Archives for December 2011

First, the punchline: the book is free. It’s called The Flinch. It’s part of Seth Godin’s The Domino Project with Amazon. The Author is Julien Smith, NYT best-selling author of Trust Agents. Julien & I connected when he did MovNat last year, and then also began doing Leangains consulting with Martin Berkhan. And then, he contributed a “fucking” guest post here.

A few weeks ago he sent me an advance copy of his free book that can be read in a short time. It’s about overcoming your fears to advance your life to your own true limits—rather than those limits society suggests prudent, or even imposes. With permission, I have included the first chapter below. And I think it fits in very well in this time of resolution and renewal, redemption and new leases.

Go for it!

THE OPPONENT

Quitting smoking. Losing weight. Starting a business. Getting a date.

For anything you want to do, finding out how is easy. Do the research and make it happen—or so any book would have you believe. Yet every day, you smoke, gain weight, and stay at your old job. Every day, you do the exact opposite of what you plan to do. Why?

This is the Information Age. The steps to achieving any goal are easy to search for, come up with, write down on a napkin, and follow. But you’re still not doing it. Part of the movie is missing. A page is torn out of the book. There’s a big X in the equation. Do you know what it is?

The X is the flinch.

The flinch is your real opponent, and information won’t help you fight it. It’s behind every unhappy marriage, every hidden vice, and every unfulfilled life. Behind the flinch is pain avoidance, and dealing with pain demands strength you may not think you have.

The flinch is why the lazy actor never gets discovered—because she never really sweats to make it happen. It’s why the monolithic company gets wiped out by a lean startup—because the big company culture avoids the hard questions. It’s the reason you make the wrong decision, even though you may know what the right one is.

Behind every act you’re unable to do, fear of the flinch is there, like a puppet master, steering you off course.

Facing the flinch is hard. It means seeing the lies you tell yourself, facing the fear behind them, and handling the pain that your journey demands—all without hesitation.

The flinch is the moment when every doubt you’ve ever had comes back and hits you, hard. It’s when your whole body feels tense. It’s an instinct that tells you to run. It’s a moment of tension that happens in the body and the brain, and it stops everything cold.

When coming across something they know will make them flinch, most people have been trained to refuse the challenge and turn back. It’s a reaction that brings up old memories and haunts you with them. It tightens your chest and makes you want to run. It does whatever it must do to prevent you from moving forward. If the flinch works, you can’t do the work that matters because the fear it creates is too strong.

Individuals have flinches, but so do organizations and cultures. They can invoke a fear of a certain kind of person, a kind of racism or xenophobia, or a fear of new technology or outside influences.

Whatever form it takes, the flinch is there to support the status quo. It whispers in your ear so you’ll dismiss a good idea that requires a lot of change. It stops you from seeing an up-and-coming competitor as a threat. It’s the reason most modern movies are remakes and most successful books are sequels. It hides under the guise of the hard-headed boss, the skeptical publisher, or the cautious friend.

But the problem with the flinch is that it’s based in a brain that wants to protect you. It sees shadows as threats and creates blind spots. It’s endemic to cultures that embrace the old, even though the old might not work anymore. Both individuals and groups must develop systems to handle the flinch, or they’ll always fall prey to outside forces.

Everywhere your flinch avoidance hides, you have to find it, and face it. You need to take back control and stop the flinch, like the boxer in the ring, because you have a job to do—you have a fight you need to win.

For most of your life or your business’s existence, the flinch has been there, guiding you. As you discovered your world and learned best practices from others, the flinch was learning too. It pushes you to judge some ideas as good and others as bad, guiding your behavior over time, until your decisions became streamlined.

Whatever you avoided, whatever you and authorities considered a threat, became a blind spot—it became something that could make you flinch.

The flinch has a complex history. It appears whether you want it to or not. Every day, you make decisions based on it. But you may not think much about it at all. But this is exactly what the flinch wants.

Facing the flinch is hard internal labor that comes with no up-front promise of reward. But one day, your world will change, maybe drastically, and it will do so without warning. On that day, you won’t be prepared—unless you’ve fought the flinch before.

Do this work now, and your future self will thank you.

Finding the flinch reveals a secret passage, hiding in plain sight. It’s why some people know how to sell, and others can’t—because they see the flinch in others. It’s why you can’t quit your job or be the person you want to be—you can’t see the flinch in yourself. The flinch is why you don’t do the work that matters, and why you won’t make the hard decisions. It’s why your organization isn’t competing. It’s why you don’t lead the life you want.

Take this time to learn about it. It won’t take long. Once you see it, it will be visible to you forever.

