dirtSimple.org

The Moment of Choice

2013-05-14T12:20:49-0400

Last night I stayed up late.

Like, 5:30 in the morning, late.

I was tinkering on a little programming project, that sort of got out of hand. I kept feeling like, "I've almost got it...", only to find one more little problem. The kind of thing that usually happens only when I'm stretching, learning something new, like I was last night.

And the next thing I knew, it was 5:30.

So of course I slept late, too.

And now, this morning -- well, afternoon, really -- I find myself in bed, still thinking about the programming project. I'm so wrapped up in it, I'm about to get out of bed and go work on it.

But what about my decision to spend the first two hours of each day on what's important to me?

This project is urgent, but it's not important.

But I want to!

But if I start now, I'll spend all day on it, maybe all night again too.

But I've got all these ideas! It's going to be awesome!

And so the conflict goes, back and forth for a couple minutes. Something's got to give.

I decide to question both sides of the debate. Is it true that I shouldn't work on the project instead of what I've decided is important? No, not really. Is it true that I should?

Hm. Doesn't feel like a "should". Feels like, "I want". I want to work on the project. Is that true?

I'm not sure. I want to say it's true, but I sense a couple of reservations.

First of all, I'm not sure I know what "want" really means. Sure, Robert Fritz says the question is, "If you could have it, would you take it?" But for me, there's a bunch of other stuff tangled up in it.

My parents always acted like wanting was something you chose, or committed to. As in, "are you sure you want that?" And there's another sense of "want" I'm concerned about, which is that...

My wants can be pretty darn fleeting at times!

In fact, at one point this morning, I reached over beside the bed to grab my tablet and check my email and Twitter, which led to reading a linked article, and that few minutes' distraction was enough to knock out most of the craving to continue my programming project. It wasn't gone entirely, but it reduced enough that I was no longer in a "Now now now! Wanna wanna!" place about it.

So, what does it even really mean to want something? Do I count every fleeting desire or craving as wants? Or should my long-term desires -- like my choice to work the first two hours on important/not-urgent stuff -- count for more?

Second, even if I do consider myself to really want to work on the less-important, but more urgent-feeling programming project, does that necessarily mean I ought to do that?

It takes a bit of soul-searching, but I soon see that the problem isn't that I want two different things, it's that I have a "should" about it. It was something like, "If I want something urgently, then I should give it to myself", but at the time I had a devil of a time putting it into words. I did try using a "turnaround" from The Work, though, rephrasing "I want to work on the project" to "My thinking wants to work on the project."

And I feel oddly happy at that. Like, "Yes, that's right, it's not actually me that wants that. It's just my thinking that wants it. I was thinking about it, so of course I wanted it. Checking email, I thought about it less, so I want it less. If I keep thinking about other things, I'll want it even less."

So, is a true desire one that you have without thinking about it? One that comes to you consistently?

I don't know, and I'm starting to think the question doesn't make any sense. It's in the nature of wants to come and go:

Only our choices have any chance of staying true.

And the funny thing about choice is that it isn't really about what you "want", in the visceral sense of feeling an urge or desire. It really is more about what Fritz says, as in, "If you could have it, would you take it?"

Only, it's not "if you could have this one thing right now, would you do whatever it takes right now"... It's more like, "In the overall scope of your life, considering all the things you want, which things are more important to you?"

And in the past, I fell into the trap of defining "important" too narrowly, of only considering things that could be justified to others as being important, rather than actually considering what was important to me.

So it was only natural that I'd end up divided: one part of me pushing towards "important" things, the other expressing pent-up cravings for the important-to-me things I was leaving out of the picture.

(Like time to tinker and learn new programming stuff, for example!)

But lately, I do include those things, and it's a lot easier to do them in a guilt-free way, if I spend those first two hours on writing, or working on my business.

Last night just got a little out of hand. ;-)

And now, minus the belief that "If I want something urgently, then I should give it to myself", and seeing that "I want to work on the programming" is really, "My thinking wants to work on the programming", I can actually make a choice about what to do.

A choice that's focused on everything I want, not just whatever I happen to be intently focused on at the moment.

And when I ask, "Who would I be, if I didn't believe I needed to do whatever I was thinking about?", I discover something else: that my desire to rush blindly into whatever seems interesting, is actually a kind of escape.

An addiction.

