I’m Canadian, but I’m currently living in the south of France. And, for the last five months, I’ve been doing something I never would have considered back home.

I’m not talking about drinking wine, eating baguettes or speaking French (although I’ve been doing plenty of those things).

No, I’m talking about riding a bicycle.

For the last 5 months I’ve commuted with my bike practically everywhere. I’d guess I bike at least 5-10km every day. And, while I’ve occasionally had a bike in Canada, that becomes agonizingly impractical when there is several feet of snow.

Location as an Underrated Factor in Pursuing the Ideal Life

I believe location is an underrated factor in pursuing the ideal life, but not in the obvious way people assume.

The obvious assumption is usually spoken in stereotypes. New York is fast paced. Paris is romantic. And if you want to start a technology company, you have to move to San Francisco.

I won’t argue with the specifics of these stereotypes, since I’ve never lived in New York, Paris or San Francisco. Maybe all the things said about these types of places is completely true.

What I will argue is that your location can have an unexpected impact on your lifestyle beyond the details that are most obvious when choosing a place to live.

The Unexpected Impact of Geography

Bike riding is a perfect example. The idea of biking everywhere I go wasn’t something I thought of when imagining life in France. Indeed, if I had chosen to live in a larger city like Paris or Lyon, the metro stations would more probably be my major source of travel.

Despite this, I think bike riding has had a major impact on my day-to-day lifestyle. For one, by biking 5-10km per day out of necessity, I’ve been getting a lot of exercise. Second, I’ve spent more time outdoors, which if you’ve ever experienced a winter in Winnipeg, is definitely a plus.

Location Independence and Choosing the Perfect City to Live

For most people, location is simply a matter of opportunity. My parents had moved to find jobs, and many other people will locate themselves wherever makes sense for their career.

However, there are a growing number of people who are drawing the majority of their income from location independent sources. Freelancers, web entrepreneurs or even at-home workers could theoretically live anywhere.

I think once you remove the job demand criteria as the #1 factor for where to live, a whole new area opens up, namely, picking the perfect city for your ideal lifestyle.

And, I believe this decision becomes more complicated for the reason I previously mentioned. Most of the salient details of choosing the perfect city are hidden, or at least obscured by popular stereotypes.

Finding the Perfect City

I’ve just started this journey, so I can’t weigh opinions about which cities are best. However, I think there are a couple factors worth mentioning, that are guiding my process of finding it:

1. Perfect is time sensitive. The ideal city, I believe, will be different when you’re 25 to when you’re 55.
2. Perfect won’t be obvious. I can’t be sure, but I’d guess that the ideal cities for most people are probably places they haven’t heard of yet. Or at least given serious thought to. The most popular destinations are also the most expensive and crowded.
3. Perfect needs defining. The size, weather and infrastructure that makes Montpellier an ideal city for biking is part of my definition of a great city. It will be different for every individual.

Of course, I’m not ruling out the importance of building relationships within a particular location over time. My argument isn’t that the ideal way to live means being a perpetual traveler. There are benefits to just picking a spot and then getting to know your neighbors.

However, just as the person you marry will have a major impact on your life, I believe the same is true of the city you live in. And, for a growing number, that decision will no longer be based on job openings.

“Are you procrastinating?” my roommate asks me. Three exams the next day and I wasn’t studying.

“No, I laugh, procrastination means I intended to do some work. I never planned on working tonight, so technically it isn’t procrastination,” I respond.

This was a conversation I had last week, during an exam period. Although my review schedule before exams tends to be a lot lighter than most, the biggest difference isn’t the time. It’s that I refuse to use guilt as a motivation tactic.

Stress-Cases VS Relaxed Achievers

Here’s the process a typical stressed-out student or worker uses to motivate himself:

1. Worry.
2. Be unsure where to start.
3. Take a break.
4. Take another break.
5. Feel guilty about breaking for so long.
6. Do 15 minutes of work.
7. Chat on Facebook.
8. Repeat.

Although there are probably a lot of problems in this situation, I think the worst is step #5. When you use guilt as a motivation tool you increase your stress without accomplishing anything.

Worse, guilt tends to be a lousy motivator, resulting in a little bit of effort but nowhere near the effort needed to succeed with your plan.

