Many times I’ve debated — and have asked friends whose opinions I trust — some form of this question:

Is “follow your heart” good advice?

Because you know what? It sounds really compelling. We all like the notion of a kumbaya world where we can do exactly what we want to do, whenever we want to do it. We all really dig the idea that we can, should, and must ditch the bullshit in our lives and pursue our passions. If you’re stuck in a job you don’t like, it’s really appealing to have permission to quit doing it and to take to the road playing the harmonica if that’s what moves you.

There’s a million variants on this theme.

Do what you love. Follow your bliss. Pursue your passion. Turn your hobby into your vocation.

My friend Lee Stranahan says, “If you’re in a job where people don’t thank you for what you do on a regular basis, I think you should stop doing it.”

For most people, all of these usually amount to the same big question: Faced with a choice between doing something you love (which may not pay) and doing something you don’t love (but that pays), which should you pursue?

Speaking for myself, I have two answers to this question:

First of all, following your passions is an incredibly stupid thing to do.

And second, you absolutely must follow your passions, because not doing so is the stupidest damn thing you could ever do.

Let me explain.

Follow your heart

What terrible advice. I know people who say this, but I also know what they really mean, and “follow your heart” isn’t the whole story.

I would never tell anyone that they should always follow their heart. Passions come and go, and the trouble with passion is that it’s incredibly loud. It drowns out lesser preferences and desires. If you only listen to passion, that’s like listening to the one loud asshole in the crowd who’s complaining about the show you’re putting on and ignoring the quieter majority who are enjoying it just fine. If you follow your passions without thinking, you’re listening to the squeaky wheel and giving it all the grease.

Here’s what I mean.

Let’s say you really want to play the harmonica. It’s all you want to do, all the time. It’s your passion, in the purest sense of the word. You think about the harmonica constantly. You wake up and grab your harmonica. You go to sleep with your harmonica in your mouth. You make room when brushing your teeth so that you can play harmonica at the same time. You bought an electronic harmonica with headphones so that you can play it secretly at work. No sexual experience that does not include harmonica is worth engaging in.

So you should obviously quit your job and just play the harmonica all the time, right?

Wrong. Stupid. Because unless you’re very, very unusual, I’ll bet you have other, quieter desires that your harmonica-lust is drowning out.

For instance, I’ll bet you like to eat food. And I’ll bet you like that food to be a step above Ramen noodles on occasion.

I’ll bet you enjoy living under a roof. In fact, I’d further bet that the vast majority of you prefer to live under a decent, clean roof in a good part of town. And I’d go on to bet that well over half of you enjoy living where you are right now, or have ambitions to live somewhere better.

I’ll bet you enjoy your computer. Your iPod. Your iPhone. Your iPad.

I’ll bet you enjoy pleasing any family members you may live with or may support.

In other words, your harmonica passion isn’t your only passion. Each yin has a yang, and each thing you want has a price. Unless you get a harmonica sponsorship or unless Blues Traveller signs you up, leaving your job to play harmonica is going to involve a significant — possibly total — pay cut. Are you cool with that?

If you are, awesome. Quit your job, marry and fornicate with your harmonica, and have fun out there.

But because most people have those other desires too, my guess is that you aren’t going to be cool with it. Following your heart would net you a big win in the harmonica department… but would cost you in a lot of others.

It’s a recipe for a huge, foolhardy net loss.

But, follow your heart

Noticing some incongruity here?

I’m the guy who told you that you’d better carpe diem immediately because the universe doesn’t care about you, and hey, also, by the way, you’re dying, so you’d better get a move on.

I’m the guy who told you to schedule your fun stuff so that you can have more fun.

I’d also say that burning your days doing things you don’t care about or don’t want to do is akin to slow suicide. We only get one life, and this is yours. We only get one today, and you’re living yours.

Wasting your life doing things that aren’t in your heart is the stupidest thing you could do. It’s just as stupid as quitting the stuff you don’t like in order to do the things that are your heart.

Before I stop fucking with you, let me just incriminate myself a bit further.

I just finished writing a novel called The Bialy Pimps. (I’d very much like to link to it for you, but I can’t publish it until the cover art is ready.) I’m very proud of this novel. Creatively speaking, I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done. I can’t wait to have it out in the world. I can’t wait for you to read it, because I think you’ll really, really like it. I can’t wait to write another one. I can’t wait to do a few cool things to spread, market, and disseminate this novel and the ones I write next.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is my harmonica.

I’m writing and publishing fiction right now because I’m passionate about it. What other reason could there be? Yes, I might make some money on it, but I’m definitely not counting on it. I don’t expect to become a bestselling fiction author overnight. I don’t think it will help grow the business I’m currently in, because nobody reads a novel and then says, “Hey, that was great… let’s buy some of this guy’s info products!” And I’m certainly not planning to abandon what I’ve built in the business/blogging/rule-questioning space to follow my new bliss, because I like it a lot here.

I’m doing it because I want to do it. Because it’s in my heart. Because I think about it all the time and because I can’t not do it.

Ditto the Badass Project conference I hosted last week. Someone asked me why the team and I went to all that effort when there’s zero financial or business gain to be had from it. I didn’t (and won’t) make a cent off of anything the Badass Project does. I got some good exposure and connections by doing the conference, but that was a side effect. At root, and at its inception, I work on the Badass Project because I’m passionate about giving people props for saying, “Fuck you, world… I’m going to do this whether you think I should or not.” I’m passionate about making people who blame external circumstances for the crap in their lives feel like douchebags.

I think you should ditch the meeting to go to see your kid’s dance recital. I think you should tell co-workers you can’t work a certain time because you want to go see a movie. I’ve said that my mission statement in life is to “do cool shit with cool people.” I believe firmly in the doctrine of dicking off.

Passion. All passion.

So… now what?

Passion is overrated. Passion is underrated. Following your heart is usually a stupid idea. Not following your heart is the stupidest thing you could ever do.

You can believe all of those statements, because very few things in life are absolute.

As always, it comes down to self-awareness… and that means knowing which questions you’re really asking.

The question isn’t, “Should I follow my heart?” It’s “Should I follow this particular aspect of this thing that’s in my heart, now, in this way, in full awareness of both the positive and negative consequences that may or may not arise from my decision?”

Almost nothing is as absolute as YES or NO, regardless of qualifications. I say “It depends” a lot. You know why? Because it always fucking depends.

So, should you pursue your passions?

Yes, if.

No, if.

