How to Fail at Habits

Before I learned how to change habits, I was stuck. I kept trying to change various habits — running, eating healthier, waking earlier, getting out of debt, ending procrastination — and I kept failing.

I got very good at failing, in fact.

Looking back on those days, given the power of retrospect, I now know that I did everything wrong. I was setting myself up for failure, and in failing often and not learning from those mistakes, I was learning to be good at failing. Failing became my habit.

And while I’m actually a fan of failing as a method for learning how to get better at something quickly, if you’re not learning from your failures, it’s not as useful. So in that spirit, I’d like to share what I’ve learned from my failures so that you might glean some useful information from my suffering.

I failed at creating new habits repeatedly. Here’s what I did, and what most people also do:

Take on multiple habits at once. We have lots of things we want to change, so we try to change them all at once. Of course, this spreads our focus and energy thin, so that we can’t give our entire focus to any one habit. Habits are hard to change, and spreading yourself thin is a good way to make sure you fail.Bite off more than you can chew. Whether you do one habit or many at a time, try to do as much with each habit as possible, so that it takes up a lot of energy and seems really hard. Don’t run for 5 minutes, try doing 30. That way it’ll be a big chunk of your day that will get pushed to tomorrow when other urgent things come up, it will take a lot of your physical and mental energy, and it’ll be something you dread doing because it’s so difficult. Don’t meditate for 5 minutes, meditate for 60. Do 90 minutes of yoga. Change your entire diet all at once. These are excellent ways to fail.Tackle habits you don’t enjoy. Because habits should be something you do for moral reasons — they’re good for you! And so it doesn’t matter if you hate them, and if you dread doing them after awhile, because you’re going to be disciplined. That works extremely seldomly, so it’s a great strategy.Keep it a secret. Don’t tell anyone you’re changing your habit. That way, if you mess up, it won’t be embarrassing. This means that you secretly think you’re going to mess up, which is another excellent way to fail.Jump right into it. Decide today to start running, and just do it! This way you are treating it as if it’s nothing, and not a big commitment. You don’t plan for obstacles, don’t set up a support system, don’t give yourself rewards, and treat the habit change as lightly as you do putting on your socks. And when you quit doing the habit, it will be no problem either.Don’t worry about how others have succeeded. Why read the success stories of other people? You know better than them. You can do it without learning from them. That’s what I used to think, at least.Don’t motivate yourself. You don’t need motivation if you have discipline. Discipline is something you have or don’t have, but motivation is something you can actually do.Give yourself plenty of opportunities to give up. Trying to eat healthy? Have your cupboards and fridge filled with junk food, and have it surround you at work, and go to restaurants filled with fried foods and sugary sweets. You’ll definitely have the discipline to ignore those.

The eight steps above are a sure-fire recipe for habit failure, and I recommend you try all of them if you’re looking to fail. Of course, if you’re looking to succeed, you might want to avoid them and possibly try the opposite.

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BBC Future column: Does the internet rewire your brain?

My column for BBC Future from a few days ago. The original is here. Mindhacks.com readers will have heard most of this before, thanks to Vaughan’s coverage of the Baroness and her fellow travellers.

Being online does change your brain, but so does making a cup of tea. A better question to ask is what parts of the brain are regular internet users using.

This modern age has brought with it a new set of worries. As well as watching our weight and worrying about our souls, we now have to worry about our brain fitness too – if you believe the headlines. Is instant messaging eroding the attention centres of our brains? Are Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools preventing you from forming normal human bonds? And don’t forget email – apparently it releases the same addictive neurochemicals as crack cocaine!

Plenty of folk have been quick to capitalise on this neuro-anxiety. Amazon’s virtual shelves groan with brain-training books and games. (I confess I am not entirely innocent myself). You can fight the cognitive flab, these games promise, if you work that grey matter like a muscle.

But is this true? Are sudoku puzzles the only thing stopping the species turning into a horde of attention-deficient, socially-dysfunctional, email addicts – part human, part smartphone?

Fear not, there is some good news from neuroscience. But first, it is my duty to tell you the bad news. You may want to put down your phone and take note, this is the important bit.

The truth is that everything you do changes your brain. Everything. Every little thought or experience plays a role in the constant wiring and rewiring of your neural networks. So there is no escape. Yes, the internet is rewiring your brain. But so is watching television. And having a cup of tea. Or not having a cup of tea. Or thinking about the washing on Tuesdays. Your life, however you live it, leaves traces in the brain.

Brain workout

Worrying about the internet is just the latest in a long line of fears society has had about the changes technologies might bring. People worried about books when they first became popularly available. In Ancient Greece, Socrates worried about the effect of writing, saying it would erode young people’s ability to remember. The same thing happened with television and telephones. These technologies did change us, and the way we live our lives, but nothing like the doom-mongers predicted would stem from them.

But is the internet affecting our brains in a different, more extraordinary way? There is little evidence to suggest harm. Here we are, millions of us, including me and you, right now, using the internet, and we seem okay. Some people worry that, even though we cannot see any ill-effects of the internet on our minds, there might be something hidden going on. I am not so worried about this, and I’ll tell you why

We regularly do things that have a profound effect on our brains – such as reading or competitive sports – with little thought for our brain fitness. When scientists look at people who have spent thousands of hours on an activity they often see changes in the brain. Taxi drivers, famously, have a larger hippocampus, a part of the brain recruited for navigation. Musicians’ brains devote more neural territory to brain regions needed for playing their instruments. So much so, in fact, that if you look at the motor cortex of string players you see bulges on one side (because the fine motor control for playing a violin, for example, is only on one hand), whereas the motor cortex of keyboard players bulges on both sides (because piano playing requires fine control of both hands).

So practice definitely can change our brains. By accepting this notion, though, we replace a vague worry about the internet with a specific worry: if we use the internet regularly, what are we practicing?

Get a life

In the absence of any substantial evidence, I would hazard a guess that the majority of internet use is either information search or communication, using email and social media. If this is so, using the internet should affect our brains so that we are better at these things. Probably this is already happening, part of a general cultural change which involves us getting better and better at dealing with abstract information.

Internet use would only be a worry if it was getting in the way of us practicing some other life skill. If Facebook stopped people seeing their friends face to face that could have a harmful effect. But the evidence suggests this is not the case. If anything, people with more active internet lives have more active “meat-space” lives. Most of us are using the internet as a complement to other ways of communicating, not as a substitute.

So there is no magic extra risk from the internet. Like TV before it, and reading before that, it gives us a way of practicing certain things. Practice will change our brains, just like any habit. The important thing is that we are part of this process, it is not just something that happens to us. You can decide how much time you want to put into finding pictures of funny cats, bantering on Facebook or fitting your thoughts into 140 characters. There will be no sudden damage done to your brain, or great surprises for your brain fitness. You would be a fool to think that the internet will provide all the exercise your brain needs, but you would also be a fool to pass up the opportunities it offers. And those pictures of funny cats.

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Passive Income Series

In the weeks ahead, I’ll be blogging an extended series on how to earn passive income.

Passive income is money that comes to you even when you’re not actively working, such as royalties, investment income, and revenue from automated business systems.

I started earning passive income in the 1990s by creating, selling, and licensing computer games. Once those deals and systems were established, I continued to earn money from those products year after year.

This approach soon became a habit. Consequently, most of the money I’ve earned during my lifetime has come from passive or semi-passive income source, not from a salary, wage, or hourly rate.

It took me many years to figure out how to make a living this way, and I went bankrupt along the way, but eventually I learned what I needed to learn. It works, and I definitely appreciate the benefits of it.

