“Productivity” Tricks for the Neurotic, Manic-Depressive, and Crazy (Like Me)

Sometimes, life seems upside-down.

I originally wrote this post months ago, but I’ve been too self-conscious to publish it until now. This quote convinced me to put on my big girl pants:

“The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.”
- Neil Gaiman
University of the Arts Commencement Speech

So, here goes, and I hope it helps at least a few of you.

A few months ago, I had a birthday party.

A dozen friends and I gathered for several days of wonderful sun, beach, and catching up. On the last day, I didn’t get up until 11:30am, knowing full well that the last remaining friends were leaving at 12 noon.

I was afraid of being alone.

Like a child, I hid my head under the covers (literally) and hit snooze until reality couldn’t be postponed any further.

But…why am I telling you this?…

We all like to appear “successful” (a nebulous term at best) and the media like to portray standouts as superheroes.

Sometimes, these dramatic stories of overcoming the odds are inspiring. More often, they lead to an unhealthy knee-jerk conclusion:

“Well… maybe they [entrepreneur/artist/creator painted as superhero] can do it, but I’m just a normal guy/girl…”

This post is intended to give a behind-the-scenes look at my own life. Though I’ve occasionally done profiles like A Day In The Life with Morgan Spurlock’s crew, I rarely let journalists follow me for a “normal” day. Why?

I’m no superhero. I’m not even a consistent “normal.”

In the last 3 months, I’ve:

Cried while watching Rudy.Repeatedly hit Snooze for 1-3 HOURS past my planned wake time, because I simply didn’t want to face the day.Considered giving everything away and moving to Montreal, Seville, or Iceland. Location varies based on what I’m escaping.Seen a therapist for the first time, as I was convinced that I was doomed to life-long pessimism.Used gentlemanly (ahem) websites to “relax” during the day when I clearly have urgent and important shit to do.Taken my daily caffeine intake (read: self-medication) so high that my “resting” pulse was 120+ beats per minute. 8-10 cups of coffee per day minimum.Worn the same pair of jeans for a week straight just to have a much-needed constant during weeks of chaos.

Seems pretty dysfunctional, right?

But, in the last 8 weeks, I’ve also:

Increased my passive income 20%+.Bought my dream house.Meditated twice per day for 20 minutes per session, without fail. This marks the first time I’ve been able to meditate consistently.I’ve cut my caffeine intake to next-to-nothing (in the last 4 weeks): usually pu-erh tea in the morning and green tea in the afternoon. I’ve had no more than 1 cup of coffee per week. More on this in a later post.With your help, raised $100,000+ for charity:water for my birthday. (Thanks to John Park for bringing the thunder!)Raised $250,000 in 53 minutes for a start-up called Shyp.Signed one of the most exciting business deals of my last 10 years.Added roughy 20 pounds of muscle after learning the pain and joy of high-rep front squats (and topical DHEA, courtesy of Patrick Arnold).Transformed my blood work.Realized — once again — that manic-depressive symptoms are just part of entrepreneurship.Come to feel closer to all my immediate family members.

Most “superheroes” are nothing of the sort. They’re weird, neurotic creatures who do big things DESPITE lots of self-defeating habits and self-talk.

Personally, I suck at efficiency (doing things quickly). Here’s my coping mechanism and 8-step process for maximizing efficacy (doing the right things):

1) Wake up at least 1 hour before you have to be at a computer screen. E-mail is the mind killer.
2) Make a cup of tea (I like pu-erh) and sit down with a pen/pencil and paper.
3) Write down the 3-5 things — and no more — that are making you most anxious or uncomfortable. They’re often things that have been punted from one day’s to-do list to the next, to the next, to the next, and so on. Most important usually = most uncomfortable, with some chance of rejection or conflict.
4) For each item, ask yourself:
- “If this were the only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day?”
- “Will moving this forward make all the other to-do’s unimportant or easier to knock off later?”
5) Look only at the items you’ve answered “yes” to for at least one of these questions.
6) Block out at 2-3 hours to focus on ONE of them for today. Let the rest of the urgent but less important stuff slide. It will still be there tomorrow.
7) TO BE CLEAR: Block out at 2-3 HOURS to focus on ONE of them for today. This is ONE BLOCK OF TIME. Cobbling together 10 minutes here and there to add up to 120 minutes does not work.
8) If you get distracted or start procrastinating, don’t freak out and downward spiral; just gently come back to your ONE to-do.

Congratulations! That’s it.

This is the only way I can create big outcomes despite my never-ending impulse to procrastinate, nap, and otherwise fritter away my days with bullshit. If I have 10 important things to do in a day, it’s 100% certain nothing important will get done that day. On the other hand, I can usually handle 1 must-do item and block out my lesser behaviors for 2-3 hours a day.

