Ramit Sethi – How I mastered the 15-minute nap. .... on and find the experiment
that changes your life. Enjoy! -Ramit. Founder, I Will Teach You To Be Rich ...
Table of Contents Introduction......................................................................................................................................................................3 Ramit Sethi – How I mastered the 15-minute nap..............................................................................5 A.J. Jacobs – Using a carrot...or a stick?.................................................................................................... 7 Lewis Howes – How salsa dancing helped me make my first million................................ 9 Gretchen Rubin – How I stopped snacking after dinner.............................................................. 11 Cal Newport – Simple tests for complicated tasks........................................................................ 13 Derek Halpern – How a “smack in the face” helped me shed my big fat belly........ 15 Ben Casnocha – If you aren’t taking notes, you aren’t learning............................................ 17 James Altucher – Should I pray to Jesus or should I test?........................................................19 Jay Cross – How I saved $29,000 “testing out” of college...................................................... 21 Chris Guillebeau – When all else fails and you have to just go for it................................23
Thanks for reading!..................................................................................................................................................25
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Introduction I’m obsessed with testing. From testing what I eat, to running multi-variate and multi-cohort tests in my business, I test as much as I can. This is for good reason. I’ve found through years of testing that often little adjustments – or life hacks – can mean HUGE rewards. Also, I know that at least half my theories are wrong. But the only way to tell which ones are right is through testing. Some of the most creative, intelligent people I know also use testing and experimentation in their everyday lives to learn more, live a healthier lifestyle, and manage hugely successful careers. It doesn’t have to be complicated – usually, it’s just a simple notepad of a couple ideas you’re working on improving – but the results can be huge. This was the idea behind 15 Little Life Hacks That Can Change Your Life, an ebook I published in 2012. It contains some of the most life-changing testing results from some of the most successful people I know. But I knew that wasn’t it. So, I reached out to even more of my successful friends – writers, professors, and entrepreneurs who I admire – and asked them to pull back the curtain and share the results of their best testing. Here’s just a few things they came up with: •
Three approaches to give up junk food
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A way to save nearly $30,000 in college expenses
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How to position yourself as the smartest person in the room
Plus, they’ve answered these questions along the way:
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How do I apply testing when I’m working on a really difficult project?
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How can I leverage one test in multiple areas of my life (business, home, family, etc.)?
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What do I do when all my best efforts to test fail?
I listed just a few of the results they shared. Read on and find the experiment that changes your life. Enjoy! -Ramit Founder, I Will Teach You To Be Rich
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Ramit Sethi How I mastered the 15-minute nap I love daytime naps, but it’s tough to find 2 hours for a luxurious nap – plus I’d always wake up sluggish. I wanted to know how to take a nap for more energy in a short window. I wanted to master the 15-minute energy nap. I started off by trying to get a baseline: I gave myself an hour and napped just fine. When I woke up (with an alarm clock), I felt good. But when I tried to go right down to 15 minutes, I didn’t fall asleep at all. Now I knew that I had to work on falling asleep quicker. I started tracking a bunch of variables. It looked like this: TIME OF DAY Early afternoon Late afternoon Evening WORKED OUT Yes No ATE BEFORE NAP Yes No After experimenting with all of these, I got down to falling asleep in about 10-12 minutes. I learned that eating right before a nap in the early afternoon worked best in helping me fall asleep faster. (Gym had no impact at all.) But after a 15-minute nap, where I only really slept 3 minutes, I’d just wake up frustrated.
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That’s when I started playing around with all kinds of things. Should I nap on the couch? In my bed? Put the pillow over my head? The single-best technique for me was carving out 30 minutes – 15 to nap, and 15 to wake up and get back into my day. I don’t know exactly why, but somehow, consciously giving myself that extra 15 minutes after the nap let me fall asleep faster. Now, I can nap for 15 minutes and wake up energized. You’ll hear people say, “I wish I could take naps.” But there was nothing magical about this – just simple testing. Takeaway: When testing a new system, try many different variables. Then, continually tweak your approach for maximum benefit. Ramit Sethi is a New York Times bestselling author and the founder of I Will Teach You To Be Rich. His personal finance and career advice has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, FORTUNE, NPR, CNN and ABC.
