PUA Blogger

I was so close to the end today that I had to push through and finish. My schedule is normally 35 new Kanji per day, but today I did 78.

And what a sweet victory it is.

As I mentioned earlier, Emergency from Sushi and Seduction had a great post on learning Kanji in two months.

The system teaches the 1945 basic “Joyo” kanji as well as another 97 useful kanji for a grand total of 2042 characters. They range from one stroke (for the number one) to twenty three strokes for the character for specimen

.

The system, called Remembering the Kanji by James Heisig,  is totally ingenious and easy to follow. It’s based around identifying primitive elements and making stories around them to remember.

For example, take specimen. The left hand side of it means gold or metal. The right side means oversee. So to remember specimen I think of someone overseeing me giving a urine specimen, since it’s gold, for a drug test. Kind of weird, but weird stories stick.

Gold was learned by combining easier words, and so was oversee. Oversee is made up of slave, reclining, floor, dish. So I imagine a slave reclining on the floor of the kitchen, overseeing the other slaves cleaning dishes.

That sounds a bit complicated, but once you get into it it’s very easy.

Like Emergency said, it can be done. Two thousand forty two characters in two months means that you have to average 34 a day. I don’t remember exactly when I started, but it was within a day or two of my two month goal.

You don’t just learn new ones, though, you also review old ones. The best software to do this with, by far, is Anki. You start out with very few review cards, but eventually you have 200+ per day.

One day I did nothing and was welcomed with 400+ cards the next day to catch up. Three days I waited until it was too late and only did review, no new cards. Three or four days I did way more than the 35 (stupid idea, in general), up to 120.

Anki says I worked for 165.37 hours total. Rescuetime says it’s only 72 hours. I have no way to account for that disparity, but to me it seems like somewhere around 140-150 hours, not counting time spent reading the book and memorizing (maybe another 30 hours total).

I flipped over 14,647 virtual flashcards.

Besides the 2042 kanji, I learned a lot. First are some lessons ONLY applicable to other people wanting to learn Kanji, next are lessons that translate to other areas,

FOR PEOPLE WHO WANT TO DO THIS:

1. Just do it. Start today. It’s easy and fun at first, and by the time it gets hard you will already be reasonably committed. The system is so elegant and clever that you always feel the time is worth it.
2. Use Anki. It offers no way to “pause” your learning, so you HAVE to be accountable and do it every day. Write out your answers on paper for a while but once you get going you can just do it in your head
3. Do a fixed number of cards per day. Don’t follow the lessons. I followed the lessons for a while and the 120+ card days will kill you. Also, some lessons are inconsequentially short. Thirty five cards was manageable and will get you done in two months.
4. Use http://kanji.koohii.com to come up with stories. They usually have better ones than I could come up with, and it’s much faster. The book’s stories are pretty weak, but you should study with the book AND the site because the book has extra meanings and info.
5. Study early in the day, as soon as you get up. I tried to do it right before bed and it’s MUCH harder. Usually I would have a ten % drop in performance.
6. The character meanings and drawings are VERY similar to Chinese. I picked up a third year Chinese student’s reader and could get the gist of everything very easily. This is gratifying.

FOR EVERYONE

1. This is all about the dip. If I hadn’t read the book, I may have given up. Twice I thought “this is pointless, I have other stuff to do, who really cares if I know kanji?” because I had monster 300+ stacks of cards to do. Did I feel that way before getting in? Do I feel that way now? Nope. Commit, push through, enjoy the fruits of your labor.
2. It’s amazing to see how the brain works. To think that two months ago I couldn’t read more than 20 or so Kanji, and now I know over 2000 is inconceivable to me. I love learning things quickly.
3. Two hours a day is nothing. I watched less movies, no TV, and wasted less time online. I could see that time being siphoned into something productive. It was almost never an impediment on my life, and now I have tons of useful knowledge. Is there ever a good excuse to do mindless activities when stuff like this is out there?
4. Most shirts and tattoos that people have with Chinese/Japanese characters say really dumb things.
5. Japanese city and neighborhood names aren’t as mystical as they sound. Harajuku, for example, means Meadow Inn. Sounds like a suburban subdivision, doesn’t it? Tokyo means “Eastern Capital”.
6. Breaking huge tasks into smaller chunks makes them easy. I know this, but forget it. This reinforced it.

