Do you ever go to the gym, stare at all the dumbbells lining the wall, and exclaim, “Dammit! Why are there so many weights here? I can’t possibly lift all of them! Look at how heavy they are! Why can’t they just have a few easy weights and let that be enough?”

Of course that sounds silly, but this is precisely how many people react to the various problems that surface in their lives.

“Dammit! Why do I have to be overweight? Why can’t I just be thin and fit? Why are there so many delicious foods that make me gain weight? Why does exercise have to be so hard? I’m so sick of being fat!”

“Dammit! Why does it have to be so hard to make money? How am I supposed to get out of debt when I can barely pay my bills? Why does it seem like every time I start to pull ahead, my car breaks down again? I’m so sick of being broke!”

“Dammit! Why can’t I find a girlfriend (boyfriend)? I’m a nice person, aren’t I? I’m tired of lame dates with total idiots! Maybe I should just be celibate. Why does this have to be so hard? I’m so sick of being alone!”

“Dammit! Why can’t I find a job I like? Why do I have to do stupid work I hate just to make money? What kind of life is this? How am I supposed to do what I love when I don’t even know what that is? I’m so sick of my job!”

Any of this sound familiar?

Problems as Obstacles

The attitudes reflected above depict problems as obstacles. They are roadblocks, annoyances, and irritations. They get in the way of living. They interfere with your peaceful enjoyment of life.

Given this mindset, you should do your best to prevent problems from arising whenever possible. If a problem occurs, it means something went wrong. It should have been anticipated and avoided. An unavoidable problem represents bad luck or a cruel twist of fate. Or perhaps it suggests you held the wrong thoughts and somehow attracted it via the Law of Attraction.

If you currently have problems on your plate, then you should try to eliminate them if you can. Aim for the delicious nirvana of a problem-free existence — everything in its proper place and nothing to worry about.

This is a terrible mindset to hold. The longer you think this way, the weaker you’ll become. This mindset puts you on a path with two primary branches.

The first branch leads to overwhelm. Eventually your life gets filled with problems you can’t easily solve. You’ll probably resort to some form of escapism to cope (such as via TV, web surfing, video games, excessive reading, alcohol and drugs, etc). You’ll get that slow sinking feeling that your life is slipping away from you. When new problems arise, you’ll become stressed, worried, or anxious.

The second branch leads to withdrawal. You gradually check out from the world in order to reduce the problems you’ll face. You may justify this with words like simplification and minimalism. If some part of your life gives you too much trouble, you try to surgically remove it. You probably live alone and have few friends. You favor work that’s easy, unchallenging, and unrewarding. The thought of living in a cave somewhere or meditating for days on end starts to sound like a good idea. All you want is peace, peace, peace, but you never seem to be able to stay there for long. Some annoyance always comes up.

There are other branches as well as variations of the two above, but for the most part, you’re either headed toward stressful overtraining or long-term atrophy. Either way, the longer you run these patterns, the weaker you become. Eventually problems that didn’t seem so big five years ago now feel like terrible burdens. “Dammit! Why did that light bulb have to burn out? Oh crap, I’m outta bulbs too. Now I have to go to the store. Ehhh… I’ll do it later. I just don’t have the energy to deal with this now.”

Problems as Opportunities

Let me offer you a different way of thinking about problems that’s a lot more empowering and a lot less whiny.

Problems do not exist to beat you down. They exist to help you grow stronger. Problems are like the dumbbells at the gym. If you attempt to lift them, you may feel tired in the short run, but you’ll grow stronger in the long run.

When you think about the various problems and challenges you’re facing in life, you may be tempted to assume that the goal is to reach the solution state — to get past the problem. But that’s a very narrow and largely disempowering perspective. That’s like saying that the point of going to the gym is to reach the end of your workout.

A more productive perspective is to consider that the activity of solving problems is what really matters. It’s the activity, not the final solution state, that helps you grow.

Suppose that one of your problems is that you’re broke and in debt. If so, I imagine that’s a problem you’d very much like to solve. You may feel desperate to arrive at a solution as quickly as possible. But the greatest value is found in the activity of solving this problem, not in the end result.

One of the reasons I’m doing well financially today is that I solved the problem of being broke about 10 years ago. It was definitely not an easy problem to solve. I had to go through a lot of difficult intermediate steps to become strong enough to solve it. I made many adjustments to my attitude. By lifting those weights, I grew stronger mentally, and my finances soon followed.

Consequently, I know that if I ever found myself broke at some point in the future, I could solve that problem again, probably much more quickly than I did the first time. Even though I have more to lose these days from a financial perspective, I don’t fear losing it. I know I have the strength to bounce back. My real gain wasn’t money. My real gains were inner strength, knowledge, and skill.

What would my life be like if I jumped instantly to the solution state without actually solving the problem on my own? Suppose I won the lottery. At first it might appear that all my financial troubles were solved. But I’d actually be in a far worse position.

As I was going through that period of financial scarcity, I prayed that I didn’t experience a cash windfall. I knew I had to solve the problem on my own. I didn’t want to accidentally get a big inheritance and rob myself of crucial financial lessons and training. When someone gave me lottery tickets as a gift, I got nervous because I was worried I might win.

It was hard dealing with some of those challenges, but I could see that my problems served a greater purpose. They were helping to train me up.

Another benefit is that by solving these problems for myself, I’ve been able to write many articles to share what I’ve learned. I couldn’t have done that if I bypassed all those difficult lessons.

Physical problems build physical strength. Mental problems build mental strength. Social problems build social strength. And all problems will on some level build spiritual strength (or strength of character).

This mindset has a positive long-term outlook. The longer you hold it, the stronger you become.

Problem-Solving Attitude Adjustment

I’m pretty sure I learned the value of problem solving from my Mom. For pretty much my entire life, she was a college math professor (and still is). She would often buy me books filled with problems to solve — math problems, visual problems, word problems, logic problems, etc. You can find these books in any local bookstore. That was her way of keeping me busy during summer vacation.

I grew to like these books, so I was exposed to lots of different problems as a child. At first I was baffled by most of the problems in these books, and I could solve very few of them. But I gradually got better.

When I was in the the fifth grade, I started learning BASIC computer programming, so that exposed me to even more problems. I began to see problem-solving as something to do for fun and as a way to get smarter over time.

By the time I was in high school, I really enjoyed solving interesting problems. If a teacher assigned more problems for extra credit, I would always do them — just for fun. It was almost an addiction. If I saw a problem, I got really curious and felt compelled to solve it.

Other students would sometimes come to me in the morning before school to ask for help with their math or science homework. And I’d help them. Often we weren’t even in the same class, but I had a school-wide reputation as a good problem solver. With the encouragement of one of my teachers, I also did some tutoring in math. That was even better because I got paid to teach people problem-solving skills.

One morning my physics teacher walked up to me at my locker before school and asked me to step inside his classroom. He presented me with a physics problem that he couldn’t seem to solve. I solved it easily, not because I was better than him at physics but because I’d been exposed to such an enormous variety of problems that my mind just saw the solution. That physics problem fit the pattern of a class of problems I already knew how to solve. My solution was unusual for a physics problem, but it wasn’t that unusual for a math problem.

During Christmas break in my senior year, I was bored during the two weeks off from school… partly because I had no serious problems to deal with. So I opened my calculus textbook and started reading ahead and working through some problems. I did it simply because I enjoyed the challenge.

After the holiday break (at the start of my final semester of high school), I went up to my calculus teacher and handed him a big stack of papers. I told him that during the holiday break, I completed all the homework he would assign for the rest of the year.

He said, “But how did you know which problems I’d assign?” I said, “I didn’t, so I just did them all.”

Typically he’d assign 12-15 problems from each chapter for homework. I probably did about four times that amount.

Of course that left my calculus teacher wondering, “Now what the heck am I supposed to do with Steve for the next five months? He’ll be sitting in class twiddling his thumbs the whole time.” He actually found creative ways to push me, giving me special assignments and take-home exams to do on my own. During classes, I mostly tuned out from the lectures and wrote a blackjack game for my programmable calculator. More problem solving.

It was only later in life that I realized how helpful it is to generalize this attitude beyond math, science, and logic problems and into the realm of practical daily existence.

For example, it’s no secret that I despise accounting work. I find it to be the most boring part of running a business. I outsource most of it by using an accountant, but you can never totally disengage yourself from the numbers and financial obligations when running a business… unless you’re in a position to request a government bailout because you’re “too big to fail.”

Instead of resisting the accounting work, I decided to see it as a training exercise. The point isn’t to get to the end of the work and be done with it. The point is to use the work to grow stronger. Keeping the financial side of my business in good order helps me become more organized and efficient. I know that if I can get really good at managing the financial side of my business, that training will serve me well for many years to come.

I could outsource more of this work, but right now I don’t want to. It wouldn’t be a good idea to do that yet. This work is teaching me important lessons I need to personally integrate at this time in my business life. Otherwise I risk screwing things up when I have more money and more business complexity to manage. I can outsource more of it later, but right now I can tell that this training is still helping me get stronger. I have to master the 20-lb dumbbells before I can progress to 25 lbs.

Overcoming Overwhelm

If you’ve been slacking off due to escapism, when you pull your head out of the sand, you may find yourself surrounded by problems that seem too heavy to lift — deep in debt, a dead-end job, a sucky relationship situation, a big belly, no sense of purpose, etc. That’s okay. Just start with the lightest weights, and train up from there. As you clear some of those minor problems, you’ll begin feeling stronger and more hopeful. Eventually you’ll be ready to tackle some mid-sized problems… and then the really big ones.

Cleaning, organizing, and minor repairs are great places to begin. Straighten your desk. Clean the toilet. Organize one shelf. Clear your email inbox. Hang that picture. Remove the expired food from your fridge.

You can also use timeboxing for this. Set aside a fixed period of time, say 30-90 minutes, and just make a dent in some of your problems. When the time is up, you’re free to stop, regardless of how much progress you’ve made. I often use timeboxing for tedious tasks like cleaning up a hard drive that needs better structuring of its folders. I’ll chip away at it for 30 minutes every few days until it’s complete. That way the task never feels too overwhelming. The long-term benefit of dealing with little problems is that you get good at processing them quickly. My parents are masters at this. Every weekend they would tackle little problems in batches, so the house was clean, neat, and in good order at all times.

Think of a problem-solving session as a short workout for your mental discipline, much like going to the gym. If you conduct these problem-solving workouts regularly, you’ll gradually get stronger, and little problems will no longer seem so troublesome.

Getting Stronger

Solving problems increases your resourcefulness. The more problems you solve, the better you get at problem solving.

This attitude adjustment can be very effective. If you start seeing your problems as training exercises intended to make you stronger, you’ll be able to face your problems with a can-do attitude. You know it will be hard, and you accept that it’s supposed to be hard. The weight is supposed to be heavy, and the workout is supposed to be tiring. If it was too easy, it wouldn’t help you grow.

You may feel some stress and strain when you’re in the thick of a tough problem, but you’d feel the same way doing a tough workout at the gym.

Don’t bemoan your problems. Be grateful for them. They’re training you to become smarter and stronger. Learn to enjoy the training you’re receiving. Years from now you’ll be grateful you had to deal with these problems because of how much stronger you’ve grown.

Don’t resist resistance training.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

Suppose you set a goal to write a book, but you aren’t already in the habit of writing on a regular basis (ideally daily). Most likely you’ll never complete the book. That goal will just sit on your to-do list for years.

Suppose you set a goal to quit your job and run your own Internet business, but you aren’t in the habit of developing websites. That goal is also unlikely to be achieved. It will simply remain a fantasy, overridden by the habit of showing up to work each day.

Identify Habits to Support Your Goals

When you set a new goal, think about what habits would enable you to put that goal on autopilot, thereby making it a done deal.

It’s usually best to think in terms of daily habits, especially for big goals. Daily habits are easier to install than less frequent habits. (For details on successfully installing irregular habits, see the article How to Maintain Not-Quite-Daily Habits.)

It’s also wise to think in terms of simple habits, not incredibly complicated ones. Simple habits are easier to install and maintain. You can always add complexity later, but focus on getting the basic habit successfully installed first.

If one of your goals is to write a book, a simple daily habit would be to work on your book for at least one hour per day. If you can install and maintain that habit, completing your book is practically a done deal. Even if you write only on weekdays and take two weeks off, that’s still 250 hours per year you’ll be investing in your book. This simple discipline is enough to build a career as a professional writer.

Ask yourself: What daily discipline(s) would make this goal a done deal? The answer to that question will tell you what habit(s) to install. If you can condition and maintain those habits, you’ll very likely achieve your goal. It’s only a matter of time.

Be Specific

Make your habits specific. Identify when, where, and how you’ll implement them. Leave nothing to chance.

If you’re going to exercise daily to support your weight loss goal, specify when you’ll exercise and for how long, where you’ll exercise, and what type of exercise you’ll perform. Doing yoga in your living room from 4pm to 4:45pm daily is a clear habit. Adding “go to the gym” to tomorrow’s to-do list is not a clear habit.

One of the most basic habit properties is time. To install any new habit, you must put in the time.  Carve out a dedicated block of time to spend on your new habit. Even if the habit doesn’t require any extra time to maintain, such as the habit of not biting your nails, you’ll still need to devote time to conditioning the habit.

