Live Hard

Likes: Twinkies, siege warfare. Source: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

There’s a concept in economics called Creative Destruction. Basically, the idea is that when things stagnate in a country – often economically – it takes massive disruption of the existing order to improve things and promote growth. Think of it like a forest where the trees are so densely packed together that no sun reaches through the upper branches, and everything on the floor starts to rot – until a fire or other disaster clears some space, and things can start to grow again.

This works in other areas, although it’s often not very pleasant. Genghis Khan, for instance, is credited with bringing huge swathes of Asia into one political system, allowing increased trade and communication between the West and East. He did that by destroying the stagnant, tribe-run system that was preventing progress – but on a more basic level, he did it by catapulting palm trees into besieged cities, using captives as human shields and being indirectly responsible for the deaths of at least 10 million people. Historians argue about his influence, but you can’t deny that he was a bit of a shit.

The good news is, you don’t have to go that far. The bad news is that if things are stagnant, rotten or otherwise not working properly in your life, you’re going to need to wreak some Creative Destruction to fix it.

How? Here’s one way. Dozens of coaches, thinkers, business leaders and thinkers will tell you that you’re the sum of the five people you spend the most time around. If they’re proactive, healthy, kickass people who get things done: great. If they aren’t, you might be in trouble. When you embark on any sort of lifestyle change, some people are bound to try and hold you back – they’ll ask why you’re wasting your time at the gym, why you can’t go for beers every night, or why you’re spending all your time writing/reading/training instead of being up for all-day Call Of Duty marathons like you used to. They might even tell you that you’ve ‘changed.’

You might have to destroy these people. Not literally: I can’t stress that enough. But if they won’t change, or stop criticising you for trying to make changes, then at the very least you need to spend less time with them. If they’re relentless, you might need to cut them out of your friendship circle altogether. Because if the path you’re on is the right one (and hopefully you’ve done some research, so you think it is) – then they aren’t your friends for trying to keep you away from it. Catapult them out of your life, and make room for growth.

HOMEWORK: Write down the names of the five people you socialise with the most. Decide whether they help you, or hold you back. Act accordingly. And listen to Dan Carlin’s Wrath Of Khan podcast – it’ll make the most ruthless thing you can possibly do seem pretty tame.

Like sending a man to the moon.

I made a Sunday roast the other day (because not being able to cook is like not being able to cuddle – right, Robert Rodriguez fans?) and it made me think about fighting. More specifically, it made me think about the process of getting good at anything.

You can’t make a flawless Sunday roast first time. Nobody can. To take just one part of the Platonic ideal of a roast, I’ve seen some films where bomb disposal looks less stressful than making proper Yorkshire puddings. You have to have the right flour, and sieve it, and mix it so it doesn’t get lumpy, then get the tray (and oil) hotter than the fires of hell, then tip the batter in without letting the tray-heat drop more than a couple of degrees or burning your hands off, then play the game of chicken that is watching the puddings through the oven-window (clue: when they look done, when you’re sure they’re done and they’re about to burn, they still aren’t done enough to stop them deflating as soon as you open the door). Now combine that with managing every other element of the roast, bearing in mind that all of them have to go in and out of the oven at the optimum time, and it looks like an impossible task – like playing six games of chess when you still aren’t really sure how the horsey ones move.

But here’s the thing: you don’t have to make a flawless roast first time. You make one, or (preferably) help someone else make a bit of one, and some things go right and some things go wrong. Then you refine the process, by learning how much you need to baste the potatoes or that you need to make a tiny carrot-rack for the chicken to stop it getting soggy, and then you refine it some more. Then one day you make a roast that everyone says is amazing, and you can’t even remember when you couldn’t cook like this.

This process is remarkably similar to how everything else works. Learning judo, or Chinese, or bass guitar, can seem insanely difficult, if you look at it in the same way as a Sunday roast – if someone puts you in front of a large aggressive man and tells you to throw him on the floor, or gives you a guitar and the tab for Seven Nation Army. But you don’t have to learn them all in one go. You learn bits here and there, you enjoy the process and keep plugging away, and then one day you realise you’re pretty good at throwing people on the floor or you can understand most of Ip-Man. And here’s the real secret: life is going to go on whether you do any of this stuff or not. In five years, you’re going to be five years older, but you could have had five years’ practice at cooking or fighting – enough to get really, really good. Start it today. Nothing’s impossible.

