(Pam Slim here once again to give you a sneak peek into a discussion between Martha and Seth Godin.  Both are doing a lot of thinking about the future of the publishing industry, as well as the emerging role of author as coach and leader. Enjoy, and please share your reactions in the comments below!)

Martha:

Drawing and painting were used to convey images before photography, so representational art was considered most valuable.  When photography was invented, realistic images could be replicated easily and accurately, so the value of drawing/painting as representation collapsed.  Impressionism and other non-representational genres emerged as “valuable” art.

For centuries, the only way you could hear a musical piece written by a certain musician was to write down the music note for note and get another musician to play it exactly as the first one had. When recording equipment was invented, replication was easy and accurate.  Immediately, jazz and other improvisational forms became highly valuable.

You see where I’m going with this, right?  Since Gutenberg, the printed book was the cheapest, quickest way to transfer a large block of written work.  With Internet technology making replication quick and cheap, publishers everywhere are seeing themselves become unnecessary.

Question:  What is the literary equivalent of impressionism or jazz?

Because that’s what’s going to become valuable in what has always been the book world.  I have a few ideas of my own, but I’m dying to hear your take on this.

Seth:

Painting and music moved in two different directions because of technology.

Painters discovered that in order to succeed, they needed to become more human, more emotional and less like cameras. Pushing to the cutting edge and being personal were the two ways painters thrived over the last hundred years. When you see a painting, you probably know who made it.

Musicians discovered that in order to succeeded, they needed to create music that would spread, recordings that would be shared and talked about and bought in bulk. They didn’t write on commission for the king, they wrote for the radio. Ideas that spread, win.

Writers are discovering that a book that tells people how to do something is obsolete. Knowledge no longer needs to live in an arcane format like a book. And facts are free, because they spread easily.

So, writing that is worth paying for is either encased in a souvenir-like rarity, like a limited edition, or a reading or a conference…or it’s delivered quickly and personally so that the convenience and exclusivity is worth a premium or it’s personal and direct… almost bespoke.

The last is the biggest opportunity. Our tribes need leaders. We need people who will assemble and introduce and connect and lead. People who will help us get to where we want to go. Writing (at least a certain kind of writing) is now more like coaching or governing or teaching. And there’s a real shortage of that and we’ll happily pay to be part of this tribe if someone will only step up and lead us.

—

Seth Godin blogs at www.sethgodin.typepad.com. His new book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? hits shelves today.

Hello, dreamy friends!

As you know from our frequent conversations, I’m a HUGE lover of Asian philosophy (though I am trying to take off a few pounds).  Finding the world’s wisest book, the Tao te Ching, was one of the two good things that came from my naive college decision to major in Chinese, a language for which I have the aptitude of a potato.

The other good thing was my early and continuing exposure to a phenomenon known as Japlish, Chingrish, or Engrish, depending on your source.  Recently, I found the meaning of life expressed so concisely in a few words of Engrish that the Tao te Ching now seems overdone by comparison.  Allow me to explain.

Engrish for All

On both sides of the Pacific Ocean, humans are busily slapping foreign words on T-shirts, signs, bags, and magazines, with only the vaguest idea what these words actually mean.  Asians love the look of certain English words, as we love the look of Asian characters.  But we often use these words without quite catching the nuance of native speakers.  For example:

Thus it is that early ads selling Coca Cola in China bore characters (chosen by Americans) that were supposed to recommend a refreshing beverage, but actually said “”Bite the Wax Tadpole!”  Pepsi, not to be outdone, ran ads trumpeting, “Come alive, you’re in the Pepsi generation!”  which really said “Pepsi will make your ancestors come back from the dead.”  This made Chinese consumers uneasy in the same way this Chinese sign unnerves Americans:

When I lived in Singapore, I thrilled to daily doses of Chinglish, like the whippy marketing slogans on my favorite brand of toilet paper (“Clean Grape Toilet Tissue: It’s sturdy and tenacious!”) and my South Winds water cooler (“When we hear the voice of the south wind, we always meet with happy chances.  Now is the time!  Let your hot heart swing with it together!  Good luck!”).

After returning from Asia, I missed all the happy chances that made my hot heart swing with it together.  But now, thanks to a website called “Engrish.com,” we can all enjoy the fount of wisdom that comes from randomly swapping Asian/English words.

It was on this site that I found the meaning of life stated with such poetic brevity that it took my breath away.  Here it is:

This bag is my new scripture, my latest memoir, and my motto for 2010.  It is changing my life, and it can change yours too.

My Rife-Changing Resorution

For as long as we’ve known one another, you’ll recall, I’ve made just one New Year’s resolution each year–but I always keep that resolution.  Try this only if you cope well with change, because it will make over your life like the Oprah Show on steroids.

For example, my 1990 resolution was not to tell a single lie for the entire year.  This immediately cost me the vast majority of my relationships, plus my career, my home, and my religion.  The only thing I got back—myself—barely seemed worth it.  (But things worked out well.  I gradually began to tolerate, then grudgingly accepted myself.  Flash forward: myself and I moved in together, and now I just can’t imagine how I got along without myself!  We’re, like, practically the same person!)

So this year I couldn’t wait to open my resolution.  I started a little early, on my birthday, about six weeks ago.

This year’s resolution?  During 2010, I will question any thought that causes me any kind of unpleasant sensation whatsoever.

Revorutionary Thinking

Now, I’ve been questioning my painful thoughts for years, but until recently there were so many it didn’t even occur to me that I could get rid of ALL of them.  It would have been like performing a whole-body electrolysis on Sasquatch.  Which could easily happen at this spa in Thailand.