The journey is far from over. I’m going to do a month of review, which means 100-200 cards per day. I want to make sure that I have all of them solidly committed to memory, and I know for a fact that I probably only have 80-85% really well in there.

The system teaches you the meanings of the words, but not how to pronounce them, and not the multiple meanings or compound meanings. Months after the review months will be spent on that.

Still, knowing the meanings is a huge start. I could probably make sense of any sign, menu, or map. I have the framework now to learn vocabulary properly.

Above all, this experience reinforced the value of getting to the finish line. It was hard, though not as hard as I expected, and it feels great to have finished it. More than anything this post is a cathartic marker of having finished something tough.

If you like my writing and don’t have a love life you’re totally satisfied with, check out my full course on dating here.

That’s not a typo. I just read over the last couple years of goal posts and realized something – I need to be working on my goals in smaller chunks because my life changes too quickly for yearlong goals.

As one guy said in the comments last year, I sorta suck at goal setting. So this year I have a new idea.

First, let’s get to last year’s goals:

1. Hold myself to a very high standard and accept NO excuses from myself. If I do accept an excuse I will write it down and post it publicly for others to judge.

2. Focus on output. Every day I will make a list of my daily output. I will also make this public.

3. Work harder than I’ve EVER worked. Every day I will grade myself on a scale from 0-3. I will publish this daily. My goal is a weekly average of 2.75 (I’m not trying to eliminate fun, just useless and unproductive activities). I will only count time that I SHOULD be working.

#1 – I held myself to very high standards and publicly shared all excuses for around six months. After that the no-excuse habit became totally ingrained and I stopped writing them. I can still definitely hold myself to higher standards, but I achieved my goal.

#2 – I focused on output big time. With a few exceptions, I really shifted my behavior to learn things as needed and create a high amount of output.

#3 – I have worked harder than I ever worked. I can still work much harder, but I am happy with progress this year. I don’t think I actually maintained a 2.75, but I know that it was very close – around a 2.7 or so. I also stopped publishing my output and rating every day after about six months.

Overall I give myself a B+. Hey, high standards, right?

Here are the other things I did this year that I’m proud of:

• Did my first Life Nomadic trip, which was one of the best things I’ve ever done (in terms of fun as well as life experience and learning)
• Improved my Japanese, Spanish, and Chinese (only a little) and learned a good chunk of French.
• Learned all 2000+ common use Kanji (okay, I won’t actually be done with this for another 4 days, but it’s as good as done)
• Learned about THE DIP
• Got rid of all of my businesses (still transitioning)
• Published Make Her Chase You as a paperback
• Switched to Dvorak typing
• Became an Alcor member
• Was interviewed on TV for the first time and got on a movie set for the first time
• Trained a squirrel to climb on my shirt and eat from my hand
• Learned all countries and most capitals on the world map
• Met a great girl whose idea it was to learn the countries and capitals
• Increased my net worth (not by a super impressive amount)

There are a lot of other smaller Life Nomadic related things that I could include, but I think that would make the list a little boring. All in all, I had a fantastic year.

So for the first half of this year, here are my goals:

#1 – Become THE authority (along with Todd if this is his goal too) on the Nomadic Lifestyle.

Some measurable subgoals:

• Become the #1 writer on Gadling (measured by average # of comments, other factors will be taken into account)
• Build Life Nomadic into a top 50,000 web site on Alexa.
• Write at least 70 high quality posts for Gadling.
• Have at least 300 people involved in the community aspect of Life Nomadic

You know what? That’s my only goal. Everything else in my life is just about perfect, and it’s time to focus and push through a dip.