If you’ve ever asked that question in its naked form, you either aren’t paying much attention or are afraid of taking the scary, decisive action that might come from a legitimate answer to a legitimate question.

So, if you can get a handle on your fear, I’ve got something for you to try. The next time you’re trying to decide whether you should follow a passion, ask yourself five questions.

The first two are:

1. What do I have to gain by following this passion?

2. What am I losing by not following this passion?

These two are easy, because it’s what’s being screamed in your ear by that internal voice. That voice knows all the reasons why you should quit your shitty job and go play harmonica (#1) and it has many pushy opinions about how staying in your shitty job is sucking the life out of you (#2).

But then, keep going, and be honest.

Ask:

3. What am I gaining by not following this passion?

Think really damn hard about this one. Be honest in both directions, meaning that you’ve got to truthfully come up with things that you are gaining from staying right where you are even if you don’t want to admit it (self esteem, the perception of safety, the feeling that there’s safety in numbers) and that you can’t exaggerate the importance of not rocking the boat on your current situation (i.e., your job is not keeping you alive, and it’s pretty unlikely that it’s literally keeping a roof over your head unless you have no friends or relatives who would house you if there was no alternative).

Frame these things in the positive, because you’ve got to see the good in the situation, not just the bad in the alternative. So if you think that quitting your job would have you borrowing money and that would embarrass you, reframe it. Say that your current situation protects your dignity and makes you feel respected.

The next question is the hammer. Pay close attention to it.

4. What’s the price of following this passion?

Everything has a price. EVERYTHING. The price of a normal job is forty to fifty hours per week, a defined salary, and the need for approval of your actions, among other things. The price of playing harmonica all the time for no pay is that you may (may!) have to live in your parents’ basement and have no spending money and be called a loser. Everything has definite and potential upsides, and everything has definite and potential downsides. You’re going to pay the price for whatever you do, so make sure you’re okay with the price you’re choosing to pay.

There’s one more. And this is where things get really fun.

5. Are there other ways to get to where I want to be?

In other words, question the rules, because everything you’ve carefully reasoned out in questions 1-4 may be moot if you find an alternate way to satisfy your passion. The price may be far less in size, and far more appealing than you’d imagined.

I was talking with my buddy Benny Lewis yesterday. Benny travels. Like, that’s what he does, essentially for a living. He goes to different countries and he immerses himself in the local culture and he tries to learn the language. He’s from Ireland, but he really only goes back for Christmas. Everything he owns, all together, weighs fifty pounds. He’s a true nomad.

Benny said that people tell him all the time that they wish they could do what he does. And Benny told me that his response is, “So do it.”

But people don’t think they can do it. They’ve decided that the “price” of doing what Benny does is different from its true price, because they’re “pricing” a traditional, inside-the-box model. Benny’s model is outside the box. Most people think of travel as consisting of an expensive plane ticket, a week or two in a hotel (which is usually expensive), and then all sorts of other vacation expenses. But Benny doesn’t fly in and fly out. He flies in and stays for months. That’s several plane tickets a year, not several a month. He rents a place for the long term. His current place in Taiwan costs $300 a month. And if that’s too pricey? He couch surfs, and gets his accommodations for free.

Benny told me that most people have this mentality that says, “Work hard, save up a big chunk of money, and then travel the world.” But if you hack the system, you can start now. With just a bit of planning, you could do what Benny does for a pittance. So don’t wait. Travel, and earn that pittance as you go along.

The bottom line

I think that you should pursue your passions. I think that you should follow your heart.

…if, that is, you decide what it’s going to cost you, and decide that you’re honestly okay with paying that price.

Anything is possible. The only questions are how, where, when, and at what cost.

Following your heart isn’t bad. Staying where you are isn’t bad. What’s bad is inaction. Malaise. Inertia. Apathy. Unconsciousness.

Decide, then do.

Go.

So you like the idea of being a badass? You’re sold on badassery? You admire people who are badasses, and you want to become more badass yourself?

Are you sold on the idea that excuses suck, that most excuses are bullshit, and that the minute we learn to master our own true abilities is the minute our lives become amazing and virtually unlimited?

Well, lucky you. By joining us online for the Badass Project Conference 2012 next week, you can immerse yourself in an insane amount of badassery — taught by 18 amazing speakers — for FREE.

Here are the details on the conference.

So, I just want to make sure we’re clear about this.

This is virtual (online), meaning that you can attend from anywhere with an internet connection.

18 amazing who believe in our cause are joining us: Leo Babauta, Carole Brown, Brian Clark, Jonathan Fields, Charlie Gilkey, Maggie Ginsburg-Schutz, Matt Glowaki, Seth Godin, Joe Hall, Thor Holt, Warren MacDonald, Anissa Mayhew, Jon Morrow, Amber “Miss Destructo” Osborne, Amber Rae, Julien Smith, John Unger, and Tommy Walker.

They’ll be speaking about topics that will help you achieve your maximum level of badass… things like getting through fear, overcoming resistance, and eliminating excuses.

And IT’S ALL FREE.

Check it out, then block off the time on your calendar. You absolutely don’t want to miss this.

We’ve put together something I’m very, very proud to be a part of. I hope you’ll join us.

By the end of the week, I’ll finish the final draft of a novel I’ve been writing. It will then go to a few people who’ve agreed to give it a first read for me, and unless one of them says something very surprising, The Bialy Pimps will be for sale on Kindle by the end of the month.

But there’s more to this story. See, I wrote the first word of that novel on October 15th of 1999. For the past twelve years, my previous “final” draft has been sitting in the back of my closet, forgotten.

So in case you’re keeping score, here’s what happened:

Man writes novel.
Man shops novel around to literary agents, to no avail.
Man puts novel away for over a decade.

Then, in the middle of his busiest time, with a shit-ton of “brand-aligned,” “profit-generating,” and “strategically sound” projects on his plate that have absolutely zilch to do with fiction, man pulls novel out of closet and begins spending thirty hours or more a week working on it instead of on his more important stuff.

Why? Because this project matters to me, and because it doesn’t make sense to dogmatically follow any rules about how things “should” be done — including your own.

Question your assumptions

Here’s something we believe: Making money is important.

I’m not going to argue with that. I love money. I want more of it. If you feel you have too much money, go ahead and send it my way. I’ll give it a good home.

But the assumption that follows the belief that making money is important is that we should spend a lot of our time on what we know will make us money, and fit things that seem less likely to make a buck into whatever spare time remains.

I don’t buy it. Not this time, anyway.