But that’s another story.

My point here is that toward the end of 2009, I noticed my negative thoughts slowing down, thinning out, and becoming more obviously absurd, like the elderly grayhound pictured below.  So I decided it was worth attempting to eliminate them entirely.

My recent negative thoughts.

Total Tolerance for No Tolerance

My resolution is basically a “no tolerance” policy for thoughts that caused me to feel trapped in any degree of suffering.  (Quick reminder:  I believe the fact that a thought causes suffering is evidence it’s false, and that questioning such thoughts until their untruth is obvious clears them out of the mind, thus setting the thinker free.)

Ironically, the most important step in dissolving a thought is to love it unreservedly as if it’s a brand new baby.  So my 2010 policy is absolute tolerance of all thoughts for which I have no tolerance.  This may sound odd, but as the following masterpiece emphasizes, it’s always a natural and it exists!

So for weeks, I’ve been noticing every negative thought and taking a few minutes to question it lovingly until it dissolves, like Jack Bauer handling a terrorist.

I’ve found that this causes the running verbal commentary in my mind to stop.  And in the absence of thinking, just as all those wacky mystics have been telling us for centuries, the simple perception of what is present fills one’s awareness with a strangely vibrant stillness.  Truly, my mind is paralyzed, and it is a delightful day!  There is…how shall I say…no hullabaloo!

Everything Is Silly

I’d love it if you joined me in my 2010 resolution.  But I must warn you:  If you decide to question your thoughts, expect to spend more and more of your time laughing.  When I completely accept a thought that makes me sad, mad, or scared, it generally starts to seem amusing almost immediately.

For example, when I have a sorrowful thought, I allow it to be by reminding it of this incisive Asian aphorism:

When I’m frightened, I quote to my scared self the riveting, evocative prose from another Japanese handbag:

And when I burn with rage over the malfeasance of other drivers in traffic, the inconsideration of acquaintances, or the whole Tiger Woods thing, I find solace and fellowship by reading this sign from a home in Southeast Asia:

As I regard these testaments to negative human emotions, I realize that my darkest thoughts probably seem equally ridiculous to a state of being that speaks the language of pure presence.  I experience anew the powerful truth of impermanence, summed up here so compellingly:

And almost immediately, I am at peace.

For the Love of Truth

I made my “no lies” resolution after a surgery where I encountered the White Light people sometimes describe after near-death experiences.  What surprised me most about this overwhelming experience of love and truth was that the White Light and I spent almost all our time together laughing like there was no tomorrow.  Because, of course, there really is no tomorrow.  There is only now, and even the concept of “tomorrow” is Engrish to anyone who lives outside of time. I think all spiritual masters, human or luminous, find our mental resistance to reality adorably hilarious.

Long ago, Asian philosophy brought me to the idea that our mental stories are the source of suffering.  Now I find that dissolving every negative thought really does fill me with jolliness.  And if I ever begin to think otherwise, I  only need to glance at a trans-Pacific handbag to remind me.  May you too, my dreamy friend, have a year made up of delightful days.

This is Martha’s long lost blog editor Pamela Slim stepping in for a moment to let you know about a cool project that Martha just participated in with Seth Godin.

What Matters Now is an e-book filled with delicious one-page essays like Elizabeth Gilbert on ease and Daniel Pink on autonomy and Tom Peters on excellence.

And our very own Martha Beck on world healers.

It talks about dignity, vision, enrichment and sacrifice.

And how you recognize enough.

The eclectic group of 71 authors will stimulate you to think and feel and question your beliefs.

All so you can change your corner of the world.

So download a copy at this link.  It is free. Read it. Pass it on. Share it with your friends. Talk about it.

What Matters Now says “big thoughts and small actions make a difference.”

What are yours?

Back in the days when humans still lived in a pristine relationship with nature, a woman my age wouldn’t have spent more than four decades eating genetically altered food, unknowingly consuming insecticide with her vegetables, and noshing on processed snacks packed with preservatives.  She wouldn’t have spent all those years parked on her voluminous rump, getting no physical exercise most of each day.

That’s because in those days, a woman my age would have been dead for twenty years.

Come on, face it: Statistically speaking, modern conveniences have given a lot more than they’ve taken in terms of healthy and longevity.  That’s why I’m relaxed about things most Whole Foods customers abhor.  I have various friends who are militant about their whole-food, live-food, sanctified-by-the-nutrition-gods food, and while these folks are as healthy as horses, they also tend to be murdered by people they keep criticizing for eating Twinkies.

Food Nazi and Twinkie Lover

That said, you all know I’m a big back-to-nature buff.  And I’m always looking for ways to make my clients’ lives work better.  So I was intrigued when my friend Betsy informed me about one way we’ve strayed from our biological best path.  We have abandoned our parasites.

Hookworms and Happiness

There’s surprisingly robust research that suggests we co-evolved with many parasites in a symbiotic way.  For example, being infested with hookworms apparently activates a chain reaction that can heal allergies, asthma, and various irritable bowel syndromes.  I’m not kidding.

That’s why one guy, whose story appears on several internet sites but whose name is wisely obscured, took his serious allergies and asthma to the African nation of Cameroon, which is apparently the Disneyland of parasites.  Then he took off his shoes and tromped around in piles of human feces, an idea he no doubt read in his guidebook, “Fun and Friendly Things To Do In the Third World.”

