The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.

– Oscar Wilde

A while back I read a book called Real-Time Relationships, by Stefan Molyneux. It’s a book about creating relationships that are healthy, enjoyable, loving, and virtuous. The author hosts a philosophy podcast called Freedomain Radio, which deals with everything from overcoming procrastination and how to be a good parent, to the ethics of taxation and philosophical analyses of current events.

This article is not a review of the book, so I’ll avoid any comments on its read-worthiness as a whole. But I would like to share with you an extract that forever changed the way I look at things. It’s a quote from the book that concisely summarizes what the whole thing is about:

The Real-Time Relationship (RTR) is based on two core principles, designed to liberate both you and others in your communication with each other:

1. Thoughts precede emotions.
2. Honesty requires that we communicate our thoughts and feelings, not our conclusions.

Molyneux’s point is that so much of the negative communication in relationships arises because we treat feelings as facts, and tend to skip over the thoughts that underly those feelings. This results in arguments that are, in essence, based on mythology.

So let’s say one day Alice says to her husband Bob:

You’re so lazy! You never help around the house!

This is an example of communicating a conclusion — that Bob is lazy — rather than communicating just her thoughts and feelings. It is not necessarily true that Bob is lazy. Perhaps he doesn’t help clean up after dinner because he assumes that, since he cooked dinner, the cleaning task should naturally fall to Alice. Or maybe he left washing the dishes to Alice because he did the vacuuming earlier in the day.

Alice calling Bob “lazy” bypasses these possibilities. It’s a conclusion derived from anger, rather than an honest deployment of what she’s experiencing on the inside. A more sincere approach would be for her to tell Bob that she feels frustrated because he left her to do the dishes, which makes her feel disrespected, makes her think that Bob doesn’t care, and so on.

Replacing the name-calling with an accurate testimony of what it made her feel opens the door for Bob to address those feelings. On the one hand, it might make Bob realize that he really is lazy, and if he cares about his partner he better work on that. On the other hand, he has a chance to clarify a misunderstanding. He could talk to Alice about how he assumed that since he cooked dinner, he thought it was okay if he left the clean up to her.

Whether that division of labour is something they can both accept is a separate issue. The point is that communicating with integrity requires describing your thoughts and feelings, not rushing to conclusions about what’s really going on.

RTR’ing Yourself

In my experience, the Real-Time Relationship is an excellent model not only for productive communication between two people, but also for communicating with yourself. In particular, it’s a powerful tool for dealing with negative emotions.

Let’s revisit those two core principles of the RTR, to see how they apply to dealing with one’s own negativity:

1. Thoughts precede emotions. Emotions, in and of themselves, tell you nothing about the facts of reality. Feeling hopeless about your chances of meeting an amazing girl does not actually mean that you have no hope of meeting an amazing girl. And just because losing that game damaged your confidence so much that you feel like you’ll never win again does not mean you actually will never win again.
2. Honesty requires that we communicate our thoughts and feelings, not our conclusions. The best way to deal with negative emotions — which are often negative conclusions we’ve come to about ourselves — is to examine the thoughts and feelings behind them.

For example, I have always had a fear of losing. As a chess player during my teenage years, this fear surfaced in the form of offering draws to higher rated players when I had a clearly better position. Other times it just kept me out of tournaments altogether: by not playing, I guaranteed not losing.

Recently that fear resurfaced when I started playing go (a board game invented in China 4,000 years ago.) One particular loss a few weeks ago was particularly hard to swallow. I was a solid 50 points ahead in the game, and my opponent was ready to resign. But my follow through was so terrible that he ended up beating me by about 50 points instead.

I don’t mind when I lose because my opponent just outplayed me, but I get really frustrated when I outplay myself. And after this particular loss, my confidence was deeply shaken: How the hell could I play so badly? Why did I try to get so fancy? It’s impossible to blow a lead that big. If anything I had to congratulate myself for being able to fail so spectacularly.

And on it went, to the point that I wondered whether I should just quit playing altogether. What was the point of all the studying I was doing if I was just going to blow games like that? How would I regain my confidence to actually win a won position? Would I ever even win another game again?

Challenging Negative Thoughts

When you start thinking negative thoughts like this, don’t try to ignore them. If you’ve ever tried to repress negative feelings you know that it just doesn’t work. If anything, it amplifies them. Further, trying to stamp out bad feelings gives you no actionable way out of that state. There are underlying premises, beliefs, and assumptions about you and the world around you that have led you to feeling that way, and those need to be addressed.

So the way out of negative emotional loops is not to ignore them, subdue them, or even “just let them be there”, but to challenge them. Confront the negative self-talk directly and identify exactly why you feel that way. Extract the thoughts that precede the emotions.

Returning to my go example, I knew I loved the game and I had no intention of actually giving it up, so I forced myself to figure out how to better handle major upsets like the one I’d just endured. I did that by taking a close look at the thoughts that were going through my head. Here are some examples:

• How could I play so badly? Easy: by making mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. When a doctor makes a mistake, he might kill someone and/or get sued. When a computer programmer makes a mistake, it might lead to a huge security flaw in his software. When an investor makes a mistake, she might lose a few million bucks. And when a go player makes a mistake, he loses a game of go.
• How could I lose such a won position? Because deserving to win is not the same as winning. And by the way, this probably won’t be the last time you blow such a big lead. This is more like “the first major screw up of the rest of your (go playing) life.” But the more it happens, the better you’ll learn to deal with it.
• Will I ever win again? Erm, seriously? Do you really think that if you play another five or ten thousand games you’re going to lose all of them? Do you really think that if you spend a couple hours a day studying and playing go, and constantly seek out opportunities to learn from stronger players, that you’re going to be the same strength in five years from now that you are today? Not. Likely.

The more I cranked up the resolution on my thoughts, the more I realized how silly they were. Sure, I still fear losing and I still hate blowing won positions, but challenging those feelings and forcing myself to reveal the thinking behind them has greatly diminished their control over my actions. And they no longer threaten my continued enjoyment of the game.

I’ve intentionally given a rather tame example here of course, but I use these same principles to confront all kinds of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. I have the same kinds of worries about my writing, my consulting work, my health, my relationships, etc., and I’ve found this process to be extremely helpful for putting things in perspective.

The networking that matters is helping people achieve their goals. Doing it reliably and repeatedly so that over time people have an interest in helping you achieve your goals, because they have a stake in it.