I have no idea if this book (which is humor, by the way… think Catch-22* and you’ll be in the ballpark) will make me any money. I don’t care. Several things happened recently that created a perfect storm of disobedience, compelling me to work on a long-forgotten and less-than-lucrative project instead of creating products and writing sales copy, regardless of what it meant for business as I know it.

For one, I’d always wanted to write fiction, but I’d given up on it. When I graduated college, I was trained to be a geneticist but my dream was to be a novelist. Unfortunately, everyone knows that you can’t actually make a living as a novelist. A few lucky people win the publishing lottery, and everyone else has to settle for doing it as a hobby.

But a new medium recently came into play. Kindle. The Kindle revolution meant that authors could publish in a meaningful way (and for no cost) without getting the approval of agents or publishers. You still had to write quality and it wasn’t a magic fountain of cash, but you didn’t have to jump through everyone else’s hoops, either. So long, gatekeepers.

It just so happened that I’d been investigating and talking about Kindle for a while now . You know, coincidentally.

I knew from talking to my friend Sean Platt that thanks to said Kindle revolution, it’s now entirely possible to actually make part (or all) of your living writing fiction, even if you’re not Stephen King. Unthinkable!

And there was one more thing. With a decade’s distance from the first drafts of my novel and a hell of a lot of practice writing, I finally knew how to rewrite my book in a way that pleased me (pleased me a LOT, as it turned out) and make it feel ready to ship.

A perfect storm.

But there was one problem, and you can guess what it was.

Ridiculous.

I’m a business guy. A marketing guy. If you’re really generous, maybe I’m a “thought leader.”

What I’m not is a fiction writer. Not in the eyes of the internet, anyway.

It makes no sense for me to release a novel. Once I finish this one, it makes no sense for me to begin another, which I’m going to do. And it sure as hell didn’t make sense for me to push back some very relevant, very current tasks and spend six or eight hours a day working on a project that I hadn’t touched in twelve years.

Or did it?

I’ve mentioned how I’m okay with being abnormal because the usual definition of “normal” sucks. In the same way, I’m okay with doing stuff that doesn’t make sense because “making sense” is just someone’s opinion.

Who says that if you’re a writer, you shouldn’t write whatever strikes you, even if it’s a departure from your norm?

Who says that you shouldn’t follow where inspiration compels you to go?

Who says that you can’t be a novelist and… and whatever I am currently?

I don’t care if this book makes me any money, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it just might do so anyway. I’ve got a track record. I’ve got a network. I’ve got a readership. I understand marketing and promotion. And, now that I’m remembering how much I love writing fiction, I’m going to keep writing books and keep putting them out, which gives me more chances to hit the big dartboard. I have a sneaking suspicion that given persistence and patience, there’s no reason that book sales couldn’t eventually be a significant portion of my business, just as it is for not only J.A. Konrath, but also a hell of a lot of the people who comment on his blog. I’ve never heard of most of these people, and yet they’re making hundreds or thousands of sales each month. That’s paltry in the old world of book publishing, but it’s entirely livable with Kindle’s 70% author royalties.

Twelve years ago, I wanted to make my living as a fiction writer. After a twelve-year detour, I might actually be able to do that. But this way, this time, it would be even better than I’d imagined in my twenties. Back then, I’d have simply been a novelist. Today, I’m a blogger/business guy. And going forward, I can be both.

Maybe it doesn’t “make sense” for someone like me to write and publish a novel.

But I’m the one defining the terms here, and I say that ignoring all of the above simply because some rule says I shouldn’t mix fiction with business is the thing that wouldn’t make sense.

Question the rules

You may remember my course Question the Rules. Well, I’ve been planning a 2.0 release — adding new modules and new interviews, spiffing it up for the new 2012 kids — for months now, but never quite got around to it. I even did a new interview with Julien Smith for it this summer that’s absolutely amazing, but I’ve been sitting on it. The QTR 2.0 project just never felt very urgent. But recently, while working on this novel that it doesn’t make sense for me to be working on, all of that stuff about how arbitrary rules hold us back started to resurface in my head.

It suddenly started to feel urgent.

As the world and work continues to evolve, we need to look harder than ever at the rules that we follow, and decide if we should be following them at all.

2011 was a tough year for a lot of people. The economy still sucks. Everything is made in China. Companies are still laying people off. Many people still hate their jobs. People are still spending more of their time doing stuff that they don’t like than they spend doing stuff that they do like. Depression rates are climbing.

That’s “normal.” That’s what you get if you follow all of the rules.

And while I was working on my novel that doesn’t make sense, setting aside my logical and profitable projects because 1) I believe that I can be both “a business guy” and “a successful novelist” and 2) because I fucking felt like it, I figured now was the time to start talking again about doing things in unconventional ways.

Question the Rules, which has the lengthy but rather descriptive tagline “The nonconformist’s punk rock, DIY, nuts-and-bolts guide to creating the business and life you really want, starting with what you already have,” will launch in its 2.0 version next month.

Existing QTR members will simply get the new content for free. New folks will be able to get it all for a steep discount during the launch. And dude… the amount of content we have up there is just getting stupid. It’s going to be nearly 50 hours of assumption-challenging, life-changing information before I’m done, from a lot of the best minds in the business. (And in life, and in art, and in travel, etc.) PLUS a bunch of bonuses. It’s kind of ridiculous.

And you know what? Fuck it. Here’s a signup form, right in the middle of this post. I’m questioning the rule that says I should put it at the end. Go ahead and drop your email address in the box below if you want to know when QTR 2.0 launches, so that you can get it at launch-week prices:

Email:

Here’s what I think might be true.

I think that if you’re failing, it may be because you’re playing by rules that you don’t have to play by.

I think that if you think you can’t have what you want, there’s a decent chance that you’re not actually pursuing what you truly want. Once you do some introspection, you may find that your goals are closer than you think.

I think that even if you’ve never realized it before, the fact that you read this blog means that you are seriously punk rock. If you keep trying to follow the normal, non-punk way of doing things, you’re going to be frustrated and bored.

I think that if you’re unhappy with the hand that you’ve been dealt, you can reshuffle, or you can play it a different way. Are you holding a five and a two of different suits in the card game of life? Fuck it. Start playing a new game. Call a five/two off-suit a “Royal Awesome” and declare yourself the winner.

I think that even though there’s no reason for an internet marketing, business coach, thought leader kind of a guy to begin publishing novels, that I’m going to fucking do it anyway.

There are rules that it makes sense to follow, but only you can decide which ones they are.

* In case you’re actually paying enough attention to notice that I have described my book in the past as “zombies meet Fight Club,” that’s a different book. That’s the next one.

