Check out my bestselling book on habits, Superhuman by Habit.
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As I mentioned before, Superhuman #1 went extremely well. Everyone left not only with actionable steps to reach their goals, but also with connections to some other really great people. I was a little bit exhausted by the end, but it was really a great experience to get to do deep work with some of my most serious readers, and to get to know them on a personal level.
I collected feedback from most of the attendees. No one rated the event less than 8/10, and 95% of the critical feedback was on logistics and timing, which I admittedly did not do a great job of. Using their feedback plus our mutual experience, I am ready to put on a second event which should be even better!
The biggest change is that this event will be 2.5 days long instead of 1.5 days long. On the first event I was worried that I wouldn't be able to fill so much time with useful content, but now I realize that more time would have been much better. People also universally wished that we had more social time (with all but one person suggesting 70% work and 30% social vis the 90/10 split we had this time). So this time around we will have much more social time.
The goals of this event will be for each attendee to have actionable next steps on their most important goals, to be paired with a like-minded peer to hold them accountable, and to get to know me and their fellow attendees.
The event will be from June 22nd to June 24th in Las Vegas and will cost $1500. Here's what the schedule will look like:
June 22nd 5pm - Join me at the penthouse suite of a hotel on the strip to meet me and your fellow attendees. I will pair each person with someone else to be their partner throughout the experience and their accountability partner afterwards. We will hang out for a couple hours to get to know each other, and I'm happy to answer random questions that aren't related to your primary goals.
June 22nd 8pm - Everyone except for me will go have dinner together. One of the attendees spontaneously organized this last time and everyone loved getting to know each other and build trust before the event. I ask everyone to be very honest and vulnerable during the event, so it helps to know who you are sharing with. The reason I don't join for this dinner is to make sure the focus is on getting to know each other.
June 23rd 10am - Meet back at the suite for relaxed tea together. I'll brew some special teas from my travels and we will chat and get to know each other better.
June 23rd 11:30am - Lunch break. Everyone can go pick up food and either eat out or bring it back to the suite.
June 23rd 1pm - The hard work begins! Going pair by pair, each person will have an hour of one-on-one coaching with me. We will work to get to the root of your goal, come up with the best course of action, and come up with habits and tasks that you will stick to. Your partner will pay special attention so that they can best support you after the event and hold you accountable to your tasks. If you don't have a specific goal, you can also use your hour to discuss whatever you like. Several attendees of the last event told me that hearing other peoples' coaching sessions was their favorite part. We will take a 15 minute break between every person and there will be plenty of snacks and water to keep energy up.
June 23rd 8pm - Chipotle! I will have food from my favorite restaurant delivered and we can eat together and hang out until 9:30pm.
June 24th 10am - We'll meet back for tea and repeat the previous day exactly with the same schedule, spending the focused time on the five people who didn't get their hour in the previous day. At the end we'll close by recapping a little bit over dinner and making sure everyone is clear on their next steps.
Three months later I will do a free 30 minute conference call with every pair of people who remained in contact with each other, gave me feedback on the event, and followed through on their agreed-upon goals.
Here are some quotes from attendees of the first event:
"Tynan’s first superhuman event was a tremendous value—insightful, spontaneous, inspiring and action-oriented. Hanging out with the legendary ninja of simplicity Leo Babauta was an awesome surprise bonus!"
"I've always enjoyed Tynan's blog because his method of communication is very action focused on improvement. Similarly Tynan's event left everyone with very actionable steps to work on the issues they brought to the event. We have a three month follow up call and I look forward to regrouping with everyone!"
"This event was well worth my time and money. I learned helpful ideas and habits with a great small group dedicated to learning, improving, and getting out in the world to do things. The in-person aspect of this event made a big difference for me. I feel energized and challenged to go out and achieve my goals and dreams."
"Tynan has a unique ability to understand a person's issue break it down and figure out an actionable path to the desired result!"
