on the house afterward, Veronika makes egg salad sandwiches and we sit around the table, all on the same page for the first time. Then, with Anne taking the front seat of the car without incident, we visit Alcatraz. As we walk from the ferry to the island prison, Belle holds my left arm while Anne clutches the other. Veronika wanders behind, taking photos.

“I feel like I’m a third child whose mother doesn’t have enough hands to hold,” Veronika says as she catches up to us.

She takes Anne’s hand in hers as a group of frat boys walks by and gives me a thumbs-up. For the first time, there’s a group energy connecting us. Perhaps all of us just needed to let go of our expectations like Pepper recommended, adjust to being somewhere new, and allow the relationship to set its own course.

And that’s when something unexpected happens: I’m overcome by a powerful sense of unworthiness. It doesn’t seem fair that these women have to share me. Any one of them could easily have her pick of the guys here who keep looking at us. But instead they’re settling for scraps of my affection.

When I imagined living in a freewheeling love commune during my monogamous relationship, I thought I’d be adrift in a blissful sea of pleasure, excitement, and feminine energy. But instead I only feel embarrassed that I’m monopolizing three hearts.

I spent my childhood starved for the love of the adult figures raising me, feeling like most of their positivity went to my brother and their negativity to me. So being in a position where I’m actually getting so much positive female caring is a new experience. Maybe the real purpose of this relationship for me is to break through my walls and feel worthy of love—or whatever this is.

CONCLUSION

This was the quiet before the storm: One of the worst relationship storms I’ve ever experienced.

The situation lasted roughly a week, then turned into a triad with just Belle and Veronika, then turned into me alone.

The lesson: If a relationship with one person is difficult, then a relationship with three people is going to be three times as difficult—or, according to the Pepper sum, six times as difficult.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, I am not a quitter. I decided that if I couldn’t make it work with three other people, then I’d definitely be able to make it work with ten.

After all, what could possibly go wrong?

But that’s a story for another time.

###

Want more stories and more of the lessons learned? Of course you do. Check out The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships. I have my own dog-eared early copy.

The post Inside an "Anything Goes" Sex Club appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Turning 38-years young… and still not acting my age. (Photo: Sir Garrett Camp)

38! I’ll turn a glorious 38 soon.

It’s going to be a great natal year–I can already feel it. Perhaps it will be good luck for you, too. In this post, I’m giving away a round-trip ticket anywhere in the world.

But back to that strange birthday gift…

Much to the chagrin of my momma-san, I’ve become difficult to buy presents for. Some friends even think I’m impossible to find presents for. Not so. I love handwritten letters, homemade brownies, and–most of all–when people do something nice.

You, dear readers, have a record of being nice and making it count. In fact, you’ve changed thousands of lives with small acts of kindness!

For my b-day in 2010, you all raised more than $100,000 for high-need public school classrooms in the US. More recently, you helped build libraries overseas (See the construction progress on Cambodia, Nepal, and Sri Lanka here, as well as the completed schools in Vietnam).

In lieu of gifts this year, my birthday wish is…

To create the FIRST elementary school in the world with exclusively stand-up desks!

Why?

This is a chance to be part of history.  

THE PROBLEM:

8-18-year olds spend ~85% of their waking hours sitting (Source: Kaiser Family Foundation), and researchers like Dr. James Levine of the Mayo Clinic now compare the health risks of extended sitting to those of smoking.

THE PROTOTYPE THAT COULD CHANGE THE FUTURE:

This is the pilot experiment that could change how schools worldwide are designed. I’m joining forces with Kelly and Juliet Starrett, the brains behind this project and founders of StandUpKids. The goal is to get every public school student in the US at a standing desk within 10 years. This massive goal is achievable if the right snowballs are put in motion now, and this proof-of-concept school is the most important. Media coverage, national attention, political pressure/alliances, etc. can all stem from this. It’s super high leverage.  

Here’s what we’re doing, plus a few things to sweeten the pot:

1. Join my 38th birthday challenge by clicking here. It’s worth clicking through just to check out the site; Donorschoose.org is one of the most creative non-profits in the world.  This is also their most ambitious project ever.

2. To get your engines started, and to put money where our mouths are: I’ve ready donated $10,000 of my own money, and Kelly and Juliet Starrett have done the same. We have lots of skin in the game.

3. If the spirit moves you, please make a $38 tax-deductible donation (for my 38 years), or whatever you can ($1, $35, $1,000, etc.).

4. We hit $100K and outfit a school that could affect the nation…or even the world! This isn’t hyperbole. This is precisely how movements are started.

So, to get this party started in force…

Sweetening the Pot…

• I’m giving away a free round-trip ticket anywhere in the world that Star Alliance flies, which is just about everywhere. There is no expiration date on the trip, so no rush on deciding where or when to go.

Here’s how to get it:

• Spread the word however you can. Send people to this post or to the Donorschoose.org page.

• Leave a comment below telling me what you did (Facebook, Twitter, blog post, e-mail blast, e-mail signature, encouraged employees/friends to do the same, company donation matching, etc.). Measurement of any type gets huge bonus points. This comment must be put up no later than 5pm PST on Friday, June 26th, 2015.

• Lastly, answer one question at the very top of your comment: “What does education mean to you?”  Put “#EducationMeans” at the very top, followed by your answer.  This is an IQ test in following directions, as we’ll skip entries without #EducationMeans at the top.

I’ll pick the winner (if clear), OR my team will pick the top 3-5 promoters, and you’ll vote on the winner of the round-trip.  As always: over 18 only, any taxes are your responsibility, void where prohibited, no minotaurs, etc.

Fun!

But the best reason of all…

Beyond the bribes, you’ll feel awesome about yourself for doing real good.

Trust me. It feels great.

Will you pause for a moment and step up, even if for $1? It would mean the world to me. I’ll share updates as I get them.

Again, here is where you can donate $38, $1, $1,000, or whatever you can.  Just click here.

Thank you for reading this post. You are all rock stars, and I continue to write on this blog purely because of you.

Pura vida,

Tim

The post An Unusual $100,000 Birthday Present (Plus: Free Round-Trip Anywhere in the World) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

In this post, I’m going to talk about suicide, and why I’m still on this planet.

These are stories I’ve kept secret from my family, girlfriends, and closest friends for years. Recently, however, I had an experience that shook me — woke me up — and I decided that it was time to share it all.

So, despite the shame I might feel, the fear that is making my palms sweat as I type this, allow me to get started.

Here we go…

A TWIST OF FATE

“Could you please sign this for my brother? It would mean a lot to him.”

He was a kind fan. There were perhaps a dozen people around me asking questions, and he had politely waited his turn. The ask: A simple signature.

