Some of my favourite links:

I’m Canadian, but I’m currently living in the south of France. And, for the last five months, I’ve been doing something I never would have considered back home.

I’m not talking about drinking wine, eating baguettes or speaking French (although I’ve been doing plenty of those things).

No, I’m talking about riding a bicycle.

For the last 5 months I’ve commuted with my bike practically everywhere. I’d guess I bike at least 5-10km every day. And, while I’ve occasionally had a bike in Canada, that becomes agonizingly impractical when there is several feet of snow.

Location as an Underrated Factor in Pursuing the Ideal Life

I believe location is an underrated factor in pursuing the ideal life, but not in the obvious way people assume.

The obvious assumption is usually spoken in stereotypes. New York is fast paced. Paris is romantic. And if you want to start a technology company, you have to move to San Francisco.

I won’t argue with the specifics of these stereotypes, since I’ve never lived in New York, Paris or San Francisco. Maybe all the things said about these types of places is completely true.

What I will argue is that your location can have an unexpected impact on your lifestyle beyond the details that are most obvious when choosing a place to live.

The Unexpected Impact of Geography

Bike riding is a perfect example. The idea of biking everywhere I go wasn’t something I thought of when imagining life in France. Indeed, if I had chosen to live in a larger city like Paris or Lyon, the metro stations would more probably be my major source of travel.

Despite this, I think bike riding has had a major impact on my day-to-day lifestyle. For one, by biking 5-10km per day out of necessity, I’ve been getting a lot of exercise. Second, I’ve spent more time outdoors, which if you’ve ever experienced a winter in Winnipeg, is definitely a plus.

Location Independence and Choosing the Perfect City to Live

For most people, location is simply a matter of opportunity. My parents had moved to find jobs, and many other people will locate themselves wherever makes sense for their career.

However, there are a growing number of people who are drawing the majority of their income from location independent sources. Freelancers, web entrepreneurs or even at-home workers could theoretically live anywhere.

I think once you remove the job demand criteria as the #1 factor for where to live, a whole new area opens up, namely, picking the perfect city for your ideal lifestyle.

And, I believe this decision becomes more complicated for the reason I previously mentioned. Most of the salient details of choosing the perfect city are hidden, or at least obscured by popular stereotypes.

Finding the Perfect City

I’ve just started this journey, so I can’t weigh opinions about which cities are best. However, I think there are a couple factors worth mentioning, that are guiding my process of finding it:

1. Perfect is time sensitive. The ideal city, I believe, will be different when you’re 25 to when you’re 55.
2. Perfect won’t be obvious. I can’t be sure, but I’d guess that the ideal cities for most people are probably places they haven’t heard of yet. Or at least given serious thought to. The most popular destinations are also the most expensive and crowded.
3. Perfect needs defining. The size, weather and infrastructure that makes Montpellier an ideal city for biking is part of my definition of a great city. It will be different for every individual.

Of course, I’m not ruling out the importance of building relationships within a particular location over time. My argument isn’t that the ideal way to live means being a perpetual traveler. There are benefits to just picking a spot and then getting to know your neighbors.

However, just as the person you marry will have a major impact on your life, I believe the same is true of the city you live in. And, for a growing number, that decision will no longer be based on job openings.

Being good at things is the key to success. Painfully obvious, right?

That means being good, having mastered skills, ranks far higher than other commonly touted “keys” to success, such as:

• Overcoming fears
• Just getting started
• Rejecting societal norms
• Having the best attitude

Sure, being a terrified, procrastinating, peer-pressured, pessimist probably won’t help you master skills. But that doesn’t remove the fact that mastery, both in your career and in your personal life, is the most important element.

Why Being Skilled Matters

For your career, the argument is simple: we live in a capitalistic world where, all else being equal, the people with the rarest and most valuable skills get the biggest rewards. Assuming you can convert those rewards to what you desire in life (do you want a big house or location independence?), mastery leads to career success.

For your personal life, the argument is subtler but I believe the same logic applies. If you have skill, achieving success becomes easier in almost any area of life:

1. Health - mastering a sport or exercise routine will keep you healthy, while mastering your own habits and willpower can ensure that they stick.
2. Relationships - mastering your interpersonal communication helps, whether you’re trying to find a new relationship or sustain an existing one.
3. Learning - improving the way you learn has a ripple effect, where ideas you pick up can be integrated into any other area of life.