Some questions for you:

What are your six month (or 1 year) goals? How did you do last year? What is the MOST important goal for the next 6 months?

If you like my writing and don’t have a love life you’re totally satisfied with, check out my full course on dating here.

Yesterday was Christmas. I spent it in New Jersey with my parents, sister, aunt, uncle, and three of my cousins. We played board games (Scattergories!), ate Christmas dinner together, and I "helped" my cousins play with their new toys they got for Christmas.

And then, in between those events, I did two hours of Japanese practice and also spent time writing content for Life Nomadic.

I have a lot of good habits as well as a lot of bad habits, but one of my best is that I treat every day equally.

We all know that progress is made through relentless consistent effort. Luck comes into play too, of course, but only when you’re in the right place for it. Relentless consistent effort is how you get to that right place.

I’m a big fan of daily habits because it’s what you do every day that determines who you are and where you end up. I also think that the discipline in doing something every day is important.

If I couldn’t pick a task and trust myself to do it every day, I would consider that a huge personal failing and would work hard on correcting it.

That isn’t to say that I’m perfect. Right now my daily task is to learn 35 new Kanji and to review approximately 150-200 kanji. This takes roughly two hours and is pretty mentally taxing.

A few times in the past 7 weeks I have put it off for too long in the day and have gotten too tired to complete it. I twice did nothing during the day and three times did only review, no new ones.

That’s not ideal, but it’s not the end of the world.

Exceptions don’t define the habit unless you use them as an excuse to get off the train. Every time I fell off I made sure to do my Kanji first thing the next day and get caught up. One of the days I skipped took over four hours of flashcards to get caught up.

The habit isn’t as important as the attitude. Don’t look for reasons to get out of doing what you should be doing. Place value on doing things even when conditions aren’t perfect.

"It’s the weekend," doesn’t count as a reason to skip, and neither does, "It’s Christmas."

Get it done.

Consistent effort is much harder when you have inconsistent timing. Think of a workweek:

• Monday - Difficult because your head is still in weekend mode.
• Tuesday - A little bit better, but still rough because you’re so far from the weekend.
• Wednesday - You’ve found your groove.
• Thursday - You’re still in the groove.
• Friday - You slack off because you’re looking forward to the weekend and you’re almost there.

Not everyone is like that, of course, but I bet you can at least relate to it a little bit.

I think a better way to do it is to create a lifestyle that blends work and pleasure in a way that is sustainable. My "work seven days a week thing" makes me sound hardcore, but the truth is that I also spend time reading and hanging out with my friends every day.

This is also how I do my diet. Other than a somewhat dreaded once-a-month "eat meat to keep bacteria in my gut" day, I don’t cheat. No weekly cheat day.

Instead I create a diet that is comfortably sustainable every single day, and I enjoy the momentum that builds.

I have found that when I give myself the same responsibilities and leeway every single day, it makes it MUCH easier to stick to things. Never underestimate the power of momentum.

If you like my writing and don’t have a love life you’re totally satisfied with, check out my full course on dating here.

If you ordered a book, it will be shipped tomorrow morning. If you didn’t order one, then you can buy them on Amazon now. Thanks a lot to everyone who ordered – I hope you enjoy your book!

Here’s a picture I took before packaging them up (and spending forever signing them and writing on the envelopes).

In case you didn’t see it on my twitter, I also did an interview with Alex Shalman that you might be interested in listening to.

If you like my writing and don’t have a love life you’re totally satisfied with, check out my full course on dating here.

My sleep schedule is unusual. I generally go to bed an hour later each day until finally I’m going to bed way too late and I end up just staying up a full 36 hours or so to reset the schedule.

And that’s where I’m at now. So to fill my day and keep myself awake I read Seth Godin’s blog. Forty pages of it.