It was Friday night, around 7pm, and a live recording of the TWiST podcast had just ended. There was electricity in the air. Jason Calacanis, the host and interviewer, sure knows how to put on a show. He’d hyped up the crowd and kept things rolling for more than 2 hours on stage, asking me every imaginable question. The venue–Pivotal Labs’ offices in downtown SF–had been packed to capacity. Now, more than 200 people were milling about, drinking wine, or heading off for their weekends.

A handful of attendees gathered near the mics for pics and book inscriptions.

“Anything in particular you’d like me to say to him? To your brother?” I asked this one gent, who was immaculately dressed in a suit. His name was Silas.

He froze for few seconds but kept eye contact. I saw his eyes flutter. There was something unusual that I couldn’t put a finger on.

I decided to take the pressure off: “I’m sure I can come up with something. Are you cool with that?” Silas nodded.

I wrote a few lines, added a smiley face, signed the book he’d brought, and handed it back. He thanked me and backed out of the crowd. I waived and returned to chatting with the others.

Roughly 30 minutes later, I had to run. My girlfriend had just landed at SFO and I needed to meet her for dinner. I started walking towards the elevators.

“Excuse me, Tim?” It was Silas. He’d been waiting for me. “Can I talk to you for a second?”

“Sure,” I said, “but walk with me.”

We meandered around tables and desks to the relative privacy of the elevator vestibule, and I hit the Down button. As soon as Silas started his story, I forgot about the elevator.

He apologized for freezing earlier, for not having an answer. His younger brother–the one I signed the book for–had recently committed suicide. He was 22.

“He looked up to you,” Silas explained, “He loved listening to you and Joe Rogan. I wanted to get your signature for him. I’m going to put this in his room.” He gestured to the book. I could see tears welling up in his eyes, and I felt my own doing the same. He continued.

“People listen to you. Have you ever thought about talking about these things? About suicide or depression? You might be able to save someone.” Now, it was my turn to stare at him blankly. I didn’t know what to say.

I also didn’t have an excuse. Unbeknownst to him, I had every reason to talk about suicide. I’d only skimmed the surface with a few short posts about depression.

Some of my closest high school friends killed themselves.

Some of my closest college friends killed themselves.

I almost killed myself.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said to Silas. I wondered if he’d waited more than three hours just to tell me this. I suspected he had. Good for him. He had bigger balls than I. Certainly, I’d failed his brother by being such a coward in my writing. How many others had I failed? These questions swam in my mind.

“I will write about this” I said to Silas, awkwardly patting his shoulder. I was thrown off. “I promise.”

And with that, I got into the elevator.

INTO THE DARKNESS

“They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.”

– Mexican proverb

There are some secrets we don’t share because they’re embarrassing.

Like that time I met an icon by accidentally hitting on his girlfriend at a coffee shop? That’s a good one (Sorry, N!). Or the time a celebrity panelist borrowed my laptop to project a boring corporate video, and a flicker of porn popped up–a la Fight Club–in front of a crowd of 400 people? Another good example.

But then there are dark secrets. The things we tell no one. The shadows we keep covered for fear of unraveling our lives.

For me, 1999 was full of shadows.

So much so that I never wanted to revisit them.

I hadn’t talked about this traumatic period publicly until last week, first in a reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything), then in greater depth on Derek Halpern’s podcast.

What follows is the sequence of my downward spiral.

Reading the below, it’s incredible how trivial some of it seems in retrospect. At the time, though, it was the perfect storm.

I include wording like “impossible situation,” which was reflective of my thinking at the time, not objective reality.

I still vividly recall these events, but any quotes are paraphrased. Please also excuse any grammatical/tense errors, as it was hard for me to put this down. So, starting where it began…

• It’s my senior year at Princeton. I’m slated to graduate around June of 1999. Somewhere in the first six months, several things happen in the span of a few weeks:
• I fail to make it to final interviews for McKinsey Consulting and Trilogy Software, in addition to others. I have no idea what I’m doing wrong, and I start losing confidence after “winning” in the game of academics for so long.
• A long-term (for a college kid, anyway) girlfriend breaks up with me shortly thereafter. Not because of the job stuff, but because I became more insecure during that period, wanted more time with her, and was massively disruptive to her final varsity sports season. What’s wrong with me?
• I have a fateful meeting with one of my thesis advisors in the East Asian Studies department. Having read a partial draft of my work, he presents a large stack of original research in Japanese for me to incorporate. I walk out with my head spinning — how am I going to finish this thesis (which generally run 60-100 pages or more) before graduation? What am I going to do?

It’s important to note that at Princeton, the senior thesis is largely viewed as the pinnacle of your four-year undergrad career. That’s reflected in its grading. The thesis is often worth around 25% of your entire departmental GPA (English department example here).