Even if you disagree that mastery is the most important element, I think most people can agree it is at least a very important part of living a successful life.

What Encourages Being Skilled?

The biggest gains in skill come when you are situated on edge of your current competence. If you stay with what you’re already good at, you won’t improve much.

Being way outside your level of skill isn’t conducive to mastery either. Unless you can receive positive feedback, or regular wins amidst failures, it is difficult to learn from your mistakes. The best way to train as a sprinter isn’t to run against Olympic athletes from day one. It’s to race against someone just a bit faster than you, so you’ll know when you make improvements.

Therefore, practicing for improvement should always be at the edge of incompetence. Where you have enough skill for positive reinforcement, but not enough skill to be considered good–yet.

Living on the Edge of Incompetence

If you accept the first premise: that mastery is an essential ingredient to successful living. And, you accept the second premise: that mastery requires an environment of being on the edge of your incompetence. Then the conclusion is difficult to escape: successful living requires living on the edge of incompetence.

For the last several years I’ve made a deliberate effort to live on my edge of incompetence. I make an effort to choose goals and projects that are not just difficult, but require skills I don’t currently possess.

In the business projects I’ve undertake with this blog and website, I’ve always chosen ones that were slightly outside my skill level. I wrote and designed a free ebook, then created one for sale, then created one with an affiliate program, finally now I finished a hybrid between an information product and a monthly coaching service.

Successfully executing the latest project would have been a certain failure a few years ago, but I slowly advanced my edge of incompetence. And I did that by living on it.

My other goals have also put me on the edge of incompetence. From learning French, taking salsa classes, practicing to cook more elaborate dishes or training to do a pistol squat and handstand pushups. The goals weren’t just difficult (although challenge is important) they also pushed me beyond my current skills.

Hard Goals vs Skill-Acquiring Goals

It’s possible to set a difficult goal that doesn’t explicitly require gaining new skills. For example, let’s say I set a goal to give up junk food. This might be a difficult goal, but after having done 30-Day Trials as a method for changing habits for years, it probably wouldn’t improve my skills significantly.

Similarly, I could set business goals that don’t really express what skills are going to improve. I have a goal to increase my business income to a minimum of $3000 per month. That will be a challenging goal to meet, but it doesn’t make it clear what skills I’ll need to improve and where I’ll be sitting on the edge of my incompetency.

Deciding exactly how a particular project will push you to learn new skills is an often neglected step. It’s the difference between aimless and deliberate practice.

Setting up Camp at the Edge of Incompetence

I feel, for many people, they want to get out of their edge of incompetence as soon as possible. It’s cold, painful and irritating outside. Far nicer to be safe and warm within your existing skills.

So when they live their life, the venture to the edge of their skills only lasts as long as it needs to be. When they need to pass a test, they study really hard. However, when the exam no longer threatens their security, they don’t bother reading a book on a difficult subject.

Not only do I feel this is suboptimal, since these people will only increase their skills when forced to, it is also a lousy way to live.

If you set up camp on the edge of your incompetency, you get used to scaling your frustrations and learn to tolerate the uncertainty. So when most people are complaining about being outside the comfortable home of their skills, you feel fine because you never closed the door.

photo taken in my city

It’s been awhile since I posted about my goal to become fluent in French. For the new people here, I’ve been spending the last 8-9 months practicing the language, with the last 4.5 living in France.

First off, I’m definitely not a language learning expert. This is my first attempt at learning a foreign language, so don’t confuse me with polyglots such as Steve Kaufmann or Benny Lewis. Their feats certainly dwarf mine.

However, as I feel the story is perhaps more important than the end product, I’d like to share some of my mistakes and successes so far.

The Ups and Downs of Language Learning

Learning a language is an interesting goal because it fluctuates between grand overconfidence and crushing embarrassment. I’ll often pride myself in my French ability, until tongue-twisted in a seemingly easy situation.

My French friends will often comment that I speak, “super bien.” At which point they will make a comment and I won’t understand. Two steps forward, one step back. Language learning often feels like a drunken stumble towards progress.