Greg Swann, a real-estate broker in the Phoenix area, is a long time friend of mine. And actually, he’s the real writer behind the Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie stories I posted about last week. He also blogs about the human condition at SplendorQuest.com. I hope you enjoy the challenge he poses to all for a more fulfilling 2012 and the years to follow.

Want to become a better, more-perfect version of yourself? Master something difficult in 2012

I always love to read about the outrageously nefarious bad guys who are doing all the things we hate. Doesn’t matter who “we” are, since the bad guys afflicting every “we” are always blindingly brilliant, amazingly competent masterminds of evil.

I guess it’s useful to exaggerate your opposition, but here’s the thing:

Everyone I remember from school was a fuck-up.

Start with a good solid two-thirds compliant drones, dutifully going through whatever motions seemed to be required. Maybe half of the rest were glib and lazy. Even the straight-A apple-polishers were just phoning it in, doing the minimum necessary to get the grade from the glib-and-lazy grown-up teaching the class.

Am I misrepresenting the world of education? Is there anything you can think of that you did in school that you’re truly proud of now? Away from athletics or the school play, was there anything in your academic life that you gave everything you had? Was there anyone else who did that?

Was there any class that you took—ever—where you had to bust ass every day or risk get hopelessly lost? And when you got to that class, was that the end of your forward progress in that discipline?

The kids from the hard side of the quad—the maths, the sciences—know what I’m talking about. The kids from the soft side of the quad—the arts, the social sciences—may be recalling a graceless exit from the maths and sciences.

But the truth is that virtually all of us were denied the kind of education that was a matter of expected routine for our grandparents. Partly this is our fault: Too often we were grade-greedy glib-and-lazy fuck-ups. But mostly it was the fault of our teachers—and their teachers.

Were they outrageously nefarious bad guys, hell-bent on depriving us of a decent education? Were they blindingly brilliant, amazingly competent masterminds of evil, conspiring to enslave us in a state of perpetual, unsuspected ignorance?

No. They were just cash-greedy glib-and-lazy fuck-ups. For a second thing, teachers generally intend to do nothing more than the minimum necessary to get the money from the glib-and-lazy politicians who employ them. But for the first thing, they are themselves glib-and-lazy know-nothing fuck-ups skating through life on a frozen river of knowledge a mile wide and a micron thick.

Belay that testy comment, at least for a moment. I absolve myself of nothing in these charges. I know how ignorant I am. I know how much of the time that I could have spent acquiring an education was wasted on trivia instead, or on tendentious cant, or on outright lies. But the fault for that is no one’s but my own.

When our grandparents went to high school—if their families were prosperous enough for them to get that far in school—they were expected to conquer the maths through calculus. It was understood that they would master biology, chemistry and physics. Their curriculum demanded a thorough grounding in the arts, including the ability to play an instrument while sight-reading musical notation. To call themselves educated, to graduate, they had to attain fluency in a foreign language—very often classical Latin or Attic Greek.

To have graduated from high school in the United States in 1880 or 1910 was to have acquired an education far beyond that attained by all but the smallest few college graduates today. All hail the math gods, but how many of them can play a Beethoven sonata on the piano or violin? How many of that cohort can translate from Seneca? How many people reading this are not quite sure who Seneca was?

But: I don’t want you to feel bad about yourself. To the contrary, I want to show how to feel better about yourself—how to have more self to feel better about.

Yes, you were cheated of an education. And, yes, you were complicit in cheating yourself—with every daydream in class, with every gossipy note you passed, with every sneer, every snicker, every spitball you shot at a clueless teacher. With every half-assed, half-stepping, half-hearted effort you turned in, hoping it was just enough to get by—you cheated yourself of an education.

But that’s over. The past can’t be undone, but the future is yours to make of it what you will.

‘Tis the season for New Year’s Resolutions, and that’s a good thing. Join that book club. Remodel that kitchen. Lose that unwanted weight. But you can make this a landmark year of your life with just one resolution:

Resolve to master something difficult in 2012.

There is no shame in knowing how to say, “¿Dónde está el baño?,” but you are fluent in a foreign language when you can read and admire its poetry, when you get the jokes, when you can twist that language into clever witticisms. That’s mastery.

We are victims of Art Appreciation and Film Studies classes, glib-and-lazy time-wasters in which we learned nothing but how to pretend to know something. But there is no class called Geometry Appreciation. In the maths, you can either do the work or you can’t. This year you can pick up where you left off in math and push yourself as far as you can go.

And tell the truth: Every time you see a musician performing—popular music or classical—don’t you wish you could do that, too? The good news is, you can. All it takes is commitment and effort—and time.

Mastering a demanding new skill will take a while. The desire for instant results is how all New Year’s Resolutions get abandoned. But to learn a serious discipline will require your time every day—an hour or more a day of serious, dedicated effort. I like the idea of working every day, since, if you take no breaks from the work, you won’t have to resist the temptation to extend a break by one day and then another and another.