After all of the above, things continued as follows…

• I find a rescue option! In the course of researching language learning for the thesis, I’m introduced to a wonderful PhD who works at Berlitz International. Bernie was his name. We have a late dinner one night on Witherspoon Street in Princeton. He speaks multiple languages and is a nerd, just like me. One hour turns into two, which turns into three. At the end, he says, “You know, it’s too bad you’re graduating in a few months. I have a project that would be perfect for you, but it’s starting sooner.” This could be exactly the solution I’m looking for!
• I chat with my parents about potentially taking a year off, beginning in the middle of my senior year. This would allow me time to finish and polish the thesis, while simultaneously testing jobs in the “real world.” It seems like a huge win-win, and my parents— to their credit —are hugely supportive.
• The Princeton powers OK the idea, and I meet with the aforementioned thesis advisor to inform him of my decision. Instead of being happy that I’m taking time to get the thesis right (what I expected), he seems furious: “So you’re just going to quit?! To cop out?! This better be the best thesis I’ve ever seen in my life.” In my stressed out state, and in the exchange that follows, I hear a series of thinly veiled threats and ultimatums… but no professor would actually do that, right? The meeting ends with a dismissive laugh and a curt “Good luck.” I’m crushed and wander out in a daze.
• Once I’ve regained my composure, my shock turns to anger. How could a thesis advisor threaten a student with a bad grade just because they’re taking time off? I knew my thesis wouldn’t be “the best thesis” he’d ever seen, so it was practically a guarantee of a bad grade, even if I did a great job. This would be obvious to anyone, right?
• I meet with multiple people in the Princeton administration, and the response is — simply put — “He wouldn’t do that.” I’m speechless. Am I being called a liar? Why would I lie? What was my incentive? It seemed like no one was willing to rock the boat with a senior (I think tenured) professor. I’m speechless and feel betrayed. Faculty politics matter more than I do.
• I leave my friends behind at school and move off campus to work — I find out remotely — for Berlitz. “Remote” means I end up working at home by myself. This is a recipe for disaster. The work is rewarding, but I spend all of my non-work time — from when I wake to when I go to bed — looking at hundreds of pages of thesis notes and research spread out on my bedroom floor. It’s an uncontainable mess.
• After 2-3 months of attempting to incorporate my advisor’s original-language Japanese research, the thesis is a disaster. Despite (or perhaps because of) staring at paper alone for 8-16 hours a day, it’s a Frankenstein’s monster of false starts, dead ends, and research that shouldn’t be there in the first place. Totally unusable. I am, without a doubt, in worse shape than when I left school.
• My friends are graduating, celebrating, and leaving Princeton behind. I am sitting in a condo off campus, trapped in an impossible situation. My thesis work is going nowhere, and even if it turns out spectacular, I have (in my mind) a vindictive advisor who’s going to burn me. By burning me, he’ll destroy everything I’ve sacrificed for since high school: great grades in high school got me to Princeton, great grades in Princeton should get me to a dream job, etc. By burning me, he’ll make Princeton’s astronomical tuition wasted money, nothing more than a small fortune my family has pissed away. I start sleeping in until 2 or 3pm. I can’t face the piles of unfinished work surrounding me. My coping mechanism is to cover myself in sheets, minimize time awake, and hope for a miracle.
• No miracle arrives. Then one afternoon, as I’m wandering through a Barnes and Noble with no goal in particular, I chance upon a book about suicide. Right there in front of me on a display table. Perhaps this is the “miracle”? I sit down and read the entire book, taking copious notes into a journal, including other books listed in the bibliography. For the first time in ages, I’m excited about research. In a sea of uncertainty and hopeless situations, I feel like I’ve found hope: the final solution.
• I return to Princeton campus. This time, I go straight to Firestone Library to check out all of the suicide-related books on my to-do list. One particularly promising-sounding title is out, so I reserve it. I’ll be next in line when it comes back. I wonder what poor bastard is reading it, and if they’ll be able to return it.
• It’s important to mention here that, by this point, I was past deciding. The decision was obvious to me. I’d somehow failed, painted myself into this ridiculous corner, wasted a fortune on a school that didn’t care about me, and what would be the point of doing otherwise? To repeat these types of mistakes forever? To be a hopeless burden to myself and my family and friends? Fuck that. The world was better off without a loser who couldn’t figure this basic shit out. What would I ever contribute? Nothing. So the decision was made, and I was in full-on planning mode.
• In this case, I was dangerously good at planning. I had 4-6 scenarios all spec’d out, start to finish, including collaborators and covers when needed. And that’s when I got the phone call.
• [My mom?! That wasn’t in the plan.]
• I’d forgotten that Firestone Library now had my family home address on file, as I’d technically taken a year of absence. This meant a note was mailed to my parents, something along the lines of “Good news! The suicide book you requested is now available at the library for pick up!”
• Oops (and thank fucking God).
• Suddenly caught on the phone with my mom, I was unprepared. She nervously asked about the book, so I thought fast and lied: “Oh, no need to worry about that. Sorry! One of my friends goes to Rutgers and didn’t have access to Firestone, so I reserved it for him. He’s writing about depression and stuff.”
• I was shocked out of my own delusion by a one-in-a-million accident. It was only then that I realized something: my death wasn’t just about me. It would completely destroy the lives of those I cared most about. I imagined my mom, who had no part in creating my thesis mess, suffering until her dying day, blaming herself.
• The very next week, I decided to take the rest of my “year off” truly off (to hell with the thesis) and focus on physical and mental health. That’s how the entire “sumo” story of the 1999 Chinese Kickboxing (Sanshou) Championships came to be, if you’ve read The 4-Hour Workweek.
• Months later, after focusing on my body instead of being trapped in my head, things were much clearer. Everything seemed more manageable. The “hopeless” situation seemed like shitty luck but nothing permanent.
• I returned to Princeton, turned in my now-finished thesis to my still-sour advisor, got chewed up in my thesis defense, and didn’t give a fuck. It wasn’t the best thesis he’d ever read, nor the best thing I’d ever written, but I had moved on.
• Many thanks are due to a few people who helped me regain my confidence that final semester. None of them have heard this story, but I’d like to give them credit here. Among others: My parents and family (of course), Professor Ed Zschau, Professor John McPhee, Sympoh dance troupe, and my friends at the amazing Terrace Food Club.
• I graduated with the class of 2000, and bid goodbye to Nassau Hall. I rarely go back, as you might imagine.

Given the purported jump in “suicidal gestures” at Princeton and its close cousins (Harvard appears to have 2x the national average for undergrad suicides), I hope the administration is taking things seriously.  If nearly half of your student population reports feeling depressed, there might be systemic issues to fix.

Left unfixed, you’ll have more dead kids on your hands, guaranteed.

It’s not enough to wait for people to reach out, or to request that at-risk kids take a leave of absence “off the clock” of the university.

Perhaps regularly reach out to the entire student body to catch people before they fall?  It could be as simple as email.

[Sidenote: After graduating, I promised myself that I would never write anything longer than an email ever again. Pretty hilarious that I now write 500-plus-page books, eh?]

OUT OF THE DARKNESS

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage…”

– Lao Tzu

First, let me give a retrospective analysis of my near obliteration.  Then, I’ll give you a bunch of tools and tricks that I still use for keeping the darkness at arm’s length.

Now, at this point, some of you might also be thinking “That’s it?! A Princeton student was at risk of getting a bad grade? Boo-fuckin’-hoo, man. Give me a break…”

But… that’s the entire point.  It’s easy to blow things out of proportion, to get lost in the story you tell yourself, and to think that your entire life hinges on one thing you’ll barely remember 5-10 years later. That seemingly all-important thing could be a bad grade, getting into college, a relationship, a divorce, getting fired, or just a bunch of hecklers on the Internet.

So, back to our story–why didn’t I kill myself?

Below are the realizations that helped me (and a few friends).  They certainly won’t work for everyone suffering from depression, but my hope is that they help some of you.

1. Call this number : 1 (800) 273-8255. I didn’t have it, and I wish I had. It’s the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (website and live chat here). It’s available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in both English and Spanish.

If you’re outside of the US, please click here for a list of international hotlines.

Sometimes, it just takes one conversation with one rational person to stop a horrible irrational decision. If you’re considering ending your life, please reach out to them.  If you’re too embarrassed to admit that, as I was, then you can ping them “just to chat for a few minutes.” Pretend you’re killing time or testing different suicide hotlines for a directory you’re compiling. Whatever works.

Speaking personally, I want to see the gifts you have to offer the world. And speaking from personal experience, believe me: this too shall pass, whatever it is.