– Seth Godin

I wouldn’t call myself an introvert, but I am definitely a not-extrovert. I am reasonably good at meeting new people, but only for the same reasons that I am reasonably good at building websites or playing chess: I’ve treated it as a problem that can be solved through directed thinking and deliberate effort.

As a geek, I see getting one’s social life off the ground not as a lottery, but as a knowledge activity. Clearly there are wrong ways to go about meeting people, which means that there must be right ways to go about it too. I don’t believe in premeditated interactions — the only script I offer is “Hi”, with the rest left as an exercise to the reader — but there is a lot to be said for foundational knowledge: cultivating the right attitude, managing your expectations, embracing rejection, setting goals, and so on. Ultimately, problems in your social life are just like any other kinds of problems: they can be identified, characterized, and worked on.

One of the most common questions I get asked by social skydivers, both male and female, is: Where the heck do you meet people?

In fact, having recently moved halfway around the world — from Montreal to Berlin — it’s a question I’ve had to ask myself. But even though I arrived here less than three months ago, I’ve already started to weave my way into the fabric of Berlin life. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting some really interesting people and have enjoyed getting to know them.

In this article, I’ll share with you the approach I’ve taken, including a list of the specific events and activities that I find most useful for bringing me into contact with the kinds of people I want to get to know.

Developing the Right Approach

Before I list my favourite places to meet people, I’ll start by outlining the principles I use to come up with these ideas in the first place. Using these guidelines, you’ll be able to tweak my later list of suggestions to fit your own tastes.

• Who can you help? Not just in a humanitarian sense, but in any sense that involves enabling other people to achieve their goals. For example, if you’re a geek working at a startup looking for Ruby programmers, why not visit your local Ruby group and spread the word? If you speak French and English fluently, why not go to a language exchange group and help other people become fluent too?
• Go open source. Don’t try to copyright your connections. The best way to build your social life is by giving things away, including your knowledge, your time, and your support.
• It’s not about meeting people, it’s about building things. Or learning things. Or teaching things. Shared pursuits are the ultimate social lubricant. When you have a common goal, you don’t have to try to meet people, it just happens. If you actually care about the interest that brought you together, you will need each other to advance.
• Be flexible. Remember the Weird Idea Radar? Turns out this is more than just a tool for discovering your passion — it’s also a great way to meet people. If you want to maximize your social potential, then you’re going to have to be open-minded. If you’re wondering whether some group is really your kind of thing, do it. If looking at their website makes you wonder if you’ll be the only person who shows up at the next meeting, do it. If you’re unsure whether you even know enough about the subject matter to talk about it, DO IT! Be willing to act on uncertainty. I’ve discovered some of my favourite interest groups by plowing through my initial hesitations.
• Be creative. Meeting people requires a capacity for original thinking. You should always be thinking of ways in which you can offer value to others, not as an entertainment monkey of course, but as a volunteer, a connector, and an enabler.
• Be an initiator. A lot of people wait for others to make the first move. I’d be lying to pretend I’m not guilty of this myself at times. I know there are at least a few people I should know a lot better than I do right now, but I’ve been waiting for them to inaugurate our friendship. And I can tell they’re probably waiting for me to do the same. But building social connections is not a game of chess — in a stalemate, both people lose.
• It won’t happen overnight. Allow for at least a few months before you expect to start connecting with people outside of the groups that brought you together. This is especially true if the group meets only once or twice a month.

Where to Meet People

With the above principles in mind, here are some of my favourite places to meet people:

• Philosophy groups. The more focussed, the better. You needn’t be a diehard adherent to the group’s philosophy to participate. For example, I’d hardly call myself an Objectivist, but I am a fan of Ayn Rand’s work. So I got involved in the Montreal Objectivist Club over a year ago and remained a member right up until I left for Berlin. Good food and great discussions which never failed to challenge my way of thinking.
• Couch surfing. CouchSurfing is a travel community that helps people wander the world by making it easy to find, and share, crash space. While this is particularly useful if you’ve just arrived in a new city, it’s also a great opportunity for locals. CS’ers organize regular parties and other events, and travelers are a fascinating bunch to get to know. I attended some CS events in Montreal. My polyglot buddy Benny travels the world acquiring new languages, and uses CS as a key part of building his social life in foreign places.
• Expat forums. This is also not limited to out-of-towners. Most people on expat forums are keen to mix with locals. In Berlin, I’ve made ample use of Germany’s most popular English-speaking expat forum and I’ve found many Germans present at the gatherings I attend.
• Meditation groups. You needn’t be New Age to sit quietly in a room with other people. I’m an atheist, but I find meditation to be a great way to relax and refocus.
• Language exchange groups. To language junkies, the benefits here are obvious. But even if you’re monolingual, you can still use your mother tongue to help others learn the language. It was through attending a language exchange group in Berlin that I met Lijit founder Stan James. He’s a brilliant guy to converse with, and we’ve parlayed our interest in German into discussions about startups, social media, the paradox of choice, “procrastiflation” (the idea that the likelihood of completing a task decreases exponentially with every day you put it off), and various other geeky subjects.
• Coworking. Coworking means sharing an office space with other people who would otherwise be working from home too. This is a great way to meet people who share the social challenges of self-employment. Coworking environments often bring together people with complementary skill sets — graphic designers, web developers, photographers, marketers, copywriters, etc. — which tends to create lots of opportunities for everyone involved.
• Take your online activities into meatspace. I did this a couple years ago with online poker. I started participating in real-life tournaments and met lots of people who were equally passionate about the game. Recently, I’ve replaced the time I normally spend playing go online with going out two nights a week to my favourite go clubs in Berlin.
• Toolchains are social objects. People love getting together and talking about the tools they use to build things. I’ve attended many different programming language groups in Montreal and more recently attended an Ubuntu BBQ in Berlin.
• Political change groups. I’m cheating a bit here, because I haven’t yet done this one myself. But I will soon be on my way to Vancouver and I am really looking forward to participating in ChangeCamp, which its website describes as “an open community and a set of tools and ideas designed to give citizens and governments the ability to work collaboratively in new ways to make change and to better address real-world challenges in our communities.” Wordy, but intriguing.

If you’re serious about getting your social life moving, I would encourage you to try every one of these suggestions, even if they seem a bit outside your range of interests. In the worst case, it might cost you an evening. But trying something that doesn’t work is never a waste of time if it brings you closer to finding something that does.