You know I’m obsessed with Seth Godin, so this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. I subscribe to only 6 blogs, and his is by far the most frequently updated.

As I read the 40 pages I took short notes. Some were direct quotes, others were paraphrases, and a few of them were thoughts I had that were inspired by something he wrote.

Here are the notes. Some might be useless without context, some may be redundant, and my capitalization is spastic, but I can’t imagine someone reading the list and not getting SOMETHING out of it.

• make something excellent
• layer progress on top of progress
• don’t do anything mediocre. Great or nothing.
• interesting is better than perfect
• don’t do gimmicks. It’s a gimmick if it doesn’t add value
• step one - get people to care step two - listen to them
• go after smart customers. they’re worth more
• create new terms that people will talk about
• interactivity can’t be pirated
• celebrity is still underrated
• people are afraid to talk about you. make it easy
• make promises and keep them
• it’s not who you know, it’s who trusts you
• authentic storytelling
• do things that people want to talk about
• offer more than other people… low margin items for free
• Don’t complain. Do something different.
• Every interaction is marketing. What’s the point of it?
• Leave people out. You can’t have insiders without outsiders.
• Good self promotion is promoting useful ideas that are linked to you
• People choose based on comparisons, not absolutes
• make customers feel like they’re right
• let people interact with things in a new way (web design)
• not "look at me", but "here’s what you were looking for"
• average stuff for average people is no way to make a living
• make things better
• What’s scarce now? Respect. Honesty. Good judgment. Long-term relationships that lead to trust.
• Marketers spend too much time trying to get people to leap over the hurdle of "buy this, right now" and not enough on "it’s yours, here’s how you keep it."
• Promise big, deliver huge
• Make things immediate, not distant
• Making things inconvenient or imposing is a bad idea, even though it used to work
• create the most remarkable experience you can imagine.
• Win a small community that leads to a bigger market
• Everyone is lonely
• write a manifesto
• Measure the right thing and optimize for it

I definitely am NOT doing all of those things. Work to be done.

If you like my writing and don’t have a love life you’re totally satisfied with, check out my full course on dating here.

Everyone’s waiting for the right time for something. The right time to quit their job, the right time to ask her out, the right time to travel, or the right time to start a new project.

In a little over a week I leave Austin until June. I have a LOT to do. More than I will get done.

I have to get my RV’s engine repaired before the warranty expires and I have to find a place to store the thing while I’m gone. I have a few things to sell on ebay. I have a few pieces of gear I’d like to test out for the new trip.

We’re close enough to the departure date that any time I hang out with a friend it may be the last time I hang out with them until the summer. I wanted to get another trip in to LA, but I’m not going to have time now.

"If only I just had one more week…"

That’s dangerous thinking. I have a good friend who had been wanting to move to LA for years, but it was never the right time.

She stuck around for a graduation, her niece being born, to save up some more money, and who knows what else.

Finally she realized that it was never going to be the right time and she just moved anyway.

And that’s what you have to do.

If you ask me, that’s one of the secrets to really living a good life. Any big action is always going to cause some complications. If you wait until there aren’t any complications, you may die before you actually do what you want to do.

Life has a funny way of working things out. Or, more accurately, we humans overestimate the importance of little problems. And we’re pretty good at dealing with them, too.

It makes sense. If a few things fall off your plate because you take a big step forward, that’s a good trade. And the sooner you make THIS trade, the sooner you’re ready for the next one.

Are you putting anything off? Have you ever noticed that people’s regrets are always things they DIDN’T do? You never hear people saying that they regret throwing caution to the wind and diving headfirst into scary. Why not?

One quote I heard which has always haunted me is, "The one thing you’ll regret when you’re old is the time you wasted."

Don’t waste time. Do it now.

Doug went on a date with a news reporter here in Austin. She had read The Game and wanted to meet a pick up artist. I had dinner with her and the weather girl the other day and she invited me to be interviewed on the Sunday news this weekend, which she anchors.

