Have you ever had something you wanted to achieve, that always seemed just out of reach?

Every day, every month, every year, you think, "this is it, I'm finally going to do it..."

And then you don't.

Why is that?

So, this is an article all about how, life got flipped turned upside down...  No, wait, nevermind.  Bad idea.

Seriously though, I was about to try and put some preface onto this to take the sting off, so I can tell myself that people were warned and if they unsubscribe then that's their deal, not mine.

So forget the preface, here's the deal: I want my blog back.

Six years ago, I started this blog after being laid off and confronting a life-changing hurricane challenge.  Not to be a business, not to teach anybody anything, but just to say random stuff.  Talk things out.  Explore new ideas, new lifeforms, and new ways of getting things done...  to boldly go where no split infinitives had gone before.

And because nobody was reading the thing, and because it wasn't connected with a business, I felt free to rant about whatever I wanted, make stupid jokes about random stuff, and even review funny reality shows.

And most importantly, I didn't feel like something had to be awesome before I posted it.  That I didn't need to have some kind of Important Point to make or Principle To Teach.

Back then, this was just a place for me to type my thoughts into the computer, so I could see what I thought about something.

Somewhere along the line though, I started getting popular.  Or at least, people were paying attention to me.

And in retrospect, it's kind of surprising (and sad) how much I let that affect me.  Pretty soon I'd plugged that into half a dozen or so of my neuroses about Not Disappointing People, and needing to be Taken Seriously as an Important Person, and, well...  the actual blogging part of things just kind of up and died.

On top of that, I piled even more "shoulds" about how I should be doing marketing the way I learned in the classes I paid many thousands of dollars for, and trying to sell something in every post while being both Brief and Awesome at the same time.

Which, rather than encouraging me to be either Brief or Awesome (let alone Selling), discouraged me from posting anything at all.

Worse yet, it stopped me from even writing things in the first place.

When I started this, my blog was just how I thought things out, how I reflected on things.  So I didn't need a polished article to post: I just needed an idea (or a vague hint of one) to start typing with.

But then later, with all my self-imposed demands, I'd actually interrogate myself into silence by wanting to first know whether what I was writing was going to be an email to my list, a newsletter to my paying subscribers, a post for the blog, an article for one of my other websites, and what was I going to sell in it, and what was the main point going to be and....

Enough!

So these days, I've noticed that most of my best writing has been going into Mind Hackers' Guild forum postings, and my rambling commentaries on LessWrong.com.  Because in neither of those places do I feel like I need to already know where I'm going before I open up the window and Just Freaking Type Something Already.

Without having to first make it into some sort of Life Changing Lesson Of Supreme Awesomeness.

Because, you know, it's okay to just be helpful.  Mildly amusing.  Or to even just be offering myself as a Minor Example Of What To Avoid.

(Sorry about all the Capital Letter Phrases today; it seems to be a side-effect of reading lots of Fluent Self posts while I download and convert my Bloglines archives.)

Sure, it's true that I still want to be more than just slightly helpful or miildly amsuing.  I'm still totally into that whole insight thing, after all. Which is why this particular post has been trying to ramble sideways towards some sort of Actual Point, apart from just the bare facts of the situation, and my declared intent to reclaim this space.

I wanted to also say something here about the specific neuroses I had, and how they made me not just want, but need to be Serious and Important, not just here, but in my current work as a teacher of mind hacking things.

How that need made me set ridiculously high goals for my work, to not only be 100% Right and True from a scientific standpoint, but to also have utterly perfect execution from a practical standpoint.  (Both of which really meant, "good enough to not have anyone be able to criticize me, ever, without me having a good defense.")

How that need made me believe I had to have the Ultimate Methods™...  not only the perfect ways of changing minds and lives, but also the perfect ways of teaching those perfect ways, with nothing less being suitable before I would allow myself to sell anything to anyone beyond the tiny circle of highly-motivated people who were willing to jump over all the arbitrary obstacles I put between them and the chance to give me money.

Which of course, was all just bullshit.

Because it not only kept my business in guilt-driven mediocrity, it also means that the stuff I have developed isn't getting to a lot of people who need it.