"I was able to be fully vulnerable in a safe environment. Getting honest insights from people across all walks of life was invaluable to me because it exposed blind spots in my thinking. Combine that with actionable advice advice and you get an awesome event."
"The event exceeded my expectations. Tynan gave us guidance specific to our individual needs and had a lot of patience when something wasn’t clear. He built an atmosphere where we could open up without the fear of being ridiculed or judged."
While I would love to do big events, it's most important to me for people to leave with real personalized value. For that reason, I am limiting attendance to just 10 people. Spots are available first-come-first-serve, though I reserve the right to decline attendance for anyone who I don't feel is a good fit.
To reserve your spot, email event at tynan dot net with the subject "Superhuman 2" and give me a very brief bio, including what your biggest challenge currently is.
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Photo is a cool park in Hilo, Hawaii
Next week I leave on a cruise where I will write a ton of blog posts instead of a book so that I can queue them and keep a more regular schedule. If you have any ideas for blog posts you'd like to see, now's the time to suggest them!
It's rare that I see advertisements. I have ad blocking on everything I own, if I go to a movie I try to go late to avoid previews and ads, and if I watch TV it is downloaded with the ads stripped or through Netflix. I still see some ads, of course, but not all that often.
When I do see them, they often jump out at me, especially TV ads.
"Ford, America's best-selling car," I heard the TV say.
What? The line shocked me so much that I wrote it down to write about later. That's a selling point? I kept thinking about it. The fact that a car is a best-selling car is actually a downside to me.
It's here! Once again I've forgotten to whet everyone's appetite by constantly mentioning my book until the release day, but I've always been more into getting books out than marketing them. Starting today, you can buy my latest book, Forever Nomad.
The idea behind the book is that when I wrote Life Nomadic, my first travel book, I hadn't quite figured out how to balance life and work. I was excited about the possibilities of travel and how accessible it is, but it took me many years to figure out how to integrate it with real life.
A lot of that work was to figure out a ton tips and tricks to make every aspect of the travel experience both effortless and affordable.
So this book is full of every single travel trick and hack I know, as well as ideas on how to integrate travel into a normal life, including lots of details on how I buy properties with my friends.
Once in a while people who meet me give me the feedback that they're surprised that I'm actually a real person who doesn't just work 24/7. A challenge of being a public writer is balancing giving useful information versus giving an accurate picture.
I think a lot of the confusion comes from a post I wrote six years ago called Love Work. I just re-read the post and it brings me right back to that time in my life. I really was working about twelve hours a day and loving it. In some ways I miss those days. I remember being in my RV almost all day, eating the same food every day, and making huge progress on Sett.
That period of time was very important for me because before then I didn't know if I could work hard or not. I thought that I could, but I had no proof, and I felt that in some key ways I was lagging behind my peers whom I admired. I also had a tremendous amount of work that needed to be done, so it felt great to cut right through it.
By the time we wound down Sett, I was burnt out. Not from hard work, but from working on something that I didn't feel would succeed. I forced myself to do it for a while because I knew that it was important to cultivate the ability to work hard, and if I quit early I wouldn't be able to know whether I quit because I couldn't work hard or because I had made the right decision to stop working on something that was unlikely to succeed.
Take it easy, she said. A-Yi, a middle-aged Taiwanese woman, rushed us out the door. Go eat! Enjoy! Thirty seconds earlier we sat at her table and enjoyed the two different teas that she prepared for us. I tried to pay, but she wouldn't have it. Take it easy.
Odd behavior for a woman who runs a tea store. We came in looking for some tea cups we wanted to buy, but she only had one left, and Leo wanted four.
Want to drink some tea, she had asked? We'd already had two pots, but it's hard to turn down good tea.
We sat far an hour or so and drank two teas from Dong Ding, her hometown. We had a nice little conversation about tea, her store, and our lives. When my rough Chinese failed, she called her daughter's husband to have him translate a few things.