When I rush into "flow", it's a way of getting out of the present moment. A way of not having to decide. A way to avoid choice entirely. My day gets away from me because I want it to, because I don't want to have to be the one managing and structuring my time -- a reflection of patterns learned from my parents.

It's an issue I've actually just been working on a few nights earlier, in a very intense Work session that revealed those patterns, showing how my parents' high expectations combined with lack of guidance repeatedly set me up to fail... and how I've kept doing the same thing to myself, my entire life.

At the end of the session, I realized that if I wanted to succeed, I'd need to actually be clear with myself: not only about what I want, but also about how I'm going to get it -- including making time commitments...

And sticking to them.

And as I remember that, I reaffirm the choice: I'm going to give myself guidance, not just expectations.

And then it's okay. Better than okay.

In fact, it's a blessing.

Who I would be, without always needing to be doing something, is someone thoughtful, and capable of actually making decisions about my day, even as the day goes on. It feels like I could actually choose and reflect, instead of quickly jumping into something so I don't have to think about how much time I've already wasted, how poorly I've lived up to my unrealistic and guidance-free expectations.

And so now, I'm back to making a conscious choice about what I'm doing today.

Like writing all this, instead of programming.

The Root of Perfectionism

2013-05-03T14:06:29-0400

I'm a recovering perfectionist.

Not the wanna-be kind, that says they're a perfectionist because they have high standards. No, I'm the kind that always feels bad about what they've done, because it's not quite as good as it could have been.

Worse, I tend to criticize what other people have done, on the same basis. Get tangled in internet flamewars over minor things that, again, could be better than they are. And I don't give people nearly enough positive feedback for the things that they did do, that are in fact better than they could have done, or how improved things are over how they were before.

At one time, I used to think that my knack for seeing how things "could be better" was a gift: it offered the possibility of continuing improvement, and certainly it has been commercially useful at times.

But what I didn't see, is that this knack was really not the root cause of my perfectionism. Seeing how things could be better, is not perfectionism. Aspiring to a high standard, is not perfectionism. Even wanting to be the very best you can be, is not perfectionism.

No. Perfectionism is just:

Feeling bad when something isn't perfect!

But where does that feeling come from?

Recently, I've been delving again into The Work, which I'd only played around with a bit in the past. At the time I first learned about it, I was looking at it only as a directed mindhacking tool, aiming the questions at specific blocks or issues... and mostly finding I could invent better tools for the purpose. (Ah, perfectionism!)

But recently, I've looked at it again, and noticed that its overall philosophy of questioning "shoulds" fits quite well with the other tools in my toolkit, and that it's actually a very quick and easy way to rapidly troubleshoot bad feelings about almost anything. And as I've been getting into the habit of questioning every bad feeling, my skill at finding what it is I think I "should" do is improving.

So this morning, when I found myself mentally critiquing something my wife had done, I decided to actually do something about it.

And as I put together my weekly vitamins, I kept asking, "What was I thinking? What do I believe that leads me to critique in that way, and feel bad about not saying anything?"

At first only a vague sense of unease came up, but it gradually refined into a general sense that, well, things were "supposed to be different". That if, well, things could be better, then they should be better.

Aha, I thought. A "should". I can use The Work on that. "Is that true?"

The answer comes back: no.

And it's a wave of relief, washing over me. It suddenly makes sense to me how other people can even see that something could be better, and yet not seem to care about it as much as I do, or feel an urge to do something about it. I mean, just because something could be better, that doesn't mean you have to do something about it. It makes total sense.

But somehow, I don't feel finished. It's like the urge to critique has diminished, like it's not quite so actively evil not to denounce things as imperfect when they are, but it's still sad.

And as I'm mulling over the phrasing of "things that could be better, should be better", it occurs to me that there's a part I haven't questioned:

The part where things could be better!

And I have to ask myself, "Is that true?"

And in a flash, it comes to me: no. No it's not.

The thing I was critiquing, could not have been better, at the moment I was critiquing it. How could it possibly have been?

In fact, how can anything be better than it actually is?

Taken literally enough, the very idea is absurd. Whatever is, is. Unless you actually have a time machine to go back and change everything that led to it being that way, it is a literal and physical impossibility for something to be better than it is!

What is left out of the idea that "things could be better", is the dimension of time. You can improve things so that they are better in the future than they are now. But you cannot improve things backward in time, so that they are better now than they are now. What would that even mean?