Despite the struggles, I’ve found the experience incredibly enjoyable. Learning a foreign language has had benefits beyond just being able to communicate. It’s a skill, like karate or painting, that becomes more enjoyable the better you become.

My Progress: Where I am Now

I find this question impossible to answer, since it all depends on when you ask me.

I spent a week with a French-speaking Belgian family during the Christmas holidays. Completely in French, as they spoke little to no English.

In the beginning, I was quite happy with my progress. Then I made the novice mistake of referring to my roommate as “ma collocataire” instead of “mon collocataire”. (In French, the possessive adjective “my” takes on the gender of the object, so my statement was only consistent with having a female roommate)

This led to an interesting discussion about the attractiveness of my roommate until we eventually uncovered my mistake.

So the best answer I can give is that I’m fluent in French, except when I’m not.

What I Would Do Differently Next Time

First, I’d like to point out that I truly hope there will be a next time. Immersing myself in the exciting strangeness of a foreign culture and language has been a great experience. I already have thoughts about where the next challenge may take me.

However, I think I made a couple mistakes that hindered my language learning ability. Some of these were understandable at the time I made the decision, or even unavoidable. But, in the future I’ll be more aware of these potential pitfalls.

Mistake #1 – Not Being Immersed Enough

My classes are in English. My roommate is Canadian and English-speaking. And, living in a university city, many of my friends are foreign exchange students. The majority of my speaking time is in English.

I have been doing my best to correct this mistake, but I realize it is more difficult once you’ve already established yourself in a new country. I tried getting my classes switched to French but was turned down because the French courses already were well over capacity. I also have no plans to ditch my roommate or English-speaking friends.

So my solution has been to take smaller steps to immerse myself. My week-long complete immersion in Belgium was one. Biasing myself towards parties with people speaking mostly French is another. I’ve even recently dedicated a 30-Day Trial to start switching over my reading/listening to French.

Mistake #2 – Being Too Afraid of Inarticulateness

Yes, I’m a real person with fears and worries too.

When I started learning French, I was very self-conscious about my lack of articulateness. It feels embarrassing when you’re mid-sentence and can’t complete a thought. Especially early on when you don’t even have the words to explain your predicament and instead end with an awkward silence.

I feel it was worse because, having written for several years and polished my public speaking skills, I’d consider myself above average in articulateness in English. I’m not a wordsmith, but my abilities with my native language made me feel even more naked when speaking outside it.

Mistake #3 – Not Congratulating Myself Enough for Progress

Earlier this week I met a group of new exchange students. Many of them didn’t speak French at all. Although there were many people with limited to no French skills when I arrived in France (myself included), it didn’t stand out.

Conversing with them, I forgot how much I (and most of the other exchange students) progressed in French. Surrounded in a bubble with people who speak the language much better than I do, it was easy to forget that I actually was making progress.

I believe confidence comes from legitimate success. But if you don’t acknowledge that success when it comes, or can’t perceive it, then you can’t improve.

Language Learning, Cultural Immersion and the Adventurous Life

For many of the readers my foray into learning a foreign language is just an interesting anecdote. Most of you have no plans to leave home, live in a foreign culture and take on the challenges that come with it. That’s okay.

But I think learning languages speaks to a broader mission. The goal to live an adventurous life. I would say that people tend to emphasize the exciting experiences as key ingredients in an adventurous life–wild parties, tourism or sky diving.

However, that emphasis ignores what I feel is a more important ingredient: the patient process of learning new skills. Without some degree of sweat and difficulty, adventures are just postcards, not memories.

I could have easily lived in France, especially this city, without bothering to learn more than basic French. But if I had chosen that path I would have missed the true challenge and beautiful strangeness that learning a foreign language has given me.

From the Web

Stop Studying, Start Learning – Here’s an interview I did with Liam about holistic learning for his new program geared towards pre-med students.

Liam’s also opening a new program offering coaching and school help for pre-med students. Like my recent sell-out, Liam only has a limited number of seats in the program, so if you’re interested in a learning program aimed specifically at pre-med students check out the link above.

