If you’re like most people the answer is probably not very often at all. Psychologists even have a name for it, the confirmation bias, or the tendency of humans to seek out information that confirms their beliefs. People search for more certainty, not less.

This bias has never sat well with me. Every mistake you make becomes a double one. Not only will you end up being wrong about the major idea, but you’ll waste a lot of time and energy trying to defend that false belief. Living in a self-made bubble of certainty is a pricey delusion.

Given this, I try to adopt an attitude of deliberate wrongness–that is allowing, and even encouraging myself, to be wrong about major ideas frequently.

Deliberate Wrongness – You Need Certainty, But it Also Traps You

The standard rationalist approach I’ve seen to the problem of the confirmation bias is to rarely have certainty about anything. Always hedge your bets, wait until more evidence comes in and be agnostic about every major idea in life.

While this rationalist answer may appeal to philosophers and scientific critics, I don’t think it’s a useful solution for anyone who actually wants to do anything. Taking action requires a degree of certainty. If you’re constantly doubting yourself, you’ll often lack the boldness to get started.

The mind lacks the Bayesian ideal of perfectly calculated likelihood percentages weighted on evidence. Instead it tends to fall into two largely fuzzy emotional states of confidence and certainty on the one hand, or doubt and questioning on the other. Never letting yourself be confident means you lack all the positive traits of that mental state of boldness, drive, ambition and enthusiasm.

If you’re launching a business, once you’ve reviewed your options, you need to have almost an obsessive belief that you can make it. The world will provide you with plenty of doubts, so you need to have certainty to get yourself to work hard every day.

Same is true if you’re writing a novel, starting a charity or setting any goal. If you don’t believe your writing will reach people, your mission will impact the world, or you’ll achieve you’re goal, you won’t have the resolution to keep showing up, every day.

The Price of Certainty

But with this certainty comes the trap of the confirmation bias. You’ll see the world through your preconceived ideas, and this often traps you.

I would argue that most plateaus and persistent obstacles in life are not overcome with more discipline and willpower. Yes, discipline is important for kicking yourself over the obvious fences that hold you back. But when you’ve tried everything and still make no progress, what works then?

In almost all of these cases, it’s the unimagined third alternative that provides the answer. Something you hadn’t considered because it violates your beliefs about what is possible and how the world works. Sometimes more hard work is the answer. But hard work can’t help you if you’re in a dead-end of your own false assumptions.

Running this business has been a perpetual example of this.

When I started, I thought the way to succeed was through advertising. I put up ads and tried to make money off them. I started earning about $40 per month, and after several months of work I was able to get up to $100-$250 per month but the ads were clogging the website and I was burning myself out trying to write articles to generate enough traffic.

What got me out of this problem wasn’t writing more and more, and hunting more traffic, but to start writing ebooks. With that step I was able to move from my $200 per month to $700-$1500, after several months of work. Eventually this peaked and I was stuck once more.

Getting out of this step had several dead ends, but setting up a service-based monthly program turned out to be a great solution–going from $1000 per month and worrying about the bills, to $3000-$5000. I don’t know when this direction will eventually peak, but I know that if I wanted to create an even larger business that could impact more people–it will be from doing something I haven’t even considered.

Each of these shifts didn’t just require trying something new–but also fixing incorrect beliefs I had about how my business worked. If I had never revised those beliefs, I’d still be under the assumption that I should be chasing traffic and advertising dollars. And I’d probably be preparing to look for a day job after I graduate.

Practicing Deliberate Wrongness

The rationalist answer to the certainty problem–that you should refrain from being too certain without proper evidence, fails to spur action. Especially in environments where taking action is the only way to get more evidence.

But the stubborn approach of certainty doesn’t work either. Never being wrong almost guarantees never being right. In any interesting pursuit, you’ll almost certainly be wrong from when you start–if those beliefs never get updates, you’ll be like I would have been–struggling to make pennies on advertising dollars.

I believe the alternative to these two extremes is to practice deliberate wrongness. First–to be certain and confident, enough to take actions and pick sides. Second–to celebrate being wrong frequently. Being wrong therefore isn’t a fatal weakness but a sign that your system is working. You can’t escape being wrong, so a lack of bad ideas usually indicates you’re simply protecting your established viewpoints.

What Can a 21-Year Old Know About Life?

I’ve taken the deliberate wrongness as a stance when writing at this blog from Day 1. Where I have strong opinions, I argue them to the best of my ability.

But I’m also acutely aware that any life philosophy developed by a twentysomething will almost certainly have holes. I simply don’t have enough experience. I don’t let that prevent me from sharing my ideas–on the contrary, I think the only way to really make progress on big questions of life is to make big statements and wait for other people to disagree with you.

With each of these ideas though, I also leave myself open to being wrong, and seek out ideas that disagree with me. I try to read books from authors with whom I disagree with. I pay most attention to commenters who argue against an article I’ve written.

The Pursuit of Deliberate Wrongness

There are two parts to the pursuit of deliberate wrongness. First, celebrate whenever you’re wrong about an idea. This goes against the natural bias towards confirmation, so it isn’t an easy practice. Being happy about being wrong takes some effort in the first place.

The second part is to actively seek out the dissenting opinions. I’m not suggesting all opinions are equal and that you should consider the rambling of a deranged cult leader in the same arena as a Nobel laureate. But, if you haven’t read a book which you disagree with in the last few months, you probably aren’t trying hard enough.

Wrongness isn’t always being wrong about stated beliefs. I’d say most of our assumptions go unarticulated. My assumptions about my business model weren’t written down anywhere. They were simply underlying all the actions I took.

Overturning the unstated wrongness is a matter of exposure. If you frequently get outside your circle of influence, then you’re more likely to see those assumptions exposed. Travel allows you to temporarily escape your culture. Also, not all culture is geographical and not all travel needs to change locations.

Be Wrong on One Big Idea, Every Month

Deliberate wrongness applies to the little mistakes in reasoning we make every day, as much as big ideas. But I believe it’s the big ideas where it matters most. These are the ideas that shape the way we live and are the most stubborn to replace.

My goal is to be wrong about one big idea in my life, business or philosophy every month. I know if I’m not having big moments of wrongness at this frequency, it’s almost certainly because I’m ignoring other perspectives, not because I’m infallible.

Ask yourself whether you’ve ever changed your mind (that is, held one opinion strongly and then either had that belief overturned or seriously weakened) on any of these huge ideas of life:

• Abortion
• Vegetarianism
• Atheism
• Political party
• Whether humans have free-will
• Capital punishment

I wouldn’t expect people to change these colossal, often identity-defining, beliefs every month. However, whether you’ve ever flopped or seriously doubted yourself on one of these big beliefs is probably a thermostat for how often you find yourself wrong on smaller issues.