The truth is that it’s much, much easier to earn passive income today than it was when I first began on this path. There are such ridiculous opportunities out there, especially online, that if you’re at least halfway intelligent, you can surely do this. There are ways to earn money online now where you don’t even need your own website, nor do you need to have a lot of money to start earning passive income.

Earning passive income is not difficult. The how-to part — the actual doing of it — is fairly straightforward.

The difficult part is wrapping your head around it, unloading a lot of false conditioning, maintaining a constructive mindset, and shedding illogical fears. The challenge here is your own self development… to grow into the man or woman who won’t block themselves from doing this.

Instead of writing my classic Steve mega-posts, I’m going to break this series into frequent, bite-sized chunks, so you can expect much shorter posts spread over many weeks. I think this is the right way to do it. I don’t want to get a bunch of “great article” feedback from people who just want more info-crack. By the end of the year, I want to see feedback like, “I’m now earning $X per month in passive income thanks to your series.”

First I’ll share some ideas to help you understand the right mindset for earning passive income. People have a lot of B.S. beliefs in their heads with respect to earning income, and I want to squash some of them (the beliefs, that is, not their heads), so they don’t get in our way later. This part may be more emotional than logical, but the truth is that the motivation to earn any kind of income is largely emotional, and we need to address that. There’s no logical mandate to earn income; it may feel like it’s essential for survival, but our species supposedly managed without money for most of its existence.

Then I’ll share a great deal of how-to information. Some of these posts will be fairly general, so they can be applied to all forms of passive income. But I’ll also give you more detailed how-to info for the forms of passive income that I’m most familiar with, which is mostly going to be in the online realm.

I can’t teach you real estate or stock investing, nor can I teach you how to create a blog as successful as mine has been. But I can still teach you how to create your own streams of passive income, first in a general way and then specifically in the methods I’ve used.

I may also do some interviews with friends and/or business associates who’ve created significant passive income streams as well, so you can gain a broader perspective on this.

Finally, I’m going to walk you step by step through a process of creating a stream of passive income from scratch. This is where I invite you to follow along and actually do this with me. So I’ll actually create a new stream of income for myself, such as creating and launching a new product or service, and I’ll blog about each step as I go through it. At the same time, I’m going to encourage and support you in creating a new income stream for yourself as well, so if you wish to do something similar, you can essentially mirror my steps and do them as I do them.

I’ll do my best to make this part of the process easy for you to follow, so you’ll be able to create a stream of income without needing to spend a lot of money, and I’ll make it so you don’t even need a website either. Obviously my website gives me a major marketing advantage, so I’ll share how to do the marketing aspect if you’re starting from scratch. I want to make it so that even a high school student working from home in his/her spare time could go through this process with me.

I’m also going to maintain a very moderate pacing here, so you can follow along in real time without needing to work on this full time to keep up.

If you want to read this series just for educational or for entertainment purposes, that’s fine. But I’m really not writing this series for the casual dabbler or the wannabe. I’m doing this for those who’d really want to get started on this path now. Consequently, we’re going to take it nice and slow and build a solid foundation. I’m not just going to throw a bunch of information at you and hope you make sense of it.

If you simply follow these steps with me, including getting into the passive income mindset, then this year you’re going to create at least one new stream of passive income for yourself. This series will focus on helping you create that specific result. If that’s a result you want, then we’re on the same page.

I’m undoubtedly going to weave personal growth lessons into this series because passive income ties in with personal growth in such amazing ways, especially with respect to setting and achieving goals, self-discipline, and overcoming limiting beliefs.

Logically this is an achievable goal. It’s not like we’re trying to figure out how to mine space asteroids. People figured out how to earn passive income thousands of years ago. Surely with all the additional knowledge and resources available to you today, you can do this too.

At this point I don’t expect you to commit to anything. I’m simply hoping you’ll be curious enough to follow along for the first week or two. Then decide if this is a part of your life you’re ready to upgrade.

Lastly, if you have any friends or family members that you feel would benefit from this series, be sure to share this post with them, so they can follow along.

If you've found this website helpful, please donate to show your support. The average donation is about $21.

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How to Stay Motivated When the World's Against You

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Why We Overplan

‘A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.’ ~Lao Tzu

There is something about my mind, and many people’s minds, that is overly optimistic.

We think we can do so much each day, and so we overplan. We fill our plans with so much, confident we can do it all, ignoring the evidence of the past when most plans didn’t get done and most things didn’t get crossed off as hoped.

We believe that, sure, we might have failed to meet our expectations in the past, but this time will be different! This time, we will do better. This time, we will be disciplined and productive and get more done.

Yes, that’s an excellent plan. Let me know how that works out.

Hint: It never works out for me. I’ll give you a good recent example.

As I said last week, my family and I recently went on a short vacation to sunny and sublime San Diego for four days. As usual, I had lots of goals and expectations (I can’t seem to help it):

I bought a book (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest) and planned to finish it in just over 4 days of vacation — which meant about 150 pages per day. No problem!I brought a yoga DVD, planning on doing yoga every morning as the kids slept in.I thought I could do some beach running every morning too, as we were staying a block from the beach.I had lots of work I thought I could get done too.And of course, we were going to walk around and explore San Diego all day, hang out at the beach for hours, and eat at lots of restaurants.

Guess how much of that got done? I did read a fair amount, but only about half the book. I didn’t even open the plastic wrapping on the yoga DVDs. I did almost no work. I ran for maybe 10 minutes at the beach once. We did a lot of walking and exploring and eating, and hung out at the beach a fair amount, but little else.

I overplanned. I was overly optimistic. I had lots of goals and expectations.

Yes, I’ve been mostly going without goals for awhile now, but I slip into my old habits frequently.

Sure, many experienced travelers know that I made a basic traveling mistake — overplanning is common among travelers, and the best of us plan very little on most trips. I know this, and usually follow that advice. I guess the plans above were subconscious plans and goals that my mind was making without me really trying. It was only during the middle of the trip that I realized I’d had high expectations of myself for the trip, and had set goals without realizing it.

But here’s the thing: travelers know we should travel without goals and too many plans … but what about in the rest of our lives?

Most people who travel with few plans and goals ignore this wisdom in regular, daily life.

In our daily personal and work lives, we overload ourselves and overplan. We are overly optimistic about what we can do, despite past evidence. We set too many goals and have too high expectations.

Here’s what I’ve learned from my vacation (and the last couple years) that can help with overplanning and goal setting in our daily lives:

Leave plans to a minimum. That’s not to say you won’t do anything, but plan as little as possible — most of what you might plan won’t get done anyway. Why create a fiction? Leave wide open blocks with few scheduled appointments when possible.Learn to act fluidly. If your day is mostly wide open, how do you fill it? Flexibly. You don’t have plans or goals, but know how to pick your priorities fluidly, in the moment. At this moment, what is the thing you’re most excited about? What is the most important thing you can do? What can you do that will change your life the most? This is a skill that you learn by practice, but planning ahead what you should do makes no sense when the landscape is changing constantly.We are not walking a path, but surfing a sea. Most people look at goal setting as picking a destination, then figuring out a path to get there. That assumes you’re walking on land that will change very little, and that while you will have unforeseen obstacles, you’ll be on stable ground and the destination won’t move. That’s not at all true — life is more like the sea, ever changing with no fixed paths or destinations, with swells and currents and waves that change everything at every moment. The ultimate skill, then, isn’t setting a destination (goal) or a path (plan), but surfing. In surfing, you take whatever waves come, learn to judge the waves as they come, learn to ride the wave as it changes, not as you planned. It’s going with the flow (literally), and changing what you do depending on how the flow changes.Your plans might fall apart, but life will be greater for it. While nothing went as I’d apparently hoped it would on our trip, I was completely happy. We still filled our days with exploring and trying new things and play, and living in the moment meant I didn’t care that I didn’t get the work done or do the yoga or accomplish the massive amounts of reading I’d hoped. Life changes things, and it’s when we cling to our goals and plans that we are unhappy or stressed — when we learn to surf the wave as it comes, we can be very happy, no matter what comes.