Now contrast this approach to the way a relaxed, effective student motivates herself:

1. Worry. (Hey, sometimes you can’t help it)
2. Stop and form an action plan with specific tasks.
3. Create a list of the tasks to be done.
4. Break the list down to a daily basis.
5. Work hard to complete the tasks.
6. Relax guilt-free.

Instead of guilt, there is a system. It’s this system that not only creates the results, but eliminates the wasted stress and time.

The System Doesn’t Need to be Complicated

If I’m making it seem like the second approach requires a black-belt level of mastery in GTD, that’s not my intention. A system doesn’t need to be hard or complicated to still work extremely well in 95% of cases.

Here’s the system I’ve used for the last few years of relatively guilt-free work:

1. Make a to-do list.
2. Chunk that to-do list into a list just for today.
3. Complete the list, without adding new items when you finish it.

Now, this may sound too easy. Sure, this might work for some people, but my work is too difficult, my academic program too intensive and the competition too fierce to limit myself in this way.

Wrong on both counts.

First, that attitude is wrong because this system works even better the more difficult your program is. The systematic approach to productivity, with pre-established limits, excels when your workload is hellish.

I’ve used this approach when managing full-time classes, international competitions, two volunteer positions and a part-time business simultaneously. Cal Newport has used a similar restrictions-first approach to get a PhD at MIT, build a wildly successful blog and publish several books.

Don’t tell me you’re too busy. You’re too busy not to have a system.

Second, this attitude is wrong because it assumes guilt is even remotely effective. It’s not. Guilt may be used in the 5% of situations where your system breaks down. But when you’re using it on a regular basis, it wears out and becomes useless.

Studies have shown that willpower is an internal resource. If you use it up on one task, you have less of it for the next task. So if willpower is this scarce, why force 100% of your work to rely on it?

Martyrs of Busyness

The real reason a lot of people like using guilt is for a secondary benefit that has nothing to do with accomplishing anything: social status.

When you tell people you have a killer workload, you aren’t just complaining. You’re also trying to tell people you’re important enough to have a killer workload.

Some tribes put discs in their lips or brand tattoos. Ours walks around telling everyone how “busy” we are, grinding away hours of our life in half-productive work. Whose is more destructive?

Guilt Free and Accomplished

January 2010 was the second best month for income I’ve ever had on the website. It was the number one for direct income. My health and fitness are nearing a personal best, last week I was able to complete 10 one-arm pushups with each arm in a row. Academically my grades will likely be staying high during my year abroad, and I’ve made significant progress learning to speak French.

Despite this progress, I’ve been more relaxed this year than perhaps any in my life. Tonight will be my forth night out in a row, in a series of going-away parties for friends leaving France. I’ve enjoyed enough free time to practice my cooking, read more books and enjoy the weather, women and wine in the south of France.

I’m not saying this to brag, but to point out a contrast. In other years I’ve had considerably more stress, a lot of it being self-inflicted. Also, during those years I arguably accomplished less towards my main goals.

I think that’s evidence that the burnout, guilt-soaked approach to work not only isn’t sustainable, it often doesn’t even get the most done.

Imagine that your main goal in life was to have as much fun as possible. What would your life look like?

I’m asking this question because I reject the idea that the pursuit of fun, in its maximum, would result in a life of non-stop television, fast-food binging or substance abuse.

Instead I’d argue that, even if putting fun as the highest goal wouldn’t lead to the ideal life, there is still a considerable overlap. I want to make the case for two points:

1. That serious fun requires effort. Giving up all discipline and effort results in a local maxima of fun which is far lower than the maximum possible enjoyment.
2. That fun supports work-related and nobler goals, rather than distract from them.

Why People Don’t Like to Think About Fun

What if I told you that you weren’t maximally productive. That is, your current behaviors don’t accomplish the most for the time you invest, you probably wouldn’t require much persuading. After all, we all sense our deficiencies when it comes to procrastination or laziness.

But, if I told you that you weren’t getting the most fun, you might require more convincing. Somehow we feel that work is something that can be enhanced by analysis and introspection, but fun is not. Fun is something magical and trying to think about how to have more, destroys the very enjoyment we seek to create.

I’m not going to disagree with you. The act of trying to figure out how to have more fun, when you’re playing a game or socializing, usually makes the activity less fun. Fun is spontaneous, so thinking about it too much can undermine it.

