Whether by injury, choice, illness, being busy, or simple neglect, sooner or later we all wind up going for periods of time without working out.

It starts simple enough. You miss a day, then two days, then before you know it a few weeks or months has gone by (sound like what happened to your New Year’s fitness resolution?).

It can be even more crushing when the layoff is not your choice. I’d been training for one-arm pull ups for about 9 months until I got the flu recently. I was getting pretty close and suddenly found myself bedridden for weeks unable to work out.

The insidious part is that when you’re ready to get back into training you start putting it off because you don’t feel like you have the energy to do it. Except that next time you start gearing up for a workout you feel like you have even less energy. The longer you wait the harder it gets.

For many of us, the challenge of getting back in shape is more mental than physical.

Fortunately, with the right mindset and a little willpower you can get things kick started again.

All is not lost

First the good news.

For shorter layoffs (less than about 3 weeks) you can often jump back in just by backing your workouts off a little bit and building back up to where you were.

However, athletes of all stripes have found that even for longer layoffs all is not lost and you can quickly regain previous levels of fitness. You may still have to build up to that level gradually, but you aren’t starting over entirely from scratch.

Emerging evidence from researchers is starting to give us some clues as to how this works. For example, they have found that even though muscle volume decreases when you aren’t training, muscle nuclei remain a lot longer.

The right mindset

It’s so easy to say, “I’ll just start tomorrow.” Because tomorrow you will magically have more energy, more time, more willpower, and less stress… right?

It’s amazing how optimistic we are about the superhuman capabilities of our future selves. But it’s more realistic to think of your future self as having the same energy levels, same amount of time, same level of willpower, and same stresses as you do right now. If anything, life just gets more complicated.

Instead try adopting the motto, “it never gets easier than right now.” You’ll find this is true for just about everything in life, not just fitness.

The importance of the first workout

Like the first time you kiss a new lover, the hardest workout psychologically is the first one. Fortunately, unlike in your love life, there is no chance of rejection from your workout.

Since the first workout is the most difficult mentally, I like to make it the easiest physically. Set the bar low–really low–just to get yourself into motion.

I can do clapping pullups, archer pull ups, and all kinds of harder pull up variations, but when I started training again after the flu I started off with a humble workout of 2 sets of 3 regular pull ups. It doesn’t need to be fancy, you just need to be able to chalk up a workout on the board.

Just getting that first modest workout in can be enough to get you over the hump and back into a training routine. It’s more about confidence building than muscle building at this stage.

Eat more

Finally, you probably started eating less during the layoff. You may not have even realized it.

When you start training again in earnest you will need to eat more to keep your energy up–even if you are trying to lose weight. If you love food like I do, this will not be a problem.

Get to it

Now all that’s left is to get to it. If you’ve just finished reading this post and you’re coming off a training layoff, could you do a quick set of pushups and air squats right now?

I recently made some critical remarks about an upcoming book called Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live. While we’ll have to wait on the release of the book to pass judgment on the actual science, the marketing for the book is irksome because it claims to “debunk” the paleo diet while displaying complete ignorance of what claims are actually made by the mainstream paleo community. [Editor's note: The book is now released, see my review here.]

My comments stirred up quite a fuss, and since I am not without an appreciation for irony I’ve decided to write about several views held by paleos that I would call “Paleo Fantasies.”

1. Low carb means no carb

Put that strawberry down! It will spike your insulin right into diabetes and the fructose will rot your veins from the inside out.

Somewhere along the line the idea of “low carb” turned into the idea of “no carb.”

This then prompted a backlash, and there are now some folks running around who launch an attack every time they hear those dastardly low carbers spouting their living la vida low carb lies.

“Low carb” itself is a problematically poorly defined term. Low compared to what?

Compared to the standard American diet (SAD), paleo is low carb. It’s also most likely lower in fat since a lot of the offending foods (pizza, cake, Big Macs, etc.) also contain lots of fat.

Perhaps what we need is not a “low carb” diet or a “high carb” diet, but an “appropriate” carb diet. The fact is that you need some carbs, especially if you are highly active and exercise regularly.

I can’t recall how many times I’ve heard, “I just had no energy after going paleo, so I had to start eating more carbs.”

So if you’ve been no-carbing it, throw a sweet potato or two in the mix, or perhaps get some unsweetened dried fruit from my favorite source (www.nuts.com). It won’t kill you and will help restore your depleted energy.

2. Insulin is the enemy

Pretty much everyone knows that diabetes has something to do with blood sugar and insulin dysfunction.

If you’ve read a little more on the topic you probably have a model in your head something like chronically high carbs leads to chronically high blood sugar, which leads to chronically elevated insulin levels, which leads to insulin insensitivity. Then wham! You’ve got diabetes.

The specter of the carb-diabetes connection is another reason that low carb turns into no carb. Fear of insulin dysfunction turns into fear of insulin in general.

But we should not fear insulin. Like cholesterol, it too has a part to play in the healthy running of our everyday lives. It might even surprise you to know that meat is highly insulinogenic. Like most things it’s probably just chronic excess that is the real problem.

For a more complete and accurate discussion of insulin than I am capable of take a look at Weightology’s four part series on Insulin…an Undeserved Bad Reputation.

3. Being fat adapted means eat unlimited fat

The high fat craze most likely began with Mark Sisson’s announcement that his goal was to create a metabolic paradigm shift from man as “sugar-burner” to man as being “fat-adapted.”

This move appears to have been a backlash against mainstream exercise nutrition practices like carboloading and mainstream diet practices of avoiding fat in foods at all costs. It was a cry out against a mentality that keeping the body fueled means putting in the right amount of sugar–and the more the better.

However, the problem is that some people interpreted this as unrestricted license to eat fat. It also further fueled the fire of low carb=no carb (despite his admonition that it didn’t mean he was anti-carb).

So instead of approaching a reasonable medium, the pendulum swung the other way and fat become the miracle food that you couldn’t eat enough of in some circles.

I can’t speak to other’s experience of fat, but when I eat too much fat I get queasy and sick to my stomach. A trip to the bathroom shortly follows (experiment: try drinking an entire can of coconut milk at once and see how long you can hold it in… or better yet, don’t and just take my word for it).

Art De Vany, another pillar of the paleo community, has spoken out against high fat because fat is inflammatory and damages insulin receptors–neither of which are desirable.

Again, I think the take-away message here is that fat is not evil, but we should avoid chronic excess. Instead of jumping to either extreme of “no fat” or “max fat,” we probably need to seek out the middle ground of “appropriate fat.”

My entirely unscientific method of gauging fat consumption is that if I start to feel queasy, I’ve eaten too much. If I start to get acne or have skin problems, then I need to eat more fat (yes, you read that right, more fat for skin problems–the opposite of what everyone thinks. While I have no scientific data on this I suspect it has something to do with fatty acids repairing the natural oil barriers of the skin. Vegans, especially raw vegans, often complain of dry skin and other skin-related issues which I suspect have to do with fat deficiency in their diet).

4. Calories in vs. calories out is broken

This is somewhat of a half-truth. People have noted that despite the supposed laws of thermodynamics, weight gain and weight loss don’t seem to obey the principle of calories in vs. calories out.

The problem isn’t so much that calories in vs. calories out (CICO) is broken as that what most people think it means is broken. In most people’s mind CICO is typically rendered as:

(Calories eaten) – (Calories burned through exercise) = (Change in weight)

This equation misleads us because calories are also burnt or lost through other ways like simple heat production in the body, other metabolic processes, or getting pooped out without actually being digested. Different foods can also have effects like promoting or reducing water retention in your body, easily creating pounds of difference in your weight (see here for a more complete discussion of factors effecting CICO and weight change).

The popular mis-perception of CICO as well as its general impracticality as a day-to-day tool for how much to eat and exercise leads me to think it is time to cast it aside. Most of us simply aren’t going to calculate our net expenditures on a daily basis, or are going to use “mental math” with margins of error so large as to make the attempt meaningless.

From the diet side I think we are better served by simply keeping our focus on eating nutrient-dense whole foods like lean meats, fruits, and veggies; and avoiding the bad stuff like grains and processed foods.

If you really want a metaphor to use, it’s probably more helpful to think of the body as a “chemistry set” than as a “calorie burning engine.” Focus more on how your body reacts to the quality of your food than on the energy content of your food.

5. Evolution has stopped

This actually kind of seems plausible. Depending on who you talk to humans have had essentially the same genetic makeup for anywhere from 250,000 to 2 million years. And everywhere we look around us humans have essentially been humans for thousands of years.

Of course it simply isn’t true. The most obvious evidence that evolution is still happening has been staring you in the face all your life–different ethnicities have different skin color, hair color, etc. These differences are genetic. You don’t grow up with brown skin just by being born in India or white skin just by being born in Europe.

The gene mutation associated with the typical Asian appearance is only thought to be about 35,000 years old. So their DNA makes the 10,000 year paleo cut off at least, but only just…

As long as we reproduce by DNA exchange, there will be DNA copying errors that produce mutations. Some of those mutations will be favorable either because they help us to survive and produce more children than the next guy or because they make us sexier than all the rest and have more mating opportunities. As those genes increase in the gene pool, evolution marches on with natural selection.

6. There hasn’t been enough evolutionary time to adapt to neolithic foods

Whoa buddy! That food is totally a post-farming invention, put it down.

This is another sort of half truth. It leads to dietary dichotomies like new world foods vs. old world foods and maxims like “only eat something with a biblical Hebrew name.” It also leads to arguments against certain foods solely because they are nightshades (tomatoes, potatoes, green peppers, eggplants etc.), with scant explanation of why that even matters.

Of course it should be patently obvious that while there may be some correlation to ancestral adaptation, whether a plant grows in the new world or the old world or whether or not it has a biblical hebrew name is not a scientific method for determining nutritional value.

Typically anytime you hear someone talk about a paleo “gray zone,” you are usually talking about one of these neolithic foods that just might be okay despite lacking its 10,000 year pedigree.

Now, the problem with the “not enough evolutionary time” argument is that it is wrong due to a concept called “punctuated equilibrium.”

The idea is that a severe enough environmental stressor can cause a rapid change in the gene pool, sometimes in as little as a single generation.

For example if your food supply gets poisoned with arsenic, most people would die. But some, even if only a very tiny percentage, would survive–only those capable of eating arsenic. This is exactly what happened to some populations of earthworms.