I used to think with enough hard work and ambition, you could achieve the things you want. I don’t believe that anymore.

Instead, I believe you can only achieve goals from pursuits you enjoy. Self-improvement works best when it maximizes who you already are–not trying to erase every flaw you see in yourself.

Over 90% of Dieters Fail–Why?

Dr. Martin Seligman writes that over 90% of dieters fail to stay thin for more than a few years, and for many diets this figure is closer to 97%. If the 80% supposed failure rate of new businesses sounded discouraging to you, this statistic is despairing.

Dr. Seligman offers a number of reasons why this might be the case: that dieting doesn’t work, that our society has a warped body image, that long-term calorie reduction is impossible. And I feel he is probably right on many of those points.

But, I think there is also a more general reason why so most dieting attempts fail. Most dieters approach their goal out of an insecurity about their perceived flaws. I believe any goal based on that insecurity is doomed to fail–whether that goal is to lose weight, become rich or find a girlfriend.

Setting Goals out of Interest or Insecurity

There are really only two reasons to set a goal:

1. You want to fix something about your life.
2. You’re interested in a pursuit and your goal is just a crystallization of that interest.

I want to argue that, as with dieters, 90% of people who set the first goal will fail. And of the 10% who do succeed, it’s either through enormous inner strife, or because they accidentally convert their goal into the second type.

I’d say a lot of the cynicism about personal development and self-help books, is because so much of it is aimed at this first group. Marketing at people who feel fat, lonely or poor, and who want to escape those feelings of insecurity.

Most of the business of self-help isn’t marketed at the opposite group: enthusiasts. People whose primary motivation for a goal isn’t because society tells them they are flawed, but because they are genuinely passionate about the pursuit itself. However, these are the people who are most likely to be successful in any personal development effort.

The business half of this blog is mostly a monthly rapid-learning tactics program I run. Of the people who’ve been successful with the program, virtually every one I could describe as a “learning enthusiast”. In other words, their primary motivation for joining was because they were incredibly interested in ways to learn more–not trying to fix a perceived flaw in their life.

Insecurity is a Terrible Motivator

The reason self-improvement efforts trying to fix flaws often fail is that insecurity is a terrible motivator. Yes, feeling lousy about yourself can give you the kick in the ass you need to get started, but it rarely allows you to finish.

For all the failed dieters–feeling fat can give you the motivation you need to get started. As Dr. Seligman cites from the research on dieting, most diets will allow you to lose weight within one or two months. The problem is that almost everyone will eventually put that weight back on.

To have the motivation to work at a goal for years, you need the opposite emotion: enthusiasm. You need to be deeply interested in the pursuit. The people I know who have excellent physiques aren’t just desperate narcissists, they’re obsessively interested in nutrition and whatever exercise they pursue.

Those who succeed as professional bloggers or internet marketers are probably as rare as successful dieters. I’ve seen no formal surveys, but a 1-2% success rate wouldn’t surprise me. What does interest me is that the people who do succeed are almost always obsessively interested in running their business. The primary motivation comes from that passion, not from hating their day job.

Insecurity can motivate, but it also eats you up inside. Eventually the damage of using insecurity as a power source outweighs any fixes it can attempt in your life.

Why This is an Extremely Hard Lesson to Learn

The lesson that insecurity is a terrible motivator and most self-improvement efforts based on it are doomed to fail doesn’t come easily.

I can still remember several years ago when I was terribly insecure about my social life. I had no girlfriend, few friends and little confidence. If any area of my life could have been describe as a gaping flaw, that was it.

My initial self-improvement efforts in that area failed miserably. It didn’t matter how much effort or work I put in, everything seemed to slide back to zero, and I was getting burnt out and frustrated by trying.

The way this finally turned around, surprisingly, wasn’t even from trying to fix it. It was from finding social activities I enjoyed and new groups of people. I joined Toastmasters, which helped me work on my speaking and confidence while allowing me to meet new people.

For a time, I still largely saw my social life as a flaw I needed to fix, but that no longer was the sole motivation for why I met new people or joined new groups. I did them because I actually enjoyed the activities.

Today I’m lucky to have a lot of friends and to have had some great relationships. But I still have insecurities. And almost always when I fall into the trap of pursuing some self-improvement goal based on those insecurities, I fall flat. It’s only when I’m driven by enthusiasm for the pursuit itself that I am successful.

Accept Your Insecurities, But Don’t Make them Your Destiny

My current advice would be to accept the insecurities you have about your life and yourself. Set your goals based on the desires you have, but within the pursuits that genuinely interest you.

But don’t make your flaws your destiny. Instead of going through cycles of insecurity and spurts of action, open yourself up to alternative possibilities. You don’t need to commit to them, simply expose yourself to enough of them. Because you might find, like I did, that some of the pursuits you really enjoy and are something you would be happy setting goals on.

If I were to go back to give my former self advice, it would be to adopt this attitude mixing acceptance and openness. I should have accepted my lousy social life fully, but at the same time left myself open to possibilities of joining new groups or taking on new activities.

If someone felt insecure about their body image, I’d probably offer similar advice. Don’t force yourself to go to gym programs you hate and take on diets that give up everything you love to eat. Otherwise, you’ll probably just be one of Dr. Seligman’s statistics in the long run with little to show for your effort.

But at the same time, open yourself up to the possibility that there might be some way to live a healthy life you could be really interested in. You might really enjoy mountain climbing or salsa dancing, but just haven’t had the chance to embrace those alternatives.

Is it Possible to Fix Your Life?

I might be going against the anything-is-possible, infinitely-malleable human nature ethos of our times, but I’d say no: it’s not possible to fix your life. At least if that’s how you phrase the question.

It’s certainly possible to live a better life and to become a better person. I wouldn’t be writing here if I didn’t believe that. But we might have to give up the notion that we can fix everything we don’t like about ourselves.

There is enormous potential to create, and our ambitions can be well-rewarded if we work hard and persist at them. But this creative potential has to be driven from an enthusiasm for the road ahead, not the doubts we all have about the place we’re standing.

Image courtesy of CarbonNYC.

I’ve asked, and been asked, this question often. And while I can’t give a decisive formula for answering it, I have made one realization: most of the standard advice is terrible.