2. I realized it would destroy other people’s lives. Killing yourself can spiritually kill other people.

Even if you’re not lucky enough, as I was, to feel loved by other people, I think this is worth meditating on.

Your death is not perfectly isolated. It can destroy a lot, whether your family (who will blame themselves), other loved ones, or simply the law enforcement officers or coroners who have to haul your death mask-wearing carcass out of an apartment or the woods. The guaranteed outcome of suicide is NOT things improving for you (or going blank), but creating a catastrophe for others. Even if your intention is to get revenge through suicide, the damage won’t be limited to your targets.

A friend once told me that killing yourself is like taking your pain, multiplying it 10x, and giving it to the ones who love you.  I agree with this, but there’s more.  Beyond any loved ones, you could include neighbors, innocent bystanders exposed to your death, and people — often kids — who commit “copycat suicides” when they read about your demise. This is the reality, not the cure-all fantasy, of suicide.

If think about killing yourself, imagine yourself wearing a suicide bomber’s vest of explosives and walking into a crowd of innocents.

That’s effectively what it is.  Even if you “feel” like no one loves you or cares about you, you are most likely loved–and most definitely lovable and worthy of love.

3. There’s no guarantee that killing yourself improves things!

In a tragically comic way, this was a depressing realization when I was considering blowing my head off or getting run over.  Damnation!  No guarantees.  Death and taxes, yes, but not a breezy afterlife.

The “afterlife” could be 1,000x worse than life, even at its worst.  No one knows. I personally believe that consciousness persists after physical death, and it dawned on me that I literally had zero evidence that my death would improve things. It’s a terrible bet. At least here, in this life, we have known variables we can tweak and change. The unknown void could be Dante’s Inferno or far worse. When we just “want the pain to stop,” it’s easy to forget this. You simply don’t know what’s behind door #3.

In our desperation, we often just don’t think it through. It’s kind of like the murder-suicide joke by one of my favorite comics, Demetri Martin:

“Someone who commits a murder-suicide is probably somebody who isn’t thinking through the afterlife. Bam! You’re dead. Bam! I’m dead. Oh shit … this is going to be awkward forever.”

4. Tips from friends, related to #2 above.

For some of my friends (all high achievers, for those wondering), a “non-suicide vow” is what made all the difference. Here is one friend’s description:

“It only mattered when I made a vow to the one person in my life I knew I would never break it to [a sibling]. It’s powerful when you do that. All of a sudden, this option that I sometimes played around in my mind, it was off the table. I would never break a vow to my brother, ever. After the vow and him accepting it, I’ve had to approach life in a different way. There is no fantasy escape hatch. I’m in it. In the end, making a vow to him is the greatest gift I could have given myself.”

As silly as it might sound, it’s sometimes easier to focus on keeping your word, and avoiding hurting someone, than preserving your own life.

And that’s OK. Use what works first, and you can fix the rest later. If you need to disguise a vow out of embarrassment (“How would I confess that to a friend?!”), find a struggling friend to make a mutual “non-suicide vow” with.  Make it seem like you’re only trying to protect him or her. Still too much? Make it a “mutual non-self-hurt” vow with a friend who beats themselves up.

Make it about him or her as much as you.

If you don’t care about yourself, make it about other people.

Make a promise you can’t break, or at the very least realize this: killing yourself will destroy other people’s lives.

PRACTICAL GREMLIN DEFENSE

Now, let’s talk day-to-day tactics.

The fact of the matter is this: if you’re driven, an entrepreneur, a type-A personality, or a hundred other things, mood swings are part of your genetic hardwiring.  It’s a blessing and a curse.

Below are a number of habits and routines that help me. They might seem simplistic, but they keep me from careening too far off the tracks.  They are my defense against the abyss. They might help you find your own, or use them as a starting point.

Most of this boxed text is from a previous post on “productivity ‘hacks’ for the neurotic, manic-depressive, and crazy (like me)“, but I’ve added a few things:

Most “superheroes” are nothing of the sort. They’re weird, neurotic creatures who do big things DESPITE lots of self-defeating habits and self-talk.

Here are some of my coping mechanisms for making it through the day:

1) Wake up at least 1 hour before you have to be at a computer screen. E-mail is the mind killer.

2) Make a cup of tea (I like pu-erh like this) and sit down with a pen/pencil and paper.

3) Write down the 3-5 things — and no more — that are making you most anxious or uncomfortable. They’re often things that have been punted from one day’s to-do list to the next, to the next, to the next, and so on. Most important usually = most uncomfortable, with some chance of rejection or conflict.

4) For each item, ask yourself:

– “If this were the only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day?”

– “Will moving this forward make all the other to-do’s unimportant or easier to knock off later?”

5) Look only at the items you’ve answered “yes” to for at least one of these questions.

6) Block out at 2-3 hours to focus on ONE of them for today. Let the rest of the urgent but less important stuff slide. It will still be there tomorrow.

7) TO BE CLEAR: Block out at 2-3 HOURS to focus on ONE of them for today. This is ONE BLOCK OF TIME. Cobbling together 10 minutes here and there to add up to 120 minutes does not work.

8) If you get distracted or start procrastinating, don’t freak out and downward spiral; just gently come back to your ONE to-do.

9) Physically MOVE for at least 20 minutes each day. Go for a long walk, lift weights, take a free online yoga class (YouTube), anything. Ideally, get outside. I was once asked by friend for advice on overcoming debilitating stress. The answer I repeated over and over again was: “Remember to EXERCISE daily. That is 80% of the battle.”

10) Follow a diet that prevents wild blood sugar swings. This means avoiding grains and refined carbohydrates most of the time. I follow the slow-carb diet with one cheat day per week and have done so for 10+ years.  Paleo also works great. Don’t forget to eat plenty of fat. High protein and low fat can give you low-grade symptoms of rabbit starvation.

11) Schedule at least one group dinner with friends per week.  Get it on the calendar no later than 5pm on Monday.  Ideal to have at least three people, but two is still great medicine.

12) Take a minute each day to call or email someone to express gratitude of some type. Consider someone you haven’t spoken with in a long time.  It can be a one-line text or a 5-second voicemail.

Congratulations! That’s it.

Those are the rules I use, and they help steer the ship in the right direction.

Routines are the only way I can feel “successful” despite my never-ending impulse to procrastinate, hit snooze, nap, and otherwise fritter away my days with bullshit. If I have 10 “important” things to do in a day, I’ll feel overwhelmed, and it’s 100% certain nothing important will get done that day. On the other hand, I can usually handle 1 must-do item and block out my lesser behaviors for 2-3 hours a day.

And when — despite your best efforts — you feel like you’re losing at the game of life, never forget: Even the best of the best feel this way sometimes. When I’m in the pit of despair with new book projects, I recall what iconic writer Kurt Vonnegut said about his process: “When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”

Don’t overestimate the world and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think.