Milk consumption and lactase persistence are evidence of punctuated equilibrium at work in humans. A BBC documentary a few years ago cited evidence for strong selection pressure for milk consumption. Of course the conversion is not “complete”–some of us deal with milk better or worse than others.

And some things like nightshades may simply never have been a problem for most folks to begin with.

Now, all that said it doesn’t mean that we need to throw the evolutionary framework out the window. All it means is there is nothing magical about the exact 10,000 year barrier and that you may have to do a little experimentation to see what works for you instead of sticking religiously to a set of dietary commandments.

7. We are perfectly adapted to the diet of our paleolithic ancestors

This is one area where Marlene Zuk, author of Paleofantasy, is likely right on the money.

In her New York Times article The Evolutionary Search for Our Perfect Past she asks just what exactly is this paleo diet we are supposedly perfectly adapted to.

The Inuit who were still living a paleolithic lifestyle in recorded memory ate almost entirely animal based diets, relying heavily on native aquatic life. The !Kung people in the Kalahari relied heavily on the roots of desert plants and the occasional giraffe or antelope catch. And the plants and animals eaten by our paleolithic ancestors in Africa, Asia, Europe, and even North America all would have been very different from one another.

A “paleo diet,” if it really exists, is many and varied different diets that share loosely common themes. Instead of asking if a specific food is “paleo” or not, we should ask if it is nutritious and if our bodies respond well to eating it (many of us, including me, unconsciously mean this when we ask if something is “paleo,” but it’s important to remember what we really mean).

Undoubtedly there is a strong genetic component to this and on average what is healthy for others will be the same as what is healthy for you, but the sheer fact that nearly all paleo figureheads advocate individual testing to see how your body reacts to different foods should explode the notion of a 100% perfect one-size-fits-all adaptation to a specific eating formula.

It’s better to think of paleo as a framework that gives hints at the probability of what foods will be healthy for us.

But more importantly, the idea of perfect adaption speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution itself. Evolution doesn’t make a species perfectly adapted to its environment, it only ensures that those better adapted to it than the next guy (or perhaps more to the point, “less badly adapted to it” than the next guy) have a better chance of surviving and having children. This can leave us in a sort of “half-adapted” state (remember our earlier conversation about milk?).

Like the man running from the bear said to his friend, “I don’t have to be faster than the bear, just faster than you.”

A funny twist on the notion of adaptation is that in the documentary The Perfect Human Diet someone is shown giving a presentation on the human digestive tract saying essentially, “Look, we don’t have four stomachs and a long digestive tract, we have a short digestive tract like a carnivore. Clearly we were meant to eat meat [slide in the background shows pictures of a cow, lion, and human digestive tract].”

Coming the other direction, vegetarians and vegans use almost the exact same argument! They say, “Look, our digestive tract is way longer than carnivores’, clearly we were meant to be herbivores.”

The truth is somewhere in the middle. We have a longer digestive tract than a carnivore but a smaller one than an herbivore, which reveals our omnivorous nature.

I use the metaphor that our digestive system is like a swiss army knife.

It’s built to do many different things and can be adapted to new uses. But it doesn’t do any of those things particularly well (compared to a specialized one-purpose tool), and none of them exclusively. It’s de-optimized on both the veggie end and the meat eating end to give us a broad range of dietary options that we are all imperfectly adapted to.

Do you have higher standards than everyone else you know?

Does it frustrate you that other people always seem content to leave things done half-assed?

I mean come on! Some of the mistakes people make are so glaringly obvious that it just doesn’t make any sense that they don’t seem to have any interest at all in fixing them. What is wrong with these people?!

If this sounds like you, then you just might be a perfectionist.

As perfectionists we suffer unique problems. From our work, to our conversational wit, to the precisely optimal temperature in our homes, we strive to optimize every aspect of our lives. It’s not enough to just do something until it’s “good enough” (whatever that means), it has to be done the right way. And if it’s not done the right way, well… it’s not really done now is it.

While the drive to pursue excellence–nay, to elevate the performance of our activities to a form of art–is a powerful asset that helps us become good at what we do, it also hinders us in ways that may be preventing us from achieving larger success in life.

Breathe a sigh of relief with me as I tell you that the answer is not to stop being a perfectionist. What we need is some mental judo to help us recognize where we are getting blocked, and refocus our energies to keep moving forward.

1. The 70% Solution

Whether it’s starting a business or simply getting our butt out of the chair to go talk to that guy or girl across the room, we often have troubles even getting started with projects–especially ones that feel important to us.

Do I have the right business plan? There seems to be a market for it, and the calculations seem plausible.. but, is it really right? What if I put years into this thing only to discover that my plan was flawed from the very beginning?

Do I have the perfect pickup line? I’d better plan out the whole conversation in my head before I get there and anticipate every response to make sure I get this right… Wait, where’d she go?

We mull over whether or not we have planned adequately for so long that opportunity slips us by. We further complicate things when we make it mean something about ourselves if we fail to plan correctly and let it stop us from even trying.

It may be apocryphal, but the story goes that when the military plans an attack, they plan until they are 70% sure of success and then they go. As World War II General George Patton said, “A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.”

The reality is that we can’t really know the outcome of a situation with 100% certainty in advance. Sometimes we just have to take our best guess and go with it while the opportunity is still available.

2. Establish your MVP

This is where we get into perfectionism proper. Our work is just never quite perfect, causing delays in delivery. The pieces of this damn Ikea furniture just don’t line up at perfect 90 degree angles (but it looks fine to your friend who has no idea what you are talking about). If you follow the paleo diet like me, you might get into a paroxysm over whether your micronutrient balance is optimized.

There’s almost a skin crawly sensation that you can feel working its way up the underside of your fingernails that what you are working on refuses to be perfected.

We can bring to our aid one of the best ideas to come out of popular startup literature, the idea of the “minimum viable product” or MVP.

Basically the concept is that for developing the first version of your product, determine and implement only the minimum features required for it to perform its function. Save the bells and whistles for version 2.0, but get your MVP to market as quickly as possible.

Reid Hoffman, Founder of LinkedIn, even went so far as to say, “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

The applications of the MVP idea are useful far beyond the bounds of product development.

Are you preparing a presentation for work or for a client? Figure out at minimum what you need to say and say it. Don’t worry about putting the perfect water mark on your powerpoint slides, or trying to squeeze in every single detail. The fact is whoever is looking at your presentation won’t care about the former, and will just get distracted from your main points by too much of the latter.

Have you been struggling with how to introduce yourself to a guy or gal in just the perfect way that they will be mesmerized and hopelessly attracted to you? Try just going over and saying, “Hi, I’m [your name].” According to Woody Allen, 80% of success is just showing up.

An MVP for the paleo diet would be make sure you’re eating the bulk of your calories in meats, fruits, and vegetables while minimizing grain, seed, legume, and processed food consumption. If you’re getting that part right, optimizing the hell out of your Vitamin B12 intake just isn’t going to take you that much further and is not worth the stress.

As for that Ikea furniture though… You’re just going to have to send that back, or pay someone else to do it. The pain never ends with Ikea furniture.

3. I’m okay, you’re not okay

Now getting back to those villains who say dastardly things like “just make it good enough,” they, unfortunately, are not going away. So we need a way to deal with them.

In my brief stint as a Hollywood production assistant and extra, I helped film a short with comedian Eddie Pepitone. During his pre-shoot warm up he was ad libbing jokes and said something that I will never forget:

Y’see, when I make mistakes it’s part of the process. Yeah… part of the process. But when other people make mistakes… well, that’s just wrong.

I think unconsciously this is the script most of us perfectionists have running in our heads. When we make mistakes and correct them as we are working on something they are almost completely invisible to us. We even pat ourselves on the back for how perfectly we corrected the mistakes as further testament to our awesomeness.

But when other people make mistakes, they stand out in bold relief. Even if they correct their mistakes, we stare on and wonder why they are such a bumbling idiot.

The truth is, we vastly overestimate just how perfectly we are doing things ourselves since we are blind to many of our own mistakes. There are also parts of our lives that we just completely let go. My desk, for instance, is notoriously messy. And I just can’t be bothered to wash my car that often because it just gets dirty again after a day or two of driving.

In the words of the eponymous 1970s self-help bestseller, we need to move out of this state of “I’m okay, you’re not okay” to a state of “I’m okay, you’re okay.”

Here are a few strategies you can employ:

• Define (even if only to yourself) and accept minimum viable product (MVP) work from others
• Deliver MVP work when asked to “just make it good enough”
• Give people a break, help them fix their mistakes
• Respect the necessity of mistakes in the growth process of others

If all else fails, sometimes you just have to take a deep breath and say to yourself “just let it go.”

4. Regularly delete your to do list

When we are in perfectionist mode we are particularly prone to never-ending to do lists.

This seems like a good idea.. oh, well, that does too. Put it on the list. And the list grows and grows.

A month later many of those things still seem like a good idea, but you don’t know when you’ll ever get around to them. You definitely do want to do them at some point though, so they stay on the list as it grows… and grows.

Your to do list becomes a source of stress, like an unpaid credit card balance on your time. You start to feel trapped by all the things you have to do, but don’t have time for.

You need to release and free that energy again.

I recommend simply deleting your to do list and starting from scratch a minimum of once per week. Only put things back on the list that you actually intend to do during that day or week.

I’ve written in detail about deleting your to do list before, so I won’t go into detail here.

5. The Serenity Prayer

If we’re honest with ourselves, we also have a mean streak of control freak in us as well.

Though I am not a religious man, I have found the serenity prayer helpful for coping with perfectionism in an imperfect world.

So as parting words of wisdom, I offer my secularized version of it:

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

If you look back at your life you can see several watershed events that completely changed the direction of your life or completely changed the way that you thought about something.

It might be a hobby a friend turned you onto, a piece of advice about men or women that completely changed your success in dating, or exposure to a particular mentor or role model who completely changed your idea of what you thought possible for your life.

Books have a particularly magical way of changing your life. For $10 and a 300 page read, you can learn in a few hours what it took someone else years or even a lifetime to figure out. It’s nothing short of miraculous if you think about it.

Reading one book often leads to reading other related books in a continually branching tree of knowledge.

If my knowledge is a tree where one book lead to reading a bunch of other books, then these 10 books are the original large branches. If your interests are anything like mine, perhaps you can find new branches of your own life that you haven’t discovered yet.