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The delightful science of laughter

Neuroscientist Sophie Scott gave a fantastic talk on the science of laughter for a recent TEDx event that you can now watch online.

Talks on the science of humour are famously humourless (usually made all the more dire by the desperate inclusion of some not very funny ‘funny cartoons’) but this discussion of laughter is appropriately delightful.

Scott describes a study her team carried out on the cross cultural recognition of non-verbal vocal sounds (like whoops of triumph) to find that only laughter was universal.

The whole talk is fully of such fascinating snippets, tackling both the social psychology and neuroscience of laughing. Well worth ten minutes of your time.

Link to ace talk on the science of laughter.

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How to Find the Right Accountant for Your Business

Are you paying too much tax? Are your financial figures accurate? Is your accounting software efficient enough? If you are looking for a new accountant, how do you find the right one?

A lot of questions, to be sure. But where do you start?

Below is a checklist of what to consider when looking for the right accountancy services:

Qualifications?Do they have industry experience?Fee structureIs the size of the accounting firm convenient for you?Are they in the right location?

Choosing the right accountant can be a very daunting challenge. Whether you’re a sole trader, limited company or multi-national company, it is likely that you will need the services of an accountant to prepare your end-of-year financial statements and tax accounts.

As a business owner, it’s important to choose an accountant that acts not only as a bookkeeper, auditor or tax advisor but also as a trusted financial advisor. The idea is that they can advise you on business risks and manage your finances effectively. The accountant will have access to your financial information, so you need to be able to trust your accountant.

Anyone could set up their own business and call themselves an accountant. You can wake up in the morning and decide “I’ll be an accountant today”. It is in your best interests to work with a qualified accountant. Taking a gamble with an unqualified accountant is taking a gamble with your finances and the future of your business.

Accountants can only become qualified through one of the following UK bodies:

Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA)Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA)Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW)Institute of Chartered Accountants in Scotland(ICAS)

Once you approach an accountant, you must find out if they are a member of one of the above institutions – you request for proof of membership. Alternatively, you can check an accountant’s membership of these institutions and their qualifications directly with the relevant organisation.

Accounting is a general field. In addition to certifications, you should look for accountants with expertise in your industry sector or in a similar industry. Some accounting firms may have experience in non-governmental organisations (NGO’s), recruitment or manufacturing businesses.

Accountants don’t offer just basic bookkeeping and auditing services; they also provide expert insights. An accountant with experience in your sector should fully comprehend the issues and challenges faced and could provide invaluable advice when needed.

How much does the accountant charge? For some businesses, this will be the main choice factor. Look for accountants that allow for fixed monthly fees, instead of supplying one lump sum bill at the end of the year. There’s no doubt that a fixed fee for accountancy services avoids any nasty surprises when the invoice lands on your desk.

Most businesses expect a reasonable charge for a good accountancy service during the financial year. The accountant may not feel inclined to offer additional support if they are making a loss by preparing your accounts. Remember, accountants can save you money and are more likely to do so if you have a good working partnership.

It’s advisable to speak to an accountant that is similar in size to your business. For most start-ups, a small accounting firm is often a more attractive option than a large multi-national accounting business – large corporations feel more comfortable employing a large, name-brand accounting firm.

Most people have internet access 24/7 so this might not be very important for your business. This applies particularly to businesses that prefer to meet their accountant. A locally-based accountant is usually more approachable as they should be more amicable to visiting you at your premises – after all, they are working for you. They can set up accounting or bookkeeping software on your PC.

Whilst the accounting industry is regulated by independent institutions, this is no guarantee that all accountants will be suitable for your business. Even if you find an accountant that ticks all the boxes in the checklist above, this is no guarantee that their services will be tailored to your business’ needs.

It’s advisable to speak to a commercial finance broker, as they’ve established relationships with a strong network of accountancy firms across the UK. The stand-out factors of the accountants they work with is that they provide a proactive service, are established, qualified accountants with excellent track records who work with your business 365 days a year…and not just at year’s end.

Sema Fongod is the copywriter for Touch Financial, the UK’s largest invoice finance broker, working with over 20 of the UK’s leading lenders, from boutique specialists to high street banks, to secure the most suitable cashflow solution for businesses. Visit them on the web at www.touchfinancial.co.uk.

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Tim Ferriss: A Day In The Life

(Trouble viewing? See Tim Ferriss: A Day In The Life on Hulu. If you’re international, try using Hotspot Shield first.)

I’m often asked, “What does your typical day look like?”

In an attempt to answer this difficult question, I met up with Morgan Spurlock’s film crew for an episode of “A Day In The Life.” The full Friday we shot (I reserve Fridays for in-person meetings) reiterates a point I’ve driven home before: The 4-Hour Workweek is, and always has been, about using time optimally, not being idle.

It also shows how much I love my POS VW Golf, which is having its 10th birthday soon.

To clarify the intro, here’s a mostly complete list of start-ups I advise and have invested in:

About.me (acquired by AOL)
DailyBurn (acquired by IAC)
Milk (acquired by Google)
Posterous (acquired by Twitter)
StumbleUpon
Uber (The Escalade in the above video was via Uber, which I use whenever parking will be a hassle.)
Evernote
DonorsChoose.org (educational non-profit)
Shopify
Trippy
BranchOut
CrowdFlower
Foodzie
RescueTime
WellnessFX
Graphicly
TaskRabbit
Schematic Labs (makers of SoundTracking)

Other investments, excluding late-stage and stealth companies, include:

Facebook
Twitter
SimpleGeo (acquired by Urban Airship)
Unsubscribe.com (acquired by TrustedID)
Digg
Reputation.com
Basis

Would you like to work together? If so, watch the “Advise This!” video below and tell me about your company in the comments, ideally in 200 words or fewer. Stats are always helpful.

Look forward to checking it out. In the meantime, I have to wrap up The 4-Hour Chef!

It’s shaping up to be a fun one… :)

——-
Odds and Ends:

WellnessFX Competition – Would you like to spend 30 minutes with me? I’d love to learn what you’re up to and see if I can help. WellnessFX, featured in the above episode, is sponsoring a giveaway for six 30-minute slots. Click here to learn more.

SXSW – “Advise This” Panel – So, what do start-up “advisors” do, exactly? How do you recruit A-listers to your cause? Or, better yet, how do you assemble and leverage the *right* team? In the below panel, Gary Vaynerchuk, Tony Conrad, JR Johnson, Chase Charvis, and I discuss the relationships between founders, investors, and advisors in start-ups. You’ll recognize the now familiar “14 minutes into my 15 minutes…,” which I say to keep my head from getting too damn big. It’s a Seneca thing:

Posted on April 24th, 2012

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Set Your Passive Income Goal

As we transition into the how-to aspect of passive income creation, let’s begin by having you set a goal for what you want to accomplish here.

Why are you reading this series? Is it just for entertainment’s sake? Do you hope to learn something that you might apply later? Or do you actually want to create a at least one new stream of passive income this year?

Let me suggest a simple meta-goal for starters: By the time you’re done reading this post, set a clear goal for what you want to gain from this series.