Whether it’s multiple-choice personality quizzes that tell you to be a farmer, security guard or laboratory assistant (regardless of whether you have any interest in those things) or platitudes to “be practical” or “follow your heart”, most advice is too simplistic to be useful.

However, amongst all the oversimplifications and Myers-Briggs tests, I have been given a few gems. I’ve been lucky enough to get paid to do what I love (writing) so I thought I’d share the best advice I’ve read, been told or synthesized that helped me reach that point, in the hopes you might too.

Passions are Built, Not Discovered

Don’t expect inspiration to hit you across the face. If you want to walk the delicate balance between doing something you love and being paid well for it, you need to be remarkably good at something society cares about.

My rough formula is: Passion = Skill + Interest

Being really good at something you hate, won’t make you love it. But being really good at something you’re curious about, can. Instead of staring at your navel, trying to discover your passions, go out in the world and start creating them.

Doing What You Love is a Long-Term Project

What could you become exceptional at in the next decade? Malcolm Gladwell suggests that 10,000 hours (or about a decade of sustained practice) is what it takes to become world-class at any skill.

Viewing the search for work you’re passionate about as a painstaking quest to master a skill changes you’re approach. Suddenly the boring class you need to take before becoming a surgeon, or the failed ventures before becoming a successful entrepreneur, aren’t signs of defeat but necessary steps foward.

Get-rich-quick schemes don’t work. I’d argue that find-fulfilling-career schemes without a long-term focus don’t work either.

School Still Matters (And *Gasp* Sometimes Getting a Job Does Too)

The world still pays attention to credentials. That may dishearten the rebel geniuses or lone entrepreneurs that dislike how much say academic or corporate systems have over what they should do with their life, but it doesn’t make it untrue.

I’d argue that, for 95% of people, the way to beat the system and live a fantastic, unconventional life isn’t to reject the system. Universities may be slow an inefficient, but a degree is often a necessary first step in many fields. Getting a job may not have the same glamor as self-employment, but it can give you insights into the industry and skills needed to make your escape.

For the 5% of people who can successfully bootstrap themselves while being a jobless dropout, you’re probably already way too smart to need any of my advice. For the rest, school and jobs can be a launching pad for bigger opportunities.

Don’t Be Afraid to Create Things that Don’t Pay Well

I’ve noticed that a well-paid passion tends to be uncovered in one of two ways: either you find paid work, and become so good at it that you enjoy it and can dictate the terms of how you work; or you find unpaid work you enjoy, and become so good at it that you can get paid well.

Many people I know (including myself) used the latter route. I poured thousands of hours into writing, long before I made anything more than a little extra pocket change. Now, after almost 5 years, I’m able to make a livable income and I expect that to grow with time.

The best advice I ever received was to not be afraid to invest yourself in projects without an immediate payoff. Even if you aren’t planning to start a business–self-running a charity, designing a computer game or completing a novel builds skills you can apply to later pursuits.

Find Someone Who Makes Money Doing What they Love and Listen to Them

When I was growing up, I’d often hear from family, teachers or news reports about how unlikely it was to succeed as an entrepreneur. I didn’t know anyone who was either a professional writer or who successfully ran a business.

I hadn’t realized that I was asking the wrong people. Instead of reading failure statistics or listening to advice from people who had never ran a business in their lives, I should have started talking to people who were successful and knew how to make money in the field I was passionate about.

The biggest change in my success didn’t come from my own ideas, or even my own willpower and determination. It came from finding people who had achieved what I wanted and listening to them speak. Not just the specifics of their advice, but their entire attitude and perspective were wired differently than the people I knew who were struggling.

I believe this lesson applies beyond just people who want to start their own business. If you want to figure out how to find a job you love, you need to stop asking advice from people who hate theirs.

People who have found their passion and get paid for it think differently than people who find themselves stuck in the grind, and at least some of that is the secret to their discovery.

I want to live an abundant life. I want to live to an old age knowing that my years were full of rich experiences and that I spent them doing something that matters. I’m guessing you do too.

The question is, in order to accomplish that aim, how important is money?

Basic economic textbooks will tell you that people are utility-maximizing creatures. Although we may lack the economists’ ideal of perfect rationality, I’d say for the most part this is true. We make decisions that will try to maximize our happiness (or whatever else we desire).

Most economics textbooks then move on to claim that money is the main method for doing this. We buy things we want. We trade our time for money by working. We then use that money to buy more things that we want.

My problem with this perspective is that there are many types of experiences money simply can’t buy. To me, it seems like there are many different currencies we pay to enjoy a richer life and money just happens to be one of them. Does focusing on one relentlessly cause us to neglect the others, and in doing so becoming materially rich but poor in experiences?

The Narrow Usefulness of Money

Money is good for a lot of things. Clothes, rent, food, entertainment and almost anything necessary for survival can be bought. If you’re not able to pay for your basic necessities, then money is blood and too little of it might kill you.

However I’d wager that’s not the situation for most of the people reading this website. The question isn’t whether money is important in the absolute (of course it is), but whether marginally having more money is important.

Even more specifically, the question is whether having more money is more important than having more of some other currency in life, and whether you should invest a lot of time maximizing money at the expense of the other.

A simple example of this dilemma would be going to a nightclub with friends. Here, money can mean the difference between staying at someone’s house and going to a luxurious party. There’s probably some difference in quality there, but it’s not huge. In either case you’re going to enjoy time with friends, simply the setting has changed.

Now consider a different life currency, like social skills or investments made in building deeper relationships. If you’re poor on this metric, then you probably won’t enjoy the party a lot. You don’t know the people well and you don’t have the confidence or skill to make friends easily.

Consider the same party, same setting, but that you have better social skills, or better relationships with the people you’re spending time with. Now the party is fun. Either you’re comfortably meeting new people, or you’re enjoying the company of good friends.

In my nightclub example money isn’t that important. At most, it can shift the setting of the party. It can’t make you a great conversationalist. It can’t make you best friends with the other partygoers.

If you had to ask me in this situation which I’d rather have–a full wallet or great social skills and great friends–it wouldn’t be hard to answer.

Life Currencies Other than Money

A quick google search of “how to make money” reveals 284 million entries. As a currency in life, people clearly want to know how to make more of it.

Go to any personal finance website and you can find detailed steps to optimize your investments, raise your income, clear debt and maximize the amount of money you have. I rarely see the same intensely methodical approach aimed at increasing other currencies in life, such as social skills or your ability to learn new things.

I’ve often heard people complain that they would love to travel the world and live in different places, but they don’t have the money. They’re often surprised when I tell them that my expenses while living abroad were actually less than living at home. If there was a limitation that held these people back from their dreams, it most likely wasn’t money.