From the Archives

7 Reasons the Gym is Better than Therapy – “I have a love affair with my gym.  She’s not much to look at: a rubber track and weight room in a dank basement, but appearances aren’t everything.  She’s there on my best days and on my worst days.  We never fight, and she doesn’t care what I look like as long as I give her my full attention for a few hours a week.”

Learning on Steroids

Earlier this week I mentioned I just opened a new program designed to implement rapid learning tactics. It was a quick sell-out, but I have hopes I can reopen the program again.

It’s been less than one week, but I’ve already received dozens of 30-Day Trials from people explaining how they are going to start training some of the ideas. It has been an interesting experiment for me, because for the first time with a large group, I’m actually witnessing how some of the ideas are being applied.

Too often in the online info-product area, there is a 95% focus on marketing with scant resources aimed at actually making a good product. I don’t claim to have perfected it, in the least.  But my hope is that rigorous data gathering from following a group over several months can give me a good picture of what typical students can achieve.

I’m a fan of early-rising as a productivity tool. I would argue that most people have the strongest motivation to work in the morning or afternoon hours, so waking up earlier means you can gain productive time.

There is also something psychological about waking up early. When you successfully achieve the goal of getting out of bed early, that gives you some momentum for all the other things you need to do in a day.

However, I think there is an important exception to this mantra of early rising. That is that sleep is more important than waking up early. Early rising only works if you are able to go to bed earlier, I believe getting your full sleep for a night trumps any early-rising considerations.

Why I’m (Now) an Inconsistent Early Riser

A few years ago, I wrote a few articles on waking up early and the benefits to productivity. At the time of those articles, I was rising pretty consistently at 5:30 or 6:00am. I have even gone for thirty-day stretches waking up early every single day, even on weekends.

However, now I would say I’m an inconsistent early riser at best. Today I woke up at 6:45, and yesterday I woke up at 6:15, but other times I sleep in well past 10am.

The reason for my switch isn’t out of laziness. Although I have had stumbles with habits before, they are usually pretty easy to fix. The switch is because I’ve found the early-rising habit isn’t ideal, at least when practiced on a consistent basis, in my life anymore.

Early Rising is Great, Having Enough Sleep is Better

Early rising is a great habit, provided your evenings are relatively quiet. When my life revolves around work or studies, going to bed earlier to compensate for early rising is a decent trade off. However, if I’m traveling, socializing or partying, it’s almost impossible to keep it up.

I’ve since realized that, whatever the benefits of waking up a bit earlier are, they are trumped by missing sleep. If waking up early starts your day with +1, having a serious sleep deficit starts your day off at -5.

Getting enough sleep for me means at least 8 hours. I’m not someone who can get by for more than a few days on 4 hours per night of sleep. I can’t even get by with six hours.

I think my abandonment of the consistent early-rising schedule is a by-product of my life getting more complex (and interesting). When my entire focus was self-development and work, it fit nicely. Now that my focus has shifted to social-development and more far-reaching goals, it comes up short.

Inconsistent Early Rising is the Alternative

My solution has been to become an inconsistent early riser. Which means that most of the time, when life keeps me up past 10-11pm, I’ll focus on getting as much of my 8 hours as I can.

However, when my focus needs to shift mostly to work, I can wake up early those days to get the productivity-enabling benefits.

This week, for example, I had several group assignments, 7.5 hours at school each day, a new product launch, blog writing and errands with the French bureaucracy to complete my visa work. Waking up early yesterday and today have helped me chew away at my weekly goals list fast enough that I should still be able to relax on the weekend.

The disadvantage of inconsistency is it requires more discipline to get up early. When I had trained myself to wake up at 5:30 without fail, I never pressed the snooze button. I always awoke on the first ring. Today, however I hit it once or twice before finally getting up.

I think if I were to go back to a mostly-work focus for a longer period of time, such as a month or two, I might try the early-riser schedule again. But, for now, getting enough sleep wins out as the best way to stay healthy and sane.

As I mentioned earlier this week, the best way to be productive is to work hard and commit to less. However, it raises an important point, what if the few commitments you do keep simply have too much work? How do you handle it?

I recently had a conversation with Stefan Knapen, a medical student and writer for StudySuccessful.com. He claimed the biggest challenge of medical school was that there was so much of it. Thousands of pages of reading and hundreds of hours of lectures, all needing to be learned.

