The Friendly Anarchist

Your Life, Your Pace, Your Rules

Recently, Abubakar Jamil asked me to write about the life lessons I learned so far, in order to contribute to a huge series he is hosting on the topic. While I feel a bit too young to look back in retrospect and share the ultimate wisdom, there are some lessons I have learned that will hopefully accompany me during the next 70 years of my life. ((Yes, I’m an optimist rather than even younger than you thought.)) Here they are.

Your Life

Maybe it was when my uncle died when he was only 65 years old, never to enjoy his pension after a stressful life with his job being the center. Maybe it was the day I woke up in hospital after some stupid surgery and wondered if this was the way life was meant to be. (It’s not.) Maybe it was when I first read Seneca, Tom Hodgkinson, or Hermann Hesse.

It’s your life, and you only got one.

Your Pace

Maybe it was when I was lying in my hammock on a ship that was running upstream the Amazon, living so slowly I was merely breathing anymore. Maybe it was when I read In Praise of Slow. Maybe it was when having a large Italian lunch with my former boss, spending three hours outside the office just to enjoy great food, light wine, and profound conversation.

You can live it at your own pace.

Your Rules

Maybe it was during one of these nights with cheese fondue binge and lots of red wine, listening to my friend Franck talking about the evils of work and how to avoid them. Maybe it was when I married by wife at young age and we were finally able to live together, with no more bureaucracy and boundaries, visa regulations and paperwork in the way. Maybe it was the moment I booked my ticket to Cartagena, in order to write my diploma thesis in the Caribbean rather than in the German winter.

You are free to make your own rules.

Universality

Fact is I cannot really pin down when I learned these life lessons. Maybe that’s because they are universal and ever-present. They reinforce and prove themselves again and again, if we are only willing to see. They prove themselves during moments of clarity and overwhelm, with company and when being alone, in the office and in the park, early at dawn and in the middle of the night.

Hell, they prove themselves in this very moment, as I am writing these lines in my hotel patio and five mariachis enter the scene. It’s past 10pm on a Monday evening and they come to play at a birthday dinner, waking up the guests that went asleep so early they ran danger to miss the party!

Your life, your pace, your rules.

These are lessons that have been written down a million times, in one form or another. They have been promoted in literature, in theater, in movies, and in popular culture. They have been spread by religious leaders, by rock stars and by self-help gurus. I personally have written about them several times, and will continue to do so. Because even though every single one of us has learned these lessons in our very own way already, we seem to have a special talent to ignore them.

That’s why I put them into my blog’s tagline: Your life, your pace, your rules.

Injustice

Some of us have it easier. Some of us have rich parents or a rich spouse. Some of us are born into well-connected families. Some of us have higher skills, a smarter brain, a stronger body.

Many of us have it harder. Many of us are born and raised in poverty. Many of us are prosecuted because of our gender, race or religion, because of our political or sexual orientation. Many of us are disabled, chronically sick, tired, pessimistic or depressed.

All of us are born and raised in some situation beyond our control, and then it’s up to us to make something of it.

Our life, our pace, our rules.

I personally was lucky in many ways, and I still struggle at times. But you know what? I have met many, many people that were born into complete shitholes and they still managed to live a fulfilled and happy life. And I’ve met the rich and the beautiful, and they were living overwhelmed on the verge of depression.

It’s not all about luck. It’s not all about ability, neither. Sometimes, things don’t work out as planned. The only remedy? Try again – or try something different. Try harder – or try smarter. Take a stand – or take two steps back and relax. But don’t despair.

Because this is your life and you only got one of it. You can live it at your own pace, and you can make your own rules.

Perfectionism

Nobody’s perfect. I know that all too well from personal experience: I’m a recovering perfectionist, slowly grasping that perfectionism all too often leads to stagnancy and procrastination. I ain’t got the perfect body, I ain’t got the perfect attitude, I ain’t got the perfect skills. I ain’t got the perfect blog, the perfect smile, the perfect haircut. I ain’t got the perfect cash flow, I ain’t got the perfect laptop, I ain’t got the perfect life.

And still, this is my life, I can live it at my own pace, and I can make my own rules. Flawed and all, but still self-determined.

Why do I keep repeating that? The reason is that I want you to become a friendly anarchist, no matter what’s your political color.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t work on making this world a better place and merely focus on ourselves. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight against inequalities. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t stand up against the injustices we experience. We should do all that!

But then, we should also take responsibility for our own lives, and live them to the fullest – despite the problems we encounter. Not because our happiness merely depends on our own abilities and society at large should be ignored. But because it’s both fulfilling and empowering to do so. And I believe that fulfilled and empowered people are able to make changes in society, too.

Here’s a little secret: Living life to the fullest doesn’t mean you have to do “epic shit” and be “pure walking awesomeness” all the time. Don’t stress out about it. It only means that you do what you want to do. That’s it. Because you’ve got one life only and it’s up to you how you use it.

Your life, your pace, your rules.

There are lessons that cannot be repeated often enough. Once you really get it, you’ll probably delete your feed reader, shut down your computer, and never look back. Because you suddenly might have some more important stuff to do. That’s fine with me. Actually, it would brighten up my day. Maybe we could still meet for coffee some day. Just let me know.