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A.J. Jacobs Using a carrot...or a stick? Recently, I was battling a serious dried mango crisis. Problem was, I was polishing off as many as twenty in a day. Dried mangos have the veneer of healthiness — but really, they’re just Snickers that happen to grow on trees. I needed to do something. I heard about a strategy pioneered by Thomas Schelling, a Nobel-prize-winning economist. He found it helpful when people wanted to give up smoking. The idea is this: You give money to charity if you fail to achieve your goal. Here’s the twist: You should pledge to give to a charity you HATE. The idea is that the carrot has its uses, but so does the stick. Research from Yale economics professor Dean Karlan has backed up the efficacy of making these selfdirected contracts containing a punishment clause. In fact, Karlan started a website where you can create your own punishment. You give your credit card number and it will charge you if you fail to follow through. Call it anti-motivation. Or loss-aversion. I decided to try the anti-charity trick on my mango addiction. When my wife got home on day, I asked her a favor. “If I have another dried mango this month, I want you to donate $1,000 of my money to the American Nazi Party.” “The Nazi Party? Why not Oxfam?” “That’s not enough of a disincentive. I want something that will make me sick to my stomach.” She quickly got into the spirit. She filled out a check to the Nazi party, signed it, and wrote “Courtesy of AJ Jacobs” in the memo space. She waved it in front of me,
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saying “Don’t eat any of those dried mangos—as delicious they may be.” It was extremely effective. I still open the cabinet, and see those slices, and get a few drops of Pavlovian saliva. But, it’s like a switch has been flipped. I can’t even conceive of eating one. The repercussions are too horrible. I’m not going to pay for a bunch of new jackboots and offensive tattoos. It’s as if I were dating a woman and discovered she was my long-lost sister. The thought of kissing her repulses. I didn’t eat a single slice the entire month. And hate groups everywhere wept. Takeaway: Don’t just reward yourself for doing well...Think of punishments for when you fail (Use the stick instead of the carrot). A.J. Jacobs is the author of four New York Times bestselling memoirs, including “The Year of Living Biblically” and “Drop Dead Healthy.” He is editor at large at Esquire magazine and a commentator on NPR. He can be found at ajjacobs.com.
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Lewis Howes How salsa dancing helped me make my first million I’m 6’4 and 225 lbs, and when people look at me I’m sure the last thing they’re thinking is, “I bet that tall white dude is a good salsa dancer.” But, with all humility, I’m not bad for a white guy. And, the lessons I learned along the way to becoming good on my feet are the very principles that helped me make my first million online. I’ve had the privilege to dance all over the world with some of the best in the business and here is the 3-step approach I tested to becoming great at salsa: My 3-Step Strategy For Salsa Dancing 1. Seek specialized training in a group environment: Thanks to my football experience I knew the importance of a specialized coach in a group environment. This is why I immediately sought group salsa classes. 2. Total Immersion: I began listening to salsa music everywhere I went and started going to salsa clubs almost every night of the week. 3. Watch the Pros: I watched hours of professional dancing on YouTube, then practiced the same moves by myself in front of my mirror. This allowed me to get familiar with the right technique. It also gave me a mental picture that I could play over and over in my mind. How These Steps Helped me Make My 1st Million 1. When I decided to become an entrepreneur, I looked for specialized mentors within each of the areas I was trying to master. I didn’t look to just one person to guide my entire future. 2. I completely immersed myself into entrepreneurship by learning as much as possible – while also applying it, taking action, and learning lessons along
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the way. I’ve seen too many entrepreneurs remain stuck in the learning phase without realizing hands-on experience is the way to truly become educated. 3. I only listened to the advice of people who had achieved the kind of success I was after. I quickly learned that everyone will have an opinion about what you should do, so it’s important to decide who you’ll listen to. Takeaway: The results of testing can have impact in multiple areas of your life. Look for ways you can apply success in one area (salsa dancing) to other areas (entrepreneurship). Lewis Howes is the ultimate lifestyle entrepreneur, world record holder, former pro football player and current Olympic hopeful for Team Handball. Learn more at www. lewishowes.com
