Chip Conley, founder of Joie de Vivre Hotels

Chip Conley is the founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, which he began at age 26 and built to more than 30 properties in California alone. In 2010, Joie de Vivre was awarded the #1 customer service award in the U.S. by Market Metrix (Upper Upscale hotel category).

Conley has also been named the “Most Innovative CEO” in the Bay Area by the San Francisco Business Times, and I’m proud to call him a friend.

We’ve shared many glasses of wine together. He doesn’t know what I’m about to tell you, but it’s true (Hi, Chip!). When we first met, and after reading his first book on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I wondered “Is this Chip dude for real? Implementing self-actualization in a company?!?” My curiosity drove me to visit a few of his hotels, including Hotel Vitale, where I eventually concluded: these are the happiest employees I’ve ever met.

He has figured out what makes people tick.

The following post is a guest post by Chip and based on his new book, Emotional Equations. Be sure to read to the end, as there is a chance to win an expense-paid trip to SF to spend an entire day training with him.

Deal-making? Empire building? Self-fulfillment? He’s your guy.

Enjoy…

Enter Chip Conley

I graduated from Stanford Business School at age 23 with Seth Godin.

I remember talking with him and others about my aspirations as an entrepreneur and my desire to become a CEO some day. Back then, I thought in order to become a successful CEO, I would need to become superhuman, leaping tall buildings in a single bound. But, after 24 years of being a CEO (I founded Joie de Vivre Hospitality, what’s become the 2nd largest boutique hotelier in the world, and sold a majority interest to a billionaire in 2010), I’ve come to realize that the best business leaders aren’t superhuman, they’re simply super humans as they’ve learned how to become Chief Emotions Officers.

Chief Emotional Officer?

Leaders are the “emotional thermostats” of the groups they lead. If you want to dig into the support for this, read this compelling piece by Daniel Goleman, the man who popularized the idea of “emotional intelligence” in the 90s and proved that 2/3 of the effectiveness of business leaders comes from their EQ rather than their IQ or level of work experience.

There are multiple metaphors I use to describe how emotions work in our lives. One that feels very familiar to me is baggage. Our luggage in life is an apt metaphor for me – a guy who’s been a hotelier for a quarter century. Countless times I’ve seen people show up at our hotel front desks with all kinds of baggage, and only some of it the physical kind. Most of us have emotional baggage that may seem invisible to the untrained eye or invisible to the person carrying the baggage. But the results of lugging that baggage around for years is noticeable in how that person shows up at the metaphorical front desk of life. If you are a Chief Emotions Officer, you are more aware of all the bags you’re carrying and how to open your luggage up and make sense of what’s inside.

Opening up a bag, you may find a truly messy interior with things in complete disarray. But, these emotional equations create a certain logic to how you pack and unpack your bags and, in fact, being a little more conscious of what’s in your bag may allow you to discard a few heavy items that have been weighing you down. Creating your own internal logic regarding your emotional baggage will allow you to carry a lighter bag…one that’s eminently easier to unpack.

4 Emotions to Unpack

We’re going to focus on four emotions that you can start unpacking (i.e. mastering).

Think of emotions as existing on a color wheel. Isaac Newton created the color wheel long ago and helped us understand that red plus blue equals purple, for instance. I learned in my research for Emotional Equations – which allowed me to spend a couple of years with some of the world’s psychology luminaries – that there’s an emotional wheel with primary and secondary emotions: the Plutchik wheel. In my book, I evolve this wheel further so you can imagine that Disappointment + a Sense of Responsibility = Regret. And, once you understand the emotional building blocks of Regret, you can turn it from a downer into a lesson. Regret teaches. Fear protects. Sadness releases. Joy uplifts. Empathy unites. Think of your emotions as messages that give you the freedom, rather than the obligation, to respond. One of my favorite quotes of all time comes from Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning:

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Now, let’s unpack and master the emotions of Despair, Happiness, Anxiety, and Curiosity.

DESPAIR = SUFFERING – MEANING

I am very proud of this equation.

It’s the one that started my exploration of emotions through the lens of equations. I took Viktor Frankl’s book and distilled it down to this useful mantra at a time in my life in 2008, when I had a series of friends commit suicide, had a flatline experience myself while giving a speech in St. Louis (literally: my heart stopped, and I dropped), and the rest of my life felt in disarray. If you consider the words “despair” and “meaning” to be abstract or off-putting, consider “sadness” as a tamer version of despair or “learning” as a more concrete version of meaning.

First off, in order for the math to work, “suffering” has to be a constant. This is the first Noble Truth of Buddhism, but it’s also true, and not just in a recession. You can always find the suffering if you want to look for it. I had no idea when I started writing this book that this decade would come to resemble the 1930s in that our near Depression-like economic conditions would persist as long as they have. But while the Depression was a very difficult time for so many people, interview-based research studies show that it indirectly prepared young women for losing their husbands later in life. These women learned self-reliance, independence, and courage early in life, which served them (and perhaps saved their families) when their husbands passed.

So, consider “meaning” in the following way: many of us go to the gym to exercise our physical muscles to ensure that our physical body doesn’t bloat or atrophy. If you’re going through a difficult time right now, maybe – unwittingly – you’ve signed up for emotional boot camp and you’re being asked to exercise emotional muscles that haven’t had this kind of workout for years. But, this isn’t meant to be just agony. It’s meant to prepare you for later in life. The emotions you may be mastering today – humility, resilience, persistence, a sense of humor – will serve you well at some later point in your life, maybe in the not too distant future.

For me, having my long-term relationship end in the midst of my train wreck of a life in 2009 was the last thing I was looking for. Suffering felt ever-present, like the fog during a San Francisco summer. The foghorn that cut through this opaque time was the question I asked myself on my most sad, self-pitying days, “How is this experience going to serve me in my next relationship? How is this going to make me a better partner when I find my true soul mate?”

These weren’t easy questions to ask when I felt radioactive and couldn’t imagine anyone loving me again. But I kept the exercise metaphor in mind. The fact that I could joke with friends about my emotional boot camp helped me realize that great rewards – or meaning – could arise as a result of this painful experience. So, just know that there are fruits to gather in the valley of Despair.

HAPPINESS = WANTING WHAT YOU HAVE / HAVING WHAT YOU WANT

People often have a love-hate relationship with this equation. The proper definitions of the numerator and denominator are what create the magic. “Wanting what you have” can be translated into “practicing gratitude,” having a reverence for what is working in your life. The more tricky definition is in the bottom of this equation. To “have what you want” is an act of “pursuing gratification.” I want something and it’s my job to go out and pursue it or “have” it in order to satisfy that want.

Don’t get me wrong. The act of pursuing something can bring us a sense of accomplishment and take us into that focused “flow” state. But, the risk is that “chasing something with hostility” (some dictionaries’ definition of “pursuit”) or even with just focused attention can completely distract you from what’s in the numerator, what you already have. Socrates said it best, “He who is not contented with what he has would not be contented with what he would like to have.”

As a type-A guy who’s spent more than my share of time on the hedonic treadmill, I can tell you that it’s very difficult to simultaneously practice gratitude while also pursuing gratification. Some mystics are able to take the bottom of this equation down to zero, which may give them infinite happiness. But, for the rest of us mere mortals, the risk is not in lack of pursuit, as this is part of what modern society demands of us. The risk is that we completely diminish the power of gratitude.

So, the true power of this equation is in keeping your attention on the numerator.

Someone once said to me that feeling gratitude without sharing it with someone is like wrapping a present without giving it to the intended recipient. So, what are the ways you can show your gratitude in such a fashion that it becomes a habit or practice for you that’s ingrained in your everyday life? For me, I needed to start by having it on my conscious “to-do” list each day. I had a rule that I had to give two face-to-face expressions of gratitude each day at work, preferably to someone who found the thank you unexpected. In fact, I wrote about this in the Huffington Post after one of my recent trips to Bali. What if you thought of your expressions of gratitude like a devotional daily offering?

