George Washington Didn’t Fap: How internet porn is stealing your time and keeping you from greatness

Posted: June 24, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Habits, Winning | Leave a comment

Do you watch internet porn? Stop. Right now. It’s keeping you from greatness.

Slowly take your left hand off your dick. Close those 13 open browser tabs, yes, that baker’s dozen of youporn, redtube, and fapdu.com.

You’re wasting your life and frying your brain, really.

This isn’t some moralistic pseudo-Christian stand against porn or masturbation. It’s about kicking a habit that sucks your time and gives you nothing but a few seconds of pleasure followed by a mess to clean up.

Take a moment and think about what you’re actually doing when you engage in looking at and masturbating to internet pornography.  You’re sitting there with your pants down looking at tens or hundreds of people you don’t know, all having sex with each other. And you’re jerking off to it, probably in the dark. Think that’s healthy? Nope. Imagine for a second that those strangers fucking each other on the screen are instead right there in your living room; and there you are in the background watching and beating off. Twisted, right? No shit.

Here’s a list of all the things you’re not doing every time you decide to kill an hour with pornhub and a bottle of lube:

  • You’re not making money or developing your business;
  • You’re not cultivating friendships;
  • You’re not working out or gaining strength;
  • You’re not gaining knowledge;
  • You’re not working toward your goals or pursuing your dreams;
  • You’re not pursuing hobbies and passions that will provide you lasting satisfaction.

And here’s the real kicker: you’re not having real sex or even getting closer to that possibility. Not with your spouse, your girlfriend, or that cute girl you’ve been eyeing. Nope, you’re not having sex because you’re spending your time fapping to a bunch of porn stars on the Interwebs.

Imagine for a moment a great man from history, let’s say George Washington. Now imagine George Washington masturbating to internet porn. Imagine ‘ole George, hero of the American Revolution, father of our country, pulling up a chair and a box of Kleenex for an hour session of spankwire.com. Imagine President Washington, the man who had two horses shot out from under him in battle, furiously pulling his pud while frantically clicking one video after the next, fifteen browser tabs open, pants-around-his-ankles, and one eye on the door in case Martha came home early.

If you can even imagine that scene, it’s absolutely absurd. Because it would never ever happen. It feels disrespectful just to think about it. On the other hand, imagine the biggest loser in your life doing this. It’s pretty easy, because it’s probably something he does. Loser is as loser does. And what a loser does is piss away his life and his time with escapist garbage like internet porn, video games and reality TV.

Don’t believe me yet? Smarter men than myself have delved into the damage internet porn use inflicts on the male mind. A famous TED Talk by Gary Wilson is downright chilling. In it, he shows how internet porn use physically changes our brains, rewiring our neural circuits, leading to things like, social anxiety, depression, performance anxiety and even OCD. Men in their 20’s are coming in with porn-induced erectile dysfunction. And the cruel irony here is that drugs like Viagra don’t work when the problem is caused by the brain’s neutral circuitry. In Japan, the most internet and porn-addicted country in the world, there’s even a whole cohort of men emerging called “herbivores”. These are men with no career ambition, poor social skills and little interest in sex or romantic relationships. The only difference between America and Japan on this front seems to be that the Japanese have a word for it, while we’re busy making excuses.

If you want to own your time and engineer the bullshit out of your life, start with internet porn.  You’ll get several hours a week back, you’ll have more ambition and you’ll feel more alive. George Washington didn’t fap to internet porn and neither should you.

How to Reduce your TV Time

Posted: June 19, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Habits, Tips and Tricks | 1 Comment

Do you watch too much TV? Does that rob you of time that would be better spent doing virtually anything else? Oh yes you do, and oh yes it does.

Here’s the fix. Make watching TV mildly uncomfortable.

Wait…What? Why not just stop watching TV altogether?

Because you probably won’t. You’ll try and you’ll fail and within days or weeks you’ll be back on the couch letting your flatscreen suck away three hours of your sweet sweet time every night.