Exercises

So now that you have some ideas for developing the right attitude to building your social life, and several examples of where to meet interesting people, how do you put these ideas to work? Here are three ways to get started:

1. 30-day challenge. Make a commitment that, for the next 30 days, you will go to some kind of event or activity at least two nights a week. Be willing to stretch your definition of a good time if you have to. The priority is to get out of your house. I did this from the moment I arrived in Berlin (but more like four or five nights a week) and it is the main reason why I feel connected to this city, rather than feeling like an outsider who has a hard time breaking through.
2. Initiate, Initiate, Initiate. Make a list, either in your head or written down, of all the people with whom you have wanted to initiate a get-together (e.g. to hang out outside the gatherings where you normally see them), but have been too shy to do it. Then do it! Try for a minimum of at least three people to get started.
3. Where do you meet people? Add a comment below to share the specific activities that have worked best for you. While suggestions like “user groups” or “taking a course” are useful, it’s easy to overlook exactly what those might be. So the more detailed your suggestions, the better.

If you got the skin to be rejected 800 times in a row, 801 is gonna be a crazy play.

– Social Media Entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, describing the Hot Girl Rule (~45:10)

Having travelled and moved around a lot in the past several years, I’ve been through a number of social resets. I like exploring the world, so my reasons for moving have a lot less to do with jobs, family, and other social connections, and a lot more to do with adventure. I am addicted to culture shock.

But my reasons for starting over have not always involved relocation. Sometimes I’ve just fallen out with a few key people and find myself, socially speaking, back at square one.

This is not an easy place to be. I think I spent my first year in Montreal just feeling sorry for myself: Why is it so hard to meet people? Why can’t I just find a girl who loves me? Why can’t there be someone out there who worries about me?

It was around that time, a little over four years ago, that I realized that self-pity is self-destruction. The reason it was so hard to meet people was because all I did was sit on my own ass and whine — to myself — about how hard it was to meet people. The reason I was single for the first year I lived in Montreal was because I rarely went out. Except maybe for a walk to contemplate how lonely I was.

Having been through this experience many times, I eventually forced myself to adapt. Blaming the world for problems I created was just not a long-term option. I realized that this feeling that “nobody cares” wasn’t what caused my loneliness. Far from it. In fact, it was only by truly understanding that nobody cares that I was able to finally make sense of my social life issues, and figure out how to solve them.

Why Meeting People Is Hard

Building your social life is a lot like building a business. The currencies are different, but the mechanics are similar.

The startup entrepreneur starts out in a war against indifference. But those that succeed at attracting customers do well because they know this: Nobody cares. Nobody cares about your architecture. Nobody cares about your website. Nobody cares that you’ve reached Inbox Zero. Nobody has even heard of the event at which you won that award. Nobody knows that you have something for sale. And even if they do, they probably still don’t care.

And the same principle applies for startup socialites as well: Nobody cares.

Nobody knows that you exist. Nobody wants to meet you. Nobody cares that you are interesting to talk to. Nobody is going to coax you out of hiding. And that bikini-clad babe who just moved in next door? Borrow some sugar? Bottle of wine? Night of unbelievable sex?

Uh, no.

“Nobody cares” is not meant to be cynical or patronizing. Rather, it is a natural byproduct of the scale of humanity. In business, your potential customers just have so much stuff to choose from that they can’t possibly notice more than the tiniest fraction of what is out there. They might not even realize that they “need” what you are selling, and even if they’re aware of their need, they may not understand that your product fulfills it.

In social spheres, the barriers to entry aren’t nearly as high, but there are similar forces — and similar filters — to contend with. Overcoming loneliness means fully accepting that these forces exist and working with them, instead of against them.

So how does “nobody cares” translate from a reality check for entrepreneurs to a wake up call for expanding your social life? Here are some thoughts:

• Don’t buy the rhetoric that “it’s hard to meet people” where you live. Those are the words of an energy vampire. That’s like a business owner saying “it’s hard to find customers in this city.” Of course it’s hard. It’s hard to find customers in any city. Welcome to Planet Earth. Population: 6.7 billion. Retaining one’s sanity here requires an unconcern for the vast majority of things. And — by default at least — that includes you.
• 80% of businesses fail. Which means that 80% of the time, indifference wins. If you’re hitting it off with more than 20% — even 10% — of the people you make contact with, I have only two questions for you: 1. How are your writing skills? 2. Wanna write a guest post?
• Get out of your house. Nobody cares. And if you’re staying at home, taking long baths to “think” about things, and repeatedly promising yourself that tomorrow is The Day that you are really going to crank it up, then they will keep not caring.
• Salespeople are the masters of rejection. They spend most of their day getting brushed off by people that don’t care. And they make a hell of a good living at it too. If you’re willing to expose yourself to massive rejection, you win.
• We buy products for the same reason that we choose friends and lovers: they make us feel better and do better. Social success isn’t about you kicking ass, it’s about helping other people kick ass. So consider: What do you know that you can share with others? What can you help other people be better at? What do you want to see changed in the world, and where might you find others that want the same thing?
• Be honest: How many people where you live even know that you exist? 50? 100? Maybe 150? What about as a percentage of your city’s population? 0.00005%? Unless you live in a smaller place, cracking even 1% is almost impossible. An entrepreneur who doesn’t advertise his product would not get depressed if nobody bought it. And yet a lot of people do get depressed when they don’t “advertise” themselves (by going out, meeting people, talking to strangers, etc.) and nobody comes knocking.

Ultimately, if you are in a social rut, I am there with you. I know what loneliness is like and I know there is a way out. Nobody cares does not mean that nobody will care. It’s just a reminder that there are forces and filters that, while helping us cope with information overload, also make us invisible to each other. And the way to social savviness is not to ignore them, but to incorporate them into your action plan.

As I mentioned in the beginning, I’ve moved a lot. And a few months ago I moved again, to Berlin. But unlike when I moved to Montreal, this time I wasted no time waiting for the world to come to me. I have built an active social life since arriving here. I’ve met some brilliant and interesting people. I will write more about this later this week, including the specific places I go and the activities I participate in that have exposed me to a wide variety of people who have been fun getting to know.

Visualization works if you work hard. That’s the thing. You can’t just visualize and go eat a sandwich.

– Jim Carrey

I have learned the secret to getting rich in math and science. And now, for the first time ever, I am making these secrets available to you.

I can teach you everything you need to know to debunk Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, and help put you on the fast track to validating your proofs.