And every time I developed a newer technique that improved on earlier ones, I had to stop pushing or teaching the older (but usually easier-to-learn and easier-to-teach!) ones...  even though it's usually way easier for people to learn the simple techniques first and then build up to the super-duper fix-everything ones.

And then, after getting to a point late last year, where the super-duperest techniques are totally awesome and changing me and my wife and other people in ways I'd never dreamed of before, I just switched over to having to have the most perfect ways of describing, documenting, teaching, and promoting those techniques!

But the hardest part of mindhacking is -- and perhaps always will be -- seeing through your own bullshit.  Seeing that what you're doing isn't really as necessary as you think it is.  That your so-called "musts" are in fact merely options...  and piss-poor ones at that.

And so, it doesn't matter if I do end up creating the most marvelous methods of documenting and training the techniques themselves, because the hard part will still be unique to the individual doing the learning.

So, good enough is good enough.

And that goes for this article, too, even though I'm still kinda feeling a little nagging pull inside, one that says, "But you haven't shared an Important Life Lesson, or explained a Powerful Principle Of Change yet!  You  haven't shown how you got rid of the neuroses, or explained how they arise...  you haven't..."

Yeah, and I ain't gonna, either.  (At least, not in this post.)

Because good enough is good enough.

And this is my blog now.

And it sure is nice to be back.

Here's hoping you feel the same way.

There's an old story that goes like this:

Once upon a time, there was a boy who ate too much sugar.  His mother, who wanted him to stop, thought that if the boy wouldn't listen to her, then perhaps he would listen to his idol, Mahatma Gandhi.

So she walked for many miles through the scorching heat to ask Gandhi, "Would you please tell my son to stop eating sugar?"

Gandhi replied, "Bring your boy back in two weeks.  I will speak to him then."

Confused, the mother left, then brought the boy back two weeks later.

Gandhi looked the boy in the eye and said, "Stop eating sugar."

The boy nodded, and promised to stop.

His mother of course was grateful, but still confused.  "Why did you want me to bring him back in two weeks?  Couldn't you have said the same thing to him then?"

Wow.  Took a quick break to get a snack, checked my email, and found a really emotional comment on the Thinking Things Done site.  An anonymous reader is really really upset with me for not having the book done sooner, and calls me a fraud, among other things.  Ouch.

I fire off a smiling-on-the-outside, hurting-on-the-inside response.  He (she?) hit me right smack on one of the buttons I was just starting to write about in this article: the guilt of not having done more, and the fear of never doing enough.

Click here for the rest of the story... before and after this point...

When I was a professional programmer, I never used to miss deadlines.  I'd cut features instead.  In fact, I used to be insanely paranoid about defining deliverables so that I had total freedom to cut, and about arranging development strategies so that after a relatively short duration, there was always a "shippable" project...  precisely because I dreaded missing deadlines.

So there's a part of me that freaks out every time I think about how much longer I've been working on the book than I thought I'd be, and the part where I'm living on savings while I do this, in the middle of a not-so-good economy where some of my long-time customers have been dropping subscriptions due to their not having jobs, either.

And sometimes it seems like, the more I work on this thing, the more work I discover I need to do!

Click here for the rest of the story.

A little while ago, Leslie called me into the kitchen for some help.  The kitchen cabinets she was putting together didn't come with enough cam locks -- the little metal things you use to lock the boards together with.

She showed me how many holes there were for the cams, and said that 16 were needed to fill all the holes.  But the instructions said that only 14 were provided, and there seemed to only be 12.

I puzzled over it for a few minutes, trying to figure out what was wrong.  There were indeed as many holes as she said...  in fact, there were more.

Finally, I decided to verify the instructions by checking them for the opposite part: the posts that went into the locks.  There were 14 places for those to go, and 14 of them.  Logically, then, there should only need to be 14 cam locks for them to go into.

A few minutes later, we both sighed with relief as we verified that four of the places where she'd put cam locks, were not places where the instructions said to put them, even though they were cam lock holes.  The problem was that those four holes were for camlocks that came with the countertop, not the cabinet!

