To train any animal, you follow a simple process. You somehow indicate what you want it to do, and then when it does it, you give it a reward. Maybe in some cases you punish it if it doesn't do what it's supposed to do. Then you repeat until the animal is trained. When it comes to training ourselves, though, we come up with a million weird and ineffective ways to do it.

Why is that? Maybe it's because we don't want to face the truth about what it takes to train ourselves, so we hunt and hunt for shortcuts. As someone who has trained himself to do all sorts of things, I think that the solution is much easier.

The first fix is to drop this idea of looking for a shortcut. Often times people will spend years trying to find that shortcut to losing weight, learning a new language, or developing a sense of optimism. Maybe they save a month or two, but they would have been a lot better off just doing it the hard way to begin with.

When people tell me that they're going to change, the number one indicator I've found to predict whether or not they'll succeed is how quickly they start. If they start right now they have a much better chance of succeeding than if they start, "after this pack" or "on January first" or "as soon as I'm settled in". If you don't want something bad enough to start immediately, you may as well give up and not waste your time on it. Obvious exceptions are when there's a concrete logistical reason to start later like, "I'll start training for skiing in the winter, because that's when there's snow".

Last Friday night, after two years of really hard work on SETT, we sent invite codes out to the four hundred people on the SETT waiting list, offering fifty spots. Whoever managed to snag a spot could either take a free basic account or buy a premium account and get 50% off for life.

The main point of releasing these spots is to start testing SETT on a wider scale, to get more feedback, and to begin work on some really cool blog to blog features. So if no one actually paid for an account, and everyone just took free ones to mess around with, I would have been satisfied. I figured maybe one or two people might pay, and maybe things would go really well and five people would pay.

As it turns out, thirteen people bought accounts, covering all three price points that we set. More than the actual money, which I've already used to upgrade the servers, I'm personally touched that people are excited enough about SETT to pay for it. I've worked so hard on this and continue to narrowly focus on making it the best blogging platform, that it's moving to have people who share the vision.

I'm also grateful for the people who set up free accounts and have already started using them. Many of the paid and unpaid SETT customers are members of this site who are active in the community section and comments, so I have high expectations for all of their blogs. As they get settled in, import their old blogs, and write new posts, I'll be linking to some of them here. Next Monday I will link to every new SETT blog that has at least one post on it.

There's this new-age idea that we should all be completely in the present at all times, ignoring the past and the future. Some people go so far as to parrot phrases like "the present is the only thing that really exists", or "live every day like it's your last!". I disagree. I think that there's value in considering all three time periods, as long as they're looked at differently. The problem is that most people treat them in the same way.

Past

Take the past. Most people look at the past as something that could somehow be changed if they wished hard enough. They don't actually believe that, but they act like it, saying things like, "If only I had _____". A better way to see the past is like a series of completed experiments. Everything, from before you were born until the moment you read the previous sentence is now set in stone and cannot be changed. The value we can get from this is to learn from our mistakes, failures, and pure observation.

It's possible to live in the past, to rehash things that happened and associate their greatness or tragedy with the present. We are the product of nothing but the past, but on the other hand the past is only a series of experiments. We aren't bound to make the same mistakes, and we aren't guaranteed the same successes, especially if we can't emotionally distance ourselves from what has happened, and rationally extract all of the available lessons from it.

I've noticed that a lot of times when I do something and I wonder for a moment if it was the best choice or not, I tend to come to the conclusion that I don't regret it, so it must be good. For example, I was debating whether a week or so of sharply diminished productivity was an acceptable cost to go hike around the mountains in Peru.

My first instinct, with the Peru situation, amongst aothers, is to say, "Well, I had an awesome time, learned some good stuff, and had a great experience, so it was the right decision." But does that actually really mean that it was a good decision?

I'm really happy with my life and what I'm doing, so therefore I don't regret any decision I've made. The implication is that even though I didn't make every decision absolutely correctly, everything worked out for the best. To support this idea, I can think of one cool thing that happened, or one really great person I met, and work backwards through the improbable series of choices I made that led me there.

The more I think about it, the less stock I put into these sorts of thought patterns. Rather than reflecting the objective reality of decisions, I think that they reflect my optimistic nature. Really bad things can happen to me, and I'm still happy. Some circuit in my brain finds happiness and then weaves all past events into a narrative that supports that happiness: "If I didn't have hundreds of thousands of gambling profits stolen, I wouldn't have become a writer and put out a few books. Therefore I'm glad that I lost that money."

Back when I was gambling professionally, it seemed like everyone had an opinion on which casino was rigged. I never really thought that, but I also didn't really think that I was winning as much as I was supposed to. To test this, I recorded every single session I played for over a year. Guess what? I was within a fraction of one percent from where I was supposed to be statistically. I learned that not only were the casinos not rigged, I wasn't very good at mentally aggregating lots of independent events.