But the benefits to be realized are huge—far beyond anything you might be expecting. In Art Appreciation class, everyone participates in the group discussions, there are no right or wrong answers and the class is graded on the curve. That is, everyone, including the teacher, is wasting time on a pantomime of education.

But mastery of a truly difficult discipline can only be done alone. Your teacher can help, and, as always, we stand on the shoulders of giants. But it is only your brain, working all alone, that can distinguish educere from educare in Latin. Only you working alone can solve that quadratic equation—and prove your work. Even if you’re playing in an ensemble, the music will jar unless you yourself are competent to play your part.

You’ll be better for having improved your mind. But your mind will be improved for having learned something you may have overlooked in school: Only an individual mind can learn and master any branch of human knowledge. You’ll be a better scientist, a better mathematician, a better musician, a better linguist. But you’ll be a better person, too—more independent, more competent, more whole.

How much progress can you make on any resolution in a single day? Almost none. How much progress can you make in a year’s worth of serious, daily effort? You’ll be amazed. It may take you more than a year to get the education your grandparents had by the age of eighteen. But, unlike them, you have instant access to all the world’s knowledge at your fingertips—most of it for free.

And once you’ve mastered something truly difficult, you can take a second look at those outrageously nefarious, blindingly brilliant, amazingly competent masterminds of evil and see them for what they truly are: Glib-and-lazy fuck-ups doing the minimum necessary to get by.

In Latin we can say, “Educere est educare”—to bring up is to bring out—to cultivate your mind is to liberate it, to lead it forevermore away from the slavery of ignorance. No matter what your pedigree, unless you were very lucky you were cheated of an education when you were young. This is the year you can begin to amend that deficit.

You’ll be better for the effort, and wiser, and more confident. But you’ll be more independent, too, more indomitable. And you’ll be more admirable—to your spouse, to your children, to your family and friends—and to yourself.

You weren’t just cheated of an education when you were young, you were cheated out of the full awareness of your own humanity. Not by outrageously nefarious bad guys, but by glib-and-lazy fuck-ups.