Use this to cure that:

“I became infested almost immediately,” he writes. “It must have been either the first or second day I spent walking barefoot through the latrines. When one thinks of it this was an enormous piece of luck.”

Okay.  One is thinking of it, but one is having a hard time agreeing.

Anyway, this guy says his asthma went away (just as it went away from patients in legitimate studies at places like the University of Nottingham).

Below: test subjects from the University of Nottingham

Pooping for Profits

These days, our hookworm-infested gentleman makes money harvesting the larvae of his new pets, which he gets from his own…well, yes.  He sells the larvae to other people who have allergies but lack the wealthy jet-set’s ability to go lollygagging around latrines in Cameroon any time they darn well please.

On a similar note, doctors now use “medical maggots” to clean wounds, and leeches to keep blood from coagulating.  One website sells tapeworms to people who want to lose weight: swallow the worm, lose the weight, take a worm-killing pill, bada bing, bada boom, you have thighs like a gazelle.  Also anemia, post-traumatic stress, and a story that means no one will ever marry you, but hey!  It’s better to look good than to feel good, right?

In light of these findings, I’ve been wondering—any responsible life coach would—if there are other healthy primordial conditions or behaviors we modern humans have abandoned.  Could we have evolved to benefit from many parasites that make me want to hurl?  Could the tendency to hurl be cured by ticks?

It is possible.

So here’s a list of little-known ancient biological truths (or not) that I think might restore our natural health.  There is no evidence whatsoever to support any of them.  I just have a feeling.

Martha’s List of Possible Primordial Cures for Whatever Ails You

• Babies should only be cleaned by dogs.
• A mouse in your house means no sties in your eyes.
• Bake with dung, it keeps you young!
• Armpit odor prevents nightmares and sleep crime.
• Fine lines and wrinkles around the eyes and mouth virtually disappear if you pound them with a rock.
• A moldy fridge makes a fertile mind.
• Stabbing a yak cures back pain (for you, not for the yak).
• Toe fungus makes you joyful.
• Lice stop you from running mad.

These are just a few bits of ancient wisdom that occurred to me on the fly.  If you have any other back-to-nature practices I can incorporate into my life coaching, by all means share them!  It’s time to start licking our meat clean and re-connecting with all the disgusting parasites that use humans as hosts.  Which reminds me, it’s time for my political pundit shows.  I think they make me immune to swine flu.

(Of All Hope of Sounding Comprehensible)

Well, I’m back in the States again after another amazing trip to South Africa.  I had a wonderful time connecting with many of our fabulous SA coaches, helping run the wilderness STAR (Self-Transformation Adventure Retreat) and beta-testing a plan to help some brilliant educators transform a small African village.

It’s always a bit of a bummer to be an American overseas, because everyone else seems to have been brought up in a regular Babel of linguistic influences, and they all speak a little of this, a tad of that.  It’s bad enough in Europe, where the local lingos, whatever they are, at least have English cognates.  In South Africa, everyone but me seems to speak approximately 80 languages, none of them remotely similar to anything I’ve ever heard.

To remedy this situation, I am once again trying to Teach Myself Zulu.  I’m serious.  I ordered some Teach Yourself Zulu CDs from Amazon.com and everything.

The first CD is sobering; not only is Zulu from a language family about which I know nothing (Bantu), it’s also a tonal language AND a click dialect.  The concept of tones is fine with me, since I’ve studied Chinese.  But the clicks are going to be a real challenge.  I’ve asked click-dialect speakers to help me pronounce Zulu words, and after a few repetitions they always look at me with despair in their eyes, like people trying to teach a chicken to knit.

Fortunately, my Teach Yourself CDs have a careful description of all the click variations in Zulu.  Some South African languages are so click-laden that native speakers sound as if they’re simultaneously talking and operating tiny keyboards with their tonsils.  Zulu, I’m glad to report, has only three basic clicks, each of which has four variations.  I couldn’t distinguish between the variations to get out of hot-tubbing with Dick Cheney.

Fortunately, the three basic clicks are described in Teach Yourself Zulu with a cozy clarity that makes a lot of sense.  To wit:

The first click, says the instructor on my CD (who sounds like Queen Elizabeth with an Afrikaans accent) is “the sound many people make when annoyed.” I know the sound I make when annoyed: it’s a high, whimpering gasp, like a dog who desperately wants something it is not allowed to have.  “Hnnng, hnng, hnng, hnng.”  Like that.  Good.  One down, two to go.

The second click, says Queen Elizabeth, is “the sound a cork makes popping out of a bottle.” This is vaguely familiar to me, but I’m at a disadvantage because I grew up Mormon, and never heard a cork popping out of a bottle until I was past the language-development years.  So I’ll make the sound of a cap coming off a root beer bottle: “PFFFFfffff.”  I figure that will do.

The third Zulu click, according to Queen Elizabeth, is (I am not making this up) “the sound commonly made when urging a horse.”  I assume this means a horse that one is riding.  The sound I make to urge a horse I’m riding is as follows:  “Please don’t run please don’t run DON’T RUN!  STOP!  STAY!  SIT! HELP!

So this is how my Zulu practice dialogue would sound if you translated the meaning into English:

MARTHA’S ZULU PRACTICE DIALOGUE

“Good morning, Queen Elizabeth PLEASE DON’T RUN!  So nice to see you hnnng hnnng hnnng.”

“Good morning, Mr. Cheney PFFFfffff.  I would like to hnnng hnnng hnnng buy some edible grubs SIT! HELP! such as those I have seen DON’T RUN! on the PFFFfffff Discovery Channel hnnng hnnng hnnng.”