This situation probably sounds familiar to many students or workers: the problem isn’t any specific task, the volume of work is simply too high.

Omit, Organize, Optimize

In my mind, there are really only three ways you can be more productive when you have a set workload:

1. You can omit work by removing commitments. Some commitments aren’t strictly necessary, so if you can get out of them at the nearest juncture, you will save your sanity.
2. You can organize yourself and plan carefully to manage the volume. Know what needs to be done, how much and how you will split it into daily increments.
3. You can optimize the way you do the tasks themselves so they take less time or energy.

The best places to start are the most obvious. They are usually the biggest wins for the least effort.

Omissions should come first. Eliminating one commitment can be worth the carefully organization or optimization of three.

Organizing should come second. Organizing your entire workload for a year may only take a weekend, to design and 2-3 months to put into practice, but after that you’re set.

Optimizing should come last. Once you’re left with just the essential commitments and you have a plan, then optimizing can help. For students, this might mean learning to take better notes or read faster.

The details of how I accomplish the last two steps are covered deeply in my guide. But I also have a ton of free articles you can read here, here and here.

—

One quick last note for Learning on Steroids, my program designed to implement rapid learning tactics in your life. The email list has already been getting updates about the program and it will go live on Saturday (but only if you’re on the list).

My new motto for 2010, inspired by Cal’s similar suggestion, is to work hard, but commit to less.

To be fair, it isn’t a new motto. I’ve been running with this one for the latter half of 2009, so it isn’t exactly a resolution, but an affirmation of what I’ve already been doing. However, even in the last 6-8 months following that motto has helped me enormously.

How I Learned This Lesson the Hard Way

To be honest, the simplicity movement never really struck a chord with me. I’ve always been trying to live a more interesting, adventurous and accomplished life, not eliminate stress. I wanted to do more, not less.

So, when I had new opportunities, I signed up. When I was offered the position of managing a Toastmasters’ club, I accepted. I took on a volunteer fundraising position. Signed up for an intense project-oriented class which required a lot of travel and a full-time work load.

At first managing a business, full-time classes, full-time projects, volunteering and other activities was fine. But after eight months I was starting to slip. My goals slipped from being accomplished to merely surviving the grind.

The results of this overcommitment binge weren’t impressive. This business went from supporting me full-time in 2008, to struggling painfully in the early part of 2009. I broke up with my girlfriend. My fitness level dropped. Stress was at an all-time high.

I learned my lesson. Everyone has their limit, and I got to know mine.

The Distinction Between Hard Work and Commitment

Later, I learned I could have been saved some of this anguish if I had made a simple distinction in my head: the difference between working hard and committing too much.

The reason I rejected the simplicity movement is, to me, they seemed to ignore the importance of hard work. I didn’t want the 4-hour workweek, I wanted to know how I could work more on the things that mattered to me.

However, hard work isn’t the same as commitment. Commitments are the things you’ve promised to do, maybe to yourself, but more often to other people. They are the things you’ve said “yes” to beforehand, so you can’t say “no” later.

My fallacy was that I assumed working hard and committing to many things were the same. But in practice, the two are often opposite goals.

Why Overcommitting Leads to Underworking

I’ve accepted that as a rule of human nature: have-to’s always dominate shoulds. The things you have committed to always take precedent. Even if they won’t have a long-term impact in your life.

As a result, when you commit yourself to obligations in the future, you reduce the energy and time you have to focus on the really important things. When I signed up as a volunteer, that time and energy was stripped from my day before I could consider working on personal projects.

Sure, I could have just ignored the obligations. But that would mean breaking promises and hurting people that needed me. Not a happy decision to make.

Commitments are like taxes. They get taken off your paycheck before you get to touch them, and if you’re lucky you’ll get a bit back in April. When I overcommitted, I found all of my energy and time was spent before I could touch it.

2010 Motto: Work Hard, Commit to Less

My solution in the future is to pick only one or two things that matter to me and commit to them. That doesn’t mean I can’t pursue other goals, activities or interests. Just that I don’t make a commitment to them.

For example, when I did my annual review, I had only two goals:

1. Return my business back to a reliable full-time income and exceed the income levels of 2008.
2. Speak French fluently. Fluency is hard to define, so my goal is to be comfortable reading, writing and speaking in most casual situations.