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Gretchen Rubin How I stopped snacking after dinner I’m working on a book about habit-formation, so I’ve been incessantly tinkering with my own habits. One candidate? I wanted to change my bad habit of snacking at the end of the day. I’m never actually hungry after dinner, but I’d fallen into the pattern of wandering into the kitchen around 9:00 p.m., to forage. In our family, we joke about the eating habits of Hobbits: breakfast, second breakfast, elevenses, luncheon, afternoon tea… and I’d fallen into a Hobbit-like habit of eating “second dinner.” The habit had become sufficiently entrenched that my evening felt incomplete without that last snack. I’ve been working on a related habit: to eat only when I’m hungry. Hunger should be my cue, not portion size, or other people’s eating patterns, or TV commercials, or anything else. Also, some studies suggest that it’s healthier not to eat after a certain hour. So, to stop eating after dinner, I decided to adopt a habit to underscore the transition between eating-time and not-eating-time. I’d often heard the advice to brush my teeth after dinner, but I was skeptical. I sort of enjoy brushing my teeth, so the prospect of brushing twice didn’t seem like much of a hindrance. I doubted that this little action make a difference—but hey, I decided to give it a shot. So instead of brushing my teeth right before I go to bed, I’ve started to brush my teeth after I tuck in my younger daughter, around 8:30 pm. To my astonishment, this simple habit has proved highly effective; my urge to snack diminishes noticeably after I brush my teeth. Partly, I think, this is because my mouth feels the signal of “Done for the day.” Many years of nightly brushing have made me connect the experience of toothpaste with beginning of bedtime. Also, as I brush, I repeat to myself, “No more eating for today, that’s finished” and that thought seems to help the tooth-brushing act as a boundary between the eating and
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non-eating portion of my evening. I’m often surprised by how a small change in my daily habits can yield big benefits. It’s a Secret of Adulthood: habits are surprisingly tough, and habits are surprisingly fragile. Takeaway: Creating your own cues for eating (or not eating) keeps you from using environmental cues such as TV commercials or the patterns of others. Gretchen Rubin is the author of the blockbuster New York Times bestsellers, “The Happiness Project” and “Happier at Home,” and the wildly popular site, The Happiness Project. She draws from the wisdom of the ages, the current scientific studies, and the lessons from popular culture for practical insights into how we can be happier— and, for her forthcoming book, “Before and After,” how we can change our habits.
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Cal Newport Simple tests for complicated tasks I’m a college professor. My specialty is theoretical computer science — essentially, I prove theorems. To get tenure, I need to prove lots of important theorems in a small amount of time. This goal, it turns out, is hard. There’s a lot written about “task productivity”: cranking through easy to replicate logistical obligations; e.g., launching a web site, answering e-mail, going to the gym. Very little is known, however, about “value productivity”: producing hard to replicate, high-value output; e.g., theorems that are published, screenplays that are sold, books that win awards. I need to master the art of value productivity to keep my job as an academic, so over the past several years I’ve been pursuing this goal with a ruthlessly effective strategy: quarterly testing. Quarterly testing is a simple concept. Every quarter (think: seasons) I identify a collection of habits to test that all relate to what’s important to me (in my case, improving my value productivity). I test these habits for one quarter, and then, during the next check-in, I step back to evaluate what produced results and what did not. The habits that did produce results are kept for further refining, while the latter are dropped. After several years of this testing regime, I’ve discovered, for example, that Seinfeld’s “Don’t Break the Chain” strategy (work on your high value output every single day, without exception) performs well, but only if coupled with: (1) a crystal clear definition of what result you seek; and (2) good “focus hygiene”: have food and drink on hand, block all distracting websites on your computer, use an uncluttered environment. If you miss these small additional factors, “chaining” devolves into wheel spinning. I’ve also discovered that Steve Martin’s definition of “diligence” — the discipline to say “no” to everything outside your highest value pursuits — is crucial. The more
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aggressively I retreat from the world of possibility to focus on my bread and butter, the more successful and interesting my working life becomes. Takeaway: Doing hard things is hard. Don’t assume you know the best approach to this work. Test your productivity strategies ruthlessly and regularly. Cal Newport is a writer and a professor. In addition to running the popular Study Hacks blog, he’s written four books of unconventional advice. His latest, “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” (Hachette, 2012), argues that “follow your passion” is bad advice. Learn more at www.calnewport.com.