“Of course PFFFfffff, madame STOP!  HELP!  Would you hnnng hnnng hnnng like a large one PFFFfffff?”

“I’d prefer PLEASE DON’T RUN! two small ones hnnng hnnng hnnng PFFFffff.”

“An excellent PFFFfff choice, madame SIT! STAY!  The large ones sometimes pupate hnnng hnnng hnnng if not refrigerated HELP!  SIT! PFFFffff.”

And so on.

I just can’t wait to show my Zulu-speaking friends how much I’ve learned!  I’m sure they’ll be motivated by the amount of progress I’ve made, in the sense that teaching chickens to knit will suddenly seem easy by comparison teaching me to talk.

So now I must go practice my clicks.  A huge thank-you to all my dear friends around the world for their tolerance, generosity, and companionship.  The network of the Tribe wraps itself all the way around this delicate planet of ours, and I am so grateful.

First of all, I want to register a simultaneous apology and complaint:  My blog won’t post pictures today.  This has made me feel so defeated I think I’ll go back to bed.  Which leads me to today’s topic…

Something incredibly bizarre happened to me last night. I turned out the light at midnight, but didn’t fall asleep right away, because—this is the bizarre part—I wasn’t tired.

I didn’t know that was even possible. True, I was only really tired during one period of my life, but that period lasted from January of 1970 until this past June. By then I’d begun getting Messages From the Universe indicating that I’d spent enough time in a physical and mental fog. For example:

• Having heard that Thomas Edison relied on refreshing mini-naps, I started taking them regularly. While driving.
• I had elaborate, compulsive fantasies about sleeping with all the most beautiful people I know. None of these fantasies involved sex.
• My caffeine-related jitters were interfering with seismographic readings as far away as Bangladesh.
• I kept confusing Anne Coulter with Kim Jong-Il.
• I was legally required to change the eye-color listing on my driver’s license from “blue” to “red.”
• One night in a hotel room, judgment deeply impaired, I used the scissors from my travel sewing kit to give myself a haircut that was basically an Homage to Sheep Shearing.

Then an intuitive friend said something I thought was very profound: “What would you do if you knew that every good thing in your life depended on your getting enough rest? Because it does.”

At least I think that’s what she said. And I think it was my intuitive friend. It could have been the cashier at Target. Or Kim Jong-Il. It’s all sort of hazy.

Anyway, at that moment I made a radical decision: I would put sleep above all other priorities until I was no longer tired. Every night, I would sleep until I woke up. I would consume no stimulants, and I would go back to dreamland whenever I felt fatigued.

When I woke up six weeks later, the whole world seemed shiny and attractive, like Patrick Stewart’s head. I was filled with ideas. My eye-bags had shrunk to the point where they looked less like Hefty garbage disposal units than tasteful evening clutches. I felt an inner peace I thought came only from enlightenment or horse tranquilizers.

That was yesterday, and it was followed by the bizarre experience mentioned above: I just lay there, awake and perky, feeling the amazing sensation of not being tired, and vowing that somehow, I’d make the feeling last.

So I invite you to join me in something I’m calling the Adequate-Sleep Life-Enhancing Experimental Project (ASLEEP). The requirements for membership are simple: we sleep until we aren’t tired, whenver possible. And I mean WHENEVER POSSIBLE, as in, if you show up at your best friend’s wedding tired, you take a pillow and sleep through the ceremony. Better yet, don’t show. Man up. Stay in bed.

If you violate the project’s strict standards, the rest of us… won’t even know about it. We’re ASLEEP, remember? We don’t check up on our collaborators, evaluate performance, or do a damn thing with the data from our research. All we do is enjoy life a hell of a lot more than we did when we were always tired. Because every good thing really does depend on rest. Go get some.

Maybe I like this joke because tortoises are my totem animals (they remind me to take life in turtle steps, keep a tough outside but stay soft inside, stick my neck out to move forward, etc., etc.).  Here’s the joke:

 A turtle gets mugged by a large, hostile snail.  When the police ask him what happened, the turtle stammers, “I…I don’t know, officer.  It all happened so fast….”

That’s the way this summer is going for me.  It’s very, very slow, but when I look back on it, the time seems to have gone in a flash.  I used to worry about this, but I’ve recently been convinced that it’s a good thing.  Those of you who’ve roamed within earshot of me this past month have heard me raving about the process of skill development in the brain.  It turns out those “turtle steps” I take may actually be more useful than a jackrabbit sprint.

How Slow Can You Go?

My obsession with skill development comes from reading a book by Daniel Coyle, entitled The Talent Code.  Coyle describes the way the brain develops high levels of skill—basically, by wrapping a neural synapse in more and more layers of myelin, the waxy substance that coats our nerves like the plastic on a copper electric wire. 

The more myelin you’ve got, the faster and more preferentially the neuron will fire.  And the way to develop more myelin is something Coyle calls “deep practice.”  Repeating a skill-based action rapidly over and over won’t develop as much skill as doing it slowly, correcting your errors, then doing it slowly and correcting each tiny error again.  “It’s not how fast you can do it,” Coyle writes, quoting a famous tennis coach.  “It’s how slow you can do it right.”

Me gusta mucho.

The Firebirds

We residents of Phoenix should rejoice at this discovery, especially in the summer, because Phoenicians slow down this time of year.  I mean a lot.  In case you didn’t know, it gets hot here.  No, really.  This city was named after the mythical bird that burned itself up every so often, only to be reborn from the ashes, because birds that venture out during summer days frequently burst into flames.

