I started the first comedy site on the web back in 1995, it was called zug.com. It actually was that comedy site that got me into mind hacking in a roundabout way. What had happened was we specialized on zug.com with these pranks and high-profile stunts. I had gotten a credit card in the name of Barrack Obama, and this was really easy to do because you could just call up American Express using your legitimate credit card and say I want to add an additional cardholder. So I added Barrack Obama to my account, and now that I had a Barrack Obama credit card I started making all of these purchases with it. It was totally legal, but the day that Barrack Obama secured the Democratic presidential nomination, suddenly the Secret Service had to protect him and apparently I was high on the watch list.
They showed up at my house and I welcomed them in. I said, "I'm going to record this meeting," and I pulled out my tape recorder. As soon as they saw the tape recorder, they scattered. They're like, "This is over, this conversation is over," and they left.
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It was a really terrible time. I'm making light of it but that night was terrifying for my wife and I because we didn't know if they were going to come back or if they were going to haul me off to jail, it was really awful.
Through some difficult conversations that night my wife and I kind of came to the conclusion that my drinking and my drug use we're probably at the root of a lot of really destructive behaviors that I was taking. And so I decided I was going to get sober that night, and it really kind of took this call from the Secret Service to wake me up.
I loaded all my alcohol and my drugs into the car and I go to this dumpster behind a local supermarket and I decided I'm going to throw them all away. I'm going to just go cold turkey and I found that I couldn't do it because my mind was telling me you'll never have fun again. If you get rid of all of this your life is over, it's going to be so boring without all this.
So what I had to do was I had to hack my mind or basically create a new way of thinking about the act of throwing away all these drugs and alcohol. So I focused on the muscle movement and they talk about one day at a time in the program and this was one step at a time. Literally throwing these alcohol bottles, drugs into this dumpster, and by just focusing on the muscle movement and didn't think about the long term, I was able to get through it. That was really my first mind hack and since then to stay sober I've developed a whole series of these hacks or tricks to reprogram my mind. I'm happy to say I've been sober for 12 years and it's been the greatest journey and it has been so much fun. I have way more fun sober than I ever did back then.
I use hacking in the positive sense. So hacking originally meant like a really clever kind of trick or technique to use to improve your life and that's the true meaning of the word hacking. So the original hackers, the original computer programmers, the guys who invented the Arpanet and the internet, those were the legends and heroes, my personal heroes. So I've been a geek my whole life and I just love computers, I love technology, I love hacking in the true sense of the word. So what we're doing with mind hacking is we're finding those tricks or techniques to reprogram the mind. Different ways of thinking to change our lives in a positive direction.
Sort of thinking of your mind as a computer that can be hacked into and reprogrammed with the new operating system or with a new set of algorithms that make it in a different way?
We really do have the capability of reprogramming our mind. Most of us don't think like that on an everyday basis, right? When our mind tells us something, we tend to believe it. If our mind gets worried about finances or starts obsessing about a conversation we had with a coworker, we just roll with it and we're really slaves to our mind in that sense. When you realize that, actually, you don't have to believe everything you think, actually you're the programmer that's in charge of this thing called your mind and you can reprogram it, you can choose what to think, that is an awesome power and it is a power. It's a power, it's like a superpower when you really get control of this and learn how to reprogram it.
I have a whole section in the book about creating a distraction-free work zone. I think the defining feature of our age is interruption. Every app, every program, every operating system, all have these alerts and messages. The folks creating these apps it's in their best interest to interrupt you as often as possible and we kind of allow that by default. So you really have to take control of your own mental space and that means you got to turn things off. You really have to try to live a clutter-free and distraction-free environment.
One of the exercises in the book is you just spend an hour just cleaning up and turning off as many of those alerts and interruptions as you can. Because all the research shows we can't multitask, multitasking is a myth. Every time you're interrupted by something you lose the flow, you lose the state and there's a switching cost, the mental switching cost to getting back into the zone of whatever you were doing.