Do not close your browser window or move on to something else until you’ve set a clear and specific passive income goal.

No feeble excuses. No vacillating. No “I think about it later” B.S. And please no lame ass “I want more money” vague answers.

Whatever excuse you come up with as to why you can’t set a clear goal right now, we both know it’s stupid, so let’s not even go there. Not setting a goal is a waste of time.

If your actual desire is to create a new stream of passive income, then let’s make sure your goal includes 3 aspects:

how much money you want to earn per month from your next stream of passive income (specific dollar amount)how long you expect that stream to last (number of years)your deadline for receiving your first month’s income from that stream

This isn’t your ultimate goal we’re talking about here. It’s the goal for your first (or your next, if you’ve done this before) stream of passive income.

If you have something different in mind that doesn’t really fit the parameters above, then by all means set the goal you feel is best for you. At the end of the year, when other people are enjoying their new streams of passive income, you can see how your own goal worked out.

The idea is to set a goal that’s motivating but that’s also believable for you.

If you’re telling yourself that you can’t earn any passive income because it’s too much for you, then your imagination needs work. You could put $100 in a free savings account and earn a trickle of passive income each year for decades. So don’t be lazy here. Don’t let yourself off the hook. Set a goal.

Goal setting is a skill that takes practice. If you fumble this initially and set a goal that’s too big and unbelievable for you, you won’t achieve it. If you set an unrealistic deadline, you’ll blow the deadline. How do you know what’s realistic? You calibrate with practice, just like you learned to walk and talk.

I don’t expect your goal to be perfect. That isn’t the point. The goal is just the first step to get you moving forward and taking this seriously. And the ultimate goal is to get good at setting achieving your goals. This means you have to risk making mistakes in the beginning.

As the saying goes, There never was a winner who wasn’t at some point a beginner. So begin by setting a goal.

Other than earning interest on my savings account, my first real experience with long-term passive income was when I wrote and self-published a computer game for MS-Windows. I think I released it in 1995. It was a simple side-scrolling shoot-em-up game. I did the programming and artwork for it myself (I wasn’t much of an artist though), and my girlfriend at the time did the music and helped out with the sound effects.

The game didn’t sell particularly well. I put it up on my website, by my website had virtually no traffic. I also uploaded it to a bunch of free download software sites. I had a free demo with a couple of levels, and then people would get more levels if they bought the full version. Initially most of my sales came from people finding the demo on a game download site, and the demo would refer them to my website to buy the game.

I opened a Post Office box and started receiving mail orders for the game. Later I got a merchant account, so I could take credit card orders. Then I started accepting online orders. Eventually I set things up so that orders could be processed and fulfilled automatically.

On average I earned about $75 per month from this game. I didn’t do much in terms of marketing, other than posting it on my website and submitting it to those download sites, which was a one-time effort. Once the game started selling, I moved on to other projects.

This was a Windows 3.1 game with a fixed 640×480 resolution. It was strictly 2D, so there were no fancy 3D graphics or anything like that.

A year after I released it, the game was still earning about $75 per month.

Five years after its release, it was still earning about the same.

Ten years after its release, it was still earning about the same.

I varied the price of the game over the years, testing $9.95, $14.95, and $19.95. It earned roughly the same amount of money regardless of the price. I could sell 10 copies for $10 each or 5 copies for $20 each.

The game was initially available on 3.5? diskettes, then on CD-ROM. More than 90% of the customers bought the instant download version.

I also did some licensing deals for this game with LCR publishers (LCR = low cost retail). These publishers found me as a result of finding my game on some download site. They’d put together collections of cheap games and sell them on CDs for under $10. I didn’t earn much money from these deals, but they gave my game wider distribution, and every copy included a link to my website.

Occasionally the game got some special attention, and there was a surge in sales where it might do double sales for a month. So overall it probably earned in the range of $10-15K over its lifetime.

It took me about 6 months to write and release this game. I had a lot to learn, so it was slow going. I got much faster as I learned and practiced. Writing a similar shoot-em-up game in 1998 only took me about 2 weeks, including the design, programming, artwork, and sound effects.

Eventually I released three more games at about the same level of quality. And again, each of these added another $75 month in passive income, so with 4 of these titles, I was up to $300 per month.

Finally I got smart and spent 6 months creating a much better game and put more effort into marketing it. It did $500 in sales its first month and was up to $2K per month a few months later. I kept building it up from there with two expansion packs and a deluxe version that sold for $24.95. The game did very well and dwarfed the results of my previous games. I also did more licensing deals for it, including one that had a minimum guarantee of $5K per month just from that one source.

I developed this hit game with a $0 budget. I did the design and programming, the artist worked for a percentage of royalties, so I created a passive income stream for him.

Then I went on to license and republish games from other developers, which created new passive income streams for them and me. Eventually I built up a suite of about two dozen games, which means two dozen streams of mostly passive income. Some streams were pretty good. Others were just a trickle.

In 2006 I finally took my games off the market when I shut down my games business. By this point I was earning so much more from StevePavlina.com that I didn’t want to divide my focus by keeping my games business going. But the passive income stream from these games helped me launch my personal growth business. My games income covered all my expenses while I got StevePavlina.com up and running.

Is $10K spread out over 10 years a good paycheck for 6 months of work? No, I could easily have earned more money working at a job. I was already earning more than that from contract programming work before I wrote my first independent game.

The point of creating your first passive income stream isn’t to achieve that big payout right away. The point is to learn how to create passive income streams, so you can get better at it. Then you can create bigger streams as your skills increase. Don’t expect your first effort to be your masterpiece.

Today I can create new streams of passive income with a lot less effort than I had to exert in the 1990s. The reason I can do this is because I put in the time to learn how to do this, and I’ve continued to refine my skills over time.

Don’t worry about how big your streams are in the beginning. If you can create a $50 per month passive income stream this year, I think that’s great. And it’s so much easier to do this today than it was back in 1995 when I first started, so you have it much easier than I did. Your cell phone is probably 100 times more powerful than the computer I used back then.

You also have me coaching you along the way. I didn’t have anyone coaching me at the time. Sometimes the people in my life suggested that I should get a job. They don’t say that anymore though.

Do set goals, but be patient with your progress. This is a skill that will benefit you your whole life. Even if you work on this for 10 years, there will still be plenty more to learn.

As I mentioned previously, as part of this passive income series, I’ll walk you through the process of creating a new stream of passive income. And I’ll create a new stream for myself in the process. I haven’t decided what that will be yet, but I’m sure I’ll come up with something. Coming up with ideas is easy.

But for now, the goal has to come first. Since I want to keep this simple and not overcomplicate things, I’m going to set what is for me a relatively conservative goal:

I create a new stream of passive income by September 30, 2012, that generates at least $2000 per month on average and endures for a minimum of 10 years.

So this means creating a new stream that earns at least $240,000 over the next decade.

This seems like an achievable goal for me. I’ve already created multiple streams of this size and larger, so it’s not a stretch to believe that I can do it again. In this case the challenge will be to explain all the steps as I go along, which I’ve never done before. I want to keep this goal fairly basic, so I can focus on the teaching aspect.

Having a clear and specific goal helps me transition to thinking about the how. Now I can start pondering ways to do this.

This also helps me rule out what I can’t do to create this income stream. I can’t just do more public workshops or paid speaking since that’s active income. I want to set something up once and have it generate monthly income for at least a decade.