Phoenix pigeon spontaneously combusting.

Or possibly the Holy Ghost.

The sun does not rise over Phoenix on a summer morning; it heaves itself over the horizon like a World Wrestling Federation steroid abuser and beats the crap out of the earth for fourteen straight hours before grumbling off to its locker room in the west, where it prepares for another onslaught.

So yeah, we slow down in the summer months.  A couple of times a day, Phoenicians may percolate from one air-conditioned space to another, but slowly, so as to generate no temperature rise within the body.  Walk at a normal pace in a Phoenix summer, and your brain will solidify in your head like a poached egg.  Errands are best run—or rather, ambled—between two and four o’clock in the morning, when you stand a reasonable chance of opening your car door without searing all the flesh off your palms. 

As someone who works from home year round, preferably in pajamas, I do what turtles do: lurk in shady places, take an occasional step forward, and watch out for hostile snails.  I strongly encourage this for you, too.  You can learn a lot living like a tortoise.  Here are some of my activities this summer, and what I am very slowly learning from them:

Self-Improving Thing One

This summer, I have watched every episode of the TV show So You Think You Can Dance.  This has not taught me to dance.  (Are you serious?  There’s not enough sweat in the world to cool a dancing Phoenician).  What it’s taught me is that there are human beings who get more exercise in three minutes than I’ve accumulated in my entire lifetime. 

Mary Murphy Rendering an Opinion    Daughter of Zeus and Barbie

I’m talking, of course, about Mary Murphy, a delightful woman and one of the show’s judges, who gets her workouts by shrieking about Mexican food at a decibel level that requires all the other judges to wear adult diapers.  The dancers themselves are not actually human beings.  They are the result of sexual congress between Greek gods and Barbie dolls.  If you haven’t watched them, you should.  Seriously.

Self-Improving Thing Two

After climbing a mesquite tree in the middle of the night to hang up a squirrel-proof birdfeeder, I learned that squirrel-proof bird feeders are also largely bird-proof.  However, after weeks of depressingly low sales to neighborhood birds, my feeder was discovered by two Gila woodpeckers, who now show up every morning.  I named them Sodom and Gomorrah.  (Just because.  They did nothing to deserve it.)  Their daily visit are a high point in my life, probably because, as has so often been noted, I am on the wrong medication.

                       Animal-proof feeder.            Sodom.  Or maybe Gomorrah.  I can’t really tell.

Self-Improving Thing Three

Boldly mastering my DVD player after a mere six years of skill development, I just managed to watch the movie Taken, with Liam Neeson.  From this I learned that if you haven’t really been there for your kids during their childhood, you can make up for it when they’re teenagers with a rampage of torture, murder, and car theft.  The police, realizing that you are merely parenting, will leave you alone, especially if you shoot their wives in the arm.

Loving father, inspired by the movies, winning his children’s hearts.

Self-Improving Thing Four

Um…er….  Actually, there isn’t a Thing Four.  I’m trying to pace myself, dammit!

Signing Off for Myelin Synthesis

So that’s what I’m doing, thus far, on my summer vacation.  If you’re out there in Winnipeg or Pluto or other places that are notable for cool weather, you may not have slowed down quite as much as I have. This means that your myelin sheaths just aren’t going to build as effectively as mine.  

 It may not look as though I’m doing all that much, but I’m developing skills, baby—deep skills that will make your speedy accomplishments look like just another layer of shallow frippery.  I figure it will only take me about 687,950 more Phoenix summers.  Come turtle along with me!

So I wrote this book about training your mind to reprogram your body to be thin.  It’s called The Four Day Win, and much to my delight, it seems to have helped some people lose weight and feel better about their lives in general.  But I keep getting questions about this book; questions I never anticipated.  My method of weight management is based on the fact that your body is an animal, and animals are trainable.  You can train your body in much the same way you could train, say, a wild boar.  Not that you in any way resemble a wild boar.  I’m just saying. 

Now, to train an animal, you ignore behaviors you don’t want, and reinforce behaviors you do.  I learned this from Amy Sutherland’s wonderful book What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage, which applies the techniques of exotic animal training to human behavior. 

This book can help you train any animal, including yourself.

For example, if your dog howls annoyingly, don’t react at all.  This response, or lack of response, is known as the LRS, or “least reinforcing scenario.”  Offer praise or treats only when the dog is quiet.  (You may have to be persistent.  I did this for 15 years with my beagle, and now he has totally stopped howling, partly because, as noted in a previous blog, he is dead.  So stick to it!)  When an animal does something you like, such as administering acupuncture correctly, give him a reward: a pat on the head, a romp in the yard, a Lexus. 

The same principle applies when training yourself to eat right, stay active, finish your email, or complete any other desirable behavior.  Break the challenge into tiny steps, then take one step each day, following the step immediately with a reward of some kind.  If you repeat the same behavior-plus-reward for four consecutive days, the behavior becomes a pattern, and you’ll be able to sustain it with very little effort.

A lot of my readers tell me that they’re great at setting objectives, and pretty good at following through.  When it comes to the reward, however, they get stumped.  Here’s the question most frequently asked by Four Day Win readers.

“How do I think of the right rewards and punishments to motivate myself?”

Response to FAQ, Part One:

First of all,

PUNISHMENTS?  WHO SAID ANYTHING ABOUT PUNISHMENT?  There’s nothing in any of my books that suggests anybody should punish anybody.  Yet people seem to pick this up between the lines, particularly if they learned to read in Catholic school. 