TO WRAP UP THIS LONG-ASS POST

My “perfect storm” was nothing permanent.

If we let the storms pass and choose to reflect, we come out better than ever. In the end, regardless of the fucked up acts of others, we have to reach within ourselves and grow. It’s our responsibility to ourselves and–just as critical–to those who love and surround us.

You have gifts to share with the world.

You are not alone.

You are not flawed.

You are human.

And when the darkness comes, when you are fighting the demons, just remember: I’m right there fighting with you.

The gems I’ve found were forged in the struggle. Never ever give up.

Much love,

Tim

P.S. If you have tips that have helped you overcome or manage depression, please share in the comments. I would love for this post to become a growing resource for people. I will also do my best to improve it over time. Thank you.

Additional Resources:

If you occasionally struggle like me, these resources, videos, and articles might help you rebound. I watch the video of Nick Vujicic quite often, just as a reminder of how fortunate I am:

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline –  Dial 988 or 1 (800) 273-8255 (website and live chat here). It’s available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in both English and Spanish. Outside the US? Please click here for a list of international hotlines.

My recent interview with Derek Halpern – The core of the conversation is about how to overcome struggle and the above suicide-related story, but it also includes business strategies and other lessons learned.  My apologies for the weird lip smacking, which is a nervous tic. I thought I’d fixed it, but these stories brought it back 

15-Minute Audio from Tony Robbins – I asked Tony for his thoughts on suicide. He responded with a very insightful audio clip, recorded while in the air. It covers a lot, and the hilarious anecdote about the raw-foodist mom at the end alone makes it worth a listen. NOTE: Of course, NEVER stop taking anti-depressants or any medicine without medical supervision. That is not what Tony is recommending.

Listen in the player above, or download by right-clicking here and choosing “save as.”

The Prescription for Self-Doubt? Watch This Short Video (Nick Vujicic)

Harnessing Entrepreneurial Manic-Depression: Making the Rollercoaster Work for You

Two Root Causes of My Recent Depression – This article is by Brad Feld, one of my favorite start-up investors and a world-class entrepreneur in his own right. It’s just more proof that you’re not alone. Even the best out there feel hopeless at times.  It can be beaten.

Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach.  This book is not nearly as woo-woo as it might seem.  It was recommended to me by a neuroscience PhD who said it changed her life, then by another cynical friend who said the same.  It is one of the most useful books I’ve read in the last two years.  It’s easy to digest, and I suggest one short chapter before bed each night.  For those of us who beat ourselves up, it’s a godsend.

The post Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Charlie Hoehn was a full-time employee of mine during the making and launch of The 4-Hour Body. It was an intense period.

In this post, Charlie will share his M.E.D. (Minimum Effective Dose) for overcoming anxiety and managing workaholism. There are six techniques in total.

If you haven’t already, be sure to read his previous post on preventing burnout.

Enter Charlie

Do you feel a constant sense of dread? Do you have trouble breathing, relaxing, and sleeping? Do you worry that you’re losing control, or that you’re going to die?

In other words: are you trapped in your own personal hell?

I’ve been there (here’s the backstory), and I know what it’s like. Shallow breathing, tension in the gut, chest pains, rapid heartbeat… Every moment is exhausting, crushing, and painful. Anxiety destroys your confidence, your productivity, your relationships, and your ability to enjoy life.

For a long time, I thought I was going crazy. I was convinced that something horribly wrong was about to happen. I tired and afraid all the time, and I didn’t know how to shake it. One half of me pretended to be normal while the other half tried to keep it together.

I tried everything: meditation, yoga, high-intensity workouts, long runs, therapy, therapy books, keeping a journal, super clean diets, extended fasting, drugs, deep breathing exercises, prayer, etc. I even took a six-week course, made specifically for men who wanted to overcome anxiety.

What I discovered is that the most effective “cures” for anxiety are often free, painless, and fun. When I was doing the six techniques I cover in this post on a daily basis, I was able to get back to my normal self in less than one month. 

It’s my sincerest hope that this post helps you eliminate your anxiety, once and for all. Surprisingly, it’s not as hard as you think…

1. Enjoy Guilt-Free Play with Friends

“A lack of play should be treated like malnutrition: it’s a health risk to your body and mind.”

— Stuart Brown

When I asked Tim for his advice on overcoming anxiety, he said, “Remember to EXERCISE daily. That is 80% of the battle.”

I completely agree. Exercise is scientifically proven to reduce anxiety, stress, and depression. But what’s the best type of exercise? Running on the treadmill for an hour? Doing hundreds of sit-ups? Self-inflicted torture via P90X? 

How about ‘None of the Above.’ All of those activities are miserable. People only do them because they think getting in shape has to be a punishment.

Exercise does not have to feel like work; it can be play. In other words, physical movement that gets your heart racing, causes you to sweat, and is legitimately FUN for you and your friends. You don’t have to track your time, measure your heart rate, or count your calories. Forget all that noise. Just focus on having fun while moving around with your friends.

In my experience, the best forms of anxiety-reducing play are outdoor sports. They are social (more than one person is required), mildly competitive, and cause everyone to break a sweat in the fresh air and sunshine. However, any fun play activity that you can do on a regular basis with your friends should work.

Almost every weekend, my friends and I play home run derby or go to the driving range. For me, taking batting practice or hitting golf balls is the most rewarding form of play. Plus it gives me an excuse to move around outside for an hour or two.

I also take frequent trips to the park with an Aerobie Flying Ring (a flat rubber Frisbee that flies really fast). The Aerobie is perfect for playing because I have to call up a friend to join me, and we both end up running around chasing it.

Incorporating play into my weekly routine helped my anxiety and workaholism more than anything else. It was such a massive relief to hang out with my friends and have guilt-free fun again. Playing helped me decompress and unplug from work, which actually made me more productive.

After each round of catch or home run derby, I would return to my laptop feeling light and happy. And to my surprise, I was able to produce better work at a faster pace. My brain was operating at a higher level because it was happy, playful, and recharged. And I wasn’t the only one who attested to a boost in productivity and creativity because of play.

[Note from Tim: Exercise also elicits measurable biochemical effects (like increased BDNF production) that improve cognitive performance.]

My friend Ann (a book editor) texted me one afternoon to say that she was trying to work, but was so bored that she’d spent the last hour staring at a turtle swimming in a pond. I told her to come pick me up so we could play catch. We drove over to a park and played with the Aerobie for two hours in the sun. The next day, she sent me this message:

All work and no play makes Jack an anxious boy — literally. Isolating yourself erodes your health, and sitting in a chair all day is a recipe for neuroses. Get off the Internet, turn off your screens, and go have guilt-free fun playing with your friends! You’ll be less anxious, less lonely, more relaxed, and a whole lot happier.

