STEP 1: Identify the rage

Next time you find yourself ENRAGED ON THE INTERNET, ask yourself these questions.

Does this person or organization or whatever make money off getting peoples’ attention? (This includes celebrities, television shows, media publishers, and pretty much everyone that makes money from showing you advertisements.)

If so, there’s a fairly high chance that you are being PUNK’D. Meaning. They are deliberately TRYING to get a reaction out of you. The angrier you get, the louder you shout about how angry you are, the farther their message goes, the higher their ratings, the more ads they sell, the more of your SOUL they capture. And what do you get in return? The endorphin rush of anger, and a world where people are encouraged to make you even angrier next time. (How are the VMAs gonna top this year’s ratings next year? Wait and find out…)

LOOK. It’s okay to be angry. But why give them the satisfaction of falling into their psychological trap? Why not, rather than give them exactly what they want, think of a way to get what YOU want.

If this describes your rage correctly, go to STEP 2. Otherwise, continue on to the next question.

Has this person or organization changed something that you love? (This means that a certain part of your day that you typically go to for comfort, reassurance, anti-FOMO protection, or other habitual impulse has been changed and your routine is THROWN OFF COURSE by a change that they didn’t consult you about.)

If this is the case, …

#1 What is antifragility?

I’ve been a fan of Nassim Nicholas Taleb since reading Fooled By Randomness 9 years ago. It’s one of those books that you read and you can never look at the world the same way.

Since then he’s continued to think about the same ideas, and it’s been fascinating to follow. He really hit it out of the park with Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder.

Basically, antifragile things are things that benefit from disorder, obstacles, unexpected events, change, etc.

Examples:

• Obi-Wan: “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”
• The mythical Hydra, that grows two new heads every time you cut one off.
• “What doesn’t kill you will only make you stronger.”
• Natural selection, survival of the fittest, where the weak or unadapted perish, leaving the fit to continue on more suited to the environment.
• Silicon Valley — lots of small startups that are allowed to fail.
• Muscles get stronger when they’re pushed to the point of failure.

Being antifragile is different from being resilient or robust. Being resilient or robust means that you bounce back quickly from disturbances — for example, a bridge that can withstand a 9.0 earthquake, or our skin that can quickly repair itself of cuts and bruises.

Antifragility goes a step further and describes things that not only bounce back quickly, but come back stronger when they meet adversity. The way bacteria …

How many of the following things have happened to you in the last 6 months?

1. Death of a close family member or friend
2. Major personal injury or illness
3. Major personal injury or illness of family member
4. Got divorced or broke up with long-term partner
5. Got married
6. New child
7. New sibling
8. Child left home
9. Started a new serious relationship
10. Imprisoned
11. Retired
12. Lost job
13. Financial state changed
14. Took out a major mortgage
15. Foreclosed on a mortgage or loan
16. Got a new job
17. Began or finished school
18. Moved to a new place
19. Changed schools
20. Took a long vacation
21. Multiple disappointments around big personal goal
22. Completed a big personal goal

Reply with your number, and any other big things that have happened to you recently that you think are about equal in impact:

You get one death bed point whenever you do something that you believe will still be valuable and meaningful to you when you’re on your death bed.

Toss out your goals, toss out your desire to change. Step back for a moment with me. Believe me, it’s not easy for me to say this. I built 43things.com because I believed then that managing goals was the best way to live life. I built healthmonth.com because I believed then that answering the question “How do we change ourselves?” was the single most important question we could ask ourselves during this life.

I’m strongly considering an alternative to this way of thinking. Follow this train of thought with me for a bit.

Start here.

Remember, you will die.

Your loved ones will die. Your friends, your family, everyone you know, will die. I know, nobody really appreciates when I bring this up, it’s a total buzzkill.

Mortigo is that sensation of falling that I get when I strongly consider my mortality. When I truly grasp, in the moment, that my life and everything I’ve known will blink away in a matter of decades, if not years, if not hours, and I will cease to exist.

Nick Crocker mentioned to me the other day that in his startup, Sessions, which helps people get healthy with the support of a coach, he can often tell when someone’s going to succeed if they’ve recently had a strong “mortality moment”. Either someone close to them died, or they had a close call themselves, or they recently had a child and realized that they need to stay …

Rambling notes on a Sunday afternoon after a sunny bike ride.

Our brains have roughly one hundred billion (100,000,000,000) neurons.

About thirty billion of them 30,000,000,000 belong in our neocortex, the part of our brain that’s unique to mammals, and that are responsible for our ability to recognize, remember, and predict patterns in the world.

A single pattern recognizer in the brain is hypothesized by Ray Kurzweil to be made up of about 100 neurons, which means we have the potential to store roughly three hundred million 300,000,000 patterns in our brain.

A pattern could be something very low level (for example, a pattern that can detect edges), mid-level (a pattern that can detect words), or high level (a pattern that can detect meaning). There are a lot more levels than that obviously, but the interesting thing is that each level is a new pattern made out of simpler patterns below. Edges turn into lines, lines turn into letters, letters turn into words, words turn into meanings, meanings turn into beliefs, beliefs turn into identities.

You could say that we each carry around in our brains a representation of the universe.