Start With a 30-Day Trial

Use the 30-day trial approach to kick-start your new habit. This method has a high success rate and can be adapted for virtually any habit you’d like to install. (For details on how to do this, see the article 30 Days to Success.)

Focus on achieving a perfect record with your habit for 30 days straight. Don’t worry about Day 31. If you can make it 30 days, you can usually coast from there because the habit will be on autopilot by then.

Even if you later get off track, it will also be easier to re-establish a habit when you’ll already completed at least 30 full days in a row. At the very least, you’ll know you’re capable of making it 30 days and beyond when you start anew because you’ve already done it.

Eliminate Interference

Nuke any obstacles that may interfere with your new habit. Clear commitments from your schedule that would overlap the time you’ve allotted for your habit.

Notify other people that this time is sacred and that they do NOT have permission to disturb you at these times.

Make sure you have all the equipment and supplies you’ll need to implement your habit. You don’t want to start on Day 1 with lots of enthusiasm, only to discover you’re missing something important and can’t proceed.

Give yourself every advantage before you begin. Review the article Habit Change Is Like Chess to make sure you account for the early game, middle game, and endgame of habit change. Don’t fall into the trap of blitzing for Scholar’s Mate and putting yourself in a disadvantaged position from Day 1.

Identify Supporting Habits

Take time to identify any supporting habits that will support your main habit, thereby supporting your primary goal as well.

For example, if you want to change your daily eating habits, you’ll also need to change your grocery shopping habit to make sure you buy the right foods consistently. This is especially important if your new diet will incorporate lots of fresh produce.

Another example: If you want to build a successful blog, writing is an important daily habit, but for optimal results, you may want to spend time each day promoting your work as well. This is especially important when you’re just starting out and hardly anyone knows about your blog.

Work on installing your main habit and all critical supporting habits at the same time if possible. If this is too much to handle, then install the supporting habits first. You can tackle them one by one with consecutive 30-day trials if you wish. Once the supporting habits are in place, you can then tackle the main habit.

For example, first you could install the habit of restocking your kitchen with healthy food every Tuesday evening. Then you could install the habit of preparing meals every day (to reduce your desire to eat out). And finally you could install the habit of changing your diet to whatever you want it to be. This simple progression can lock in a collection of supportive habits to help you achieve goals for weight loss and better overall health.

Commit Yourself Publicly

If you need some extra incentive to stick with your 30-day trial, get other people involved to help you. Commit to your new habit publicly. Put yourself on record, so it will be harder to wimp out.

Many people announce their latest 30-day trials in our discussion forums. Some also post daily updates to let others know of their progress. This is an excellent idea because it increases accountability. You’re less likely to slack off when you know others are watching out for your progress updates.

If that isn’t enough, then make a promise or bet with someone — with a significant consequence if you fail. Add some pain to the mix to ensure that you’ll do your best to follow through. This kind of positive stress can be very motivating, especially if you consider yourself somewhat lazy.

Goals Into Habits – A Personal Example

One of my top professional goals for this year is to develop and release a line of downloadable information products on a variety of personal growth topics.

This is a big goal that will require a significant time investment. Unfortunately, my current work routine doesn’t support this goal at all.

I have lots of experience selling info products online. I used to sell downloadable PC games for several years, so I already have the know-how to create and publish downloadable info products. I remember the daily rhythm I experienced while developing and releasing new games, and it’s very different than my current work routine which is centered around instant publishing of much shorter content.

Achieving this goal requires that I invest a serious amount of time and energy in product development. But up until this time, I haven’t been in a good position to install the necessary habits I’d need to make this goal a reality. I managed to write a book of course, but that was a one-time release, not a complete product line.

Starting this week, I’m going to devote several hours every weekday to developing new information products. Initially I plan to create a downloadable audio program. I’d also like to write more books, but I intend to release at least one audio program first.

In order to achieve this goal, I must radically change my daily habits. Here are some of the changes I’m making:

1. Continue to get up at 5am, but instead of going to the gym first, go straight to my home office to get started on my work day. Review my goals and plans, and get to work on product development tasks by 5:30am every weekday.
2. Dedicate every weekday morning to product development, working straight through until lunch time. I normally have lunch around 1pm, so with a few breaks, this should give me a solid 6-7 hours per day on product development. If I start feeling burned out, I can always cut back on the hours or take extra days off as needed.
3. Devote one hour per day to writing and editing new blog posts. I can write short posts more frequently or long posts less frequently. Adapting to shorter writing sessions will be a major change in my blogging rhythm.
4. Limit the time I spend on routine communication to no more than 60 minutes per day, including email, forums, phone calls, etc. Do these tasks in the afternoon.
5. Exercise in the early evening after my workday and before dinner. Favor exercises I can do at home instead of going to the gym. This saves driving time.
6. Run errands on weekday evenings around 8pm (especially Tuesdays). Stores are less crowded because people are at home watching TV. This habit saves me as much as 30 minutes on a typical errand run vs. running the same errands on a weekend.

It may take me a while to successfully install all these new habits to support the achievement of my goal, but once they’re up and running, I’ll be able to develop new products with a steady rhythm, much like the blogging rhythm that allowed me to write hundreds of new articles year after year.

By reclaiming more time from my daily routine, I’ll have more time and especially more creative energy to invest in developing information products. I can continue to release abundant free content like articles, podcasts, and newsletters, but I’ll save the more complex messages for structured products.

Blogging is a great medium for expressing certain ideas, but it’s a weak medium for covering topics that are too big or too complex. This is one of the reasons I decided to write the book Personal Development for Smart People. Writing a book enabled me to explain the fundamentals of personal growth in much more depth than I could do in a handful of articles or podcasts. I was finally able to share the big picture instead of always hacking away at the branches. I was delighted with the final result, as were the vast majority of the book’s reviewers, so this encouraged me to develop more products.

Other topics that would be better served by full-length products as opposed to blog posts and podcasts include time management, subjective reality, polarity, the Law of Attraction, the raw food diet, polyamory, and polyphasic sleep. These topics are all sufficiently complex that an article or series of articles can never do them justice.

Erin is also interested in developing and releasing her own info products. In fact, last week we made a bet with each other to see which of us would release a new product first. This is a win-win situation because our combined readers will benefit from a new product release from either of us, and obviously our family will enjoy the additional income as well. I won’t share the exact details of the bet (it’s kinda kinky), but suffice it to say I’m very motivated to win.

What new goals can you achieve by installing a few simple daily habits?

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

Linear Growth

Linear growth is when you can see the next steps ahead of you fairly clearly. Figuring out where you should go next isn’t that hard. Implementation is the biggest challenge here. This doesn’t necessarily mean you can see ten steps ahead, but the next step in front of you is at least visible. Once you complete that step, the next step will soon present itself.

An example of linear growth is my long-term path of improving my diet. I started on a variation of the SAD diet, and gradually progressed to vegetarianism, veganism, and raw foodism. There was some exploration along the way of course, but most of the time I had a pretty clear idea of the “next level” I wanted to reach.

There were two independent lines of development here, but they basically pointed in the same direction. The first line was shifting from animal-based foods to plant-based foods. First I eliminated all animal flesh, and later I dropped eggs and dairy products. I’ve been eating a 100% plant-based diet for about 12 years now.

The second line of development was to graduate from processed to unprocessed foods. I progressively dropped manufactured and cooked foods and began eating closer to nature (i.e. fresh, raw whole foods). Cooking does increase the bioavailability of a few nutrients, but that can’t compensate for the hundreds of other nutrients it simultaneously destroys; on the whole cooking is nutritionally devastating to food.

Linear growth is wonderful. When you can clearly see the next steps ahead of you, you can focus on making changes instead of second-guessing your decisions. This doesn’t mean that it’s easy, but at least you can see where you’re headed.

It’s important to recognize when you’re on a linear growth track in some area of your life. Often when we’re on a linear path that’s very challenging, we’ll have a tendency to second-guess our decisions. “There must be an easier way,” we proclaim. But when we rehash the decision, we keep coming up with the same answer. We’re on the right path; it’s just a very challenging path. This is good for us though because these are the paths that push us to build focus, self-discipline, and a strong work ethic.

If you think that if a path is too hard, it must automatically be the wrong path, you’re buying into weak-mindedness and turning your back on truth. Training yourself to lift heavier weights makes you stronger. Avoiding heavy weights only makes you weaker.

Growth Forks

A growth fork is when you see two or more mutually exclusive paths ahead of you, and it’s tricky to decide which path to take. Your challenge here lies in choosing the “correct” path. Implementing your decision may still be hard, but the up-front decision is the major limiting step.

Should you attend college or start your own business? Should you marry your current relationship partner or break up and go your separate ways? Should you move to Los Angeles or New York City?

Should you choose Option A or Option B? What’s the right choice? How do you decide?

Growth forks can be very frustrating. The problem with a tricky growth fork is that it can cause your growth to stall, sometimes for years.

I’ve faced some very difficult growth forks in my life. Some of them absorbed hundreds of hours trying to figure out the correct decision, and I still felt unsure about what to do.

You can seriously wrack your brain trying to figure out the best choice. You can use different diagnostic and analytical tools to help you decide. You can ask other people for advice. You can consult with your intuition. Sometimes this helps, but in many cases the more you try to analyze the situation, the more you feed your ambivalence.

One way to visualize a growth fork is to imagine two or more alternate timelines stretching into the future, one timeline for each possible branch leading away from your decision point. Once you make the decision, you lock yourself in to a certain branch. From that moment onward, you’ll never have the freedom to experience the other branches, at least not in the same way you can now.

Indecision at Growth Forks

One reason it’s so easy to get stuck at a growth fork is that the pre-fork position offers the illusion of greater freedom than any of the post-fork decisions. This freedom often feels better than making a commitment to any one path.

For example, suppose you’re married, and you’re also having an affair on the side. Your spouse and your lover find out about each other, and now you’re pressed from both sides to choose one or the other. Many people in this situation will delay making a choice, stringing along both spouse and lover as long as possible. Why? Because the freedom of keeping both possibilities open feels better than the instant loss of either partner. Neither path seems like a clear improvement over the state of perpetual indecision.

Unfortunately, when you stay stuck at a growth fork for too long, you often lose the freedom to make a choice at all. For example, your spouse and lover both get fed up with you and dump you at the same time, so you get nothing. Your freedom to decide has been taken away. The choice has been made for you. Letting fate decide isn’t a good idea because fate often makes crappy choices.

Growth forks needn’t be huge. You may get stuck at a growth fork when faced with the question, “What should I do today?” If you remain stuck in a state of indecision for too long, pretty soon you’ll lose the freedom to decide at all. Perhaps your TV or the Internet will make the decision for you. Such indecision can cause you to waste a large portion of your life, often by letting it slip away one day at a time.

Overcoming Indecision

So how do you overcome the trap of indecision at a growth fork?

Suppose you’re playing a computer role-playing game where you control an avatar in the game world. In this game you have a lot of decisions to make. What character class will you choose? Will you explore Arendia or Algaria? Which quests will you undertake? What guild will you join?

There are a lot of decisions to be made, but few people would consider such decisions paralyzing. Can you imagine someone complaining, “I bought this game three years ago, but I haven’t started playing yet because I just can’t decide what character class I should play. I don’t know what to do!”

Instead most people will just dive in and start playing. They’ll give a little consideration to such decisions, but they’ll decide fairly quickly, perhaps even impulsively. And for the most part, the consequence is that they’ll have fun.

Sure there may be some regrets along the way. “Dammit! I never should have picked up that cursed item!” But most people will just take any setbacks in stride and keep pressing on. As a result their character goes up in levels, and they get to tackle bigger and bigger challenges. When the game gets boring, it can be retired, and the player can move on to something else.

So why do we face situations in real life that can cause us to remain terribly stuck in indecision, but when we’re just playing a game, major in-game decisions are regarded as no big deal?

Consequences

Perhaps the main factor is that in an artificial game world, the consequences of your actions are considered minimal. Regardless of what you decide, you’re not really going to be hurt. No one else is likely to be hurt either. A bad choice affects only your character, but it doesn’t affect your real self. The whole thing is just pretend. No matter what happens to your character, the real you will still be okay.

But in the real world, things are different. Your actions have bigger consequences. People can get hurt. If you screw up, you could be socially ostracized, and that can create serious consequences for you.

It’s understandable to fear such consequences because at one time in human history, if you were socially ostracized by your peers, that could be a major threat to your survival. Getting kicked out of your community for incompetent decision-making might even be a death sentence.

Today, however, the consequences of being socially ostracized aren’t nearly as severe. For example, in the USA most marriages end in divorce. And interestingly, marital satisfaction has been on the rise for decades, keeping in step with the relative ease of getting a divorce. At one time getting a divorce was considered socially unacceptable (and of course still is in some cultures), but now it’s not such a big deal. Even if your divorce messes up the lives of many people, society is robust enough to absorb the impact, and you can still press on and achieve post-divorce happiness.

Of course there are other consequences aside from being socially ostracized. You could really mess up your finances, for instance. That could put a big crimp in your lifestyle plans.

When you apply some sort of analytical process to decision-making, you’re trying to assess and compare the consequences of different possible paths. The path with the best consequence is deemed the correct choice.

Unfortunately, assessing and comparing consequences requires predicting the future. To some degree we can pull this off, but it’s tough to be accurate. Real life will seldom fit our predictions.