Let me give you a suggestion about a Gratitude Journal as well. They’re not for everyone, just like personal journals resonate with some while repelling others. The purpose of a Gratitude Journal is to help you be conscious about “wanting what you have.” An alternative means of accomplishing this purpose is to have a Gratitude Buddy. Make it a point to meet with your Buddy once a month (or more frequently if you wish) in a location where there are no distractions and ask each other, “What gifts do you have in your life that are easy to take for granted?” and “What was a recent gift that may have been wrapped up as a pain or punishment?”

For those of you who’d like to explore this equation a little further, I have two suggestions.

1. Check out a research article by Jeff T. Larsen and Amie R. McKibban where they literally put this equation to the test (with inconclusive results, but really interesting findings).

2. Watch my 2010 TED talk, in which I share my key learning from my trip to Bhutan to study their Gross National Happiness Index.

ANXIETY = UNCERTAINTY x POWERLESSNESS

After reading more than a dozen books and 50 research studies on anxiety, I was struck by the fact that 95% of the causes of anxiety seemed to be distilled down to what we don’t know and what we can’t control. You may have heard of the study that demonstrated most people would prefer receiving an electric shock now that’s twice as painful as receiving some random shock in the next 24 hours. This is why, as leaders, we need to recognize that hiding the truth, especially when it’s going to come out at some point in the near future, is a futile mistake that can often just increase the amount of anxiety your employees are feeling.

If we know that the combustible product of uncertainty and powerlessness creates anxiety, we can create what I call an Anxiety Balance Sheet to turn this around. Take out a piece of paper and create four columns. Then, think of something that is currently making you anxious. Regarding that subject, the first column is “What Do I Know” about this issue. The second column is “What Don’t I Know.” The third column is “What Can I Influence.” The fourth column is “What Can’t I Influence.” Spend enough time doing this so that you have at least one item per column but you may find that you have a half-dozen items in some columns.

After you feel complete, what do you notice with respect to the four columns? About 80% of the people I’ve worked this through with are surprised that they have more items listed in columns one and three (the “good” columns) than they do in columns two and four. The reality is that when something is making us anxious, we tend to fixate on those elements of the problem that feel mysterious (what we don’t know) or uncontrollable (what we can’t influence). So, there’s some liberation in just outlining what’s making you crazy and realizing that there may be many balancing positives to those issues that are vexing you.

Now, spend some time reviewing the items in column two (what you don’t know). Is there someone you can ask – your boss, your boyfriend, your doctor – who can help you with some needed information that will move this item from column two to column one? Maybe it’s just doing a Google search? I know it’s scary to ask your boss whether your job is in jeopardy, but remember the electric shock example I mentioned earlier. Anxiety can be more painful and debilitating than bad news. Now look at column four and truly ask yourself, “Are you completely powerless about the items on this list?” I’ve found that having a smart friend sit with me can sometimes help me uncover ways to move items from column four to column three.

In sum, just the act of unpacking your anxiety bag and knowing what’s inside can have a profound effect on reducing your fear of the future.

CURIOSITY = WONDER + AWE

We’ve had a subtraction, a division, and a multiplication equation so far. Now, we’ll finish with an addition equation around the experience of curiosity. Recent studies have shown that curiosity is one of the most valuable emotional qualities people can leverage during periods of crisis. Fear and most negative emotions train us to narrow our scope. “Fight or flight” reactions are evolution’s means of helping us avert danger. But, oftentimes, we need to move from narrowing our attention to the “broaden and build” way of thinking that Barbara Fredrickson talks about in her book on Positivity. Getting through your own emotional recession may require bigger thinking rather than narrow execution.

When you’re living in a place of fear, it is hard to be curious. But, I’ve found that so much of it comes back to defusing my natural tendency toward reactivity. In other words, it’s learning to pause. Curiosity is not a reactive emotion. It’s one that takes a certain amount of reflection and a willingness to admit what you don’t know. So, ask yourself, “What habitats allow me to be more curious?” I first had to make a list of which habitats made be less curious: the office, any conference room, investor meetings, and spending time with people who I wanted to impress.

So, I knew that these were not places that were going to help me stoke up bigger thinking. Ironically, when I made my list of curious habitats, I found my list to be longer than I expected: anywhere in nature but especially near a beach with crashing surf; hanging out with kids; museums or other experimental spaces with art; zoos; places with a big night sky and lots of stars; my backyard cottage; and any place where I felt comfortable laughing from my gut (it’s hard to be full of humor and full of fear at the same time).

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found that seeking the sacred in life opens up my sense of awe and my ability to connect with curiosity.

I’ve recently made a decision to seek out a sacred festival somewhere in the world each quarter as a means of committing to finding habitats for curiosity. As Tim F. knows (he was a fellow citizen of my camp Maslowtopia), I’ve been an aficionado of Burning Man for many years and some of my best business ideas have come out of my time in the desert marveling at transcendent art and having non-linear conversations.

So, if you’re feeling “on empty” creatively, know that curiosity is the fuel you need to seek. In author Liz Gilbert’s 2009 TED talk (TED is another habitat for curiosity), she shares the fact that the genesis of the word “genius” comes from “genie” and that the most creative people in the world are able to become vessels for the genie to inhabit them. My experience is that these genies prefer inhabiting curious places in the world and that’s where they’re most likely to tap you on your shoulder and give you the gift of inspiration that may change your life.

In sum, the more the external world becomes chaotic, the more we rely upon internal logic. This was true in the 1930s when Nazism and political and religious fundamentalism rose. But, that decade also sprouted new thinking from people like Norman Vincent Peale, Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Viktor Frankl, and Reinhold Niebuhr (who created the Serenity Prayer).

I hope that you find these emotional equations help you to think differently, live better, and truly become the Chief Emotions Officer of your own life. It’s worth the introspection.

—

TIM:

Chip is offering an exclusive to readers of this blog: the chance to spend a full day with him in San Francisco.

He’ll cover economy airfare from anywhere in the US (if you’re international, you’ll need to get yourself to the US), and he’ll also cover two nights at Hotel Vitale on the water, or the best alternative if they’re sold out. The usual legal stuff applies: must be older than 18, void where prohibited, no purchase required to enter, etc.

No later than this Friday (1/20/12) at 5pm PST, leave a comment below and answer the following, in order, and in no more than 300 words:
1. What is your favorite inspirational or philosophical quote?
2. How could you apply one of the equations in this post to your life for maximum benefit?
3. What would you like to change or build after a day with Chip in SF?

Only the first 100 entrants are eligible, so the earlier the better!

###

Odds and Ends: The Crunchies, Winners, and More

The Crunchies, something like the tech Oscars, are currently in the finals, and quite a few of my start-ups have made the cut (I’m honored to be involved with all of them). If you like these products or people, please click through to give them a vote! All of the candidates, many of them friends, are outstanding.

CEO of the Year – Phil Libin (Evernote) and Dick Costolo (Twitter)
Angel of the Year – these folks are all incredible, but I have to vote for my man, Kevin Rose.
Founder of the Year – Leah Busque (TaskRabbit) For the story of how Leah and I met, as well as how she got me to be an advisor, see this article: “How to Turn $750 into $1,000,000″

Best Tablet App – StumbleUpon
Best Mobile App – Evernote and Taskrabbit
Best Location App – Uber (check out the San Francisco grid)

For all of the categories and finalists, go here.