HOMEWORK: Figure out something you want to learn, and take the first step to learning it today. That could be Googling a recipe and buying the ingredients, or anything else you like. And if you want any Sunday roast tips, give me a shout in the comments.

There’s a time for killing things, and a time to chill.

Being successful and good at things means working like a crazy man, right? Everybody says so. Will Smith can’t wait to tell you how he’s working while other people are asleep, and how he’d kill himself to beat you on a treadmill race. Eric The Hip-Hop Preacher wants you to want success as badly as you’d want to breath if he dunked you in the sea, which would presumably be a lot. So you should probably be working every hour of the day, right?

Well, maybe not.

People love to cite the so-called 10,000 hour rule popularised by Malcolm Gladwell (basically: it takes that much practice to get world-class at anything) but at least one study of elite-level performers says there’s more to it than just cranking out the hours. For starters, your practice needs to be deliberate - targeted at improving something specific, in the sweet spot outside your comfort zone but before you panic. That kind of practice is difficult and boring, and tough to do for more than a couple of hours a day.

More importantly, though, a 1990 Berlin study found a couple of interesting differences between elite musicians and average ones – differences that suggest how you work might be more important than how hard. The elite and average musicians did the same amount of hours – but the elites split their practice into two well-defined daily practice sessions, while the average guys spread the work out throughout the day. The average guys also slept, overall, for an hour less a night than the elites.

What does that mean? It means that by splitting up your work throughout the day, doing it all day, and cutting your sleep short, you might actually be ruining yourself. Add to that the fact that Anders Ericsson, author of the study the whole 10,000 hours thing is based on, says, ’To maximize gains from long-term practice, individuals must avoid exhaustion and must limit practice to an amount from which they can completely recover on a daily or weekly basis.’  Tony Schwartz, founder of The Energy Project, has made a career from making businesses more productive by instituting more breaks. And I’m pretty sure even Will Smith relaxes enough to keep himself productive.

Work when it’s time to work, rest when it’s time to rest – otherwise you’re half-working all the time and you aren’t hitting your full potential.  Don’t kid yourself that half-working long into the night means you’re getting more done: work as hard as you possibly can, then totally relax, and go to bed early. How? Here are some ideas I use:

• Go to lunch. Work out if you can, but go for a walk if you can’t- either will cut your cortisol levels and refresh you for the afternoon. Working through is madness.
• At the end of the work day, write what you need to do first tomorrow on a post-it, then leave work and don’t think about it until you come back in. Don’t make the habit of staying late: work often expands to fill the time you give yourself.
• The Pomodoro timer is a nice name for the idiotically simple idea of working for 25 minutes, then having five minutes off. It’s the perfect amount of time – not quite half an hour, so you really concentrate your efforts, and it’s just long enough to keep yourself off Twitter for. Usually, after five minutes off, I can’t wait to get back to work, for an hour of furious work instead of six non-productive ones. This is how I write in the evenings.
• Improving reading is important, but it’s not great at the end of the day – it can be hard to take in, or leave you buzzing with ideas. I save ‘improving’ books (stuff about talent, brain-science, weightlifting and social skills) for my commute, and fiction before bed.
• Sleep like a bastard. Ideally you’re supposed to switch electronics off an hour before bed, but I’m apparently incapable of doing that. I try to make up for it by making my bedroom super-dark – no phones – and taking magnesium.

If you’re working hard, you need to rest hard. You can’t do one without the other.

HOMEWORK: Every night this week, ask yourself: am I working or resting right now? And whichever one it is, make sure you’re committed to that one.

So is this.

So last year nearly two dozen people injured themselves attempting a fire-walk at a seminar run by Tony Robbins. 6,000 people attended, and the people who got injured were ‘out of state’, or not mentally prepared, according to some of the people that made it.

Here’s the thing: no, they weren’t. Firewalking is just physics. Fire embers, once the water’s evaporated out of them, aren’t that hot and don’t conduct heat that well. Running across them is bad, because it increases your chances of pushing the top of your feet into the embers. Firewalking across metal would be a dreadful idea. But the main thing is, safe firewalking is something you can learn in about ten minutes.