However, while I believe a mindless, go-with-the-flow approach works best in the moment, that same logic doesn’t apply when structuring your life to have more fun.

Serious Fun Requires Sweat

Take travel as an example. You might feel that going on a trip will be more fun than staying at home and playing video games. But, the video games don’t require any advanced planning, whereas the travel might. So if you don’t apply any thought, you’ll end up staying at home.

Look at sports. Sports are a classic example of the frustration barrier. When you are lousy at a sport, it isn’t much fun to play. But as you gain skill, the sport can become almost obsessively interesting. If you didn’t apply the foresight to practice through the frustrating phase, you would never experience the intensely fun phase of mastery.

Being a connoisseur of fun doesn’t mean all your leisure time needs to require years of practice or planning. Instead it means that, as far as having fun is a worthy goal, there are benefits to putting some thought into designing a more entertaining life.

I’d rather live an adventurous life, which has richer fun experiences, than a merely entertaining one, which occupies itself with shallower fun.

Mindless Fun vs Serious Fun

I don’t want to categorize certain activities as always being mindless fun and others as being serious fun. I’m not going to say Shakespeare is inherently better than South Park, simply because I feel those comparisons are so corrupted by people using high art to signal status.

The difference isn’t the activity, it’s the way you pursue it.

Imagine one person watches television for six hours straight, because he has nothing better to do on a Friday night. Compare that to a person who, spends the same six hours watching television, but it’s in the deep appreciation of a favorite story. Reveling in the character details, completely fascinated by the broader themes of the work.

The difference is between being an aficionado and a drone.

Why Serious Fun Supports Serious Work

I don’t believe that fun is the ultimate aim in life. However, I do think it’s useful to think about because I feel fun supports other goals. If you’re saturated in adventures and enjoyment, those experiences enhance the other aspects of your life, rather than detract from them.

I get a lot of emails from people wanting to give up online gaming or partying so they can focus on working more. That’s fine, if in their honest assessment, they’ve decided that there are more satisfying ways to use their spare time.

However, in most cases, I feel people want to abandon these pursuits, not because they’ve found something better to replace it, but because they feel they should. That watching television, playing World of Warcraft or going to a club is working against their bigger goals.

I’ve fallen into this reasoning trap myself. I’ve previously written about giving up television, and while I enjoyed the challenge (I still don’t have a television), I think I pursued the goal for the wrong reasons.

Instead of trying to eliminate all those distracting sources of low productivity, I should have been embracing them. Embracing serious fun.

How Fun Improves Productivity

The truth is, for almost all my goals, if you asked me whether I’m more productive now or years earlier when I had a more obsessive focus on work, I wouldn’t have to think about it. I’m definitely more productive now.

I believe a big reason for this is that seriously pursuing fun, making sure life is as fun as possible, gives you the energy to put back into your more focused pursuits.

Again, however, I want to draw a distinction between mindless fun, which is usually done just to occupy time, and serious fun, which is the conscious effort to make your life as adventurous and entertaining as possible.

Making my life more fun has occurred on many levels:

• Improving my business, so that the creative work I find incredibly fun is something I can get paid for.
• Living abroad, so even acts like going to buy groceries are interesting challenges.
• Building my social network, so I’m connected to other people’s adventures.

Even more, it’s been accepting that the serious pursuit of fun is productive. And that the ideal life not only accomplished but thoroughly enjoyed.

Being good at things is the key to success. Painfully obvious, right?

That means being good, having mastered skills, ranks far higher than other commonly touted “keys” to success, such as:

• Overcoming fears
• Just getting started
• Rejecting societal norms
• Having the best attitude

Sure, being a terrified, procrastinating, peer-pressured, pessimist probably won’t help you master skills. But that doesn’t remove the fact that mastery, both in your career and in your personal life, is the most important element.

Why Being Skilled Matters

For your career, the argument is simple: we live in a capitalistic world where, all else being equal, the people with the rarest and most valuable skills get the biggest rewards. Assuming you can convert those rewards to what you desire in life (do you want a big house or location independence?), mastery leads to career success.