What do they teach you in there?

I mean no offense by this.  I’m not saying you Catholics are rigid or prudish—in fact, I grew up in a religion that considered y’all to be wild-and-crazy libertines, with your alcoholic Communions and your fancy pope hats.  I didn’t go to Catholic school, and I don’t know what you’re learning in there, but apparently it enables you to find the word “punishment” in any written document, including the instructions on microwave popcorn.

Admit it: if you went to Catholic school, right now you’re thinking about dozens of ways you could punish yourself with microwave popcorn.  You see?  This is exactly what I’m talking about.

Tragic popcorn self-punishment.

But back to my point.  If you’re trying to adopt healthier habits in any way, ix-nay on the unishments-pay.  Positive reinforcement is about 50 times as effective as punishment in sustaining patterns of behavior. 

Response to FAQ, Part Two:

Once you’ve gotten over the need to punish yourself, how do you come up with motivating rewards? 

It amazes me that most people can’t think of anything they really want or like.  Occasionally when I’m running a seminar, I’ll ask a group of people what they’d like me to do for them.  If it’s within my power to do it, I tell them, I will.  But most people, even those who’ve sacrificed money and time to come hang out with me, can’t think of a single request.  In fact, I think they’re actually paying me to tell them what they like.  This is expensive and insane, and I’m so glad people keep doing it.

But there are easier ways.  Check out books like these:

I think people have trouble rewarding themselves because they associate rewards with ease, with absolute lack of difficulty.  They think the reward has to fall out of the sky, that actually, aggressively pursuing satisfaction is “too hard” to be rewarding.  But brain research indicates that we reach a state of “flow,” or maximum positive brain stimulation (read Mihaly Csikszentmihaly or Gregory Berns) when we’re doing something difficult.  Mountain climbers get a happy rush of dopamine while ascending a steep face.  Crossworders get it from the Sunday Times-the hardest puzzle of the week.  Mihaly Csikszentmihaly experienced it while trying to spell his own name.  Counterintuitively, the  most enjoyable things are difficult.

Strange but true: hard games are more rewarding than easy ones.

The Nothing-to-Something Barrier

There seems to be an initial resistance to the effort of doing things that, once we’ve begun, are highly rewarding.  Getting over that initial resistance is the key to self-reward.  I call this the “nothing-to-something barrier.”

I’ve found that no matter what I’m doing, going from absolute zero to some forward momentum requires daunting effort.  I enjoy working out, but takes about 5 minutes in the gym, riding a stationary bicycle or dodging body-builders with ‘roid rage, before the enjoyment kicks in.  Writing a first draft of anything, from an email to a book, is hellish; from there, editing and rewriting are almost easy.  I could paint all day, but I don’t like setting up the easel and prepping the canvas.  In all these areas and many more, I get past the nothing-to-something barrier by using a few mental tricks that temporarily boost my enthusiasm.  Here are my favorite methods:

Getting from Nothing to Something

Method 1: Expose Yourself to Role Models

No, I don’t mean that way.  Let us pause while those of you who went to Catholic school punish yourselves, immediately and protractedly, for even thinking such thoughts. 

At your service!

Thank you.

What I mean by “expose yourself to role models” is that you can get through the nothing-to-something barrier by focusing attention on people who are already doing something you enjoy.  For example, reading fitness magazines makes me much more likely to work out.  Reading books and articles by authors I love makes me want to write.  Visiting art galleries makes me want to paint.  The energy created by other people can heave me right over the nothing-to-something barrier into the enjoyment zone. 

 Method 2: Make Foolish Promises

Hiking the Grand Canyon is difficult.  Promising your outdoorsy friends that you’ll hike the Grand Canyon with them next summer is easy.  Backing out of a promise is, once again, often difficult.  For this reason, I encourage you to make ridiculous commitments that sound exciting at the time.  Your first reaction should be, “Oh, yeah!” followed almost immediately by, “Oh, %$&*!”

Foolish promise fulfillment

For example, yesterday I promised two friends that I’d go to Uganda with them next year, to see how well life-coaching works on people whose circumstances make most of my clients’ worst problems look like paradise.  Also to see wild gorillas.  Who knows–maybe the gorillas will want life coaching!

To me, this is a wonderful foolish promise.  There’s no pressing demand for me to life coach in Uganda, and it’ll take all kinds of preparation, money, and inconvenience.  Because it’s in keeping with my heart’s desires, every foolish step will be tinged with excitement.  Every time I get past the nothing-to-something barrier (because I promised my damn friends I would) I’ll feel rewarded by the process.

A gorilla and her life coach.

So today, promise someone—preferably several someones—that you’ll join them in doing something you want to do anyway.  Start a book club and read all of Tolstoy.  Learn Zen archery.  Grow an herb garden.  You may feel grumpy about it, but only until your promise pulls you over the nothing-to-something barrier.  Once in action, you’ll find the effort more rewarding than total lethargy.

Method 3: Ask WWOWDWOW?

You know that dream you had, in which Jesus and Buddha and Mohammed and Rabbi Hillel all descended from the clouds and promised you that Oprah was destined to transform your life into a nonstop adventure filled with delights you previously experienced only when you took an overdose of Percoset after your gum surgery? 

Well, I hate to break this to you, but everyone in the world has had that dream.  Except for one person, of course: Oprah.  She, poor woman, is the only person who can’t fantasize about what would happen if she showed up.  When she wonders what Oprah could do for her, her only option for wish fulfillment is to rear up on her hind legs and do it.