Both of these goals are achievable, but only if I can spend a significant amount of time and energy working hard on them.

This doesn’t mean I won’t have other interests or side-goals. Simply that they will come second. Some people were confused after this article, believing I advocate doing all of your interests with equal commitment levels. Completely the opposite: having multiple interests is possible only if you know which 1-2 of them are absolute musts.

I have many different side-goals I work on in my spare time, but aren’t commitments for me. Here are a few I’m currently working on:

• Doing a hand-stand pushup (without aid of a wall)
• Learning to cook
• Practicing web programming
• Self-studying economics and philosphy

The point is that I put zero pressure on myself to work on these things. I do them because I enjoy them and they correspond with activities I already do as a habit.

Commit Less Must Be Paired With Hard Work

If undercommitment isn’t paired with hard work you just have laziness. This is probably why I rebelled against so much simplicity oriented advice. It didn’t match my reality.

Committing to less can enable you to spend time each day on hard focus. Or it can enable you to play video games all day and crawl Facebook. The will to work hard at the few commitments you do keep is equally important to a philosophy of simplicity.

So my 2010 is a continuation of the latter part of my 2009: work hard, commit to less. What’s your motto for 2010?

Today is the last day of the decade. I still remember how my day was at December 31, 1999. The whole world was waiting for the new millennium. There were big celebrations all around the world. Some people worried that the computers would crash when the new millennium began.

It’s hard to believe, but that day had been ten years ago! It’s amazing how fast time flies.

How has your life been this decade? How are you today compared with you were ten years ago? Do you think you’ve been the best that you can be?

Let’s ponder these questions as the new decade coming. And let’s make the new decade a much better one for all of us.

Happy new year!

Photo by mangloard

I like doing thought experiments because they can reveal a lot about why we do the things we do. Today, I’d like to propose a simple thought experiment for all the students reading here:

What if you never graduated from university?

Not that you would drop out, but simply that you could never complete your degree program. Here are a few immediate consequences that spring to mind:

1. You would never get a diploma. Nobody would ever hand you a piece of paper declaring your knowledge in a particular field.
2. You would never stop going to classes.
3. You would need to balance education with earning an income. Classes cost money, or at the very least, don’t pay you (excluding scholarships). Therefore living would mean striking a balance with your perpetual school work and income demands.
4. University wouldn’t be a “phase”. Rather than just being a bizarre time in your life segregated with your peers away from the “real world”, school would just be another facet of regular life. Like going to the gym or doing laundry.

This is Happening Now

I bring up this thought experiment because I believe something close to this may be the reality very soon for more people.

With universities increasingly offering so-called “open courseware” and the abundance of self-education resources on the web, it seems likely that there will emerge a class of people who never leave the educational setting.

Sure, these people will need careers and face the demands of regular life, so I think the Van Wilder-esque stereotype of the perpetual student isn’t accurate. But, I do foresee, with increasing access to cheap self-education material, the numbers of Renaissance men and women who are deeply educated will increase.

How Will You Compete?

Admittedly, just as most people today haven’t touched a book after school, most people will continue to treat learning as a 4-year program. But even if this shift in the ease and quality in self-education resources increases the autodidacts from 0.2% to 1%, you’d still have 5x as many people wildly knowledgeable about almost everything.

I think this shift is really raising the bar for what will be expected of people to compete in a modern world. Mediocre skill and partial education aren’t going to cut it when a kid from Mumbai can accumulate a PhD’s worth of knowledge from the web.

However, I think for most the people here, this represents a fantastic opportunity. Many of the people here are interested in ruthless self-education and working on the slow and hard path to mastery. I think if any group will benefit from these shifts, it’s probably the typical profile of the person reading this blog.

Education Forever?

Tim Ferriss helped popularize the concept of the 4-Hour Workweek by offering readers a thought experiment: what if you could never retire? Considering the layoffs, recession and struggling pension plans, that isn’t so farfetched in today’s world.

So I want you to consider an alternate hypothesis: that the world expects you never to graduate from school (at least, unofficially). That you may never reach a point where your life transitions from learn to work, and instead is always a mix.

How would you live in such a world? Do you already? I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts in the comments.