Good Reads, Happy 2011 Edition

Happy New Year, everybody! Hope you had a great time during Christmas and the turn of the year. (I was told that saying “Christmas” instead of “Holidays” was considered politically incorrect. As a friendly anarchist, I don’t really feel too bad about being p.i. at times, although I hope you also enjoyed Hanukkah, Yule, the winter solstice, Kwanzaa and whatnot. Also, the Chinese New Year is yet to come, while Muslims and Jews already enjoyed their New Year’s festivities several weeks ago, in early December and September, respectively. So wishing a Happy New Year without specifying it as “Gregorian” is probably p.i. as well. As far as I am concerned: The more, the merrier – let’s celebrate them all!)

Conveniently, in the Worldwide (Dis)Organization of Friendly Anarchists, there’s also a special festivity coming up: On January 16th, the vigil of Art’s Birthday, we will celebrate the First International Walk With Flowers Day!

The idea to celebrate this day was born in a conversation with Patricia Taylor, who recently launched a great new blog called Monthly Adventure. A couple of years ago, Patricia started implementing one adventure per month in her life – from doing ESP readings to becoming a skipper after a session with a Peruvian shaman! What a cool strategy to live an interesting life is that!?!

(Also, Patricia’s blog is a perfect example of how to build a blog with love and sweat and a personal touch, opposed to doing what everybody else is doing and getting all red and itchy about building a business and stuff.)

As part of her January adventure, Patricia will join me in walking with flowers – and you should, too!

As most of you know, I am not a friend of big PR hype, so the idea is not to make this yet another marketing event for the flower industry. (Valentine’s Day is more than enough!) Instead, we just want to embrace this day to be friendly to strangers – and interact with them, if even for a couple of seconds.

If you are interested to participate, you could actually walk with flowers, but you could also give away some home-made cupcakes, books you enjoyed reading, or engage in non-material acts of kindness: Help that lady carry her groceries, give that parking lot to the guy coming after you, make lots and lots of compliments (especially as you are the most beautiful readers of the planet!), and spend the day smiling.

More information can be found here! It would be a pleasure to have you on board!

[¶]

Here are other good (and great!) reads I stumbled upon during the last couple of weeks.

[¶]

Becoming a clear-minded creative takes a lot of hard work and determination. It begins with learning about yourself and making changes where needed. It involves setting up habits and systems that help you achieve as much as possible. And it involves continuous awareness.

My friend Milo finally launched his new blog! It’s called Clearminded Creative, and it’s targeted towards creative people that want to get clear about their way and do more creative work. This is a friendly blog from a smart guy who is walking the walk, so be sure to subscribe for updates!

[¶]

Embrace the subconscious. In the studio, I have a sofa for naps with a couple pillows. The pillow is kind of comfortable, but mostly not. Just soft enough to relax you. But, just stiff enough to keep you from falling fully asleep. Right before you fall fully asleep, your brain is making all sorts of connections between all of the unrelated thoughts in your brain. There’s no filter from your conscious mind saying “This makes sense. This other idea doesn’t.” Without that filter, you can consider more possibilities. So, grab something to write with, fill your head to the brim with research and what you already know. Then, take an almost-nap and get ready to document the ideas that find you.

Always love Frank Chimero. This is an older post by him called 10 Principles that may make your work better or may make it worse and I found number 6 to be fitting well with my experiences of the power of the idle brain – it definitely makes my work better, not worse!

[¶]

It isn’t that Pescovitz doesn’t understand what the blog business has become; he just figures that however it works now is anathema to what’s made Boing Boing popular in the first place. The editorial policy is just what it’s always been: The principals post whatever they want, whenever they feel like it. (…)

“Whenever something has a certain set of characteristics — interestingness, weirdness, colorfulness — some magical algorithm, it has to go on Boing Boing.” (…)

“I mean, if it’s interesting to me, it’s interesting,” he says. “And I think there are enough people out there that are interested in the same things I’m interested in. That makes it worth it.” (…)

Still, critics of Boing Boing say it tilts into the self-indulgent and owes its readers a more coherent, discriminating editorial style. “Uh-huh. Yeah,” Frauenfelder says, sounding patient. “I think it would just kill the pretty large audience we already have. We’re serving them by creating the blog that we ourselves want to read. And I’m not interested at all in creating any kind of media that I wouldn’t want to consume. That would be, like, deadly.”

Do you sometimes get hung up in this whole “provide value” bullshit? Read the story of Boing Boing, one of the biggest blogs out there, and get a different look at it!

I think that most people really don’t get the value proposition thingy right. Instead of doing cool stuff, they just start to produce more of the same, old content: Another copy of the copy of the rip-off of the copy of the original.

In contrast, the approach to just create what you would love to see can actually work – even at a very big level, as Boing Boing proves. This will not only make it nicer for you, it will make it more interesting for everybody involved.

[¶]

There’s another way to look at entropy in the metaphorical sense. Maybe unless a bit of chaos is introduced into the system, things always tend toward order. Toward clockwork. Toward a machine that ticks mindlessly and effortlessly along until time runs out.