So we got it all sorted out, and Leslie thanked me for my help, saying I was "smart"...  but I had to decline the compliment.

Because, as I thought about it, I realized that I would've done exactly the same thing in her position.  There were camlock holes, there were camlocks, what else would you do but put them there?

And when I later realized there weren't enough camlocks left, I would also have blamed the manufacturer, and complained that the instructions weren't specific enough...  even though, in retrospect, it's easy to see that they never said to put camlocks in those holes!

And if our positions had been reversed, Leslie would've done the exact same thing I did, too: she'd have rechecked every step and instruction, trying alternate theories and starting from an assumption that there must be some way to make it work.

Now, there are at least two morals to this story.  The first, of course, is that if you look at something as though it must have a solution, then you are already well on your way to finding it.  And conversely, if you're seeing the world through an experience of frustration and defeat, you'll find only more of that, too.

But the second, more interesting moral to me, is that whenever you substitute your own expertise in place of following directions, you can easily go off track.  (Especially if it's something you're adding to the directions given!)

And when I think about the number of self-help books I read, but whose advice I never really took, or that I misinterpreted because I was seeing it through the filter of what I already believed -- like always starting a furniture project by putting camlocks in every camlock hole! -- I can see just how much time I wasted.

Because nowadays, I see that the things naturally successful people wrote about in their books, really are as useful and meaningful as they claimed.  It was me who didn't understand, and who didn't act, because I thought I "already knew" what they were saying, or that I "knew better".

When really, I didn't have a clue!

Now, it certainly would've helped if the instructions for the kitchen cabinets had at least put big X's over the holes that didn't need camlocks, just as it would've helped if more self-help books listed what likely preconceptions would keep you from being able to understand what they're talking about.

But ultimately, the responsibility for doing what the directions say -- and more importantly, not doing what they don't say! --  lies entirely with ourselves.

Now, I'm not saying you have to blindly follow anybody or anything.  You absolutely have to use your own judgment, to decide whether to try something.  But if you've gone so far as to buy somebody's book in the first place, it might actually be a good idea to try whatever it is they suggest!

Without altering it, and without second-guessing it.

Because, surprisingly enough, the skill of "not second-guessing" turns out to be pretty central to confidence, commitment, and concentration as well.

Heck, I just recorded a CD about that earlier this week, for Mind Hackers' Guild members.  It was called, The Secret of Single-Mindedness, and on it I taught three simple mental strategies to turn "second guessing" into "single mindedness", instantly bypassing most mental blocks and routine procrastination.

(You can download a sample track here, or you can press the  play button if your browser shows one here.)

Anyway, I explained on the CD how, if you critique and second-guess your plans or your writing while you're still trying to create them...  if you're too busy questioning what to say to someone to really pay attention...  or if you're thinking "I can't do this" when you really should be thinking about what you're doing, instead...  you're not going to do very well at it.

And the trick to fixing all this is not about "believing in yourself" or "having confidence" or some other thing that you have to do.

In fact, it's the exact opposite: it's all about what you don't do.

And how you don't do it!

(Indeed, this very same bit of "not-doing" is what would've let me succeed at dozens of things I tried from other self-help books, if only I'd known about it beforehand!)

But even if all I'd done was to "not do what the instructions don't say", I'd still have been much further ahead, much sooner.

See, self-help books don't tell you to think, "I can't do this," while you're doing what they say to do.  They don't say to think, "I'm no good at this," or "this is no good, I can think of something better."

They don't say to think, "this is too much trouble", and they don't say, "if you don't do this, you're a loser."

And while it's true that they also don't say not to do these things, to list all the things that you should not do when using a self-help book...

Would make for a very, very long self-help book!

And even then you could still -- upon reading it -- think...

"Well, but that doesn't apply to me.  I'm different."

And there is no way to make a book or recording that can fix that.

So think about it.

And then do something.

--PJ

For the last year or two, I've been trying hard to understand the real difference between naturally successful people and naturally struggling people.  That is, why do some people seem to have so few problems getting things done and going after their goals, while others (like me) tend to spend so much time going in circles and going nowhere?