You’ll fail because cutting out TV altogether takes willpower, which is something we have a limited supply of. Our willpower is better spent on things that truly matter like developing healthy lifestyle habits.

The trick is to engineer your home so that you automatically watch less TV without even trying. How? By making it mildly uncomfortably to watch TV. Here’s what to do:

1. Get rid of your traditional TV – that large flat screen in front of the couch.

The most comfortably place in your home should not be the place you watch TV. You will be drawn here like Bill Clinton to McDonald’s.

2. Cancel your traditional cable or satellite subscription and replace it with Hulu or Netflix.

3. Watch TV exclusively on an iPad or laptop.

This can be comfortable, but only for about 40 minutes or so, which is perfect. Watching streaming TV on a small screen that you have to hold or otherwise prop up will allow you to continue watching your favorite shows, but only in moderation. Gone will be days where you sit down right after work and blink only to find you’ve just watched four hours of Law & Order re-runs.

We don’t have to be masters of willpower to improve our lives or develop the winning habits needed to take back our time. We just to engineer our lives and our homes so that good habits are the default. Make watching TV just a little uncomfortable and see the difference.

Audio Books – Fill Dead Time with True Multitasking

Posted: June 17, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Tips and Tricks | Tags: | 1 Comment

Countless studies over the past few years have told us what we already know, that multitasking is utter bullshit.

This is really too bad. Multitasking is one of those things that we so wanted to believe in because it’s too good to be true. The idea of being able to do everything by doing everything at once is intoxicating.

However, there are those few moments in life when we discover a true opportunity to multitask. Ussually these are opporutnities to fill dead time. And this is key – there’s a lot more dead time in your life than you realize, which means there’s an opportunity to do a lot of the things we want to do, but think we don’t have time for.

The biggest source of “dead time” for most of us is driving. The typical American spends over an hour a day in his car. Or put differently, over 5% of your waking hours are spent driving around. This is a valueless activity. We only drive because we need to get somewhere else, driving is a necessary evil. It is also a huge opportunity.

Audiobooks, either through Audible.com or your local library can fill in that dead time. You can “read” an hour a day, with absolutely zero extra effort and no additional time. The only thing you might give up is the garbage that passes for music on the radio, or news, which is a complete waste of time anyway. Give me one example of how listening to the news has allowed you to make a better decision in the past 30 days than you would have had you not be so well “informed”. I digress.

Listening to audiobooks allows you to learn about an endless amount of topics. In the two years I’ve been listening to audiobooks, I’ve learned about home finance and economics, neuroscience, ancient Rome, business and had the opportunity to read literary giants like Graham Greene. If you’re not listening to audiobooks in your car, you’re living with dead time on your hands. Start reading an hour a day instead.

Why You Don’t Need the Gym

Posted: June 13, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Fitness | Tags: | 2 Comments

Do you go to gym?

Don’t. You need to exercise,but you don’t need to waste your time at the gym to do it.

You’re spending twice as long to get the same workout you could do at home.

The gym is one of those invisible time sucks, a temporal black hole. Don’t believe me? Let’s break it out.

Say you’re gym is located a convenient 10-minute drive from your fine home. That’s twenty minutes in travel alone. Once you get to the gym, you’ve got to change into those badass gym clothes you picked out. There’s another 10 minutes. You’re already up to half an hour and you haven’t gotten one minute of exercise yet. This, my friend is waste. It’s time that’s now gone that has added exactly zero value to your life.

There’s still more waste here. More time spent not doing the one thing you went to the gym to do, exercise.  If you go to the gym during the busier periods, say just before or just after most people get out of work, you’ll probably end up waiting for a machine. Time waiting is time wasted. Between the waiting and the little things like walking to and from your car, you’ve wasted another 10 minutes.

Let’s say your typical workout is 30 minutes. This means you have spent a grand total of and hour and ten minutes to get the value of a 30 minute workout. That’s 40 minutes you didn’t spend improving your fitness and health, forty minutes you didn’t spend with your family or friends, 40 minutes you didn’t spend pursuing your goals or otherwise enjoying life.