So let’s get disorderly. (…)

When you want to make a change, you have to shake things up. You have to knock yourself out of that rut so that you can decide if you’d like to move or settle back into it. You need a little bit of anarchy… and nothing is better at creating personal anarchy than awareness.

Brilliant post by Johnny B. Truant. Johnny equals Business, but he’s also another example of boingboingesque content anarchy and simply doing the right thing.

[¶]

There are still interesting WikiLeaks stories emerging. I found this opinion by John Naughton to be worth my time:

What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the US and UK in not regulating banks); corrupt (all governments in relation to the arms trade); or recklessly militaristic (the US and UK in Iraq). And yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.

If you are a democrat, you should be as worried about this as if you are an anarchist or anything in between. Because we still don’t know what will be next – but it lies very much in our own hands.

In an interesting twist, Noam Scheiber shows how leaks can be seen as a tax on internal coordination – leading to the possible breakdown of large companies and bureaucratic entities due to their bigger vulnerability:

The Wikileaks revolution isn’t only about airing secrets and transacting information. It’s about dismantling large organizations—from corporations to government bureaucracies. It may well lead to their extinction.

Mind you, this could be quite positive – but also negative, depending on what comes to replace these large organizations. Again, it’s in our hands.

[¶]

I’m guilty of trying to constantly fill every waking moment with things to do. That’s why I’ve begun taking a weekly digital sabbatical. I love working for myself. However, I’ve realized that I don’t have to be plugged-in all the time to be “productive.”

I love to see that more bloggers start to enjoy the benefits of idleness, especially if they are as smart and friendly like Tammy Strobel! Here is an updated 2009 post by Tammy on the topic of leisureology. Another good read over at her site explains how to be non-judgmental.

[¶]

What do I need to do in daily life that I don’t realize I need to be doing?

Another Metafilter classic I found through a tweet by @oliverburkeman (who also published this enjoyable article on the fine art of strategic incompetence).

[¶]

In my culture (pampered American living in an upscale neighborhood of intact families) we pay lip service and involuntary servitude to the overarching myth that family overrides everything else. That nothing can be more important than family. And I’m sure that’s true in its most basic meaning. But we’ve re-interpreted that, as a culture, to be an imperative that all time must be spent with family. If you have a spare second it should be spent engaged in quality pursuits with our children. If we have an opportunity to travel it’s assumed that your spouse will share in the experience (and not via long distance). In truth we’ve eroded two fundamentally healthy ways to exist. In the first place we’ve surrendered our ability to enjoyed spending time by ourselves. We feel guilty when we’re not including everyone even though we’d really rather have some time to ourselves to read, create or just be a separate human being. According to everything I’ve read we rebel in our teen-aged years to be able to differentiate ourselves and become individuals……..why do we spend our adult years joined at the hip?

In the second place we’ve lost the ability to create and maintain friendships with groups of like minded people.

Kirk Tuck at his best. I think that a family can be a great community, but we should also appreciate being on our own and engaging with our friends. Not just for our art, but for our general happiness.

[¶]

Political awareness and the awareness of nature of mind are the same. Once people become aware of what they’re doing, most of them will not continue to destroy local cultures, or disregard the dangers of global warming, or sell monstrous weaponry to one another.

The relationship between meditation and activism. Interesting thoughts!

There is No Path

“The path is made by walking,” is a common saying. So if you move into new directions and explore undiscovered territories, the story goes, you will have to create the path by yourself.

There is another way to look at the path, though, and it’s helpful to meditate on that one when considering what happened in 2010 and when planning for 2011. It’s a simpler look, it’s very easy to get – but maybe it’s also a little bit more radical: There is no path.

Not only is there no path where no one walked before.
There is no path at all.

Of course, all of us are moving. And maybe you’ll move together with others, and create a new path as you move along. But that’s of second order. When considering that there is no path, it means that you are not obligated to get anywhere. Because you are already alive. And I think this is a useful insight to remember at this time of the year.

There are people who will hate me for writing this. They are young and ambitious (or old, and still not wise), and they don’t want to accept it: You have to plan, they say, you have to review! You have to build your business and your relationships!

They are right in that we all change, if we like it or not, and that we are better off taking control of these changes rather than hopelessly trying to maintain the status quo.

What I am advocating, though, is not resistance to change. I am advocating embracing the simple, yet totally astonishing fact that you are already complete. That you are already alive. That you are already here.

Life is not a race, and once you step back from the minutiae, you are free to enjoy it. You won’t be more complete once you make six figures. You won’t be more complete once you finally marry that beautiful girl, once you finally date that handsome guy, once you lose 20 pounds, once you get that new car, or phone, or house. (Or once you declutter and live with only 100 things.)

All of this can be nice. All of this can have some positive impact on your life. But if you aren’t self-sufficient and happy to be yourself, don’t expect these things to make a difference. If you are looking for illumination, for contentment, for happiness, all you have to understand is that you can have it right here, right now. In this very moment, reading this very sentence, in the very place you happen to be.