What happens if I don’t make the deadline? Nothing. I’ll set a new deadline. The deadline is a focusing mechanism. I could create a new passive income stream within a couple weeks if I want to. And I’ll probably create other streams along the way that I don’t blog about. But for this stream, I want to take it slow and explain the process in detail, so you can follow along. But I also want to keep moving towards some kind of release. I don’t want to get stuck in perpetual idea mode.

The key to goal setting is to get into the habit of setting and achieving goals. It’s not to set aggressive targets that you never reach. You can always set a bigger goal later once you achieve the original goal.

Sometimes I’ve set a big goal with a 2-month deadline, and I achieved it during the first week or two. So I celebrated that. Then I set a new goal with a new deadline.

As long as the goal seems motivating to you and it helps you get into action, then I’d say it a good goal for you.

My suggestion would be to set a goal something like this:

I create a new stream of passive income by December 31, 2012, that generates at least $100 per month on average and endures for a minimum of 5 years.

I think this is a very achievable goal for most people. You don’t need your own website to earn this much.

Now some people will blow this goal out of the water; it will be way too easy for them. Other people will find it a serious challenge. Feel free to adjust the goal to something that feels good to you.

If you were to achieve the goal above, you’d put at least $6K in your pocket, but it’s not the amount that matters. The real aim is for you to learn how to create a $100 per month stream of passive income. Once you learn how to do that, you can surely do it again. Do it 10 times, and you’ll earn $60K passively.

Once you learn how to earn $100 per month in passive income — by actually doing it, not by reading about it — then it’s not that difficult to learn to create bigger streams. So instead of creating 10 streams that collectively generate $60K, you might learn how to earn that much with just one or two streams. As you continue to develop your skills in this area, you’ll discover how to earn larger sums with fewer streams and less effort. If one stream dies, you’ll also know how to replace it with a new one.

I’m pretty comfortable creating streams that earn around $50K per year. When I had third-party ads on this website several years ago, one of those streams was earning more than $100K per year. Once you get the hang of this, I think you’ll find it a fun challenge to create new streams of income and to experiment with different approaches.

If you want more long-term financial security, you won’t find it in the money or even in the streams of passive income. You’ll find it in building your own knowledge and skills. You can take away all my streams of income, my website, my assets, etc, and I’ll be able to recreate the same level of financial abundance in a relatively short period of time because I already know how to do it.

This is what I want for you as well. I want you to learn how to do this, so then you’ll always have that option available. This know-how will relieve you of much financial pressure. You won’t have to scramble to get a job to pay your bills. You can just create more passive income streams if you want more money.

You are NOT done reading this post until you’ve set your goal and have written it down. If you haven’t done this yet, do it right now.

Once you’ve done that, I encourage you to also post your goal in public — IF you can do this in a place where you feel that people will support and encourage you.

I’m sharing my goal publicly since I expect that many people will want me to succeed since they’ll benefit from the educational value. Watching me try and fail wouldn’t make for a very interesting series. I’ve also seen plenty of positive feedback popping up already, so I know that there’s a lot of interest in this series.

If you expect mostly positive support, then share your goal on your blog, your Facebook page, etc. Add some accountability and commitment like I’m doing. This can help motivate you to succeed, and you’ll inspire others to develop this skill too.

If, on the other hand, you anticipate a largely negative response if you share your goal publicly, then you have a different challenge to address. This means your life is filled with too many incompatible people. You have too much social drag. These people are only going to get in your way, so if you don’t think you can win them over, then drop them. Block them, unfriend them, etc.

If other people have a problem with your setting a goal in this area, what are they going to be like when you actually succeed? They’ll probably get worse, and then you’ll have to deal with problems like pettiness, jealousy, sarcasm, neediness, and more. Better to cut them out now and fill your life with positive support. Let them learn from your example… from a distance.

Prepare to succeed. Expect to succeed. Know that once you’ve set this goal, you’re going to achieve it. And if you’re going to achieve it, then you need to start shedding from your life whatever would otherwise get in the way of your goal. Whoever can’t handle it, drop them. This will create space to invite much better relationships with people who will support you on this path. The dead weight must be shed, so that positive support can come through.

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Join new TEDinClass conversations with Jessica Green’s Biodiversity students

Engaging in dialogue and conversation is a great way to learn. Which is why, this semester, TED Fellow Jessica Green is teaching a Biodiversity class this semester at the University of Oregon, and her students are starting great TED Conversations around topics that come up in class. And you are welcome to join!

How does affluence influence biodiversity?  – asks Drew Thompson, inviting you to discuss the role of affluent societies in environmental harm. Sudni Rucks, also a student, challenges us to think and talk about the ecosystems we use: What are ecosystem services that you rely on everyday? Are you willing to pay for them?

These conversations run for one week and new ones will be posted every Monday and Wednesday every week until early June.

This is the second time that Jessica Green has involved TEDinClass Conversations in her class. Find more student-run conversations from Jessica Green’s previous course on Population Biology. We asked Jessica about her motivations in using TED Conversations to teach:

“University of Oregon students motivate me. The students in my Population Ecology this year are exceptionally gifted. Inspired by TED Fellow Nina Tandon’s experience, I brought the option of initiating TED Conversations to my classroom. The students have embraced the process wholeheartedly. It is clear that individuals and groups are the most creative when they take ownership over the learning process. I am motivated to continue teaching in ways that serve our continually evolving student needs. I think the students are slowly getting the hang of things — and they are getting VERY excited! This is so special for the students! I have never seen students this engaged. WOW. I’m inspired as a teacher.”

New Conversations from Biodiversity class can be accessed through special tags: TEDinClass, TEDinClassroom, Biodiversity class, or simply by visiting this page:
http://www.ted.com/conversations/topics/Biodiversity+class

All of the TEDinClass conversations so far can be found here >>

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Richard Feynman: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

Many times in the last five years, I’ve been asked: “If you could have dinner with anyone in history, who would it be?”

My answer is always the same: Richard Feynman.

Right alongside Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, Feynman’s book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) hugely impacted every aspect of my thinking when I first read them circa 2005. Since then, I have studied Feynman’s letters, teaching style, discoveries, and beyond. How many Nobel Prize winners also safe crack and play bongos in bars for fun?

The above video will give you an taste of why I love Richard Feynman. It was forwarded to me by Brew Johnson and J.R. Johnson, whom I owe huge thanks, as I’d somehow missed it. About the program, Professor Sir Harry Kroto, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, said:

“The 1981 Feynman Horizon is the best science program I have ever seen. This is not just my opinion – it is also the opinion of many of the best scientists that I know who have seen the program… It should be mandatory viewing for all students, whether they be science or arts students.”

Feynman’s makes me want to be a better teacher and, ultimately, a world-class parent (you’ll see what I mean). A few notes on the video:

- I first watched this in 10-minute bites before bed. There’s no need to watch it all at once.
- :30-:38 is fascinating physics, but physics nonetheless. He does a masterful job of getting lay people excited (his cadence helps a lot), but skip if needed, rather than missing what follows.
- :40+ explains part of his teaching philosophy, which greatly influenced how I outline my books.
- His concept of “active irresponsibility” is worth remembering.

May you all experience the pleasure of finding things out, starting here with a closer look at a most curious character: Richard Feynman.

If you could have dinner anyone from any time in history, who would you choose and why? Assume you can’t tell anyone about the dinner, so bragging rights don’t apply. What would you want to learn, know, or experience?

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Odds and Ends:
Tim Ferriss on Reddit AMA (answering some controversial questions, too)
The 4-Hour Chef site – Brand-new and soon getting more. Some of the copy is placeholder text, but it give you an idea.