(Photo: H.Koppdelaney)

Just a few weeks ago, I received the following from Ryan Holiday:

“…in the last 6 months, I’ve lost 15 lbs and am in the best shape of my life. From adding in sprinting to my running regime, using kettle bells once a week, using a weighted vest while taking long walks, and the cat vomit exercise, I now have abs and — like I said — lost weight in places I didn’t know I was storing fat. It was all from your book and keeping to the slow-carb diet. Here’s the part I really have to thank you for: by changing the way I thought about running, I ran the fastest mile in my life, and that’s after four years of cross country and track in high school. Last Friday, I ran a 4:55 mile. A month before my 24th birthday, I shattered my all time best from track: 5:02. Being that close to breaking five minutes had always haunted me.”

Those of you who’ve read this blog for a while know that Ryan is 24-years old and works directly with Dov Charney as his online strategist for American Apparel. He takes more heat, makes more high-stakes decisions, and takes more risks in a given week than most people experience in any given quarter… and he does so with an unusual calm. Unbeknownst to most, he largely credits this ability to his study of Stoicism, among other practical philosophies.

How did this philosophical bent accelerate his physical changes?…

Ryan made the above progress, in part, because he looked at how to transform choices related to food into a vehicle for larger transformation. If you want incentives to change, losing an additional 10 pounds oftentimes just doesn’t cut it.

So let us look to the ancients.

This guest post from Ryan explores his thinking and features wisdom from Epicurus, Seneca, Epictetus, the Spartans, Montaigne and others.

Enter Ryan Holiday

I’ve been grappling with a dilemma.

It’s a philosophical problem that’s thousands of years old, but fresh in an age of obesity, eating disorders and widespread factory farming: how does eating fit into the so-called “good life”?

What does our diet have to say about our ethics and priorities? The world seems broken down into two camps: those that rarely give the connection a second thought, and those who care too much. Could there be a better way?

And so I sought out the answer in the best way I knew how—by looking to the masters.

A student once asked Epictetus how he ought to eat. This, Epictetus replied, was simple. The right way to eat is the same as the right way to live: be “just, cheerful, equable, temperate, and orderly.” He meant that meals embody the principles and the disposition of the person who eats them. Food means choices and choices mean a chance to fulfill our principles. [So think: being thankful, eating just what you need, tipping generously, caring about where it comes from and how it got there.]

Epictetus was not alone. Philosophers have been experimenting with food for centuries in hopes of finding the best ways to be healthy and to enjoy life. (Seneca, for instance, was once a vegetarian for a year.) They sought to curb the impulse to gluttony just as strongly as they fought the urge to obsess over their weight and appearance. They looked to minimize harm and to live in accordance with nature—just as we wonder about animal cruelty or shop organic today. Ultimately, they understood that everything we do—especially something with life or death implications like diet—is a platform for philosophy, that something you do at least three times a day is worth doing well.

By “well”, do I mean healthy? Or well, as in luxuriously? In fact, I mean both. In this short article, we’ll examine eating “well” through three lenses: ethics, discipline (restraint and release), and health. It’s my hope that you’ll then realize that eating well is not just compatible with the philosophic life, but an integral and essential part of it. And conveniently, it has been baked into the The 4-Hour Body and slow-carb diet lessons.

1) Ethics

The ethics of what we eat is well-trod ground, as vegetarians and vegans constantly point out.

But I think Montaigne expressed the philosophy best when he reminded himself that he not only owed kindness and justice to his fellow man, but to animals capable of receiving the same.

Notice how different this is from most attitudes about food. Justice means doing what is fair and reasoned; kindness means empathy and consideration. Most discussions about diet (from paleo to veganism) are pervasively selfish: ‘But what can I have for dessert?’ ‘Sorry, I don’t consume diary.’ ‘Am I allowed to have this?’ Rarely: ‘is eating this the right thing to do?’ We too quickly condemn what might be best for our health, or conversely assume that the optimal nutrition for us trumps any obligations we have as people. Montaigne reminds us of our real obligations, that we should always try to do what is fair and just—what we can look ourselves in the mirror and be okay with afterward.

It’s a question I faced after reading Jonathan Foer’s wonderful book Eating Animals. I knew vaguely that the horrors of slaughterhouses existed and that I could find hundreds of slaughterhouse abuse videos on YouTube in a second or read the flyers PETA gives out, but I deliberately chose not to. In avoiding them, I made the tacit admission that something was wrong, while refusing to examine that feeling further. There is the story of a Spartan King who met two of his subjects, a youth and the youth’s lover, accidentally in a crowd. Embarrassed, the subjects tried to hide their blushing cheeks, but he noticed and replied, “Son, you ought to keep the company of the sort of people who won’t cause you to change color when observed.”

By eating well, we can be proud and transparent, rather than secretly uncomfortable. For starters, by eating more naturally (protein-dense, appropriate portions), we reduce our footprint—the amount we ask of the world to give us. By caring about the quality of what we ingest, we opt out of brutal factory farming and toxic industrial agriculture—keeping excessive blood off our hands. And by eating locally, we support small businesses and entrepreneurs instead of corporate behemoths who have few qualms about poisoning and fattening us (by doing the same to their “product”) if it means greater profits.

Philosophy gives us the tools to root around within ourselves and find these inconsistencies. We can put them out in the open and resolve them. There is something deeply troubling about a system that drives us to obscure the sources of our food. It asks us to not think of what we are eating or why. I don’t arrive at the same conclusions as Foer (vegetarianism), but I made a commitment after reading it, to eat the healthiest diet I could, as honorably and justly as was possible. I’m comfortable looking in the mirror after eating meat from farms like Niman Ranch or Good Shepherd Heritage Poultry. (thanks RareCuts.com!) If I don’t have access to these, it means I must go without, which is not a problem because philosophy helps there as well.

2) Discipline (Restraint and Release)

The Stoics avoided pleasure to prepare for adversity. The Epicureans enjoyed pleasure to help get them through adversity. As with most things, the best option for most people is somewhere in between.

Treat yourself to good meals so you don’t covet and crave them (Tim’s cheat days); learn to love simple foods and they’ll become all you need to be happy. And of course, the Cynics practiced a third way: they saw through the whole charade. Food is just dead animals, they said, plants and liquids we’re eventually going to excrete. No need to get excited nor stressed.

Cumulatively, these three schools all realized that it was important to be disciplined and in control of yourself in normal situations, so that you can develop the coping skills to deal with difficult situations. Modern science adds another layer of insight when it shows us that self-control is a finite resource. Subjects who are forced to resist eating fresh-baked cookies, for example, give up on tough math problems more quickly and have trouble sticking with other tasks. This is definitely not the right attitude if you want to be introspective, dedicated and hardworking. So here we have the the real genius of Tim’s “Cheat Days” and the Epicurean concept of enjoying the little things—it’s an outlet for release that makes discipline easier.

Practicing restraint and targeted release is a deeply philosophic exercise. It means being in tune with your body and living naturally. These are two things that are increasingly difficult in a world of plenty. To be able to say “no,” knowing that what may feel good now will actually feel bad later, is to master the self. To be able to reward the self with simple pleasures is to successful navigate the fine line between self-control and self-flagellation.

Cicero wrote that “need is what provides the seasoning for any and every appetite.” He was observing a truism that was old even in his day–that the most enjoyable meals are not the most expensive or exotic, but come at some moment we never expected. After being sick for a long time, at the end of a long hard day or even, perhaps, not even food but a drink when we are incredibly thirsty. Discipline provide a bit extra seasoning we can add to every single thing that we consume. And if could make the notorious Spartan black broth digestible, it can work for us in our comfy nerfy-lives.

3) Health

Of course, eating well and being healthy go hand in hand. But philosophers have stressed this connection for reasons you may not expect.

