Develop a morning routine (Exercise #2)

Here are a few tricks for improving your mornings whether or not you are a morning person:

1. Set your alarm clock to the real time. That old trick of trying to trick yourself only works for a few days and it's just silly anyway.
2. Set your alarm to the actual time you want to wake up. Trying to give yourself time to hit the snooze button only means you get less actual sleep and end up more tired than simply waking up when you have to wake up.
3. Wake up half an hour earlier than you usually do. Most people procrastinate until the last minute before waking up, creating a cycle of having to hurry, being late, being less than ready for the day. All that can be fixed by waking up a half hour earlier.
4. Wake up at the same time every day. Even weekends. Steve Pavlina explains the benefits of this well in his posts, "How to become and early riser" and "How to become an early riser part 2".
5. Try it for 30 days, and quit, double down, or revise at that point.

These few simple tricks can turn a morning from a drag to something to look forward to.

Develop a simple mantra (Exercise #1)

“In a healthy and happy way, I am becoming a millionaire.”
“In its own perfect timing, I am becoming a millionaire.”
“For the greatest good of all, I am becoming a millionaire.”

(inspired by combining advice in this interview with Marc Allen with this post on remembering your dreams)

Replace “becoming a millionaire” with anything that you’d like. Other possibilities include “becoming famous”, “becoming ridiculously powerful”, “becoming one with the universe”, “becoming the CEO of my own business”, and “becoming the funniest person alive”. Feel free to improvise, but once you choose one, stick with it for a while.

The key to this is to create a vision for yourself in the future. Once you convince your subconscious that this is going to happen, it will put its resources towards pointing out opportunities that lead in this direction. The subconscious has to filter through about 40 million sensory inputs per second and only passes about 10,000 of them to your subconscious. By activating this possibility in your subconscious, it will remember to pass on information it might otherwise have filtered out, and you'll begin noticing things that you hadn't noticed before. This change usually happens, according to Steve Pavlina, with 24 and 48 hours of starting the mantra.

Every day, say your mantra 20 times out loud when you wake up and then 20 times to yourself. Say it out loud 20 times and to yourself 20 times right before you go to bed. Say it every time you walk through a doorway, start eating, or finish eating. Put the mantra in weird corners of your life that you want to expose or change. By having a vision for what you want to become, and training your subconscious into taking on that vision, you will begin to see opportunities open up towards that road. Be ready for them and take any small step that you see. Be thankful for even the smallest step in that direction, and slowly the steps will become more solid, steady, and obvious.

30 day trial

Steve Pavlina is my nemesis. I've used nemeses in my life as a way to figure out who I want to "reach"… whatever is meant by reaching someone. The first step is to find people that you admire and who seem balanced. There are many ways to succeed that involve becoming unbalanced somehow, and these people we call geniuses. They sacrifice something like sanity, or common sense, or social skills in order to leap ahead in one particular area. We rarely feel jealous of these people, but appreciate them. Very few people would want to be tortured like Van Gogh even if it meant painting some great masterpieces. Same with Beethoven, Virginia Woolf, Kurt Cobain, etc. Steve Pavlina, on the other hand, seems to have found a way to live life that improves the quality while at the same time making progress on difficult projects.

One of his ideas that I like is the 30 day trial. One of the primary obstacles in change is lack of momentum. Our conscious mind can't lobby a new behavior with our subconscious unless there's some momentum or resources available to divert to the project. Maintaining a momentum of positive change in our lives is something that could improve everyone's life… we all know that it's easier to run 5 miles a day when we're already running 4 miles a day than if we haven't run in years. The more you're already doing, the easier it is to convince ourselves to go one step further.

The 30 day trial is helpful when we're trying to bootstrap momentum. If you have a new idea for a project and have no current momentum on it, it's a little easier to convince your subconscious to partake in a 30 day trial of a behavior than to convince it to start a completely new habit that will supposedly last forever. When I say something like "I'm going to become a vegetarian" I can feel the back of my mind slightly doubt that statement… it goes, "Really? That's a big change… don't you think it's more likely that you'll try it for a few days then give up?" But if I say, "I'm not going to eat meat for 30 days" my mind is more like, "Okay!" The trick is that after 30 days it's a lot easier to say, "Let's do it for 30 more days" or even "Let's do it for a year".

One of the things about making changes in your life is that we underestimate the difficulty in convincing our subconscious to adopt new behaviors. By admitting that there is a bit of a lobbying issue, and starting things with a 30 day trial, you can slowly train yourself to become more susceptible to new habits.

My 30 day trial is to post one entry a day here, which I will do by waking up 30 minutes earlier than I usually do.