I am no stranger to paths, to planning, to dreaming. I wrote about travel as the human condition some time ago, and of course there’s something to that metaphor. Yet, if you look at time, what is the only piece of it that you’ll ever have?

Certainly not the past! The past is history, created by whoever was powerful enough to write it. This is true for both accounts of the major events in world history and for our personal lives. You cannot always control it, but there definitely is some kind of struggle going on inside you, and the winning forces decide if you rather remember the beautiful vacations you took with your parents when you were 10 or the divorce they got when you were 12.

Certainly not the future! Make no mistake here, especially during this time of the year: You can make all the plans and resolutions, set up all the meetings and accountability systems that you like – but if you get run over by a car tomorrow, that’s as far as you get!

This leaves you with the present. And when I invite you to just live in this present moment, I am not rallying against using these days to consider what happened, look back at what you did. And it’s good to make plans, to reconnect with your dreams, to create your personal agenda of what’s next.

Just don’t get overwhelmed by it, and don’t let the turn of the year paralyze you and lock you into a world of illusions and analysis. Instead, remember to enjoy these days with your family and friends, or even with total strangers, because that’s what life really is about, as far as I can tell.

Once you detach yourself from the details, from your hopes and plans, from your worries and regrets, there is no path. There’s only this very place and time where you are right now. And you are free to embrace it.

Writing a bit of history myself, 2010 was a great year for The Friendly Anarchist, and I’d like to thank all of you for taking the time to stop by at this site. It was because of you, because of your comments and support, that this blog became what it is, and together we managed to make it bigger and better, without growing too fast and losing touch.

In 2011, I’d like to focus on making TFA even more useful and playful. I want to produce high quality content, and the results from my recent survey will be very helpful for this. Thanks to everybody who took the time to answer it! There were so many beautiful and inspiring remarks, and I really appreciate them. I promised a coffee to everybody taking part in it; please call me out on it whenever we meet! (I mean it!)

Also, there were some people who wrote they never got in touch personally because they were too lazy or too timid. I’d love to exchange thoughts with you, but as the survey was anonymous, I can’t take the first step. If you read this, please feel free to send a mail at any time you feel comfortable.

I am currently planning a trip to Europe for February in order to enjoy the change of the seasons from winter to spring. Before leaving, I will enjoy the heat of Colombia for the next couple of weeks. Currently, I am at a beautiful hotel right at the beach of Cartagena, writing and enjoying the December winds and the sea with my wife, who will probably stay a little longer.

For the New Year, I wish you to find the balance between idleness and action, and the power to change whatever you want to change in your life, moment by moment. Take nothing for granted, and remember that all you have to do is being yourself. As it says in the TFA tagline: It’s your life, and you are free to live it at your own pace, by your own rules! Thank you, again, for being around!

True But Useless

Did you know that email adresses that begin with A, M or S receive a higher amount of spam than those that begin with Q or Z?

Incredible, right?

Yeah, and pretty useless. Unless you are have an A, M, S address, and prefer changing it over activating your spam filter, of course.

In reality, this email fact is nothing but a tiny piece of TBU information: “True But Useless”. ((TBU also stands for Tape Backup Unit, Tertiary Butyl, and is the airport code for Nuku Alofa/Tongatapu, Tonga. Now you know.)) I first stumbled upon the name for this concept when reading Switch. ((Yes, that book definitely left its marks on me.)) Chip and Dan Heath use it when describing the case of a development worker trying to fight malnutrition in Vietnam. He has all kinds of statistics and he knows how to win the fight on a theoretical level – but all of this is useless as long as he doesn’t manage to implement change on site.

Even if you’re not a development worker and never have been to Vietnam, TBU knowledge has certainly been a companion in your life – although you maybe didn’t even realize it.

Ignore the News and Pierce Your Eardrums?

Many personal development bloggers recommend complete ignorance when it comes to news. They say that news are a useless time-suck because they only cause anxiety and don’t help us improve our lives. If you look closely at their advice, this is pretty much true for anything else that is being published on a regular schedule, too – with the notable exception of their very own blogs and overpriced ebooks, of course. Honi soit qui mal y pense.

Admittedly, they have at least some kind of a point. Using our new vocabulary, much of news is TBU indeed. Unfortunately, the same could be said of most blog posts and the majority of the quarter million books published each year in the US alone.

Consequently, this personal development recommendation is TBU itself. True but useless! 99% of news isn’t relevant to our lives? So what?! “Ignore the news because most of it doesn’t concern you” is as good an advice as “Pierce your eardrums because most of the talk around you doesn’t concern you either!”

What we really need to learn is how to get rid of TBU knowledge in any given context, while maintaining ourselves informed and up to date about the things that do matter to us. Here are my thoughts on that:

The Use of News

News anxiety obviously doesn’t help anybody except the people selling news and counting clicks on CNN.com. Ernst Jünger wrote already in 1951 that the modern man’s obsession with checking the news several times a day was more an indicator of his personal fears and worries than anything else – and of course he has a point here.