It doesn’t take much to seem superhuman and appear “successful” to nearly everyone around you. In fact, you just need one rule: What you do is more important than how you do everything else, and doing something well does not make it important.

If you consistently feel the counterproductive need for volume and doing lots of stuff, put these on a Post-it note:

Being busy is a form of laziness–lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.

And when — despite your best efforts — you feel like you’re losing at the game of life, remember: Even the best of the best feel this way sometimes. When I’m in the pit of despair, I recall what iconic writer Kurt Vonnegut said about his process: “When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”

Don’t overestimate the world and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think.

And you are not alone.

If you occasionally struggle like me, these resources and articles might help you rebound:

The Prescription for Self-Doubt (Video)
Harnessing Entrepreneurial Manic-Depression: Making the Rollercoaster Work for You
Two Root Causes of My Recent Depression (by Brad Feld, one of my favorite start-up investors)

Did you find this post helpful? Please let me know, and if you have any particular strategies or quotes that help get you out of funks, please share in the comments!

Posted on November 3rd, 2013

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5 Crazy Ideas To Save The Environment

Climate change is a global problem; it follows that all of us should have a desire to help alleviate the problem, right? Actually we can all take little steps to help. As we all know, the human race continues to waste Mother Earth’s natural resources.

We as good children should take steps to prevent further damage. It’s beneficial to take action now to avoid disasters of catastrophic proportions in the near future.
Today is the best time to start doing something good for Earth; our only home. In the infographic featured here, we can see ideas that could contribute to our goal of saving our planet from total destruction.

Some are absolutely crazy while one is just plain practical. Some are scientific breakthroughs waiting to be confirmed as such. This infographic introduces some promising fresh innovations. However, they remain at a stage where researchers and scientists are waiting for validation. Just the same, these ideas are worth trying.

It’s encouraging to know that caring and committed individuals continue to look for solutions to help save the environment.

Explore more infographics like this one on the web’s largest information design community – Visually.

For today’s knowledge workers, every distraction is a drain on productivity and sanity. 10 Steps to a Zen-like Working Environment

Anthony is an expert broadcaster/professional blogger who is fueled by cappuccino and jazz music. If he's not busy writing for clients, and churning out ebooks for greenhorn broadcasters and freelance writers, he gives tips to entry level broadcasters and freelance writers on his site The Write Freelance

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50 Crazy Facts About Hair

Did you know your hair (assuming you had enough of it) is strong enough to support the weight of two elephants? Or that you lose 40-150 strands of hair a day on average? (Don’t worry, we have an average of 100,000 strands, so that shedding is pretty minimal.) No matter how much (or how little) hair you have on your head, you probably don’t know that much about it. Fortunately, this infographic can fill you in with over 50 folicle-friendly facts.

The facts are quite fascinating too. For example, while only 1% of the world’s population has red hair, 13% of Scottish people are natural redheads and the US has the largest total population of gingers. Of course, it’s hard to tell if someone really is a redhead or not these days when 75% of all women dye their hair.

Having a long hair is often considered as a sign of beauty: 10 Tips to Make Hair Grow Faster

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Personal Development: 5 Playfully Crazy Tips That Can Unleash Your Creative Potential and Boost Your Creativity

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Crazy Talk: The Do-What-You-Love Guide

‘Everything you can imagine is real.’ ~Pablo Picasso

When I wrote the first words of this blog, more than five years ago, I had no idea those few keystrokes would change my life.

I thought I was doing nothing more than reflecting on the changes that had been happening in my life, sharing a bit about what I learned with a handful of friends. I thought those tinkling of computer keys would fade into the void, as most of my thoughts had before that.

I didn’t imagine that a year later, I would have 26,000 people reading my blog (and eventually a quarter million subscribers), that I’d finally be out of debt, that I’d have my first book publishing contract, that I’d happily hand in my resignation for my day job. All of that was out of the realm of possibility.

That’s the amazing realization here: that we rule out the possibility of great change, because it doesn’t seem realistic. For nearly two decades I focused on going to college, and working at a day job that I sometimes enjoyed but often dreaded, because that’s what we expect should happen. Starting my own business, pursuing my dreams, doing something I loved? Crazy talk.

Crazy talk is what I’m going to give you today, in hopes that perhaps one of you will expand your possibilities. It is possible — I did it, all while working a full-time job, doing free-lance writing on the side, and having a wife and six kids. I did it, even if I never dared to dream it for the first three decades of my life.

I am not someone who likes to give career advice, or teach people to be online entrepreneurs. So I’m not going to do that here. I’ll just tell you this: it’s possible. Yes, it absolutely is possible.