DO IT NOW

Schedule a daily reminder to Play. Ask a friend, co-worker, or neighbor to play catch. Search Yelp.com for “co-ed sports” or “improv comedy,” then sign up. For a negligible fee, you get to be surrounded by fun people who like to play. Totally worth it.

You can take baby steps toward playing more, of course. You could invite a friend on a long walk, or play catch instead of drinking coffee, or take a date to the driving range. The important thing is to schedule guilt-free fun with good people.

FREQUENCY

Aim for 30 minutes per day (or more, if possible). Reducing your anxiety through play only takes 2% of your total time each week, but it’s up to you to decide that your happiness is worth the effort.

[Note from Tim: Schedule this recreation in advance or it won’t happen.  If you’re a type-A personality, work will swell to fill your unfilled calendar.]

COST

Free, or very cheap. Try not to think of play in terms of costs. This is an investment in your health and happiness, with a guaranteed return.

RESOURCES

Aerobie Flying Ring. This is the best toy for playing catch. It’s light, durable, portable, and extremely fun.

Charlie’s Play Picks. Check out my list of fun activities and toys.

Play by Dr. Stuart Brown. If you want to read more about the science behind play and its essential role in fueling happiness, pick up a copy of this book. It’s fantastic. Also worth reading: The Play Deficit (article) by Peter Gray.

2. Unplug from All Sources of News

“Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.”

— Robert J. Sawyer

It took me a long time to see it, but the news was my single biggest source of anxiety.

The websites I was reading each day talked non-stop about crime, corruption, economic breakdown, and the end of the world. As a result, my fear of being attacked spun out of control. I became obsessed with protecting myself from every possible threat. I researched what to do if I was arrested and thrown in jail. I spent hundreds of dollars on food and equipment that I hoped would save me in the event of a disaster.

There was nothing inherently wrong with preparing for an emergency, but obsessing over apocalyptic scenarios, every day, for months on end?

One day, it finally dawned on me: my fear of an imaginary future was destroying my ability to enjoy the present.

And what planted those seeds of fear? The news.

When I made the commitment to cut the news out of my life completely — no TV, no conspiracy sites or “truth deliverer” blogs, ignoring / blocking every sensationalist link I came across on social media, etc. — my anxiety plummeted in less than two weeks. The negative information I removed from my conscious awareness freed me from the confines of other people’s frightening narratives.

I replaced the scary news with positive, joyful, and fun information. For instance, I listened to uplifting songs and standup comedy. I watched improv, and classic funny & happy movies. I read fun books that sparked my imagination and touched my soul. It really helped.

Of course, I didn’t bury my head in the sand. I still talked with my friends, who would inevitably bring up the noteworthy events that took place that week. And I was always surprised to discover that… I didn’t really miss anything. I was alive, and the world kept turning. That was about it.

The information you allow into your conscious awareness determines the quality of your life. In other words, you are what you think. If you are subsisting on content that’s unsettling, anxious, and soulless (see: the news, reality shows, horror movies, books written by hateful authors, porn), your mind will become stressed, scared, and cynical.

But if you are consuming content that’s joyous and playful, your mind will become happy and loving. Simple as that.

DO IT NOW

Cut anxiety-inducing information – especially the news – out of your daily routine completely! If your friends are watching the news in the same room, either change the channel or go do something else. If a scary headline appears in your Facebook feed, don’t click it – block it.

There’s no need to subject yourself to unhealthy unrealities. Replace those unsettling thoughts with positive content that will uplift you.

COST

Free.

RESOURCES

The “Anti-News” List. My favorite anxiety-fighting content. Just remember: Sad people tend to focus on the lyrics, while happy people just listen to the music. Don’t over-analyze the deeper implications of the art; just enjoy how it makes you feel.

BONUS POINTS: Flip the Shut-Off Switch

Whenever I’m feeling burned out, I have to force myself to unplug.

I relocate to a scenic environment where the skyline isn’t cluttered with buildings or human activity, then I disconnect from every device with a screen for a minimum of 24 hours. That means no texting, no calling, no email, no Facebook, no Instagram, and no Seinfeld. Only nature, face-to-face interactions, and books are allowed.

Unplugged nature vacations are incredibly refreshing. My mind always feels like a stuffy room that gets a sudden rush of fresh air. Instead of feeling tired all day long from a steady diet of internet content, I’m rejuvenated by real life again.

Give yourself permission to stop working and unplug. Don’t feel guilty for taking time off. This isn’t an escape from the real world – it’s a chance to reconnect with it.

3. Consistent Bedtime & Afternoon Naps

“My girlfriend asked me, ‘Did you sleep good?’  I said ‘No, I made a few mistakes.’”

— Steven Wright

I really can’t overemphasize the importance of consistent quality sleep. Every anxious person I’ve met has either been in denial about how little sleep they get, or they’re overlooking the fact that they’re going to bed at random hours every night.

One of my readers wrote this message to me after reading an early draft of my book:

“When I began forcing myself to sleep eight hours a night, my physical health problems cleared up, my emotions balanced out, and my anxiety disappeared. My mind could function and that tight feeling around my eyes vanished. Eight hours of sleep is a miracle pill.”

I was chronically in a severe sleep deficit, which took a major toll on my mental health. 

The endless stream of digital information I was taking in every waking hour only compounded the problem. And because I kept going to bed at random hours, my mind never had enough time to shut down, relax, and digest everything that poured in during the day.

During the month I cured my anxiety, I made consistent sleep one of my highest priorities. The first thing I did was optimize my bedroom for ideal sleeping conditions. Here are the steps I took:

1. Plugged my iPhone charger in an outlet far away from my bed so I couldn’t grab my phone while I was laying down. This little obstacle prevented me from checking Facebook or watching Youtube before trying to fall asleep. [Note from Tim: I always put my iPhone on Airplane Mode or turn it off while sleeping. Even on silent, the illumination of arriving text messages is enough to wake or aggravate me.]
2. Cranked up the air conditioning so the temperature in my bedroom was around 68 degrees Fahrenheit.
3. Kept the curtains drawn and wore a sleep mask so that my room was as dark as I could possibly make it.

Once my room was optimized, I committed to a consistent bedtime. I set a daily reminder on my iPhone called “Get Ready for Bed,” which went off at 10:00PM every night (i.e. nine hours before I wanted to wake up). As soon as it went off, I’d stop whatever I was doing, hit the bathroom, brush my teeth, and change out of my day clothes. I was dead serious about obeying my phone’s command. Even if I was in the middle of a conversation, I’d abruptly end it so I could get ready for bed.