For something like world travel, there are a number of life currencies I’d rate as being more important than money:

• Ability to adapt to the unfamiliar
• Extroversion
• Travel know-how
• Fluency in other languages
• Self-confidence
• etc.

Yet I’ve rarely seen books and blogs devoted to methodically improving your ability to adapt to unfamiliar environments.

Lack of money is often blamed for many problems in life. Poor guys wish they were richer so that more women would be attracted to them. Poor homebodies wish they were richer so they could travel the world. Poor students wish they had more money to buy a better education.

But in focusing, and often blaming, money for their problems, do these people miss the point?

Being Wealthy Without Being Rich

I’m faced with this dilemma in my own life. For years, my primary goal was to make enough money to live off my business. To be in a position where profits covered my living expenses with a safe enough margin that I didn’t need to stress over it.

At this moment, things are finally at a point where I can say I’ve mostly reached that goal. Many of my peers who have also reached this point then take the next logical step. They want to go from getting paid to do what they love, to getting paid extremely well to do what they love.

There’s nothing wrong with taking that step. My feeling is that, in taking that step and focusing on it obsessively, do these people miss investing in the other currencies of life they may be lacking?

In my own life, should my priorities be to go from covering my expenses to financial abundance, or as a 21-year old should I be investing in the many other assets that I haven’t had the time on this planet to accumulate? This is an interesting question I’ve only begun to ask myself.

As this blog is about the pursuit of the ideal life, I feel a big part of that is pinpointing exactly what that is for you, and then asking what are the currencies you need to create that life. And, if they aren’t money, how do you go about earning something you can’t count and society often fails to acknowledge?

Image courtesy of zzzack.

This Thursday will mark ten months that I’ve been living in France. Many readers have asked me questions about the experience:

• What is life like for a Canadian living in France?
• What is it like studying abroad?
• How is life immersed in a non-English speaking country?

Until now, I’ve held back writing a full article, since I didn’t want to prematurely label my experiences. Now that my stay is nearing an end (I’m back in Canada in one month) I feel it’s a good time to share my thoughts.

My Thoughts on Life in the South of France

I’m hesitant to write any definite opinion about a country or its culture. Even if I avoid obvious stereotypes, I risk relying on the personal caricatures of my own interactions here. The opinion of a small-town, anglophone, blogging, vegetarian in a mostly unheard-of city in the south of France won’t be representative of everyone’s experience.

However, here are a few observations for what life has been like for me:

Everything Moves at a Slower Pace

Shops close in the afternoon. Ninety-minute lunch breaks are common. Nothing is open on Sundays. The pace of life here feels as if the intensity has been turned down. People seem to rush less, savor life a little bit more.

I enjoyed this change of pace, riding my bike or walking was better than being stuck in a car or bus all day. But this had frustrations too. We waited two weeks without electricity because the power company was in no particular rush to turn it back on.

The People Are Friendly

The French have a reputation for a lack of friendliness, especially towards English-speaking foreigners, but I noticed the opposite. Even during my ten days in Paris, people were friendly, despite this city’s notoriety for rudeness.

The culture itself seems more predisposed to friendliness. From the mandatory bis on the cheeks, to each day having strangers at my gym make the rounds and shake hands with everyone working out (something I’ve never seen in all my years exercising in Canada).

There is more hostility here towards people who refuse to speak their language than in other European countries I’ve visited. However, the stereotype that the French won’t tolerate other people speaking français poorly didn’t hold for me. Most people were polite and happy to help, so long as you put in the effort.

Dot the i’s and Cross the t’s

My one standing complaint about France and French culture is the bureaucracy. The French, from my perspective, pay far more respect to procedures than results and obeying rules than creative solutions.

It took over seven months to get my visa finalized, during which time I was (technically) not allowed to leave the country. I also had to deliberately fail a final exam, due to the bizarre consequences of missing a midterm after volcanic ash stranded my flight in Munich.

There is also less of an entrepreneurial culture in France. The emphasis for most people is to get a secure job, which is supported by the labor regulations in France. I won’t argue whether this is good or bad for everyone, simply that I lean more towards places that encourage creative individualism.

There have definitely been hiccups in my stay here in France. But on the whole, I love the country and its people, and I’ve greatly enjoyed my time here.

Life Lessons from Living a Year Abroad

It’s a bit of a cliché to say that living abroad changes your life. But cliché or not, it’s been entirely true for me. As much as the experience has given me greater confidence and certainty in what I want from life, it has opened up even more questions.

Some of the lessons I’ve gathered from this year:

Say Yes to More Choices with Unpredictable Outcomes

I’ve come to realize that the most rewarding experiences can’t be planned for in advance. They surprise or assault and you need to ride them as they hit you. The only way to have these experiences is by saying yes more often to unpredictable outcomes.

From illegal border crossings into Spain, to just by chance arriving in Lyon on the day of their biggest annual festival, I’ve had my share of unpredictable outcomes here in France.

It’s easy to say no. You’re busy, I’m busy. There are a million and a half reasons why you shouldn’t. Why you should stick with what you know and wait. But sometimes you need to say yes to questions you don’t know the answers to yet.

Be Comfortable with the Lack of Control You Have Over Life

As an ambitious person who plans and sets goals, this lesson took awhile to sink in. I like having control over my life and routines. Heck, much of this blog is premised on the idea that we can take control over our lives and steer them where we want.

However, somewhere between landing in a country not speaking the language or knowing a single person, and winding up in a candlelit apartment trying to avoid deportation while navigating an inscrutable visa application process, you get comfortable with the lack of control.

I’ve learned that often getting comfortable with your inability to control everything is often the best solution. Planning ahead and trying to avoid costly mistakes are important, but there are some situations where you can’t know enough to do either of those reliably, so you just need to embrace that bad things may happen.

Friendships Matter, A Lot

Probably my biggest lesson of this year was how damn important the people are in my life. That relationships are investments, and although its easy to find people to have a beer with and fill up the time, great friends who you can trust with your joys and moments of weakness are rare and take a considerable investment.

Before this year, I’d often feel like a bit of an outsider in many of the groups I was in. Not that I had been pushed away, but simply that I wasn’t central in all the connections of a particular group.

In the past, I would have blamed this on differing personalities. It just wasn’t a good fit, our interests differed too much. They were too young, too old, too unambitious or too boring.

Now it’s clear to me that the real reason there wasn’t a fit, and the real reason there has been a fit when it occurs, is because I invested the time in the relationships. Friendliness takes just the right attitude. Deeper connections take an enormous amount of continuous face time, which I had underrated in the past.