With my program, you will literally rewrite the book on formal logic.

Looking to untangle the origins of the universe? No sweat. I will show you how, in just 30 minutes a day, using simple techniques that anyone can learn, you will discover how you can create revolutionary new approaches to thinking about the Big Bang, string theory, and even the nature of God itself. (Did you know, for example, that God is neither a man nor a woman, but made up, in fact, of a fairly inexpensive set of ingredients that can be bought at almost any Italian food store?)

But that’s not all. The normal price of this 24 CD, 2 volume course is $1,999. But if you order now, you will get the entire “MATHEMILLIONS” box set, that’s over 50 hours of groundbreaking material, a signed copy of my new book “Awaken the Giant Mathematician Within”, and I’ll throw in a coupon for 10% off my live, 3-day “1 + 1 = $1,000,000!!11!” bootcamp, a coupon worth over $3000, all for the incredibly low price of $119.95!!!

So don’t wait. This offer can only last a short time. Do me yourself a favour and CALL NOW.

Framed in the context of objective and rational pursuits, the above comes across as obvious drivel. But it’s amazing how much of the multi-billion dollar self-help industry is fueled by offers like these.

This mock sales letter may seem like an exaggeration, but in many ways it is not. If anything, I’ve gone conservative on the markup and punctuation. I only offer two bonus gifts, instead of the usual five or six. My discount may be a little exaggerated, but it is not that far from the truth. And, in the interests of time and space, I’ve kept the length of my sales letter to a mere fraction of the real spiel.

But the purpose of this article is not to rant about sales letters. I think most people can detect an infomercial when they see one. Instead, the purpose of this article is to declare war on the false premise that motivates people to write sales letters, the same belief that can undermine your efforts in the pursuit of happiness: The idea that there’s a secret to creating the life you want, and that some random person you’d never heard of until now can offer it to you at an unbeatable low price.

The Key(words) to Success

In no other realm of human endeavour are we so focussed on hugely unrealistic metrics as in the realm of personal growth. Here, for example, are the results of a keyword search I did in the self-help section of Amazon. The number in parentheses represents the number of matches as a percentage of the total number of items in that category:

• Secret: 21,287 matches (20.5%)
• Million: 18,223 matches (17.6%)
• Instant: 13,998 matches (13.5%)
• Unlimited: 7,727 matches (7.5%)
• Effortless: 3,620 matches (3.5%)

Compare that with, say, the Computer and Internet section. There are three times as many books in this section, so the most useful comparison is by percentages:

• Million: 30,939 matches (8.0%)
• Instant: 25,469 matches (6.6%)
• Secret: 23,602 matches (6.1%)
• Unlimited: 19,117 matches (4.9%)
• Effortless: 2,246 matches (0.6%)

In the vocabulary of false promises, self-help books dominate the competition. And while the statistical difference here is large, the cultural difference between these two worlds is even larger. Whereas books that offer instant results (”Learn Java in 24 Hours”) and “secrets” are generally laughed at in computer circles, they take center stage in the world of self-improvement.

In fact, one of the most popular self-help titles of all-time is called The Secret.

Fantasy Positions

My favourite chess book ever is Jeremy Silman’s How to Reassess Your Chess. One of the insights that stuck with me most from that book was the use of “fantasy positions.”

The idea was that you learned a set of principles for evaluating a chess position, and then you used them to imagine the ideal position you wanted to create on the board. The key was to forget about what it took to get there at first, and focus exclusively on the desired outcome. From there, you looked for moves in the current position that brought you closer to the fantasy position. Lather, rinse, repeat until you found a feasible course of action.

This technique was a great way of approaching chess strategy for me. I’d never quite thought in terms of fantasy positions before, and doing so gave me a much clearer sense of what I was doing. Of course, the fantasy position is just another name for visualization applied to chess.

The fantasy position, in other words, is chess’s version of The Secret.

Ask, Believe, FAIL

In the chess world–and this is true of most fields of human knowledge–there are some manuals written to teach you some things, and other manuals written to teach you other things. While I was blown away by how useful it was to think in terms of fantasy positions, I didn’t for a second think that this was the key that could unlock my potential as a chess player. I knew there were still hundreds of volumes of chess wisdom out there for me to consume–so many nuances of opening, middlegame, and endgame theory–and thousands of games yet to be played and analyzed before I would have any hope of being really good.

Visualizing was a nice little tool, but only a tiny part of the overall arsenal I needed to win.

But in the self-help industry, visualization is presented as decisive, a “key to success.” In fact, a search for “visualize” in Amazon’s self-help section turns up 9,170 matches, which is 8.8% of everything in that category, or more than double the total number of chess items for sale.

The self-help form of visualization takes on an entirely new dimension, and an entirely new name: The Law of Attraction. And the Law states that all you need to do is place your order with the universe and the universe will respond.

Back to Reality

If you’re not careful, the vastly overstated claims of self-help literature can make you feel ripped off, and even downright cynical about personal change. After all, if you were one of the many people who spent hundreds of dollars on a course that claimed it would triple your reading speed, but it made no difference at all, how could you not feel let down?

In the case of someone trying to start a business, whose 30 minutes a day doesn’t *gasp* turn into a million dollar company, the worst that happens is they keep their day job. A tad unfortunate to see all that effort wasted, but not the end of the world. But the consequences of deception can get much worse than that. For someone trying to, say, quit drinking, following a trail of false hope can lead to disaster.

As the chess example shows, a good way to gain perspective on the strange and sometimes mystical advice of self-help authors is to frame those ideas, where possible, in terms of something concrete and familiar and see how they measure up. I’ve found this to be an effective way to manage my expectations.

The other thing I do is follow a simple rule of thumb: Don’t read stuff by people who got successful by telling other people how to be successful. This is especially true when I can find no other evidence of their past achievements in the real world. There are just too many insanely smart people out there, whose claims are supported by reasoned argument and scientific evidence to waste a single minute on stuff that isn’t.

I haven’t always followed this rule, but since I have I’ve been able to fully engage with what I read. No more having to ask myself why an author would include a well-known email chain letter at the end of his book and claim it was written to him by a dying young girl, or wondering why I can find no trace of their history on Google outside of their promotional campaign.

These ideas are both pretty common sense, but not always common practice. It’s so easy to start out with a genuine desire to live a better life, and end up confused and disappointed when met with the junk science (Law of Attraction, NLP, “Power of the Subconscious Mind”, etc.) and made-up anecdotes (Yale Goals Study, claims of winning some world championship somewhere that no one is able to verify) that are so painfully common to self-help literature.