At the same time, ignoring news altogether is not beneficial for most of us either. I doubt I even need to write this, but: If we like it or not, we are political animals, and we live in societies that might require us to manifest, demonstrate and take action against the things governments and corporations are doing – or at least cast a vote. If we have no information at all, we might happily live in our self-development bubble until we get hit by a nuke.

News can also bring us information about what’s happening in our very own neighborhood. I’m not thinking about the muggery last Saturday, but more about the new photography exposition, the beginning of theatre season, the opening of a new bar. Admittedly, we could find out about all these things through a well-informed peer group – but the news could be helpful, too.

Use it or Lose it

The real question when it comes to news or any other piece of information we might consider to consume is if we intend to use or lose it. “Using it” can mean pretty much anything from taking massive action (DDoSing Mastercard, boozing at the gallery opening, signing protest notes for Amnesty International) to merely entertaining ourselves – but it should be clear that entertaining ourselves with news for more than half an hour a day or so probably won’t do much good. It’s actually this part of news zapping that many of the mentioned bloggers would like to avoid – but by becoming obsessive about it, they lose the positive side of news, too.

The Best Piece of Useless Information is Still Useless

Books are great. I’m always stunned by the amount of high-quality non-fiction books that are published in English every year; many of them written for non-collegiate audiences. Then, there are quality ebooks, and even a handful of quality blogs. ((Most of them publish too much to always provide quality. It’s hard to create well-written content several times a week. Realistically, most bloggers are either not good enough writers, don’t have enough knowledge to share, or just don’t care about editing. Quality over quantity should become the new standard, as far as I am concerned. It’s also much more fun, as Joel points out!))

But here comes the thing: Even the best resource will be TBU if you don’t act on it. A great novel might become useful by taking you to a world of imagination, lightening your spirit. And admittedly, so might many non-fiction books. You should be honest to yourself, though: Was that the reason you bought them? Did you really only want to be entertained reading about non-conformity or losing your fears? Or did you justify the expense by promising to yourself that this would be a step to changing your life?

The information we read and digest day after day may be correct, well-researched, backed up by science, and even available for free – but if we don’t put it to use in some way, it will probably be TBU!

Antidote 1: The Intellectual Diary

Just as much as anybody we ever meet can be our teacher, pretty much any information we consume can be of use to us – as long as we know how to process it. Unfortunately, this is the point where at least I could certainly improve: This year, I read some 50 books or so, but I feel like I didn’t make too much of it. While I don’t think that everything I do or read has to be put to use, ((This would be yet another crazy obsession of some personal development peeps out there!)) I noticed that some of my good habits of processing information were slowly vanishing.

A big inspiration to counteract this can be Derek Sivers’ reading list: Not only does he list and rate the books he reads, he also takes notes or creates summaries in order to make it easier to come back to the content at a later date. The idea is to create a kind of intellectual diary that initially doesn’t need to be written for no one but ourselves.

Consequently, I became more disciplined in writing my own summaries again. I then took it a step further with Switch and compiled what I read and my accompanying thoughts in two of my largest blog posts ever. This can both help you to make changes in your life, and serves as a reference for myself. And as the experience and the feedback has been quite positive, I will certainly continue creating similar posts in the future.

Antidote 2: The Info Razor

In order to fight TBU knowledge before spending time consuming it, here is the antidote I’d like to suggest:

1. We don’t need to consume all the information on a given topic just to feel “well informed”. As long as we aren’t planning to become experts on that matter or it’s directly relevant for our survival and well-being, we don’t need to dive into it too much, but can only read the interesting digest.

2. In order to ease our decisions (Remember, habits are free!), we need to develop a kind of Ockham’s razor for our personal information consumption. The goal is to make the razor easily applicable, so that it doesn’t require much argumentation, but cuts the crap right away.

The information razor could be whetted by asking two questions before spending time on any information:

Is this directly relevant for my life?
Will I act on it?

If you negate both questions, move on and skip the information. The exception to this recommendation is whenever you have free time to spend with info entertainment, of course. But then, consider the downsides of loading your brain with TBU knowledge – you might be better off by just taking a walk and giving your idle brain some time to do its job!

True but useful photographies accompanying this post (CC) by LU5H.bunny, m4r00n3d and laverrue. Thanks for that!

How to Make Change Real

How is that icicle in Columbus doing? Did it grow? Did it melt? Whatever you personal icicle is, take a moment to look at it. Look at the situation you find yourself in. Look at your job (or your unemployment), look at your relationships, at your friends, at your hobbies. Look at your talents, your passions, the food you are having for lunch. Go get a mirror and look at your face. Look deep into your eyes, and ask yourself honestly if what you are doing with your life is what you want to be doing.

If you discover anything your don’t like, take some extra time to look at it right now. Then, say Good Bye to it. Because here comes the information to change it, and if you follow through, you won’t ever see that thing again.

Direct the Rider

As we’ve seen in the first post on how to change your life, there are three elements for change, as described by Chip and Dan Heath in their magnificient book Switch: Directing the Rider, motivating the Elephant, and shaping the Path.

I will explain how to do that in this post, and outline three concrete change scenarios: Whether you want to quit your job and take your life back, become a daredevil traveler, or build a blog that stands out from the crowd, here are the strategies you are looking for, plus examples to make your personal change real! ((Of course, all of this information could be extended even further and taken to other areas of your life. Feel free to share your personal approach in the comments!))