So we really have two problems that lead to the state of indecision. First, we consider the consequences of certain real-life decisions to be serious and important. Second, we try to predict which consequences are best. This is how we try to make a decision.

The problem is that this decision-making process often fails. The more you magnify the importance of a decision, the more you’ll paralyze yourself. Eventually external factors will force you down a certain path, and you’ll lose your freedom to decide altogether. By refusing to decide, you get assigned the character class of Peon by default.

An Alternative Decision-Making Process

How can you make a decision if not by comparing future consequences?

This might sound like a subtle distinction, but a different way to make decisions is by comparing immediate present-moment consequences.

What does this mean?

Instead of trying to predict the future to determine the long-term implications of each possible path, drop the whole branching timeline model. Instead of regarding time as a line, consider time as a single fixed point. In other words, assume that only the present moment is real, and nothing beyond that exists.

Your decision point no longer involves the selection of a long-term path. Now it’s merely a state change to your present moment.

As you consider the alternative choices you might make, ask yourself this question: If I were to commit to this choice, how would it affect me right now? What immediate changes would I experience?

Imagine each possible choice as real, as if you’ve already made it. Pay attention to how the choice makes you feel. Does it feel good, or does it feel wrong somehow?

From Growth Forks to Linear Growth

When I use this process, I often find that my growth forks transform into linear growth. The indecision fades away, and I begin to see that the fork itself was merely an illusion. It was a mental construct — a distraction — that my mind created because on some level I didn’t feel ready to face the next logical step on my linear path. Because I thought the step was too big for me to handle, I created the growth fork as a way of putting my progress on pause.

For example, for many years while I was running my game development business, I was stuck at a growth fork. I debated whether I should keep growing my games business or quit that field and build a career in the field of personal development.

I kept trying to decide by predicting the future consequences of each path, but that led to analysis paralysis because I was comparing apples to oranges. It was tough to decide on that basis. Because of the difficulty of changing careers, my mind had a tendency to keep me stuck. Remaining in a state of indecision was actually easier and gave me the illusion of more freedom.

However, when I compacted each alternative to a present-moment decision, considering how each option made me feel in the present moment, the right choice was clear. When I thought about continuing to build my games business, I felt trapped. When I thought about working in the field of personal development, I felt excited. I didn’t need to predict the future. The present-moment difference was clear enough.

This helped me see that deep down, I already knew the right decision. But I was having trouble coming to terms with it, so I created the decision fork to keep myself stuck. Once I saw that the decision fork was a self-created illusion, I realized that I was dealing with a linear growth challenge all along.

Although it might not seem like a linear progression to shift from game development to personal development, it was for me. While running my games business, I began writing articles on the side to help out other game developers. Eventually my articles became more popular than my games. Switching from creating games to creating articles was therefore a semi-logical “graduation” for me. It became clear that I could provide more value through writing articles than I could through producing games.

Since that time, whenever I’ve faced a tricky growth fork, it has eventually revealed itself as a false dichotomy. It was an illusion I created to avoid dealing with a major growth challenge. Sometimes I created growth forks as a way of giving myself permission to pause and gather my strength.

Making the right decision wasn’t the real issue. Deep down I knew the correct decision. I could see the correct path just by focusing on the present-moment effects of each alternative. The challenge was being able to accept the correct path and to stop resisting it.

Is it possible that your own growth forks are merely illusions? Could they simply be delay tactics? Might you already know the correct choice, but you’re having a hard time accepting it?

Can you recognize the pattern that whenever you get stuck at a growth fork, you use the state of indecision as a way of putting your forward progress on pause? Do you see that this is a way you avoid what you know is coming up because you don’t feel ready to deal with the consequences yet? Can you see that making the correct decision isn’t the real issue? Can you see that the real issue is being able to fully accept the path you’re already on?

Even when you’re on a fairly linear path, you may have a tendency to create growth forks as a way of putting your progress on pause. If you don’t feel strong enough to take on the challenges ahead of you, a growth fork is a tempting option. By placing yourself in a state of indecision, you get “credit” for trying, even though your forward progress is halted.

When you face a tricky growth fork and you feel stuck in a state of indecision, pull back for a moment, and reconsider your challenge from a different perspective. Instead of trying to choose the correct path, consider that your task is to fully accept the path that deep down, you’ve already chosen.

Accepting Your Path

Accepting your path can give rise to some interesting emotions. I’d call it a combination of relief, excitement, and surrender. It feels good to leave the state of indecision behind, but it can also feel uncomfortable because now you have to get to work. You can no longer hide behind the excuse of indecision.

The feeling that “Crap… this is gonna be hard! I’m not even sure I can do this…” is perfectly normal. I experience that feeling every time I get past a growth fork. On the one hand, I know the decision is correct. But on the other hand, I don’t feel quite ready for the path ahead. I glance at the level 30 monster down the road, and I’m concerned because my character is only at level 20.

But once you stop asking, “Am I really supposed to tackle that level 30 monster?” and you fully accept that yes, you’re the hero assigned to it, this helps to shift your focus. The indecision evaporates, and you surrender to the path ahead. You realize you’re going to have to build your character beyond level 20, so you can prove a match for that monster.

“I don’t know what to do” is an excuse that really means, “I don’t feel strong enough to take the next step.” In other words, “I don’t know what to do” is pure nonsense. Of course you know what to do. You’re just scared that you won’t be able to handle it.

The funny thing is that if you poured all the energy being wasted on worry and indecision into building your character, the monster ahead would soon be no match for you.

Which path of your growth fork makes you think, “Gosh… I dunno if I can do that. That looks pretty tough. That’s a pretty scary monster”? Is it the entrepreneurial path? The path of improving your diet? The path of marriage? Which path will push your character to progress from level 20 to level 30?

Take heart that other heroes have already defeated that same monster you must face. Others have already reached the level you’re trying to reach. You can train up to their level if you work at it. Your level 30 challenge looks difficult because you’re looking at it through the eyes of a level 20 character, but you don’t have to remain a level 20 character forever.

Drop the excuse of indecision, and start working on level 21 today.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

Erin just joined Facebook this afternoon. If you have a Facebook account, please send her a friend request. She has 121 Facebook friends so far (after we posted about it to our Twitter accounts), and she’s looking to add more. Her Facebook page is at:

Erin Pavlina – Facebook

My Facebook Experience

My Facebook page is here:

Steve Pavlina – Facebook

I’ve been using Facebook for a few months now. I currently have 1,907 Facebook friends. I’ve been a fairly active user ever since I joined. I get new friend requests, comments, and emails there every day.

Overall I’m glad I joined Facebook. It takes extra time to keep up with it, and it can easily become a time sink if you aren’t judicious in how you use it. However, I’ve found it a good way to meet people with compatible interests.

I set things up so that whenever I update my Twitter status, it updates my Facebook status automatically. Also, if I make a new blog post, the link is automatically posted to my Twitter and Facebook accounts too. Facebook has an app that anyone can add to their account to do this. To set this up with Twitter, I used Twitterfeed. You only have to set these up once, and after that it’s all completely automated. Nice!

There are four primary ways I use Facebook now:

1. Broadcast medium. I use Facebook as a broadcast medium via the auto-updates that appear when I post anything to my blog or my Twitter account. This is fully automated. This brings more readers to my blog posts. It gives people an extra outlet to keep up with my work.
2. Gathering feedback. Facebook is another place where I receive general feedback (via comments posted on my Wall and Facebook email) as well as specific feedback about my Twitter updates and blog updates. Most of this feedback is pretty general (”great post”), but some of it has been helpful. The Facebook feedback is usually short and snappy, so it gives me a quick vibe on people’s reactions to a post. The feedback I get via email and the forums is usually much longer.
3. Making new connections. I’ve met some pretty cool people on Facebook. This includes new friends (people I now keep in touch with regularly) as well as new business contacts. I’ve received a few interview requests and speaking invites via Facebook too. Facebook has been more beneficial as a business tool than Linkedin. My Linkedin account generates mostly spam and inappropriate requests and has been largely useless. Between the two, Facebook wins hands down for business networking.
4. Maintaining existing connections. Some people prefer keeping in touch with me via Facebook instead of using regular email or phones. Some of my existing connections have strengthened with people who happen to be on Facebook. I think this is because my Facebook friends see my updates more frequently (vs. if they just subscribe to my blog feed or newsletter), so they think about me more often as a result.

The downside is that I can’t respond to all the feedback I get on Facebook, including the emails people send and the comments they post on my Wall. It’s just too much to keep up with it all. A few times people got upset when I didn’t reply to their questions, but I have to triage. However, I think most people understand that when you have nearly 2K Facebook friends, you can’t be equally responsive to everyone. If people think I can do that, their expectations are totally unrealistic.

Another thing I don’t have time for is getting involved with all the Facebook apps. Most of them are way too cutesy for me. I really don’t need people sending me virtual candies and such. Don’t get me wrong — I appreciate the sentiment behind it — but I just don’t have time for that sort of thing. I almost always decline requests that require me to add new apps to my account. If you want to send me extra love, just hold the intention in your thoughts, and I’ll receive it. No need to send me virtual snacks via Facebook.

I also decline all Facebook cause invites. People send me new ones every day. Again, it’s not that I don’t care about the fate of whales or polar bears. It’s just that I don’t have time to get involved in five new causes every day. I have to be more focused than that.

Spam hasn’t been a big problem for me on Facebook. When people start spamming me with too much junk (some Internet marketers have done this), I just unfriend them. Problem solved. If you spam me, I can guarantee you won’t be my friend for long. If you send me a message that says, “I know this looks like spam, but…” you’ll be unfriended before I read the rest of your message. I have zero tolerance for anything that looks like spam.

I normally accept all initial friend requests. The limit is currently 5,000 friends, so my account still has room for about 3K more friends. I thought about creating a separate fan page, but for now that seems unnecessary, and I don’t see what it would accomplish. Maybe if I hit the friend limit, I can consider it.

There is a lot of stuff in Facebook that is awfully cutesy and which seems totally pointless to me, so I simply ignore that stuff. When I stick with my core reason for using Facebook, which is to cultivate new compatible connections, it does fulfill that purpose quite well. Many people find me on Facebook because they see I’m friends with one of their friends. This has a rippling effect of expanding my Facebook network in interesting directions. For example, I frequently get new friend requests from other raw foodists because I’m friends with lots of other raw foodists there.

Twitter

I’ve been using Twitter a bit longer than Facebook. I currently have 2,409 followers there, and I’ve posted 479 updates. On average I gain roughly one new Twitter follower per hour.

One thing that helped boost my follower join rate was adding my Twitter page to my signature in our discussion forums. If you regularly participate in any online forums, I highly recommend you do the same. Your signature links will appear on every post you’ve ever made (assuming the forum software is decent). People who find your old forum posts (such as via search engines) may start following you on Twitter if they like what you posted. This way your old posts are working for you. Be sure to also link your forum signature to your Facebook page if you want more Facebook friends.

Overall I like Twitter. I wish I adopted it earlier, since I’d have a lot more followers by now. Many bloggers who started using Twitter earlier have way more followers than I do.

Using Twitter doesn’t require much time at all if you’re disciplined, especially since my blog posts are automatically announced there. I have it set to announce Erin’s blog posts to my Twitter account as well. If I get a quick thought I want to share, it takes 30-60 seconds to post it on Twitter.

I use Twitter mainly as a broadcast medium. I don’t reply to all the questions and comments people send me there — that wouldn’t be a good use of my time. As with Facebook, a few people get upset when I don’t reply to them. I do reply to some people there, but replying to everyone who contacts me there is totally unrealistic.

People often send me cool links via Twitter, and I’ll occasionally re-tweet them or share them in our forums. Earlier today I shared a link to a heart-warming Youtube video (16:23) that someone sent me via Twitter this morning. If I get too busy, I don’t even look at the links people send me. I can’t keep up with all the links people email me either. If you send me a link, the odds are less than 50-50 that I’ll even look at it.

Even on Twitter I get a lot of people asking me to help them with certain causes. I appreciate the seriousness of some of these requests, but it’s just too much for me to get involved with this sort of thing. I do what I can now and then, but I can’t get behind every cause that crosses my plate.

While I don’t do a lot of out-linking from my blog posts — I feel it would add way too much clutter to the archives if I did — I often share cool links via Twitter. Those links may not be seen by as many people, but I think it’s a good compromise. I prefer to use my blog for sharing original content. If I want to pass on a link or share something timely, Twitter works well for that.

One of my favorite things to do on Twitter is to share interesting, inspiring, and/or challenging quotes. Sometimes I’ll tweet a famous quote I come across. Other times I’ll post a sentence or two from my book or my blog that I think people will find stimulating. I get some cool feedback on these quotes, so I think people like them. Again, all of these tweets are automatically posted to my Facebook account too.

Online Socializing

The downside of adding Facebook and Twitter to my life is that it increased the flow of new connections coming into my life. At first this was great, but soon I started feeling over-socialized. I was forming more new connections than I could sustainably manage. Adding these new contacts is easy. Maintaining ongoing relationships with all of them is impossible.

In lieu of spending even more time answering emails and such, my most practical option was to raise my standards for the type of online socializing I would do. Otherwise I could spend all day on this stuff and never get any real work done.

Consequently, I’ve become much pickier about which connections and conversations I’ll get involved with personally vs. keeping my distance. This applies to my regular email as well as to forum discussions, Facebook feedback and emails, and Twitter responses.