Now: maybe that firewalk helped some of the people who made it, and maybe it didn’t. Participants claim that it’s a metaphor for ‘facing your fears’ and ‘achieving your goals,’ and that’s fine. It probably shows some people that they can do things they never thought possible, which probably isn’t a bad thing.

But here’s the thing. It’s just physics. I’ve never done a firewalk, but I’ve done similarly idiotic things: once, a physics-student friend convinced me that most Shaolin monk tricks were all down to the brittle properties of certain materials, and so I let him crack a concrete slab over my chest with a hammer. It didn’t really convince me that I was awesome, any more than the time I realised that doing a backflip off a wall wasn’t much more complicated than running and kicking really hard.

Here’s what does convince me I’m awesome: when I choose something I want to get better at and do it. When I make a plan, put in some time, and the plan works. When I’ve lifted more, or learned something new at work or at the jiu-jitsu academy. When it takes more than ten minutes to learn, but that’s okay because everything worthwhile does. Every time I do that with something, it convinces me that I can do it with something else. Firewalking wouldn’t do that. It’s just physics.

HOMEWORK: Get better at something hard this week. Remember: if it was easy, everyone would be doing it.

Especially not the Kardashians.

Here’s a thing: I don’t watch reality TV, because it fits my White Room definition of a complete waste of time – but sometimes I see it. And if there’s one phrase that’s guaranteed to make me fist-through-the-screen mad, it’s when one of the participants says:

‘I’m not going to change who I am for anybody.’

Now. In the case of reality show contestants, this usually means they’re reserving the right to carry on being vindictive/narcissistic/petty/aggressive or otherwise an affront to humanity, while trying to portray it as a noble act under the (false) premise that being ‘true to yourself’ is somehow more impressive than ‘not acting like a massive shit.’ But other people do it too. I hear it a lot. From people who think that reading some Dale Carnegie and learning to talk to people better would be a betrayal of who they are. From Youtube Commenters who watch Amy Cuddy’s insanely good TED talk on body language and go ‘Hmm, fake it til you make it? That seems…fake.’ From anybody who thinks that bettering themselves means somehow betraying their essence as a person.

This usually happens when it’s in an area related to social psychology – to how you talk to and deal with people. Because that, quite rightly, seems bound up with your identity. Nobody is going to have a go at you for learning French or studying physics, because those are things you’re taught at school. Some people might mumble ‘You’ve changed,’ when you refuse to hit the bar with them because you’d rather go train, but only you can judge whether those people have your best interests at heart or not. But people are uncomfortable if you start to smile more, make jokes, be more confident, because people are scared of change. Especially when it makes them realise how little they’re changing themselves.

Here’s the secret: there is no Ultimate You. In three years, you’re going to have changed as a person, whether you take a conscious hand in the process or not. As I’ve mentioned before, I look back every few years and shake my head in disbelief at how little I knew about certain things. How I act changes, how I think changes, even my values shift a bit. But I’m trying to make myself better.

And that’s the thing. You can carry on living by your core beliefs, like not being a massive shit or treating other people like you’d like to be treated yourself, while changing the things that make you better at carrying them out. Making more small talk isn’t selling out. Learning to ‘sell’ your own ideas isn’t betraying your fundamental humanity. Getting better at communicating isn’t going to make you worse, it’s going to give you more opportunities to be better. And you’re going to change, whether you want to or not: what you’re going to change into is the question.

HOMEWORK: Watch the Amy Cuddy talk and try the exercise she suggests. And if some part of you goes ‘Oh, behaving like that just isn’t who I am,’ kill that part. Live Hard!

‘Just send away for my 8-week pamphlet.’

Theodore Roosevelt was, unquestionably, awesome. A sickly child, he took up strenuous activities for the good of his health, boxed during his tenure at Harvard and was an early fan of jiu-jitsu. When the Spanish-American war broke out he resigned his own post in the navy to create a volunteer group called the Rough Riders, then marauded through Cuba with them. He’s also credited with popularising the phrase ‘Speak softly, and carry a big stick,’ which is about as solid a personal philosophy as you’d expect from a guy who once guarded a group of prisoners for 40 sleepless hours rather than hang them, and he used it to one day win the Nobel peace prize. Also, when he was a child he bought a dead seal’s head so that he could start his own zoo. I don’t know much about his parents, but it’s probably a safe bet that they were fucking kickass.