If you’re one of those nitpicky assholes who likes to try to catch people screwing up and then tell them Nyah-nyah, you did this wrong, you probably noticed that I’ve fallen short on my promise to try six 30-day trials during 2011 and were all set to yell at me.

I tried biphasic sleep, the Slow-Carb diet, releasing resistance, quasi-minimalism, fighting email addiction, and… and?

And nothing. And 2011 is almost over.

Well, ha-ha! I did a sixth trial already and just haven’t said anything until now… with eleven days in the year to spare.

Here’s what it was: from mid-November until mid-December (to embrace the holiday spirits of both Thanksgiving and Christmas, I suppose), I did a favor each day for friends… with the requirement that they did nothing for me in return.

A little background

I have a confession to make. I’m a little selfish.

I try not to be, but I’m driven and I have big goals, and one of the ways you maintain drive and make progress on big goals is to keep your eye on the prize — which means watching what YOU do and the results YOU are getting very closely, often to the exclusion of other people’s concerns. I think that the vast majority of achievers are in danger of being overly selfish — without meaning to be or wanting to be — for this very reason.

(In fact, if you’re thinking that I’m wrong and that there are a lot of selfless achievers, I’d argue that they’re selfish too… but in a very specific way. A person who wants to feed a million people has a plan to make it happen, and has to stay focused on that plan just like any other goal. Think there are any great world-changers and philanthropists whose families sometimes felt neglected while said philanthropists were out doing good for others? Think any of those great people were sometimes seen as bullheaded or unyielding? I sure do.)

So sometimes, I’ll be trying to go after something, and I’ll look back too late and I’ll say with regret, “Ooh, I didn’t really even thank that person for helping me.” Or, “That person really cheered me on, but I don’t think I’ve ever cheered them on.”

I’ve even been mad at people who haven’t dropped everything they’re doing to be impressed by something I’ve achieved. How selfish is that, when they had a big thing last month that I didn’t even notice?

So, noticing this trend, I thought about trying to reciprocate more and be a better team player from now on.

But that didn’t feel like enough. The karmic scale was out of balance thanks to all the times I’d inadvertently taken without giving.

For a change, I wanted to do a bunch of stuff for people and get nothing back.

What’s in it for me?

A lot of the people who knew I was doing this experiment nodded their heads with understanding when I told them and said something like, “So it’s a networking thing. You’re strengthening your connections.”

And that would have made sense. I think that keeping your network karmically balanced is a good plan (see how my client Ben Rubin explains it here), but that’s not what I was doing. Doing good turns so that people would “owe me one” is honestly not what I was after… especially since a lot of the people involved weren’t business connections anyway.

That said, there’s a lot here that’s splitting hairs.

After doing 30 favors for people and asking nothing in return, might I expect to have better connections, and might I benefit from said connections later on? Sure. But that’s not why I was doing it.

This is something Seth Godin talks about in his book Linchpin: giving gifts. The linchpin gives gifts of him- or herself, and that creates an economy based on art and generosity. But the linchpin doesn’t give gifts in order to receive. The idea is to give freely, and to receive freely.

So yeah, I suppose I might receive. I kind of hope I don’t, though, because I have enough without these favors coming back to me, and I’d rather not mar the intention of the trial.

How I went about it

The idea was super-simple. I sent the following to a bunch of people who have done generous things for me in the past:

At the beginning of this year, I decided to do six 30-day challenges. To end the year, I want to do one unreciprocated favor for a friend for 30 days.

So, as a friend, I’m asking you to let me do a favor for you… and I specifically ask that you do nothing for me in return regarding this favor.

It can be pretty much anything you’d consider to be a “favor” if you asked someone to do it. I can’t walk your dog or pick up your mail or water your plants while you’re on vacation if I don’t live where you live… but I can look over something you’ve written, connect you with someone else I know, make a testimonial or give you a review, participate in your XYZ, give you my recommendation re: the latest widget, give you advice on something I know well… whatever.

If this seems like a strange request to you, then you don’t know me very well. I’ve done much, much stranger things.

A few wiseasses replied with joke requests, like “no more naked photos of you in my email,” and a few more replied that they didn’t need anything. Some didn’t reply at all, necessitating some creativity (more on that in a minute) and a second round of emails.

I did get a few “Nothing, thanks” replies, but because people could tell that I was seriously trying to do this, I tended to get a variant on the theme: “I don’t know what I need. Let me think about it.”

I even had to talk one person into it. He didn’t feel comfortable receiving without giving, which really proved the point of the whole experiment. This guy ALWAYS cheers for and supports me, and wanted nothing. What the hell?

I had to remind a lot of people, too. Hey, remember this email? What can I help you with? And after sending a few emails like that (not to the same people, though. I didn’t want to be a pest) I started trying to be creative and suggest things I could do for them until we came to something that felt right.

What I did

I didn’t explicitly say whether or not these favors would be confidential, but I figure it’s better safe than sorry. So with the exception of a few public cases, I won’t say who requested what.

But that said, here’s the kinds of things I ended up doing:

• Telling others about their good stuff
• Giving advice (I gave a lot of advice)
• Reviewing people’s writing or projects and giving testimonials to people who’ve done good work for me
• Reading/looking through people’s stuff and giving my opinion
• Various personal tasks for the non-businessy people on my list
• Brainstorming with them
• Creating something amusing. One person wanted a funny photo and one wanted a funny video. I can tell you about one of these because he shared it on Twitter; Tony Clark asked me to draw him a picture of Lumpy Space Princess and Lady Rainicorn from the cartoon Adventure Time. OMG the resulting artwork was a masterpiece.
• I also decided to do a favor for my email list as a whole, because those are the clients and friends who make my business possible. So I did a no-strings-attached and zero-promotion Q&A call for them, and told them to ask me anything.
• One person said that he had all he could want, so he asked me to do something for someone else without that person knowing it was me.
• Two people hemmed and hawed but couldn’t really come up with anything, so I told them I’d make a donation to a charity I knew they supported.
• I did some technical fix-it jobs.
• Sonia Simone’s request was for me to record a Third Tribe seminar. I couldn’t believe this didn’t qualify as her doing me a favor.

That last one was interesting, and really brought the issue of reciprocation and synergy back to the fore. How could I not benefit from a Third Tribe seminar? But Sonia needed the content as much as I could use the exposure, proving that some of the best arrangements really do benefit everyone.

What happened

Nothing, and that was the point.