This wasn’t easy to do. There were many people I felt deserved a response, so I constantly have to remind myself not to follow up on anything that doesn’t pass my pre-qual tests. I don’t always succeed, but I’m gradually getting better.

I admit I feel a bit guilty about all the stuff I have to let slide. But I can’t justify spending all day answering one-on-one feedback when I have more impactful things to do.

Even though I’ve added Twitter and Facebook to my life, I’m actually doing less online socializing than I used to. The reason is that the extra incoming communication made me more aware that it isn’t a good use of my time to over-socialize online. I quickly realized that in order to stay productive, I had to be more selective than ever.

Consequently, I’ve been letting some online-only friendships fall by the wayside if the compatibility connection just isn’t there. I’m letting a lot of emails go unanswered these days. In fact, many of them are now going unread. I used to read every email I received, but no longer. If people send me lengthy emails about their life stories and how my work has helped them, I used to love reading that stuff, but I can’t justify spending time on that anymore. It steals too much attention from other things. It’s unfortunate that some people will spend hours writing these long messages that will go unread. I’m grateful for the intent behind them, but I must be more careful in how I use my time. If I take the time to read those emails, I have to do less of something else.

Incidentally, if you’re considering sending me a long email in the near future, please don’t. I probably won’t have time to read it. I do appreciate the intent, however.

A big problem with online socializing is that it can become a crutch that crowds out face-to-face connections. I’d rather meet new people face-to-face as opposed to sitting in front of my computer typing emails. So I’m intentionally withdrawing from a lot of online socializing in order to free up more time for face-to-face interaction. I’m dropping the quantity, so I can raise the quality.

Ironically, the net benefit of adding Facebook and Twitter to my life is that they caused me to back off from online socializing and to become much more selective with socializing in general. The upside is that these services help me cast a wide net, so I have new potential connections coming into my life every day. Then I sift through the contents of that net with a pair of tweezers. I look for strong compatibilities, and when I find them, I follow up to see if there’s the potential for a deeper connection to be made. Sometimes this results in new friendships or business contacts, and other times it just fizzles.

Dealing with Rejection — When You’re the Rejecter

What I dislike most is that this approach requires me to “reject” more people than ever, usually by ignoring them or blowing them off. I still feel a bit guilty about this. But obviously this isn’t going away if I’m going to keep doing what I do. It will very likely continue to get worse.

Still, there’s an ongoing incongruity between my feelings and my reality that I haven’t yet resolved, and I dislike that very much. For years now I’ve been receiving more feedback than I can possibly respond to. And now I’ve ramped that up to an even greater level. Now I can’t even read it all. Logically I know that it’s unrealistic for me or anyone else to expect I can personally follow up with everyone who contacts me. So why do I still feel like everyone deserves a personal response? Why do I feel like I should do my best to maintain every online relationship I have, even though that’s totally impractical these days?

It feels rude to ignore people who take the time to keep in touch with me, especially those who genuinely want to connect or who offer encouragement and support. I think it’s very nice that such people take the time to email me. So how can I respond by ignoring them?

Something is messed up with my beliefs here. I’m looking at this situation from a disempowering perspective. I can see the truth logically, but I’m not feeling it emotionally. My heart just isn’t onboard with my brain’s solution. Some part of me is resisting the idea that possibly for the rest of my life, I’m always going to have to blow off people who reach out to connect with me. This includes saying no most of the time to people who ask for help (and need it).

When I switched to a 100% raw vegan diet this year, something strange happened to me energetically. There are lots of ways to describe it, but one way to explain it is that I used to have an imbalance where my power chakra was a lot more energetic than my heart and third-eye chakras. This year that imbalance has totally flip-flopped. In plain English, this means that my emotions and intuition keep bringing problems to my attention that at present, I lack the ability to solve in a way I feel good about. So I have a lot of motivation and drive to do certain things that I’m simply not able to do to my satisfaction. My solutions often make me feel worse than the problems they’re intended to solve.

This new imbalance has been causing me problems for several months now. On multiple occasions, I’ve acted on some of these heart-centered impulses, but the results weren’t so good. I’ve gone out of my way to help people in a few situations, but the results left me feeling empty and disappointed. This relates to some offline problems I’ve been tackling lately, i.e. stuff I’d never blog about due to the importance of protecting people’s privacy.

This Facebook/Twitter expansion seems like it might be another manifestation of this imbalance. Originally I felt motivated to join these services as a way to reach out and connect with more people. It certainly had that effect. But the side effect is that I now must reject more people than ever, which is the opposite of what I wanted. So yeah, you could say it’s a solution of a sort, but it’s not a solution that makes me feel totally good.

Ultimately in order to resolve these issues, I need to correct the energetic imbalances I’m experiencing. That may take some time though. It’s like whenever I take some kind of action now, I can feel the rippling consequences of it so deeply that I end up focusing too much on the negative side and not enough on the positive. It’s like my emotions and intuitive abilities have become over-energized and don’t know when to shut up.

On the many occasions when I have to blow people off, I wish they wouldn’t think their disappointment so loudly… cuz I can hear it, you know. It’s like constantly having one of those Obi Wan moments after Alderaan got Death Starred.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

This is a majorly long article. At about 8,600 words, I’m pretty sure this is the longest article I’ve ever written. It’s more like a free book chapter. The length is because my goal is to share one of the most comprehensive articles ever written on this topic. If you actually read the whole thing, you should gain many helpful insights from it. There are many subtle ideas here. If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to print it out for later. It goes good with peppermint tea.

Calibration for Long-term Success

When you begin any new activity or endeavor, initially you won’t be calibrated for success, so you’ll experience mostly failure. However, if you keep moving forward with a clear goal in mind, and if you progressively adjust your thinking and actions along the way, you’ll eventually calibrate yourself to get the results you want. This calibration only occurs from directly applying a skill under real-world conditions, not by reading about it.

When you’re in the pre-calibration period, achieving even a small degree of success in a new field requires a massive, all-out effort. Post-calibration, success is practically on auto-pilot; you can consistently achieve the results you want with minimal effort.

Calibration Examples

It’s easiest to understand calibration by way of example, so here are some detailed examples to consider:

Social Dynamics, Making Friends, and Dating

In the field of social dynamics, calibration is the process of learning how to meet new people, initiate conversations, keep conversations going, make new friends, get dates (second meetings), and basically achieve positive social interactions.

How you calibrate your social skills will depend on your personal goals for this area. A salesperson may focus on learning how to build rapport, generate interest, close sales, and construct a database of quality contacts. A professional speaker may learn how to get attention, arouse emotion, generate laughter, and inspire people to action. A pick-up artist may study how to initiate conversations, demonstrate value, build attraction, and achieve successful closes (a close could be getting a phone number, a date, or a sexual encounter).

In high school I was comfortable within certain social circles, but I was still more introverted than I wanted to be. So when I started at college, I decided to remake myself into a more extroverted person. I didn’t really know what I was doing, so I just dove in and attempted to be as social as possible. I accepted any and all opportunities for social interaction. If anyone invited me to go out, I always said yes. I made a huge commitment to elevate this part of my life, and I stuck with it for my entire freshman year.

This strategy actually worked. I hadn’t read any books on social skills at the time, but I quickly calibrated my social skills via trial and error.

Within a few weeks, I’d made dozens of new friends, and I was going to parties every week. If I ever wanted to hang out and do something fun, I could always find someone willing. Not including sleep time, I’m sure I spent more time in other people’s dorm rooms than my own. I was always going out — for parties, poker games, volleyball, ping pong, or just for pizza. I created an absolutely amazing social life and packed more fun into each month than I used to enjoy in a year. I practically became like a different person.

What I found interesting was that in the beginning, it seemed like I was always the one to initiate new connections, but once I felt comfortable doing that, additional connections began flowing into my life almost effortlessly. During my first week at college, I noticed a party across the hall and asked if I could join in the fun (and got a quick yes). After that I was always getting invitations to parties and virtually never had to ask. During the first few months, I initiated a lot of social experiences (Wanna join me for dinner at the dining commons? Wanna grab a slice? Wanna get a poker game together?). But eventually I had so many invites coming to me passively that I didn’t have to initiate as much.

Looking back, I probably went way overboard. The good news was that I really took control of this area of my life. By throwing myself into it with a passion, I quickly became comfortable meeting new people, and I learned to make friends easily. The bad news was that I totally blew off my studies and was flunking out of school. In retrospect it wasn’t such a bad trade off though. I got expelled after my third semester, but the social calibration I gained during that time has served me well ever since. I went to a different school later and still earned my college degrees, but I think the social calibration has proven more valuable in the long run. I don’t feel intimidated in new social situations, and it’s normally easy for me to make new friends and connect with people. Somewhere along the way, I picked up a wife without even trying.

When Erin and I moved to Las Vegas in 2004, we didn’t know anyone in the city. We went from having a lot of friends in L.A. to having zero local friends in Vegas. It was just the two of us and our kids in a big city of strangers. But part of the reason I was happy to move to a new city was that I knew I could make new friends easily. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before I had plenty of great local friends. The bigger challenge for me has been feeling over-socialized at times. There have been some weeks where I’d have preferred more alone time.

This social calibration has benefited me tremendously in business. I can go to a mixer or conference where I don’t know anyone, and I have an easy time making new friends and contacts. I remember when I first started attending the Game Developer’s Conference many years ago, most of the attendees seemed shy and socially awkward. They’d mostly keep to themselves or cling to their co-workers, especially at meal times. Meanwhile, I was going around making new friends, which just felt natural to me. Some of those chance encounters led to new opportunities and deals that helped grow my business. It was also nice to have more friends with similar interests.

One year at that conference, I hung out so late that the shuttles had stopped running. It was pouring rain outside, but a new friend offered me a ride back to my hotel. In fact, something similar happened at a different conference this year. It’s nice to know that my social calibration can keep me out of the rain when necessary.

To some people this may not sound like a big deal. Many people develop such skills in high school or younger. But for a shy kid like me who went to an all boys Catholic high school, it was indeed a big deal.

Although I use my social skills mainly to make friends and business contacts, you can use a similar process to develop dating and relationship skills. For example, if you want to go on more dates, you can calibrate your skills to get good at opening conversations with strangers, develop fun and interesting conversations, build attraction, and at least close with a phone number. There are lots of people teaching this stuff online now, with varying degrees of credibility (and sanity), but the most important thing is to just dive in and start experimenting. You’ll experience some rejection at first, but if you just keep learning and adapting, your skills will calibrate to the point where you’re able to get consistently good results.

If you happen to be suffering from loneliness, most likely it’s because you never took the time to adequately calibrate your social skills. Consequently, you may avoid making new friends because you don’t understand the social nuances of how to do it. You probably feel socially awkward and suffer from an amplified fear of rejection. The solution is to focus on a different goal first. You need to calibrate your social skills before you can apply them. Go out and socialize for the sake of learning how to socialize. Don’t worry about whether or not you make any new friends. Once your social skills are calibrated, which may take a few months, then you can focus on building the kinds of friendships you desire, and it will be much easier for you. Aim to get good first. Then aim to get results.

Martial Arts

If you study martial arts and begin learning to spar, you’re going to be pretty bad at it initially. You’ll have no sense of timing, and you won’t grasp the rhythm of a sparring match. You’ll probably bang knees with your opponent a lot. All the newbies do that.

For the most part, you can expect to look and feel like a total dork. The first time I sparred, which was more than 10 years ago, I was laughing during the match, mostly at how awkward I felt. I’m sure I looked like a total dork.

This is to be expected. You can try to play it cool, but the truth is that the first few times you attempt any new sport, you’re virtually guaranteed to look and feel like a dork. This is because your mind and body aren’t calibrated to that sport.

Within a few months of regular training, your sparring should be fairly well-calibrated for an intermediate level of skill. At the very least, you won’t embarrass yourself. You’ll have sparred many different opponents, and you’ll have a good sense of what to expect. You’ll be able to use different moves successfully, land punches and kicks, and pull off the occasional surprise. I remember how cool it was when I stripped an opponent’s helmet off with an axe kick during a sparring match.

While sparring at the beginner level feels awkward and intimidating, once you gain a little competence, it becomes a fun challenge. At this point the subtleties of the skill begin to reveal themselves. Once your basic sparring moves and tactics are calibrated, you can begin to calibrate your strategic decisions, and this is where the richness of sparring really opens up. The game becomes less physical and more mental. Some would even say it becomes spiritual at a certain point.

Calibrating to a particular sport is a lot like learning to ride a bicycle. Even if you don’t train for a while, the mental calibration remains, and you can easily pick it up again later.

I trained for about three years in Tae Kwon Do in the late 90s with a mix of group classes and private lessons. Over time I got pretty good at sparring and really enjoyed it. I moved away from the studio and stopped training, but several years later, I started training in a different martial art, Kempo, starting as a white belt. Kempo is geared toward self-defense, while TKD is more sporty. Fortunately, all the moves that are legal in TKD are also legal in Kempo, and Kempo allows you to do some things that aren’t legal in TKD, such as punching to the face. (Protective gear is worn during sparring, but there’s still some risk. I suffered a bruised rib and a split lip on different occasions.)