Email is the worst time-killer ever. Most of the time email is low-value work, so in other words, you can chew up a ton of time with email and you start this response cycle, right? Where people now are like emailing you back and you're stuck in this loop and meanwhile you feel like you're getting stuff done but its usually low value. Writing is high-value work, so writing is the hard work that you need to do first before you get into the email. Email is better later in the day when you're already tired and you can just kind of like churn through a lot of stuff easily. But the writing, the hard work, the valuable work is good first thing.
What I do actually, first thing is I meditate when I get up. I do not look at a screen. I don't check my phone. It's just 20 minutes silent. You focus on the breath and when you notice yourself wandering from noticing the breath, you just go back to the breath and that's it for 20 minutes. It has made such a difference in my life because what you find is that that practice of noticing that your mind is wandering pays off in everyday life. So in other words, for meditation, we're not developing the skill there on the couch, we're developing the skill for everyday life.
So then what happens when you're in traffic and you find yourself getting angry at the guy in front of you, you say, "wait a minute I don't have to think this." In other words, that mindfulness that literally the sense of being aware of your own mind and the emotions going through it, that you've been practicing 20 minutes every morning, now are paying off in real life situations and that's the magic of meditation. I never hear people talk about that that clearly but that is why meditation is so good.
Okay, so you get up in the morning and you meditate for 20 minutes and then you begin your writing?
Basically, the idea is to do the hard work first and then you've got this feeling of accomplishment and that energy snowball starts to roll. For me, I have about an hour I give each morning to writing, then I've got other things that are pressing into my time. So I'll get up at 5:30, I'll meditate 6:00 to 7:00 is kind of that time to write. But if I'm on deadline, you know, I'll spend some larger chunks maybe on the weekend on Saturday or Sunday and it could be up to four hours depending.
You talk about "debugging our minds," explain what that means and how that might apply to writers.
When you're writing a new application or program, you look for bugs. This is called debugging. When you find a bug you try to rework it and reprogram it until it works correctly. Debugging our minds is a similar process where we try to become aware of those negative thought loops, and it's so difficult in real life because we believe what our minds tell us. So if our mind is telling us, for example, you need to obsess about this relationship with your mother in law or you need to worry about this job promotion, we tend to believe it.
But by being mindful or meditating and developing these practices, this awareness of the mind, we can start to see those negative thought loops and we can start to figure out, okay what do I want? Do I want to think about my job or my mother in law or my kids or my finances or my life? What do I want? Now that's one of the most difficult things to figure out--what do you want? What do you want out of life? And when you ask most people, they might say, "Uh, a pony?" Most people don't know what they want--they haven't thought it through. So figuring out what you want is really an important part of this process. Then you replace that negative thought loop, that you found through debugging, with your positive thought loop. In my case, you know, from sobriety means the end of all fun to sobriety is the foundation of all good things in my life.
In the book, we have an exercise called "The $20 Million Dollar Inheritance." Imagine that a great aunt, who you never knew existed, leaves you $20 million dollars and now you don't have to work, what do you do? What do you do with your life at this point? The goal is really to let your imagination run and say, what do I want?
So for example, some of my thought loops over the past few years have been: I really want to be a model human and I want our company to be a model company. Being a model human doesn't mean I want to be a perfect human being. It just basically means that I want to be someone who other folks would want to model themselves after. And this company, Media Shower that we run, like I want it to be a company that is respected worldwide, that is seen as a model for other companies. It is so powerful how the repetition of that thought loop has changed my life. It almost is like a kind of magic that starts to work its way into your life and you start to undertake projects and think about things in a way that you never thought before. That's been my experience but try it, it's so much fun and it's so interesting to watch how your life changes when you start implementing these things.
It's interesting you bring up the word repetition because I know that comes up as one of the hacks in your book. What's the importance of repetition and how one might put that into practice in their life?
Repetition is very important and also repetition is very important. Regardless of how you might feel about the President of the United States, watch how often he uses repetition to get his message across and watch how often that constant repetition starts to become reality for people. Watch, advertising works on the same principle. If something is repeated enough, we become familiar with it and we began to trust it, that's the concept of branding and marketing. 152ee80cbc
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