Have I seen any effect from the favors I did? No. I don’t want effects. People have asked me how it went, and my answer has been, “Well, I did the favors.” Sometimes I add “It was interesting” or “It felt good,” but that’s not the answer people are looking for. They want to hear what I got out of it.

When I did the biphasic sleep trial, I could point to something that affected my life: Interesting, but not for me. When I did Slow Carb, the same was true: It was close to a good fit, and it eased me into Paleo — and Paleo is a game-changer.

But this? What did it do? What has occurred? Nothing.

Well, nothing tangible. Maybe it’s realigned the karmic scales, and maybe it will improve my friendships. Maybe it’s shifted my perspective, and maybe it’ll make me more aware of reciprocity in the future. And I guess that’s not nothing.

Happy holidays, everyone. May you give as freely as you receive, and appreciate the joy of both.

Anyone who reads this blog has probably noticed that I really like the work of Julien Smith. And really, if you like my writing, you’d probably like his.

Let’s drill it down a bit further. Remember my post “You are dying, and your world is a lie“?

Well, if you liked that specific post of mine, you’re going to like Julien’s new Kindle book The Flinch. It’s incredibly expensive at $0.00, so you might as well go ahead and grab it. I don’t think Amazon discounts much below that point.

If you’ve been revved up and motivated by some of my recent, “big thoughts” posts but weren’t quite sure what to do, this will fill in some of the missing pieces for you.

Here’s the idea:

When we’re aware of impending pain or suffering, we have an inborn instinct to flinch away from it. This is all well and good in things like protecting your head when you take a fall and in flinching away from a hot stove (or if someone like the Incredible Hulk throws a hot stove at you), but it falls apart when the thing we’re flinching away from is something we need to do.

In other words, it’s that persnickety issue again. The one we all love and hate.

Remarkable things are often uncomfortable by definition. If they weren’t, everyone would be doing them. So in order to be remarkable, you have to get used to discomfort. But we flinch from it. Just as we’re hard-wired to flinch away from actual, physical, destructive impending pain, so too do we learn to flinch away from ridicule, rejection, discomfort, and bad feelings.

Your body says: This thing that’s about to hit us is going to suck. Let’s get the fuck away from it like, now.

Julien says that before champion boxers can become champions, they have to learn to do one thing that novice boxers can’t do. They have to learn how to take a punch.

They have to learn to see the impending pain or discomfort, and not flinch.

Champions in anything are the same way. If you want to achieve anything great, you have to learn when it’s truly appropriate to flinch and when you need to hold your ground and take the hit.

That’s the theory. But there’s practice in here, too.

Want to learn how to get past the flinch? There’s specific strategies in this book. And I’ll admit, they were tough. They all made me want to flinch.

You want to learn how to do big things, start with small things. Start getting intimate with your flinch, and learn how to push through it.

The Flinch was written by Julien Smith for Seth Godin’s Domino Project. It’s free. With that particular combination of attributes, it’s kind of hard for me not to recommend it wholeheartedly.

Julien sent me an advance copy, and I read it in a day and loved it. I think you will too.

Check out The Flinch at Amazon for free. You’ll thank me.

Today’s post is over at my nonprofit, The Badass Project. You should read it.

Read it here.

P.S: My last post was short. This post is short. This one doesn’t really count, though, because the post I’ve linked to isn’t short at all. And it’s bad ass.

P.P.S: Don’t get used to short posts from me.

1. Begin.

2. Do the work.

3. Ship.

4. Repeat.

Almost nobody truly does all four. Those that do inevitably become great.

Last year, Adam Baker and Karol Gajda did their “Only 72″ sale for the first time, and I was blown away by how incredibly they’d managed the principle of WIN-WIN-WIN. Everyone pays lip service to the idea, but Baker and Karol had embraced it, dated it, married it, and had like fifteen kids with it.

They made an offer that was incredibly WIN for the buyers. (Over $1000 worth of stuff for $97 last year. This year’s is bigger… there was still a “over $1000 worth of stuff for $97″ offer, but they added a “$4344 worth of stuff for $497″ level.)

They made a big WIN for charity. In fact, they gave enough to Charity:Water to dig like 3-5 freshwater wells in Ethiopia. This year, the charity was WASI (a sustainable businesses women’s charity).

They managed a WIN for the people who contributed to the sale, who greatly increased their sales and profits during the sale.

They managed a WIN for affiliates who promoted the sale.

After all of that, I distinctly and honestly figured there was no way they would make money themselves, but they did, and a lot of it. Baker and Karol WON too.

This year, neither Baker nor Karol contributed anything to the sale itself, which means they did all of this without producing any content. That’s not just win-win-win. It’s incredibly outside-the-box.

If you want to be successful in business, you need to learn how to do this. You need to learn how to let others WIN first and trust that you will get your WIN later. This takes a leap of faith, but it’s vital.

I talked with the guys and picked their brains on how other people could do the same… not how they could create a super-sale, but how they could have the trust to GIVE before GETTING. It takes guts. It takes flipping “looking out for number one” on its head.

And it works. I’d daresay it’s the secret to success… for everyone.

Have a listen:

Download MP3

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This post contains a lesson about life, about your job, and about being human. Hang in there with me with through the intro, because whether or not you’re an athlete, this applies to you.

—

This summer, over a two-month span of time, I did an Olympic triathlon, a bike century, a half Ironman, and a marathon.

That’s not bragging. Bragging carries the assumption that I did it with a purpose, to prove something to others. I did neither. Only after completing the second event did I ask myself what the hell I was doing it for. I’m not fast. I’m not going to finish in the top third of any event I enter. I’m not trying to impress anyone. Yet it took a huge amount of effort, required me to repeatedly get up around 3am, and had me going for up to seven hours at a time. So why was I doing it?

At first I thought it was to see if I could do it, but then I realized that the intent was subtly different. “Seeing if you can do it” comes with a positive expectation. It’s a carrot. You train, and hopefully you accomplish.

What I was doing was a bit more masochistic. I was trying to see how much I could take.

My empire of dirt

There’s a song by Nine Inch Nails, called “Hurt.” The lyrics go like this:

I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel.
I focus on the pain… the only thing that’s real.

It’d be really easy to dismiss this as the ramblings of a morose kid who grew up to become an idol for depressed teenagers, and that’s what most adults do. Kids do dumb shit, and as adults, it’s our job to explain away said dumb shit so that we don’t have to try to understand it. Dumb shit doesn’t require an explanation. It can simply be dismissed, because it’s dumb.