Anyway, these are all matters of public record. The important thing is this Roosevelt quote, which is amazing:

The one quality which sets one man apart from another, the key which lifts one to every aspiration, while others are caught up in the mire of mediocrity – is not talent, formal education, nor intellectual brightness. It is self-discipline. With self-discipline all things are possible. Without it, even the simplest goal can seem like the impossible dream.

Turns out, Teddy would later be proved right by science. According to Roy F. Baumeister, author of Willpower, a study that tracked New Zealand children from birth to the age of 32 found that those who had the most self-discipline in their youth had better teeth, happier marriages, better-paying jobs and were less likely to end up in prison than their undisciplined brethren. Dozens of other studies corroborate this. But here’s the best bit: now, science has worked out how to make self-discipline much easier.

See, what Baumeister (and others) also say is that self-discipline is largely about habit. Most of the ‘decisions’ you make in a typical day aren’t actually decisions at all – they’re just automatic processes you go through. Secondly, modern researchers now think that willpower is like a muscle: you can exercise it to make it stronger. What does that mean? If you’re starting a new way of eating, exercise regime, writing routine or set of working practises, it might be tough, but you can stick it out. You can manage things by creating if-then plans, so that if your willpower’s at a low ebb you fall back on a predetermined strategy. You can say ‘I don’t,’ rather than ‘I can’t,’ because that makes it easier to resist temptation. You can focus on the pride you’ll feel from following your strategy, rather than the shame you’ll feel if you don’t.

Those are three examples of how to make self-discipline easier. There are dozens. The important thing is to remember: self-discipline is more important than how clever or pretty or strong you are. It can make you into anything you want. Look what it did for Teddy.

HOMEWORK: Pick a new habit you’d like to form and spend this week trying to ‘automate’ it. That might be pressups before the shower, writing when you get up, or getting the most important thing done first thing in the morning every day. You might as well read Roosevelt’s wikipedia page. Oh, and check out Sharpwriter, who drew the Teddy/Bigfoot battle. He is awesome.

Note from the editor: Books are excellent. Read Hard is a semi-regular column about some of the books you ought to read. For the first installment in this series, look here. 

Charles Xavier’s best superpower? He’s immune to your stupid ideas.

Contrary to how this site occasionally sounds, I don’t think I know everything. What I think I am quite good at is evaluating new ideas, which isn’t a skill you’re born with, and isn’t really something that’s emphasised enough, considering that it’s one of the most fundamental things you might need to do in your whole life. Does God exist or not? Which get-rich quick book should I buy? Which programme promising me a six-pack is going to get me the best results? This post won’t answer a single one of those questions, but it will point you towards some books that’ll help you answer them on your own. These books can’t entirely bulletproof your head against stupid ideas, but they’ll give you a good start.

The Black Swan

Nicolas Nassem Taleb

Think about this: out of every one of the hundreds of thousands of people who play slot machines in Vegas every year, quite a few are going to come out ahead. Some of them might even come back the next year, and come out ahead again. The group gets smaller, sure – but the starting group was big enough that maybe one guy makes big money every year, for five years, and then writes a book about how to win big on slot machines. The question is, would you buy that book?

Nicolas Taleb’s central point in The Black Swan is that a lot of professions work like that Vegas casino. Certain types of stockbroking, for instance, are virtually identical – by law there’s basically no skill to them, so you should be pretty wary of anyone writing a book on how to get rich because of something that has worked for them. Maybe 10,000 other people entered the profession with similar skills, did similar things, and failed – but they lost money, and they got fired, and so they don’t get to write a cautionary tale about how it doesn’t work. Similarly, this principle is at work in professions that aren’t entirely luck-based: when some self-made entrepreneur talks about burning your boats, never looking back and the like, consider that he can say that because he’s already made it – maybe there are a thousand other guys who burned their boats and now just don’t have any fucking boats, let alone a blog or book deal. When you see Ryan Lochte flipping a tractor tyre, consider: is the tyre-flipping making him a better swimmer, or did the 10,000 hours of pool-time do that? When Will Smith tells you that you just have to work hard and believe in yourself, consider the possibility that that won’t be enough. Don’t give up on your dreams: just consider where you get your advice from.