(in roughly chronological order…)

1. The Hobbit (Sci Fi / Fantasy, 1st grade)

The Hobbit is probably more personally significant to me than you than other books I will write about. It was both my first “big boy” book and my first introduction to the Science Fiction / Fantasy genre.

In first grade they did some intelligence testing with me and figured out I had a pretty good noggin. This had unexpected benefits like being able to ask my teacher for something “more challenging” when I didn’t feel like doing the current assignment and getting to do Spiderman crossword puzzles instead.

Anyhow, one benefit I got was access to the older kids’ library at the school that first graders were not ordinarily allowed to use. The first book I happened to check out was The Hobbit. I knew nothing about it and picked it completely at random.

And… I loved it. Though I don’t read much fiction anymore, I still love watching shows like Game of Thrones and Merlin. And I still feel like a smarty pants.

2. Total Immersion (Swimming, 9th grade)

At first glance this is just a book on swimming (they also have several great instructional DVDs), but it is so much more than that.

Total Immersion is really a blueprint for how to learn anything. Terry Laughlin, the creator, takes an incredibly complex skill (swimming) and breaks it down into easily digestible bite-sized chunks. He teaches drills that help you easily master individual pieces of the whole stroke and then weave them back together into masterfully graceful swimming.

To this day whenever I want to learn something new or teach something to someone else a piece of me says, “is this how Total Immersion would do it?”

In addition to modular learning, I also learned about cumulative incremental improvement (or “kaizen,” if you will) from TI. Terry teaches that you don’t have to make huge leaps in your training–in fact you probably shouldn’t even try to. If you just keep working on one skill trying to do it a little better the next day than the day before then over time you can make huge improvements.

More than just changing the physical how-to of learning, TI changed my philosophy of learning. It’s sexy to try and use complicated, technical strategies, but even at highly advanced ability levels you will generally get better results by focusing on relentlessly refining skills in the basics.

I learned so much from TI that it’s really hard to give it enough credit. It also taught me about diminishing returns, looking out for the counter-intuitive skills where you should actually do the complete opposite of what you would expect, and learning about common pitfalls upfront.

Today, Total Immersion is held up as an example of exemplary teaching by many, notably including Tim Ferriss. As a point of personal pride I like to think that I was swimming TI style before it was popular.

3. Beyond Brawn (Strength Training, 10th grade)

If you’ve ever been into strength training at some point you’ve undoubtedly picked up a muscle mag or had some personal trainer that told you to do a workout routine that was something like this:

• Bench Press: 10 sets of 20 reps max weight
• Pec Fly: 10 sets of 20 reps max weight
• Dips: 10 sets of 20 reps max weight.

You thought “okay, max weight!” so you loaded up the bar, cranked out 20 bench press reps–barely, and then when you hit the next set you ran out of gas after only a few reps. Or maybe you did make it to the pec fly only to find out your pecs were already fried.

Beyond Brawn changed all of that for me. The author, Stuart McRobert, is famous for teaching “hardgainers” how to build muscle. He advocates bare basics training. Do few sets, of few reps, of few exercises, and go heavy. Focus on prime movers like squats, deadlifts, and bench presses. Ignore silly light-weight isolation exercises like bicep curls and leg extensions.

It’s a simple fact of biology that your body is only capable of going all out for short bursts. The bajillion rep muscle magazine workout sounds impressive, but it won’t do much other than tire you out–especially if you’re a hardgainer or even a “normal” person. The genetically gifted often have huge muscles in spite of their training rather than because of it.

[Editor's note: I would not recommend Beyond Brawn as a first book for someone getting into the iron game today. Instead see Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe or Power to the People by Pavel Tsatsouline.]

Once an underground training ideology, “bare basics” style training has become increasingly popular as the scientific vindication has come pouring in. I’ve also enjoyed books on strength training of similar philosophies like Power to the People, Underground Secrets To Faster Running, and Convict Conditioning.

4. Japanese Word Usage Dictionary (Ruigigo Jiten, Age 21)

Yes, even dictionaries can change lives.

I’d been studying Japanese for about 5 years when I finally became good enough to look up definitions of words in a real Japanese dictionary instead of a Japanese-English dictionary. Shortly after that I discovered the Ruigigo Jiten.

Unlike a regular dictionary that just tells you the meaning of a word, a usage dictionary tells you how several similar words are different from each other.

Up until high school and some of college I had a habit of reducing the connotation of all words to either positive or negative. All that really mattered is whether what you thought you were saying was a good thing or a bad thing. The usage dictionary opened me up to the rich-ness of vocabulary and wide-range of intentions and implied meanings behind words.

Words became almost like molecules where this little bit of meaning attaches to these little bits of meaning. If you add or subtract one bit of meaning you don’t just get more or less of the same thing, it changes the whole nature of the word.

Consider the difference between flexible and supple. They both mean approximately the same thing–easily bendable. For “flexible” you might think of stretching and someone who can do the splits. Or it might make you think of construction materials that bend, but don’t break. You can describe a body as “supple,” but it seems a bit strange to talk about supple building materials (my word processor even kicks out a grammar error for it). Even when describing a body, “supple” has a different, almost sexual vibe to it.

If I had been seeing words in black and white before, now I was seeing them in full HD color. Aside from bringing new life to my language studies, becoming more in tune with the finer distinctions between words has helped my communication, persuasion, and marketing abilities.

Choose the Right Word is a similar usage dictionary for the English language.

5. Double Your Dating (Dating Advice, Age 24)

I’m almost embarrassed to put this one on the list because of how scammy/sleazy/cheesy it sounds, but Double Your Dating is the single most pivotal life-changing book I have read in my adult life. Not only for what is written in the book itself, but for all other books and life changing experiences I went on to pursue as a result of reading this book. It (and other works by the same author) also led me into wide ranging interests like personal development, evolutionary psychology, sociology, primatology, sales, and marketing.

In one short volume Eben Pagan (pen name David DeAngelo) managed to describe just about every mistake I’d ever made with women. I began to wonder if he had secretly been taking field notes on every date I’d ever been on.

He also described, how by pure accident and certainly no conscious intention of my own, I had managed to do several things right with women as well.

It was like I had taken the red pill and was now starting to see The Matrix of male-female relations for what it really was.

I learned about how I was unconsciously projecting neediness, how my attempts to make women feel comfortable were actually having the opposite effect of creeping them out, and that women are actually just as nervous and uncomfortable (and human) as I am rather than being all-powerful judgers.

Perhaps most painful of all, I began to recall numerous times in my life that women had shown clear, unambiguous interest in me and I didn’t even know it!

After reading this book I embarked on a long campaign of personal development that has dramatically enriched my social, romantic, and even professional lives. In fact, without this book the past decade of my life would be completely unrecognizable. And this blog would not exist.

6. I Will Teach You to be Rich (Personal Finance, Age 25)

I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi saved me from years of fumbling in the dark with investing and personal finances. It’s another book with a scammy title, but priceless advice.

Though Ramit has no idea who I am, I first ran into him when we were both students at Stanford and he was doing a student-led session on personal finance. He gave advice like have multiple credit cards to increase your credit score (though obviously don’t max them out and accrue high interest debt).

I didn’t think about him much until a couple years later when I was working and finally had some money to actually worry about doing something with, so I cruised over to his blog (www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog) to see if it was still active and if he had anything interesting to say.

I didn’t know much about investing, but assumed it would involve some kind of stock picking and eventually hiring a financial advisor as I got wealthier for ever more complicated investment strategies.

On Ramit’s blog I learned about dumping my high-fee bricks and mortar bank accounts for high-interest online accounts, rewards credit cards, the folly of stock picking, and automated investing with simple, low-cost index funds.

Personal finance turned out to be the opposite of complicated. In fact, the complicated investing strategies like hedge funds and money managers typically overwhelmingly underperform the modest passively managed index fund.

Ramit encapsulated all his best advice into the eponymous NYT bestseller I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

7. The Paleo Diet (Health & Nutrition, Age 26)

I was recovering from a summer cold in 2008 when I had had it and was fed up with being sick and having low energy all the time.

Nutrition, like golf, had always seemed like one of those voodoo sciences of complicated and contradicting advice that you could never be sure of. One day cholesterol is good, the next it’s bad. One day bacon is the devil’s food, the next it’s the cure to cancer. The “scientific” advice seemed to flip-flop so often as to make any kind of informed decisions impossible.

Then I discovered The Paleo Diet by Loren Cordain which prescribed a simple formula: eat the foods that your body has been programmed to eat over millions of years of evolution. Already being a big fan of evolutionary psychology, this approach made a lot of sense to me.

I’ve already written quite a few things about paleo health, so I won’t cover them here. Suffice it to say my health and fitness have dramatically improved since I made meat, fruits, and vegetables the staples of my diet and eliminated or greatly reduced grains, beans, seeds, and tubers. Simply eliminating soy and wheat from my diet greatly cleared up itchy skin problems I’d been having.

8. The 4-Hour Workweek (Business, Age 26)

The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss completely changed what I thought possible for myself and my career.

I had always assumed I’d be stuck in some company somewhere for the rest of my life. Even if I had a prestigious title or founded a company it would take me decades to get there and I’d still be wedded to wherever our office was.

In this book I learned about online solopreneur businesses, virtual assistants, drop shipping, fulfillment companies, and working remotely. I could see the whole architecture for how to setup a business on the internet and run it from anywhere in the world. It was everything I never knew that I always wanted in my business life.

The 4 Hour Workweek also got me thinking about minimalism and productivity. The greatest waste of energy is doing that efficiently which should not be done at all. Tim talks a lot about the 80/20 rule which reminded me of my Total Immersion swimming days, in fact Tim even talks about Total Immersion.

One thing I had learned from my first job is that there is always a never-ending stream of things you could be doing. You need the 80/20 rule to focus you on the things that you should be doing and reclaim your life by not wasting time on activities that produce no or minimal results.

9. Looking Backward: 2012-2062 (Politics, Age 30)

Unlike other books I’ve chosen, Looking Backward by Beth Cody is the end of a branch and not the beginning. The title is a play on the book Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy. I’ve mostly ignored politics for most of my life, but after reading this book I now feel like I have an informed set of principles for evaluating what the right types of solutions to society’s ills are.

I’ve always had a self-reliant and atheist bent which drew me to books like The Psychology of Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Branden and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I believe our minds have the ability to understand the universe as it is rather than “divine” it from supernatural beings, that the facts are the facts–whether you like them or not, and that it’s flagrantly irresponsible and criminally unjust to put social welfare programs into place that benefit some at the forced expense of others (though true charity and donation based systems would be okay). While it was helpful to see the philosophy spelled out on paper, these books felt more like preaching to the choir to me than teaching me something new.