To recap, the Rider represents our rational side. He’s a great planner, but he likes to figure out everything a hundred percent. As a consequence, he tends to overanalzye matters and he often gets stuck in decision paralysis. Here are the three techniques to avoid that:

1. Follow the Bright Spots

“Imagine a world in which you experienced a rush of gratitude every single time you flipped a light switch and the room lit up,” the Heath brothers write. Reality is different, though: The Rider is complaining all the time. To him, nothing is perfect, and even if life feels good in general, he will focus on the problems rather than on the successes. And the longer he looks at it, the more problems he will find.

Following the bright spots is the exact opposite behavior: Instead of focusing on what’s lacking, focus on what’s working. There are exceptions to every problem we might have, and if we can identify these exceptions, we can create change from there. Thus, spot something that works, and then do more of it!

Quit Your Job and Take Your Life Back: What other ways have you pursued so far to make a living? How are other people making a living with similar passions as yours? Also, consider how you lived happily spending less when you were younger. This is true for most of us, and it can help you when downsizing in order to reduce living costs and become less income-dependent.

Become a Daredevil Traveler: Remember that spontaneous road trip you took years ago: How did you do it, and was it really as difficult as you might feel your current travel plans are? Also, consider looking for bright spots among your friends and acquaintances, and find out how they managed to prepare their long-term travels. As a crazy example, check out how Steve Kamb is traveling the world for $418. This would be a perfect bright spot to imitate!

Build a Blog That Stands Out From the Crowd: Which of your posts so far have been retweeted the most, which got the most comments? Through which traffic sources did readers find you, and which posts generated the most page views? (If you are unsure about how to get this kind of statistics, consider installing Google Analytics.) These are the bright spots of your blog, and if you manage to find out what was different about them, you can use these techniques in your next posts!

2. Point to the Destination

Create a crystal-clear but catchy goal you can identify with and work towards: Where are you going and why is it worth it?

In Switch, one way to answer these questions is to create a destination postcard, setting a clear yet emotional goal that both helps to show the Rider where you’re heading to and to motivate the Elephant.

When doing this, think mid-term: A couple of months or maybe one or two years ahead. Make the image as vivid as possible, as this helps to overcome the analysis and procrastination phase and get the Rider into “do mode“.

Quit Your Job and Take Your Life Back: Don’t focus on how bad your current situation might be, but on the freedom you are going to create for yourself: Will you be working everyday? Or will you be working way less than ever before, and counterbalance income losses by living as a minimalist? What kind of projects will you be working on, and how will you do it? Will you work as a night owl, from your home, from an office, a studio, or even work from the coffee shop? Describe how your new work situation will actually look like.

Become a Daredevil Traveler: Travel in itself is certainly a great goal. But make it more vivid and concrete: Will you be traveling for a month, a year, or all your life? Will you be going to the beach, to the mountains, or rather move from city to city? Will you be traveling alone or with someone else? In exotic locations or near your home?

Build a Blog That Stands Out From the Crowd: Do you want to have more than 1.000 subscribers, or do you want to make at least 500 dollars a months from your blog? Why do you care about these numbers? Do you want to spread knowledge, entertain people, or do you need to make money? Numbers help getting clarity, but try to imagine what would happen if your blog became the kind of platform you always wanted it to be! ((As for numbers, consider this great quote from Switch: “There are some people whose hearts are set aflutter by goals such as “improving the liquidity ratio by 30 percent over the next 18 months.” They’re called accountants.”))

3. Script the Critical Moves

Goals can be anything and everything. The trick is to break them down to concrete action steps.

The reason for this is that the bigger the problem, the longer the Rider will brood over how to solve it – looking for an even bigger solution. In reality, big changes require small solutions: They become real step by step, not in one big burst of creation.

When scripting the moves, don’t let room for ambiguity. The more choice the Rider is offered, the more exhausted he gets, because he feels the need to evaluate everything. Thus, avoid excess choice, and make the steps as clear as possible: “Clarity dissolves resistance,” as the Heath brothers write.

Don’t try to define every single step on your journey, but only script the critical moves in order to get going. Ignore everything that wouldn’t make a bigger impact or isn’t of central importance for your goal. What you want to define is an compelling end goal, and then lay out the first steps to take. Forget about the middle when starting out, because you can always cope with this in due time. You’ll be better informed by then, as you’ll already have learned something at the beginning of your change effort.

Quit Your Job and Take Your Life Back: Script the critical moves to build an emergency fund – you should reduce living costs and try to save a certain amount of dollars for a couple of months in order to be financially prepared for the transition period. (Check out Tyler’s free guide for the details!) – Also, figure out what would be the critical steps to build your own business or become a successful freelancer. (Again, don’t be shy to consult some useful guides on these topics, like Chris Guillebeau’s Freelancer 101 or the Unconventional Guide to Working for Yourself. ((These are affiliate links)) Warning: Don’t buy these in order to have another bunch of PDFs on your hard drive. Buy them only if you are totally sure you will use them!)