The year 2012 is your chance to break the chains of ignorance forever. And in the process, you just might find that you have also broken the imaginary chains that bind you to supposed masterminds of evil.

~~~

So what are you going to resolve to master in 2012 and beyond, and how will you go about accomplishing that objective?

I have a guest post coming up probably tomorrow about an idea for a New Year’s Resolution for 2012, but here’s one of my own for you to consider. I got this idea when yesterday, a Facebook friend put up this quote of a “politically correct” holiday greeting and best wishes for a new year, attributed to Lars Petrus.

Please accept with no obligation, implicit or explicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, gender neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion or secular practices of your choice, with total respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, and their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all.

Additionally,

A fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2012, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make our society great, without regard to the race, creed, colour, age, physical ability, religious faith, sexual orientation and choice of smart phone and computer platform of the wishee.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! . . .And I don’t give a runny shit about Hanukkah, Ramadamabingbangboopadon, Kwanzaa. . .or the fucking Mayan or Chinese calendars. So there.

To me, people who are easily “offended” are kind of like those people who wear all of their problems—financial, health, relationship, etc.—on their sleeve. You know who I’m talking about. The victim mindset. Something or someone is always out to get them and they’re more than happy to let you know that whatever or whoever it is, it got the best of them yet again. It always gets the best of them because their best is piss poor and never good enough.

They’re fragile little flowers, susceptible to just about everything. They’re weak, and they’ve somehow convinced themselves that being weak and susceptible is a badge of honor. To relate it to diet and health by way of analogy, let’s take Don Matesz and his “Farewell to paleo” post back in June. Of course, that post alone was chock full of his own alleged “health problems” on a Paleo diet, and those of his new wife and his “patients.” And then, who rang in comments but none other than Matt Stone?

For fun I will list my health problems as well as that of my ex-girlfriend on a prolonged diet high in meat and fat – that neither of us have after switching to a high-carbohydrate diet….

1 Autoimmune iritis
2 Abdominal pain
3 Pain in the spleen and gallbladder
4 Irritability
5 Hyopnatremia from long duration exercise
6 Muscle cramps
7 Amenhorrea
8 Mood disorders
9 Low sex drive
10 Mediocre sexual function
11 Bad breath
12 Foul body odor (mmm, ammonia)
13 Occasional constipation
14 Chronic heartburn
15 Food allergies
16 Shakiness during exercise
17 Loss of lean mass
18 Fat gain eating to appetite on a mixed diet – particularly abdominal fat and love handles
19 Poor exercise performance
20 Poor exercise recovery
21 Insomnia
22 Tooth pain

That’s a short list. I’m sure I’m forgetting a few things.

Yea, pretty “short list.” One gets the sense that there’s almost some longing to have the biggest list possible, as if to announce: “look at what a pussy I am!” A few comments down I got to laugh my ass off.

nothing91 said…

LOL @ Matt Stone

You are the most psychosomatic, delicate flower on the planet. Every time you switch diets you crow about how the new diet has eliminated every health problem you’ve ever had. Then a year later you’re on another diet making the same claims.

So, give it some thought. Are you the type of person who, when you see, hear or read things from others that don’t correspond to your own values, you take some offense?

If so, why do you allow others such power, influence and authority over you? It’s really a queer sort of behavior when you think about it. Presumably, by taking offense you are in some way desiring to assert some power or authority over the “offender,” but you do so by admitting weakness? By being a victim? By first letting the offender know what great power and authority they have over your own mind and sense of values?

Stop it.

Update: Someone just dropped this YouTube in comments of Steve Hughes doing a bit on being offended and political correctness and I simply have to add it.

Hope everyone is enjoying the day after Christmas. One more week to go, and it’s back to life as usual. Got an email the other day and thought I’d share it.

The subject of the email: paleo Discrimination

I decided to write this for two reasons: First, I want to make others aware of the bureaucracy and politics I, and possibly others, have faced. (If you have experienced anything like this, please share.) And second, to be honest, I’m looking for some encouragement and support. I’ve kept this anonymous because I don’t want to get into any more trouble; I’ve got to keep my job, right? Thank you for respecting that.

So I’ve been paleo since January of this year (2011). I’ve lost 40 pounds and 7 inches off my waist. My health has improved dramatically! But you’ve heard stuff like that before. I’m a nurse and work for the government (vagueness is very important here). I work directly with patients to, ultimately, help them get healthier and out of the hospital. Nurses are supposed to stay current on research and utilize that research in our practice. We’re supposed to educate others and share information not only with our patients, but with our fellow coworkers.

I’m always talking about the paleo lifestyle, and I love helping others get healthy and realize how amazing they can feel. I tell them all about the research and science behind the diet. But in the end I always say, “If you’re happy, keep doing what you’re doing. But if you’re not, and you want to get healthier and make a change, why not give this a shot for 30 days?” Then I tell them to buy Robb’s book.

As a new nurse, I have to attend some additional training beyond college before I can work as a “real nurse.” In this new training, my diet was naturally brought up because I was immediately refusing all the candy, cookies, and sugary drinks being passed around on day one. After hearing me discuss some basics of paleo (like cholesterol and saturated fat are not bad), my supervisor approached me and told me I should not discuss my diet with patients. I said that I would never go into a room and start preaching that the patients should start eating more cholesterol and saturated fat; it’s not that simple. She still warned (nicely) that I should not bring it up because it’s not in line with the government’s dietary recommendations. So I “silently” rolled my eyes and have not discussed my diet with patients. However, I have discussed it amongst staff at the hospital. People get curious and want to get healthy, so they ask and I answered their questions.

Fast forward a few weeks and I’m told that I need to report to my supervisor, “We have an issue to discuss.” I was given a counseling (a formal, written report) about discussing my diet in the workplace. I was told to cease discussing my diet while at work. This was extremely unfair considering I was never told I could not discuss my diet amongst staff, only patients. And I was never given any kind of verbal warning that what I was doing was wrong.

So I guess discussing accurate, research-based science is not appropriate for the hospital environment? But it’s okay to discuss the Kardashians, right? And I have to sit quietly while other people talk about which brand of low-fat yogurt or oatmeal is better for your health. And let’s not mention the barrage of candy and cupcakes being passed around daily. But most importantly, let’s not discuss what’s healthy for our patients who are fighting multiple diseases and eating disgusting foods. It really feels like discrimination. I feel singled-out. While everyone else is free to discuss their favorite fast food restaurants, I have to keep my mouth shut.

Sadly, what I learned from all this is that selfishness is more important than service. It’s better to keep my mouth shut and protect my career than help others get healthy. Inspiring message, huh? I suppose this situation will piss most people off. And it should! But there is some hope. I do have goals of becoming a doctor or…something one day where I can have more authority to help people. And I know some people (like Robb Wolf) are working to get more physicians on board with paleo. I did meet one doctor in the hospital who eats paleo. I was so excited. I felt like I’d met a celebrity. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to chat much about it.

Let’s just hope I can bite my tongue while in this government role and not get in any more trouble. But you can bet I’ll still be spreading the word and trying to help people get healthy outside of work. Thank you for reading.

Sumthin’ isn’t it?