Or, The Blackjack Diet

I’ve been trying to reduce everything I know about health, and behavior change, and habits, into their simplest possible implementations. Here’s one I’ve been kicking around that’s eating related and I’d love your feedback on it (especially if you think you’d want to try to do it with me).

Rather than counting calories, or macronutrients, or taking pictures, or logging everything, or whatever, have only 1 line in the air that you need to think about.

Question #1: Is the current meal more or less than half plants?

What classifies as plants? Unprocessed whole foods: fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, nuts, seeds. That’s it.

If it’s more than half plants (by weight, or mass, or just size, however you feel is easiest to judge) then add 1 to your tally.

If it’s less than half plants, then subtract 1 from your tally.

Whenever the tally gets to 10, or -10, or a new week starts and I feel like it, I celebrate and start over. If 10’s too low or too high, pick your own favorite number after some trial and error. I have thought about remembering how many “sets” I win or lose, but that’s not really that necessary unless you want to. More important is that you just keep playing.

That’s it!

Inspired by card counting in Blackjack

I got the idea from a This American Life episode that talked about how to count cards while playing Blackjack. Basically, you sit at a table and …

Are your tweets safe? No.

Are your photos safe? No.

Are your MP3s safe? No.

Are your television shows safe? No.

Are your documents safe? No.

Are your passwords safe? No.

Are your computers safe? No.

Is your job safe? No.

Is your health safe? No.

Are your loved ones safe? No.

Is your money safe? No.

Is your neighborhood safe? No.

Are you safe to drive? No.

Are your investments safe? No.

Is the future safe? No.

Should we therefore panic? No.

In order to feel safe, things need to be permanently fixed in space and time. Isolated from the effects of time, change, evolution, adaptation, shifting environments, shifting priorities, weather, moods, economics, ecosystems, new information, and any outside influence.

In order to make something safe, it needs to be plucked out of the universe and placed in a perfectly contained jar where nothing can ever touch it again. What is that state called? Death. Separation from everything that it means to be alive. We want to protect the things we love, but sometimes the desire to protect and shelter results in not allowing the things we love to live.

Being alive is equivalent to being unsafe. To be part of the world, to bend in the wind, to learn from mistakes, to play, to experiment, to strive to grow in the midst of risk, difficulty, and limited time and resources.

“To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest, in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as …

I wouldn’t say anything is impossible. I think that everything is possible as long as you put your mind to it and put the work and time into it. —  Michael Phelps

The beautiful lie that we all want to believe.

Let’s take this aspirational quote apart a bit just for fun (since I’m sitting at the airport with a 2 hour delay). I think it’s important to understand why we believe these kinds of ideas and can’t help but keep spreading them around.

I wouldn’t say anything is impossible. I think that everything is possible…

The statement “everything is possible” is pretty ambitious. It’s therefore pretty easy to prove false. How about swimming the 100m butterfly in 1 nanosecond? Even light can’t do that. But let’s assume that he’s actually only talking about the set of all things that are conceivably possible given the laws of physics and the human body (Olympic-brand or not).

as long as you put your mind to it and put the work and time into it.

I love how casually people throw these tasks around. If you want to be the world’s best swimmer, just decide to do it, and then practice a lot. Oh, and:

• start swimming when you’re 7 years old
• channel frustrations from your parents’ divorce into swimming
• have an arm span that’s 3 inches longer than your height
• have large feet and double-jointed ankles so your feet can act like flippers
• produce less lactic acid than a normal person

Natural …

Cross-posted on the Bold Academy Blog.

I had the opportunity and honor of speaking at the first ever Bold Academy in Boulder, Colorado the other day. I have been trying to distill many of the ideas we’ve experimented with and learned about in Habit Labs into something that is sharable, and I used this 3-hour talk/workshop as a way to test a first draft of some of these thoughts and got some really great feedback from the group.

Rather than summarize the entire talk, I thought I’d just continue to push forward some of the core ideas for ways to make your habit decisions more fail-proof.

What is a habit decision?

A habit decision is my made-up term for a sentence you write that describes a change in behavior that you intend on applying to yourself. If we were computers, this would be the script you ran on yourself to change yourself in some real way. Some examples:

“I am going to walk to work whenever it is not raining for 2012.”

“I’m going to drink 2 glasses of water before I look at my phone in the morning for the next month.”

“I am going to do pushups every day at 8:30am for the rest of my life.”

The important parts of a habit decision statement are:

1. You – yes YOU – are making a conscious decision to do something different from what you usually do.
2. It’s concrete (“pushups” and “run” are both better than the vague “exercise”).
3. It’s flexible (no need to specify an exact number of pushups, though “more than X” is sometimes helpful as long as X is something …

Habit Labs is ending soon, the third company I’ve started.

The first one, The Robot Co-op, still lives on in some form or another, with 43things.com (and myriad other offshoots). Its question: what do you want to do with your life? Currently owned by Amazon.

The second one, a bar / art gallery / private membership club called McLeod Residence. Its promise: an home for extraordinary living through art, technology, and collaboration. And alcohol. We closed up after 2 years because of a lost battle with city permits, and also because we had no idea really what we were doing.

750 Words led to Locavore and Locavore led to Health Month and Health Month led to Habit Labs and Habit Labs led to Budge and Budge led to a dead end (maybe more like a small cul-de-sac). The last couple years have taught me that my life’s creative purpose comes in the form of a question: “How do we change ourselves?” All of my guesses so far have been mostly wrong.