Become a Daredevil Traveler: My favorite trick for getting on the road without overthinking it is by setting a date: Buy a ticket, research a general itinerary, then fill the gaps as necessary once you are out there. (Remember you don’t have to define all the steps, but only the critical ones. All over the world you will find other travelers, guide books, and decent internet connections to schedule the details of your next trip segments in due course!)

Build a Blog That Stands Out From the Crowd: Some of the probloggers out there want you to believe you have to read their whole archives in order to build a great blog. The truth is that this will only cost you time and not take you a single step towards your goal. Better, focus on your content first, and then embrace one or two promotional channels you like. This could be Twitter, guest posting, interviewing other bloggers from your field, Facebook, or sending out promotional emails to people already on your list. Just don’t try to do everything at once, because you will get overwhelmed (see “Shrink the Change” in the next section!).

Motivate the Elephant

The Elephant represents our emotional side. He’s the real change maker, but he needs to be motivated or he won’t move a single step. Here are three techniques to do that:

1. Find the Feeling

You probably know that it would be “nice” to live a more interesting life with less TV and more adventure. But when it comes to doing something to make it real, your favorite sitcom is about to start and the Elephant feels that chilling on the couch would be a better thing to do than working towards your goal.

To counteract this, tie your change effort to a strong positive feeling. This will motivate your Elephant to try new things, to experiment, and to play. In short: It will make him interested in interesting things.

Quit Your Job and Take Your Life Back: See yourself getting up every morning, ready to do things that matter. See yourself working creatively, self-determined, and at your own pace. This is the feeling you are looking for.

Become a Daredevil Traveler: Imagine breathing the fresh air on the Apallachian Trail you want to explore. Think of the sunset over the Caribbean. See yourself walking through Rome and Paris, embracing the culture of these cities. Here’s the feeling you might want to evoke. (If you want to take this further, take a short trip to one of the places you’d visit as a long-term traveler. Once you are there, the feeling becomes real, and you’ll be able to connect with it back at home while plotting your escape (PDF).)

Build a Blog That Stands Out From the Crowd: Feel the inspiration that grows out of being an integral part of your blogging niche and being connected to other writers. Maybe the idea to launch a product is exiting for you, or to take your writings and thoughts to other platforms or conferences.

2. Shrink the Change

The bigger a task, the less likely the Elephant will move. One way to counteract this is to impose a clear time limit for the activity ahead: You are not going to reach inbox zero, you are just going to spend 15 minutes replying to mails from your back log. Also, you can break down any big task into tiny bits and pieces until it becomes managable: Writing one paragraph on shrinking change is far easier than writing a large blog post on how to change your life! (Ahem…)

Quit Your Job and Take Your Life Back: If you have just $500 in savings, you are $500 closer to reaching your emergency fund goal. If you manage to skip just one compulsive shopping impulse today, you are already on your way to becoming a minimalist and reducing your cost of living dramatically. Now, save another $500, for example by selling 10 things you don’t need anymore and putting the money into your fund.

Become a Daredevil Traveler: If you have never traveled before, book the already mentioned trip to a place that intrigues you and give it a try. (Don’t book an all-inclusive tour, but try traveling like a long-term traveler.) If you are already on the road but looking for more adventure, leave your guide book at home for just one day and stroll around aimlessly. Be open to new people, events, and opportunities of all sorts. You don’t have to join the Foreign Legion only to become a more adventurous traveler!

Build a Blog That Stands Out From the Crowd: Take just 15 minutes to review your post again before you publish it. Read it aloud to get a feeling for the tone and make it more consistent. You could also try to improve nothing but the headline and the first three sentences. It’s a small task for your Elephant, but it will have a huge impact.

3. Grow your People

This is the idea of motivating other people to change. It is more relevant for a company context or in society at large, but you can also use some of this advice for personal change efforts.

One idea the Heath brothers describe is to connect with your true identity in order to motivate change. Also, adapt a growth mindset and prepare for failure. Studies have shown that people that accept setbacks as part of the change process are much more likely to succeed than people who don’t.

Quit Your Job and Take Your Life Back: Do you see yourself as an office clerk dealing with whatever tasks are thrown at you, or as a sovereign individual doing work that matters in a self-determined way? Are you ready to fail with your first three business ideas, but to learn from it and succeed with the fourth one?

Become a Daredevil Traveler: How does the way you travel (or plan to travel) fit in with your identity as a traveler? Are you a culturally interested person, a sports freak, an idler on the road? Whatever you identify with, are you living up to it? – As for the growth mindset, don’t stop traveling just because you encounter some problems on the road. Sometimes, you won’t find a nice hostel. People will suck. Maybe you’ll get mugged. Expect this to happen, and see it as part of the game. The next time, you will be better prepared.

Build a Blog That Stands Out From the Crowd: Are you just writing an online diary or are you a blogger who wants to provide value to your readers? Both ways are fine, but these different identities lead to different actions! If you want to take your site to a new level, maybe you should tweak your blogger identity – and experiment with new strategies, even if they might not work: Try long posts instead of short ones, include some great pictures in your posts, get a new design. Mix it up!