What’s the solution?

Work out at home. In 20 to 30 minutes you can get a kickass workout without all the overhead of going to the gym. You don’t need fancy or expensive equipment. Push-ups, sit-ups, body-squats combined with some running or a jump rope will give you 100% of the exercise you need. If you really want some equipment, I recommend kettlebells, which can be used to get a full workout in less than twenty minutes. See the 4 Hour Body for more on that.

Here’s the Optimized Home workout that I do everyday:

1. Wake up at 5 AM.

2. Do 100 push ups, 100 crunches and 100 body squats wearing the boxers I slept in the night before.

3. Hit the showers.

Total time spent working out: 20 minutes, no waste.

You don’t need to go anywhere, or change into gym clothes, and you’ve got to shower before work anyway. As an added bonus you won’t have to wash any dirty gym clothes later.

Next time you’re about to get into your car to go to the gym, don’t. Start working out at home and take back your time.

Take Back Your Time – Become an Early Riser

Posted: June 10, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Habits | Leave a comment

More than anything else you can do, becoming an early riser is a keystone habit that is an absolute must-do if you want to take back your time and your life. If you wake up 10 minutes before you have to leave for work running out door with a Pop Tart in your mouth, your life will never be your own. You will never feel like you have enough time. Never. If you’re interested in optimizing your life and taking back your time, read on.

How does it feel when you start the day with an ambitious to-do list only to have it derailed by interruptions, unexpected events, and other people’s bullshit? It feels bad, it’s frustrating, it feels like our life is spent as the handmaiden of others, as the grunt toiling away at building another man’s fortune.

How do we get off this hamster wheel and start moving forward? How do we stay on top of the everyday must-do bullshit of life and still keep our commitments to ourselves?

The answer is by becoming an early riser. I mean early. 5 AM is good. Earlier is even better if you can pull it off.

If you wake up earlier than almost everyone else, you’ll find that you have the time and energy to pursue your goals and dreams. You’ll be amazed how fast you start accomplishing things. It’s often said that we all overestimate what we can do in a day and drastically underestimate what we can do in a year. Even just half an hour a day of completely uninterrupted time can catapult you toward achieving your goals or building the habits to want to build.

Not all of us have well-defined goals, we’re too busy. With work and household chores and family obligations we don’t even have the time to think about what are dreams or goals are, much less pursue them. Becoming an early riser is the answer to this problem. Having that quiet, focused time each day to reflect, will allow you to tap into your dreams and also appreciate what you already have. You’ll be able to ask yourself questions like, what do I really enjoy about my life right now? What do l wish were different? Just by having the time to let your mind ponder these types of questions you’ll start to notice that goals will organically emerge.

So now I want you to imagine yourself waking up early, say 4:30 or 5:00 every day. After a few weeks it becomes the new normal and it’s no harder than it was to wake up at 6:00 or 7:00. Remember how early we all thought that 9 AM class was back in college? It wasn’t, we were just lazy, undisciplined and unfocused. But no more.

Now you have this hour or two to yourself, before the events of the day have a chance to interrupt and distract you. Maybe you spend half an hour working out before hitting the shower. Normally working out is tough because you’re tired after work. Much easier to sit on the couch like a fat slob eating hot pockets and watching America’s Next Top Model. But that is not the person any of us want to be.

You still have over an hour before your day “officially” starts so you start thinking about that vacation to Costa Rica that you always wanted to take, but never got around to planning. So you go to a few websites and get prices for hotels and airfare. You jot down some thoughts on when you should take the trip, what you might want to do there, and you’ve got the beginnings of a vacation plan.

You spend the rest of the time, sketching out ideas for that side business you always wanted to start, but just never got around to thinking about.

There you have it. You’re day hasn’t even really started yet and it’s already a success.

Give it try. For the next thirty days, become an early riser and wake up an hour earlier than you do now. You’ll be amazed at the impact on your life.