At first, I noticed a lot of individual distinctions.  For example, naturally successful people aren't fazed by setbacks -- in fact, they can't even think about failure for long, without automatically refocusing on success.

They set goals, not because they're supposed to, but because they like it.  And they tend to view education costs as easily recouped: their attitude towards spending thousands of dollars to attend a seminar is that if they get just one actionable idea out of it, they'll make a profit.

But just understanding differences like these doesn't really help much.  It's just a list of random characteristics, no different than you'd find in any profile of a successful person.

And that just wasn't enough for me.

Click here to discover the crazy secret I just found out about this weekend...

I just wrote my first article for LessWrong.com: Spock's Dirty Little Secret.

It's about how I learned the limits of logic, and the importance of emotion to actually making decisions or getting anything done.  I wrote it more for the current audience of OvercomingBias.com and LessWrong.com than for my own blog audience, but you might find it interesting anyway.

So feel free to check it out.

So a couple nights ago, it's Valentine's Day, and Leslie and I are talking about what -- if anything -- we're going to do that evening.  Eat out, eat in?  Go to a movie?  A show?  What?

And as we're lying there in bed, throwing options back and forth, it's beginning to occur to me that nothing is really going to happen.  Because even though we're talking about possibilities, neither of us is really proposing anything.

Neither of us is saying, "Hey, let's do X."  We're just saying, "Well, what do you think about X?"

And so we get to talking about that, and about how we're actually pretty passive in most of our lives, not just figuring out dates with each other.

So we both did a little mind-hacking, to see what we could do...

To Fix It!

And in my case, I started with a little "installation conflict" test -- a procedure I use to find out what existing mental "software" installed in my head, would conflict with any attempt to install new attitudes and behaviors.

Specifically, I wanted to find out if it would be okay for me to take a more active role in managing my own life -- and at the same time, be more okay with accepting proposals made by other people.  (Like my wife!)

Now, a few weeks ago, when I found and got rid of my superhero complex, I mentioned how I thought an easy life would be boring.  This time, though, thinking about my ideal life came back, not as being boring, but rather as being painful... in some vague and unclear way.

I felt a sense of deep loss, almost as if living the way I wanted to, would in fact be a fate worse than death!  As if I were losing my soul, or my sense of self.

And when I thought about it, I realized I'd had that feeling...

Many Times Before!

But every time I'd encountered it in previous mind-hacking sessions, I'd ended up shying away from it, to deal with less-central issues.  And even when I got rid of my "superhero" ideal, I only skirted the edge of this feeling.

This time, though, I was determined to face -- and understand -- what was causing it.

Now, more than once before, I'd asked myself about it, trying to get what it was I was afraid would happen if I actually became the organized and motivated person I claimed to want to be.  Not just some of the time, or most of the time...

But all of the time.

And always the answer came back, "because then I won't be me anymore."

And every time I'd gotten that answer before, I'd always been stumped by it.  Where, exactly, do you go from there?  I mean, I could hardly claim that I would still be me, could I?

But this time, it occurred to me that there was another angle I could approach the issue from.  And so I shot back, with one of my classic mind-hacking questions:

"What's bad about that?"

Now, if someone were to do a study on what things I do most when I'm helping my clients and students, this question is probably one of the top five things I say or ask.

Because its function is to uncover cached thoughts.  Or more precisely, stale cached thoughts.

You see, the brain, like a computer, uses "cache memory" to store previously-computed answers.  That way, it can get results faster, by looking up old answers, instead of doing all the work of thinking up new ones!

But a key side effect of this caching process is that we end up doing most of our reasoning, on the basis of unthinking prejudice.  Because literally, that's what prejudice is: pre-judgment, or using already-thought-of answers.

And we can then go on to reject entire lines of thinking -- entire pieces of our possible selves, lives, and personalities! -- on the basis of conclusions we jumped to with outdated evidence!

But by asking questions like, "What's bad about that?", we can force our brain into a "cache miss": computer terminology for a situation where the desired answer isn't available in the cache memory.

And as a result,  a cache miss forces the computer to calculate the answer directly, or to at least fetch it from another, slower (but more up-to-date) layer of cache memory.