If you want to improve the quality of your life, self-help is the wrong route to take. But the growth mindset itself is vital. Things like visualization, gratitude, early rising, and all those fuzzy things are truly wonderful ideas. They do work well. But even if you add them all together and multiply by 42, you still won’t find the key to success.

Oh, BTW, Hi

Speaking of personal growth, welcome to my blog. It’s been a while. You might not remember me. Brad?…Ring any bells?

My life has changed a lot in the last few months and, in case this article (and this article) hasn’t made it clear enough, so to has my take on the art of living. I am writing to you no longer from Montreal, but from Berlin. I will soon be on my way to Vancouver. And I recently became the world’s most eligible bachelor.

I’ve made a lot of useful mistakes since we we last spoke. But I’ll save those stories for future posts. In the meantime, it’s a pleasure to be writing to you again. It’s good to be home.

Competence, like truth, beauty and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.

– Laurence J. Peter

The World’s Fastest Man in 1980, Allan Wells, would not have made the podium in the 100-metre races at the Beijing Olympics last year. In fact, his winning time of 10.25 would not have even qualified him for the semi-finals.

If you were a trailblazer in the world of personal computing in 1983, you’d be bragging about how your team had just shipped a product that offered a 5 MHz processor, a 5 MB hard drive, dual 5.25 inch floppy drives, support for up to 2 MB of RAM, a graphical user interface, and a mouse.

You’d be bragging, of course, about the Apple Lisa, a machine that sold for the ridiculously low price of $9,995.

And in 1984, one of America’s most influential consumer advocacy groups, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), launched an all-out war on fast-food restaurants. According to their own press release, their goal was “to pressure fast-food restaurants and food companies to stop frying with beef fat and tropical oils, which are high in the cholesterol-raising saturated fats that increase the risk of heart disease.”

By 1990, their campaign had succeeded. Most fast food chains had significantly lowered the amount of saturated fats in their foods, and replaced them with a substitute that the CSPI had been arguing for since 1987: trans fats.

You know that type of mutated fat this is so dangerous to humans that governments around the world are seeking to ban it? Yeah, that one.

Looking back not even 30 years ago, these people were leaders in their field, the best of the best, “experts.” Today, we’d more likely refer to them as unemployed hacks.

Which brings me to the first point I want to make about becoming an expert: Experts aren’t really experts. They suck at what they do. They just suck a little bit less than everybody else around them at the time.

Expertise as Fog

The other point I want to make about pursuing expertise is this: Expertise does not exist.

Sure, it’s a nice label to be given if you’re being interviewed on CNN, or if you’re being introduced into a debate on the existence of God, but it is not something you can achieve. If you’ve set yourself the goal of becoming “a Ruby on Rails expert”, “a blogging expert”, or even say “a fluent French speaker”, you haven’t set a goal at all.

What is a blogging expert? Someone who makes a lot of money blogging about how to make a lot of money blogging? Or perhaps someone who achieves 20,000 subscribers by churning out list posts and other linkbait that do an excellent job of growing traffic, but a poor job of growing the reader?

And if you apply for a job that requires a “Ruby on Rails expert” and you get hired, does that mean that you are an expert? Maybe all it really means is that you know just enough to convince the person that hired you. Which doesn’t actually mean you know a lot about the framework.

The best way to achieve expertise in your chosen field is to eliminate the word “expertise” from your lexicon. As my seven-language-speaking friend Benny Lewis put it, in an email exchange I had with him on the subject of attaining language fluency:

If you really want to be fluent, I recommend abandoning the thought process of “achieving fluency” entirely. Setting a goal of “speak $language fluently” is too vague to be achievable. It implies that some day you will reach the point where you can finally say, “I speak Klingon fluently!” But that day will never come.

You need to have more concrete goals spread across a small number of days or weeks that eventually add up to something tangible, such as, “This week I will learn vocabulary related to objects in the house” or, “Today I will work on my consonant pronunciation.”

If you think about it, isn’t all learning really language learning? Whether you’re trying to achieve fluency in Italian, or building websites with Ruby on Rails, or baking designer cakes, every skill set is really just a vocabulary for self-expression. The more you know, the more you can say.

Just like spoken language, the language of the Builder has no beginning and no end. So the best way to improve yourself in any pursuit is to forget about “becoming an expert” and to instead focus on expanding your range of communication. Ideally in a way that is clearly measurable by an outside observer.

If you want to be a “competent Rails hacker”, then set a goal to get one of your patches landed in the Rails trunk. If your dream is to be a “successful blogger”, bring it closer to reality by aiming to publish, say, three posts per week. And if want to be a “world-class chessplayer”, make it actionable by playing 10 blitz games per day in a specific opening you’re trying to master, and analyze each game afterwards.

Be less concerned with the adjectives of success–good, great, world-class–and more concerned with taking a worthwhile next step. The path to expertise is the path to nowhere in particular. When you get specific, you get results.

The first couple minutes of this video, a speech Lund gave about entrepreneurship at Le Web ‘08 in Paris, are rough going as they get the presentation set up. But the remaining 10 minutes are a gold mine of insight and inspiration.

It comes at a time when Lund has just failed badly. Really badly. Like, they’re-coming-to-take-my-house-away badly. He went “all-in” on a newspaper project that bombed, and lost 30 million euros as a result.

He’s not too bothered though. My favourite quote:

I started with nothing as a student [but] I probably had more fun [at that time] than I had last year when I was thinking about buying a private jet.

But the most valuable lesson I take away from his speech is this: An entrepreneur is someone who is more willing to fail at something that matters than to succeed at something that doesn’t.

The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.

– Aristotle

As Ayn Rand pointed out in her excellent book, Philosophy: Who Needs It, we are all philosophers.

We all have a certain attitude towards life, we all have different hypotheses regarding Flying Spaghetti Monsters, and we all have a standard by which we measure good and evil. The only difference, as Rand says, is “whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought…or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions.”

That you’re reading these words suggests you are most likely of the conscious, rational vintage. Even if you think my writing deserves no particular admiration, you are at least here to consume ideas and think critically about them, to improve your grasp on the art of living. This is what personal growth is all about.