Posted on April 19th, 2012

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Dealing With a Full Mailbox in Outlook 2010

We’ve all seen it. The dreaded “Your mailbox is over the limit.” message.

This means that not only can you not receive any new mail messages, you can’t send any emails either. This usually happens right at the climax of a very important project. The question is: What can we do about it?

You could always ask your email administrator to increase your limits, but that could take some time depending upon how busy they are with other help desk tickets. Below I’ve offered ways to help yourself. Plus, if you’ve already done these steps below, then when you do request the help desk ticket for increasing your limits, you will stand a much better chance of getting them increased.

The first thing that you can do is empty your Deleted Items folder. The following steps are if you are using Outlook, but the concepts work in almost any mail program. Like your trash can at home, if you don’t empty the Deleted Items once in a while, you won’t ever get the space back. Simply right-click on the Deleted Items folder and choose Delete.

The next one that’s often overlooked is your Sent Items folder. Outlook by default, saves every mail message to your Sent Items folder. Most other mail programs have the same capabilities. What this means is that every single “Hey…what are you doing for lunch?” email is in there. All five years worth of them. You don’t need to hang onto those messages. Go ahead and delete them. This step may take a bit longer than emptying the Deleted Items folder, but it will get the job done as well. You may want to sift through the messages, since there will be some messages that you have sent that you want to retain.

The third option is to use the AutoArchive function of Outlook. This one could be an issue for you, since the criteria for most archiving is by date. There are some messages (an annual or biannual contract negotiation with a vendor, for example) that you need to keep. Instead of auto-archiving those, move the messages to another folder manually.

Outlook is usually configured to store messages on the Exchange server, which is good because you can sign into any PC in your organization and still retrieve your messages. Likewise, you can sign into webmail while you are traveling and still have access to those same messages. Unfortunately, this is where those mailbox limits come into play.

For less critical mail, create an archive for yourself , since we’ve determined that AutoArchiving may not be the answer.

The way to do this is to have Outlook open, then go to File > Account Settings. Click on the Data Files tab and click on Add. This will let you create a new .PST file. You can name it anything your want. (I would suggest something along the lines of “2011 Archives” vs. “Personal Folders”, which is the default name. And no, I don’t know how they got PST out of Personal Folders. It’s a mystery to me too…)

When you go to create the new PST file, you may want to create it in your shared files drive letter (commonly called H: for home, P: for Personal or U: for Users — your mileage may vary depending upon your network administrator.) This will create a new folder icon underneath your normal mailbox icons on the left. Expand this folder and start dragging emails over to the new folder. This folder used to have a limit of 2 GB in size, although you could always create more PST files. In Outlook 2010, they changed its formatting, increasing the limit to 50 GB — more than enough space. (If you need more than 50 GB of email, you have bigger issues than “mailbox full” messages.)

There are some caveats to this method of archiving. First, this PST file won’t be available to you from machine to machine, unless you saved it to your U: drive. Secondly, if the machine that you put it on gets corrupted or has a hard disk failure, say goodbye to your e-mail (unless it’s backed up…you do have a backup, right? ). Third, your email administrator or your network security may not favor you doing this. If there is a virus in the email system, they can clean the mail servers. If if makes it into your PST file, it’s a whole lot harder to eradicate it. Of course, you should have anti-virus scanning your email as it comes in, but it still is a concern.

If this still doesn’t do the trick, then you simply need a larger quota. Doing the steps above will help support your request for more space.

(Photo credit: White Email Symobls with One Red One via Shutterstock)

Brian K. Vagnini is a musician, designer, engineer and writer of fiction and technical topics. He was a technical trainer for five years and learned about almost every class of software. His additional writing can be found at Grey Matter Ideas and "a href="http://www.wicketbang.com">Wicketbang.com.

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Is the brain the centre of your universe?

The Observer has a fantastic debate between neuroscientists David Eagleman and Raymond Tallis about how much brain science tells us about free will and the unconscious.

It’s a wonderful pairing as Eagleman is a broad-thinking wonderboy of neuroscience while Tallis is a veteran street-fighter of brain debates.

The main point of contention revlves around whether we can understand the brain as the source of human nature or whether we have to look beyond the individual to make sense of our experience and behaviour.

Eagleman: It is clear at this point that we are irrevocably tied to the 3lb of strange computational material found within our skulls. The brain is utterly alien to us, and yet our personalities, hopes, fears and aspirations all depend on the integrity of this biological tissue. How do we know this? Because when the brain changes, we change…

Tallis: Yes, of course, everything about us, from the simplest sensation to the most elaborately constructed sense of self, requires a brain in some kind of working order. Remove your brain and bang goes your IQ. It does not follow that our brains are pretty well the whole story of us, nor that the best way to understand ourselves is to stare at “the neural substrate of which we are composed”.

This is because we are not stand-alone brains. We are part of community of minds, a human world, that is remote in many respects from what can be observed in brains. Even if that community ultimately originated from brains, this was the work of trillions of brains over hundreds of thousands of years: individual, present-day brains are merely the entrance ticket to the drama of social life, not the drama itself.

As an accompaniment to the piece, I also wrote a ‘brief guide to neuroscience’ that you can also read online.

Link to debate ‘The brain… it makes you think. Doesn’t it?’
Link to ‘A brief guide to neuroscience’.

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Easy Project Organization in 10 Minutes Flat

One of the easiest things you can do when starting a new project is create a bunch of ideas. These ideas come naturally because you are so enthusiastic with the thought of something new and potentially beneficial to you or your business ventures. But, you soon see that all those ideas become incredibly hard to sift through and organize into a project.

Project organization can seem like it takes forever, especially if you get caught “in the weeds” of the details of your project. The fact is that initial project organization, for almost any size project, can take as little as 10 minutes if you follow these simple steps.

Take the first 2 minutes of your planning sessions to write out the goal of the project. Answer these questions to further solidify the goal:

What is the purpose of the project and what will it accomplish?How will you know when you are done with this project?Answering these two questions is essential to organize any project. Without knowing what you are trying to accomplish and what done looks like you won’t be able to identify the right tasks and actions moving forward.

Take the next 1 minute to identify the single next, physical action of your project. If you are a GTD nerd then you know all about the power of the next action and how it can propel you to get form “I don’t know what the heck I am doing” to “one step closer to done.”

When I say “the next, physical action”, I mean that exactly. If you need to call someone to get a quote on a new set of tires but you don’t know the number of the tire guy, then you next action would be “Google tire guy’s number”. That seems obvious, but it can also be quite subtle.

Rather than say my next action is to “think about ‘x’”, ‘x’ being anything under the sun, make my next action “draft 10 reasons why I want to ‘x’”. This gives you a next action that is physical and something that is accomplishable.

It may seem extreme, but identifying your next action gives you a stake in the ground to start from. Since you identified what the project will look like when it’s done, you now have the starting point and the ending point.

The next 5 minutes is spent organizing the next steps of your project. This is where you can become too detailed if you aren’t careful; don’t let that happen to you. Instead of analyzing why a certain task will be the best one to do after another certain task, which tasks can be parallel to one another, or what are all the major and minor dependencies of tasks and sub-projects, simply find the tasks that can be done at any time or have a natural order to them.

You don’t have to plan the entire project in a matter of 5 minutes, what you need to do is organize a list of tasks in a natural order to move the project past the next physical action. You can always come back and do another 10 minute project planning session to finish your project organization.

Now that you have the bulk of your project organization out of the way, take the last 2 minutes to step back and review your project. If you see any glaring things that need to be changed before you dive in or pass it off to a coworker, take care of them now. Make sure that you next action is truly a next action. Ensure that your list of subsequent actions are laid out naturally and aren’t full of awkward dependencies.

