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The Less Fortunate
I write a lot about how people need to make decisions for themselves, work extremely hard, and get off the beaten path. Inevitably, people ask about normal people or people who don’t have all the advantages that I have. Let me address that. Any struggle I’ve had in my life is a joke. I was…
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Isn’t it Convenient
Isn’t it convenient that humans all need the same amount of schooling? Four years of high school, four years of college, and then we’re prepared. Isn’t it convenient that driving a car is the exact maximum risk that 90% of Americans are comfortable with? No one thinks cars are too dangerous, but very few are…
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Whose Goals?
It’s really hard for me to judge people by their own goals, but I think it’s an important thing to do. I see someone chomping down on McDonalds, sitting behind a desk, playing solitaire on their computer, and my first thought is that they’re screwing up their lives. And, according to my goals, they are…
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My Daily Routine
For most of my life I operated without a daily routine. I would have an idea of what needed to be done every day, and how I should be living my life, but there was little consistency between my days. Around a year ago I started working on building a daily routine, and I’ve been…
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The Tempo of Work
Whenever you fully immerse yourself in something, you begin to see patterns and make connections that you wouldn’t otherwise make. This is why everyone who’s ever become really good at pickup has dropped everything and immersed himself in it for a period of time. These days, I’m fully immersed in work, and I’ve begun to…
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Almost Impossible to Fail
When beginning some new undertaking, I ask myself: what would I have to do for it to be nearly impossible to fail. Certainty of success is an illusion, but by for any given goal it’s possible to come up with some process that would nearly guarantee success. For example: when starting SETT, I asked myself…
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Not That Kind of Person
For the past month I’ve been working out regularly under the tutelage of Dick Talens, the founder of Fitocracy, and for the first time ever I’m making actual gains. Seven pounds gained so far, and substantial increases in the weights I can lift. When we first started going back and forth about the training, I…
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My Writing Process
I’ve gotten a few emails asking about my writing process, now that I write every day. It’s changed quite a it since last time I wrote about this, so it’s probably about time for an update. I use ResophNotes, which is very similar to Notational Velocity on Mac. Leo uses Notational Velocity, and when I…
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You’re Going to Be the One Doing it Anyway
When I was a kid, my parents would tell me to do something reasonable like clean my room. I’d probably do it, or at least make a token effort. Sometimes I wouldn’t do it, and my mom would do it for me. Or maybe I’d be out at school and she’d be sick of me…
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Training Yourself
To train any animal, you follow a simple process. You somehow indicate what you want it to do, and then when it does it, you give it a reward. Maybe in some cases you punish it if it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. Then you repeat until the animal is trained. When it…