For your personal life, the argument is subtler but I believe the same logic applies. If you have skill, achieving success becomes easier in almost any area of life:

1. Health - mastering a sport or exercise routine will keep you healthy, while mastering your own habits and willpower can ensure that they stick.
2. Relationships - mastering your interpersonal communication helps, whether you’re trying to find a new relationship or sustain an existing one.
3. Learning - improving the way you learn has a ripple effect, where ideas you pick up can be integrated into any other area of life.

Even if you disagree that mastery is the most important element, I think most people can agree it is at least a very important part of living a successful life.

What Encourages Being Skilled?

The biggest gains in skill come when you are situated on edge of your current competence. If you stay with what you’re already good at, you won’t improve much.

Being way outside your level of skill isn’t conducive to mastery either. Unless you can receive positive feedback, or regular wins amidst failures, it is difficult to learn from your mistakes. The best way to train as a sprinter isn’t to run against Olympic athletes from day one. It’s to race against someone just a bit faster than you, so you’ll know when you make improvements.

Therefore, practicing for improvement should always be at the edge of incompetence. Where you have enough skill for positive reinforcement, but not enough skill to be considered good–yet.

Living on the Edge of Incompetence

If you accept the first premise: that mastery is an essential ingredient to successful living. And, you accept the second premise: that mastery requires an environment of being on the edge of your incompetence. Then the conclusion is difficult to escape: successful living requires living on the edge of incompetence.

For the last several years I’ve made a deliberate effort to live on my edge of incompetence. I make an effort to choose goals and projects that are not just difficult, but require skills I don’t currently possess.

In the business projects I’ve undertake with this blog and website, I’ve always chosen ones that were slightly outside my skill level. I wrote and designed a free ebook, then created one for sale, then created one with an affiliate program, finally now I finished a hybrid between an information product and a monthly coaching service.

Successfully executing the latest project would have been a certain failure a few years ago, but I slowly advanced my edge of incompetence. And I did that by living on it.

My other goals have also put me on the edge of incompetence. From learning French, taking salsa classes, practicing to cook more elaborate dishes or training to do a pistol squat and handstand pushups. The goals weren’t just difficult (although challenge is important) they also pushed me beyond my current skills.

Hard Goals vs Skill-Acquiring Goals

It’s possible to set a difficult goal that doesn’t explicitly require gaining new skills. For example, let’s say I set a goal to give up junk food. This might be a difficult goal, but after having done 30-Day Trials as a method for changing habits for years, it probably wouldn’t improve my skills significantly.

Similarly, I could set business goals that don’t really express what skills are going to improve. I have a goal to increase my business income to a minimum of $3000 per month. That will be a challenging goal to meet, but it doesn’t make it clear what skills I’ll need to improve and where I’ll be sitting on the edge of my incompetency.

Deciding exactly how a particular project will push you to learn new skills is an often neglected step. It’s the difference between aimless and deliberate practice.

Setting up Camp at the Edge of Incompetence

I feel, for many people, they want to get out of their edge of incompetence as soon as possible. It’s cold, painful and irritating outside. Far nicer to be safe and warm within your existing skills.

So when they live their life, the venture to the edge of their skills only lasts as long as it needs to be. When they need to pass a test, they study really hard. However, when the exam no longer threatens their security, they don’t bother reading a book on a difficult subject.

Not only do I feel this is suboptimal, since these people will only increase their skills when forced to, it is also a lousy way to live.

If you set up camp on the edge of your incompetency, you get used to scaling your frustrations and learn to tolerate the uncertainty. So when most people are complaining about being outside the comfortable home of their skills, you feel fine because you never closed the door.

Everyone procrastinates. Heck, you might be procrastinating right now by reading this, instead of doing something that should be done. That isn’t news.

What I feel is more interesting is where people procrastinate when we do. Even the most productive people have Achilles’ heels, types of tasks which they procrastinate on. Similarly, even the people who claim they have no willpower still have some work they always do on time.

Why is that? And how can you use that knowledge to fix the problem?

I’m a Productive… Except When I’m Not

I’m not superhuman. I have bouts of laziness, procrastination and every other typical human failing.

But, when it comes to my normal work, whether it is assignments for university, tasks for running my business or personal goals, I usually show up. I’ve written according to my 2-3x weekly schedule for this blog almost without exception for nearly 2 years.

I’ve also exercised for nearly 6 years 3-5x per week. I’d guess that in those past six years, I’ve never missed more than 2-3 weeks in a row, and only then because of travel or illness.