Like the growing majority, my political views tend to be socially liberal but financially conservative.

But I really had no vision for what that could look like in the real world. There are real problems like environmental pollution, food safety, and consumer protection that need to be addressed. Sometimes even the best intentioned of us find ourselves unemployed and need assistance (as I was after the market crashed in 2008).

The government has so overwhelmingly taken over these functions through onerous regulatory agencies that it’s hard to imagine things not falling apart without them, and indeed transitioning these functions to the private sector would not be simple or short.

Beth describes a possible future Libertarian republic with a minimal government and does a great job of touching on every aspect of society and government that you could think of. You’ll have an answer for every, “But how could that possibly work?” question you can think of.

If you have any inkling of Libertarian in you or felt that something was inherently wrong with the current political system that you couldn’t quite put your finger on, then you owe it to yourself to read this book.

10. The Spectrum of Consciousness (Philosophy, Age 30)

Ken Wilber… what to say about you. Outside the academic sphere, Ken Wilber has been quietly revolutionizing the field of philosophy by attempting to create a theory of everything he calls “Integral Theory.” The Spectrum of Consciousness is his first of many books, and will completely change how you think about the nature of the universe.

The basic premise of this book is that as we grow up, our sense of self fragments over a series of dualistic splits. Right after we are born the world is just a mass of sensation and eventually we learn to distinguish self vs other. Sometime in early childhood we learn about death, and then distinguish life from death. The shock of life vs death drives us into the distinction between mind and body. We think the body is not the real me, my mind is the real me. My body will die, but my ideas can live on. But we don’t stop there, we continue dividing ourselves. We learn that some personality traits are good and some personality traits are bad, so we choose to identify only with the good personality traits (the psyche) and disown the bad ones (the shadow).

Over the years and divides we keep saying “not me, not me” until we are left with just a sliver of ourselves that we identify as “me.”

But even though we have disowned all of these aspects of ourselves, they still belong to us and affect our lives. We tell ourselves we are not angry people but we have road rage, our bodies are attached pretty firmly to our minds, we will die someday, and our inner sensations are indivisible from our outer stimuli.

So once we have become completely fragmented into the psyche vs shadow level, our developmental challenge is to re-integrate all the disowned parts of ourselves and arrive back at a state of non-dualistic consciousness. To experience all of these dualities as two sides of the same coin.

To further clarify the idea of non-dualism, there are two types of knowing: symbolic knowing and direct knowing. The difference is like that between a map and the actual territory. The non-dualistic form of experience is what Buddhism calls “enlightenment.”

Once again the long reach of Total Immersion swimming’s influence came up for me. You could describe the feeling of swimming with words like wet, a rushing sensation, and cool temperature. But these only capture impoverished slices of the total raw experience of body against water. Little did I know in my early years that while I was swimming I was having a transcendent, enlightened experience.

Ken Wilber has also complicated my views on religion. His basic premise is that all religions are incomplete attempts to describe reality itself. If “god” is all present for instance and you extend that out far enough you reach the conclusion that god is equal to all of existence. It wouldn’t even be enough to say that god is entwined in all things because it would imply that god is not present in the thing itself he is entwining. Therefore god literally is all things. In that case saying that you believe in god is the same as saying that you believe existence exists. This erases the distinctions between religions, and even atheism. We are all just attempting to know the universe as it is and some folks have attached a “being-ness” to it.

There is still so much more I could say about Ken Wilber’s work, but suffice it to say if you want your assumptions about human nature and the nature of the universe seriously challenged you should give Ken Wilber a read.

It’s that time of year. The New Year is rolling around and you’ve decided that now is the time to make a change. Maybe you want to lose weight, get fit, start a business, get a better job, quit smoking, or fall in love this year.

Up to 62% of us will start the new year with a resolution. Only 8% of us will succeed.

This probably isn’t your first time around the block. You know how this goes. You start off with good intentions. You stick to your resolution for a couple weeks. Then you miss a day, then two days, then a week. By the time summer rolls around your New Year’s Resolution is barely more than a distant memory.

But this year will be different! Or will it?

As Einstein said, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

So then, why do our New Year’s Resolutions fail and can we do anything about it?

Setting the bar too high

One of the biggest reasons our resolutions fail is that we try to do too much too soon. If we want to lose weight or get fit we sign up for some class or find an article in some fitness magazine that tells us to hit the gym for 2 hours, 3 days a week.

The problem is that before this, the most strenuous part of your exercise routine was arm curls from the bag of potato chips to your mouth. You go from nothing straight into a high octane workout routine. It feels great at first, but a month or two in you inevitably burn out and that’s the end of your fitness goals.

The fix: Set the bar low. Ridiculously low.

For example, I’m currently training towards one-arm pull ups on a 5 days/week workout plan. If my workout plan was 5 sets of 20 reps per day I’d never make it and I’d have quit long ago. Instead my rule of thumb is to only do at least 1 pull up per day.

Now, obviously I usually do more than just one rep, but the commitment is so low that even when I’m having an off day it’s hard to come up with an excuse as to why I can’t do one measly pull up. But some days, that really is all I do. And just getting that single rep in is enough to help build a feeling of consistency so that I don’t want to let myself down the next day. When you miss a day it’s all too easy to tell yourself “well, I already missed one day. Missing one more won’t hurt…”

Successful authors often speak of setting a goal to write at least one sentence per day to keep your book moving. Ramit Sethi frequently talks about setting a goal to floss one tooth a day to build a flossing habit. Of course once they actually get into action, they usually do more than that. But the key is to really be okay with only completing the minimum commitment on some days and sticking with it consistently.

How could you make your minimum daily commitment so low that it would be trivial to accomplish? If you want to change careers could you make a commitment to spending at least 1 minute per day looking at job postings? If you want to fall in love could you sign up for an online dating site and commit to sending at least a 1 sentence e-mail to a potential partner every day? If you want to learn a foreign language could you commit to learning one new word every day?

Again, the goal is not to achieve your wildest dreams by only doing the minimum commitment every day. It’s to build a habit of commitment and consistency. Once you’ve got yourself into action you will find that you naturally want to do more a lot of the time. And if not, that’s okay because you’ll keep on living to fight another day.

Multiple habits

Another reason New Year’s Resolutions fail is that they might not just be one new habit, but actually be many new habits.

Let’s say you want to lose 20 pounds. There are many ways to get there. You might change your eating habits. You might exercise. To be most effective you’d do both. “Eating healthy” is also multiple habits in disguise. If you eat out less, now you have to shop, cook, prepare food, and clean dishes. All of which are separate habits.

If you want to start a business you also have multiple activities going on. You have to build a product or service, deliver on that product or service, do marketing, bookkeeping, and a host of other activities.

The fix: Refine and work on one habit at a time.

If you’re an office worker who eats out for lunch every day and your resolution is to “eat healthy,” you could start by identifying healthier items on menus at the places you frequent or find others in the area that offer healthy options. Let’s face it, you probably have a handful of places that you eat the same thing at whenever you go there anyway so it might as well be something healthy. Make a commitment to eating a healthy lunch every day, and once that habit is ingrained you can commit to working on others.

If you’re starting a business there are a lot of things you could do depending on where you’re at and what you need most. Most likely though, you are in need of revenue, which means that you need to sell something. You could start by building a habit of prospecting potential customers and making a commitment to contacting at least one new prospect every day–though obviously some days you will feel like contacting more. Even if you don’t have a product or service yet, you could begin feeling out interest and building a potential client list.

How long should you work on one habit before moving to another? The general consensus is that 30 days is the minimum time you should focus on one new habit before you try adding another new habit into the mix.

Vague goals

New Year’s Resolutions also fail because our goals are too vague. If your goal is to “lose weight” how will you know when you got there? Is 20 pounds enough? 30 pounds? Does only 1 pound count as having lost weight?”

Even if you have a specific target of 20 pounds you still have a fundamental problem–losing 20 pounds is not a “habit.” It is a result of other habits such as healthy eating and exercise.

Or if your goal is to “make more money” how do you get there? There is no “make more money” habit you can put into practice. You have to do other things such as become an expert in your field, or sell more product.

The fix: In order to achieve vague goals you have to translate them into actionable habits.

If you want to lose 20 pounds you have to decide how you are going to get there. You might start with a healthy lunch eating habit as I described earlier and build from there. Or you might start from a simple exercise plan and build from there.

If you want to make more money, you might decide the way to do it is to get a better job and work on a job hunting habit. If you’re a sales professional, you might find ways of altering your pitch or prospecting habits that lead to more sales.

How could you translate your goals into actionable habits?

Caveat: The way most people approach vague goals like losing weight is to go on some variety of a temporary extreme diet to get to the desired weight and then switch to a maintenance plan. These aren’t just two different habits, they are two entirely new sets of habits! You’re almost always setting yourself up for failure with this two phase approach.

The brutal truth–if you want to lose weight and keep it off you have to choose new habits that you will stick with for life, not just the next two weeks until you switch back to doing what you’ve always done.

You’ll get the best results by starting small and setting the bar ridiculously low with a habit that you could see yourself doing happily forever. It might be finding a healthy meal recipe that you love to eat to put into your regular rotation, then adding one new recipe each week.

Or if you want to make more money and you want it to last for more than the 2 weeks you spent working on it, you have to find new habits that permanently change the way you work. Getting a new higher paying job often accomplishes this by its very nature.

Have you ever had a big career, weight loss, or personal goal that no matter what you did you just couldn’t seem to motivate yourself to actually take action on?

It seemed like a good idea at first. You really did want to start that business, learn to speak Japanese, or lose those 30 pounds.

From time to time you put a little effort into it, but six months–or worse, maybe even years down the road–you still have nothing meaningful to show for your effort. Meanwhile you’ve been beating yourself up over your lack of progress and self discipline.

Why does this happen? You know you wanted to achieve the goal. But where is this ephemeral motivation that never seems to possess you or drive you forward?

Before we go any further though, let’s be clear. When we talk about motivation, we are talking about what it takes to accomplish the big things and make major life changes. We’re not talking about procrastinating on making breakfast because you can’t find the “motivation” to fry some eggs. In fact it feels a bit weird to even use the word motivation in that context.