Exciting!

So if you’re in Austin, watch KXAN (on cable or broadcast) at 10am or so. I’m going to TRY to have it recorded and put on here, but we’re not totally sure it’s actually going to work. If someone else can try recording it too, that would be awesome.

Thanks to Doug and Jenny for making this happen!

If you like my writing and don’t have a love life you’re totally satisfied with, check out my full course on dating here.

I had the foresight to go to bed early last night so that I’d be well rested for my interview.

Then I stayed up until about five am tossing and turning, imagining her questions, and answering them.

“Well, Jenny…”

When my alarm went off at 8 I bolted up. I drank some delicious acerola cherry juice, took a shower, and put on my red shirt. A friend who’s been on TV a bunch of times told me not to wear black or white. My three shirts are black, very dark blue, and red, so that was an easy choice.

By the way, I get a real kick out of wearing my same clothes everywhere. I’ve worn the same clothes running with the bulls, sleeping in a cave, eating dinner on the Queen Mary 2, and now on TV.

Doug came to pick me up so that I wouldn’t have to worry about parking the RV and so that he could come hang out in the studio during the interview.

When we got there we were escorted to the lobby and left to our own devices. I imagined someone would be trying to put makeup on me and that I would maybe be offered a complimentary glass of water. Nope, just some leather seats and a flat screen watching the news.

Two minutes before my scheduled appearance time someone comes and gets me. No prep or anything.

I imagined that the studio would be bustling with commotion as newscasters poured through the news. Nope. Just a quiet camera guy and the two girls I’d met a couple days ago.

Another surprise is the amount of downtime in the studio. Even though it was a live show, there was plenty of time to say hi and joke around for a minute before the show started. A lot of the time is spent on recorded segments from outside of Austin and on commercials.

The camera guy put my mic on and I sat down with Jenny.

“Do I look at you or the camera?”

“Me.”

“Standby!” the camera guy called out.

And all of a sudden we were rolling. The interview passed in a blur. It lasted for three and a half minutes but it felt more like thirty seconds. I had no concept of how well I did, or even what my answers were. It was fun, though. I like high pressure situations and this was definitely one for me.

It actually reminded me a lot of the first time I did karaoke. We were at Krunkaoke, an all rap karaoke, so I knew I had to give it a shot. My friends knew this too and pushed me.

I was terrified when I got up to the stage, but I did okay. Not great, but it was enough fun that I knew I was hooked. After that there was practically no fear and absolutely no hesitation.

I think that’s how TV is too. I had a great time and I can’t wait to get in front of the camera again.

Here’s the segment:

If you like my writing and don’t have a love life you’re totally satisfied with, check out my full course on dating here.

I just finished Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers. I always like reading Gladwell’s books, but mainly as entertainment. It’s that sort of smart writing that makes you feel like you’re learning something important, even though the main purpose of the book is for entertainment.

Still, with any book I read I generally try to come up with some immediate actions I can implement from it to improve myself or my life. Outliers had a couple good ones that I’ll share with you.

Small Scale Persistence is IMPORTANT

Gladwell talks about persistence, not in the long-term sense of persevering, but rather on every day small tasks.

Asian kids tend to be better at math for a lot of reasons, one of which is that because of their cultures they tend to persist in figuring out the answers. One study showed that Japanese kids would spend 40% more time trying to figure out a really difficult math problem than American kids would.

I’m going to cultivate the habit of persisting on small things. An example from my life is when I’m doing my Kanji flashcards I sometimes come across a hard one and just flip it, thinking “I’ll just relearn it and try again”. Instead I’m going to try spending more time trying to wrack my brain and figure them out.

This isn’t necessarily being done because I think it will help me learn Kanji faster or better, although it might, but rather because the habit will serve me well next time I come across a difficult but solvable problem that I may otherwise give up on.