Shape the Path

Wherever Rider and Elephant want to go, it will be easier the less obstacles are on their Path. Remember the downhill road and the coffee stops! Here are three techniques from Switch for clearing your personal change Path:

1. Tweak the Environment

Often, change is difficult because your environment isn’t supportive. If you want to become an evolutionary biologist in an Amish community, change will be hard. As a consequence, try to adapt the situation you find yourself in and make it favorable to your change project. If you want to live an interesting life, look for interesting people, and visit the places where they gather. Go somewhere interesting, like a cockfight arena, ((I said “interesting”, not ethically correct. Admittedly, there are many better places to go to than cockfight arenas!)) opposed to sitting at home watching YouTube.

Quit Your Job and Take Your Life Back: If you long for becoming an entrepreneur but only know people who are happily employed, change will be hard. Try connecting with entrepreneurs and freelancers. If you can’t find any in your local community, there are many of them on the web. (Caveat: You have to avoid becoming a marketing jerk!)

Become a Daredevil Traveler: Locally, you could try to connect with long-term travelers giving speeches and presentations in your city (or who are visiting it). The best way to become a traveler, though, is to travel. ((You wouldn’t have guessed, admit it!)) This brings me back to the idea of taking a short vacation before leaving for a year-long round-the-world trip. Emerge yourself in the environment you want to be exploring, even if it’s just for a short time. It will reflect back on you. – If you’re already on the road but want more interestingness, avoid hanging out all the time with people who only travel from city to city to stay in their hostels. Instead, engage with the guys who try all the crazy local stuff and dive into any new adventure (with the notable exception of chrystal meth).

Build a Blog That Stands Out From the Crowd: The blogger’s environmental change will mostly happen online. That said, I see many bloggers moving to Portland, Oregon or Bangkok, Thailand, and I suppose that one reason for this is that there are so many interesting people to connect with in those places. Even if you can’t move so easily, you could still travel to meet-ups and conferences, like Chris Guillebeau’s World Domination Summit. ((If there’s any friendly anarchists planning to go, we could maybe do an informal session advocating people’s sovereignty over world domination. I’m just sayin’…))

2. Build Habits

The Heath brothers describe habitual behavior as “free,” because it doesn’t cost the Rider any effort. Once you got used to something, you’ll just do it without the need to think about it or convince the Elephant. Thus, habit building is a perfect element of shaping the Path.

One major trick when it comes to habits is employing action triggers: If you do X, condition yourself to do Y directly after that.

Quit Your Job and Take Your Life Back: Work on your personal project or on building a side business for one hour directly after getting up in the morning, or after coming home from your job.

Become a Daredevil Traveler: Travel to a place you’ve never been at before every Saturday after breakfast. This may be a place in your own city, even in your neighborhood, but you can also take your lear jet and visit Vegas. (Yes, even habits can be interesting!)

Build a Blog That Stands Out From the Crowd: Sit down to write everyday once you grab your first coffee. Work focused and ignore any distraction for 30 minutes whenever you set your timer.

3. Rally the Herd

Behavior is contagious. This is another technique used mainly to change companies or society at large, but it can be helpful for many personal changes you might be contemplating, too: Don’t just start having adventures on your own, bring some friends along! Learning to cook will be much more interesting if you do it with your peers. And once you motivate them to be a part of it, the group dynamics will also reflect on you, making your change easier!

Quit Your Job and Take Your Life Back: Do you have a co-worker that wants to escape, too? Create a conspiracy of two, and get each other moving to break free within six months of time! Hold each other accountable to take at least one step towards your goal every single day. (I am doing this with my friend Milo, who is currently building a great blog on defining your own success. (Psst, it hasn’t launched yet, but you can sneak a peek here. Don’t tell him I sent you!))

Become a Daredevil Traveler: Traveling may be more fun if you do it with a friend, but I also made very good experiences traveling solo. Still, planning with other people and engaging them to exchange thoughts can be really powerful in order to keep you moving and overcome obstacles. I’m also a big fan of ad hoc travel alliances that often lead to very interesting travel episodes.

Build a Blog That Stands Out From the Crowd: Get more people into blogging, motivate and direct them, and you will motivate and direct yourself, too. I am currently doing a consultation with a reader who is building a great web presence that will change the way people understand the English language. The work with him reflects on me, too, as it forces me to rethink the main strategies and tactics for building a better blog, leading to more useful and entertaining content for you here on TFA. ((At least, that’s my megalomaniacal assumption!))

Go Make It Real

Let’s recap very quickly: We looked at how to live an interesting life by leaving your worries behind and finally do the things you care about. Next, we outlined how to change your life by overcoming the main obstacles to change and commiting to make your own rules for your personal game of life. To conclude, we explained the strategies of Switch to direct the Rider, motivate the Elephant, and shape the Path.

All I have left to say is that the tools are here. Now, you have to use them. Don’t worry anymore, don’t lose direction, don’t overanalyze – and don’t mind taking a tiny step right now to make your change real!

Illustration based on beautiful photos by Giorgio Montersino and Valerie Chiang. Thanks!