And on Saturday, the answer came back as:

"That would be giving in!"

Hm.  Interesting.  "So what's bad about that?", I ask, forcing a miss through to the next layer of cache after that one.

And bam! -- just like that -- the entire story starts pouring out, a string of previously-unconnected childhood memories.

And before I can even think to ask one of my other top 5 questions (i.e., "And what does that say about you?"), I already have the answer:

"Giving in" means I'm weak.

A wimp.

Pathetic!

Because I despised myself for not standing up to bullies.  Not just of the schoolyard variety, mind you, but also those adults who shamed, demeaned, or objectified me as a child.

And in compensation, I created an ideal of holding to my beliefs under pressure.  Of emulating the christian martyrs I heard so much about in church, who suffered diverse tortures and death rather than "give in" to their oppressors.

And so I'd decided that, even if parents and teachers and bullies might be able to force my physical compliance, I would never give in to them mentally!  Never would I change my own mind to agree with them, nor would I ever allow their efforts to so much as influence my own values.

Even if they were values that...

I Wanted To Develop!

And I saw the insanity that resulted from this decision: decade upon decade of struggling with myself, unable to develop any kind of self-discipline, for the simple reason that I interpreted all my attempts to change as giving in to the enemy!

Because, even if what I sought was not a value that parents or teachers tried to force on me, I still seemed to find the very idea of giving in so distasteful, that even giving in to my own decisions was off-limits for me!

Indeed, for most of my life, the only sure way I'd gotten myself to do things, was to arrange them so that I had to do them, with sufficiently bad consequences that I could obtain my grudging -- and merely physical! -- compliance.

Meanwhile, the idea of actually enjoying working hard (or even on a regular schedule!), was the very height of betrayal, as far as my inner rebel was concerned!

And I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.  So many years... so much wasted effort and pain...  for no real benefit whatsoever.

Because it was all just another classic "ideal-belief-reality conflict" -- a fear of weakness, covered up with a compensating ideal of strength.  But fortunately,...

It Also Had A Classic Solution

In his books, Robert Fritz suggests that a simple way to get rid of such a conflict is to just admit whatever it is you're afraid of, and/or to state that you are that thing a few times.  So, I said to myself a few times, "I'm afraid I'm weak"...  and then I also said, "I'm a wimp," a few times.

And around the third or fourth repetition, I felt a sudden easing of the tension and terror that had initially gripped me.

"...And that's okay," I added.

Now, not every conflict like this goes away with just a few short statements, of course.  Both I and my clients have occasionally had situations where stating the fear just makes it worse in that moment.  But, in such cases, we simply use other techniques to break the conditioned link between the statement and the feeling, first.

In my case on Saturday, though, no additional measures were required.  I just felt a remarkable sense of relief, as though I'd just put down a very heavy weight, that I'd been carrying for a very long time!

And I began to see all the ways that this conflict had driven me to passive-aggressive behavior, and other negative patterns.

How it affected my ability to let go of control in some situations, and to go along with the ideas or suggestions of others.

Hell, I could even see how it affected my sexual development!  Because, when I was a teenager, living in the Caribbean, I was aggressively pursued by local girls... to a point we'd call sexual harassment today.  And of course...

I Never "Gave In"!

...no matter how much I wanted to, at times.

(Which means I stayed a virgin for several more years than was strictly necessary.  Oh well!)

Now, I wish I could tell you that after making this change on Saturday, I went on to live happily ever after, with all my "passivity" problems solved.

In reality, it has taken some considerable additional "cleanup" work over the last couple of days, tracking down another half-dozen or so interrelated beliefs and blocks like, "If I fall behind, I can never catch up" and "I'm no good at anyhing that's difficult."

But, even as early as last Saturday night, I found I'd already become much more comfortable going along with my wife's suggestions, now that I lacked the subconscious need to find things wrong with them, in order to justify my knee-jerk objections to them.

And I think Leslie would have to agree...

That it's probably the best Valentine's Day present...

I've ever given her.

I was in the middle of planning another revision of Thinking Things Done's chapter 7, when I stumbled across a year-old email from Mind Hackers' Guild member Mike Brown.