The right diet is important not because it helps you live longer, they are quick to point out, but because it makes you a better philosopher. Think about what a better person you could be if you didn’t fucking hate yourself after gorging your face at a dinner, or feel sick and bloated with gluten, to which you’re allergic. If you felt in control of, and confident about, your body instead of lethargic and dissatisfied. Jumping these dietary hurdles is, in effect, a dress rehearsal for awareness in other areas. How much easier would it then be to be empathic, kind and generous? To focus on other people with energy that’s no longer directed at your own problems?

A healthy man can help others better and longer. Anntonius the Pious, one of the truly great Roman Emperors, kept a simple diet so he could work from dawn to dusk with as few bathroom interruptions as possible—so he could be at the service of the people for longer. And as Seneca wrote to a friend, the better you eat, the less you need to exercise, thus leaving more time for philosophy. Our keen edge, he said, is too often dulled by heavy eating and then wasted further as we drain our life-force in exercise trying to work it off. It’s ironic and sad how many people think they eat well (whole grains, carbs and fruits) but really sentence themselves to needless time at the gym. Imagine what would have come of that time if spent doing good for themselves and others.

We all know that eating healthily is good, but too often we forget why. It is not just about us. It’s about our place in the world and the role we need to fulfill. Like a soldier’s diet, our choices about food help us with the job we must do, and if we waver in our dietary decisions, we may come up empty at a critical moment elsewhere.

An Athenian statesman once attended a dinner party put on by Plato. When he met his host again, he is reported to have said “Plato, your dinners are enjoyable not only when one is eating them, but on the morning after as well.” The man’s point was that he’d felt good the next day too. He was sharp and ready to go instead of a miserable bloated mess. To me, this is a host and a guest understanding the proper role of food, health and pleasure in our lives

Conclusion:

We live incredibly unnatural, stressful lives in increasingly unhealthy times.

The Japanese novelist and runner Haruki Murakami has a theory along the following lines: an unhealthy soul [whether deliberate or from external forces] requires a healthy body. How we treat this bit of flesh we’ve been given says a lot about what we will become on the inside.

Put in a more uplifting light, in such a crazy world, we need to utilize every positive counterweight we can. Eating well is one powerful option.

The benefits aren’t just physical, but also emotional and even existential. Some of the most important moments in my life and career have come at dinners with friends. I think back on these meals, like an Epicurean, and I can savor the the taste all over again. No matter where I am, what I am going through or how long ago it was, I always have this to turn to, to lean on, to enjoy.

By leaning on the masters, who have meditated with this topic for centuries, we find age-old but fresh perspectives. I followed their lead and began thinking philosophically about food–that is, trying to eat both naturally, reasonably and ethically–and I saw drastic changes. I am in the best shape of my life physically and mentally.

And this is why Philosophy is so important. Because it can turn a simple thing like eating into a lens for viewing the world, a path to what we all want: the good life.

###

Interested in philosophy and excellent reading in general? Consider joining Ryan’s free reading list e-mail. It started as a small private e-mail list for friends, but it has now become a book club of about 1,500 people.

If you liked this, I also recommend:
Stoicism 101: A Practical Guide for Entrepreneurs
On The Shortness of Life: An Introduction to Seneca
All posts in “Practical Philosophy”

(Photo credit: Graphistolage)

The following interview is a slightly modified version of an interview that just appeared on BoingBoing.

It explores philosophical systems as personal operating systems (for better decision-making), the value of college and MBAs, and the bridge between business and military strategy, among other things.

Avi first reached out to discuss my practical obsession with the philosopher Lucius Seneca, so that’s where we start…

From Seneca to Musashi…

Avi Solomon: How did you get to Seneca?

Tim Ferriss: I came to Seneca by looking at military strategies. A lot of military writing is based on Stoic philosophical principles. The three cited sources are — first — Marcus Aurelius and his book Meditations, which was effectively a war campaign journal. The second is Epictetus and his handbook Enchiridion, which I find difficult to read. The last is Seneca and, because Seneca was translated from Latin to English as opposed to from Greek to English, and also because he was a very accomplished writer and a playwright, I find his readings to be more memorable and actionable.

So, Seneca came to me through a number of different vehicles. First, through the study of war and war strategy. Second was through philosophers like Thoreau and Emerson who were also fans of Seneca. Thirdly, was when I was really embracing minimalism and trying to eliminate the trivial many, both materially and otherwise. From a business standpoint, Seneca is constantly cited by people in the “less is more” camp of philosophical thought.

Part of what appealed to me about Seneca was the similarity I found between his brand of stoic thought and the brands of Buddhism and Zen Buddhism that were practiced by people like Musashi Miyamoto. He wrote The Book of Five Rings and is also the most famous Japanese swordsman in history.

Avi: Did you also read James Stockdale?

Tim: Absolutely. You said James Stockdale, right? He was in a POW camp.

Avi: Yeah, in Vietnam.

Tim: Yeah, absolutely. He would be one of dozens of military leaders who have embraced Stoicism to survive and to win in combat.

Avi: Do you have a favorite letter of Seneca?

Tim: Offhand, it would be hard for me to choose a single one. The first that comes to mind is “On the Shortness of Life,” which is more of an essay. I’ve read Letters from a Stoic at least 50 times and I tend to find different letters appropriate and helpful at different times.

Avi: There’s a difference between reading and doing. How do you apply this in your daily life?

Tim: It’s really, for me, the base foundation of an operating system for decision making, and I’ll explain what I mean by that. I don’t view philosophy as an idle form of intellectual masturbation. I really view good philosophy as a set of rules that allows you to make better decisions. What Stoicism helps you to develop is a value system that allows you to take calculated risks, which I think is very effective for entrepreneurs.

So, in very simple terms, stoicism and, by extension, Seneca teaches you to value only those things that cannot be taken away, meaning you would actively practice poverty, for example, subsisting on the meagerest of food and clothing for, let’s just say, one week every two months. The way Seneca would phrase it is all the while asking yourself, “Is this the condition I so feared?”

That type of practice – and I do view it as a practice, just like you view meditation as a practice and I don’t think it’s entirely coincidence that Marcus Aurelius’ book is called Meditations – helps you to live life offensively as opposed to defensively. So, I would say that on a daily basis I revert to some of the basic principles of stoicism to make decisions about where to invest my time, which relationships to cultivate, which relationships to sever so forth and so on.

Avi: And it’s also making you comfortable with failure. The essence of entrepreneurship is being OK with failure and with having fears.

Tim: Yes, absolutely. It also helps condition you so that you don’t have emotional overreactions to things that you can’t control and I think that’s very, very helpful. Critical even, not only for competitive advantage but for quality of life.

Avi: Do you have a generic method for hacking some advanced skill set. You seem to have hacked so many advanced topics that you must have a method to your madness!

Tim: Well, I do have a method and it’s really a series of questions more than anything else. It’s almost a Socratic process but I would say that, first and foremost, I have to have a very clear, measurable objective, whether that’s in language acquisition or in power lifting.

The common element is measurement, so you need to know when you have succeeded and how to measure progress to that success point, whether that’s a 500 pound dead lift or a 50 kilometer ultra marathon or getting to the point where you can do, let’s say, a single lap in an Olympic pool with 15 or fewer strokes. These are all real examples. The number of footfalls, meaning stride rate, per minute in endurance training and how long I can sustain that for say with a goal of 20 minutes at a time. Or a 95 percent fluency in conversational German as measured through different metrics. Again, all real examples.

So the first is measurement. I have a clear idea of what success looks like and how to measure it.

Secondly, I will look at the most common approaches, which are, oftentimes, the lowest common denominator but have some thread of efficacy. I will ask, “What if I did the opposite?” I’ll look at the established common practices, the established dogma, and ask myself what if I did the opposite.