And I’ll share what I’ve learned, in small snippets of goodness, about doing what you love.

If you don’t think it’s possible, do a small easy test. Don’t think you can start a blog? Sign up for a free WordPress.com or Blogger.com account and do a short post. Don’t tell anyone about it. Just write a post. It costs nothing, risks nothing, takes almost no time. But you will learn you can do that one little thing, and if you pass that test, you now know your theory of impossibility was wrong. You can do this with any skill, btw, not just blogging.Expand your tests. If you pass the first test, do another small one. Then another. Keep going and notice your confidence grow. Your skills grow along with the confidence. It’s amazingly simple. Iterate and re-iterate as long as you are having fun.If you don’t know what you love, don’t worry. There’s no need to figure that out right away. Try something that someone else is doing, and see if you think it’s fun. The real fun part, btw, comes when you start to get good at it, so perhaps stick with it for awhile and enjoy the learning, then enjoy being good at it. If that first try doesn’t work, try something else. You don’t have to commit to one thing for your entire life. You can do a dozen a year if you want, for a decade. You’ll probably find something by then.Find inspiration. Who else is doing what you love doing? Who is excited about it most? Follow them. Learn about them. See what path they took. Watch closely how they execute, what they do right. Learn from the best.Reach out to a mentor. Of the people who inspire you the most, try to make contact with a few of them. If they never respond, try a few more. See if you can buy them lunch or coffee. Don’t pitch them on anything. Just ask for their help, and say you’d love for them to mentor you in a way that won’t take up much of their time. Don’t demand a lot of time, but go to them when you’re having trouble making big decisions.Choose one passion at random. Some people have many interests and don’t know where to start. Pick one or two randomly if they’re all about equal, and just get started. Don’t let choice paralyze you. Get started, because in the end it won’t matter if you started with the wrong passion — you’ll learn something valuable no matter what. Read more.Get good at it. You get good at something with practice. Allow your friends and family to be your first audience, readers, customers. Then take on a few others at a low cost, or increase your audience slowly. But always have an audience or customers if possible — you’ll get good much faster this way, with feedback and accountability. Read about it. Watch videos. Take a class. Join a group of others learning. Find people to partner with. Before long, you’ll be good at it.Help others. One of the best ways to get good at something is to help others learn. Making someone’s life better with your new skill is also an amazing way to get satisfaction out of what you do, to love what you do. Help as many people as you can in any way possible — it will pay off.Find your voice. Eventually, as you master your skill, you will learn that you are different than the thousands of others doing it. You will find your uniqueness. It’s not necessarily there at first, because you might not have the technical skills to express yourself. But eventually, find that voice. Find the thing that sets you apart, that helps you to stand out from the crowd. Then emphasize that. Read more.How can you be valuable? What can you do that is valuable to others? Sometimes it’s doing something that they really need. Sometimes it’s doing it better than others. Sometimes it’s saving people time, or money. Other times it’s just making their lives better, brighter, pleasanter in some way.Become an expert. If you get good at something, and help others, and find a voice, and become valuable — you’ll become an expert at what you do. Others will turn to you for advice. Help them. Read more.Sell your own stuff. I’ve found that the best way to make a revenue, by far, is by selling your own stuff. I’ve tried ads and affiliate links, and while I have nothing against those things, the thing that works best for me is selling my own stuff. I’ve already proven to my audience that I’m valuable and honest and trustworthy, and so they are much more likely to want something that I’ve created than something I recommend made by others. So create something valuable that will help others, and sell it.Don’t be a jerk. Too many people online are so worried about maximizing subscriber numbers or pageviews that they do things that are disrespectful to their readers. Asking me to click “Next Page” five times to read your article? Jerk move. Having a pop-up asking me to subscribe before I’ve even read the article I came to read? Jerk move. Screaming at me to “Like” your page on Facebook, when I could decide that on my own without being asked if the article was really good? Jerk move. Learn to feel what is respectful, and what’s a jerk move.Don’t let numbers rule you. Numbers are arbitrary and basically worthless. How many readers do you have? No one really knows, and in the end the number of readers doesn’t matter as much as things like: how much do they care about your articles, how much have you helped them, how much do they trust you, how excited are they? Pageviews don’t matter, neither do Facebook fans or Twitter followers or the number of people on your mailing list. Instead of worrying about numbers, pour yourself into your work, make yourself incredibly valuable, help people as much as possible, love what you do. The numbers will come as a side effect.It’s the doing and loving that matters. Many people focus on growing, or hitting goals, or making money, but they forget what matters. What matters most is loving what you do. If you love it, and you’re doing it, you’ve already succeeded. Don’t worry so much about achieving certain levels of success — people push themselves so hard to reach those things that they forget to enjoy what they’re doing, and in the process they lose the reason they’re doing it in the first place.Dream bigger. Once you’ve overcome the initial fear and started to become good at something you love, dream bigger. The first stage is small steps, but don’t stop there. You can change lives. You can change the world. Doing so will change you.