But what if you’ve been involved in this whole personal growth thing for some time and it just isn’t working? What if you’ve read a lot of stuff from the self-help section–Tony Robbins, Tim Ferriss, Napoleon Hill, Stephen Covey, Rhonda Byrne, etc.–but now realize that you’re the same person you were a year ago? What if instead of losing weight, you’ve gained weight? What if instead of expanding your social life, you’ve made unwanted friends and influenced the wrong people? What if you’ve read all that Mars/Venus stuff but your relationship is still lost in space?

Getting Out of the Rut

There are three reasons to explain this:

The first reason is that you don’t apply what you learn. In that case, the ideas that follow won’t help either.

The second reason is that you apply what you learn, but incorrectly. The author knows how to “ask, believe, and receive” and the reason your intentions aren’t manifesting is because you don’t know the secret.

Or should I say, you don’t know The Secret.

But this is unlikely. Personal growth ideas are generally not that complicated. They are intentionally broad strokes, not intricate mathematical equations. The hardest part is applying what you learn. And, more specifically, applying it day in and day out for as long as is needed to achieve the desired outcome.

You don’t need a university degree to lose weight. There is no Ph.D. in social engineering. And relationship problems are hard to measure; emotions don’t fit in test tubes.

The third reason to account for a lack of success is that you are an earnest student with a capable mind, who is faithfully implementing what you’re learning, but it just doesn’t work. Despite the claims of the enormous power of the Hyper-Mega-Success Formula (TM), and the author’s assertions that “countless experiments” in “modern science” have proven its efficacy, the only thing it’s given you in a Hyper-Mega-Hole-In-Your-Wallet and an ever-present speech bubble floating over your head that reads:

         . o O (WTF???)
        O
       /|\
       / \

It is to this person that I am here speaking.

If you have a large library of self-help books, and you’ve learned from and applied their teachings with excellent results, then what follows probably won’t change much. Output is, after all, God.

But if you find yourself frustrated and in many ways poorer from your efforts–if self-help feels more like self-destruct–then I’d like to suggest an alternate course: Stop reading self-help books. And start devouring philosophy.

Questions Are Not the Answer

At a casual glance, self-help and philosophy appear to be almost the same thing. Both Tony Robbins and Aristotle are trying to help you live a fulfilling life. Both want to help you gain a better understanding of yourself and the world around you. But while the goals of these two fields are similar, the differences in implementation are not trivial.

One of the most fundamental problems with many self-help books is that they assume that questions are answers. For example, in his book Awaken the Giant Within, Tony Robbins, talking about how to come up with goals, suggests you ask yourself (pp. 289-290), “What would I want for my life if I knew I could have it any way I wanted it? What would I go for if I knew I could not fail?”

What’s missing from this solution for choosing worthy goals is…a solution for choosing worthy goals. A lot of people ask themselves this question and have no idea how to answer it. How do you know what you would do if you couldn’t fail? What do you consider “good” (a worthy goal) versus “evil” (an unworthy goal)? And by what standard?

Ethics: The Missing Manual

To answer this particular question, I advocate using your Weird Idea Radar, constantly saying yes to new experiences until you stumble upon something that you can really sink your teeth into.

But equally important is a tool with which to measure the value of your experiences, an instrument that will not only give you readings of “Bad”, “Good”, “Better”, and “Best” but that also explains why this is so. That instrument is ethics.

Ethics is the branch of philosophy that illuminates the path to right action. It is not just about determining which actions which should be legal or illegal; any evaluation of bad, good, better, and best, whether on a personal, social, or societal level falls within the concern of ethics.

If your moral code is based on Marxist ideas, your life goals are going to be completely different from someone whose moral code is derived from Objectivism. Likewise, a hedonist’s ethics will result in a completely different day-to-day experience compared to someone whose moral guide is the Bible.

And here’s the thing: not all moral codes are created equal. If your moral code is broken, it doesn’t matter how you answer the goals question, because the answer will always point you in the wrong direction.

Ethics is the primary deliverable of philosophy. The rest–metaphysics (the nature of reality), epistemology (the nature of knowledge), and esthetics (the nature of beauty)–is interesting only because it all lays the groundwork for understanding how to conduct our lives.

And while an entire book on ethics is at the core of most contributions of those we consider great philosophers–Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, and Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason come to mind–the subject of ethics is conspicuously absent from self-help literature.

In most cases, it is conspicuously ignored.

Ideas – Ethics = FAIL

Since personal growth is all about action, and ethics provides a framework for right action, a solid understanding of ethics is the most important weapon in your arsenal of change.

What happens when you ignore ethics?

One risk, like the goal-setting example shows, is that you just get stuck.

The other risk is that your actions write a cheque that your sanity can’t cash.

The seduction community is ripe territory for causing such psychological fallouts. For example, the Mystery Method is probably the most well-known How-To manual on meeting women. Its premise is that seduction is a linear process. It describes each step of the process, from the opener, to getting a girl interested in you, to how and when to demonstrate interest in her, to getting her in bed and avoiding “buyer’s remorse.”

And, as someone who was involved in the seduction community a couple years ago, I can tell you this: it works. In fact, it’s almost frightening to realize that it works, to see an interaction with a girl unfolding before your eyes exactly like a book told you it would.

Sometimes word for word like the book told you it would.

But there’s a problem here. If you need money quickly, both mugging a blind man in a back alley late at night and selling off one of your five TVs to the local pawn shop will achieve that goal, but clearly only one of these alternatives is viable.

While the Mystery Method can answer almost all your questions about meeting women–why she needs to be interested in you before you demonstrate interest in her, why going for rapport before attraction will get you LJBF’d, why backhanded compliments will actually increase your appeal–there is one question for which no answer is provided: Is this right?

Is the right approach to meeting women to observe alpha males, identify the characteristics and behaviours that distinguish them, and then emulate those attributes in the hopes of producing the same results? Is posting and analyzing “lay reports” on the internet a sensible way to improve your skills with the opposite sex? Will 20 lays make you happier than 17?

The short answer to these questions can be found here:

• Seduction for Smart People: Should You Become a “Pickup Artist”? – Part I
• Seduction for Smart People: Should You Become a “Pickup Artist”? – Part II

The long answer can be found in Neil Strauss’s excellent book The Game.

Learning How to Learn

What do you know? How do you know that you know it?

This might sound like a cute little brain teaser, something to think about while you’re waiting for the bong to make its way in your direction, but it is a vital day-to-day enquiry. It is the primary concern of epistemology, the branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge: what it is, how to acquire it, and what its limits are.