Even though I’d lost most of my flexibility, the first time I sparred in Kempo, I did amazingly well, certainly far beyond the white belt level. From my first Kempo sparring class, I was able to hold my own against one of the black belts in the studio. I was sparring TKD-style, not Kempo-style, but that actually gave me an advantage because the other students weren’t calibrated to that style. TKD is mostly kicking, but Kempo uses more hand techniques. My preference for kicks surprised the other students because they would hover just outside of punching range, but they were still within my TKD-calibrated kicking range, so I hammered them with kicking combos until they figured out they needed to back up. This threw them off mentally, and it took months for many of them to adapt to my style. Of course, it also took me a while to get used to having punches thrown at my head.

After a year of training in Kempo, I was fairly well-calibrated to that style, but I had to unlearn some of my TKD habits that were ineffective in Kempo. I had to work on my speed, defensive maneuvers, and incorporating punches, strikes, and backfists into my sparring.

The point is that once you gain calibration at a particular skill set, you may very well lock in that skill for life. I feel as if basic competence in sparring is so ingrained in me that even if I didn’t spar again for 20 years, I’d be able to quickly pick it up again. I can actually feel that calibration in my body.

Blogging

Since blogging is still a fairly new medium, it usually takes new bloggers a while to properly calibrate. The failure rate is pretty high for newbies because most of them give up before they calibrate for success. I’d say you need to write at least 200-300 posts before you get a decent calibration going, and that assumes you’re making a solid commitment to getting better. For some people it will require more than 500 posts to achieve reasonable calibration, especially if they aren’t very good writers. There’s just a lot to learn.

In particular, there’s a huge gap between writing posts that people read and forget vs. writing posts that people will remember well enough that they’re still referring their friends, family members, and co-workers to read a year later. One of the key calibrations for long-term blogging success is to learn how to write the latter type of post; that’s how you get your archives working for you, and your traffic can still grow even when you aren’t posting anything.

For example, of the top 10 articles on my website that generate the most referrals, only one was written this year. Articles I wrote years ago continue to attract new readers today. However, it took me a long time to learn to write the kinds of articles that would produce such results. I’ve publicly shared how I do this, and that’s been helpful for some people, but it still takes time for new bloggers to “get it” to the point where they can apply it.

Not long ago I was at a party, chatting with a woman who got started blogging after attending a blogging workshop I did a couple years ago. She was telling me some of the mistakes she made with her blog during that time, all of which were mistakes I explicitly said to avoid during the workshop. For example, she wrote lots of timely content instead of timeless content, so she felt like she was on an endless treadmill, and her archives were largely worthless. She remembered that I said to avoid those mistakes too, but that wasn’t enough to stop her from making them. Despite having the opportunity to learn from my experience and avoid the pitfalls I described, she still had to go out and make those mistakes in order to refine her own calibration. I’ve seen countless bloggers make the same mistakes. They seek my advice, I tell them what to do and what not to do and why, and they do exactly what I tell them not to do and then wonder why it isn’t working. Oy vey! This is okay though, as long as they keep plugging ahead and learn from those mistakes. We human beings aren’t known to be the best listeners in the galaxy. We learn much better by doing something than by reading about it.

Different bloggers will naturally calibrate themselves toward different goals. For example, I wanted to calibrate my blogging skills to the goal of having a deep, long-term impact on my readers. I want to change people’s lives for the better. This is partly why I do things differently than most bloggers. I blow off many practices that other pro bloggers defend as sacred. My articles tend to be very long and detailed. I typically avoid posting shallow short info-crack pieces. I post less frequently, sometimes going a week or more with no fresh content. I largely ignore current events. I don’t often link to other blogs. This is all because I’m calibrating my skills toward a certain type of result. Those popular strategies just aren’t very helpful at achieving the results I desire, so I don’t use them. If you want this to become yet another info-crack blog, get used to disappointment. I want to change your life, not provide you with a five-minute distraction.

So be careful when taking advice from others. If you’re calibrating toward a different goal than they are, their advice may hurt you more than help you. It’s best to learn from people who’ve already achieved a similar calibration to what you want to achieve. For example, if you just want to make as much money as possible and don’t care how you get it, then you probably wouldn’t want to model my blogging methods because I’ve calibrated myself toward a different goal. But you might want to follow those bloggers who proudly proclaim they’re in it for the money — there are plenty to select from. On the other hand, if you believe you’re here for a reason and that blogging could potentially become a sustainable expression of your life purpose, then you’d probably benefit greatly by studying my style, since I’ve been getting positive results in this area for years. The point is that if you decide to model someone, be sure you’re modeling someone with compatible goals (and thus a compatible calibration).

One thing I’ve learned from 4+ years of blogging is that it really isn’t that hard in principle to become a successful blogger; however, it’s very hard in practice. Newbies’ minds are typically filled with many false notions. In some ways they need to unload more useless ideas than they need to absorb useful ideas. I’ve raped quite a few pro blogging sacred cows, yet my blog is still going strong.

There are a lot of blogging success factors that are somewhat counter-intuitive. You won’t realize this if you just read sites about blogging because they’ll rarely write about these factors. For the most part, it’s not that anyone is intentionally withholding information. The ideas are simply too subtle for most bloggers to be consciously aware of them. Many calibration issues are like this — they’re just too subtle to appear on any “top 10″ or “how to” lists. Sometimes people who succeed can’t document all the specific reasons they’ve succeeded. They can’t consciously unearth every detail of their unconscious calibration. There are some things I do as a successful blogger that I’ve never seen anyone write or speak about publicly, myself included. Some of the concepts are so subtle or intricate that even if I explained them in detail, nobody but other successful pro bloggers would even understand what I’m talking about, and some people would accuse me of lying.

Yesterday another blogger emailed me a link to a post he wrote, explaining why he personally dislikes my writing style. This is a blogger who says he gets significantly less traffic than I do. His main criticism is that I state my opinions too directly, as if they’re facts. This is a perfectly valid criticism of course; I confess to doing this liberally. The attitude of that blogger was that this is a personal defect I should correct. However, what he probably doesn’t realize is that this is a trait I developed over time as part of my calibration process for blogging success. I’m sure his advice is well-meaning, but I know that if I take his advice, my results will actually decline. I can say he’s wrong and that I’m right because I’ve learned which approach works best for me via trial and error. As a generalization, I know that making strong statements works better than making weak statements.

This is one of many subtle calibration refinements I learned from years of blogging. I discovered that prefacing every opinion with phrases like “I think…” or “I feel…” or “In my opinion…” leads to the creation of wimpy content. So this was actually a personal defect I learned to correct, and I intentionally make strong statements. My readers aren’t stupid. They know that since this is my website, such statements represent my thoughts, opinions, and beliefs. When I offer up my thoughts directly, as opposed to watering them down with qualifiers, people are challenged to agree or disagree with me. This helps people question their beliefs, strengthening some while weakening others. This is what I like to see.

Another benefit to making strong statements is that other bloggers, including the one critical of my posting style, will take the time to write posts just to disagree with me, thereby sending traffic to my website and actively helping me achieve my goals. Yet because their content is usually wimpier, they don’t benefit equally from this same mechanism. There are a lot of subtle interactions going on here, and I’m only offering a cursory overview here, but the net effect is that by posting strong statements, I enjoy more blogging success, but I also attract more criticism. However, the criticism actually benefits me. This is pretty counterintuitive, isn’t it?

Part of the reason I’ve been so successful as a blogger is that people remember what I’ve written, especially if they disagree with it. If you look at the comments written about my work throughout the blogosphere, you’ll find that most people have very polarized opinions about my work. Some people love my work. Some absolutely despise it. Very few are neutral. However, love it or hate it, these same people keep discussing my work, constantly spreading the word to those who don’t know about me. Such controversy makes people curious and brings new readers to my website every day. Isn’t this just insidious? The more people dislike me, the more they actively go out and market my work to others, and the more they help me achieve my goal of helping people grow. This is so effective that I can even tell such people how they’re helping me, and they’ll keep right on doing it.

I could certainly write more agreeable posts that few people would find objectionable. I could apologize for every opinion of mine that isn’t mainstream. But that’s totally the wrong calibration for my goals, not to mention for my personality. It’s way too cowardly. I don’t want to calibrate as a wimpy blogger that nobody can find fault with. It’s more effective to calibrate as a blogger who challenges people and makes a difference, even if it sends some people running the other way (to go out and promote my work instead of reading it themselves).

Uncalibrated newbie bloggers often blog scared. They try to please everyone and avoid taking risks. Consequently, they write posts that are easily forgotten and which will generate few referrals. Then some new upstart blogger comes along with a better calibration, breaks all the newbie rules, and surges ahead in traffic. And the other newbies think it’s luck. It’s not luck though. A good example is the blog Stuff White People Like. I first happened upon it shortly after it launched, and I knew it would become successful. I could see it had a great calibration for building traffic quickly — it was only a matter of time before it took off. The posts were politically incorrect to the max, but they were witty and memorable. Sure enough, that blog became a hit and even led to a book deal. If this sort of success surprises you as a blogger, it means your calibration is off. If your calibration is solid, you should be able to browse through the early posts on that blog and NOT be surprised by its success. Overall, if you’re often surprised by the success of others in your field, it means your calibration isn’t very good yet. As your own calibration matures, you’ll get better at being able to predict successes.

One of the keys to success in any field, especially blogging, is to accept that there are good reasons the successful people are succeeding, and it has nothing to do with luck. If you see someone who’s getting better results than you, even if it’s someone with less experience who started after you, chances are they have a more accurate calibration than you. You can rail against that, feel jealous, and call them names, but it’s better to take a step back, eat your humble pie, and learn from such people if you can. I’ve learned some pretty cool things from bloggers who started long after I did. Although my current calibration is obviously working, I know I can always improve, and I never want to think of myself as such as expert that I can’t keep learning and growing.

One of the worst things you can do in blogging is to write in such a manner that will offend no one. If you don’t offend or challenge anyone, you’re probably writing content that isn’t very memorable or meaningful. If you write what people expect, their minds won’t store it. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any highly successful bloggers that don’t have multiple negative rants written about them somewhere. All of them piss people off. Most of them aren’t intentionally trying to upset people. It’s just that upsetting people seems to be a natural consequence of the calibration required for blogging success.

This isn’t unique to blogging either. Think of any successful media personality, and I’m sure you can find some rants about them with a quick online search. In fact, the biggest stars will have tons of rants. Consider Tom Cruise for instance.

Some people might assume this sort of controversy is a side-effect of success, like perhaps that celebrity got a big head after enjoying some success (causing people to turn against him/her), or maybe the rants appeared as a side effect of the celebrity’s popularity (like it’s just a numbers game). I’d say that’s the wrong way to look at this. It’s more likely that generating controversy was part of the celebrity’s early calibration process. If anything, the ability to handle controversy probably helped them become a celebrity in the first place.

Some of the first articles I ever wrote, even before I launched StevePavlina.com, generated controversy that helped turn them into fast hits. An example was the article Do It Now, which I wrote in 2000. Lots of people love that article, but some people find it disturbing and feel compelled to rant about it (even eight years after it was first posted online), perhaps because it makes them realize just how unproductive they are compared to what they could be achieving if they really made an all-out effort. Unfortunately, it took me years to figure out why that article became a hit and to learn how to reproduce the kind of impact it had. It also took me a long time to realize that the negative backlash generated by that article was actually helping me grow my readership… and that I should accept and embrace such critical feedback rather than worry about it. What I initially interpreted as negative feedback (i.e. I did something wrong) was actually positive feedback (I did something right). Interpreting emails from people saying “you are wrong” as evidence that you did something right is again pretty counterintuitive, isn’t it?

This is a key point of calibration. When you’re building a new skill, you have to look at the big picture in terms of the results you’re getting. You might do something that seems to generate immediate negative feedback from people, but when you step back and look at the big picture, you may see that the overall feedback is overwhelmingly positive. This happens a lot in blogging, where a reader may chew you out for something you wrote, and then six months later, they’re singing your praises for helping them achieve a breakthrough they never thought possible. And even if they aren’t singing your praises, they’re out there telling people why they hate you, thereby making people curious and sending you more traffic.

A similar effect also happens in social dynamics, where the “bad guys” can actually attract more success because they have so many detractors unwittingly doing their marketing for them.

Newbie Fear

Perhaps the toughest part of calibration is dealing with newbie fear. This is the fear of failure or rejection we experience when learning a new skill. Initially we suck, we know full well that we suck, and we really don’t want to deal with the embarrassment and humiliation of other people witnessing just how badly we suck. This is most distressing with skills that must be calibrated in public, such as dating skills and public speaking.

There are some ways to mitigate newbie fear. One of the best ways is to connect with other newbies and go through the initial training together. When you look up to experts who are already well-calibrated, it’s easy to become intimidated and psyche yourself out. You’ll tend to hold yourself to an unreasonable standard of performance. But if you befriend and hang out with other newbies, the learning process can be a lot more fun. It’s comforting to have buddies that suck just as badly as you do. You can blow off steam together, share your latest insights, and poke fun at each other as you learn. “Misery loves company” isn’t such a bad idea in this case.

The key is to associate with newbies who are committed to learning and growing. If you hang out with flakes, it probably won’t help you much. Try to identify other newbies that you predict are likely to stick with it and succeed, and hang out with them if you can. This will help increase your commitment without making you feel too intimidated.

When I first started learning about blogging, I enjoyed connecting with other newbie bloggers. In the old days (old as in four years ago), we swapped links with each other, shared advice, and found ways to help each other gain traffic. Many of those people gave up and quit of course, but a few are doing very well today. It’s cool to watch your newbie friends improve their calibration right along with you, even though everyone improves at different rates.