I sold Health Month to someone who I believe will be able to make something of it. Not sure what is going to happen to Budge yet. Habit Labs as a company is pretty much over.

Companies, at least the kinds that I’m interested in building, are voyages into the unknown. They become tales of inspiration, and people are rallied, and they hop in a boat and sail off… but not very many of them find a shore.

My fear of disappointing people has set off its alarm many times over the last 6 months. Investors, …

Here’s what I had to say about turning 35 last year. The motto for the year was more presciently chosen than I could’ve known at the time. Love the Struggle.

Every year I chose a theme for the year. Here are a few of the previous:

• 34: Cultivating the core
• 33: Frugal to the max
• 32: No problem
• 31: Double down
• 30: Higher highs and lower lows

Most of the struggle this year had to do with running a business on a tight budget, with a difficult problem, and a tiny team. I have some regrets for the year, mostly about not making decisions quickly and confidently enough. Maybe I was too tolerant of the struggle.

Overall, though, I do love the struggle. I love being close to the core, close to the most meaningful work. It was painful to stay focused on the meaningful parts of the life (trying to add value to the world, being connected to family, helping others) even while less important but more urgent items nipped at my heels. The strange thing about life is that nobody else can really know how difficult the decisions were to make, and they probably wouldn’t care if you told them.

For my 36th year, I would like my motto to be to Talk it out. I’ve been keeping a lot of my struggle to myself (and some close friends/family). It’s part of the default mindset one has when running a business and being afraid to show weakness to investors, press, the public, etc.

However, when things really did get difficult, and I had no choice but to tell the story with others, and ask for help, things …

On January 4th, 2006, a Wednesday, I wrote this in my LiveJournal (long live LiveJournal!):

This weekend I was walking to a bar or something with a friend and we walked along this big guy (sort of a down-and-out kind of guy, but probably not homeless) who had a giant boom box on his shoulder and it was playing The Impossible Dream loudly and he was singing along and walking so slowly, swaying. We started singing too, and it was a moment. It was the most beautiful, sad, awesome, terrible, beautiful, terrible, horrible, awesome, sad, and beautiful thing… I spontaneously burst out in tears and started laughing. I have been listening to the song over and over since… something about the whole scene just tears me apart.

Yeah, it’s a bit dramatic, but the moment has stuck with me for the last 6 years partially because of it. We’re so accustomed to being practical these days. Living within the realm of the doable and the possible. Constraining ourselves to that which is so lean, so agile, so hedged, so data-driven and user-tested and over-funded that it cannot fail. So… safe.

At the time, it sent me off on a slight obsession with impossible dreams, and their fragmented, imperfect, usually ill-appreciated manifestations in real life. Especially artful things like:

• Jane McGonigal’s Cookie Rolling project
• Jamie Livingston’s polaroid project
• Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus

There’s a bit of a celebration of the imperfect in the impossible dream. Of wabi-sabi.

On May 22nd, 2008, a few days …

I’m 35! Luckily, the roller-coasters of entrepreneurship and parenthood don’t really let things drift accidentally out of perspective, only to be thrust upon one at yearly anniversaries. The sense of mortality, obscurity, youth vs age, and passing opportunity never get taken much for granted these days… I have the luxury of insomnia and feeling like a grain of sand in a big universe on a pretty much daily basis. And I feel exactly 35 right now. Honestly, it feels great. Bring it.

My tradition since turning 30 has been to come up with a motto for the year. Previous years include: Higher Highs and Lower Lows, Double Down, No Problem, Frugal to the Max, and last year was Cultivate the Core. They’ve all had personal meaning to me, and more than anything capture my frame of mind at the moment.

This year I have decided on the motto: Love the Struggle.

Being a new parent is a struggle. Starting a new business is a struggle. Staying with your values and staying healthy and keeping a good perspective and a calm mind is a struggle. Struggling is good. It is one of the only things that exercise the deep well of will and vitality within us. That help us dig into ourselves deeper, that push us to grow.

Love the struggle, as much as it sometimes feels like a pain in the moment.

I read this in a parenting book today:

“Kids repeadedly set their sights on something they can’t yet do. Many fuss, cry, and make loud noises while they struggle. Some work for a while, take a break, and come back …

This one was on a blog that got deleted. Found a copy of the text and archiving it here.

When I turned 30, my birthday motto was Higher highs and lower lows.

When I turned 31, my birthday motto was Double down.

When I turned 32, my birthday motto was No problem.

Last year, my 33rd birthday coincided with my last day at the Robot Co-op and the beginning of Enjoymentland. My motto for the year was 33: Frugal to the max. I just did a little calculation and it looks like our spending over the last 12 months compared to the 12 months prior was 34% lower. So, at least on the money front, I think we did pretty well on the frugality goal.

In the meantime, I spent the whole year working on my own projects, and managed to stay somewhat afloat finance-wise. Also, we had a baby. I guess that’s not very frugal on the DNA front. But we did have the baby in fairly frugal way: without selling the house (not our choice), without buying a car, without doing all of the screening tests, and hospital visits, and without even requiring a hospital’s intervention. I’m pretty proud about that, and think Kellianne’s more amazing than ever for having gone through the process with such grace, strength, and confidence. And we were also very lucky, as there were a couple near misses on needing a hospital transfer, and I know that it’s entirely possible for someone who does everything right, and has the best intentions, to still have a high-risk pregnancy. Â We are lucky that we never had to draw that …