Rendering the sharpest image of reality that your mental hardware can support means continually upgrading your mental software. But the only ideas worth “installing” are those that perform useful functions without causing your system to crash all the time.

It may seem like recognizing bad ideas is just common sense, but refined critical thinking skills are not innate. Looking through the history of the scientific method for example, you’ll find that the idea of using a controlled experiment with two identical populations and one variable is only 250 years old. Without that idea, many of the major medical breakthroughs we make today would not be possible.

Growth requires critical thinking skills. Ideas need to be resisted before they can be accepted. When you’re studying advice on personal growth, that resistance comes in the form of some necessary questions: What does this author know? How does he know it? And how do you know that he knows it?

Blurring Reality

There’s a lot of wisdom in self-help books that can never be considered knowledge, because it involves claims that are so general that they cannot be proven either true or false. As long as these claims are kept in a box labelled “beliefs”, that’s generally not a problem. There are a lot of areas in life that we aren’t sure about–and might never be–and beliefs provide us some way of wading through uncertainty.

Unfortunately, in my experience, self-help books have a tendency to blur the line between fact and fiction, making scientific claims (statements that can be demonstrated as true or false) with insufficient, or even bogus evidence.

For example, to continue picking on Tony Robbins, in his book Unlimited Power, Tony talks about the power of writing down your goals and refers to the famous Yale Study of Goals. The story goes like this:

In 1953, researchers studying goal setting surveyed the graduating seniors from Yale University on their goals and aspirations for the future. They discovered only 3% of the graduating class had specific, written goals and objectives.

20 years later, when they tracked down the same graduates, the researchers were astounded by the results. They discovered that the same 3% who engaged in goal setting activity and had clearly written goals when they graduated in 1953 were more successful, and worth more in terms of wealth than the other 97% put together. The same 3% also tended to have better health and relationships than the other 97%.

Evidence like this is so powerful that it’s almost overwhelming. So it’s no wonder that the same story has been repeated by some of the most well-known self-help gurus, including Zig Ziglar and Brian Tracy. After all, if you had known the power of clear, written goals 5 or 10 years ago you’d probably be a millionaire many times over by now, right?

There’s just one problem with this story: It is complete bullshit. Total air. It never happened.

Eyes Wide Shut

This might seem like a small fib, but the problem with false claims is that they rarely travel solo, and hollow evidence leads to hollow conclusions. If the Yale story were true, then the power of setting clear, written goals would indeed be enormous. And if you hadn’t been doing that lately, it may actually be the missing ingredient to your success.

But even with razor-sharp, written goals, even with all your I’s dotted and your T’s crossed, you still have all the real work ahead of you. The decisions you make along the way will require refined moral judgement. Choosing the people with whom you’ll associate will require a keen sense of virtue. And making yourself equal to the work at hand will require learning from impeccable sources.

Becoming a student of philosophy will make you a more rigorous student of everything else. You will no longer have to squint when reading. When a scientific claim is made, you will insist on evidence to back it up. You will learn to spot logical fallacies that might normally have gone unnoticed. You will avoid the frustration of false expectations derived from false affirmations.

Self-help gurus make promises. Philosophers make arguments. The great philosophers are measured not by the cost of their weekend seminars, but by the quality of their proofs.

A common recipe for personal growth is to start with what you have, identify what sucks about it, and try to make it suck less. Software developers call this “fixing bugs.”

“Fixing bugs” may seem like a natural metaphor for personal development, but in most cases this is actually an extremely limited, even harmful, perspective. When you focus on fixing what’s broken, the standard by which you measure your progress is whatever you started with. If what you started with was crap, then the standard by which you judge your results is crap.

If your software currently crashes 20 times a day, making it crash only 15 times a day is “good”, only 12 times a day is “better”, and a mere 10 crashes a day would be “excellent.”

You might even get a raise.

This way of thinking is its own worst enemy. Patching a bad situation often still leaves you in a bad situation. Even worse, you might get the impression you’re doing something useful. Sure, 10 crashes a day is a lot better than 20 crashes a day. Perhaps you even used your Employee of the Month bonus to upgrade to the 500 channel cable package that Bob and Alice have been raving about.

But it’s still a profoundly shit way to live. Fixing a bug doesn’t necessarily fix anything. You may think you’ve uncovered a solution, when all you’ve really done is found a rut and made it deeper–a little more like a grave.

Death by a Thousand Service Packs

If it’s been three years since your last promotion–if you’ve spent almost every day for as long as you can remember arguing with your girlfriend about absolutely nothing–if you’ve swallowed up the last six months going on about how hopeless you are with women, yet you’ve approached only a dozen girls in that time, then reality has a message for you: The data has spoken. There is no bandage large enough to cover this wound. There is no way to alter this cause to produce the desired effect.

You cannot fix what was built on this foundation. You have to replace the foundation entirely.

The day after my cousin died several weeks ago, I quit my job. I’d been working on a contract for the last several months, but it just wasn’t me. It couldn’t be me. And no amount of tweaking, tuning, or patchwork could fix that.

It’s always a little terrifying to shake things up, but there is no better way to live. Until last Thursday, I was scratching someone else’s itch. Now I’m scratching my own.

On Friday night my 22-year-old cousin, Derek Sloboda, was out on a lake partying with his friends when the boat they were in capsized. In the ensuing frenzy, some of them, including Derek, left the overturned boat in 30-metre-deep water to swim to dry land and find help.

If anyone had the physical strength for heroism in this situation, Derek certainly did. He’s been an athlete all his life, and in recent years his efforts in the gym had shaped him into something resembling a Greek statue. But at some point during the chain of events, Derek disappeared.

There were as many as eight boats that went out to search the waters that night, and all of Derek’s friends were eventually recovered safely. But Derek was not. What began as a rescue mission ended as a recovery operation.

I’ve spent years shaping my voice as a writer. I’ve worked really hard to develop the creativity and precision to express my ideas in rich and interesting ways. But I have hit a dead end here. There is no sorrow of a magnitude greater than that which my aunt, my uncle, my cousin Kristin, our family and his friends are now facing. There are no words to describe the inside of a black hole.

It’s hard to believe we lost him. So to we lost that part of us which he held: as a friend, a family member, a coworker, a teammate, a brother, a son, a grandson, a cousin, a nephew, a student, a teacher, a boyfriend, a good kid. We will never forget his kindness and his innocence.