Despite that, I have my own Achilles’ heel. Certain types of tasks I’m no better than average at getting them done on time. Others, I forget to do, delay them when I remember and generally fare poorly at getting them done.

What’s my Achilles’ Heel? (And How That Can Help You Fix Yours)

In looking over my weekly/daily goals for the past few years, I would say there are two types of tasks I’m most likely to procrastinate on:

1. Maintenance tasks.
2. Non-routine errands.

Maintenance tasks are things like backing up my computer or website, reorganizing my filing system, tidying or doing laundry. For example, on that last point, I pushed doing laundry off my daily goals list for about 5 days before finally getting it done.

Non-routine errands are another weak-point for me. Things such as calling a support line to cancel a subscription or renewing a driver’s license. Especially if these things have no clear deadline (a subscription could renew indefinitely, unless I stop it).

Why do I procrastinate on these things? Also, how can the self-knowledge of your weak points allow you to improve on yours?

Two Reasons: One in the System, the Other in Motivation

The first reason certain tasks are procrastination trouble spots is that the system you use to organize your life doesn’t accommodate them well.

Obviously, if you used a system like GTD to the exact specifications, keeping every list and folder and using it perfectly, there wouldn’t be any tasks that don’t fit. But nobody uses those systems perfectly, and even if they do follow it closely there are certain types of work that will more easily slip through the cracks.

This seems to be a major reason errands occasionally are sources of procrastination for me. Because they don’t take much time, or have any significant advantage for completing them early, they don’t get much weight in my weekly/daily goals system. I do use a calendar to funnel date-sensitive tasks into the system, but if the errand has no deadline, W/D Goals tends to ignore it.

This is especially true with errands which may not get finished just because you invest time in them. Last year I continually procrastinated on making phone calls to difficult-to-reach people. The reason was simply that my productivity system didn’t manage those types of tasks well. If I call and get a busy signal, am I finished?

Correcting Systemic Errors

Fixing problems in your system usually isn’t too difficult. The solution is just to create a way of elegantly capturing those tasks so that you don’t forget about them. Defining deadlines for errands without deadlines will probably go a long way to solving my procrastination problem with these kinds of tasks.

The difficulty is sometimes in fixing a system problem, you make your life more complicated. Now instead of just having one to-do list, you have three. The bulkier your system, the less it pushes you to work. I’d rather have a 95% successful system that was ruthlessly simple, than a 99.5% system which was horrendously complex.

The Other Problem is Motivation

The other reason for an Achilles’ heel is psychological. There are certain types of tasks that you just don’t like to do.

I think maintenance tasks fall into this category for me. In theory, they shouldn’t be procrastinated in my W/D Goals system. Exercise and blogging are similar tasks in terms of work, frequency and consistency, but I rarely have procrastination issues with them.

Somehow, backing up my website or reorganizing my filing system just feels a lot less satisfying than finishing a blog article or going to the gym.

I could give up and claim that the situation is intractable. That blog writing and exercising are just naturally more fun, so I’ll always be doomed to procrastinate on the other items. But that isn’t really my style.

Instead, I’d like to probe into why I don’t have motivation to do these tasks, and maybe see the beginnings of how to correct it.

Looking deeper, I think the main reasons I lack motivation to work on these tasks is that:

1. Deep down, I don’t feel they accomplish anything meaningful.
2. I don’t take much pride in their completion.

Now for some maintenance tasks (polishing cutlery, for example) these two points are probably true. But that’s probably why I never put them on my to-do list in the first place.

The problem here seems to be that consciously I recognize that regular backups or reorganizations are necessary and important, but I don’t sense that on a gut level. Second, I don’t reward myself enough for sustaining these types of maintenance tasks. I congratulate myself for keeping the blog regularly updated and feel guilty if I don’t exercise, but I don’t have the same internal rewards for keeping my desk tidy.

Obviously recognition of these motivational weak spots is just the first step. The next is to start installing habits to correct it. That will take more time and effort, but it isn’t an impossible problem to solve.

However, just as I have current procrastination weak spots, I used to have even more, and patient habit adoption helped cure many (if not all) of those weak points.

How to Spot Your Motivational Weak Spots

I think just about anyone here could go through a similar process to what I went through. Starting with fixing the gaps in your productivity system and then identifying why you don’t put energy into accomplishing certain types of tasks.