Why would pain have any value? Pain is real, sure, but so is the budget deficit, and we don’t want either of them in our lives. Pain isn’t “the only thing that’s real.” You know what’s real? This deadline. These bills. The fact that we haven’t done our Christmas shopping yet. Oh, and the Patriots game.

This is what we tell those whiny teenagers. But interestingly, it’s what we tell ourselves, too.

So what if you hate your job? It gives you genuine security. You can keep a roof over your head. You can even buy that new plasma TV you’ve been wanting. So turn in your work on time. Listen. Advance. These things are real, and important.

But if you think your deadline is real, go out in the woods and get a grizzly bear to chase you. Which of your pressing concerns seems more real now?

If you think your job is real, get cancer and be given six months to live. Then see if you give a fuck about your job.

The fears that come with your job, your finances, or your social standing are fears of things that aren’t real. If you lose your job, life will go on. This isn’t the way it used to be with the objects of our fears. Used to be, we were afraid of being eaten by tigers. That was a legit fear. You get eaten by a tiger just one time, and things change dramatically for you.

In first world societies, we’re not really in danger anymore. Sure, you can still get hit by a car. You can get a disease. You can get shot. You can get home-invaded or robbed or raped. But comparatively, today, true threats are almost nonexistent. Cave people got a cut and it got infected and they died. They twisted their ankle and lost some of their speed and died. They drank bad water and died. Food became scarce, so they slowly starved and died.

Those things don’t really happen much nowadays, but we’re wired to fear pain. So to compensate, we promoted the things we found moderately unpleasant to “pain” status and began fearing those things instead.

Stress. Discomfort. Awkwardness.

We used to make the choice not to cross a plain based on fear of the pain of being eviscerated. Today we make the choice to not start a new venture based on fear of the pain of failing.

We started saying things like, “This stress is killing me” and “Those people are exercising themselves to death!” and “I was so embarrassed, I could have died.”

That’s not pain. That’s not true discomfort. That’s not the peril to life and limb we evolved to avoid.

We’re not the fragile beings we’ve been trained to think we are. We’re not as weak (of body, of mind, of will) as we’ve hypnotized ourselves into thinking. But the only way to truly learn that — and to open the entire spectrum of human experience we’ve buried beneath the shiny veneer of modern existence — is to meet our own personal limitations and boundaries head-on.

It’s ironic. Letting yourself experience what you most don’t want to experience is the only way to truly be human.

What’s real?

Think about how we live today.

We live in television and on the internet. (I’m scorning neither and I love both, so there’s no finger-pointing here.) Sometimes our friends are people we only see once or twice a year, who we might have physical contact with only half a dozen times.

We go from place to place very quickly without having to wear down our shoes or the soles of our feet, thanks to fast cars and fast trains and fast planes.

We spend a lot of time accomplishing very little. The work of a human life might be the movement of one set of papers or one group of numbers from one location to another.

We have kids, but then we go to work and they go to school (so that they can later go to work, thus closing the circle). Often, our lives cross only briefly, like ships in the night.

We’re shaped by fashion and consumerism. Instead of desiring and chasing food, we desire and chase iPads and iPhones… present company included.

We check email and social networks compulsively. Are we lonely? Or are we just looking for some urgency that we can pretend matters — a surrogate for the survival requirements we used to spend our lives pursuing, but which are now handed to us?

We have fast food. We have video games so real you could step into them. We have reality TV that isn’t very realistic, so that we can vicariously live the lives of Jersey kids and celebrities. And even though we may never visit Australia if we live in New York, we can video chat with Australia, live, for free, whenever we want.

Old-fashioned, unfiltered reality worked for a while, but it was untidy. It was really time-consuming. It had some great positives, but it also came with some shitty negatives.

Move over, reality. Now there’s Reality 2.0.

The good old days

Used to be, things were different.

Used to be, you had to be strong, fast, and smart to survive. That was how evolution proceeded. Those with an advantage leading up to reproductive age passed on their genes, so humans got stronger and faster and smarter.

Then we started getting so smart that our bodies didn’t have to evolve quite as quickly to keep up.

We stopped needing to be strong when machines were invented.

We stopped needing to be fast when chariots, buggies, bicycles, and cars were built.

We no longer had to hunt for food. Others created food in such surplus that certain populations would never want for it. We even manufactured cheap superfoods that were so calorically dense, the poorest among us ended up being the fattest.

Even battling your enemies can now be done largely with the push of a button.

We found a cure for pain. A cure for sleeplessness. A cure for emotional upset. Some cures were medical, and some were behavioral. A cigarette could cure nervousness. A trip to the mall could cure sadness. Eating could cure fear. Drinking could cure shyness.

And that’s all fine and dandy until you realize that we’re hard-wired to experience all of those so-called “negative” things.

A lot of people today, they like to ride roller coasters. As time goes on, roller coasters get bigger and faster. The logical explanation for this is that progress must march on, and a bigger and faster roller coaster is the next logical step, but I think it’s because as our lives become less and less genuine, we require bigger and bigger thrills to scare us, for just a moment, into feeling human again.

Horror films get more and more frightening for the same reason. Those stop-motion sequences of Japanese kids in movies like The Ring? Holy fuck. I don’t need an iPad anymore; all that matters is that you keep those things away from me. Or the breed of intensely grotesque movies that started with the likes of Hostel and Saw — nothing supernatural about those at all, just stuff that could actually happen via ordinary everyday evil. Those movies were huge hits because the more you can feel yourself as being there, being in it, the more you realize, for just a little while, that what your neighbor thinks of your car is irrelevant.

This is the society that embraced Fight Club.

This is a society that spawned real-life fight clubs.

We all go about it in different ways and succeed to different degrees, but every one of us has a part inside us that wants to feel discomfort, because it’s visceral. It’s human.

Remember what Agent Smith said in The Matrix?

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world, where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program; entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world, but I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. That perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrums kept trying to wake up from.

We’ll never create a utopia, because it’s impossible to define good without having bad to compare it to. There is no pleasure without pain. There is no Heaven without Hell.

The more we try to eliminate the negatives in life, the more we consequently eliminate the positives.

Modern society has tried very hard to be safe and secure, to keep us in the soft and protected center of our experience spectrum, and away from the perilous edges.

The problem is that the edges are where all of the really good stuff is.

Edgework

The way to expand your joy is by expanding your capacity for discomfort and failure.

We spend all our time trying to insulate ourselves from negative sensations and emotions, and we end up stunted on both ends. If the experience of modern life feels dim and muted to you, you’re not alone. We’re seeing the world through a protective wrapping. The reason people seek out extremes is so that they can, for once, truly experience something that they know is unblunted and real.