Time Spent Matters MOST

Most may be a strong word, because there are so very many factors to consider, but the book really drilled home how important time spent is. Gladwell goes through a ton of examples ranging from the Beatles to Bill Gates, showing that their success was basically due to opportunity and time spent.

I’ve found that most of my opportunities SPRING from spending time on something, so for me the lesson is to spend TONS of time on things that are meaningful to me and important.

An example from my life for that one is that right now I’m writing content for the new Life Nomadic site. I made a schedule for myself on when things needed to be done by and was going to stick to that.

Not anymore.

Now I’m going to get at done as fast as possible and spend more time writing additional things, editing, or working on inevitable sub-projects that will spring up.

I’m even thinking about reevaluating waking up early and blocking off time to do projects. Two hours to study japanese, four to write for LN, etc.

There’s a lot going on in the book, so it’s very likely that you’ll get different things out of it than I did. Check it out!

If you like my writing and don’t have a love life you’re totally satisfied with, check out my full course on dating here.

I’ve finally finished making Make Her Chase You into a paperback. I’ve been selling it as an ebook for the past year and a half or so and refining it and adding to it. After one last edit I finally felt like it was good enough to be put into a permanent format.

I also had a lot of fun laying out the book. I get really into design things like this, so I surrounded myself with books in my RV and figured out how a book is laid out. There’s a ton to consider, from gutters and margins to font sizes and chapter pages.

For example… what is the very first page of a book? Take a guess! I would have gotten it wrong.

In the next couple of weeks the book will be on Amazon. I want to price it at $20, but I may have to jack it up to not compete with the ebook, depending on the strategy of the person who takes over the project.

Anyway, I’m in Austin for another 19 days, and so I’m going to do at least one batch of autographed books before I go. I may have time for two batches, but maybe not. I have the feeling the last week is going to be spent making last minute gear adjustments, figuring out how to store the RV, etc.

So… if you want an autographed book, now’s the time! Maybe the only time!

Here are some photos:

The price for an autographed copy is $19.99 plus $3.99 for shipping (more for international). I think that’s a pretty great deal since I normally sell the book for $47.

Of course, it doesn’t come with the online-only extras (70+ minute audio course, wingman ebook, and 30 day interactive online pickup course). If you want all that, I’ll make you a deal. Pay the $47 for the online version and I’ll send you an autographed copy of the paperback for free. I’ll even pay shipping.

If you already have the ebook then don’t feel like you have to get the paperback. The edits from the 2008 edition are mainly for clarity. There are no new sections, so don’t buy it expecting for it to be something new.

If you aren’t familiar with the book, it’s basically the collection of all of my pick up knowledge. It’s different from other books because it focuses on BUILDING a life and personality that attract women, rather than tactics and routines (although there are a few of those). It covers everything from opening to getting out of the friend zone to date ideas, etc.

People who have read the book really like it and despite a very liberal return policy on the ebook, I get virtually no returns. Lots of people have written to me and told me that their dating lives have been turned around 180 because of the book.

I’m really proud of the book and really happy with how it came out. I hope you enjoy it too! I’ll take down this link in a few days when I won’t have time to order, sign, and ship the books. Until then:

ORDER HERE!

And you also get free shipping if you order more than two. This is mainly because I got sick of trying to set up the shipping tables properly. This includes international orders for the same reason.

Also, you can get more info on the book by clicking the “dating” link at the top, but make sure you buy with the link above to get a deal.

If you want to wait and buy through Amazon, it will be on there in a few weeks, but the price may be really high. Not sure yet.

P.S. I have two proof copies which were sent to me to verify the layout of the book. I have them labeled #1 and #2. They represent the first two physical copies of a book that I’ve written that have ever existed. If you want to buy these as a collector’s thing or an investment (because you rightly believe that I will be famous-er some day), I’ll sell the #1 for $200 or the #2 for $150.

If you like my writing and don’t have a love life you’re totally satisfied with, check out my full course on dating here.