Procrastination strikes unevenly. Fixing the weakest links strengthen the entire chain, so spotting these glitches in your approach can have a huge impact.

photo taken in my city

It’s been awhile since I posted about my goal to become fluent in French. For the new people here, I’ve been spending the last 8-9 months practicing the language, with the last 4.5 living in France.

First off, I’m definitely not a language learning expert. This is my first attempt at learning a foreign language, so don’t confuse me with polyglots such as Steve Kaufmann or Benny Lewis. Their feats certainly dwarf mine.

However, as I feel the story is perhaps more important than the end product, I’d like to share some of my mistakes and successes so far.

The Ups and Downs of Language Learning

Learning a language is an interesting goal because it fluctuates between grand overconfidence and crushing embarrassment. I’ll often pride myself in my French ability, until tongue-twisted in a seemingly easy situation.

My French friends will often comment that I speak, “super bien.” At which point they will make a comment and I won’t understand. Two steps forward, one step back. Language learning often feels like a drunken stumble towards progress.

Despite the struggles, I’ve found the experience incredibly enjoyable. Learning a foreign language has had benefits beyond just being able to communicate. It’s a skill, like karate or painting, that becomes more enjoyable the better you become.

My Progress: Where I am Now

I find this question impossible to answer, since it all depends on when you ask me.

I spent a week with a French-speaking Belgian family during the Christmas holidays. Completely in French, as they spoke little to no English.

In the beginning, I was quite happy with my progress. Then I made the novice mistake of referring to my roommate as “ma collocataire” instead of “mon collocataire”. (In French, the possessive adjective “my” takes on the gender of the object, so my statement was only consistent with having a female roommate)

This led to an interesting discussion about the attractiveness of my roommate until we eventually uncovered my mistake.

So the best answer I can give is that I’m fluent in French, except when I’m not.

What I Would Do Differently Next Time

First, I’d like to point out that I truly hope there will be a next time. Immersing myself in the exciting strangeness of a foreign culture and language has been a great experience. I already have thoughts about where the next challenge may take me.

However, I think I made a couple mistakes that hindered my language learning ability. Some of these were understandable at the time I made the decision, or even unavoidable. But, in the future I’ll be more aware of these potential pitfalls.

Mistake #1 – Not Being Immersed Enough

My classes are in English. My roommate is Canadian and English-speaking. And, living in a university city, many of my friends are foreign exchange students. The majority of my speaking time is in English.

I have been doing my best to correct this mistake, but I realize it is more difficult once you’ve already established yourself in a new country. I tried getting my classes switched to French but was turned down because the French courses already were well over capacity. I also have no plans to ditch my roommate or English-speaking friends.

So my solution has been to take smaller steps to immerse myself. My week-long complete immersion in Belgium was one. Biasing myself towards parties with people speaking mostly French is another. I’ve even recently dedicated a 30-Day Trial to start switching over my reading/listening to French.

Mistake #2 – Being Too Afraid of Inarticulateness

Yes, I’m a real person with fears and worries too.

When I started learning French, I was very self-conscious about my lack of articulateness. It feels embarrassing when you’re mid-sentence and can’t complete a thought. Especially early on when you don’t even have the words to explain your predicament and instead end with an awkward silence.

I feel it was worse because, having written for several years and polished my public speaking skills, I’d consider myself above average in articulateness in English. I’m not a wordsmith, but my abilities with my native language made me feel even more naked when speaking outside it.

Mistake #3 – Not Congratulating Myself Enough for Progress

Earlier this week I met a group of new exchange students. Many of them didn’t speak French at all. Although there were many people with limited to no French skills when I arrived in France (myself included), it didn’t stand out.

Conversing with them, I forgot how much I (and most of the other exchange students) progressed in French. Surrounded in a bubble with people who speak the language much better than I do, it was easy to forget that I actually was making progress.

I believe confidence comes from legitimate success. But if you don’t acknowledge that success when it comes, or can’t perceive it, then you can’t improve.

Language Learning, Cultural Immersion and the Adventurous Life

For many of the readers my foray into learning a foreign language is just an interesting anecdote. Most of you have no plans to leave home, live in a foreign culture and take on the challenges that come with it. That’s okay.