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Book review: Crazy Like Us

‘Cultures become particularly vulnerable to new beliefs about the mind and madness particularly during times of social anxiety or discord’, notes Ethan Watters in this compelling book. Watters sees social discord as making cultures ‘vulnerable’ to new beliefs, rather than simply ‘receptive’, and this sentence captures both the depth of insight in Crazy Like Us and its main theme – that sees the spread of Western ideas about mental illness as a form of psychological imperialism.

‘Imperialism’ is perhaps too strong a word, as Watters is neither overtly political nor tiresomely polemic in his analysis, which results in one of the most engaging, accessible and well-researched non-academic books about culture and mental illness available. But in summing up he does tend towards suggesting that Western ideas about the disordered mind are imposed on other cultures, when occasionally there are more subtle stories in the details.

Not unlike the adoption of Western music and fashions by young people in traditional cultures, the shift toward new ideas is as often driven by local enthusiasm for concepts of wealth and sophistication as by deliberate outside forces. The book gives several examples of how changes occur by a combination of the two, as, for example, aggressive drug company campaigns to market the Western concept of depression to the public in Japan relied on the fact that these ideas had been already adopted by Japanese psychiatrists, many of whom trained in Europe and America.

Watters discusses culture as a powerful determinant of how we express psychological distress and mental illness. This influence is not always positive, and the book notes how Western models of mental illness may be detrimental over traditional ideas of coping, for example by silence or even spirit possession. The clearest example is how disasters and emergencies often draw in well-meaning ‘experts’ who clumsily apply Western concepts of psychological trauma and pathologise local reactions that may be psychological helpful but don’t fit the model.

I was left with a few minor quibbles, including the reliance on World Health Organisation data on how schizophrenia outcomes in developing countries are better than in developed countries, when more recent work has shown that there is so much variation between countries that this generalisation really means very little. These, however, remain minor concerns in the overall scheme of things. The book is not an academic tome and the approach is narrative, but Watters has clearly mastered the scientific research where it counts. As an introduction to (and perhaps even a revelation of) how culture and mental illness are intertwined, you are unlikely to find a more engaging and thought-provoking book.

This review was originally published in The Psychologist and you can read it online here.

It’s worth noting the book is available in both a US edition and a UK edition which seem to differ only in the subtitle.

Link to Crazy Like Us companion site.

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You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder

With over a quarter million copies in print, You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?! is one of the bestselling books on attention deficit disorder (ADD) ever written. There is a great deal of literature about children with ADD. But what do you do if you have ADD and aren't a child anymore? This indispensable reference -- the first of its kind written for adults with ADD by adults with ADD -- focuses on the experiences of adults, offering updated information, practical how-tos and moral support to help readers deal with ADD. It also explains the diagnostic process that distinguishes ADD symptoms from normal lapses in memory, lack of concentration or impulsive behavior. Here's what's new:

• The new medications and their effectiveness
• The effects of ADD on human sexuality
• The differences between male and female ADD -- including falling estrogen levels and its impact on cognitive function
• The power of meditation
• How to move forward with coaching

And the book still includes advice about:

• Achieving balance by analyzing one's strengths and weaknesses
• Getting along in groups, at work and in intimate and family relationships -- including how to decrease discord and chaos
• Learning the mechanics and methods for getting organized and improving memory
• Seeking professional help, including therapy and medication

Price: $17.00

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Crazy Fit Massager Body Vibration Plate Exercise Machine

The Crazy Fit Vibration Stand up Massager gives you powerful stimulation to your body and benefits your health.
It is not only a Massager; you can also call it a weight reduction Machine, A stress reliever,
It provides a relaxation to your whole body muscles, which can be impossible for human to give you such a relaxing, powerful massage.
This device not only provides ultimate relaxation and stress relief but also generates vibration in plate base that goes directly to your whole body. Thus research shows that it strengthens the cells of the body due to the repeated automatic "stretch reflex" in the muscles.
Whole Body Vibration is the hottest and latest technology in Fitness. It is proving to be one of the most beneficial Fitness equipment that can give you many results. By applying the vibration to your body research claims that
You improve circulation, tone nervous system and muscles and, enhance bone density.
Research also claims the Machine is an excellent aid for a better range of motion, Core conditioning and stability
And plays an excellent role in losing weight naturally.
Comes with instruction manual,

Price: $699.00

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