You can't change what is. You can only change what will be. So the error in my thinking is not that I imagine how things could be better... it's that I'm imagining that better tomorrow, today.

Instead of in the future, where it actually belongs.

But the even bigger wave of relief that follows this realization is not really driven by all this logic of time and cause-and-effect. It's mainly the feeling, the visceral gut-level feeling, that imperfection is no longer a tragedy to be grieved, or an emergency to be fixed.

Because things aren't supposed to be any more perfect than they already are.

And so, if something isn't exactly as I imagined it, or as I could imagine it...

It doesn't mean I've already failed.

Don't Want, Doesn't Matter

2013-04-04T15:17:47-0400

While it's certainly good to get away from the things you don't want, in the scope of life as a whole, what we don't want doesn't really matter.

Because avoiding what you don't want will never bring you happiness, or peace, or joy, or even a sense of accomplishment.

It will never bring you happiness, or even contentment, but at best, only relief.

But that relief will never bring you any lasting peace, because your mind will always be on guard, waiting for the thing you don't want to come back again.

And it will never bring you any joy, because only the presence of a good thing can bring joy to your life. The absence of a bad thing brings only emptiness.

And that emptiness will never bring you any particular sense of accomplishment. What have you accomplished, after all, by avoiding something? You have successfully remained exactly the same, that is all.

Avoiding what you don't want is a nothingness, a non-event. You didn't lose, but you also didn't win. You are running out the clock, but not scoring any points.

Is your life already so good that it's worth running out the clock on? Are you really winning that much?

In the end, the only way we move forward is by confronting -- or even embracing -- those things that we don't want, that are required to obtain the things we do. And while I have never been a fan of jumping into cold water, preferring to wade in a little at a time, it is nonetheless true in the general case, that our suffering is shortest when we treat obstacles as if they meant nothing.

Grasp a thistle gently, the saying goes, and its thorns will prick you. Grasp it boldly, and its spines crumble. To be bold, to be courageous and unhesitating, means only one thing: to treat what you don't want as if it is of no importance to you. As though it does not matter.

Ah, you say. But not getting hit by a car matters. Not losing my job matters. Well, duh. Of course they matter, on an absolute scale. But what are you not getting hit by a car for? What are you not losing your job for? Those are the things that really matter, and you can see them if you can only stop staring at what you're trying not to lose.

I wish that when I was a child, someone had taken the time to explain this to me, in a way I could understand. Because I've spent pretty much my entire life, till now, becoming ever more focused on the things I don't want, as I learned more and more ways for things to be wrong or imperfect or unpleasant. As my body has grown older and less capable, my responsibilities greater and my personal time less and less available, the ways that life can give me something I don't want have only ever increased. And there is so much, so very very much that I would have done differently, if I could change only this one, tiny thing in my past:

To know, to have learned at an early age to focus on what I did want, and let what I did not want fade from my mind, as long as I knew how to handle the worst that could happen.

To know that what I did not want would, in the long run, amount to nothing, and less than nothing.

And that my efforts to avoid it would be nothing more than a black hole, a giant sucking sound, swallowing hours and days and years of what might have been.

But that whatever I truly wanted, and chose for myself, and set out to do without questioning my motives or ability or the worth of the doing...

Would matter more than I could ever imagine.

And that I would be far, far better off with less of the first, and more of the second.

And so I say to you, at whatever age you are now: don't wait. Don't hesitate. If you are not now a reckless person blindly risking your life or health or finances, then you can only gain by becoming bolder.

Say it with me now: what I don't want, doesn't matter. Say it when you are afraid. Say it when you are in pain. Say it when you don't think you can go on. When you don't know what to do, and you don't even know if there's any point. In the end, you're going to feel pain and die anyway, so why pretend that a lack of fear and pain can ever last?

Indeed, I came by this insight myself, only through sickness and pain and fear of prolonged suffering unto death. Because if you're in pain for long enough, you may eventually realize that trying to avoid the pain isn't helping, and you need to have something more important to you than staying out of pain. And that if you want to move on in the face of death, you had better have something more important to you than just staying alive.

Nothing isn't something, and what we want to avoid is nothing. What we don't want, doesn't really matter.

But what we DO want, makes all the difference in the world.

#dw_dm

Building a Dream

2011-05-19T09:02:39-0400

Have you ever had something you wanted to achieve, that always seemed just out of reach?