We also need to separate out vague feelings of “wanting to do something” from real motivation that lights the fire behind your eyes and makes you unstoppable. With real motivation you can move mountains and achieve superhuman feats. Just “wanting to do something” is merely wishful thinking that won’t get you anywhere but a pleasant daydream.

When it comes down to it, there are really only two types of motivation. I call them “The Rock Bottom Turnaround” and “Falling in Love with an Idea.” These are the extreme opposite ends of the spectrum. In other words, they are the biggest carrot and the biggest stick.

Why do we need not just any carrot or any stick, but the biggest carrot and the biggest stick? Because for major life changes nothing less will do. When we are cruising along in our comfort zones, small carrots and small sticks are powerless against the status quo.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these in turn.

The Rock Bottom Turnaround

Often by the time we go looking for a solution to our problems it’s because we have already let them get so bad that they’ve blown up in our face and now it’s time to do or die.

If this is you, don’t feel bad. It happens to us all. Governments are also notorious for not even trying to fix situations until they’ve blown up in our faces–2008 financial crisis anyone?

In fact, most, if not all, self-help gurus speak to the rock bottom turnaround motivation for the very reason that most people are seeking answers once they’ve hit rock bottom. Tony Robbins, the most famous self-help guru of all time, tells the story of hitting rock bottom as a broke high-school student living out of his car.

We’re used to hearing stories of drug addicts who turn themselves around after hitting rock bottom and experiencing a country music song string of misfortunes like their wife leaving, losing their kids, their house and truck get repossessed, and to top it all off even their dog runs away.

However, there are also other ways of hitting rock bottom. We’ve all heard the infamous breakup line, “I just don’t want to be another year older and still in this relationship.” Or if you’re overweight and the doctor tells you that you either need to lose weight or you’ll die.

You might also experience hitting rock bottom at your job. Though it isn’t absolutely terrible, you are not particularly happy in your current job and interested in finding a new job. Six months go by and maybe you’ve submitted a resume or two on Monster.com that didn’t even get so much as a rejection letter in response, but you haven’t really gotten anywhere yet. Then maybe something happens like you get stiffed on a bonus check or your boss chews you out over something that wasn’t your fault and that’s the last straw. Come hell or high-water you are getting out of that job.

However you get there, you reach a point where in the infamous words from the 1976 movie Network, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

Until you actually hit rock bottom a tiny piece of your mind sabotages you. It tells you that things aren’t all bad. It gives you just enough hope that things will get better to keep you placated. And ultimately it prevents you from taking action.

It takes your back being against the wall and the loss of all hope in the status quo to find the determination to lose the weight, start the new business, leave the abusive spouse, or pursue the unpursued dream.

But… what if you don’t want to hit rock bottom? I mean.. most of us don’t live lives that are really all that bad. Your version of the status quo might be a fairly comfortable, though unsatisfying, middle-management job. Deliberately orchestrating some catastrophe in your life in order to hit rock bottom and find some motivation just isn’t a great way to go about doing things.

The rock bottom turnaround is a great motivational style if you do happen to hit rock bottom, and you should absolutely take advantage of it when it arises. As politicians say, “never miss an opportunity presented by a crisis.”

However, you should never actively try to hit rock bottom. There is a much better way.

Falling in Love with an Idea

I was watching a video once about meeting women in bars and clubs. The speaker was saying you need to be playful, banter, and have a “cocky funny” style of humor. At the time I was thinking, “oh god, do you really have to do all that?” when as if reading my mind he said, “and by the way, the guys who are really good at this don’t see it as a chore that they have to do to meet women, they really enjoy flirting and bantering and that’s why they are the best at it.”

And in that moment I achieved critical insight. High achievers who are the best of the best at something don’t get there in spite of what they have to do to get results, but because they love doing what it takes to get those results.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, for example, never rolled out of bed and said, “fuck, I hate lifting weights.” He literally described his time in the gym as if he were “cumming” all day long. Every time he went to the gym he was cumming, and his life was awesome because he spent all day every day cumming. As he progressed he found new goals to challenge himself and won a record seven Mr. Olympia titles.

You’ve undoubtedly experienced some version of this before with a hobby. You saw something that looked fun, so you tried it. Before you knew it you were obsessed with it and spent all your time thinking about it, reading about it, and practicing it.

If you love to put together model airplanes, never once did you think to yourself, “gee, I just can’t find the motivation to put together this model airplane that I’ve been saving up to buy for months and anxiously awaiting for 2 weeks to arrive in the mail.” As soon as the box arrived, you disappeared into your plane assembling lair and emerged a week later with your masterpiece.

Most business success stories have idea love motivation in common. Microsoft, for example, started with a couple of college boys messing around in Bill Gates’s garage just seeing what they could make a box of electronics do with some code. The idea grew on itself organically and turned into Microsoft Windows.

You will almost never hear a Fortune 500 business story that starts off like this, “well, I wanted to start a business so I thought up a bunch of ideas that might make money and picked one that seemed like it might work.” Without the love of the idea or product that you are developing it’s all but impossible to weather the storms of starting a company.

In my own life, I always struggled with learning kanji (the pictographic characters) while learning Japanese. It was just such an incredible pain in the ass and there were so many of them. But when fall break came during my study abroad in Japan I suddenly got this idea to see how many kanji I could learn in a week. Before I knew it I was on a bus to the store to buy some make-your-own flash card kits. I spent 12 hours a day for a week straight making flashcards and reviewing them. At the end of the week I’d learned over 600 new kanji and about 1,500 new Japanese words.

The best part is that since I had fallen in love with my own idea it required no “motivating myself” or “psyching myself up.” I actually enjoyed what I was doing and couldn’t wait to get up in the morning to get started.

As I intimated this motivational style doesn’t work particularly well if you sit down and say, “okay, I’d like to start a business” or “I’d like to lose some weight.” You get much better results if you fall in love with the idea of developing a particular product or service, or if you fall in love with the idea of seeing how much weight you can deadlift. The successful business and the weight loss are the result of the idea you’ve fallen in love with and not the idea itself.

If you’re a baker you might fall in love with the idea of owning your own bakery. If you’re a corporate drone who’s lived in the same town all his life, you might fall in love with the idea of running guided tours to exotic locations. If you’ve wanted to get fit, instead of hitting rock bottom by pounding that last box of donuts to tip the scale at 300 lbs, you might fall in love with the idea of deadlifting 500 lbs. Or you might read about the paleo diet and fall in love with the idea of perfecting your food intake and discovering how your body reacts to different foods.

If you’re not head over heels in love with an idea, you won’t pursue it to perfection. It will seem like a chore. Intrinsic love of the idea is the only thing that will keep you pursuing it day in and day out, and the only thing that will allow you to achieve long range goals that require delayed gratification.

Final thoughts on motivation

It goes without saying that it’s better to be motivated by love of an idea than hitting rock bottom whenever possible.

The rock bottom turnaround is a “move away from” motivation. It seeks to take you away from what you don’t want, but it doesn’t necessarily give you a clear direction of where to go instead. Falling in love with an idea is a “move toward” motivation. It takes you to new heights and leads you to the metaphorical promised land.

If neither one of these types of motivation are accessible to you, it’s worth stopping to re-assess whether the goal you have in mind is something you really want or would just be a nice to have. You might decide, for instance, that losing 15 lbs really won’t add that much quality to your life and you can do without, so you can stop feeling bad about your failure to take action on that goal.

There’s no shame in admitting that you’ve been pursuing the wrong goal–even if you’ve been doing it for a long time. We’re talking about your own personal happiness here and it just doesn’t make sense to waste precious life pursuing goals that aren’t a good match for you.

If you’re not about to hit a rock bottom turnaround or you aren’t madly in love with an idea, you’d be better off spending your time on the couch watching TV or doing something else that brings you pleasure. Otherwise all you will accomplish is long periods of no productivity that you beat yourself up over.

You don’t need to worry too much about finding ideas that you fall in love with. They have a way of finding you and propelling you into action before you even know what happened.

Instead, I would encourage you to learn to tell the difference between goals that you really feel inspired by and goals that you merely think you should be inspired by.

What you believe about the economy affects an untold number of decisions in your life from what job you take to what business you start to who you vote for president to whether you think life is good or the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

But what do you really know about the economy?

You might have strong opinions like “the 2008 financial crisis proves free markets lead to unchecked greed,” or vote for a particular presidential candidate because you think they will create more jobs, or support laws that regulate bad behavior by businesses.

But what if you were wrong? What if you supported ideas and leaders that were actually the cause of and not the solution to the problem? What if you were losing money and you didn’t even know it?

If we want to live abundant lives, choose the right leaders, and make good decisions about money matters we need to know the truth.

Unfortunately there are many old wives tales about the economy that many of us have grown up with that are simply wrong. However, we find it hard not to believe them because we’ve heard them ad nauseum from our media, our friends, our parents, our government leaders, and even our teachers.

Let’s begin the myth-busting and take a look at some of these ideas.

Myth: We live in a free economy

You might find this shocking and hard to believe, but no, despite what you have been led to believe, we in America do not live in a free economy. Our economy is freer than most, say compared to communist China or North Korea, but it is not entirely “free.”

At the time of this writing there are nearly 100 government agencies whose sole jobs are to regulate industries. In other words, we have almost 100 different government agencies telling companies what they can and can’t do in the marketplace. Decidedly not free. This does not really come as a surprise to anyone who’s ever had to obtain some kind of licensing for their profession or business.

I’ve started here because, as we shall see shortly, understanding that the market is not in fact free is key to unraveling many other myths about the economy.

Truth: We live in a mixed “freer than most” economy and we have nearly 100 government agencies who tell businesses what they can and can’t do.

Myth: Free markets lead to unchecked greed and selfishness, you can only get ahead by stomping on people.

The “every man for himself” mentality horrifies a lot of us. Sometimes we think of free markets as free-for-all economic war zones where the strong trample the weak. Big business exploits workers, cheats customers, and forces suppliers into money losing contracts–or so we fear.

But hold on a second. Have you ever been to a store that you thought cheated you or treated you poorly? Did you go back? Of course not!

You can, will, and have left businesses you don’t like at the drop of a hat. A few fly-by-night folks might pop up here and there, but it’s impossible to stay in business for the long term by consistently treating people poorly. People simply refuse to do business with you.

On the other hand, have you ever been treated well at a restaurant? Did you go back as a result? Perhaps so often that you became a regular customer and they know you by name? We reward businesses that treat us well with our continued business.