But I think learning languages speaks to a broader mission. The goal to live an adventurous life. I would say that people tend to emphasize the exciting experiences as key ingredients in an adventurous life–wild parties, tourism or sky diving.

However, that emphasis ignores what I feel is a more important ingredient: the patient process of learning new skills. Without some degree of sweat and difficulty, adventures are just postcards, not memories.

I could have easily lived in France, especially this city, without bothering to learn more than basic French. But if I had chosen that path I would have missed the true challenge and beautiful strangeness that learning a foreign language has given me.

Stop Studying, Start Learning – Here’s an interview I did with Liam about holistic learning for his new program geared towards pre-med students.

Liam’s also opening a new program offering coaching and school help for pre-med students. Like my recent sell-out, Liam only has a limited number of seats in the program, so if you’re interested in a learning program aimed specifically at pre-med students check out the link above.

From the Archives

7 Reasons the Gym is Better than Therapy – “I have a love affair with my gym.  She’s not much to look at: a rubber track and weight room in a dank basement, but appearances aren’t everything.  She’s there on my best days and on my worst days.  We never fight, and she doesn’t care what I look like as long as I give her my full attention for a few hours a week.”

Learning on Steroids

Earlier this week I mentioned I just opened a new program designed to implement rapid learning tactics. It was a quick sell-out, but I have hopes I can reopen the program again.

It’s been less than one week, but I’ve already received dozens of 30-Day Trials from people explaining how they are going to start training some of the ideas. It has been an interesting experiment for me, because for the first time with a large group, I’m actually witnessing how some of the ideas are being applied.

Too often in the online info-product area, there is a 95% focus on marketing with scant resources aimed at actually making a good product. I don’t claim to have perfected it, in the least.  But my hope is that rigorous data gathering from following a group over several months can give me a good picture of what typical students can achieve.

I’m a fan of early-rising as a productivity tool. I would argue that most people have the strongest motivation to work in the morning or afternoon hours, so waking up earlier means you can gain productive time.

There is also something psychological about waking up early. When you successfully achieve the goal of getting out of bed early, that gives you some momentum for all the other things you need to do in a day.

However, I think there is an important exception to this mantra of early rising. That is that sleep is more important than waking up early. Early rising only works if you are able to go to bed earlier, I believe getting your full sleep for a night trumps any early-rising considerations.

Why I’m (Now) an Inconsistent Early Riser

A few years ago, I wrote a few articles on waking up early and the benefits to productivity. At the time of those articles, I was rising pretty consistently at 5:30 or 6:00am. I have even gone for thirty-day stretches waking up early every single day, even on weekends.

However, now I would say I’m an inconsistent early riser at best. Today I woke up at 6:45, and yesterday I woke up at 6:15, but other times I sleep in well past 10am.

The reason for my switch isn’t out of laziness. Although I have had stumbles with habits before, they are usually pretty easy to fix. The switch is because I’ve found the early-rising habit isn’t ideal, at least when practiced on a consistent basis, in my life anymore.

Early Rising is Great, Having Enough Sleep is Better

Early rising is a great habit, provided your evenings are relatively quiet. When my life revolves around work or studies, going to bed earlier to compensate for early rising is a decent trade off. However, if I’m traveling, socializing or partying, it’s almost impossible to keep it up.

I’ve since realized that, whatever the benefits of waking up a bit earlier are, they are trumped by missing sleep. If waking up early starts your day with +1, having a serious sleep deficit starts your day off at -5.

Getting enough sleep for me means at least 8 hours. I’m not someone who can get by for more than a few days on 4 hours per night of sleep. I can’t even get by with six hours.

I think my abandonment of the consistent early-rising schedule is a by-product of my life getting more complex (and interesting). When my entire focus was self-development and work, it fit nicely. Now that my focus has shifted to social-development and more far-reaching goals, it comes up short.

Inconsistent Early Rising is the Alternative

My solution has been to become an inconsistent early riser. Which means that most of the time, when life keeps me up past 10-11pm, I’ll focus on getting as much of my 8 hours as I can.

However, when my focus needs to shift mostly to work, I can wake up early those days to get the productivity-enabling benefits.

This week, for example, I had several group assignments, 7.5 hours at school each day, a new product launch, blog writing and errands with the French bureaucracy to complete my visa work. Waking up early yesterday and today have helped me chew away at my weekly goals list fast enough that I should still be able to relax on the weekend.