I think that in real life, we all have a natural inability or unwillingness to accept that we generally receive what we deserve. Before I get into this, though, I'll say that it definitely isn't true all of the time. I offer the idea here just a useful tool and framework, not to pass judgement. For example, I know people who have lost close family members, people who have been raped, and people who have been affected by other horrible things. I don't think that they deserve those things or earned them in some way. I think they're an unfortunate side effect of the chaos and variance of life, which is otherwise a good thing.

When I was around twenty, I knew for a fact that I would become rich by the age of twenty-five. Twenty five was really old and I knew that I was special, so it made perfect sense to me that I'd be rich by then. I put in a moderate amount of effort, and made moderate progress towards my goal, but didn't really even close. When I turned twenty five, I was at least a little bit surprised that I wasn't a millionaire yet.

I'm still not a millionaire, but I'm not surprised about it anymore. I've seen people work harder than me and work smarter than me and become rich. I've seen the dedication it takes, and I've seen how that compares to what I have typically put in.

When I write about "average people" or "average Americans", I often get flack about it. Some people call me elitist. Occasionally I get called something worse. Then there are the comments about how if everyone did something that I suggest, it wouldn't work anymore, or that the average person isn't exactly the same as me, so he may not be able to do everything I can do. All this boils down to a pretty good topic for a post.

Who exactly am I talking about when I talk about average people? The best way to define my usage of the term would be to say that I'm talking about people who live lives of defaults. They go with the flow and conform to society's expectations of them. That doesn't mean that they're all exactly the same-- there's enough chaos in the world to make everyone completely unique. But although the expressions of their principles are unique, the actual principles are pretty much the same. They do what's easiest. They may have big dreams, but they have low goals. They work as hard as they have to. They don't make independent decisions.

That's not to say that they ALWAYS fit exactly into this mold, only that they usually do. And there's a bell curve, of course, with some people being dead average, some people being mostly average, and then way out on the fringes there are weirdos like myself, and probably even weirder people than me.

Why do I rant about average people so much? It's not because I hate them or think poorly of them-- it's actually because I believe that they're capable of much more and would have better lives if they made the effort. Mostly I think it's a shame that so many people are plodding down this worn trail when there's lots of undiscovered wilderness to explore. I have some contempt for their actions, but not for them as people.

I must be in an art sort of mood. I went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston before Christmas, and then went to the Met and Museum of Modern Art in New York after New Years. Today I even skimmed a book on drawing, but gave up after discovering the first exercise in the book wasn't enough to transform me into Picasso. Cutting out my five minute foray into fine art, here are a couple art things that might be interesting to you:

Hack the Met Tour

My friend Nick Gray has a goal of becoming the best Met tour guide in the world. I think he's already there-- I've been on two of his tours so far and can't wait to go again. He's not an official tour guide. In fact, he's as unofficial as it gets. He's been kicked out before and has to now avoid certain areas of the Met. What's cool about his tours is that although they reflect his love for the Met and the art contained within it, they're irreverent and down to earth. You're as likely to hear about how a piece was conceived as you are to hear about how he might steal it. The highlight was his trick to get to wander around the Met after it's closed, as seen in the top photo here.

His tour is free and runs twice a week on most weekends, but has limited space. If you want to go, contact him through his site or just wander around the Met and try to crash the tour. He's usually pretty open to those things.

A few people asked what I eat every day. I think that what I eat is of minor interest, but maybe the reasoning behind it might be more valuable.

First the what. My friend Dick Talens suggested that I do intermittent fasting, which means that I eat during only an eight hour period each day. There's some compelling evidence that this is good for longevity, but not enough that I can say for sure that it's true. I was attracted to the diet because it meant that I could spend less time eating each day.

When I bought a house ten years ago, I also bought place settings for six and silverware for twelve. Then I developed a minor fascination with bone China and bought settings for eight. I probably had four dozen glasses. About once a month or so, all of these dishes would be piled up in and around my sink, begging to be cleaned. I didn't have a lot of dinner parties-- I just hated doing dishes so much that I'd procrastinate until washing became a full day event. Those days were some of my least favorite.

A few days ago, I was doing the dishes for the six of us that ate dinner. There were pots, pans, plates, serving utensils, and glasses. The works. For the first time ever, I found myself enjoying doing the dishes. I could appreciate the warm water on my hands and the shine in the pot when it was clean. When I washed everything that wasn't dishwasher safe, I started handwashing the things that could have just gone in the dishwasher. It wasn't fun exactly, but it was so enjoyable that I actually found myself looking forward to washing the dishes the next day.