I’m Not Sure Whether I Should Travel the World or Build a Home

I’ve always prided myself on my independence. The ability to move, create a new life and new friends. I admired and glorified vagabonding lifestyles like Tim Ferriss’, Benny Lewis’ or Rolf Potts’. I hate to admit it, but I even looked down upon people who lived their entire lives in the same small town or who couldn’t cope with being alone for more than a few days.

Now I find myself in a position where those glorified lifestyles are in my grasp. If my business continues as it has been, there is no reason why I couldn’t live in a different country every year.

The funny thing is, as I gain the ability to reach those glorified lifestyles of adventure and travel, I’m not sure I want them.

Living abroad and continuous travel is expensive, but not in a monetary sense. The expense comes in the form of exhaustion from adapting to new environments. From the loneliness of having only shallow acquaintances to difficulty of saying goodbye forever to friends and places you’ve invested in.

The idea of starting a new business each year wouldn’t appeal to me, primarily because there would be so much waste. My business didn’t start paying returns in money, reputation or impact until at least a few years in. I’m questioning whether the same is true with places and people. Restarting each year may be exciting, but it might also miss all the deeper rewards.

I’m still unsure how to answer this question.

Living Abroad and the Pursuit of the Ideal Life

Overall my experience was incredible. I made hundreds of friends and some very good ones. I learned to speak my first foreign language. I traveled through nine countries and dozens of different cities. I drank a lot of wine and pastis, and met a lot of beautiful women.

Perhaps my hesitations about vagabonding as a lifestyle owe a lot to the sheer intensity of my experience here. Immensely enjoyable, but also difficult to say goodbye.

“If you want to invent life-saving medicine, you need to accept that at some point, people will die.”

A successful life-science entrepreneur told me this during a conversation. At first, I was shocked at the comment. Isn’t the point of creating new drugs or medical procedures to save lives?

But the more I thought about it, what he said made sense. New medical advances will inevitably have complications. Drugs will have unknown side-effects by the time they reach human trials. Some people will die in spite of otherwise helpful treatments.

Obviously, we should aim to minimize these losses. This isn’t a justification for allowing unsafe or untested medicine to reach the general population. However, the only way to reduce the loss to zero would be to stop inventing new treatments, and the cost would be much greater.

This example, on a smaller scale, mirrors a lot of decisions in life. Doing anything important, means accepting a minimum level of bad things happening. The only way to completely avoid losing is not to compete at all.

Eventually, You’ll Make Someone Unhappy

The first time I wrote and sold an ebook, I was terrified. Not because I didn’t know what to write, I had already written a series of articles on the topic. Not because I was worried it wouldn’t sell, the website wasn’t making a large income at the time so any sales would have made me happy.

No, I was worried that someone might demand a refund and tell me the book was worthless.

I wasn’t worried because I didn’t understand what I was writing about. The book was about changing habits, a practice I had obsessively pursued for a couple years before writing (and still do today). I had written about the topic on my blog, and even offered a free preview, so anyone purchasing had a reasonable idea of what they were going to get.

But still, as my first ever product, my fears nagged at me. I set up a money-back guarantee, not for the oft-cited reason that it increases sales, but simply because I wanted to make sure anyone who was disappointed with the book could easily get their money back.

I released the book, and you know what? Nothing happened. I had a small trickle of sales and nobody requested refunds.

As I continued selling products, however, I realized that refunds were inevitable whenever I sold enough. They were usually only a tiny percentage of sales, but a few disappointed customers were inevitable with enough sales.

Another blogging friend recently released his first ebook (with quite a bit more success and fanfare than my first). His sales were successful and he had many positive reviews, but he was frustrated by one customer who angrily demanded a refund and called him a con artist.

The biggest factor in having disappointed customers is the amount of customers. Obviously we should try to minimize disappointment by being straightforward when making the offer, but the only way to have zero unsatisfied customers is to have zero customers.

The Minimum Threshold of Terrible Things that Must Happen

In just about any important pursuit in life, bad things will happen.

Often these bad things will be terrible enough that you’ll want to work hard to avoid them. But even if you did everything possible, they will still happen some of the time. Businesses will infuriate customers. Life-saving medicines will kill people.

Other times, the so-called terrible things will be manageably awful. You might not like getting rejected, being embarrassed or receiving hate mail, but investing a lot of energy to avoid them is fruitless. You may successfully get fewer rejections or be embarrassed less, but you often sacrifice your goal in the process.

Am I Too Young to Share My Opinion?

Writing for this blog has its share of manageable awfulness. One of them is whenever I write an article, there’s a good chance I’ll be wrong. There’s always the worry that in trying to think about the issues of my life and writing my thoughts, I’ll give bad advice.

Considering I’m 21 years old, there’s a pretty good chance that in ten years I’ll disagree with many of the ideas I’ve written. Considering my inexperience, there’s a good chance you’ll disagree with me now.

When I started this blog, that piece of manageable awfulness was a big concern. I was writing at an audience that often had double or triple my life experience. Even the areas I felt more confident writing about, I lacked decades of experience. What if I were wrong? What if I gave harmful advice?

Thinking about it now, after over four years of writing, I realize that if I hadn’t accepted that manageable awfulness, I would have paid a bigger price. For myself, writing here has meant I can live my dream: running an online business, living abroad and constantly learning new things. For everyone else, I’ve received thousands of emails from people telling me something I wrote helped them through a personal problem.

In hindsight, my fears seem a little ridiculous. Most of the readers, I feel, read because they want to connect with a story, not just advice from an expert.

Second, when I have given bad advice, most people reading are usually smart enough to let me know right away. I may not realize when some of my ideas are stupid, but my readers do.

Finally, I’ve done my best to switch from writing in an authoritative style to one that is more open for discussion and alternative ideas. My original goal was to offer advice, now I’d say my main hope is to stimulate deeper thinking and discussion.

What are Your Lurking Fears about Manageable Awfulness?

The funny thing about manageable awfulness is that it almost always easier to deal with in practice than in theory. When you spend a lot of time thinking about what terribly unpleasant thing might happen, fear dominates. When you actually start doing things, it’s manageably unpleasant but far less terrifying.

Think about asking someone out. Before, fear dominates as you fret about whether or not that person will reject you. In practice, you may get rejected, in fact you may even get rejected a majority of the time. That rejection is still unpleasant, but you can live with it.