Every day, every month, every year, you think, "this is it, I'm finally going to do it..."

And then you don't.

Why is that?

Reclaiming This Space

2010-09-28T10:10:09-0400

So, this is an article all about how, life got flipped turned upside down... No, wait, nevermind. Bad idea.

Seriously though, I was about to try and put some preface onto this to take the sting off, so I can tell myself that people were warned and if they unsubscribe then that's their deal, not mine.

So forget the preface, here's the deal: I want my blog back.

Six years ago, I started this blog after being laid off and confronting a life-changing hurricane challenge. Not to be a business, not to teach anybody anything, but just to say random stuff. Talk things out. Explore new ideas, new lifeforms, and new ways of getting things done... to boldly go where no split infinitives had gone before.

And because nobody was reading the thing, and because it wasn't connected with a business, I felt free to rant about whatever I wanted, make stupid jokes about random stuff, and even review funny reality shows.

And most importantly, I didn't feel like something had to be awesome before I posted it. That I didn't need to have some kind of Important Point to make or Principle To Teach.

Back then, this was just a place for me to type my thoughts into the computer, so I could see what I thought about something.

Somewhere along the line though, I started getting popular. Or at least, people were paying attention to me.

And in retrospect, it's kind of surprising (and sad) how much I let that affect me. Pretty soon I'd plugged that into half a dozen or so of my neuroses about Not Disappointing People, and needing to be Taken Seriously as an Important Person, and, well... the actual blogging part of things just kind of up and died.

On top of that, I piled even more "shoulds" about how I should be doing marketing the way I learned in the classes I paid many thousands of dollars for, and trying to sell something in every post while being both Brief and Awesome at the same time.

Which, rather than encouraging me to be either Brief or Awesome (let alone Selling), discouraged me from posting anything at all.

Worse yet, it stopped me from even writing things in the first place.

When I started this, my blog was just how I thought things out, how I reflected on things. So I didn't need a polished article to post: I just needed an idea (or a vague hint of one) to start typing with.

But then later, with all my self-imposed demands, I'd actually interrogate myself into silence by wanting to first know whether what I was writing was going to be an email to my list, a newsletter to my paying subscribers, a post for the blog, an article for one of my other websites, and what was I going to sell in it, and what was the main point going to be and....

Enough!

So these days, I've noticed that most of my best writing has been going into Mind Hackers' Guild forum postings, and my rambling commentaries on LessWrong.com. Because in neither of those places do I feel like I need to already know where I'm going before I open up the window and Just Freaking Type Something Already.

Without having to first make it into some sort of Life Changing Lesson Of Supreme Awesomeness.

Because, you know, it's okay to just be helpful. Mildly amusing. Or to even just be offering myself as a Minor Example Of What To Avoid.

(Sorry about all the Capital Letter Phrases today; it seems to be a side-effect of reading lots of Fluent Self posts while I download and convert my Bloglines archives.)

Sure, it's true that I still want to be more than just slightly helpful or miildly amsuing. I'm still totally into that whole insight thing, after all. Which is why this particular post has been trying to ramble sideways towards some sort of Actual Point, apart from just the bare facts of the situation, and my declared intent to reclaim this space.

I wanted to also say something here about the specific neuroses I had, and how they made me not just want, but need to be Serious and Important, not just here, but in my current work as a teacher of mind hacking things.

How that need made me set ridiculously high goals for my work, to not only be 100% Right and True from a scientific standpoint, but to also have utterly perfect execution from a practical standpoint. (Both of which really meant, "good enough to not have anyone be able to criticize me, ever, without me having a good defense.")

How that need made me believe I had to have the Ultimate Methods™... not only the perfect ways of changing minds and lives, but also the perfect ways of teaching those perfect ways, with nothing less being suitable before I would allow myself to sell anything to anyone beyond the tiny circle of highly-motivated people who were willing to jump over all the arbitrary obstacles I put between them and the chance to give me money.

Which of course, was all just bullshit.

Because it not only kept my business in guilt-driven mediocrity, it also means that the stuff I have developed isn't getting to a lot of people who need it.

And every time I developed a newer technique that improved on earlier ones, I had to stop pushing or teaching the older (but usually easier-to-learn and easier-to-teach!) ones... even though it's usually way easier for people to learn the simple techniques first and then build up to the super-duper fix-everything ones.