If it’s endurance training, let’s look at Iron Man training, and the average is 20-30 hours of training per week for people in the upper quartile. What if I limited that to five or fewer hours per week? What would I have to do? How could I make this type of training work, or perhaps be more effective, if I had to focus on low volume instead of high volume? The same could be said of weight training. The same could be said of language learning.

If someone says it takes a lifetime to learn a language or it should take 10 years, what if I had to compress that into 10 weeks? I know it’s “impossible,” but what if? And if they say that vocabulary comes first because we should learn as we did when we were a child, which I completely disagree with – it’s entirely unfounded – what if you were to start with a radicals (Japanese/Chinese) or grammar instead?

So, flipping things on their heads and looking at opposites can provide some very surprising discoveries and shortcuts.

Thirdly, I look for anomalies. For any given skill, there’s going to be an archetype of someone should be successful at that skill. If it’s swimming, for example, it would be someone with the build of Michael Phelps. They would have a long wingspan, relatively tall, big hands, big feet and large lung capacity. So, if I can find someone who defies those anatomical proportions — say, someone who’s 5′ 5″, extremely heavily muscled, like 250, who is still an effective swimmer — I want to study what the anomalies practice because attributes can compensate for poor training. I want to find someone who lacks the attributes that can allow them to compensate for poor training.

Typically, you find much more refined approaches when you look at the anomalies. That’s true for any skill I have looked at, whether that’s programming or otherwise. So, let’s just take computer programming. If the common belief is that someone should start with language A, then progress to framework B and then progress to language C, if I can find someone who skipped those first two steps and is regarded as one of the best programmers in language C, I’m going to look closely at how they developed that skill set. In some cases, it correlates to their use of analogies and background from music or natural languages (for example, Derek Sivers or Chad Fowler)

Then I would say, lastly, is a set of questions related to rate of progress. So I don’t just look at the best people in the world; I look at people who have improved upon their base condition in the shortest period of time possible.

Let’s say I’m looking at muscular gain. I would certainly interview the person who’s, let’s say, 300 pounds and 7% body fat, but there’s a very good chance that I’ll learn more from the person who’s put on 50 pounds for the first time in their life in the last 12 months. So, I always try to establish the rate of progress and, when that person has plateaued at different points, for what duration. I find that exceptionally helpful also for finding non-obvious solutions to problems.

Avi: Thanks, I would call that a meta-hack! It might take a while to digest but it could drive a lot of things in many different domains.

Tim: Oh, sure. That’s the framework that I overlay on any skill I’m looking to analyze and hack.

Avi: So like in language learning, you have one critical sentence I think.

Tim: Right. Each of these different skill sets will have certain domain-specific approaches, but in the case of languages, a big part of learning language quickly is teaching native speakers to deconstruct their own language for you. You only do that through very refined questioning, because they’re not going to be able to explain to you the difference between abstract concepts.

If you say, “What’s the difference between ‘anything’ and ‘something’?” the average native English speaker’s not going to give you a good answer, but if you know how to ask them for comparisons properly and you can simply ask them to, perhaps, provide five or six examples of various types then you can get your answer [so, focusing on deductive learning vs. inductive]. You can essentially use a lateral approach to get your answers. So, in my particular case, it had determined that we had eight to twenty sentences of various types, if you have them translated effectively. Fortunately for native English speakers most of the world is forced to study English or chooses to study English.

If you translate those 8 to 20 sentences, you’ll have a very good grasp of auxiliary verbs, sentence structure, like subject-object-verb versus subject-verb-object, how indirect objects, direct objects are treated, how personal pronouns are treated, etc., and it only takes 8-20 sentences to get all of that onto one sheet of paper. So, it’s entirely possible to become fluent in almost any language. Conversationally fluent – there’s a problem with definition there – so that’s a longer conversation, but effectively what most people would consider conversationally fluent in 8-12 weeks.

Avi: So again, there’s also the traces of Pareto’s law there.

Tim: Without a doubt. The material you choose is oftentimes more important than the method you use, so it’s important to have an understanding of high frequency versus rote memorization from a textbook that doesn’t do any kind of analysis of frequency of occurrence, for example.

Avi: Food, for example, you boil it down to eggs and spinach first thing in the morning.

Tim: Exactly. In behavioral change related to diet, small changes are more effective than big changes. The abandonment rate is less, so I would say give someone a very simple prescription, like 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up, and that could take the form of a few hard boiled eggs and spinach, a few hard boiled eggs and lentils, it could be scrambled, certainly, or you could simply have them consume 30 grams of unflavored whey protein with cold water. I think that in the world of behavioral change, simple works.

Avi: I remember you saying that access to rich experiences doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. Can you expand on that?

Tim: The perception is…let me first take a step back: Most people have a number, a fairly arbitrary number, usually influenced by their peer group, which is a financial target, typically an amount of money in liquid assets like a checking account. So that could be “once I have a million dollars, I won’t have to worry about anything.” “Once I have five million dollars, I won’t have to worry about anything.” “Once I make 250,000 dollars a year, I won’t have to worry about anything.”

That number is typically arrived at with no calculation of what their ideal lifestyle actually costs and the question I like to pose is if you had 20 million dollars, 50 million, 100 million in the bank, after the first month or two of going crazy of buying all the toys and doing all the ridiculous girls gone wild stuff, what would you actually spend your time on a daily basis, monthly, weekly, and what would you like to do and what would you like to have? And then you can sit down and cost those things out and for most people it very seldom costs more than, let’s say, 150,000 dollars a year. [Here is an ideal lifestyle calculator to test this for yourself.]

And what we find is even to privately charter a private airplane in Patagonia, which I did or in my particular case also in the wine county in Argentina, it cost me, I think it was, less than 300 dollars for effectively a half day and that included gasoline costs, or to live on a private island in Panama, especially a research island, to go snorkeling and scuba diving every day, that cost similarly less than 500 dollars.

And what you find is that the deferred-life plan which is based on retirement and redeeming these experiences, that are most valuable in your peak physical years, is a false paradigm. It’s a very Faustian bargain and bad bet. So when I say that having incredible experiences, once in a lifetime experiences, is generally less expensive than people think, it simply results from sitting down and costing those out. So if you want an Aston Martin DB9, there are definitely ways you can do that for 1,500 dollars a month, even if you purchase. And to postpone all of these bucket list experiences until 50, 60 years old or beyond is, I think, a very bad wager.

Avi: So that kind of leads me to the other question I have, which is about college or MBAs. Is college a scam in terms of lost opportunity cost or investment? If you’d rather invest the money, like 40,000 a year, with the added advantage of not being in debt?

Tim: So I’m going to leave aside the debt question, as that’s a very personal question. I have different views of, let’s say, a liberal arts undergraduate degree versus an MBA. I don’t think the objective of a liberal arts education is to train you for a single profession. I view the value of a liberal arts education as making you a well rounded human being, and to that extent I think it’s a very worthwhile investment. The real world doesn’t go away once you enter it, so I don’t see any particular rush in jumping into income generation if you have the option of cultivating yourself through a good liberal arts program. I don’t regret having gone to college at all and I would recommend it to most people who can afford it or find a way to afford it, even if that puts them into debt for limited amount of time.

When you start looking at professional programs like law school or MBAs, then I have a less favorable opinion simply because they’re so specific, and they’re designed to train you for a specific career path. If you’re not confident that is your career path, I view it as a huge opportunity cost and financial burden.

But if your goal is to reach the pinnacle of success in investment banking or management consulting, where an MBA is effectively a prerequisite to have certain job titles, then that is a good investment of your time, if that is your chosen path. It requires being very honest with yourself about your motives. So if you’re going to business school, as I would say at least half of the students do, because they want a two-year vacation, an excuse to party and decompress that looks good on the resume, that’s fine, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that that’s the best way to gain practical business experiences, which it is not.