There’s a choice in most situations where there is a lurking fear of inevitable bad things that will happen. Either you sit out and do nothing, or you do it anyways and feel the rejection, handle the refund, get embarrassed, and maybe end up making something important.

What are your thoughts? Where do you draw the line between manageable, unavoidable awfulness and terrible things that must be avoided at all costs? Where does your fear of making a mistake hold you back from making something meaningful? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Image courtesy of 1Happysnapper

Should your priority for living be happiness or virtue? Is it better to be a happy person of mediocre character, or noble and melancholic?

I believe this is one of the biggest questions you can ask yourself. Not only because it guides so many life decisions, but because it changes your approach to life. The person who lives solely for happiness takes a completely different attitude than someone who lives out of duty. Neither I feel are ideal.

Living Well and Living Good are Not Mutually Exclusive

For the most part, these two aims aren’t in conflict. If I wanted to be a doctor, I’d need to work hard to achieve my position, and once achieved, my work would likely help a lot of people. I’d say that’s a strong sign of living good.

Doctors, on average, are also paid well, and have positions of high status. A sign of living happily.

The same is true of most goals. Gaining anything personally satisfying usually requires employing a lot of effort and virtue along the way, and it often benefits other people in the process. Most modern economies are based on the principle that happiness and virtue work together.

But as much as the two goals overlap, there are certainly conflicts we face every day:

• Should you illegally download music which will boost your happiness but isn’t terribly virtuous?
• Should you take a long beach vacation, or volunteer at a homeless shelter?
• Should you become a vegetarian out of conscience, even if you love meat?
• Should you devote your life intensely to a calling, even if it sacrifices your private life?

Even if you rule out extreme decisions that sacrifice happiness or goodness for the other, you’re still left with a decision. Whatever you put first changes how you evaluate any choice in life, and perhaps more importantly, it changes how you evaluate life itself.

Virtuous Living Doesn’t Mean Traditional Values

I’ll never forget one lesson my father shared with me. He told me the story of a church minister who sold him an oven, and tried to swindle him on the price. The moral was that religiosity or preaching to particular values doesn’t make you a good person, only your actions do.

I think about this story whenever I think about the dilemma of living happily and living good. Mostly because, as a secular person, I worry that certain groups hijack what it means to be a good person, so much so that the discussion is tainted.

Instead of talking about being fair in dealings with other human beings (which the oven-salesman in this case, was not) it becomes about anti-profanity, whether you show up to church on Sundays and many other “traditional” values that aren’t the same as living good.

As one reader commented on this blog:

“As an atheist I struggle with the idea of happiness not being the point.”

I can’t speak for this particular reader, but I worry that this reaction is partially due to the large public confusion between living a religious life and living a good life.

The Trap of Happiness-Oriented Living

Utilitarianism is happiness-oriented living applied to society as a whole. So whatever raises not just your personal happiness, but society’s in aggregate, is the ideal choice.

Although I’m not a utilitarian, one thing I find interesting about this philosophy is it can be self-defeating. That is, if a philosophical mindset other than utilitarianism tended to produce greater aggregate happiness than if everyone became utilitarians, utilitarianism would suggest switching to that mindset.

Put another way, if everyone following a rights-based theory of justice resulted in greater aggregate happiness, a strict utilitarian would suggest we follow a rights-based theory. Even if utilitarianism were 100% correct, it may not be the best approach to take if a simpler philosophy resulted in better happiness-increasing decisions.

I believe that utilitarianism’s self-defeat is magnified when done on a personal basis. If happiness is your utmost priority for living, that can become self-defeating at a certain point.

Think of a situation of depression. If you feel momentarily depressed, with happiness as your gauge for life, you’re now not only depressed, but also a failure. Thinking you’ve failed at life makes you more depressed, and the cycle continues desperately downward.

In contrast, the person who places virtue (which in some senses, is easier to control) before happiness may be depressed, but can take solace in the fact that he or she can still work hard and try to do the right thing.

So even if you believe personal happiness is the #1 metric for life, you may end up being happier by not having it as the top priority.

My Answer: Virtue Matters More, but Happiness is a Virtue Too

My answer to the dilemma faced between happiness and goodness is that goodness must come first. It is better to live a good life, than a happy life, if those are the only two options.

However, those are never the only two options. Happiness, I feel is a virtue as well, and any decision that in the long-run, impairs happiness cannot be completely noble. Just as an entire life that was productive to many but relied on consistently stealing from someone wouldn’t be entirely noble.

Virtue is important. Living solely for happiness, while putting nothing higher, is a shallow way to live. It results in increasing depression during moments of unhappiness, and it results in lack of fulfillment in moments of triumph.

But happiness is also a virtue. Completely sacrificing your personal ambitions, desires and needs just because society tells you that you “should” do something neglects that your life is an end unto itself as well.

What are your thoughts? Have you ever felt pressure to take on a decision (such as which career to follow) because you were told that it would benefit society the most? Have you ever fallen into a negative spiral by prioritizing happiness in moments of depression? Please share in the comments.

Image courtesy of Mr. Kris

Could the internet be making us stupider?

Cal Newport suggests it might. He shares recent research that shows electronic multitasking results in poorer performance on cognitive tasks. No surprise there: being on Facebook or Twitter won’t help you concentrate.

The interesting finding however, was that chronic multitaskers perform significantly worse on tasks even when they weren’t being distracted. Constant distractions might actually be reshaping the brain.

Can You Really Follow 10,000+ People on Twitter?

I know people who have over 1000 unread items in their feed reader. I also know people who “follow” more than ten thousand people through Twitter. People who have 1000 supposedly genuine friends on Facebook (i.e. not fans of a blog or celebrity).

My question: Is it even possible to keep up with all this information?

Of course, the people I’ve spoken to about their internet habits claim it is. One of my friends that follows 2000+ people on Twitter claims he just drops in sporadically, scans the latest news and jumps back out. He doesn’t try to read everything, just focus on the important and ignore the rest.

My friend with 1000+ unread blog articles expressed a similar sentiment. He claims he knows which feeds he always reads, scans headlines for interesting articles and ignores the rest.

Perhaps my brain just isn’t hardwired to do what my friends have done. Maybe they really can selectively filter thousands of inputs and focus on the few that truly matter. Or maybe they’re just kidding themselves that they can manage the flood of information without drowning in it.

Too Much Choice Leads to Poor Decisions

Most people who choose to live in a high-information environment accept that they can’t read everything or befriend everyone. The argument, instead, tends to be that they have the ability to select and focus on the essential pieces of that information.

Modern cognitive research suggests otherwise.