Or have you ever left one job for another, higher paying job? If you were a business owner would you actually sign a contract where you were guaranteed to lose money?

The myth of free markets leading to evil corporations gobbling us up just doesn’t stand up. We reward businesses we like with our patronage, and we punish businesses we don’t like by refusing to do business with them.

Truth: In free markets companies compete for better ways to serve customers.

Myth: Free markets caused the 2008 financial crisis, we need the government to protect us from large companies.

What about all the greedy banks that caused the 2008 financial crisis? Even in our “free” market runaway big business stole all our money and left us holding the bag.

But… as anyone who’s ever worked at a bank will tell you, banking is one of the most heavily regulated industries. It may be the most un-free market in America.

Let’s consider a laundry list of government intervention in banking in the leadup to the 2008 crisis:

1. In the early 2000s, the Fed lowers interest rates below inflation making money “cheap” in order to spur investment and home buying.
2. The IRS gives tax deductions for mortgage interest to encourage home buying and help homes become more affordable. However, the combined effect of 1 and 2 are to increase competition for homes and drive prices up.
3. Government calls for banks to end discriminatory lending practices against the poor and disadvantaged communities. The only way for lenders to achieve this is by lowering lending standards, causing them to give subprime loans to people who have no business taking on highly leveraged debt.
4. To support 3, Fannie & Freddie buy these subprime mortgages from banks on the secondary market giving an implicit government backing to bad debt and thus giving the banks even more money to issue bad loans.

It’s blatantly obvious to anyone that the cumulative effects of these interventions was going to blow up in our faces sooner or later.

We didn’t need government intervention to protect us from the banks, it was precisely government intervention that caused the banking crisis.

Government interference also causes us problems such as driving down quality of customer service when it creates artificial monopolies. Ever had an unpleasant experience at the DMV?

Truth: It’s actually un-free markets and government backed industries/monopolies that treat us like crap.

Myth: The government creates jobs

I don’t know how or why this got started, but somehow it became legitimate for government leaders to claim credit for job creation. Every time a presidential election comes around we focus on how many jobs one administration created and what the candidates’ plans are for job creation in the upcoming term.

Malarky. Businesses create jobs by hiring people to develop products and services that people are willing to pay for.

You might argue that government creates policies that encourage business growth and hence jobs, but at best this is a verbal encouragement at worst it’s wholesale funding of industries like we saw in the 2008 financial crisis.

The only time the government truly creates a job is when it hires a new position into a governmental agency–and increases your taxes to pay for it.

Whether you supported Romney in the 2012 election or not you can only feel for him as he dejectedly tried to explain the ludicrousness of people wanting to know how he was going to create jobs and was assaulted by Obama over his job creation plans (though smart of Obama, given the prevalence of this myth).

Truth: Government does not create jobs. Independent business owners create jobs.

Myth: Government lies about inflation, it’s actually much higher–close to 10%

We love, love, love to believe the government is lying to us. Things are worse than they really seem, but it’s all being covered up and lied about. Sometimes it’s even true.

However, claims about inflation are greatly exaggerated.

The “Rule of 72” is a simple way to look at the compound effects of inflation on prices. Basically, divide 72 by the % of inflation and it gives you the number of years for prices to double. If inflation were 10% then prices would double every 72/10 = 7.2 years.

Though this is by no means a complete analysis of prices, let’s take a look at a couple of sample prices from my hometown of Des Moines.

1998 Prices

• McDonald’s Big Mac meal: $3.75
• Movie theater ticket: $7

Now nearing the end of 2012 we would have expected prices to double, then double again if inflation were 10%. So they should be 2 x 2 = 4 times what they were in 1998.

2012 Expected prices at 10% inflation

• McDonald’s Big Mac meal: $15
• Movie theater ticket: $28

Yowza! Even New Yorkers would cringe at those prices.

2012 Actual prices

• McDonald’s Big Mac meal: $6.03
• Movie theater ticket: $9

While prices have increased, inflation is obviously nowhere near 10%. Neither one of these prices has even doubled a single time yet in 14 years.

Truth: Government reported inflation figures are fairly accurate.

Myth: Government printing more money causes inflation

Sigh, I originally wrote a segment with this as the truth, but that is incorrect. Alas I am fallible.

It’s actually more of a half-truth. Government printing money can and often does cause inflation, but the truth is more complex than that.

This is only absolutely true if wealth is a fixed pie. For example, if 100 coconuts and $100 comprise the entire wealth of the world and no wealth can be created or destroyed and coconuts are equally as desirable as dollars then the price for 1 coconut is $1. If more money is printed and there are now $110 in circulation, then the price for a coconut goes up to $1.10 and inflation has occurred.

Alternatively, if 20 more coconuts are discovered and $10 more are printed then we have 120 coconuts and $110. The price for 1 coconut is now less than $1 and deflation has occurred, even though more money was printed.

Real life, obviously, is nowhere near that perfect and wealth is not a zero-sum game. Credit markets also severely complicate things since lenders are not required to keep all funds on hand and dollars spontaneously spring into existence when loans are made.

Truth: The government printing more money can and often does cause inflation, but the mechanisms of inflation are more complex than just the number of printed dollars in circulation.

Myth: Money is actually worth something

I chose to end on one of our more sacred myths, that money is inherently “worth” something. After looking at myths about inflation, cracks are probably already starting to form in your confidence about the value of money.

If you’re familiar with US history you know that in 1971 we went off the gold standard. In other words, we stopped defining the value of a dollar in terms of the weight of gold–the value was fixed at $35/ounce at the time. We now have what is called a “fiat” currency, or a currency that is not pegged to any fixed or objective standard.

In other words, money is worth something because we “think” it’s worth something. The illusion of value is strong, but in actuality it’s just so much paper with ink printed on it. If you just look at the paper and the ink, a $100 bill isn’t inherently worth any more than a $1 bill.

Although demand for gold has traditionally been fairly stable, even the gold standard is somewhat arbitrary. If everyone decided they’d rather have silver jewelry instead of gold, the demand for gold would plummet taking gold-based currencies down with it. Or if we made it out to space and discovered an entire planet made of gold, suddenly it would no longer be a “precious” metal.

Moreover, since governments can always print more money in a fiat currency they have unlimited power to devalue it. Governments like to do this because they can take on debt, then print more money to pay off the debt with “cheaper” dollars.

Some argue that the Fed should be ended for its interest rate manipulations that lead to bubbles like the 2008 crisis and its money printing policies–or at least stripped of its powers to arbitrarily manipulate money.

Interesting, but what can you actually do with this info you say? Avoid keeping your wealth in dollars or currency and own non-depreciating things of objective (as possible) value.

Truth: Money isn’t inherently worth any more than the paper and ink it is made of, $100 bills are worth more than $1 bills solely because we believe in their value.

You know that person in your industry or your social circle that you just can’t stand?

It might be one of your co-workers who somehow has the boss fooled into thinking that they are the cat’s meow, a rival business owner who always gets unearned praise in your industry, or even just your neighbor with the crappy lawn that everyone seems to think is so well landscaped.

Undoubtedly you currently have or have had someone like this in your life. You want to claw their eyes out and the mere mention of their name causes you to seethe with rage. Well, maybe it’s not that extreme, but dammit you do NOT like them.

For me, this person is the author Tim Ferriss. He has no idea who I am or even that I exist. He released a new book today called The 4-Hour Chef which I bought and is probably awesome, but there’s still a part of me that hates him for it (we will dig more into the psychology of this in a second).

It may not have occurred to you as such, but your deep-seated hatred of this person is because you are jealous of them.

“What? Hell no, I am not jealous of that no good hack,” you say?

Unclench your fists and bear with me for a second because there is a silver lining here. A very important, life affirming silver lining that you can’t afford to miss.

Affirmation of your values

The reason we are inflamed by and jealous of people in our lives is because they are receiving recognition for something that we want to be recognized for.

That rival co-worker, blogger, or neighborhood lawn is stealing your thunder. You want to be recognized as the rainmaker, the genius blogger, or the pride of the neighborhood and every time the praise goes to someone else it’s like a slap in the face.

Tim Ferriss is well known for being a “lifehacker” and finding shortcuts to achieving maximal results in minimal time. He often cites his experiences learning foreign languages like Japanese, learning to swim using the Total Immersion methodology, and getting into an elite college (Princeton).

Whenever I hear his praises sung I want to shout out “Yeah?! Well I’ve been swimming Total Immersion style since 1995, I swim circles around people learning Japanese and hold certification for the highest level of the proficiency test, and I went to Stanford, so hah!”

We think to ourselves, “I’m doing the same damn thing even better than this guy, why is this joker getting so much attention?”

And in our stymie we have missed something important.

People are praising this person because they value whatever attribute it is that they see in them. In other words, people like and want the things that you want to be recognized for. The things you care about and are good at matter to other people and if your hated rival can translate them into money, popularity, or well being then so can you.

Perhaps an allegory will help. I once knew a pizza man who said never open a pizza shop in a town that has no pizza shops. Why? Because if there are no pizza shops it means that the people in that town don’t like pizza. On the other hand, if there is a pizza shop, yes they are competition, but it’s still tremendous news because it means that there is a market for pizza in that town.

Whenever you see someone receiving “undeserved praise,” take heart that this means there is a good chance others will be able to appreciate you for the same values.

Your dis-owned ambition

The cause for our jealousy also contains more subtle layers.

The most intense anger happens when someone is praised not only for something that you want to be praised for, but is praised for something you’ve given up on or believed was not possible for you or someone like you to succeed at.

In my case, I’ve always considered myself a master of learning. Ever since I can remember I’ve reveled in not just learning how to do new things, but in perfecting the art of learning how to do new things. I take great pride in being able to sort out the books and methods that very quickly get you to a high degree of proficiency from the books and methods that put you on the “slow, if ever” path.

Also, I’ve always wanted to write a book on something I was good at but thought to myself, “No one wants to read a book on learning how to learn,” and, “No one wants to read a book by the guinea pig, they want to read a book by the master.”

Tim Ferriss proclaims that his role is not the master, but the guinea pig. His newest book is not just about cooking, but about learning how to learn. He hopes that it will join his first two books with all 3 of them on the New York Times bestseller list at the same time.

I want to strangle him.

He is succeeding at the very things I told myself were not possible and gave up on. Not only that but he isn’t some rich heir that has an obvious advantage over me. His background is very similar to mine, but he has achieved dramatic results in a field I told myself was not possible.