The tone of this writing

I find it really difficult to adopt an appropriate tone when talking about mutual improvement, self-improvement, or any of these overly introspective topics. I've become very sensitive (in a negative way) to the tone of most self-help, marketing, and spiritual talk. It's the reason I can't go to a church service, or have a therapist, or really participate in any of these types of conversations that come across as cheesy, or slimy, or touchy-feely. And yet, I still want to talk about the things that are talked about in these tones. So one of my first goals here is to experiment with a couple different tones to see if I can stumble upon one that I feel comfortable with. This is your warning.

Begin with the end in mind

The end for me is to reach a state of self-sustaining radical mutual-improvement with the people around me. I want to fill a hole that I see in the world–a space that exists between life hacking, personal development, and the things you want to do with your life, where using technology and psychology and common sense and existing well-known practices in society and religion to improve yourself and others really works in an deliberate way that is benefitial to all and not reliant on hype or marketing. Gandhi and Benjamin Franklin both described their philosophy on life as mutual-improvement, where you never have to engage in win-lose scenarios, and adversity is not something that you avoid, but instead accept as a challenge that will act as a catalyst in you and everyone else's benefit.

To be more specific, in the short term this means:

1) Starting a life-coaching business or possibly non-profit organization (I haven't decided yet) that is inspired from existing organizations like Toastmasters, Alcoholics Anonymous, investment clubs, Juntos, book clubs, Vipassana meditation retreats, Landmark Forum, Mormonism, pickup artists (it's actually sort of interesting), and of course the new field life coaching itself. Some small details include an inexpensive membership, weekly or bi-weekly meetings, an emphasis on interviews and problem-solving, and occassional "What's your best idea?" conferences.

2) Opening a bar/art gallery in Seattle with a friend. It will be small, able to be run by one person on Sundays-Thursdays and two people on Friday and Saturday night. Very limited food options, only open from 5pm-2am, and integrated with the life-coaching business so that members can hold meetings there.

3) Writing a book/manifesto to help build these other things off of. I've found that I cannot keep all of the ideas involved in this project in my head at once. Memory needs to be improved or supplemented in order to better manage these ideas. I think my options are to either become more concise in my articulation of the ideas, or develop a memorization trick in the form of a book.

4) Contribute to the conversation of life hacking and self-improvement, and converse with some of my role-models that are currently writing about this on the internet.

Can you laugh? Can you cry?

Try to laugh naturally. What do you do? First, if you’re like me, you’ll try to think of something funny, and then you run that funny thing through your mind trying to provoke yourself to laugh. Consciousness has ways of manipulating the subconscious responses that we have… but it’s a bit crude and doesn’t always work.

Some subconscious reactions are more difficult to control than conscious ones. For example, can you burp on command? How do you do it? Can you cry on command? Can you fall asleep on command? Each of these things is a subconscious response to a particular environment. We can’t activate these responses merely by willing them in the same way that we can move our arms and legs.

Understanding the link between the conscious and subconscious (the methods we have created for communicating back to our subconscious and receiving messages from our subconscious) is a subtle but important way of getting to know yourself better.

You are what you see

We all know that in a materialistic way we are what we eat. At least, our bodies are what we eat. But I think our minds and personalities are what we see. If you see the world as boring and uninteresting, then there's a good possibility that slowly you will become boring and uninteresting. On the other hand, if you see the world as challenging, compassionate, and full of love, you too will slowly become a challenging, compassionate, and loving person.

The convergence of many fields

An article in the May/June issue of Utne titled "Saffron Robes and Lab Coats" talked about how some neuroscientists are beginning to see parallels with Buddhism in their investigations of the brain. One interesting overlap is in the investigation of suffering.

"While their approaches to suffering may sound different, Mobley said, neuroscience and Buddhism both acknowledge the Four Noble Truths regarding suffering: There is the fact of suffering, the cause of suffering, the end of suffering and the path to end suffering.

"'The traditional Western approach to end suffering is to block the inputs that cause it,' said Spiegel. 'But that's not the whole answer.' Spiegel noted that there are more neuronal connections in one person's brain than there are stars in the universe, and that focusing on compassion, for instance, makes it possible for those connections to 'reset' the brain. 'Reverberating circuits can amplify or dismiss pain and depression,' he said."

I think this convergence between science and religion is only going to start happening more and more. Our brains are good at mixing things together, the lines will begin to blur between psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, religion, superstition, self-help, and popular culture. I want to help that convergence along. One of the areas that I see emerging as a possible container for these similar thoughts in a variety of fields is in life-coaching. It's a brand new field that is still figuring itself out, and admittedly is right now a bit confused about whether or not its a big marketing pyramid scheme, but its goal is simple and relevant to all of these fields… using your knowledge about yourself to improve your life.