Ultimately, you’ll only get so much mileage out of trying to reduce newbie fear. The fastest way to overcome it is to simply charge straight at it. Just accept that you’ll suck, that some embarrassment will happen, and that the only way out is through. This is especially important for building good social skills.

You’ll only get so far by sitting at home reading, listening to audio programs, and watching videos. Such educational aids can help, but they can never substitute for real-world experience. Use them as supplemental materials to refine your in-field experimentation. If you want to become a successful blogger, start blogging immediately. If you want to build an online business, get some kind of website online right away. If you want to improve your social skills, go outside and meet people tonight. Yes, you’re going to suck at first. But if you push through the newbie fear and do it anyway, the fear will subside, and you’ll begin to calibrate your skills very quickly.

Even if you read all the books in your field, you will still suck on your first in-field experience. You won’t even be able to apply what’s in those books. So get out in the field and start calibrating.

Get that first crappy “Hello, World” blog post under your belt. Let out that inane “Hey, baby. What’s your sign?” pick-up line. Bang shins with your sparring partner as you scream, “Ouch!”

Newbie Pride

If you’re a newbie at something, and you’re feeling hesitant to go after some live in-field experience, realize that this is very normal. Many newbies resist being newbies, but this resistance only makes them more nervous. So realize that a big part of the problem is your own resistance to being a newbie. You’ll get into the field sooner if you can accept this phase of your learning curve.

My advice for turning this around is to fully embrace your newbieness. Don the badge of Newbie Pride. Instead of fearing that you’ll look like a total dork, take this the other way. Embrace and even exaggerate your dorkiness. Don’t try to resist it. Blow it up even larger.

In martial arts classes, there’s no hiding your newbie status. You wear a white belt, so everyone knows you’re a beginner. This actually makes it easier because you know people don’t expect much of you. The lower belts may be nervous about sparring, but since they know that nobody expects much of them, most are able to get out on the mat and spar without undue hesitation.

However, in other fields, people don’t wear white belts. This has positive and negative side-effects.

In online business, for example, many newbies try to hide their newbieness. I made this mistake when I started my first business. I pretended to be an experienced business person when I just started. I talked about my staff even when I was the only person in the business. That was totally unnecessary, not to mention really dumb. When I started blogging, however, I didn’t try to hide my newbieness. I embraced that dorky beginner phase and had fun with it. And because of that, more experienced bloggers reached out to help me. Back then, “more experienced” meant they started blogging a month before I did.

I still maintain this attitude today. If I’m new at something, I’ll openly share my newbie dorkiness and hesitation. It doesn’t embarrass me to share my weaknesses. On the contrary, it actually invites a lot of help and advice from non-newbies who want to help me calibrate.

The Master Newbie Pick-up Artist

Suppose you’re a guy who wants to learn how to pick up women at night clubs, but you’re terrified of going out, and you can’t imagine walking up to a woman and delivering an opener. Realize that so much of your resistance is because you’re trying to appear cooler and more experienced than you really are. Do you realize this is totally unnecessary? It’s better to embrace your newbieness and use it to your advantage.

If I were trying to develop this particular skill, here’s what I’d do. I’d go up to women and tell them the plain and simple truth. I’ve never actually done this, so take my advice with a grain of salt because this isn’t a calibration I’ve bothered to develop, but I’ll bet you it would work well at initiating fun conversations.

I’d walk up to a group of women with a big smile on my face. I’d get their attention and say to them, “Hey guys, I’m currently learning how to meet women at night clubs, but I’m a total newbie at this. Would you mind if I practice on you just for fun for a couple minutes? And would you give me some honest feedback afterwards?”

I suspect you’ll probably get a laugh if you do this, and if you don’t, then the women aren’t likely worth talking to anyway, so you can quickly disqualify them as boring or humorless. You’ve taken the pressure off by initiating a “practice session,” so it doesn’t even matter what you say next. Your next line could even be, “Okay what do you think of this? [Switch to deep voice] Hey, baby. What’s your sign?” That would probably get another laugh, but even a groan isn’t bad. You can keep saying other funny lines. You could also kick off a meta conversation about meeting women at night clubs, such as by asking a question like, “Okay, after I do the opener, what should I talk about next? Would this be a good time to tell you a quick story to demonstrate that I’m a cool guy? Should I tell you about the time I …?” The context is that you’re just practicing, but in truth you’ve already opened the group.

This is an untested suggestion of course, so you’ll have to try it yourself to see if it works for you. The general idea is not to hide your newbieness. It’s perfectly okay to be a newbie and even to admit it to people. When you’re a newbie, your initial goal is to calibrate your skills, not to achieve a particular result. So take the pressure off as to whether or not you succeed or fail. You can go for results after you’ve calibrated your skills.

If you pretend to be an expert when you’re not, you’ll just stress yourself out. Wear the badge of Newbie Pride.

Incidentally, if you actually try this, please let me know how it goes. I’d love to hear how people react to it. I think this could work for men and women alike.

In fact, if a woman came up and used this opener on me, I’d probably laugh and say, “Sure, let’s practice.” I’d be pretty impressed by a woman who used such a line because it demonstrates a high level of awareness with a certain playfulness. I’d probably fall in love on the spot.

Great… now I’ve gotten myself all riled up to the point where I totally want to go to a night club and try this for real just to see what happens.

The Skill of Calibration

Being able to calibrate yourself to a new skill set is a skill in itself. The more skills you learn, the faster you’ll be able to achieve competence in each new skill you attempt.

One thing that happens as you calibrate to many different skills is that you become more comfortable being a newbie in general. Once you’ve gone through the newbie phase enough times, it ceases to bother you so much. You can start from rock bottom in a new field and be mostly okay with how badly you suck. You get used to it, and you know you’ll eventually get better. This makes it easier to put in the time as a newbie, so you can quickly progress to intermediate. For me the newbie phase is often the most fun and exciting because I learn the fastest during this time.

Another benefit of having lots of calibration experience is that you’ll be less intimidated by the experts. You’ll accept that they fine-tuned their calibration over many years. This will help you develop the patience necessary to keep hacking away in order to build long-term competence.

When I became a raw foodist earlier this year, I spent a lot of time communicating with successful long-term raw foodists. Initially, the information I gained was just overwhelming. I was offered thousands of pages of text to read (books, e-books, articles), plus audio, video, and live lectures to attend. There were some weeks where learning this skill practically became my full-time job. I had to unlearn many bad habits that were holding me back, not to mention breaking a lifelong addiction to cooked food. This was a total lifestyle overhaul, not just a minor diet change.

After months of study and practice, I eventually calibrated myself to being a successful raw foodist, well enough that I felt I could maintain it on autopilot. I’d probably label myself an advanced intermediate at this point. I have a solid grasp of the fundamentals, cooked foods are no longer appealing to me, I feel fantastic, and I love the foods I eat. As part of this re-calibration to raw foods, my taste buds have shifted a lot. I actually crave fresh greens now. I feel mildly deprived if I don’t eat at least a pound of greens each day. Now that I’ve achieved a decent calibration, maintaining this lifestyle is pretty much a no-brainer for me. But during the first few months, I had to invest a lot of thought and effort into it.

Immersion and Experimentation

When learning new skills, my preference is to get through the newbie phase as quickly as possible, so I can start enjoying some good results. In order to accomplish this, I’ll often put other areas of my life on hold, so I can devote the bulk of my time to building competence in the new skill. I don’t always do this, but if the skill is important to me, I prefer the strategy of total immersion instead of working on it a little bit each week.

The danger of being stuck in beginner mode for too long is that your early motivation may fade, and more self-discipline will be required to keep going. Many new bloggers give up within the first few months, well before they’re getting any results. It takes them too long to calibrate their skills to what is required for success in blogging, so they never make it past the beginner phase. After a few months, they still haven’t calibrated, so they continue to make the sorts of mistakes that a well-calibrated blogger could spot within seconds. For example, they write boring posts that nobody cares to read, or they write time-bound posts that will be worthless a year later. It takes too much discipline for them to keep going with no results to show for it, so they give up. Then they repeat the same process again in a different field. Hopefully by now you can clearly see that this is a loser strategy.

On the other hand, I’ve seen bloggers who’ve built a lot of traffic very quickly, earning $1000+ per month within a few months after they started. They threw themselves wholeheartedly into learning everything they could about blogging, and they were willing to be open-minded and flexible. They learned what worked for them and did more of it. They learned what didn’t work and stopped doing it. They understood that if they wrote a blog post, and it generated no increase in traffic whatsoever, then perhaps they should write something totally different instead of sticking with more of the same.

Proper calibration requires a lot of experimentation. If you don’t get a good result, you can interpret that as a negative result, and change something — change anything. But don’t keep doing what didn’t work, expecting that it’s just a matter of time before things pick up. It’s not really a matter of time. It’s a matter of skill.

When you immerse yourself in learning a new skill, don’t focus on trying to get results with the skill — at least not right away. Instead, focus on getting good at the skill.

For example, if you’re learning to blog, focus on writing posts in a variety of styles. You want to calibrate yourself to get good at writing blog posts that generate referrals. Don’t worry about trying to make money with your blog. Don’t even worry about trying to build a certain level of traffic. You can focus on those goals later. But initially, aim to figure out how to semi-consistently write awesome posts that generate referrals. If you can’t figure out how to do that, your blog will surely fail. But if you can calibrate yourself to this skill, then you can shift from building your skill to applying your skill. That’s where you can start really building your traffic and generating income from your work.

A New Equilibrium – Post-Calibration

The funny thing about calibration is that once you reach a certain point, you’ll tend to let go of all the tricks, tactics, and techniques you learned along the way. Now you’re able to maintain a certain level of success just by being yourself.

This happens because the skills you learned have been internalized. You no longer have to think about the details because your subconscious mind takes care of them for you. Applying your skill becomes much easier when you reach this point.

Blogging is largely effortless for me these days. I can crank out a detailed new article with fairly little effort. I got the idea for this particular article while I was at the gym this morning. I outlined it in my head while I took a shower. Later I sat down to write, and the words just flowed. It took me a while to write an article of this length of course, but the process was easy and effortless. The reason it was easy is that I’ve already calibrated myself to the skill of writing articles. There are lots of details that go into writing an article of this length, but I don’t have to consciously think about the process of how to write. It’s all internalized. I can just sit down at my desk, the ideas start flowing, and my fingers automatically start typing. I can chunk the task of writing an article as a single to-do item, even an article of this length, and it isn’t a big deal to me.

When I write a new blog post, I don’t consciously think about all the details that other pro bloggers would tell you are important. I just blog. It feels like a very simple thing to do, not nearly as complicated as it might seem. However, the reason I can keep it simple and still do well in this field is because I went through that complicated newbie phase years ago. I internalized the techniques that proved effective for me, so today I don’t even think about them anymore.

Putting a skill on automatic pilot is the long-term benefit of good calibration. Once you gain this calibration, you can’t really lose it. You may need to re-calibrate your skills from time to time to adapt to changing conditions, but that usually isn’t as hard as acquiring the initial calibration.

If you took away my blog and all my articles, and I had to start over from scratch as an anonymous blogger today, do you think I could repeat my success? I’m sure I could do so very quickly because I’ve already calibrated my blogging skills. I typically experience quick success when I can rely on a previous calibration, such as learning to spar in a new martial art or building a social network of friends in a new city. One of the reasons I achieved quick success as a blogger was that I benefited from my previous calibration of running a profitable online business for years, so I was able to adapt much of that skill to the medium of blogging. I was also able to adapt my blogging calibration to writing a book.

When you calibrate, you lock in a new skill. Then you can use that skill to generate consistently good results. This is a wonderful place to be. Post-calibration, you’ll typically feel very confident within the realm of that skill. You have every reason to feel confident because you’re genuinely competent. I’d feel comfortable starting a new online business. I’d feel comfortable moving to a new city where I didn’t know anyone. I’d feel confident studying a new style of martial arts. I’d feel confident giving a new speech. However, the first time I did these things, I hadn’t yet calibrated myself for success. The only kind of confidence I was able to muster back then was the “fake it till you make it kind,” which is more false bravado than genuine confidence.

Calibrate Is a Verb

Don’t let the newbie phase get you down. Everyone has to go through it. Get a newbie training partner if you must, but turn toward that newbie fear, and run straight at it. The fear will soon go away. It’s not a big deal to fail or to get rejected. That’s part of being a newbie. Accept it. You will get better.

In order to calibrate your skills, you have to take action. You can’t just sit at home reading or studying training materials. You must go into the field and do field work under real-world conditions.

As Mike Tyson said, “Everybody’s got plans… until they get hit.”

I know so many people who’ve spent months reading about and talking about starting an online business. They still don’t have an online business. But they just keep talking about it and planning it, as if that’s some form of phantom progress. Their calibration is still at zero. They think they’re getting closer to their goal. From my perspective, they haven’t even started yet. They’re just procrastinating.

Such people would do much better if they stopped reading and planning and started doing. Nobody earned a black belt from reading about martial arts.

Which approach do you think will generate the best results? Reading about a diet for 30 days? Or doing a 30-day trial of that diet?

Which will improve your social skills the most? Watching social skills videos for 30 days? Or going out every night for 30 days and starting up conversations with strangers?