Derek had a healthy appetite for danger–the good kind. I personally will remember, among other things, my admiration for him moving to Banff to work there for several months, for his willingness to take a chance on something new in that way. I was even more blown away in hearing that while he was there, something made him reflect on how poorly he treated his sister at times, and how they often fought over silly things. When he returned from his trip he apologized to her and they became closer than ever. For a kid with such good genetics, he had every reason to be cocky and arrogant, but somehow managed to be exactly the opposite.

We love you and we miss you buddy. Because of your life, we will live differently.

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

– Elizabeth Drew

In my recent article, How to Read a Book, I offered some ideas for extracting value from dead trees. I focussed primarily on non-fiction in that article. Now I want to offer you an approach for fiction.

Fiction differs from non-fiction in only one necessary way: it’s made up. But that small variation in its linguistic DNA produces an entirely different organism. While the primary goal of fact-driven content is to extract the information you need, the primary goal of reading a story could be anything. A work of fiction is, essentially, an artifact of self-expression. There are as many motivations for writing a story as there are reasons for us to communicate with one another. Many authors write stories to explore issues they’re experiencing in their own lives. Others attempt to get us thinking about the good, bad, and ugly things in our world.

But if works of fiction are made up, why bother reading them? What value can we possibly derive from the people, places, and things that exist purely in our imagination? And how can those fictitious forces inspire us to push our own boundaries and do things we’ve never done before?

Why Read Fiction?

Obviously a question like, “Why read fiction?”, has many answers: for entertainment value, to improve your vocabulary, to be inspired, etc. For me the primary value of fiction, the one that is most beneficial from a growth perspective, is that it offers an experience.

What kind of experience? Whatever one I choose. The literary landscape is as diverse as a very diverse thing. If I want to live in a world full of robots, I’ll read Asimov. If I’m in more of an anarchist mood, I’ll reach for Orwell. When I wanted a taste of life in Soviet Russia, I read Ayn Rand’s We the Living. I immersed myself so completely in the story that I began to feel the agonizing boredom of waiting for hours in line for rations of stale bread and rancid butter. I came to understand the paranoia that people felt, how careful they had to be with their words towards the Party, fearing that one of their listeners might be a member, knowing the fate that came to those who begged to differ.

Several weeks after reading that book I found myself in conversation with a couple friends from eastern Europe, who’d lived under the Soviet regime. It was fascinating to discover how much their real-world experiences paralleled my not-real-world ones. A lot of what they said refreshed the mental images of what I’d read, almost as if they were things I’d lived through myself.

This episode is explained by more than just my overactive imagination. Even science has something to say about the ability our creative powers have to shape our reality. In an article entitled “Experiencing the Future”, in the June 2008 issue of Le Monde de l’intelligence, Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, talks about how our thoughts are processed in ways similar to real sensory experiences. Here’s a quote:

The pleasure that we feel when we imagine future events comes from the same parts of the brain as the pleasure we feel when we live events in the present.

The visual imagination activates the visual cortex, in the same way as our visual sense; the auditory imagination activates the auditory cortex, in the same way as our hearing, and the affective imagination activates the affective centers of the brain, exactly like affective experience.

So while we know that fiction is–obviously–quite fictional, diving deeply into a great story can be an almost visceral adventure. A decent novel can entertain you. A good novel can make you feel stuff. A great novel can change your life.

Read Only What Interests You

That a novel offers an experience is of no inherent value. Getting the most value out of a novel requires asking yourself: What kind of experience do you want to have?

My answer to that question is usually a reflection of where I’m headed with my life. I often use my intentions as a compass to point me to the right section in the bookstore. Since my primary relationship to a story is through its characters, I look for books populated with intriguing personalities: people I’d want to know in real life, or at least have a conversation with through a bullet-proof glass window. I used to choose books to read because they were “classics”, or recommended by so-and-so. I’ve since become wise to the folly of that approach.

There are so many words to choose from that knowing where to begin your search for a good book can be overwhelming. Here are my preferred sources, all of which can also apply to non-fiction:

• Bloggers. A great deal of what I read is stuff recommended by bloggers I respect.
• Online forums. Shared interests are a great source of reading ideas, particularly for novels, since their titles rarely give a clear hint at what they’re about.
• Other books. Not only those mentioned in the main text, but also those in the bibliography.
• Wikipedia → Influences. Many Wikipedia pages for authors include a list of authors that influenced them. You may also prefer to read stuff by authors they influenced.
• Bookstores. When all else fails, nothing beats spending an hour or two just wandering around a big bookstore, picking things off shelves and examining them.

Fiction as Vehicle for Growth

Great fiction expands your emotional repertoire and deepens your self-understanding. This makes it a particularly useful tool in the conscious pursuit of happiness. I prefer to choose a reading path that floods my imagination with images and ideas that are aligned with my present goals.

For example, reading Atlas Shrugged taught me a lot about self-reliance. I was so inspired by the characters in Ayn Rand’s epic novel that I decided to devour her other well-known works of fiction: The Fountainhead, We the Living, and Anthem.

This kind of tunnel vision is a healthy thing, for short periods. It gives the ideas a chance to soak in, for the mindset to really rub off on you. Unlike most non-fiction, a novel takes an idea and wraps it in context so you can see how it might play out in the real world. By focussing your reading around a particular theme, you build up a database of reference “experiences” related to that subject. Of course, fiction is no replacement for real life, but like the example I gave earlier about We the Living, it can still offer profound insights.

Invite the Characters Into Your Life

Every so often, you’ll meet someone who changes your perception of the world. You might work alongside a brilliant computer geek who redefines your notion of competence, or you might connect with someone in your social life whose ability to deal with a rough situation inspires you.

This same reservoir of human potential is available in paperback form. It requires only the force of your imagination to be extracted. So when you read a novel, really read it. Invite the characters into your life. Think about them even when you’re not reading. Weigh the events in your life against the events in theirs. What might they be doing right now? How would they handle the situation that you currently find most challenging? How is your personality different from theirs and in what ways do those differences shape your lives differently? Experiment with all the ways you can think of to weave the story and characters into your own existence–without getting arrested.

Only fiction can provide such a broad context in which to think about life, the universe, and everything. Use this to your advantage. Just like we exercise caution in who we choose to associate with in real life, so we should be picky about what we read. Read deliberately, with your mind wide open. Use fiction to live; not as a replacement for the real world, but as an extension of it.