After I finished getting ready, I’d switch my phone to silent mode, plug it into the charger that was far away from my bed, and lay down to read fiction for 15 minutes (No business or “thinking” books allowed). Then I’d turn off the lights and focus on the rhythm of my breathing until I fell asleep.

It took several nights to adjust to this change, but within a week, I was sleeping like a champion. The key was getting ready at the same time every night. It set me in motion toward getting in bed, and ultimately re-trained my body to crave sleep at a reasonable hour.

There was another aspect of my sleep routine that was critical for healing my anxiety: I took a 20-minute nap every afternoon.

Each day, immediately after I finished lunch, I would find a spot to nap – a couch, a bench, a reclined car seat, a carpeted floor, a friend’s wedding…

I’d set an alarm on my phone for 20 minutes, lie on my back, and close my eyes. I never tried to fall asleep; I just relaxed and focused on breathing in and out. Even if I didn’t fall asleep (10-20% of the time), I always felt refreshed and calm when my alarm went off.

Naps are awesome. I wish I could be a salesman for naps. We all took them every day when we were kids, so… why should we stop taking them just because we’re older? Take a quick nap in the afternoon, even if you have to cut your lunch break short. Then force yourself to get ready for bed at the same time every night. You’ll be more relaxed, more productive, and far less anxious.

DO IT NOW

Set a daily reminder on your phone to “Get Ready for Bed,” nine hours prior to your target wake time. Set another reminder to take a nap after lunch. Plug your cell phone charger in an outlet that’s far away from your bed. Cover your windows so your bedroom is as dark as possible. Drop the temperature in your bedroom to 68 degrees.

COST

Free.

FREQUENCY

Aim for 8 hours of consistent quality sleep each night, and one 20-minute nap every afternoon.

RESOURCES

Relax like a Pro and 11 Tricks for Perfect Sleep. Check out Tim’s articles for more tips on taking your sleep to the next level.

Sweet Dreams Sleep Mask. The light! It buuurns! Use this mask to block it out.

Flux. The bright white light that you refer to as your “computer” might be disrupting your internal rhythm. Download the free Flux application to have your screen’s lighting automatically switch to a sunset hue in the evening.

Philips Wake-up Light. If you despise alarms as much as I do, then check out the Wake-up Light. It makes waking up gradual and pleasant.

4. Eliminate Stimulants

The physical sensations that preceded my panic attacks were the jitters (shaking hands, quivering voice) and a rapid resting heart rate. Guess what gave me both of those sensations? Coffee. And wouldn’t you know it, I was drinking 3-4 cups each day, running around like Tweek on South Park.

I decided to cut coffee out of my diet for a week. Shortly after I removed the caffeine from my bloodstream, I stopped having the jitters. My resting heart rate remained steady. The physical sensations that came with having a panic attack were no longer there, and I started calming down. [After some experimentation, I found that I could only have a half serving of coffee before I started feeling jittery. I also found that I couldn’t have caffeine past 5:00PM without disrupting my sleep routine.]

A friend of mine experienced similar results after removing aspartame. She had horrible anxiety for months but couldn’t figure out what was causing it. One day at work, she noticed that she’d finished three diet sodas in just a few hours. Her body was overloaded with caffeine and aspartame (a toxic sugar subsitute in diet drinks). As soon as she stopped drinking diet soda, her anxiety disappeared.

Sometimes, we tend to overlook the simple answers that are right in front of us.  Let’s fix that.

DO IT NOW

Cut out any substance you regularly consume that’s correlated with increased feelings of anxiety. Common culprits include: caffeine, aspartame, gluten, refined sugar, alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana. Keep it out of your body for one week.

If you have that substance in your house, throw it away. If the people you spend the most time with are encouraging you to consume it, politely turn them down and do something else. If you have strong cravings for that substance, find a healthy substitute you can consume instead (e.g. water, tea, sugar-free gum).

After the substance has been out of your system for seven days, you can reassess its toxicity by consuming a typical dose you’re used to taking. If your anxiety symptoms return within one hour of ingestion, you’ve found the culprit. Try to eliminate that substance for good.

COST

Free.

5. Trauma Releasing Exercises

[Note from Charlie: This technique is going to sound bizarre. I don’t blame you if you’re skeptical, but it worked really well for me and there’s a good amount of research to back up the benefits of T.R.E.]

One of the weirdest effects of anxiety is how much tension builds up in your body. I couldn’t even take a deep breath because my stomach always trembled, like it was being stretched to its limits. Relaxing felt physically impossible.

My body was so tense because I was constantly in fight-or-flight mode. Every day, I was producing the energy needed to survive a life-threatening event. The problem was that this event was in my mind; it was imaginary and it never took place. I had all this excess energy that wasn’t being released, so I became extremely high-strung.

A friend recommended that I check out T.R.E. — Trauma Releasing Exercises, which helped him conquer his anxiety. I watched a few videos of T.R.E. on YouTube and immediately thought it was fake. The clips showed people lying on the ground as their bodies went into spastic tremors. Their movements looked comical and freaky, like they were in the middle of an exorcism.

T.R.E. was originally designed as a safe and easy way to induce tremors. Anyone who has gone through extreme trauma, from the emotionally abused to war veterans, can use these exercises to their benefit. The exercises take about 20 minutes to complete, and they’re intended to induce tremors by exhausting your leg muscles.

I learned that tremors are a natural means for mammals to discharge excess energy after a traumatic event. The tremors release our body’s surplus of adrenaline after it’s no longer needed for survival. I watched footage of antelopes, bears, and other animals that had narrowly escaped an attack. Their bodies instinctively trembled for a few minutes, and then they’d act calm and normal again. It was fascinating.

Unlike most species, adult humans typically prevent themselves from having tremors. Why? Because we avoid behavior that makes us look weak or vulnerable. In other words, we are so self-conscious that we unknowingly block our body’s natural (yet embarrassing) function during times of great stress. As a result, we make it very difficult to overcome trauma because we’re constantly holding in so much excess energy. Thankfully, T.R.E. can help.

I bought the T.R.E. book on my Kindle and went through all the exercises. After I completed the full circuit, I lied on the ground and was STUNNED as my back, hips, and legs shook rapidly in sporadic bursts for 20 minutes. The tremors weren’t painful at all; the sensation actually felt relaxing and natural. I was just astounded by how vigorously my body shook. I looked like a vibrating cell phone. After my body’s tremors finally subsided, I went to lie down on my bed and immediately fell into a deep sleep.

I performed these exercises three nights per week, for three weeks. They were hugely effective for releasing the physical tension my body was holding in. I can’t show or describe all of the exercises here, as I don’t want to take credit for a routine I didn’t create. But if you’re interested in giving T.R.E. a shot, you can check out the book (or win a free copy by leaving a comment below — see instructions at the bottom of this post).