I would much prefer to take someone who’s interested in becoming a competent deal maker or business development icon and put them into a start up of, let’s say 15 to 50 people, in a position where they can work directly with the CEO or one of the top deal makers or negotiators in the company like a VP of Business Dev. or a VP of Sales.

An MBA buffers your decision making from the consequences of the real world. It’s fantastic if you can sit down in a Harvard case study and determine what the best decision is for a company that you have no vested interest in. It’s quite a different story when you’re sitting across the table from someone who has 20 years more experience negotiating than you do and you have millions of dollars at stake that will personally affect you and affect everyone at your company. Theoretically, you might understand what to do, but you need practice in the trenches to be able to respond properly in those circumstances or you’ll fuck it up.

Avi: What would be advice to a smart kid in high school today?

Tim: I would say choose your friends wisely. You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Choose your peer group wisely and if you can’t find the type of mentors that you’re looking for in person, find them through books and don’t be biased towards the latest and greatest. I think that you can certainly learn just as much, if not more, from Seneca and Benjamin Franklin by just reading their writings, as you can from the hot CEO of the moment.

In closing, and to that point, here are just a few of my favorite passages from Letter XVIII from “Letters from a Stoic“:

For more, grab the hardcopy or Kindle above, or you can find the entire public domain version of Letters from a Stoic here. It might just change your life.

###

To see my highlighted notes (thus far) from the incredible book, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, just click here. To see *all* of my highlights on this and other books, which I’ll make public soon, simply follow me on Amazon here. Hope you enjoy!

Courtesy of Hugh MacLeod

The following piece is an exclusive excerpt from ‘Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination‘ by Hugh MacLeod. Enjoy!

Enter Hugh

People love to imagine a worst-case scenario. Especially when it comes time to quit doing what they hate and start doing what they love instead…

Cindi is a very bright young friend of mine with a great career in front of her. She’s about twenty-six, and she’s been working her tail off in New York in the graphic design industry since she graduated from college a few years ago.

Cindi grew up in a single-parent household, so there was never a lot of money around. That’s OK; her mom was one smart, fun, tough cookie, and Cindi and her siblings always got good grades at school, so it all worked out rather well.

While she was getting her degree, Cindi had to pay her way through college. Happily she found this job (a) she really liked (b) was really good at, and (c) paid really good money: waiting tables at this fancy restaurant in Manhattan. She held down that job for years.

When I met her, Cindi was working for this small but kinda-sorta successful design agency, call it Acme Design (not its real name). It was founded by a pretty smart entrepreneur type, call him Joe Acme (not his real name, either).

When I met her, she was working all hours, doing a really good job. Busting ass, to put it plainly.

A few months ago, the phone rings. It’s Cindi.

“I’m thinking of quitting Acme,” she says.

“But I thought you really liked your job?”

“I did at first,” she says. “But I don’t think the company’s growing anymore. Plus, I think Joe’s gotten more interested in his new, far-too-young girlfriend than he is in growing the company. The same week he told us we weren’t getting any new pay raises this year, he bought the chick a brand-new Audi coupe.”

Ah.

“Besides,” she continues, “I think I might want to start my own thing. I’m starting to get nibbles from potential clients wanting to work with me.”

Ah!

“I just want to pick your brain,” she says. “What do you think I ought to do?”

“Sounds like a good time to move on,” I say.

“Yeah, but I’m kinda nervous about it.”

“Sure, but that’s normal. . . .”

So I gave her my two cents:

1. Her mother is very supportive of her idea to move on.

Besides, they get on very well. So she can always move back home to the suburbs if she needs to save money.

2. Acme Design is going nowhere, I can already tell. When a man starts trying to shtup his way out of a midlife crisis, you know there’s trouble afoot.

3. Cindi tells me she has no worries about going back and working for the restaurant. Not only was the money insanely great and she liked her job, she only quit her job at the restaurant because Joe Acme told her to.

4. The money at Acme stinks. Pretty much everybody who works there is broke by month’s end. Which makes it hard to stand up to Joe Acme when he’s having a bad day or having a bad idea. She was making plenty of money and still doing her job at Acme before Joe made her quit the restaurant. And since she had to give up that job, she feels a lot more powerless than she used to—without any increase in revenue. Just the opposite, in fact.

5. Cindi doesn’t mind the idea of going back to the restaurant. I tell her to do it. At the very least, she can save some money that way. A young woman with an extra ten or twenty thousand in her pocket has a lot more room to maneuver than a girl who’s broke at the end of every month.

So a simple game plan emerges: She goes and gets her old restaurant job back, she moves back in with mom to save money, she quits her job at Acme, and then she works in the mornings and afternoons for her new design clients, since her restaurant shift begins at five p.m.

When she gets off work she goes straight back home—she doesn’t bother with the after-hours thing with the guys and the gals at the restaurant. No late-night booze, drugs, and club sessions for this girl. No, she’s on a mission. Her colleagues at the restaurant, sadly, are not. They’re too busy being young, fun, and too coked-up to tie their shoelaces, let alone do something interesting in the long-term.

She’s still young. A couple more years of waiting tables won’t kill her—not if she’s saving money and using her off-time wisely to build her design business slowly and surely. I’d bet after a year or two, a girl with that talent and drive would easily be able to leave her waitressing job and start looking after her design clients for much better money, easily. And she’d still be well under thirty. What’s the worst that can happen?

Some of Cindi’s twentysomething peers raised their eyebrows a little bit, though. “Going back to waitressing? Isn’t that a backwards career move?” they said.

No, it isn’t, actually. She’s still young and what she’s doing is consistent with what she wants to do long-term. There’s no disgrace in waiting tables if it’s part of a long-term strategy. If she were just doing it because she had no earthly clue what else to do with her life, that would be different. But she’s not.

“The good news is,” I say to her, when she was just beginning to hatch this Evil Plan of hers, “you won’t die.”

So she went through with her Evil Plan. I was so proud. And the really good news is, she didn’t have to waitress or live with her mom for very long. Three months and she was gone. Three months and she managed to bag half a dozen high-paying clients for her business. Last time I saw her, she was wearing very expensive shoes and had moved into this very hip apartment in Brooklyn. Like I said, I was so proud.

And her colleagues back at the restaurant? They’re still there. Choices were made.

# # #

Hugh’s latest book, Evil Plans, is available through all major book sellers. You can find more of his writing and artwork at his popular blog, Gaping Void.

The following is an excerpt from the appendices of The 4-Hour Body, which explores a common question: Can self-experimentation be valid at all, compared to placebo-controlled studies?

As we shall see, self-experimentation need not be extreme (I do the extremes so you don’t have to), and you can make significant discoveries with a sample size of one.

I’ll let a professional, Dr. Seth Roberts, explain how…

The Value of Self-Experimentation

“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.” —Richard Feynman

This is an excerpt from The 4-Hour Body, written by Dr. Seth Roberts, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California–Berkeley and professor of psychology at Tsinghua University. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and The Scientist, and he is on the editorial board of the journal Nutrition.

###

I started self-experimentation when I was a grad student. I was studying experimental psychology; self-experimentation was a way to learn how to do experiments.

One of my first self-experiments was about acne. My dermatologist had prescribed tetracycline, an antibiotic. Just for practice, I did an experiment to measure its effect. I varied the dosage of tetracycline—the number of pills per day—and counted the number of pimples on my face each morning. First I compared six pills per day (a high dose) and four pills per day (the prescribed dose). Somewhat to my surprise, they produced the same number of pimples. I tried other dosages. Eventually I tried zero pills per day. To my shock, zero pills per day produced the same number of pimples as four or six pills per day. The conclusion was unavoidable: the drug had no effect. (Many years later, research articles about antibiotic-resistant acne began to appear.) Tetracycline is a prescription drug; it’s not completely safe. I’d been taking it for months.