The disadvantage of inconsistency is it requires more discipline to get up early. When I had trained myself to wake up at 5:30 without fail, I never pressed the snooze button. I always awoke on the first ring. Today, however I hit it once or twice before finally getting up.

I think if I were to go back to a mostly-work focus for a longer period of time, such as a month or two, I might try the early-riser schedule again. But, for now, getting enough sleep wins out as the best way to stay healthy and sane.

A big learning point for me over the last few months has been rejecting the common online wisdom of “passive” income. “You want to earn money while you sleep,” goes the rhetoric, “if you need to be there to earn a dollar, that work can’t scale!”

My rejection isn’t based on passive income being bad, or even undesirable. Simply that needing passive income is a good problem to have. For most people, the problem isn’t that there business doesn’t have enough “passive” income, but it doesn’t have enough income, period.

Lack of Scale is a Good Problem to Have

If your #1 problem when running a small business or doing freelance work is that your time doesn’t scale, you are probably doing very well.

Think about it. If you’re active complaint is scale, that means (usually) two things:

1. You are already well-paid for your time.
2. You have more lucrative clients, or business opportunities, than you can handle.

If these two things aren’t the case, scale shouldn’t be your #1 priority. Figure out how to earn a decent business or freelancing income before worrying about how to make it more passive.

Don’t Focus on Scale Too Early

I think a big mistake I made in the earlier running of this blog was to fall for the passive income rhetoric.

I was hesitant to let people know I responded to emails because, hey, that activity won’t scale and it will eventually reach a point where I can’t handle the volume. The thing I forgot was the word “eventually” and that, in the meantime, my ability to interact with people and respond to every email was a personal strength.

I ignored business opportunities that might not scale perfectly. Earlier, I rejected ideas of membership-based programs that involved coaching from my part because, in theory, I could only serve a certain number of people. So, instead I focused strictly on ebooks or other goods that could scale from zero to infinity.

The thing I forgot was that if you spend a month writing an ebook and only sell 30 copies, that still isn’t a lot of value for your work. Doing that same work for 100 people, even if it can’t scale to 1 million, can be more profitable and personally rewarding.

The Online World Hates Perfect Scaling

To borrow a line of reasoning from Chris Andersons’s excellent book, Free, the online world doesn’t like paying for things with perfect scale. When you do, there are forces which work against you.

So, when you decide to create an ebook, you have a product that can scale perfectly. You also have something which can be pirated easily. I once found a torrent of one of my ebooks with nearly 10,000 downloads and several highly positive reviews. Um… thanks?

With unscalable products you also have to face a higher level competition. Maybe this isn’t so much a problem in the blogosphere, but if you were starting a web 2.0 service, it might be. How can you make an excellent service that people will pay for, when Google is giving it away for free?

It’s not impossible, and I know many people who have succeeded with purely passive income business models. But I feel, for new entrepreneurs or freelancers, scale shouldn’t be a priority. Worrying about scale comes when you’re sold-out and making bank.

Early scale worries are delusions of grandeur.

How Rejecting Scale Helped My Business

It turns out, as much as the impersonal forces of the online world hate scale, they love its opposite. They love things that can’t scale.

I mentioned yesterday I sold out enrollment in a rapid learning program I was offering in 36 minutes. There were probably many reasons for this. But, I feel a big one was that I was only offering 100 spots. The program lacked theoretical scalability because I was offering feedback and coaching as part of the package.

Just as you value a handwritten thank-you card more than an automatic email, value is tied (in part) to perceptions of marginal cost.

While it may have lacked scale, in theory, in practice that means potentially adding an important revenue source to my business which will help it survive as a full-time income source. And I’d rather have full-time income with imperfect scaling, doing what I love, than a perfectly scalable business and still need a job.

I had been collecting emails of interested students, with the promise to give them priority announcements when the project launched.

Well, I did and the program sold out in just over half an hour. You guys rock!

I’ll be opening the program again in a few months after making improvements from what I’ve learned from this group. Hopefully I’ll be able to let in another 100-200 students, so if you’re interested you can join the email list and you’ll be the first to know when we reopen:

Click here to get in.

Thanks to everyone, gratitude is definitely my feeling for 2010!