And then, after getting to a point late last year, where the super-duperest techniques are totally awesome and changing me and my wife and other people in ways I'd never dreamed of before, I just switched over to having to have the most perfect ways of describing, documenting, teaching, and promoting those techniques!

But the hardest part of mindhacking is -- and perhaps always will be -- seeing through your own bullshit. Seeing that what you're doing isn't really as necessary as you think it is. That your so-called "musts" are in fact merely options... and piss-poor ones at that.

And so, it doesn't matter if I do end up creating the most marvelous methods of documenting and training the techniques themselves, because the hard part will still be unique to the individual doing the learning.

So, good enough is good enough.

And that goes for this article, too, even though I'm still kinda feeling a little nagging pull inside, one that says, "But you haven't shared an Important Life Lesson, or explained a Powerful Principle Of Change yet! You haven't shown how you got rid of the neuroses, or explained how they arise... you haven't..."

Yeah, and I ain't gonna, either. (At least, not in this post.)

Because good enough is good enough.

And this is my blog now.

And it sure is nice to be back.

Here's hoping you feel the same way.

Ending My Insight Addiction

2010-02-04T13:34:06-0500

There's an old story that goes like this:

Once upon a time, there was a boy who ate too much sugar. His mother, who wanted him to stop, thought that if the boy wouldn't listen to her, then perhaps he would listen to his idol, Mahatma Gandhi.

So she walked for many miles through the scorching heat to ask Gandhi, "Would you please tell my son to stop eating sugar?"

Gandhi replied, "Bring your boy back in two weeks. I will speak to him then."

Confused, the mother left, then brought the boy back two weeks later.

Gandhi looked the boy in the eye and said, "Stop eating sugar."

The boy nodded, and promised to stop.

His mother of course was grateful, but still confused. "Why did you want me to bring him back in two weeks? Couldn't you have said the same thing to him then?"

Forgive Us Our Struggle

2009-06-01T18:27:56-0400

Wow. Took a quick break to get a snack, checked my email, and found a really emotional comment on the Thinking Things Done site. An anonymous reader is really really upset with me for not having the book done sooner, and calls me a fraud, among other things. Ouch.

I fire off a smiling-on-the-outside, hurting-on-the-inside response. He (she?) hit me right smack on one of the buttons I was just starting to write about in this article: the guilt of not having done more, and the fear of never doing enough.

Click here for the rest of the story... before and after this point...

Later vs. Better

2009-05-31T13:18:35-0400

When I was a professional programmer, I never used to miss deadlines. I'd cut features instead. In fact, I used to be insanely paranoid about defining deliverables so that I had total freedom to cut, and about arranging development strategies so that after a relatively short duration, there was always a "shippable" project... precisely because I dreaded missing deadlines.

So there's a part of me that freaks out every time I think about how much longer I've been working on the book than I thought I'd be, and the part where I'm living on savings while I do this, in the middle of a not-so-good economy where some of my long-time customers have been dropping subscriptions due to their not having jobs, either.

And sometimes it seems like, the more I work on this thing, the more work I discover I need to do!

Click here for the rest of the story.

How We Get Stuck

2009-05-07T17:22:04-0400

A little while ago, Leslie called me into the kitchen for some help. The kitchen cabinets she was putting together didn't come with enough cam locks -- the little metal things you use to lock the boards together with.

She showed me how many holes there were for the cams, and said that 16 were needed to fill all the holes. But the instructions said that only 14 were provided, and there seemed to only be 12.

I puzzled over it for a few minutes, trying to figure out what was wrong. There were indeed as many holes as she said... in fact, there were more.

Finally, I decided to verify the instructions by checking them for the opposite part: the posts that went into the locks. There were 14 places for those to go, and 14 of them. Logically, then, there should only need to be 14 cam locks for them to go into.

A few minutes later, we both sighed with relief as we verified that four of the places where she'd put cam locks, were not places where the instructions said to put them, even though they were cam lock holes. The problem was that those four holes were for camlocks that came with the countertop, not the cabinet!

So we got it all sorted out, and Leslie thanked me for my help, saying I was "smart"... but I had to decline the compliment.

Because, as I thought about it, I realized that I would've done exactly the same thing in her position. There were camlock holes, there were camlocks, what else would you do but put them there?