In the fantastic book, How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer shares a study which gave participants the task of choosing a car. When only 4 criteria were displayed, participants who thought about the decision tended to make the correct choice. When the number of criteria was increased to 16, the participants who thought about the decision actually made worse choices.

This finding shows that at the level of conscious thought, our brain is spectacularly bad at filtering information.

Intuition and emotional reasoning is better suited for handling these types of decisions. But that creates new problems. The gut reaction is better tuned to highlight the urgent, rather than the important. You are attracted to flashy headlines instead of meaningful thoughts.

Guzzle the Waterfall or Sip from the Straw?

The way I see it there are two distinct strategies you can use to read books, blogs, magazines and use the internet:

1. You can try to guzzle from the waterfall and hope that whatever you drink was worthwhile.
2. Or, you can pick a straw and selectively drink from a much smaller cup.

My internet habits are decidedly straw-sipping. I rarely follow more than a dozen blogs at a time, and I regularly purge my feed reader. While I do get a lot of email, my inbox is emptied every day.

On Twitter, I only follow about 50 people. Even with that service I have mixed feelings. While I enjoy the community conversation and sparks for ideas, it exacerbates the problem, glorifying brevity over substance.

In my experience, waterfall-guzzling suffers from two major problems. First, it forces you to rely only on emotional reasoning when deciding what to consume. And just as emotional eating doesn’t usually result in the best diet, I don’t believe strictly emotional information consumption results in the best quality.

Second, waterfall-guzzling pressures you to seek summaries instead of substance. It’s far easier for me to scan Twitter than it is to read a 1000 word article on a topic. It’s even easier for me to read that 1000 word article than it is to read a 200 page book. The pressure of the waterfall makes us shallower.

Tweets are Not Short Articles, Blogs are Not Short Books

This pressure toward shallowness is dangerous because articles aren’t the same as books. Reading two dozen articles isn’t the same as reading one entire book. Similarly reading 140 character tweets doesn’t add up to one article with a thesis and supporting argument.

I wrote a precursor tweet to this article on Twitter earlier:

Interesting, maybe. Especially if you only need five seconds of your time to read it. But there are no arguments, no hard-earned conclusions, no tangents of thought. Just statements that you either agree with or don’t, that either trigger you to think or forget it entirely.

Similarly, this article isn’t the same as reading an entire book, such as How We Decide or The Paradox of Choice. I can briefly touch on arguments and present a few pieces of evidence. But I can’t deepen the ideas, present every relevant viewpoint, tell vivid stories that will make the information stick with you forever.

After having written a few books, I can say that writing a book doesn’t feel the same as writing an article. It’s like the difference between a week-long interaction and a speed date. Writing a book doesn’t have the same breathless urgency to each sentence, as if any explanation over two paragraphs must be dropped for something more interesting and succinct.

This doesn’t mean books are universally better. Simply that some ideas need them. Some can be sufficiently expressed in an aphorism, others require 1000 pages to truly understand. By choosing shallowness you cut yourself off from every argument that can’t be summed up in a sentence.

Cultivating Silence in the Age of Noise

My solution has been to deliberately cull the noise from my life. I don’t own a television, so any shows I watch must be selected beforehand. I regularly remove people from Facebook and Twitter, unsubscribe from blogs or email newsletters.

My goal is to be chronically empty. That is, I should be able to easily empty all my information accounts each day, so that there are no unread messages, tweets, unseen photos of friends. My goal is to create silence.

Silence isn’t a vacuum, however. It creates space that lets me read books instead of just blogs, follow genuine friends instead of just acquaintances, and spend time thinking about deeper ideas instead of irrelevant details.

What are your thoughts? Do you guzzle waterfalls or sip from a straw? What is your strategy for managing the flood of information without drowning in it? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Image courtesy of Thomas Faivre-Duboz

In Lewis Carrol’s novella, Through the Looking Glass, there’s a wonderful dialog between Alice and the Red Queen:

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

I think about this idea often–running fast, just to stay in the same place–as a great metaphor for life. How much time do we invest just to maintain things? How much energy do we really dedicate to going beyond the status quo?

This isn’t a veiled critique on society, but an honest question. I believe the majority of time we spend each day is, as the Red Queen suggests, spent running just to stay in the same place.

What Percent of Your Day is Spent on Growth?

Running this blog and business is a perfect example. Each week I write a new article, send out ass-kicking updates to the members of my learning skills program, and respond to the dozens of emails and comments I receive. These are all worthwhile tasks, but they merely keep me in the same place.

Fitness is another example. I’ve been exercising regularly for long enough now that going to the gym no longer means gaining strength or losing fat. Four times per week at the gym sustain my current fitness, but they don’t improve it. I’ve even had moments where my physical shape was getting worse even though I was exercising regularly, simply because the intensity dropped.

Think about your daily routine–eating, showering, sleeping and work. I would guess that in a given week, there are probably only a few hours which are genuinely invested in something outside simply maintaining what you already have.

Good News, Bad News and Breaking out of the Red Queen’s Trap

Needing to spend a lot of time on maintenance isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, if most of your life is spent maintaining your status quo, that probably means there is a lot worth maintaining in your life.

For myself, I could complain that I need to spend hours each week just to keep my business in the same place. Or I could be extremely grateful that I have the opportunity to communicate and work with thousands of people every day doing what I love.

I suspect the same is true in your life. Life takes a lot of time for maintenance especially when it is truly worth maintaining.

The downside of this is that as you get improve, it becomes easier to stop growing. When exercising four times per week simply keeps you at the same level of fitness, how can you go beyond? When you need 40 hours just to get today’s work done, how do you set ambitions for tomorrow?

The Red Queen’s trap is that the effort that goes beyond the status quo is scarce. And unless we pay attention to it carefully, it can slip through our fingers.

Mentally Separate Maintenance Tasks with Growth Tasks

One way to avoid the trap is to mentally separate tasks which maintain your position from ones which allow you to grow. That way the hundreds of hours you spend each week don’t drown out the few hours you actually invest.

I’m not confident you can easily remove maintenance tasks without also removing the growth tasks.

With relationships, you can’t streamline out all the face time and communication just to spend it on intimacy-deepening moments. With fitness, you can’t cut out all the workouts and just focus on the extra few reps and miles that build strength and stamina.

Business and work may be an important exception, as you grow you can reinvest your gains into delegating, eliminating or automating the parts you’ve already mastered. That isn’t always possible with many other areas of life, and even if it were, it might not be desirable.

But even if you can’t automate your love life, there’s still tremendous value in knowing how much of your running is going beyond keeping you in the same place.