This is a legit sociological concept. It’s called “edgework.” (And thanks again to Julien Smith for introducing me to the concept.)

There are two sides to every coin. If you want to experience real emotion, you get the gamut. If you experience a level 8 emotion in one area, you get access to all emotions at level 8. And if you seek out a negative experience at level 8, you master it. Fear doesn’t blindside you because you went after it. Pain doesn’t overwhelm you because you went into it willingly, step by step. If you wanted to back off, you could have.

Whatever level of discomfort you reach, you reach deliberately. You’ve met the negative head-on, on your own terms. You own it, and you’ll own it forever.

And your world gets bigger. Your spectrum of experiences broadens in all directions — positive and negative. We don’t grow in a line. We grow in a sphere. If you master X, you get access to Y. That’s how it works.

We seek out edges so that we can reconnect with who we really are.

We are not averages and statistics.

We are not the upper, middle, or lower class.

We are not citizens, or constituents, or the governed.

We are not megaplex Christmas shoppers.

We are human.

Tick… tick… tick…

A few months ago, I wrote a post that part of me wishes I hadn’t written.

It was called “The Universe Doesn’t Give a Flying Fuck About You,” and it was exceedingly popular. It went viral and got me a lot of attention, and it might just be the best thing I’ve ever written. But it came with a price.

The price is that I didn’t just write it. I read every word of it, over and over and over and over. I lived it. And so now, every day, almost without exception, I’m hideously aware that the clock is ticking. We all get older. We never get younger. And we all know this, but think about it. If you’re 30, do you look back longingly on your 20s? Good. Because they’re over. They’re fucking OVER. You’ll never be there again. Never. This is also true of the age you are now. You have exactly one chance to enjoy it… and then it’s gone.

I guess my new intense awareness of time is a gift. I guess it means that I know not to sweat petty details or to waste time. A lot of people haven’t figured that out yet and continue to squander what few days, weeks, months, and years we’ve been given.

I just watched the movie In Time which, in spite of being a ripoff of Logan’s Run, was still pretty entertaining. In it, the currency is time. The more time you have, the longer you live. When you go broke, you don’t move into a box in an alley. You just die. And that’s a great premise for a sci-fi movie, where you could live each day in a terrifying struggle to earn a few more minutes or hours, but that’s how we live too. You could punch out tomorrow. Nobody knows.

Every day now, I wonder if I’m spending enough time with my family. If I’m having enough fun. If I’m enjoying my work, and if I’m making a difference. I feel like a man who’s been given a death sentence. I’m not kidding. Someone asks me to spend an hour doing something stupid and I resent it. That’s an hour I won’t get back.

What are you doing with the time you have?

Are you watching life through a protective bubble? Are you afraid to leave that bubble, to feel the true pain of effort, of exertion, of something that you’ve never dared to try before? And as you succumb to your fear of the unreal, do you have to settle for experiencing fake joy, fake excitement, fake victory?

Life isn’t meant to be lived through a filter. When you walk into pain and discomfort willingly, and you feel it, unblunted, you know you’re beyond the filter. You know you’re finally experiencing the real.

I don’t know about you, but if I only have so many years here (we’re all born with a terminal disease, after all), then I want to experience the real.

Don’t be stupid, but test your boundaries. Do what bothers you. Do some things that hurt. Let yourself be afraid, and uncomfortable, and at your limit. If you’re scared of something, dive in the next time you experience that fear and revel in it, sampling it like a rare delicacy. Look at everything you’ve been trying not to feel and say, “Let’s try this on for size.”

I don’t know about you, but I want to see what’s out there in the world. And within limits, within reason, I don’t mind if it hurts.

Sometimes I run into people I haven’t seen since high school, or I meet someone new, and they ask me what it is that I do for a living. And so I tell them: I’m a blogger.

I used to pussy-foot around. I’d try to explain the substance of what it is I do (“I’m a writer.” “I’m a coach.” “I create online courses.”), but all of those things invite further inquiry, and eventually we end up getting into more questions — Who do you write for? What kind of people do you coach? What kind of courses? — and so I sigh and say what I start with today: “I’m a blogger.”

And that’s a shit answer, because it frustrates people.

You tell people that you’re a lawyer, and they get it. A little drawer opens in their mind and you go into it. Or you say you’re a paper salesman. Or a drill press operator. Or a social worker. People understand these things. They may not know the details, but they have a basic understanding of where a drill press operator fits and what he or she does. You operate a drill press. Probably in a big factory. You come home from work dirty, you probably earn X, and you’re likely in a union.

You tell people you’re a normal, predictable thing, and their brain gets all happy because it doesn’t have to do any more work. It’s like there’s a form in their mind that contains the essential information about all of your stats, and knowing your occupation populates that form from start to end in one fell swoop. They may not be right about the car you drive, but they can be confident that they’re close. If you’re a drill press operator and drive a new Mercedes and like opera, they’re going to be shocked, for instance. Or if you’re a banker and spend your weekends BMX racing.

You give people a convenient handle and they know what to do with you. But “blogger”? What the fuck is that?

When you tell people you’re a blogger, they don’t know how to populate the form. They don’t know where you go, so they can’t slot you into the mental box they have for you. You’re not neat and tidy. You become an open loop, a loose end in their mind. And people hate loose ends. Loose ends require mental energy. The brain likes to tag things with sweeping judgments — good, bad, happy, sad, fun, boring, tedious, difficult, easy — and to not worry about shades of gray.

(Imagine having a huge pile of receipts at tax time, and having a corresponding set of file folders that match up with where those expenses go on the tax forms. You sort through the entire pile of receipts, putting each one in place… but then there’s one big receipt left that doesn’t fit on any line. You’re going to need to call your accountant or maybe the IRS about this receipt. You aren’t even sure how to explain the receipt to them. Maybe you’ll have to drive down and show it to them, or contact the merchant on a 3-way call. Now: How much do you hate that receipt?)

If you tell people you’re a blogger, you become that receipt. Nobody knows where to put you, and how to profile you. What are your political views? How do you spend your free time? Are you fun and outrageous or boring? What are your kids probably like? What kind of house do you live in, and what kind of car do you drive? Do you even have a car, or are you one of those hippies who bikes everywhere?

Personally, I kind of enjoy confusing people, but if you spend enough time around people with orderly life descriptions and don’t know enough about your own field, you can start to feel that way to yourself. Where do you fit? What’s to be expected in “the blogging life” and what’s not? What’s working? What’s not working as well as it used to? Who are the others like you… and what are they like?