If you look at the people you are jealous of do you see an ambition that somewhere you gave up on, perhaps without even trying at it?

It probably makes you angry and want to throw a pity party.

But don’t take it so hard. You’ve just reconnected with one of your dreams. Not only that, but you have proof that it can be done. Not only done, but done by someone like you.

I’m actually grateful to Tim Ferriss for being the living proof that learning methods themselves can be enough to get people excited.

What they did that you didn’t

We have a form of selective blindness when we look at others we are jealous of.

We see the praise, either consciously or unconsciously we realize they are receiving the praise for something that we should be praised for, but since we are not receiving that praise we then conclude that they are receiving “unearned praise.”

However, we are so focused on this one area that we think we are so much better than that person that they shouldn’t even bother to compete with us, that we often fail to see things they have done that we haven’t.

When I look at Tim Ferriss I get really dialed-in to the Total Immersion style swimming, Japanese, “learning how to learn,” and life optimization topics. However, his first book The 4-Hour Workweek was largely about creating a lifestyle business via the internet. I didn’t know anything about drop shipping, fulfillment companies, and web stores when I first picked it up.

And while people might be interested in learning how to learn, people don’t book Tim Ferriss as a keynote speaker to hear about swimming and Japanese. He has also developed promotional skills far beyond where mine are currently at that allow him to launch bestselling books.

His fame, his real fame, comes from things that I haven’t done.

Is it possible that the rival co-worker did an exemplary job on a project that you, though just as capable, weren’t involved in? Or that the rival business owner has succeeded in some area where you haven’t? Or that the neighbor may have gone yet an extra mile in their lawn care?

Again, the point here is not self pity or frustration, but to see what the object of your jealousy might be doing that you aren’t and learn from it to improve your own results.

Rooting for success

Ultimately, what we want to do is learn to properly label the anger (or disgust) that we feel as jealousy and use it as a mirror to reflect back our own wants, aspirations, and interests. We react strongly to the targets of our jealousy because the attributes we see them as being recognized for are deep meaningful parts of ourselves that we have dis-owned or lost touch with.

One of the best ways to keep your hopes and dreams alive is to root for others’ success–especially for the success of rivals that you secretly wish would fail.

When the people doing the things that you want to do lose, you lose too because the things you care about have failed.

However, when the people doing the things that you want to do succeed, you win too because it proves to the world that it can be done.

In that vein, I sincerely hope that The 4-Hour Chef lands on the NYT bestseller list and Tim Ferriss makes the 3-peat.

If you’re a Liberal Christian, you face a conundrum. You generally consider science to be good and true, you agree with evolution, and you view the bible as more of a book of stories to help you live a good life than historical fact. You may have even gone so far as to condone gay marriage and stop seeing Jesus as a divine being, and instead consider him as more of an idealized role model.

You might be starting to consider yourself more agnostic than purely Christian. You might even occasionally have crises of faith from time to time, but are afraid of being an atheist and what that would mean and what your friends and family would think of you.

But even though you’ve rejected the fundamentals of Christianity as absolute truths, you still feel tied to the church for some reason.

I’ve been an atheist for over 25 years and had a great deal of time to think about why people are attached to God, Jesus, Christianity, and other faiths. (Note: I don’t consider myself an atheist, as I generally consider others to be “theist,” but I will use that word for want of a better one.)

If you’ve wondered what things are really like inside the atheist camp, are undergoing a crisis of faith, or simply want to have more meaningful conversations about faith with your theist friends then this post is for you.

Secondary Payoffs

When I heard the local atheist group was doing a critical bible study meet up, my first thought was, “What the hell for?”

After I thought about it for a while curiosity started to grow on me and I wanted to know why atheists would want to do such a thing and what they hoped to get out of it. I had to go see what this was all about.

The question discussed at the meeting was how to have a conversation about religion with liberal Christians when they freely reject all of the fundamentals of Christianity. The leader of the study, a former pastor, went to work describing what liberal Christians believe–the Bible is not historical fact, God is pure love, evolution is true, etc. And we began to look into the flaws in some of these approaches to Christianity.

Then it hit me. If you’re a relatively open-minded person and a Liberal Christian you’ve found ways of integrating science, history, and religion to minimize the conflicts between your faith and what your eyes see in the world. In fact your faith may have nothing at all to do with the bible, belief in God, or “proof” that Christianity is true.

In psychology there is a concept called “secondary payoffs” where you continue to do something even though you might not necessarily agree with it because you are still getting an emotional payoff from it (usually this is something unconscious that you can’t easily see).

For example, you might have taken up drinking beer to be social even though you really don’t care for it. You don’t particularly like drinking and feeling like death warmed over the morning after, but your friends like to drink and drinking gives you the secondary payoff of having fun with your friends.

Digging these secondary payoffs out of your subconscious mind and taking a clear look at them can give you insight into what keeps you tied to Christianity and what lies on the other side.

It gives me strength to know that someone is looking after me and protecting me

This is probably the big one. There is an enormous amount of comfort in believing that not only does someone have your back, but an all-knowing, all-powerful God has your back.

It might even be the number one reason atheists go back to Christianity when they face hardships in their own lives. As they say in the military, “there are no atheists in foxholes.”

I personally have vivid memories from elementary school and middle school of some crisis happening, probably something that seemed really important at the time like finding out that a girl I had a crush on had a boyfriend, then thinking well maybe there really is a God and I’ll pray to him for the strength to get through it.

Even though no one knew about my secret angst and prayers, afterwards I always felt embarrassed.

Psychologist Nathaniel Branden, famous for pioneering a lot of the work in self-esteem, says that the road to healing begins when you realize that “no one is coming to save you.”

It sounds harsh and lonely. But what if it were true?

My answer to that question is that you would have to have unerring confidence in yourself to handle the challenges of life. You do not have absolute power over all of the things that happen to you in life, but you do have absolute power over how you respond to them. And if you get it wrong, you have the power to dust yourself off and try something different next time.

The reason why I always felt embarrassed after praying is that I realized I had knowingly and consciously cut myself off from my own source of power. I had abdicated responsibility for my life and my mind to another being, one that I didn’t even think existed.

How would your life be different if you had complete confidence in your ability to act no matter what life threw at you?

I like the sense of community and supporting one another

Second, if not equally as big a benefit you might be getting from Christianity is the community you get at your church.

You have family friends you’ve known for years, possibly your entire life that you connect with through church. If you live by yourself or tend to be a loner, church might be one of your few regular social outlets that you rely on.

I know people who openly do not believe in God, Jesus, the Bible or any of the trappings of Christianity, but continue to attend church solely for the friendships and support they receive.

If you stopped going to church you might have to make new friends, worse your old friends might hate you or think that you were now condemned to hell.

As social animals, we have a real need for community that can’t be overlooked.

Fortunately, church is not the only way to experience community. You undoubtedly have other interests. Particularly if you’re on the fence about your faith, you might find that regularly participating in your local philosophy group, Paleo Diet club, or basketball team allows you to connect with community on a much deeper level around something that you are truly passionate about.

It makes me feel special to think that God is speaking directly to me

We all crave feeling special. And what could be more special than the almighty, supreme God singling you out and choosing to speak to you, of all people?

It’s intoxicating. Former ministers speak of the ecstasy of feeling that the Word of God flowed directly through them to the congregation.

However, in the back of your mind at some point in time or another this has felt false. As much as you wanted to believe God was really speaking to you, something didn’t feel quite right about it. You may have flip-flopped between feeling like a fraud and insisting that it really happened.

In day-to-day life you might feel like people treat you small, unimportant, or ignored. But you know that you are special because God chose to speak to you.

Atheists who stay atheists–and happy ones–learn to pat their own back. Instead of looking for someone else to think they are special to prove that they are in fact special, first they look to themselves. Give yourself permission to be who you are. Take pride in your accomplishments, no matter how small–even if it’s just tying the perfect knot on your shoelaces.

I don’t think I can face never seeing my loved ones again after they die

Losing a loved one is painful.

My grandfather died a number of years ago. I didn’t know him very well, but I am the spitting image of him. It’s upsetting to think that I’ll never get to talk to him again, and of all the family history that died with him. But that’s life.

I also know that one day my own parents will die and it will be heartbreaking. As an only child, I will be truly alone.

But I find no comfort in thinking that I’ll be able to see them again in the afterlife. Instead I look to the now and to fill the time I spend with my parents meaningfully.

When they eventually die, I just hope that they rest peacefully and that their last thoughts on life are, “well, I had a good run, thanks for the ride.”

If there’s no heaven and no afterlife, what happens to me when I die?

Our own death is even more frightening. The idea that not only do we get to live forever in the afterlife, but there is an ultimate reward waiting for us in heaven is appealing.

The bottom line is that no one really knows what happens when we die. If you’re an atheist, however, most likely that’s it. The end. And a few minutes later after oxygen deprivation causes the synapses in your brain to explode the possibility of being revived on Earth is also eliminated.

How would you live differently knowing that when you died, that was really the end?

Would you pursue your own passions more vigorously? Would you take less crap from other people? Would you appreciate the quality time with your loved ones all the more? Would you celebrate your own achievements even harder?

Many of us suffer in life. Sometimes intentionally. How would you change your life if the rewards in heaven for martyrdom were off the table?

As an atheist, you boldly face your own death. A happy atheist knows they have no power over when and how they die, but they are prepared at any moment to think, “There were ups and downs, but I had a good run.”

Without Christianity, I would have no moral compass

Or in other words, “what’s to stop you god-less atheist bastards from murdering, raping, and stealing?”

There is a lot of exciting work being done in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology right now.

Studies with chimpanzees and other primates have found that they are keenly aware of ideas of fairness, reciprocity, and justice.

Studies with young children have also found that helping behavior comes natural to kids who are too young to have any concept of God.

Evolution has made us pack animals. Not only have we learned intellectually that hunting together and working as a team helps us to collectively survive better, but we actually feel good when we do good. You don’t need to look any further than your own experience to validate this. At some time or another you have helped a friend move, given someone a present for the sheer delight of seeing how happy it would make them, or given street directions to a total stranger unasked.

On the flip side, you may have accidentally stepped on someone’s foot, unknowingly insulted someone, or broken a friend’s golf club. Odds are you didn’t go, “okay, Bible… such and such verse, yup whoops, fucked up. Therefore I feel bad.” You felt bad instantly, and you felt bad just because you did.