How much of your running is just keeping you in the same place? Do you mentally separate the tasks that keep things from falling apart versus the time you actually spend building your life? Please share in the comments!

I believe happiness is important, and all else being equal, the happy life is better than the unhappy one.

But this doesn’t mean I believe the ideal life is free from unhappy moments. I have plenty of unhappy moments, and I think that’s okay, perhaps even necessary, to live well.

Some Unhappiness is a Necessary to Live Well

I see a few powerful arguments for claiming occasional unhappiness is essential for the ideal life:

#1 – Uninterrupted Joy is Impossible

First, there’s the argument that perfectly sustained bliss is impossible. There is strong evidence that genes play a role in determining happiness. That is, we might all have a particular set-point of internal happiness and the goal of self-improvement can only be to shift this set-point–not to disregard it.

Some people will live happier lives simply by being born with a different personality. It’s unfair, but complaining about it is like whining about not being taller. It won’t help and it ignores all the things you can do to live better.

Even if a genetic set-point didn’t exist, uninterrupted happiness is unlikely. I know of no person who has ever lived this way. Ironically, expecting zero unhappiness will probably make you stressed and miserable in the attempt.

#2 – Pain Pays for Future Happiness

Second, there’s the argument that unhappiness fosters happiness. Our most challenging and difficult moments that define us. Pain and sadness carve the space needed to experience real joys.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say all happiness is derived from past pains. Otherwise, what would the point be in striving to live better if happiness can only be gained through misery? However, some unhappiness is often the down payment for future joys.

#3 – Happiness Isn’t the Point

Third, there’s the argument that happiness versus unhappiness isn’t even the right ruler to be measuring the ideal life. Without a purpose, life is meaningless, happy or unhappy. The question isn’t to live well but to live good.

This argument resonates strongly with me. Going to hypothetical extremes, I’d say a wretched life devoted to a purpose would be closer to ideal than a blissful life without one.

Living good also tends to result in living well. Having a meaning for your life fosters the kind of happiness that normally can’t be attained just by consuming pleasurable things. Whole books have been written on this argument, so I won’t develop it much here, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a powerful one.

#4 – Functional Unhappiness

A final argument is that the amount of unhappy moments isn’t what counts. Rather, it’s the direction these thoughts are aimed at that should matter. If pain or depressing moments are channeled properly they become tools for the ideal life instead of a detraction.

Many so-called negative emotions serve important purposes. Fear keeps you from taking stupid risks. Anger ensures you assert yourself against an aggressor. Pain keeps you from putting your hand in an open fire.

Sure, there are times when these emotions backfire. When you’re afraid of risks that don’t have much downside, angry when you need diplomacy or feel pain when you’re objectively fine. But just because you can cut yourself with a saw doesn’t mean saws aren’t useful.

Ben Casnocha cites Jonah Lehrer in writing about the potential function of unhappiness:

“Joe Forgas, a social psychologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia, has repeatedly demonstrated in experiments that negative moods lead to better decisions in complex situations. The reason, Forgas suggests, is rooted in the intertwined nature of mood and cognition: sadness promotes ‘information-processing strategies best suited to dealing with more-demanding situations.’”

Adding, from his personal experience:

“I have long noticed that when I am most joyous and happy I tend to get little real work done.”

Channeling, not Choosing, Your Mental State

We don’t often get the chance to choose how we feel about something. At best we can change how intensely bad or good we feel about something. Rarely can we change how something makes us feel outright.

Even though you can’t always choose to feel in the short-term, it’s a lot easier to choose what you’re going to do with those emotions, once you have them.

If I get rejected, I usually don’t have the opportunity to choose to react with this the same way I might react to winning a million dollars. I can rationalize, cope or distract myself to lessen the intensity, but getting rejected will still suck.

However, once I have that blip of unhappiness, I do have a choice in how I use it. I can spin it into something self-destructive where I use that single example as a means to attack my self-worth. Or I can spin it into something positive, refocusing myself on self-improvement.

Mental Aikido and Redirected Unhappiness

Aikido is a Japanese martial art that emphasizes “redirecting the force of the attack rather than opposing it head-on.” From this perspective, the attacker’s own aggression can be turned against him.

Similarly, if you’re stuck with a negative emotion, you can redirect that energy back towards something useful. This kind of mental aikido certainly isn’t something I practice perfectly, but I think it’s a better way to look at the problem of unhappy moments.

Two things have happened since I started taking this approach. First, the intensity of negative emotions goes down. Unhappiness doesn’t get a chance to fester when it is properly redirected. Second, the feeling of control increases. Yes, you still feel lousy, but knowing you have some control as to where that energy is going gives a bit of calm in the center of the storm.

Training Your Mental Aikido

Practicing mental aikido is mostly two steps:

1. Separating the constructive uses of negative emotions from destructive ones.
2. Reminding yourself to use the first when you’re feeling unhappy.

For the first step, I’ve started to pay attention to what I’m good at when I’m facing a particular mental state. If I’m angry about something, I’m often better at exercising. When I’ve been rejected, that energy often helps in working harder. Stress allows me to do better on routine, non-mental tasks.

Your deflection strategies will differ from mine, but if you try out many things you may be surprised to find you’re actually stronger, more creative or diligent when caught up in some bout of unhappiness than when you’re joyful.

The second step is perhaps more difficult. Mental states have an addicting quality to them. Good or bad, we want to feed our emotions, not cancel them. Sad people listen to depressing music, not cheerful songs. Even if they don’t like feeling sad, they take steps to intensify that feeling.

This is one reason I’ve found mental aikido more successful than trying to change my emotional state. Since we’re irrationally addicted to the emotions we experience, it’s often easier to convince yourself to take steps to channel that experience rather than change it.

Mental Aikido in Action

I can recall a time a few years ago after being rejected by some girl I had liked. It was a successful moment of deflection for me because I used a lot of the energy to brainstorm for my own self-improvement. I remember spending more time than usual defining what I wanted from life and re-dedicating myself to putting in the energy to reach that.

During the time I felt lousy. Redirection didn’t change the fact that I had been struck. But it did mean I was able to keep myself from feeling worse, and to channel that remaining energy into something constructive.

My brainstorming session probably wasn’t as successful as if I had been filled with confidence. However, channeling that energy meant that I could accomplish something constructive instead of simply wallowing in the blip of unhappiness.

What are your thoughts? Are there any activities you do better when experiencing an unhappy mental state? Do you practice your own form of mental aikido? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Image thanks to tharso