Anyway, that’s what the Black Swan is about. It’s pretty heavy going, so you might want to dip a toe in with this excellent Malcolm Gladwell piece about Taleb himself. Once you’ve digested the thought process, you might want a more systematic way of evaluating ideas. Which brings us nicely to…

Bad Science

Ben Goldacre

You’ve probably heard of this one. Outwardly it’s a collection of bang-your-head-on-the-desk anecdotes about homeopathy, anti-vaxers and outlandish medical claim, but more importantly – at least for this post’s sake – it’s a great primer in scientific thinking. To quote the awesome Carl Sagan:

‘Science is more than a body of knowledge. It’s a way of thinking.’ 

In other words, what you know about atoms or gravity or the large hadron collider isn’t as important as the system you use to check whether ideas are right or not. And beyond the anecdotes, that’s what Goldacre’s book is about: a way of analysing ideas and theories that’s systematic and sensible. Whether you agree with his specific arguments or not, you can’t fault his logic.

Flat Earth News

Nick Davies

This book, by Godzilla-among-investigative-journalists Nick Davies, is the perfect companion piece to Bad Science. It’s about how stupid ideas – whether they’re PR fluff, scare stories, deliberate plants or just outbreaks of mass hysteria – get into the news, and why you should always consider the source of what you see or read. Bonus: once you realise that 80% of most news content is just fill-the-pages tosh (or churnalism, as Davies has it), you’ll have more time to spend getting your bench press up to par, or reading Davies’ other uniformly excellent books – I’d start with Dark Heart.

The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading

Ian Rowland

Odd choice? Maybe. Perhaps you don’t think cold reading has much effect on your life, or that you’re too smart to be taken in by it. Fair enough: maybe you don’t believe in horoscopes or tarot cards. But cold reading goes beyond that: pickup artists, salesmen and businesspeople use it all the time. Some people know they’re doing it, and some don’t: maybe the astrologer who says ‘You’re doing some serious self-examination at the moment,’ really believes that’s an insight provided by the stars, and maybe guy in a bar who goes ‘I can tell you’re a bit of a perfectionist in some ways, and quite talented when you put your mind to things,’ actually thinks he’s developed a deep connection with you in ten minutes. Maybe not, though: and either way, this book will allow you to assess those sorts of statements for what they really are. It’s a very swift read, and it’ll change the way you think about things: like all these books, really.

‘I’ve just had a great idea for a narrative device.’

So: as even the most disinterested readers of this site will know, two of my great joys in life are writing stuff and deadlifting. I’ve written five books (four published by children’s publisher Scholastic, one feminist zombie comedy) and I’ve deadlifted a small van in competition (ten reps, at the expense of several thousand blood vessels in my face). Since I’m not one to mess around, two of my goals this year are to:

a) Write a better, more exciting and even stupider sequel to the zombie book.

b) Finally hit a triple-bodyweight deadlift.

Now: more astute readers of this site will know that I also think that doing most difficult things will prepare you for doing other difficult things. Or, in the words of Miyamoto Musashi: ‘When you know the way broadly, you see it in all things.’ So you’re probably wondering what I think deadlifting and writing a sequel to the book that SFX described as ‘A joy to read’ have in common. WONDER NO MORE.

1. You might not ever do it

This is honestly the most important thing to acknowledge. I’ve heard writing a novel compared to running a marathon or being pregnant, but that’s simply wrong – in a marathon there’s a clearly-defined finish line and you’ll get there if you keep putting one foot in front of another, and, though I’m no expert on having babies, I’m pretty sure they come out after nine months however much you procrastinate. In a novel, though, you can get stuck on rewrites, or decide whole swathes aren’t good enough, or simply slow down and get mired in despair. Similarly, in deadlifting, you can just get fat, or drink too much, or get old, or just not ever actually train enough. At some point, your chance will be gone. You have to acknowledge the possibility of failure. Because otherwise you won’t be scared enough of it to put in the work.