I know T.R.E. might sound kooky, or even a little scary. But it’s really not bad at all. It’s basically just a series of stretches that help your body thaw itself out by alleviating your chronic tension. Your tremors will definitely make your body move in strange ways though, so be sure to do these exercises in a relaxed environment where you won’t feel self-conscious.

DO IT NOW

Watch the 8-minute Tremors video on T.R.E.’s official website to see how it works.

FREQUENCY

Do the exercises every other day for three weeks. Then as needed.

COST

$10 for the book.

RESOURCES

Trauma Releasing Exercises. This short book explains the trauma recovery process in uncomplicated language. The last chapter includes photos and descriptions of the exercises, which elicit tremors that release deep chronic tension in the body.

6. Fix Micronutrient Deficiencies

Everyone should get tested for micronutrient deficiencies at some point. There are plenty of reasons why this is a smart move, but the most obvious is because of our changing soil. 

The vegetables we eat absorb their nutrients from the soil they grow in, and the purity (and depth) of our topsoil has been severely compromised through hyper-aggressive/monoculture agriculture and mining. So even if you are eating a seemingly natural and well-balanced diet, you could still be deficient in key nutrients your brain and body need in order to function properly.  Broccoli in one place doesn’t necessarily equal broccoli in another, for instance.  Where you get your produce matters; they could be chock-full or devoid of the vitamins, etc. depending on where you source.

Below are two of the most common nutrient deficiencies that tend to amplify anxiety:

1. The Vitamin B club. A lot of people are deficient in B-12 (methylcobalamin — found in meat), but others might be deficient in B-2 (riboflavin — found in yogurt, spinach, almonds, and eggs), or B-5 (pantothenic acid — found in avocados, mushrooms, and sweet potatoes), or B-6 (pyridoxal phosphate — found in tuna, chicken, turkey, and cod). Fortunately, it’s possible to get the recommended dose of all the B vitamins by taking a B-complex pill once per day.
2. Omega-3 Fatty Acids. You can find omega-3 in salmon, fish oil, hemp seeds, and flax seeds. I take 2-4 servings of Nordic Natural’s cod liver oil pills each day, which contains a solid dose of the three fatty acids: EPA, DHA, and ALA.

For a few months, I was feeling unusually fatigued. I had no idea what was causing it. I was getting good sleep, I was eating healthy, and I was exercising regularly. I did some research, and found that I had a ton of symptoms for Vitamin B-12 deficiency: I felt mildly depressed, I had very little motivation, I was short of breath, my brain was foggy, and my fingers occasionally went numb.

Vitamin B-12 is in meat, fish, and certain dairy products (if you’re a vegetarian or vegan, you’re likely deficient in B-12). The normal range for B-12 is between 500 and 1,000 pg/ml (picograms per milliliter), and if your levels fall below 500 pg/ml, your brain ages twice as fast. In other words, if your body isn’t absorbing enough B-12, your mind rapidly deteriorates and stops functioning properly. Holy Guacamole!

When I got tested for B-12 deficiency, the results showed that my levels were 200 pg/ml — less than half of the minimum amount my body required. Even though I was eating meat almost every single day, I was still massively deficient.

I immediately began supplementing with Vitamin B-12 pills — 1,000 mcg every day, sublingually (under the tongue). Within one week, I could already feel a difference. I was less foggy and more energetic. When I got tested again for B-12 a month later, my levels had shot up to 529 pg/ml. I was back in the normal range.

A few of my friends took micronutrient deficiency tests, as well. None of them had B-12 levels as low as mine, but they were all deficient in something. One found he was deficient in magnesium. Another was deficient in selenium, while another was deficient in potassium. All of them took measures to correct their deficiencies, brought their levels back up to the normal ranges, and felt like new people. Their minds were clear and sharp, and their energy went through the roof.

One final note on deficiencies: It’s possible that your gut isn’t absorbing nutrients properly. If you suspect that’s the case, you might consider taking a probiotic supplement to introduce more healthy bacteria into your GI tract. You can also get more healthy bacteria by eating fermented foods, like sauerkraut and kimchi.

DO IT NOW

Research the nutrients mentioned above to see if you might be deficient.

FREQUENCY

Once you’ve been tested for deficiencies, ingest an ample amount of the desired nutrients (via food or supplements) for 30 days. Get tested again and re-assess.

COST

Varies, depending on whether you’re ingesting food or supplements (pills average less than $1.50 per day). $80 for the B-12 deficiency test at Any Lab Test Now. $400 for the micronutrient test. I know, I know – it’s expensive.

RESOURCES

[None of these resources are affiliate links. Neither Tim nor I will earn money if you decide to make a purchase through them.]

Any Lab Test Now. You can get tested for deficiencies in just a few minutes at Any Lab Test Now and have the results emailed to you within 48 hours. You can also get micronutrient tests at your doctor’s office, but (depending on which state you’re in) they will probably make you jump through a few hoops first.

Spectracell. This is the micronutrient testing lab Tim used to uncover his selenium deficiency (he used Brazil nuts to correct it).

Vitamin B-Complex Caps. This covers all of your bases for the B vitamins. These pills are free from common allergens, like soy, yeast, barley, wheat, and lactose.

Cod Liver Oil. I take 2-4 servings per day to get omega-3 fatty acids. If you don’t like taking so many pills, try squeeze packets.

Final Thoughts

Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question, “Is this real, or is this just a ride?” And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and they say, “Hey, don’t worry; don’t be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride.”

– Bill Hicks

I couldn’t see it for a long time, but I was the creator of my own anxious reality.

I didn’t allow myself to have fun. I never slept. I drank coffee all day while staring at screens. I consumed fear-mongering news that convinced me the end was near. People absorbed and reflected my nervousness back at me, and my anxiety perpetuated itself.

I’m not crippled with anxiety anymore, and I’m not burned out. Now, my state of mind is different.

I allow myself to have guilt-free fun in everything I do. The world is a playground, my work is a game, and life is a ride. And you know what? I feel 100 times better than I ever thought I would. I’m back to my normal self.

And I have no fear that those awful feelings will ever return, because I know the antidote — play.

# # #

Want a free copy of Charlie’s book, Play It Away: A Workaholic’s Cure for Anxiety?

Leave a comment below with your favorite technique for managing or overcoming anxiety.

The top 20 comments, as selected by Charlie, will receive:

• (1) free digital copy of Play It Away — Kindle .mobi or PDF ($10 value)
• (1) free digital copy of the Trauma Releasing Exercises workbook ($10 value)
• Bonus: Charlie’s weekly routine during the month he healed his anxiety

The post How to Cure Anxiety — One Workaholic's Story, Six Techniques That Work appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.