Lastly, quickly go over the goal of the project and what will be true in your world when the project is completed successfully.

There isn’t anything like being able to take a large amount of ideas and snippets of actions and quickly put them together into a full fledge project in 10 minutes. It helps keep the momentum of the ideas flowing and greatly reduces the resistance between idea andaction. While this simple plan may not work for a project like “build a replica of Taj Mahal”, many of the projects that we need to accomplish for our work and lives can be organized in a matter of 4 steps and 10 minutes.

(Photo credit: An image of a hand with a pen drawing a sketch via Shutterstock)

CM Smith is a technologist, writer, and husband. He holds a degree in MIS and CMPSC from Penn State. CM is also interested in personal productivity, creativity and how to use technology to get things done. Check out his writing at devburner.net or follow him on Twitter.

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What I’ve Learned About Learning

‘We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.’ ~Lloyd Alexander

I am a teacher and an avid learner, and I’m passionate about both.

I’m a teacher because I help Eva homeschool our kids — OK, she does most of the work, but I do help, mostly with math but with everything else too. I also teach habits, writing/blogging, simplicity and other fun topics in online courses.

I’m a lifelong learner and am always obsessively studying something, whether that’s breadmaking or language or wine or chess or writing or fitness.

Here’s are two key lessons — both really the same lesson — I’ve learned about learning, in all my years of study and in trying to teach people:

Almost everything I’ve learned, I didn’t learn in school; andAlmost everything my students (and kids) have learned, they learned on their own.

Those two lessons (or one lesson) have a number of reasons and implications for learning. Let’s take a look at some of them, in hopes you might find them useful.

One of the foundations of Unschooling, which Eva and I and the kids do here at home, is that you’re not teaching subjects to your kids — in fact, you’re not really teaching them at all. They take responsibility for their learning, and do it because they’re interested in something, not because you tell them they should learn it.

This is exactly how I learn as an adult, and so I know it works.

When teachers (wonderful people that they were) tried to teach me something in school, I often became bored, and just did what I needed to do to do well on the test. Not because the subject or the teacher was boring, but because it wasn’t something I cared about. They wanted me to learn it because they thought I should, but that’s not why people learn something. They learn it because they care about it — because they find it incredibly interesting, or because they need it to do something they really want to do.

When teachers succeeded in getting me to learn, it was only because they made something seem so interesting that I started to care about it. But then I learned on my own, either in class while ignoring everyone else, or more likely after class in the library or at home.

That’s because someone walking you through the steps of learning something doesn’t work — you aren’t learning when you’re just listening to someone tell you how something works. You’re learning when you try to do that something — putting it into action. That’s when the real learning begins and the superficial learning ends — when you try something and fail, and adjust and try again, and solve countless little problems as you do so.

The best teachers know this, and so they inspire, and help you to put the learning into action.

As an adult, I’ve learned a lot on my own. The stuff I’ve just read, I’ve mostly forgotten. But the stuff I’ve put into action by playing with it, by practicing, by creating and sharing with others — that stuff has stuck with me. I truly learned it.

I learned about blogging when I started blogging, and kept doing it for five years — not by reading blogs about blogging. My students have learned habits and decluttering and meditation and blogging from me not because I told them something brilliants, but because the ones who really learned put it into action. They formed a simple habit, decluttered their homes, did 5 minutes of meditation for 30 days, blogged.

This is where the real learning happens — when the fingers start moving, the feet start dancing, not when you hear or read something.

The teacher’s job, really, is to fascinate the student. Fascination is the key to learning. Then help the student put the fascination into action.

It follows then, that if you’re teaching yourself, your job is exactly the same.

Here’s how to learn:

Get fascinated. As a teacher, you should fascinate the student by rediscovering with her all the things that originally fascinated you about the topic. If you can’t get fascinated, you won’t care enough to really learn something. You’ll just go through the motions. How do you get fascinated? Often doing something with or for other people helps to motivate me to look more deeply into something, and reading about other people who have been successful/legendary at it also fascinates me.Pour yourself into it. I will read every website and book I can get my hands on. Google and the library are my first stops. They’re free. The used bookstore will be next. There are always an amazing amount of online resources to learn anything. If there isn’t, create one.Do it, in small steps. Actually doing whatever you want to do will be scary. You can learn as much Spanish vocabulary as you like, but until you start having conversations, you won’t really know it. You can read as much about chess as you like, but you have to put the problems into action, and play games. You can read about how to program, but you won’t know it until you actually code. Start with small, non-scary steps, with as little risk as possible, focusing on fun, easy skills.Play. Learning isn’t work. It’s fun. If you’re learning because you think you should, not because you’re having fun with it, you will not really stick with it for long, or you’ll hate it and not care about it. So make it play. Make games out of it. Sing and dance while you do it. Show off your new skills to people, with a smile on your face.Do it with others. I believe most learning is done on your own, but doing it with others makes it fun. I like to work out with my friends and with Eva. I like to bake bread for my family. I like to play chess with my kids. That motivates me to learn, because I want to do well when I do it with others.Feel free to move around. I will dive into something for a couple weeks, and then move on to something else. That’s OK. That’s how passion for a topic often works. Sometimes it will last for a long time, sometimes it’s a short intense burst. You can’t control it. Allow yourself to wander if that’s where things lead you.But deep learning takes months or years. You can learn a lot about something in 2-4 weeks, but you really become an expert at something only after months and years of doing it. I knew a lot about blogging after 6 months, but I waited a couple years before I was comfortable teaching others about it. Even now, after 5+ years of blogging, I’m still learning. The same applies to habits — I’ve learned a lot after 7 years of successfully creating habits, and now can actually teach it with some confidence. So how do you allow yourself to wander, but stick with something for long enough to get deep learning? By wandering around within the topic. You can learn a lot about wine in a month, for example, but what if after that you focused on cabernet sauvignon for a month, then zinfandel, then pinot noir? What if then you decided to learn about Oregon pinot noirs, then Sonoma pinots, then (the wonderful) pinots from Burgundy? You’d be wandering around, but going deeper and deeper. You can also move away from a topic, then get fascinated with it again and come back to it.Test yourself. You can learn a lot of information quickly by studying something, testing yourself, studying again to fill in the holes in your knowledge, testing again, and repeating until you have it by heart. That’s not always the most fun way to learn, but it can work well. Alternatively, you can learn by playing, and when you play, allow that to be your test.Disagree. Don’t just agree that everything you’re reading or hearing from others on a topic is correct, even if they are foremost experts. First, experts are often wrong, and it’s not until they are challenged that new knowledge is found. Second, even if they are right and you are wrong by disagreeing, you learn by disagreeing. By disagreeing, you have already not only considered what you’ve been given, but formulated an alternative theory. Then you have to try to test to see which is right, and even if you find that the first information or theory was right and you were wrong, now you know that much better than if you just agreed. I’m not saying to disagree with everything, but the more you do, the better you’ll learn. Don’t disagree in a disagreeable way, and don’t hold onto your theories too tightly and be defensive about them.Teach it. There is no better way to cement your knowledge than to teach it to others. It’s OK if you don’t really know it that well — as long as you’re honest about that when you’re teaching it to someone. For example, I’m a beginner at chess, but I will learn something about it and teach it to my kids — they know I’m not a tournament contender, let alone a master, and yet I’m still teaching them something they don’t know. And when I do, I begin to really understand it, because to teach you have to take what you’ve absorbed, reflect upon it, find a way to organize it so that you can communicate it to someone else clearly enough for them to understand it, see their mistakes and help correct them, see where the holes in your knowledge are, and more.Learning can be subliminal. We think we’re in control of our minds and we’re like programmers telling our minds what to learn, how to learn, and what data to retain. No. Our minds work in mysterious ways, and cannot be tightly controlled. They wander, latch onto the weirdest things, and soak up more than we know. Later, you can come back to what you’ve absorbed, and test yourself, and find you knew something you didn’t realize you knew. The lesson is to expose yourself to as much as possible on a topic, and allow yourself to absorb it. Sometimes your mind will pick up patterns you didn’t consciously realize were there, but then can use those patterns later when you put the learning into action.Reflect on your learning by blogging. You soak up a ton of information and patterns, and you can put that into action, but when you sit down and reflect on what you’ve learned, and try to share that with others (as I’m doing right now), you force yourself to think deeply, to synthesize the knowledge and to organize it, much as you do when you teach it to others. Blogging is a great tool for reflection and sharing what you’ve learned, even if you don’t hope to make a living at it. And it’s free.