The roots of our morality aren’t spiritual, they are biological. Our sense of right and wrong is hardwired, not taught. We implicitly know what is good for us and what is bad for us, and therefore what is good for someone else and what is bad for someone else.

We react emotionally to how our behavior affects other people. Our actions are not subject to the judgment of God, but to the judgment of our own hearts.

God is love

We like the idea of pure, unconditional love. We don’t particularly care for fire, brimstone, and the wrath of God. Liberal Christianity says let’s keep the good and toss the bad. We think the world would be a better place if we all loved one another–indeed it probably would. And if God is pure love that gives us an example to follow and to emulate.

In holding onto pure love we subtly sabotage our minds in what psychologists call “repression.” We have within us the capacity to hate. You’ve undoubtedly experienced hate. Someone cut you off in traffic, got the promotion you wanted, or ate your cheesecake out of the fridge and you were enraged. You might still love a particular relative, but resent them bitterly for something they did.

You might have even chastised yourself for your fit of hateful rage afterwards and failing to embody God’s love.

The potential for hate, anger, and “negative” emotions exists within us all. Trying to eliminate them doesn’t get rid of them, it just represses them. Feeling these emotions doesn’t make you a bad person. What matters is how you act on them.

How free would you feel if you could be completely, non-judgmentally honest with yourself about what you feel?

Sometimes we like the idea that God is love so much because we don’t feel particularly good about ourselves, and if God can love us unconditionally then at least someone does.

Give yourself permission to be nice to yourself. A happy atheist thinks, “I love myself, and I value my own opinion very highly.” The world is tough enough as it is. Learn to be your own best friend.

I just like the idea of something comfortable and traditional

If you’ve read this far and nothing has clicked, you might think, “well, that’s nice and all but none of this really applies to me, I just like the idea of something comfortable and traditional.”

You’re already an atheist, you just don’t know it yet.

I love a good Christmas tree, always have. So did the Pagans before Christians borrowed the tradition. Presents under the tree and family gatherings are a fun thing to do.

We like rites, rituals, and traditions. In my opinion it would be nice if we had even more of them.

An atheist doesn’t view these as being necessarily connected to religion though. Birthday parties and Thanksgiving are good examples of traditions completely unrelated to religion.

You can make your own traditions too. A weekly family dinner that everyone makes a commitment to attending can also be a tradition.

What secondary payoffs are you getting from Christianity?

As a frequent traveler and a frequent mover, one of the biggest challenges is dealing with “stuff.”

Even after as little as a year in a one-bedroom apartment it’s amazing how much stuff you can accumulate. Appliances, books, clothes, and other random things pile up.

Not only do you have to figure out what to do with it all, but the things that you do move you stress out about getting scratched, broken, or damaged in the process.

Just the sheer thought of having to move all your stuff can be enough to make you feel weighed down and anchored to where you currently live. It might even become an excuse for not making a move that you really want to make.

Even if you’re not moving, an expensive purchase like a new car can give you a constant state of anxiety about worrying whether it will get scratched or need expensive repairs.

I recently re-discovered an essay called Musoyu (or Musoyou depending on how you anglicize it) I read while living in Korea years ago by a Buddhist monk named Pubjeong that expresses a beautifully applicable philosophy. Read the English translation here.

Musoyu is typically translated to either “Non Attachment” or “Not Owning.” Both are two sides of the same coin and can help de-clutter your life, restore the mobility you crave, and maybe even save you a boatload of money in the process.

Attachment

In the essay, Pubjeong talks about owning orchids that constantly demand his attention. They demand his attention so much that he almost feels imprisoned by them. And this feeling of having to take care of them and constantly worry about them is what is meant by “attachment.”

We feel attached to things in many different ways. Sometimes it can be an expensive new purchase like a house or a car, but often times it is little things like a shirt someone gave you that no longer fits, your beanie baby collection, or even an old classic Nintendo that you haven’t played in over 10 years but still can’t bear to part with.

The accumulation of these attachments bogs us down and makes us feel stuck. Even though we have no use for the mounds of junk around us we just can’t get rid of the stuff because “I might use it someday,” or “so and so gave it to me,” or “I put so much time/effort/energy/money into it.”

Non Attachment

Pubjeong feels “free from bondage” after he gives the orchids away and no longer has to care for them constantly.

De-cluttering your life means consciously severing attachments to things you’ve picked up along the way that no longer serve you, yet you still feel strongly about keeping.

That shirt your spouse gave you that doesn’t fit anymore? Toss it out. The metal ice-cream cone that you’ve had for 10 years and never used but “might use it someday?” Toss it out too.

To really de-clutter your life you can’t just get rid of the things that you objectively no longer want. As soon as you start sorting through your stuff you’ll discover that you feel like you want many of these things after all even though you have never or rarely used them. New attachments literally spring up in the way of de-cluttering.

Stop Collecting Things

The first, most powerful step in de-cluttering your life is to stop collecting things.

“Collections” are the biggest wasters of space and money.

Comic books, baseball cards, Barbies, Simpsons figurines, paintings, knick knacks, other memorabilia. They all take up space, provide the illusion of “value,” but serve no functional purpose.

Even though we think our collections are worth so much or will be worth something someday, to really get an idea of how much that baseball card is worth, go to eBay and find 100 people selling it for 50 cents.

The urge to “complete” a collection is powerful, but it’s okay to let it go. You can let the collection go incomplete. In fact, sell off what you do have and you will still get a feeling of closure.

What’s worse, even though you might no longer have any interest in Beanie Babies you might still keep spending more money on them just because you already have such a large collection.

If you stop collecting things and sell off your existing collections it’s a double win. You’ll be able to use both the money that you saved from not collecting and the money that you made from the sale towards something meaningful like taking that trip you always wanted to take.

Go Digital

There’s no longer any reason to own CDs, DVDs, or VCR tapes. And print books are 90% of the way out too. Music, movie, and book libraries take up a lot of space and can be expensive to move.

Nearly any movie you want to watch can be found on Netflix for $7.99/mo. Nearly any song you want to listen to can be found on Spotify for FREE. While some books still aren’t available, soon Kindles and other e-readers will enable you to replace almost your entire bookcase with a small compact device. Even many libraries are getting integrated with Kindle.

Digital media is one area where I really like “Not Owning.” I prefer services like Netflix and Spotify where I can access it on demand.

I’ve made a “no new physical media” promise to myself. From now on I only get digital books, or watch movies through a streaming service.

In tandem with this I also have a “one-time only” policy for watching movies and TV shows. There are so many things to see and do in this world that it barely makes any sense to watch TV let alone watch the same things over and over again.

If you have physical documents that you need regular access to, scan them and upload them to a service like Google docs. Opt for e-mail delivery only with your bank statements. Put everything on the cloud that you can.

On vacations I no longer buy any souvenirs. They just wind up going in a box somewhere unused and unlooked at. I only take digital pictures which I upload to the cloud via Picasa. I also scanned all my old pictures and uploaded them too. It’s great, if I meet someone abroad and I want to show them a piece of home all I need is an internet connection and my entire photo library is only a click away.

If you not only no longer own physical media, but all of your digital media is in the cloud; then not only do you not have to worry about taking care of or moving the physical items, but your computer can crash, burn, or get stolen and you don’t have to worry about losing any of your data. You can also travel comfortable knowing you can easily access your files from another computer if you need to.

Trade Down

Expensive items create another major attachment.

With the first big bonus check I got in New York City I went out and bought a $1000 pair of sunglasses with fancy bullhorn rims.

They are a pain in the ass.

The bullhorn requires regular waxing. I don’t want to casually place them on top my head or fold them into my shirt collar when I’m not wearing them because I’m afraid of bending them out of alignment. I don’t want to leave them in my car because I’m afraid they’ll melt in the summer heat or freeze in the winter cold. I don’t want to wear them on a day it might rain because I’m afraid the rain water will ruin them. I don’t want to take them on vacations because I’m afraid they’ll get stolen. So I wind up almost never wearing them.

Eventually I got fed up with this so I just went to Walmart and picked up a $5 pair of sunglasses that look pretty damn similar. I don’t care if they get wet, melt, stolen, broken, or left in a cab. I don’t have to worry about them at all. $5 is such a small amount to me that I can easily replace them without feeling any pain in my wallet.

Where in your life can you trade down?

Could you buy used furniture on Craigslist instead of new furniture? Could you buy the $10 polo shirts instead of the $50 polo shirts? Could you buy a Honda instead of a BMW?

I once bought a solid wood coffee table on Craigslist for $35 and then sold it for $40 when I moved out.

Whenever possible buy things cheap enough that you can break them or replace them without a second thought. Of course this is relative to your income. If I made $100 million a year I could buy and toss $1000 sunglasses without a second thought.

Consciously Choose Expensive Items

Trading down works for some things, but not for others.

I bought an expensive Vitamix blender because it turns berries, nuts, and kale into fine drinkable mush in a way that a standard blender just can’t do.

I spent an extra $100 on a TV to get 1080p instead of 720p.

I pay the extra money for organic whenever possible.

In general I’m willing to pay more for things when it is necessary to have a high quality product to get the job done, or if there’s a direct connection between the product/service and my health. I don’t recommend severing your attachment to your health, that’s a pretty important one.

As I’ve written about before I’m also into fashion and I’m willing to spend a bit more on clothes and tailoring to get the right fit. I don’t mind spending more on clothes since clothes are something you inevitably have to bring with you no matter where you go. However, I do go cheap when it makes sense–as I mentioned earlier $5 sunglasses and $10 polos at Uniqlo. I also try to get items that “travel well” and I don’t have to worry about getting (too) messed up in a suitcase.

The moral of the story is not to just go brutally cheap on everything, but to avoid buying entirely when you don’t really need it, go cheap when you can, and consciously choose the expensive item when the difference between it and a cheaper item actually makes a difference.

Parting Thoughts

I challenge you to reconsider what belongings you really need in your life.

How much space and money would you free up if you stopped collecting things and sold off all of your “collections?”

How would you change your shopping habits if “least hassle possible” was one of your primary purchasing considerations?

Where could you trade down to items you can treat as disposable without sacrificing functionality?

If you had to fit all of your belongings into two suitcases and a carry-on what would you absolutely have to take with you? What could you get rid of?

And perhaps most importantly, if you were no longer spending the time, money, and energy on things that don’t serve you, what opportunities that you’ve been putting off would it open up to you?