2. You won’t get it done in a day

Because of the scale of both goals, no single day – however monstrous the workout, however many synonyms for ‘said’ you come up with – is going to get it done, or even make a monumental difference. That one time you get super-motivated is not going to get things done. What matters more than one big day is consistency – sitting at your desk or showing up at the gym day after day after day, and really trying, even when you can’t think of anything or your legs are still sore.

3. Gadgets cannot help you

Anthony Trollope (who forced himself to write 2,500 words a day before he went to his job at the local post office) didn’t have a subscription to Scrivener, and Ernie Frantz hit a near quadruple-bodyweight deadlift before the 531 plan, Jack3D or internet message boards were invented. Yes, it is a fine thing that so many resources exist to help you in your goals, but a lot of them aren’t helping you, and honestly, plenty of them are probably holding you back. Before you read another book about plot structure or programme-hop to another training plan, consider whether you’d get better results by just working a bit harder.

4. It’s about more than just time at the desk/gym

Either of these goals are tough enough that you’re unlikely to get to them without making changes to the rest of your life. Realistically, the four hours a week you spend in the gym aren’t as important as the rest of the week, when you’re eating properly, making sure you get enough sleep to recover and resisting the temptation to go get shitfaced. Similarly, writing a novel is about more than just your special alone time in the house – it’s about sketching out plot points on post-it notes at lunch, carrying a notebook wherever you go (everybody says this, nobody does it) and resisting the temptation to go get shitfaced. If you can’t face that, you won’t get there.

5. IT ISN’T AS HARD AS I’VE JUST MADE IT SOUND

More people than you’d think are capable of writing a novel. More people than you’d think are capable of a triple-bodyweight deadlift. Yes, they seem hard if you look at all the resources created to dealing with them, or if you listen to many of your friends and colleagues, or build them up too much, or mess around for years pretending to do them without actually buckling down to doing them. But they aren’t beyond you. You could get them done. I’m going to do both this year, and I’m no more badass than you. What’s stopping you?

HOMEWORK: If you don’t care about writing a book or doing a physical challnge, work out how this all applies to something you do care about. And start getting it done.

Serious question: when was the last time you stepped out of your comfort zone?

Until fairly recently, I’d have said, oh, all the time. Something about deadlifting or fighting people or going to a dance class or falling off a climbing wall, or things like that. But then I thought about it, and that’s not true. Not really.

I’ve been lifting and fighting for a long time. They aren’t outside my comfort zone at all. Even the worst-case scenarios that occur in them have predictable outcomes, things that I can cope with. If I do a workout like Jonescrawl – 25 box jumps, 10 90kg deadlifts, repeated for three rounds – I’ll hate it and feel like I’m going to be sick and perhaps roll melodramatically around on the floor afterwards, but it’s not totally out of my frame of reference. It’s part of my schema – I know how to cope with it. Lifting heavy things and falling off big things and getting elbowed in the face can build my ability to cope with adversity elsewhere, but they don’t really provide much adversity in themselves.

Here’s something a personal trainer friend said to me the other day: when he sees fat, unfit people who are new to the gym, he tries to put himself in their shoes. That doesn’t mean doing workouts that he finds tough: doing workouts isn’t uncomfortable for him. It means going to somewhere that’s unfamiliar, doing something you’ve never done before, which you know almost nothing about. Maybe that new guy sweating and hurting his way through a kettlebell workout that looks like your warmup has everything else in his life sorted: his finances and career is are locked down and under control. He’s outside his comfort zone now, but you’re sitting happily in yours. Right now, I’d be more scared of walking into a mortgage adviser’s office than trying to climb a V5 pitch over a load of pointy gravel. That’s no good.

So that’s what I’ll be doing more of this year: getting outside of my comfort zone. Sorting out my knowledge of things I haven’t traditionally enjoyed or understood as much as my stupid, dangerous hobbies – things like finances, mortgages and better organization in business. Things that scare me more than stepping into a cage or push-pressing 110kg over my head. The more I do it, the more my comfort zone should expand. One day, maybe, I won’t be scared of anything.

HOMEWORK: Work out where your comfort zone is. Work out what’s outside it. Consider getting on that.