And when I later realized there weren't enough camlocks left, I would also have blamed the manufacturer, and complained that the instructions weren't specific enough... even though, in retrospect, it's easy to see that they never said to put camlocks in those holes!

And if our positions had been reversed, Leslie would've done the exact same thing I did, too: she'd have rechecked every step and instruction, trying alternate theories and starting from an assumption that there must be some way to make it work.

Now, there are at least two morals to this story. The first, of course, is that if you look at something as though it must have a solution, then you are already well on your way to finding it. And conversely, if you're seeing the world through an experience of frustration and defeat, you'll find only more of that, too.

But the second, more interesting moral to me, is that whenever you substitute your own expertise in place of following directions, you can easily go off track. (Especially if it's something you're adding to the directions given!)

And when I think about the number of self-help books I read, but whose advice I never really took, or that I misinterpreted because I was seeing it through the filter of what I already believed -- like always starting a furniture project by putting camlocks in every camlock hole! -- I can see just how much time I wasted.

Because nowadays, I see that the things naturally successful people wrote about in their books, really are as useful and meaningful as they claimed. It was me who didn't understand, and who didn't act, because I thought I "already knew" what they were saying, or that I "knew better".

When really, I didn't have a clue!

Now, it certainly would've helped if the instructions for the kitchen cabinets had at least put big X's over the holes that didn't need camlocks, just as it would've helped if more self-help books listed what likely preconceptions would keep you from being able to understand what they're talking about.

But ultimately, the responsibility for doing what the directions say -- and more importantly, not doing what they don't say! -- lies entirely with ourselves.

Now, I'm not saying you have to blindly follow anybody or anything. You absolutely have to use your own judgment, to decide whether to try something. But if you've gone so far as to buy somebody's book in the first place, it might actually be a good idea to try whatever it is they suggest!

Without altering it, and without second-guessing it.

Because, surprisingly enough, the skill of "not second-guessing" turns out to be pretty central to confidence, commitment, and concentration as well.

Heck, I just recorded a CD about that earlier this week, for Mind Hackers' Guild members. It was called, The Secret of Single-Mindedness, and on it I taught three simple mental strategies to turn "second guessing" into "single mindedness", instantly bypassing most mental blocks and routine procrastination.

(You can download a sample track here, or you can press the play button if your browser shows one here.)

Anyway, I explained on the CD how, if you critique and second-guess your plans or your writing while you're still trying to create them... if you're too busy questioning what to say to someone to really pay attention... or if you're thinking "I can't do this" when you really should be thinking about what you're doing, instead... you're not going to do very well at it.

And the trick to fixing all this is not about "believing in yourself" or "having confidence" or some other thing that you have to do.

In fact, it's the exact opposite: it's all about what you don't do.

And how you don't do it!

(Indeed, this very same bit of "not-doing" is what would've let me succeed at dozens of things I tried from other self-help books, if only I'd known about it beforehand!)

But even if all I'd done was to "not do what the instructions don't say", I'd still have been much further ahead, much sooner.

See, self-help books don't tell you to think, "I can't do this," while you're doing what they say to do. They don't say to think, "I'm no good at this," or "this is no good, I can think of something better."

They don't say to think, "this is too much trouble", and they don't say, "if you don't do this, you're a loser."

And while it's true that they also don't say not to do these things, to list all the things that you should not do when using a self-help book...

Would make for a very, very long self-help book!

And even then you could still -- upon reading it -- think...

"Well, but that doesn't apply to me. I'm different."

And there is no way to make a book or recording that can fix that.

So think about it.

And then do something.

--PJ

Stumbling On Success

2009-03-31T19:29:25-0400

For the last year or two, I've been trying hard to understand the real difference between naturally successful people and naturally struggling people. That is, why do some people seem to have so few problems getting things done and going after their goals, while others (like me) tend to spend so much time going in circles and going nowhere?

At first, I noticed a lot of individual distinctions. For example, naturally successful people aren't fazed by setbacks -- in fact, they can't even think about failure for long, without automatically refocusing on success.

They set goals, not because they're supposed to, but because they like it. And they tend to view education costs as easily recouped: their attitude towards spending thousands of dollars to attend a seminar is that if they get just one actionable idea out of it, they'll make a profit.

But just understanding differences like these doesn't really help much. It's just a list of random characteristics, no different than you'd find in any profile of a successful person.

And that just wasn't enough for me.

Click here to discover the crazy secret I just found out about this weekend...