My dermatologist had also prescribed benzoyl peroxide, which comes in a cream. When my self-experimentation started, I believed that tetracycline was powerful and benzoyl peroxide weak, so I rarely used the cream. One day I ran low on tetracycline. Better use the cream, I thought. For the first time, I used the cream regularly. Again I was shocked: it worked well. Two days after I started using it, the number of pimples clearly went down. When I stopped the cream, two days later the number of pimples rose. When I restarted the cream, the number of pimples went down again.

My data left no doubt that (a) tetracycline didn’t work and (b) benzoyl peroxide did work—the opposite of my original beliefs. My dermatologist thought both worked. He’d seen hundreds of acne patients and had probably read hundreds of articles about acne. Yet in a few months I’d learned something important he didn’t know.

This wasn’t the usual line about self-experimentation. Read any book about it, such as Lawrence Altman’s Who Goes First? The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine, and you will come away thinking that self-experimentation is done by selfless doctors to test new and dangerous treatments. My experience was different. I wasn’t a doctor. I wasn’t trying to help someone else. I didn’t test a dangerous new treatment. Unlike the better-known sort of self-experimentation, which usually confirms what the experimenter believes, my self-experiments had shown I was wrong.

From my acne research I learned that self-experimentation can be used by non-experts to (a) see if the experts are right and (b) learn something they don’t know. I hadn’t realized such things were possible. The next problem I tried to solve this way was early awakening. For years, starting in my twenties, I woke up early in the morning, such as 4 a.m., still tired but unable to go back to sleep. Only a few dreary hours later would I be able to fall back asleep. This happened about half of all mornings. It showed no sign of going away. I didn’t want to take a pill for the rest of my life—not that there are any good pills for this—so I didn’t bother seeing a doctor. The only hope for a good solution, as far as I could tell, was self-experimentation.

So I did two things:

1. I recorded a few details about my sleep. The main one was whether I fell back asleep after getting up. How often this happened was my measure of the severity of the problem. In the beginning, I couldn’t fall back asleep about half of all mornings.
2. I tested possible solutions.

The first thing I tried was aerobic exercise. It didn’t help. Early awakening was just as common after a day with exercise as after a day without exercise. I tried eating cheese in the evening. It didn’t help. I tried several more possible remedies.

None helped. After several years, I ran out of things to try. All my ideas about what might help had proved wrong.

Yet I managed to make progress. For unrelated reasons, I changed my breakfast from oatmeal to fruit. A few days later, I started waking up too early every morning instead of half the time. The problem was now much worse. This had never happened before. I recorded the breakfast change on the same piece of paper I used to keep track of my sleep, so the correlation was easy to see. To make sure the correlation reflected causality, I went back and forth between fruit and oatmeal. The results showed it was cause and effect. Fruit for breakfast caused more early awakening than oatmeal for breakfast. After ten years when nothing I’d done had made a difference, this was a big step forward. I eventually figured out that any breakfast made early awakening more likely. A long experiment confirmed this. The best breakfast was no breakfast.

I was less surprised than you might think. I knew that in a wide range of animals, including rats, a laboratory result called anticipatory activity is well established. If you feed a rat every day at the same time, it will become active about three hours earlier. If you feed it at noon, it will become active about 9 a.m. I had been eating breakfast at about 7 a.m. and waking up about 4 a.m. I had essentially found that humans were like other animals in this regard.

Not eating breakfast reduced early awakening but didn’t eliminate it. In the following years, self-experimentation taught me more about what caused it. By accident, I found that standing helped. If I stood more than eight hours in a day, I slept better that night. That wasn’t practical—after trying to stand that much for several years, I gave up—but the realization helped me make another accidental discovery 10 years later: standing on one leg to exhaustion helps. If I do this four times (left leg twice, right leg twice) during a day, even in the morning, I sleep much better that night. More recently, I’ve found that animal fat makes me sleep better.

Both effects are dose-dependent. I can get great sleep if I stand enough and great sleep if I eat enough animal fat.

How much animal fat is “enough”? I’ve just started trying to figure this out using pig fat, which I consume in a cut called pork belly (the part of the pig used for bacon). I found that 150 grams of pork belly had a little effect; 250 grams of pork belly had a much clearer effect. The effect seems to get larger with more pork belly (e.g., 350 grams). Because pork belly may be more than 90% fat by calories (there is great variation from one piece to the next), it’s a lot of calories of fat to get the maximum possible effect. I need to burn a lot of calories per day to make that many calories easy to eat, but it’s in some respects more convenient than standing on one foot.

Acne and sleep were my first self-experimental topics. Later I studied mood, weight control, and the effects of omega-3 on brain function. I learned that self-experimentation has three uses:

1. To test ideas. I tested the idea that tetracycline helps acne. I tested ideas about how to sleep better. And I’ve tested ideas derived from surprises. A few years ago, while trying to put on my shoes standing up, I realized my balance was much better than usual. I’d been putting on my shoes standing up for more than a year; that morning it was much easier than usual. The previous evening I’d swallowed six flaxseed-oil capsules. I did self-experiments to test the idea that flaxseed oil improves balance. (It did.)
2. To generate new ideas. By its nature, self-experimentation involves making sharp changes in your life: you don’t do X for several weeks, then you do X for several weeks. This, plus the fact that we monitor ourselves in a hundred ways, makes it easy for self-experimentation to reveal unexpected side effects. This has happened to me five times. Moreover, daily measurements—of acne, sleep, or anything else—supply a baseline that makes it even easier to see unexpected changes.
3. To develop ideas. That is, to determine the best way to use a discovery and to learn about the underlying mechanism. After I found that flaxseed oil improved balance, I used self-experimentation to figure out the best dose (three to four tablespoons per day).

One complaint about self-experimentation is that you’re not “blind.” Maybe the treatment works because you expect it to work. A placebo effect. I have never seen a case where this appeared to have happened. When treatment 10 helps after treatments 1 through 9 have failed to help (my usual experience), it’s unlikely to be a placebo effect. Accidental discoveries cannot be placebo effects.

My experience has shown that improve-your-life self-experimentation is remarkably powerful. I wasn’t an expert in anything I studied—I’m not a sleep expert, for example—but I repeatedly found useful cause-and-effect relationships (breakfast causes early awakening, flaxseed oil improves balance, etc.) that the experts had missed. This isn’t supposed to happen, of course, but it made a lot of sense. My self-experimentation had three big advantages over conventional research done by experts:

1. More power. Self-experiments are far better at determining causality (does X cause Y?) than conventional experiments. Obviously they’re much faster and cheaper. If I have an idea about how to sleep better, I can test it on myself in a few weeks for free. Conventional sleep experiments take a year or more (getting funding takes time) and cost thousands of dollars. A less obvious advantage of self-experimentation is that more wisdom is acquired. We learn from our mistakes. Fast self-experimentation means you make more mistakes. One lesson I learned stands out: Always do the minimum—the simplest, easiest experiment that will make progress. Few professional scientists seem to know this. Finally, as I mentioned earlier, self-experimentation is much more sensitive to unexpected side effects.
2. Stone Age–like treatments are easy to test. I repeatedly found that simple environmental changes, such as avoiding breakfast and standing more, had big and surprising benefits. In each case, the change I’d made resembled a return to Stone Age life, when no one ate breakfast and everyone stood a lot. There are plenty of reasons to think that many common health problems, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and cancer, are caused by differences between modern life and Stone Age life. Modern life and Stone Age life differ in many ways, of course; the fraction of differences that influence our health is probably low. If so, to find aspects of Stone Age life that matter, you have to do many tests. Self-experiments, fast and cheap, can do this; conventional experiments, slow and expensive, cannot. In addition, conventional research is slanted toward treatments that can make money for someone. Because conventional research is expensive, funding is needed. Drug companies will fund research about drugs, so lots of conventional research involves drugs. Elements of Stone Age life (such as no breakfast) are cheap and widely available. No company will fund research about their effectiveness.
3. Better motivation. I studied my sleep for 10 years before making clear progress. That sort of persistence never happens in conventional health research. The reason is a difference in motivation. Part of the difference is how much the researcher cares about finding solutions. When you study your own problem (e.g., acne), you care more about finding a solution than others are likely to care. Acne researchers rarely have acne. And part of the motivation difference is the importance of goals other than solving the problem. When I studied my sleep, my only goal was to sleep better. Professional scientists have other goals, which are enormously constraining.