‘The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.’ ~Albert Einstein

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May 19 is Food Revolution Day

We’ve heard the statistics. Obesity has more than doubled worldwide since 1980. For the first time in history, being overweight is killing more people than being underweight. At least 2.8 million adults die each year as a result of being overweight or obese. Where do we begin to tackle such an immense problem?

There is not one single solution, but there are two key paths: getting moving and eating better. We must change our habits and promote better living.

On May 19, Food Revolution Day is a day for people who love food to get back to the basics. To become a conscious community and understand our daily food choices. Learning to cook from scratch is at the heart of the movement. Food Revolution Day can empower everyone to start.

People around the globe will connect with their community through events at homes, schools, restaurants, local businesses, and farmers’ markets. Already 100+ food events and 200+ dinner parties are planned. You can join them or arrange your own. Do you want to bring the revolution to your company or your school? Check out the toolkits.

Learn more about Food Revolution Day >>

Below, watch Jamie Oliver’s video message to TEDxers, announcing Food Revolution Day:

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Share your idea for the City 2.0 — and apply for a $10,000 award to make it happen

Inspired by today’s TEDTalk from Eduardo Paes, the mayor of Rio? Share your own idea for leading your city into the future, and apply for a $10,000 award to help make it happen!

If you have a bold, creative project for your city, apply for one of ten (10) $10,000 awards from the TED Prize to push it forward. It’s all part of this year’s prize: The City 2.0. Find guidelines, judging criteria and application: http://j.mp/city2award. Deadline is May 15. Email info@thecity2.org with any questions.

From building bike lanes to monitoring air pollution to setting up skills centers for the unemployed, engaged citizens have great ideas for creating your own City 2.0. You can find them on

Find guidelines and judging criteria for the award after the jump …

GUIDELINES
1. Projects should be based on creative ideas that can be replicated and spread to other cities.
2. A group of people, rather than just an individual, must be committed to the project. We encourage cross-disciplinary teams and will favor organizing groups that actively engage residents in their work.
3. Unproven concepts with a strong action plan are welcome. Our goal is to help people experiment and think big.
4. Projects that have already begun are eligible for the award. In fact, evidence of progress already made is a benefit.
5. All projects, whether successful or not, will need to report back to us on their progress and findings. Details will be provided to winners directly.
6. All projects must fit reasonably under one of the City 2.0 categories presented in the wish: inclusive, innovative, healthy, thriving, or soulful. You can learn more about what type of projects fit under these categories by looking at the ideas page (and using the filter) on thecity2.org.

JUDGING CRITERIA
1. Is the project feasible given the organizing group and the plan? Bold ideas grounded in practical understanding are best.
2. Will the $10,000 make a significant contribution to kickstarting the project? It need not be the complete budget but it should not be too small of a percentage of the initial needs.
3. Is the concept, or key insights derived from it, replicable? What can be learned from this project that can be applied to other cities? Projects that help other people think differently about their own city, its challenges and possibilities, are best.
4. How does the outcome of the project impact the bigger vision of The City 2.0?

The City 2.0 is about connecting short-term action to long-term vision. A winning project is a possible solution or lesson in solving a larger challenge or reaching a larger goal.

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The return of All in the Minds

The two best psychology and neuroscience radio shows, both confusing called All in the Mind, have just started new series in the last couple of weeks.

BBC Radio 4's programme, which takes more of a magazine format featuring several topics each week, has just kicked off with a programme about stress, humour and discussing personal mental health issues.

On the other side of the wires, ABC Radio National’s programme has begun with an edition on the genetics of mental illness and one on self-harm. I really recommend the genetics programme, by the way, as it takes a fresh look at the whole concept.

Both come highly recommended so do tune in your wireless. Or click your mouse. Whichever is easiest.

Link to BBC Radio 4's All in the Mind
Link to ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind

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You've Got One Change Left. What Do You Do?

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Flip this lesson! A new way to teach with video from TED-Ed

Announcing a new way to use video to create customized lessons: the “Flip This Lesson” feature from TED-Ed, now in beta at ed.ted.com.

With this feature, educators can use, tweak, or completely redo any video lesson featured on TED-Ed, or create lessons from scratch based on a TEDTalk or any video from YouTube. How? Just plug the video in and start writing questions, comments, even quizzes — then save the lesson as a private link and share with your students. The site allows you to see who’s completed the lessons and track individual progress. It’s still in beta, but we’re so excited about this feature we had to share.

Watch the short video to learn how it works:

“Flip This Lesson” is an open platform — you can create a lesson from any video, whether from the TED-Ed library, from more than 1,000 TEDTalks, or from any video on YouTube. Read Chris Anderson’s blog post about why we built TED-Ed as an open platform. Read the full press announcement here. And explore a sample lesson Chris made as a proof-of-concept, based on a great new TED-Ed talk.

Then — go forth and write lessons of your own!

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Snakes on a brain

The latest Journal of Neuroscience features a study on the neuroscience behind Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s famouse Rotating Snakes illusion and to celebrate they’re made a ‘Rotating Brain’ illusion for the front cover.

This type of illusion, often called a peripheral drift illusion, was thought to occur due to slow drifting eye movements but this new study suggests that it is more likely to be explained by rapid but tiny eye movements called saccades.

Brain-shaped version of Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s “Rotating Snakes” illusion. In its usual presentation, the image consists of concentric circles of stepwise luminance gradients with curved edges, which produces a strong illusion of rotation in most observers. New evidence suggests this illusion is produced by transient oculomotor events such as microsaccades, saccades, and blinks, rather than continuous drift.

Despite the fantastic cover I expect the journal to outdo itself next time and have both an article explaining the neuroscience Brocken spectre as well as an image you can hide up a mountanside to create 20 metre tall ghost-like figures.

Link to study (via BoingBoing)

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Listen now! TED Radio Hour’s first episode: “Our Buggy Brain”

Journey through the world of ideas with TED Radio Hour, a new program from NPR and TED that inspires imagination about modern life and places bets on tomorrow with today’s most compelling minds. The show’s first episode airs today, April 27 (check listings for your local station, which may vary). You can find the full hour-long episode, as well as each individual segment (yes, they’re each 18 minutes long), related TEDTalks and more in-depth content on n.pr/TEDradiohour and on NPR’s mobile apps.

In Episode 1, “Our Buggy Brain,” host Alison Stewart talks with Dan Ariely, Paul Bloom and Dan Gilbert about how our minds inform and sometimes deceive us.

Listen to TED Radio Hour Episode 1: “Our Buggy Brain” >>

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