If you’d even consider telling people “I’m a blogger,” you’re probably used to being weird and you’re probably comfortable outside of the normal nine dots, but there’s a limit. If you’re totally out there on your own — and are out there on your own all the time — then things just gets harder and harder.

So how to do you deal?

Well, you meet others. You learn your craft. You treat blogging like a business instead of a hobby. Even if you never answer other people’s nagging questions (“How do you know what to write about?” “How do you make money?” “How do you build your traffic and keep people coming back?” “Are others like you making a living at this, and how are they doing it if so?”), you’ll at least know the answers for yourself.

You can learn those things by poking around online, but because I’m in charge of BlogWorld’s Virtual Ticket this year, I’m shamelessly going to suggest you register for a conference instead.

Yeah. I went there. But keep reading.

Ahem. You might have missed an important bulletin.

I suspect you might have missed my big announcement about becoming the head and the face (basically everything above the neck) of BlogWorld’s online program. And if you did miss it, it’s probably because I haven’t made a big deal about it, but that was dumb, because this is something that I’m really proud of and really excited about. Go ahead and give that announcement a read. I’ll wait.

See, if you tell people you’re a blogger, most people will ask what that means. You might not have figured out yet how to answer that question, and when it actually comes up for me, I do a lot of hemming and hawing too.

But if I were honest with these people, my answer would always be, “It means I do cool shit with cool people.”

That’s why I love my job: I’ve met a lot of cool people, and I do almost nothing that isn’t totally fucking awesome.

And how did I meet these cool people?

By going to conferences and learning my craft.

And what’s totally fucking awesome?

The BlogWorld Virtual Ticket.

You see where this is going.

Totally fucking awesome.

So how did all this awesomeness happen, you ask?

Well, as with any success, it started with irritating the right people.

About a year ago, I did something that pissed off BlogWorld Dave, BlogWorld Rick, and I’d guess also BlogWorld Deb. I didn’t mean to piss them off, but I was totally naive (that was my old slogan: TOTALLY FUCKING NAIVE) and made a faux pas that resulted in a few phone calls.

Ultimately, we came to an agreement wherein I wasn’t a total asshole and then nine months later, Rick says, “Hey, you’re doing some cool stuff and we’ve already spent time determining that you’re not a total asshole, so how about you kick the Virtual Ticket up a notch?” And I was like Bam! and Rick was like Awesome! and then we high-fived and rode sharks through hoops of fire.

This is how I met BlogWorld.

And my task about kicking it up a notch? That’s the fun part.

I’m not going to go through the entire Virtual Ticket sales pitch here because I did it so well here, but suffice to say that this isn’t your father’s virtual event. When we started working on the VT project (we = Jess and I; you know Jess from The Badass Project?), we basically went through this thought process:

Most online versions of live events end up being “the event on tape.”

If the BlogWorld Virtual Ticket was simply “BlogWorld on tape,” that would be TOTALLY FUCKING LAME… and remember, what we’re shooting for is TOTALLY FUCKING AWESOME. So there was a gap. I don’t want to work on lame shit, no matter how well it pays.

So we said, “How do we make it awesome?”

And we said, “We make it as much like ‘being there’ as possible.”

(In other words, providing the content of a live event is not enough. We had to provide the experience as well.)

And so we got all excited and said, “We can make it just like attending live!”

And then we corrected ourselves and said, “What are you, an idiot? No virtual event is like being there live, no matter how awesome it is.”

And then we got all mad about that and were like, “Don’t call us an idiot, idiot. We just meant that we can replicate a lot of the experience and that’ll be way cool.”

And then a fight ensued. Luckily, we won.

But the end result? I hope you’ll agree it’s totally fucking awesome.

Check this out, yo.

The Virtual Ticket already had content in spades. You get over 100 hours of recorded session content, and you have access to it for a full year. That’s the “BlogWorld on tape” part, and even though it wouldn’t be enough by itself in my opinion, it’s still an insane amount of material. What other info product has 100+ hours of professional sessions presented by the best minds in the business?

But then, on top of that, we added a ton of extras that will give you as much of the experience of BlogWorld as possible.

We’ve got:

• Live video from the conference hall floor (or quasi-live if the internet underperforms on us).
• Exclusive interviews with the bigwigs.
• Random behind-the-scenes footage, wherein I attempt to catch Sonia Simone in line at a Starbucks in an US Weekly style “Blogging stars: They’re just like us!” moment.
• Q&A with presenters via social media.
• Quasi-networking opportunities with other VT attendees through social media.
• Brief, on-the-spot interviews with every single presenter who isn’t able to outrun me.
• A host and MC for the whole event. (I propose myself as that host and MC, I accept, I congratulate myself.)

So yeah, I want you to sign up… but the reason you should is because it’s totally fucking awesome.

So, okay… brass tacks.

The price is $247. For 100+ hours of content and all that experience stuff I mentioned.

But in true internet marketing fashion, the price goes up $100 on Friday. Don’t ask me why we torture you like this. It’s just something we do, like playing checkers or setting fire to buildings. It’s a personality flaw or something.

So if you want in, best do it before Friday’s price hike.

Here’s the link. Click it.

If you went to BlogWorld live, it’d cost you thousands of dollars between travel and hotel and a pass. This is like 1/10th of what you might pay.

If you’ve thought, “I wish I could go to BlogWorld but I just can’t make it,” the Virtual Ticket your answer.

(“Answer to what?” you ask? Why, to the question, “What is totally fucking awesome and doesn’t smell like fish?” of course.)

Here’s the link again, because another thing we do on the internet is repeat links because we suspect you missed the one above or somehow feel that repeated exposure will weaken your resolve, like if we said, “C’mon, do it!” and you were like “Nah,” and so we said “C’mon” and this time you were like, “You make a good point” and then did what we wanted.

But if you want to sign up, I’d do it now, before the price goes up on Friday.

So… I hope to “see” you there.

(Oh, and if you’re going live, you’ll get an email in a week or two giving you the opportunity to add the Virtual Ticket to your registration for a stupidly cheap price. So you’re not out in the cold. Unless you live at the North Pole. And if you do, say, “Wassup?” to Santa for me.)

P.S: If you’re wondering why this post started with ruminations on being in an unclassifiable profession and ended with a pitch for a conference, I’m wondering the same thing. So I can’t answer your question. I started writing and this is how it came out. What… do you think I have a plan or something?