If you’ve been waiting for the Oprah gravy train, try wearing a bracelet that says WWOWDWOW, for “What Would Oprah Winfrey Do (Without Oprah Winfrey)?  In other words, if Oprah woke up in the life you’re living right now, what would she do to make that life better? 

Fill in the blank.

For you Catholics (who seem to be the particular target of this blog) it might help to recall that Pope John Paul I struggled with a similar issue.  After he’d ascended to the papacy, he’d wake up worrying about some problem facing the church, and think, “I’ll have to ask the pope about it.”  Then he’d wake up a little more and realize, “Oh, my goodness, I am the pope!”  If you’re the Oprah, the pope, the hero of your own life, the buck stops with you.  All the fancy hats in the world can’t save you from the responsibility to work your own miracles.

Seriously, right now imagine what your most revered role model would do in your wildest fantasies.  Write it all down—the places you’d go, the great things you’d accomplish, the experiences you’d have.  Piggyback on this role-model fantasy to gather enough excitement to propel you over the nothing-to-something barrier.

What if you were the one in the fancy hat? 

Something to Something Better

Once you cross the nothing-to-something barrier, you’ll get better and better at thinking up rewards for your meritorious behavior.  You’ll develop a whole armament of TV shows, books, hobbies, friendly outings, and interesting adventures, any one of which can motivate you to take the next turtle step on your quest for self-improvement. 

Like anything else, thinking up rewards is a skill that gets easier with practice.  Getting from nothing to something: difficult.  Getting from something (anything!) to something better: easy.  And every fabulous life is build from nothing, to something, to something a tiny bit bigger, then a tiny bit bigger still.  If this method doesn’t work, you can always try punishing yourself.  But you’ll have to find the instructions for that in somebody else’s blog.

Exciting news, people!  Right now, specialists around the globe are working on the DSM V, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders!  Since the DSM is practically a biography of my addled old self, I’m preordering today—but sadly, the new version isn’t due out until 2012.  We’ll have to wait until then to find out about new proposed disorders and diagnoses, like “embitterment disorder” and “apathy disorder” (I didn’t make those up; they’re really considering them). 

Thinking about the long wait until publication makes me embittered and apathetic, conditions for which I will demand medication, come 2012.  Until then, I’ll be passing the time by thinking up new mental illnesses on my own.  I’d like to invite you to join me.

New Flavors of Nuts

For example, right now I’m suffering greatly from “Excessive Attempted Temple Disorder,” or “EATS.”  It begins when I decide that my body is a temple, the earth is a temple, we all exist in a temple of consciousness, and I must be reverent and righteous about everything.  At that point I start reading inspiring works by Hafiz, St. John of the Cross, or Bono, and embark on a program of healthy eating, meditation, yoga, and charitable thought, speech, and action toward all beings.  I answer my email, even the weird stuff from readers who have mistaken me for Martha Stewart and want my opinion on their choice of duvet covers.

EATS, stage one.

Sometimes I can keep this up for literally minutes.  Then the next few symptoms of EATS descend upon me like a flock of harpies.

This generally begins in a bewildering flurry of carbohydrates.  For example, yesterday for breakfast I had a smoothie made of organic pomegranate juice, a blend of Chinese herbs, and organic blueberries.  Midmorning snack: two handfuls of raw organic almonds.  Then, around 2:00 p.m., I suddenly ate three cupcakes, two cans of Diet Coke, and toast.  You know there’s something seriously wrong when you follow up cupcakes with toast.  Next I bought 14 books for my Kindle (you can download a novel in seconds, no waiting, no trips to the bookstore) and spent most of the afternoon crouching behind my bed, hoping no one would catch me reading for pleasure.

EATS, stage two.

New Candidates for the Diagnostic Manual

I don’t know of any cure for EATS, and since I probably also have apathy disorder, it’s highly unlikely that I’ll ever bother to find one.  It’s just nice to have something to call it.To while away the time until the assistants take off my restraints, I’ve been soliciting ideas for new brands of insanity.  Here are some I’ve gleaned from friends and loved ones:

Pundimania:  Actually caring what is said by televised political pundits.  Leads to rage, profanity, brain erosion, sleep crime, and the catastrophic failure of all relationships.

Birkenstockholm Syndrome:  Spending so much time at meditation retreats that you begin to accept hemp clothing as formal wear.

Recovering Religious Renunciate Rebound Regression (RRRRR):  Affects anyone who once gave up large chunks of personality in an attempt to be loved by weird religious definitions of God.  Under pressure, the patient snaps back into believing that s/he will be smitten with boils for using the word “damn.”

Petopediac Confusion:  The sincere belief that your pets are human children.

When humans get Petopediac Confusion, it’s the innocent who suffer.

Acute Peripatetic Obsession Disorder: Becoming temporarily obsessed with a sequence of different topics, such as songwriting, ornithology, Facebook, astral travel, and French.  Treatment includes integration of topics (writing birdlike songs in French about astral travel to post on Facebook).

Delusional Literary Purchase Syndrome: The conviction that buying 20 books per week is the same thing as reading them.

Law and Order Disorder:  The paranoid sensation that there is nothing on TV but Law and Order, which is on every channel, all the time.

Syndrome Syndrome:  Developing the symptoms of every syndrome you read or hear about, eventually acquiring so many overlapping diagnoses that they mush together.

Protective headgear: a common symptom of Syndrome Syndrome.