In it, he mentioned an article he'd run across, talking about how some scientist had found that each time a memory is used, it has to be stored again as a new memory, in order to be accessible later, because the old memory is either not there, or because it becomes inaccessible.

Now, when Mike first sent that to me (over a year ago), I didn't give it much thought.  For one thing, it sounded like another one of the many quirky or over-reaching interpretations that journalists often give to scientific topics.  (I read a lot of those, especially on topics related to procrastination... and sometimes the scientists themselves are the ones with the quirky or over-reaching interpretations!)

But for some reason, that old email caught my eye this evening, as I was skimming through a folder of un-answered and un-followed-up-on emails.  So I followed the link he sent to here, and then did some follow-up research via Google.

And it turns out that the basic idea, called "reconsolidation", has effects that have been studied by neuroscientists for quite some time now.  And the basic idea, explained quite well in this paper, is:

When you retrieve a memory,
it becomes changeable!

Now, that might not seem particularly important or significant, and indeed, a year ago I didn't make the connection that I made tonight.  But in the last year, the variety of mind-hacking techniques that I use and teach, had gotten quite a bit more varied.  And I was starting to notice a lot of commonalities.

In the lead-up to writing Thinking Things Done, I had been studying the predictive function of memory, and the role of surprise in my work.  Because frankly, when people change quickly and easily, it surprises them.  (Not to mention their friends and family!)

But more importantly, it had seemed to me that the emotion of surprise itself was a key part of the process of change.  Because people who failed to surprise themselves, failed to change.

Now, this is where things get interesting.  The reason that some people fail to surprise themselves, when first using my techniques, is because they're thinking about the present....

Instead Of Experiencing The Past!

Because most of my work involves using questions designed to provoke certain memories or thought patterns, in order to "access the code" that makes a person feel or act in a certain way.  So the people who have difficulty, are the ones who go into analytical and conceptual thoughts, instead of emotional/behavioral experiences.

And when I ask a question like, "And where do you feel that in your body?", they'll give a non-answer like, "I think I must be afraid of success," or "it must be my low-self esteem."

Of course, working with such people 1-on-1, I can usually get them to stop doing that after a little bit of prompting.  But when people just read what I write, or listen to my recordings, there's no way for them to get that kind of feedback!  (And to date, I haven't managed to write or say anything that gets 100% of people to not do this.)

Now, I've always known that directly accessing the relevant memory or belief was critical to what I do; heck, I was writing about that as far back as 2005!  After all, every technique I use and teach is essentially just a different way of locating, activating, and then altering different kinds of memory patterns.

So I knew, from direct experience, that you had to access your mind's "code", in order to change it.

I just didn't have a good explanation for why!

But now, reading about how memory reconsolidation works, I see a new way to explain this principle.

Not just from a motivational perspective, (i.e., "you have to do it this way because Science says so").

And not just from a teaching perspective (i.e. "this is why you need to be as specific and sensory-based as possible, so as to access the precise memories").

But now, I also have a better way for someone to test whether they're doing it correctly!

See, up till now, I've only been able to point to their analysis and thinking, and say, "stop doing that", until they learn to do the right thing.

But now, I can more clearly describe what they're supposed to be doing in the first place!

Specifically, in order to perform a successful mind hack, you must be either:

1. Remembering something,
2. Expecting something, or
3. Experiencing something.

And if you're not doing one of those three things, then you're thinking, and therefore doing it wrong. 

Because, while reconsolidation applies to both "declarative" memories (concepts and abstract thinking) and "procedural" memories (emotions and behaviors), it only affects the currently active system.

And that's the real reason why...

Abstract Ideas Can Never Change You!

Anyway, this reconsolidation concept doesn't actually change any of the techniques I use or teach in any meaningful way, and I certainly don't need to rely on it for "scientific" validation of what I do.

But, it does seem like it could have some profound influence on how I teach people to do what I do, and that it has some potential to make the learning process a little easier...  especially for people who get too bogged down in abstract thought to be able to actually apply the techniques.

And that's precisely what I needed, for the rewrite of chapter 7.

So thank you, Mike.  And thank you, Science!