Which will generate the best blogging results? Reading blogs on blogging for 30 days? Or starting your own blog and posting your own blog entries for 30 days?

Which will generate the best physical results? Read about weight training for 30 days? Or hit the gym and do 30 days of weight training?

Reading and studying will give you knowledge and information that sits in your mind. That seems like a good thing, but you’ll still have zero results to show for your efforts. You’re actually no closer to your goals. You’re still at the starting line. But if you go out and do the best you can to apply what you know right now, even if your understanding is full of holes, you’ll quickly learn what works under real-world conditions, and you’ll adapt. You’ll make a huge leap forward in your calibration. You’ll also generate some real-world results that may benefit you.

Get your nose out of the books and onto the field. Take your licks as they come, and learn from them. Build your skills under real-world conditions, so you can actually apply them to get results. Don’t just read about life. Live it.

Reading and learning are awesome, but make sure you’re using these as supplements for in-field experience, not substitutes. If you’re reading about any skill you want to develop, but you aren’t regularly performing in the field yet, you’re just procrastinating. Deep down you already knew that, didn’t you? I’m here to remind you of this, so you can hate me for it and help spread the word about how awful I am.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

Breaking the Juice Feast Today

I haven’t broken my juice feast yet, but I plan to do so later today. It will take a few days to transition back to solid foods. I’ll still drink all my juices today — I have about 4.5 quarts in the fridge that I made this morning — but I’ll be adding a green smoothie as well. I’ll probably keep it simple and just make a smoothie from bananas, spinach, and water.

The thought of going back to solid foods isn’t particularly appealing right now, mainly because I still feel mildly nauseous this morning. I don’t even find fresh juice appealing, but my stomach is growling right now, so I suppose I should give it something.

I’m glad to be transitioning off the juice feast. This was a rough 30 days, and the results were different than I expected. If things had gone differently, I might have continued juice feasting another 2 months, but at this point I’m feeling ready to go back to solid foods. I don’t think it would be a wise idea to keep going beyond this point.

It’s hard for me to assess the effects of the juice feast because I haven’t transitioned out of it yet. I need to return to solid foods and regain some perspective before I can assess the value of this experiment.

Weight Loss

After being stuck at roughly the same weight (171 pounds) for 14 days straight, I finally dropped below that. This morning I weighed 169.8, so I lost a total of 9.2 pounds on this 30-day juice feast. My body fat also dropped about 3 percentage points during this time.

This is the lowest I’ve weighed since 1999, when I was doing lots of distance running and training for a marathon.

Dry Skin

I’ve been having problems with dry skin for most of the juice feast. Yesterday while I was working out at the gym, one of my knuckles started bleeding because the skin had cracked. I have bloody cracks on several fingers. This is similar to what I experienced during my 30-day trial of the 80-10-10 raw food diet.

I tried rubbing lots of coconut oil on my skin, and that seemed to slow the degradation, but it certainly didn’t stop the problem from getting worse.

It seems that my skin doesn’t do well on such a low-fat diet. I suspect the dry skin problem will be gone within a week or two once I start incorporating more fat into my diet again (mainly avocados, nuts, seeds, and coconut).

Intuitive Boost

I’ve really noticed a boost in my intuitive abilities this past week.

I decided to take advantage of this improvement while it lasts, so last week I spent about 5 hours journaling through some problems I wanted to solve. The solutions I came up with weren’t dramatically new or unusual. The main difference is the degree of clarity I felt about each solution. Previously I had to do a lot of reasoning to find a solution I felt good about, such that I could be confident that it was the correct path for me. But this time my intuition helped me bypass much of the analysis. I could more clearly see the correct solutions, and I understood why they were correct. It’s like I had a more holistic field of view and could grasp the big picture more quickly. I was able to intuitively sense my way to the solution faster than I could analytically think my way there.

I hope some of this intuitive boost remains after I transition back to solid foods. It would be a nice gain to lock in permanently.

30 Days Without Eating

This was a tough challenge to be sure, but not in the way I expected. I thought the hard part would be the daily grind of making each day’s juices and feeling like I was missing out on solid foods. I also thought it might be rough dealing with the physical detox symptoms too. Those parts were challenging to be sure, but the hardest part was dealing with the emotional detox. On many days I had to deal with seemingly random emotional shifts, including feelings of major stress, depression, and anger. It was difficult to prevent myself from acting on those feelings, and I didn’t always succeed. Much of the time I felt grumpy and hostile.

My productivity in terms of creative output plummeted during this juice feast. I thought I’d get a creative boost and would be writing a lot more articles, but it was hard to get anything done. Aside from posting the juice feast updates, I had little motivation for creative writing. I was getting plenty of ideas, but I didn’t feel drawn to express them. Writing was actually harder, not easier.

My focus was drawn inward, and I didn’t enjoy socializing with people as much as I used to. I began spending more time alone. I did a lot of reading and reflecting during this time. Even now I feel I’d much rather be alone than spend time with other people. I was still able to socially interact with people during the juice feast, but those interactions were often draining for me.

Erin commented that my personality was very different during the juice feast. She said I seemed like a different person.

Will I ever do another long-term juice feast? That’s hard to say. At this point I would have to say probably not. I’m glad I did it — this has undoubtedly been a major growth experience — but I’m not sure if it was worth all the effort. Aside from the weight loss, I think the #1 benefit I gained was to give my self-discipline a major workout.

I was tempted to cheat many times during this juice feast, and it was NOT easy to hold myself back. I’m happy to say that I never cheated though. Knowing that I’ve been able to go 30 days without solid food will serve as a powerful reference experience for the rest of my life. To me this probably the most significant gain.

My juice feasting results seem fairly weak compared to some of the amazing experiences others have experienced. I’m glad I gained this first-hand experience, since now my curiosity is satisfied, and I can turn my attention to other growth pursuits. I can still continue to detoxify my body on a raw food diet, albeit more slowly.

This was probably the hardest 30-day trial I’ve ever done. Of course I originally set out to do 92 days, not 30, but I’m content with my decision to stop at this point. I don’t see any indication that the problems I’ve encountered are going to improve, and I wouldn’t want to go through another 62 days if they’re going to be much like the previous 30. I don’t feel that continuing the juice feast would be a good use of my time and energy right now.

Someone asked me if I would look back with regret if I didn’t go the full 92 days. Honestly I have to say no. Given what I experienced thus far, I can’t imagine looking back years from now, regretting that I didn’t continue beyond this point. I think I’d be amazed that I continued as long as I did. This is how I feel about my 80-10-10 raw diet trial. When I look back, I’m somewhat surprised I kept going the full 30 days, despite having major issues with dry skin. I don’t think I needed to complete the full 30 days to realize it wasn’t right for me.

If I made an error here, it was probably on the side of pushing myself too hard. My body was giving me indications that it didn’t like the juice feast, and I relied heavily on self-discipline to push through that resistance.

Many people who talk about listening to their bodies use such words to justify slacking off, but they do make a valid point. “My body said I needed a hot fudge sundae” is undisciplined self-delusion. That’s an addictive craving, not a genuine need. But cracked, bleeding skin is a pretty clear signal that some need isn’t being met. When I do future health experiments, I’ll endeavor to give more attention to those signals and change directions if things aren’t working.

Years ago I needed to err on the side of rigidity in order to build my self-discipline. Now I need to work on developing more flexibility.

I hope you learned something from my juice feasting experiment. Hopefully I’ll feel better soon and can return to writing new articles once I return to solid foods.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

Weight Loss

I weighed 170.4 this morning for a net loss of 8.6 pounds in 22 days.

I’m now wearing my belt one notch tighter.

Feeling Unmotivated

Aside from the weight loss, I honestly haven’t noticed any significant breakthroughs or serious benefits thus far, at least not the kind that would justify the effort.

I’m relying on willpower and self-discipline to get through each day. The task of making each day’s juices still feels quite tedious to me. I can do it, but it’s not something I look forward to. It basically amounts to 60-90 minutes of tedium.

Also, drinking the juices has become pretty boring. I’ve been looking at each quart of juice thinking, “Blech.” Even straight pineapple juice doesn’t thrill me anymore.

I’m not really craving solid food at this time, but I am attracted to eating a wide variety of raw foods again. I keep thinking about all the different salad combos I’d like to enjoy. I miss the experience of eating. The thought of not eating anything for another 69 days feels very depressing.

Feeling Disconnected

The way I feel now reminds me a lot of how I felt near the end of my polyphasic sleep experiment. I kept it up for 5-1/2 months and then went back to monophasic sleep, largely because I began feeling more and more disconnected from everyone, especially my family. Our lives were totally out of sync while we were on different sleep schedules. I ended up spending a lot of time alone at night while my family slept. I’m glad I did the experiment, since polyphasic sleep was an incredible thing to experience, but I’m also glad that I returned to monophasic sleep.

It’s been bugging me that I’ve been largely out of sync with my family for the past 3+ weeks. While juice feasting I’ve been feeling more disconnected from them. They’ve all been very supportive of what I’m doing, but I feel cut off because I can’t share meals with them anymore. It’s very unpleasant for me to watch them eat while I’m sipping a juice, so I don’t like doing that. But then we never share any meal times together. It’s beginning to feel like I’m a live-in guest in some other family’s home.

Before the juice feast, I gradually learned to be okay with the rest of the family eating cooked food while I ate something raw. It took a while, but I eventually got used to it, mainly because cooked food no longer appealed to me. On a few occasions the whole family would eat something raw together, like a big fruit salad for breakfast. Also, we would often go out to eat together, especially at local buffets, since then everyone could get what they wanted. We haven’t gone out to eat together since I started juice feasting, so those experiences are gone too.

This would be different if I were a bachelor doing this on my own, but it’s pretty hard being a juice feaster in a non-juice feasting family. I’ve been pondering whether it’s a good idea to continue juice feasting, given that it’s having the negative side effect of making me feel more disconnected from my family.

When the kids ask me to make them something to eat, that’s pretty hard for me to do now. It doesn’t feel right to prepare solid foods during this time, but nor does it feel right to deny their requests or tell them to ask Erin all the time.

I don’t have a good solution for this right now. I’m glad the juice feast is temporary no matter what, but I can’t shake the feeling that I may be sacrificing too much by continuing this experiment. I’d have to do Thanksgiving and Christmas on my own as well. As a bachelor, I could handle that. But as part of a family, hmmm… not so sure.

At this point I don’t know if this is a temporary emotional blip that will soon pass… or if these feelings of discontent will continue to grow stronger. Right now I suspect it’s the latter.

Is It Time to Break the Juice Feast?

David Rainoshek lists six criteria for when to break out of a juice feast. If you meet any one of these criteria, that’s a sign that it’s time to break the feast and transition back to solid foods again.

1. If your heart is not in it, has not been for 3-5 days or more, and you are definitely about to eat something.
2. You have no guidance from a health professional, and/or are feasting with feelings of fear.
3. You are not drinking enough juice or the right juice to provide your body with all the calories it requires, and do not feel that you can maintain the discipline of doing so.
4. Your weight hit 10% below your ideal, and by virtue of drinking 5-8 quarts of juice per day with increased superfoods, has risen back steadily over at least 4-10 days.
5. Your weight has hit 10% below your ideal, and has continued to trend downwards. You are feeling hungry, and are not feeling compelled (which is totally cool) to drink 5-8 quarts of juice per day to increase bodyweight.
6. You have reached 92 Days of Juice Feasting, and are ready to move back into eating, to Juice Feast more at a later date, once you have had a chance to regroup from this significant life event.

Items 2-6 don’t apply, but I do meet part of the first criterion. My heart hasn’t been in this for several days now. Am I definitely about to eat something though? Not necessarily. I could probably keep going on willpower for quite a while longer — the whole 92 days if necessary — but I’m not sure if that’s wise. I’ve built some pretty strong self-discipline muscles over the years, and this has served me well in many situations, but I recognize that it’s not always a good idea to over-rely on it.

I’m glad to have made it 23 days on just juice, which is more than I’ve ever done before, so I can’t consider this experiment a failure no matter what happens. I haven’t decided what I’ll do yet, so by default I’ll continue the juice feast for now and give this some more thought.

What Would You Do?

In the meantime I’d like to invite your feedback, in the hopes that other people might be able to see this situation more objectively than I can. I’m so close to this situation that it’s hard for me to see the big picture clearly.

Do you feel that I should carry on and push through these feelings of disconnection with my family and go the remaining 69 days no matter what?

Or is this a sign that I should back off and begin to transition back to solid foods?

What would you do if you were me?

I really haven’t made a decision at this point, so I’m genuinely interested in your opinion. Time to use my “Ask the audience” lifeline.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

Steve, you’re encountering lots of obstacles on this juice feast such as food cravings, feeling sick, and emotional yo-yoing. Ergo, this is clearly the wrong path, and you should quit.

I hear similar feedback whenever I conduct public experiments. It makes no difference what the experiment is about.

Where do people get the idea that encountering obstacles is a sign that you should quit pursuing a goal?

The truth is that you’re going to encounter obstacles in the pursuit of any meaningful goal. The obstacles aren’t there to derail you. The obstacles are there to help you grow stronger.

Sometimes you’ll encounter obstacles that are too much for you, you’ll run up against your limits, and you’ll be forced to quit. Sometimes you’ll meet a weight that’s too much for you to lift, and it just won’t budge. There’s no dishonor in that. That’s just life.