Your Turn

So what’s your disorder, or the disorder of that awful man in the cubicle next to yours, who seems to have been hacking up a single hairball since the day he was hired in 1997?  Let me know, and we’ll beat the DSM V to market.  The manual we create may one day sit on every therapist’s shelf, and lead a new generation of parents into overmedicating themselves and their children! 

Or not.  If not, I’ll be so, so embittered.  Not that I give a damn. 

I have to go now. I think I’m developing boils.

Physicist Niels Bohr once said that an expert is someone who’s made every possible mistake in a narrow field.  Well, I hate to toot my own horn, but I’ve made every possible mistake in about a million fields.  Take blogging.  As you can see, I started off to write a blog-treatise on leadership, which became a bogged blog when I reached the topic “leading up in an evil system.”  

So as I prepared the next post, I found myself writing a meandering thesis on the nature of morality—how do you know what’s evil, when is it your duty to act against an evil system and when can you be excused for going along, consider the fact that terrorists always think they’re trying to change an evil system….  Ye gods.  It was a Blog Hydra—every time I’d whack off a chunk of topic, two more would grow in its place.

My Blog Hydra

So anyway, I’m putting all those thoughts into my next book, because they’re book topics.  Not so much blog topics.  I think. 

I am reminded of a time I gave a speech in one of the Carolinas—I don’t remember which Carolina, because I was speaking so often during that period that all 50 states blend together.  I was tired and jetlagged, and my speech—how shall I say—sucked, sucked, sucked.   I went back to my hotel room with the sound of pity-applause scorching my ears, and schlumped onto the bed under several tons of shame.  Whoever had invited me to speak gave me a lovely room right on the beach, but I closed the drapes, feeling that if I couldn’t deliver a decent product, I didn’t deserve to look at the ocean. 

Verboten to the Verklempt

Far too verklempt to watch TV news or drama, I settled on an Animal Planet program that seemed cheerful—a touching reality show about a woman and her wonderful service dog—until the dog got sick and had to be euthanized. 

I spent the evening in the fetal position, numbed by bitter reality: I’d failed as a speaker, the Carolinians had been disappointed, and someday my dog would die.  This all happened some six or seven years ago.  Last week should have been much worse.  Last week the reality was that I’d failed as a blogger, my Facebook friends had been disappointed, and my dog actually did die. 

And yet, it was a great week, thanks to people like you.

R.I.P. Cookie

I’ve had pets before, and loved them all.  But Cookie the beagle taught me why some people spend more on their dogs than on their educations.  Every morning of his life, he pressed the top of his head against any part of my body he could reach, cooing ecstatically just because I existed.  He was with me during every grueling hour of writing and every rejection letter, before I’d published a thing. No matter how many all-nighters I pulled, Cookie stayed up with me.  He was present for every life-coaching session held in my home office, greeting every client with deafening howls, parking himself in my lap, and silently emitting aromas to back up my tentative advice.

He was a good boy.

Cookie the Good, 1995-2009

True, he was also incredibly old—about 105, in people-age.  He’d been partially fossilized for years, though we knew he was alive because he kept gaining weight.  Two years ago, when he was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer, I started feeding him anything he wanted, figuring he’d last a couple of weeks at the most.  But the new food rules made Cookie so happy he went into remission.  Hefty remission.  I thought I’d solved the weight problem when I promoted him from beagle to Bassett hound, but his metabolism kept slowing, he kept finding chocolate bars in my luggage.  I was on the verge of promoting him again, this time to Land Manatee, when Fate intervened.

Cookie was out for a waddle when we met a human friend who sometimes gives him biscuits.  He took off at a dead sprint and tore a ligament in his knee.  It was the beginning of the end.  Last week, an emergency vet gave us morphine and bad news (which as far as I’m concerned should always be offered in tandem).  Cookie’s organs were simply shutting down.  Doped as he was, when I put my arms around him Cookie lifted his head and gave me that utterly guileless gaze I loved to distraction for 15 years.  Then he set his head on my hands and sighed with relief, and never breathed in again.

I cried for three days and two reasons: 1) because the end of a well-lived life is so sweet and sad and poignant; and 2) because so many people—this may mean you—were so nice to me.  Despite my inadequate blogging, despite my failure to produce a cogent, snappy essay on the nature of evil and our moral responsibility to end it, dozens of people have sent me emails, cards, letters, and other varieties of kind wishes, just because my fat old dog died.

This has radically shifted my concept of reality.  I’ve always thought the only way to earn acceptance is through continuous good performance—and even then, I believed, people who don’t approve of the performance want to smack me briskly about the head and face with a croquet mallet. 

I am being forced to reconsider this position. 

Beagle Invasion

So many people have offered me love in the past few days, for no earthly reason except pure kindness, that I’ve come to a radical conclusion.  It seems that the world is filled not only with human beings, but with human beagles.  People who love you even when you’re not “productive.”  People who don’t care how much you earn, sleep, weigh, or vacuum.  People who accept and encourage and care, even when you fall off the communication map for months on end.

Who Some People Really Are

So this is my new attempt to make a few less mistakes in the narrow field of blogging.  I’m sure I’ll make many more.  Someday, maybe I’ll have made so many mistakes I’ll actually be an expert.  But for now, I just had to write and say THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU to every human beagle out there.  I’ll never deserve to have you in my, life, just as I never deserved to have Cookie.  The miracle is, we get love whether we deserve it or not.  In fact, it may come to find us just when we think we deserve it least. 

Now, that’s something to blog about.