One set of prison bars involves employment and research funding. To keep their jobs (e.g., get tenure, get promoted, get jobs for their students, and get grants), professional scientists must publish several research papers per year. Research that can’t provide this is undoable. Another set of prison bars involves status. Professional scientists derive most of their status from their job. When they have a choice, they try to enhance or protect their status. Some sorts of research have more status than others. Large grants have more status than small grants, so professional scientists prefer expensive research to cheap research. High-tech has more status than low-tech, so they prefer high-tech. As Thorstein Veblen emphasized in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), useless research has higher status than useful research. Doing useless work, Veblen said, shows that you are higher-status than those who must do useful work. So researchers prefer useless research, thus the term “ivory tower.” Fear of loss of job, grant, or status also makes it hard for professional scientists to propose radical new ideas. Self-experimenters, trying to solve their own problem on their own time, are not trapped like this.

Acne illustrates the problem. The dermatological party line is that diet doesn’t cause acne. According to a website of the American Academy of Dermatology, “extensive scientific studies” show it’s a “myth” that “acne is caused by diet.” According to “guidelines for care” for dermatologists published in 2007, “dietary restriction (either specific foods or food classes) has not been demonstrated to be of benefit in the treatment of acne.” In fact, there is overwhelming evidence linking diet and acne. Starting in the 1970s, a Connecticut doctor named William Danby collected evidence connecting dairy consumption and acne; it is telling that Danby wasn’t a professional scientist. When his patients gave up dairy, it often helped. In 2002, six scientists (none a dermatologist) published a paper with the Weston Price–like conclusion that two isolated groups of people (Kitava Islanders and Ache hunter-gatherers) had no acne at all. They had examined more than 1,000 subjects over the age of 10 and found no acne. When people in these groups left their communities and ate differently, they did get acne. These observations suggest that a lot of acne—maybe all of it—can be cured and prevented by diet.

Why is the official line so wrong? Because the painstaking research needed to show the many ways diet causes acne is the sort of research that professional researchers can’t do and don’t want to do. They can’t do it because the research would be hard to fund (no one makes money when patients avoid dairy) and because the trial and error required would take too long per publication. They don’t want to do it because it would be low-tech, low-cost, and very useful—and therefore low-status. While research doctors in other specialties study high-tech expensive treatments, they would be doing low-cost studies of what happens when you avoid certain foods. Humiliating. Colleagues in other specialties might make fun of them. To justify their avoidance of embarrassment, the whole profession tells the rest of us, based on “extensive scientific studies,” that black is white. Self-experimentation allows acne sufferers to ignore the strange claims of dermatologists, not to mention their dangerous drugs (such as Accutane). Persons with acne can simply change their diets until they figure out what foods cause the problem.

Gregor Mendel was a monk. He was under no pressure to publish; he could say whatever he wanted about horticulture without fear for his job. Charles Darwin was wealthy. He had no job to lose. He could write On the Origin of Species very slowly. Alfred Wegener, who proposed continental drift, was a meteorologist. Geology was a hobby of his. Because they had total freedom and plenty of time, and professional biologists and geologists did not (just as now), Mendel, Darwin, and Wegener were able to use the accumulated knowledge of their time better than the professionals. The accumulated knowledge of our time is more accessible than ever before. Self-experimenters, with total freedom, plenty of time, and easy access to empirical tests, are in a great position to take advantage of it.

The above is an excerpt from the new book The 4-Hour Body

###

Tools and Tricks

Seth Roberts, “Self-Experimentation as a Source of New Ideas: Ten Examples Involving Sleep, Mood, Health, and Weight,” Behavioral and Brain Science 27 (2004): 227–88 (www.fourhourbody.com/new-ideas) This 61-page document about self-experimentation provides an overview of some of Seth’s findings, including actionable sleep examples.

The Quantified Self (www.quantifiedself.com) Curated by Wired cofounding editor Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf, a managing editor of Wired, this is the perfect home for all self-experimenters. The resources section alone is worth a trip to this site, which provides the most comprehensive list of data-tracking tools and services on the web (www.fourhourbody.com/quantified).

Alexandra Carmichael, “How to Run a Successful Self-Experiment” (www.fourhourbody.com/self-experiment) Most people have never systematically done a self-experiment. And yet, it’s one of the easiest methods for discovering what variables are affecting your well-being. This article shows you the five principles that will help you get started in running successful self-experiments. Bonus: an 11-minute video from Seth Roberts, discussing experiment design.

CureTogether (www.curetogether.com) CureTogether, which won the Mayo Clinic iSpot Competition for Ideas That Will Transform Healthcare (2009), helps people anonymously track and compare health data to better understand their bodies and make more informed treatment decisions. Think you’re alone with a condition? Chances are you’ll find dozens of others with the same problem on CureTogether.

Daytum (www.daytum.com) Conceived by Ryan Case and Nicholas Felton, Daytum is an elegant and intuitive service for examining and visualizing your everyday habits and routines.

Data Logger (http://apps.pachube.com/datalogger) Data Logger for iPhone enables you to store and graph any data of your choosing along with a time-stamp and location. It can be used for anything, whether food-related, animal sightings, or temperature sensor readings around your neighborhood. If you can think of it, it can be recorded and tracked.

Resources

1. [How Seth Roberts’ self-experimentation began]. Roberts, Seth.  Surprises from self-experimentation: Sleep, mood, and weight. Chance.  2001; 4(2):7-18. UC Berkeley: Available from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/5bv8c7p3
2. [The first of many papers to show antibiotic-resistant acne was a significant problem]. Eady EA, Cove JH, Blake J, Holland KT, Cunliffe WJ. Recalcitrant acne vulgaris. Clinical, biochemical and microbiological investigation of patients not responding to antibiotic treatment.  Br J Dermatol. 1988; 118:415-23.
3. Roberts, Seth. Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas: Ten examples about sleep, mood, health, and weight. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.  2004; 27(2), 227-288. UC Berkeley: Available from http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/117/
4. Boulos Z, Rosenwasser AM, Terman M. Feeding schedules and the circadian organization of behavior in the rat. Behav Brain Res. 1980; 1:39–65.
5. Seth Roberts’ blog: http://blog.sethroberts.net.
6. Acne myths: http://www.skincarephysicians.com/acnenet/myths.html on 2009-09-13.
7. Guidelines of care: http://www.aad.org/research/_doc/ClinicalResearch_Acne%20Vulgaris.pdf on 2009-09-17.
8. Danby: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2007/12/16/a_clear_connection/ on 2009-09-17.
9. No acne among two isolated groups: Cordain L, Lindeberg S, Hurtado M, Hill K, Eaton SB, Brand-Miller J. Acne vulgaris: a disease of Western civilization. Arch Dermatol. 2002; 138:1584-90.
10. Dangers of Accutane: http://www.accutane-side-effects.net/ on 2009-09-13.
11. Wegener: http://www.pangaea.org/wegener.htm on 2009-09-17.