For years I've thought about doing a live event for my readers. It's always been on the backburner as I've thought about formats and group sizes, but my friend Leo Babauta challenged me to set a date and just do one, so I did.
Last weekend ten people came into town for a 1.5 day event. They were pretty brave, because I gave almost no information on what the event would be like, since I didn't really know when I posted it.
As the weeks passed and I thought about the event, I decided to keep it simple. We'd hang out together in a big hotel suite and I'd coach them one on one, pairing them up with someone else to act as an accountability buddy. I had done something similar via video chat for a charity a few years before and got good feedback on it.
Not having ever done an event like this, I didn't really know what to expect. Would people get along? Would we have way too much time or not enough? How many breaks should we take? What kind of person would actually show up?
The first thing I did where I was aware that people thought I was crazy was to buy a school bus with my friends. In retrospect it probably wasn't the first time people thought I was crazy, just the first time it was so obvious that I couldn't ignore it. I was somewhat oblivious back then, so a lot got by me.
People really thought I was nuts when I started gambling. I suppose I sort of encouraged it as a prank, but there was a very real consensus at school that I had become a problem gambler.
Not everyone thought I was crazy when I dropped out of school, but many people did.
Again, almost everyone thought I was crazy when moved to LA with a few weeks notice to learn pickup. Same when I sold everything to travel the world with a tiny backpack, when I bought the island, when moved to Vegas, when I go on cruises, and who knows what else.
While a lot of the actions I take on a daily basis strike people as normal and reasonable, I'd wager that the majority of people would classify most of my major life decisions as crazy.
One of my friends likes to remind me that everyone is worrying all the time, because he senses that I almost never worry. He's right, and when I do worry it tends to be a more active process where there's something happening and I'm trying to figure out what to do about it. I'm not really even sure that can be defined as worry.
Of course, a large part of being able to rarely worry is that I have a very good life. If I was in an abusive relationship and under constant threat of violence, I have to assume that I would worry all the time.
While there are circumstances from which it is very difficult to extricate oneself, I've found that a lot of not worrying is just putting yourself in a position where you have few things which concern you.
A perfect example is living below your means. I have always been perfectly willing to live below my means, even when there wasn't all that much room below the bar. For a while I lived in my RV and cooked the same lentil, quinoa, and vegetable stew every night for dinner. Though I really enjoyed that lifestyle, it was certainly less convenient and comfortable than living in a nice apartment and eating out every night.
In one of my (many) posts about optimizing, someone made a comment to the effect of, "What's the point of optimizing everything? Eventually you'll optimize your entire life away and have nothing left to do." That reminded me of what people say when they hear that I'm being cryogenically frozen when I die. Very often they say that they wouldn't want to live forever.
It is very peculiar to me that people would ever want to die, but that's another topic. Even stranger to me is that people somehow believe that the exact right time to die is when they are going to die anyway. Good genes and healthy living, dying at age 95? Perfect. Cancer at 65? Also perfect.
If you would not end your life earlier, and would likely get medical treatment to extend it to a "normal" life expectancy, why would you not also live forever, or at least until you voluntarily died at age 500?
(I should say here that I believe there is only a 5% chance I will actually be preserved and resurrected in the future, so you can save the comments about why it won't work)
It cost me about $100 to go to my friend's Christmas party. I had to buy a cheap flight from Vegas to San Francisco, and then a couple uber rides to and from the party.
On the surface, that doesn't make all that much sense to do. But I made a deal with myself—any time one of my good friends in SF invites me to something in SF, I will go, even if it's not quite worth it on paper.
My friends in SF are some of my closest friends. I love living in Las Vegas and have saved a ton of money in doing so, but if moving meant that I'd never spend time with my SF friends, the move wouldn't be worth it for me.
Sometimes the only way to unlock something valuable is to overpay for something else. The only way I can live in Vegas and still maintain important friendships is by overpaying most of the times I hang out with them. So overall it's a net benefit.