The Brain—is wider than the Sky— For—put them side by side— The one the other will contain With ease—and You—beside—

The Brain is deeper than the sea— For—hold them—Blue to Blue— The one the other will absorb— As Sponges—Buckets—do—

The Brain is just the weight of God— For—Heft them—Pound for Pound— And they will differ—if they do— As …

Every year of my 30s has had some kind of birthday reflection and a motto. Here are the ones from the past:

• 36: Talk it out
• 35: Love the struggle
• 34: Cultivating the core
• 33: Frugal to the max
• 32: No problem
• 31: Double down
• 30: Higher highs and lower lows

I was really impressed with my coworker Kevin Weil who ran 30 miles on his 30th birthday this last weekend.

I definitely could not run 37 miles today. I wonder actually if there was ever a year that I could run the number of miles that matched my age. I think 17 or 18 was probably my best bet, but that’s pretty lame… if I can get back on my running wagon maybe I could aspire to run 40 miles on my 40th.

My primary personal goal this year is to do 1,000 small things to become a marathoner. I registered for the Lake Tahoe marathon at the end of September. My knee is attempting to thwart me, but I am not gonna let that discourage me (too much).

Updated Manifesto for Living

I also take the time every year to update my Manifesto for Living:

1. You must not dilly-dally
2. You must be your word
3. You must have good intentions
4. You must admit to being the maker of meaning
5. You must not feel sorry for yourself
6. You must have a vision that you are striving for
7. You must tie creativity and experimentation with survival
8. You must be the change you want to see
9. You must rally others with your vision
10. You must stake your reputation on your better self
11. You must be comfortable with the consequences of being who you are
12. You must share
13. You …

Your birthday is the number of years you’ve been alive (obviously).

But what if we also celebrated the number of years we estimate to have left?

I created a quick script to calculate your next deathday (when your years remaining hits a round number). Because your years remaining go down a little slower than your years so far, presuming you don’t die, it’s going to be different every year. The data comes from the CDC’s latest death report.

If you want me to tell you what your next deathday is, just tweet me your birthday (you have to include the year, month, and day) by replying to the tweet below. I’ll try to respond to most within the next day or so.

I just did something sort of morbid.

Using the most recent life expectancy data published by the CDC, I ran the numbers for my current age and gender to find the distribution of my year of death if I lived 100 times.

This accounts for all of the currently reported causes of deaths, ranging from all types of cancer, to suicide, to assault, to lightning strikes and car accidents, to drowning, to kidney infections and a thousand other categories.

If there were 100 of me, all 36 years old (as I am right now), and you set them loose, one of me dies before I turn 40.

Another one of me dies before I turn 45.

Two more of me die before 50, another two before 55, and another two before 60.

Then things start to ramp up and five of me die before 65, six of me before 70, and nine of me before 75.

From the one hundred Busters that started at age 36, only 59 of me make it past my 80th birthday.

Sixteen of me die before 85, eighteen of me before 90, and fifteen of me before 95.

At my 100th birthday, seven of me got pretty close, but only two of me are left to blow out the candles.

Those two die within the next 5 years.

What were those last nine or ten Busters like? Were they the ones that, at age 36, were running every morning? Did they drink as much as I did last night? Or did they just get lucky? I want to know more. What happened to the Buster that died before age 40? Was it cancer, like my father (age 41)? Was it one of me that made a poor life choice and never course corrected? Or was …

I respect BJ Fogg and his work around tiny habits, but lately I’ve found my own opinions (granted, I’m no academic) diverging from his quite a bit.

All of my thinking about behavior change lately has ended up re-affirming my conviction that habits aren’t tiny things. They’re huge. If you could do a brain scan on someone and squirt food coloring into their ear that highlighted the neuronal pathways that supported, say, their exercise habit, my guess is that you’d see a complex and fragile structure.

When people talk about tiny habits, I think they are hiding the cost of true change. It’s akin to saying something like: “You can buy a house, just put $1 down. Make sure you pay $1 a day for 21 days, and then your automatic bill pay will kick in and pay for the rest.” It’s not a strategy for buying a house, it’s a sales tactic for selling houses.

You can’t just download an app or sign up to a mailing list and have that complex brain structure magically appear in your head. You have to build it yourself.

Say you’re someone that wants to start an exercise habit. How should we frame the task of constructing this complex habit structure in your brain?

It’s not about putting your shoes next to your bed. It’s not about doing something 21 days in a row. Those things will only work if you already have a complex exercise habit structure in your brain (for example, if you’d had a regular exercise habit earlier in life that later lapsed), and all you need …

Most people are loss averse. Meaning that the pain of losing something is felt about twice as strongly as the pleasure of gaining something.

Most people are also fairly bad at intuitively understanding risk. We understand certainty (0% and 100%) but tend to get everything in between muddled up. Some people err on the downside (thinking things are less likely than they really are) and some people err on the upside (thinking things are more likely than they really are).

If we combine being loss averse with also erring on risk’s downside, we will act extra conservatively.

If we are loss averse and err on the upside with risk, the two might actually manage to cancel themselves out a bit. In other words, even though we continue to be loss averse, we’re also biased to underestimate the chances of losing something and overestimate the chances of gaining something. In this case, two biases make us act, effectively, unbiased.

Important distinction: It would be an error to label people with this double-bias as risk-tolerant. They aren’t necessarily seeing bets and making them, but rather systematically misunderstanding situations to be less risky than they really are.

If this counter-balanced double-bias system does “work” by effectively giving us the “correct” risk analysis of multiple situations, and we notice this, then confidence in our own intuition gets ratcheted up. We believe it’s because we’re good at understanding risk, …