But why would I let a few bumps like not feeling well or dealing with emotional detox stop me from continuing to pursue an interesting goal? The mere existence of obstacles isn’t a good enough reason to quit. Obstacles are to be expected. Figuring out how to deal with them is an integral part of the challenge.

Obstacles help us become stronger through a process of progressive training. Each new obstacle we encounter and overcome makes us more capable of handling even bigger challenges.

I don’t take on challenges like a juice feast with the naive expectation that it’s going to be smooth sailing the whole way. What would be the reward in that? That would be like going to the gym and doing my workout on a machine set at level 1. I’d just be wasting my time.

Even when you go with the flow, there are still rocks and whirlpools to be avoided. That’s what makes the ride fun and interesting. Otherwise you’d just be sloshing around in the kiddie pool.

Growth

I enjoy pursuing goals that push me to grow, goals I’m not sure I can successfully accomplish. If I’m 100% certain I can accomplish a goal, I don’t see much point in pursuing it. Such goals usually bore me.

The goals that interest me most are the ones that cause me to say to myself, “Wow… I’m really not sure if I’m cut out for this. This looks pretty damned tough. I’m going to have to push myself to a whole new level in order to make it to the end. I honestly don’t know if I’ll be able to pull this off.”

But then I think to myself, “What if I fail? No big deal. At least I’ll know where my limits are. But what if I succeed? How awesome would that be? I’d gain an incredible new reference experience for the rest of my life. I’d have an amazing experience to share with others. And what new challenges might I tackle beyond this one?” That’s the kind of thinking that excites me.

You Can’t Do That!

I’ve been hearing the line above for the past 30 years.

I remember when I started selling my computer games online, people would say to me, “Everyone knows there’s no money to be made in shareware. You’re deluded if you think you can succeed at that. At best you could earn like $50 a month — if you’re lucky!”

Years later it was, “Everyone knows you can’t make a living from blogging. There’s way too much free content out there, so obviously nobody is going to pay anything for it.”

And today it’s, “Everyone knows that it’s crazy to try to live on just juice (or raw foods). That’s just common sense. Ya gotta eat the four food groups for balance, ya know. Human beings evolved to suck on cows’ teats.”

Apparently if you try anything that goes against the mainstream, it means you’re being fanatical, crazy, and deluded. Supposedly common sense dictates that we all get regular corporate jobs, eat factory-produced “foods” from cardboard boxes, and live our lives just like we imagine everyone else does. Then quietly die.

I feel sorry for the people who genuinely think this way… and live their lives accordingly.

I know it upsets some people when I run experiments or pursue goals that go beyond mainstream thinking. It reminds people that they still have plenty of growth ahead of them and that they can’t get complacent and settle. That really pisses people off to no end. Some of them figure the best way to deal with those feelings is to attack the messenger with silly labels like fanatical or extremist… even though they secretly wish they could be labeled as such.

And guess what… I have the same issues. I also get pissed off when I see people out there doing something beyond what I think is possible for me. It bugs the heck out of me.

I remember the first time I heard about juice feasting, which was roughly a year ago. My initial reaction was, “Nothing but juice for 92 days? You have got to be kidding me!” I thought such people were nuts. Then I realized that I was irked by my own feelings of inadequacy. Those “crazy” juice feasters shed light on the fact that I could push myself to an even greater level of performance and self-discipline — if I really make the commitment. They reminded me I had more growth ahead of me and that I wasn’t even close to being done here yet. That’s an incredibly annoying realization.

The people doing juice feasting weren’t super-human. They were regular people doing extraordinary things. They set their standards higher than me. When I became aware of that, and when I witnessed my reaction, I had a choice to make. I could settle where I was, or I could push myself to the next level.

Reaching the Next Level

It’s never easy pushing ourselves to that next level — whether it be physically, emotionally, socially, spiritually, financially, or something else. But when we label those who expose our inadequacies as fanatical or extremist, we’re merely branding ourselves as cowards. We hear the call to bring our lives more in line with our potential, but we shy away from it. We see a weight we cannot lift, so we attack the weight, labeling it a “monster.”

Is it the weight’s fault for being too heavy? Or is it our own weakness that’s the problem?

When you become aware of a potential challenge or goal that seems daunting to you, don’t blame it for existing. And certainly don’t attack those who are successfully overcoming it. Just acknowledge the challenge: “I see you. You are a worthy challenge. Right now I do not believe I can face you. But I intend to become strong enough to eventually face you — and win.”

Take a moment to mentally review the people in your life you’re tempted to label as fanatical or extremist. What are they here to teach you? What challenges do they make you aware of? What desires — and accompanying feelings of inadequacy — do they stir within you? Now can you admit that what you want most of all is to build the strength to pursue and eventually fulfill these desires yourself? And can you hold yourself in the space of intending for that strength to come to you?

You have within you the power to make whatever changes you want to make in your life. You can’t blame your problems on the foods you eat, the money you don’t have, or the opportunities you didn’t get. Every day you have the power to make new decisions and to follow through on them. If you don’t like where your life is heading, then don’t set the same heading today that you did yesterday. No one is forcing you to show up for work at the same job, to go to the same grocery store and buy the same foods, or to remain connected to the same relationships. Those are all your choices.

The fanatics and extremists are present in your life to remind you of what you already know but feel unready to face — that you have the power to take your life to a whole new level. Those people will keep appearing in your life as a frequent reminder that you’re settling for less than you’re capable of. As soon as you decide to stop settling and to start doing your best, such people will no longer be thorns in your side. Instead they’ll become your friends and guides.

Then you’ll have to deal with other people labeling you a fanatical extremist as well. And you’ll realize that you’ve never been happier… and that you wouldn’t have it any other way.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

After not feeling so good for a day, last night my appetite came back with a vengeance. I drank a quart of veggie juice and quickly followed it up with another quart of coconut water (the water from two young coconuts). I felt pretty good after that.

I did two one-hour phone interviews today related to Personal Development for Smart People, and both went very well. Fortunately I was feeling great for both of them.

I’m actually feeling a little more mentally clear now than I used to — I especially noticed a difference during today’s interviews — but I can’t say it’s a dramatic improvement, at least not enough to justify 18 days of juice feasting on its own.

Food Cravings

Yesterday evening I experienced some major cravings for cooked food, the strongest I’ve had during the juice feast so far. I really had to hold myself back from eating something. I can’t believe how hard it was to hold myself back. Even when my stomach was full of juice, I still had this lustful appetite to eat something cooked.

It’s like I had one of those cartoon devils on my shoulder tempting me with all the reasons I should go have something to eat. He even suggested, “Just eat some food now. It will taste good and totally satisfy you, and then the cravings will be gone. You can go back to juice feasting tomorrow. No one has to know about it. It will just be our little secret.”

I think if I weren’t publicly blogging this experiment and maintaining that sense of accountability, there’s a good chance I might have given in to those cravings and ended the juice feast last night. I probably wouldn’t have eaten cooked food, but I could have easily wolfed down several ounces of raw nuts. I just wanted something — anything — that was high in fat.

I think the coconut water I drank helped to overcome those feelings, and I didn’t cheat, but it was definitely a close call. The cravings were so strong that I was literally clawing my hands on the kitchen counter, trying to stop myself from breaking the juice feast. I felt like an addict who absolutely needed his fix. This wasn’t just an emotional feeling; it was a physiological reaction. I could feel the craving sensation throughout my whole body.

I’m not Superman here, so if I ever do cheat or decide to break the juice feast early, I’ll certainly tell you, even if I feel a little embarrassed about it. I don’t want to get my ego so wrapped up in this experiment that I’d be tempted to gloss over a cheating experience and pretend it didn’t happen. I want to be totally honest in sharing the results, regardless of how this turns out. Real life doesn’t always go according to plan. As Mike Tyson said, “Everybody’s got plans… until they get hit.”

This definitely hasn’t been easy so far. To be honest I’m amazed that people are able to keep this up for a full 92 days. I’m also amazed that I’ve made it past 2-1/2 weeks on just juice. These 18 days haven’t exactly whizzed by for me.

I’ll aim to keep some coconuts on hand at all times since it really seemed to help. I’d rather stuff myself with coconut water and keep going instead of quitting early.

Weight Loss

I weighed 170.8 this morning, so my net weight loss is 8.2 pounds in 17 days.

I’m only doing the enemas about twice a week now. It was daily for the first two weeks, but now I don’t need to do them as frequently according to the protocol I’m following. I did one today, but it was mostly clear liquid coming out, so even that seemed unnecessary.

Sleep

Some people report needing less sleep on a juice feast. I seem to be experiencing the opposite. A normal night for me used to be 6.5-7 hours of sleep. Now I’m probably averaging 8-10 hours. If I don’t sleep that much, I get drowsy in the middle of the day. This may change as the juice feast progresses since sleep needs can increase while the body is detoxing.

My sleep is very restful. I have no trouble falling asleep at night — no insomnia or anything like that.

Dreams

My dreams have been incredible lately. I commented on the amazing dreams early in the juice feast, and that hasn’t changed. These dreams are so elaborate that it often feels like I’m gone for days in an alternate reality.

For example, last night I dreamt that I was Robin while Batman was away on vacation. I had to go on all these missions, drive the Batmobile, and do Caped Crusader stuff solo, so Batman could take a much needed break in Hawaii. It’s certainly a lot of fun, and I look forward to going to bed each night, wondering what new adventure awaits.

Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I’ll lie in bed for an extra 10-20 minutes to mentally review the dreams I had. It’s hard to believe how much content is packed into each one.

Where is all this coming from though? It’s like my nighttime imagination underwent an enormous upgrade.

74 days to go.

Happy 11-11!

I saw 11:11 on the clock this morning too. I may have to write an article about that someday for those who see 11:11 (and related numbers) all the time too.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

The original release date was October 15th, but the book has already shipped and is available now.

You can get it at Amazon.com and in many major bookstores, including Borders, Barnes & Noble, Books a Million, and Hastings.

The major book distributors also have it too, including Baker & Taylor, Ingram, Partners, Bookazine, and New Leaf. So if your local bookstore doesn’t carry it yet, it should be easy for them to order it if you request it.

Why an Early Launch?

The early launch was actually a mistake. I learned of it last week when people started telling me that they’d just received their pre-ordered copies from Amazon. That was news to me!

I checked the Amazon sales page for the book and saw that it was no longer in pre-order status — it was already selling. Once that happened, the book’s Amazon sales rank quickly climbed into the top 1,000. And I hadn’t even announced the release yet.

I promptly contacted Hay House to find out what happened. Apparently the book was supposed to be shipped from the printer to their warehouse, and then it would be shipped to their distributors shortly before the launch. But instead, thousands of books were shipped from the printer directly to the distributors and retail chains, who promptly began selling them.

Obviously this throws off the timing of my launch plans, but all we can do is roll with it. I’m not even bothered by this because I’m so thrilled that the book has finally shipped.

Blogger Review Copies – Update

If you’re a blogger who took advantage of my review copy offer, there’s no need to wait until October to post your review. Please feel free to review the book as soon as you get a chance to read it. If you email me a link to your review via my contact form any time between now and October 31st, I’ll be happy to add a link to your review. I’m going to do this in batches. About 420 bloggers have already been approved for review copies, so that’s a lot of reviews.

The review copies began shipping last week, so please be patient if you haven’t received your copy yet. Most reviewers will receive a print copy in the mail. But there were a lot of requests from international bloggers, and it was a challenge to find a fair way to qualify them. Hay House wanted to disqualify almost all of these requests because many of the international blogs were in languages or countries where the book isn’t even available yet, and Hay House wants to focus on the U.S. launch. Many of these requests also came from countries where the mail system is unreliable, such as parts of Eastern Europe. And on top of that, many international bloggers said they preferred an electronic version of the book, so they could get it sooner.

I still wanted everyone to get a print copy, but Hay House has to pay for this, and shipping hundreds of books internationally isn’t cheap.

After some discussion we ultimately decided to send the international bloggers a PDF version of the book, but if their traffic was high enough (we had to set the bar fairly high), Hay House would still mail them a print copy. Maybe this wasn’t a perfect solution, but I think it was a fair way to handle it. The alternative would have been to disqualify most of the international review copy requests. But this way, nearly everyone who requested a review copy will receive something — either a print copy or a PDF. If you received the PDF but don’t like reading on your computer screen, you can always print it and read it on paper. I don’t know too many people that read long e-books on their screens.

If you didn’t participate in the free review copy offer but would still like to review the book on your website or blog, I’ll link to your review if you send me a link to it… as long as it has some decent substance to it and doesn’t just rehash the back cover text.

I’m not possessive about the ideas in the book — I really want them to spread. I’d love to see people writing about other ways to apply the book’s 7 principles to specific challenges and situations. Put your own creative spin on it.

Several bloggers have already posted reviews and have sent me the links. I’ll be sure to link to these reviews soon. I’m just waiting for a few more to come in so I can do this in batches.

Interview Requests

I still have about two dozen interview requests to process, so if you requested an interview, please be patient. I’ll endeavor to reply to all of the requests I’ve received so far by the end of the week. As you can imagine, this is a pretty busy time for me.

***

So I turn my back for one minute… and my book sneaks out the door without me. Must be an Aries.

I see that there are already a couple of Amazon reviews posted. I’m delighted to read some of the first pieces of feedback about the book. Wow!

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© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.