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Derek Halpern How a “smack in the face” helped me shed my big fat belly “Damn it,” I screamed. The shirt I wanted to wear to an important meeting didn’t fit. The buttons pulled so much that you could see my BFB (that’s short for Big Fat Bellayyyy). For years, I ballooned from 155 to more than 190 pounds. I had to lose some weight... ...But knowing and doing it were two different beasts. And if you ever thought, “I wish I could [insert anything],” and never did it, then you know what I’m talking about. That’s why I’m PUMPED to share the technique I used to shed my BFB. I call it the “smack in the face” technique. Here’s my story: I’m Derek Halpern, the founder of Social Triggers, and I was addicted to Coca Cola. Not smacking my lips addicted, but I rarely drank anything else. Hello BFB! My friends would say, “Just drink water.” But replacing soda with water? Impossible! I LOVED soda. So check it: Whenever I felt thirsty, I realized I’d open my refrigerator and mindlessly grab a can of soda. That’s when I decided to put a roadblock between me and my refrigerator — a scale! And, I made the rule, “Before I open the refrigerator, I must weigh myself.” My weight was the “smack in the face” that I needed. But I still craved those tasty bubbles and plain water wouldn’t do the trick. So I replaced soda with sparkling, lemon-flavored water.
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And it worked! Now I have a sparkling water habit... and a shirt that fits. Let’s break down why this works and how you can use it to hack your behaviors. •
First, create a rule to interrupt your usual behavior. My rule was to weigh myself before opening the refrigerator.
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Second, smack yourself in the face. Not literally... But you need something to remind yourself that you want to make a change. For me, the smack was my weight.
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And finally, replace your behavior with a better behavior.
Follow that 3 step strategy and bam! You’re set. Takeaway: It’s hard to just stop or start anything, so replacing the behavior works much better. For me, that was sparkling water. Derek Halpern is the founder of Social Triggers, the place entrepreneurs learn how to use proven psychological principles to get ahead in business and life. His blog serves more than 130,000 subscribers, and Forbes calls him “an expert on consumer psychology.” But he’s most known for his “no nonsense, insanely practical advice” that anyone can implement.
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Ben Casnocha If you aren’t taking notes, you aren’t learning Recently, Mark Zuckerberg addressed a large auditorium of young entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Every seat was taken, and the 20-somethings who aspired to entrepreneurial greatness were listening with rapt attention. There were two older folks in the front row who stood out: John Doerr and Ron Conway, both legendary investors in Silicon Valley. They stood out not just because their gray hair shimmered in the sea of youth around them, but because they were the only people in the audience taking notes. The two most successful people in the room after Zuckerberg were also the only two people taking notes. There’s an old rule of thumb that if you have something really important you need done, ask for help from the busiest person you know. Here’s an analogous rule: if you want to identify the most senior, knowledgeable people in an audience, look for the people who are taking notes and asking questions. There are many ways to take notes. I’ve tested different approaches. Early on, I scribbled notes in a notebook, and randomly and periodically flipped back through the notes to see what I’d written down. That worked okay — the sheer act of writing them down was helpful, but I often missed the follow-up items. And the important nuggets were often buried amidst my hard-to-read scribbles. What I tested next worked better — it’s a three-step process. Ben’s 3-step Note-taking Process: 1. I take notes in meetings in paper moleskine notebooks. 2. I go back through the notes with a different color pen and circle the key sentences and in effect annotate my own annotations. 3. I transfer the highlighted notes to Evernote files on my computer (if they’re
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private) or directly onto my blog or twitter feed (if they’re public). Probably 5% of what I write down with pen and paper ever makes it into an electronic system, but the act of writing and then re-typing and publishing those 5% of thoughts really solidifies them into my memory. This process has not only increased my retention of key ideas, but improved my follow-through on action items that come out of meetings, conferences, and the like. Everyone’s different. Try different systems of note taking. Figure out the right approach for you (Tim Ferriss’s extreme “take notes like an alpha geek” system is an example on the extreme). Takeaway: Take notes. But, more than that, find a system to make use of the notes long after the presentation is over. Ben Casnocha is an entrepreneur and author. He is currently Chief of Staff to Linkedin founder and chairman Reid Hoffman and coauthor with Reid of the #1 New York Times bestselling book “The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career.” He is also co-author of a forthcoming book based on his article in Harvard Business Review entitled “Tours of Duty: The New EmployerEmployee Compact.” Learn more about Ben and read his blog at www.casnocha.com.
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James Altucher Should I pray to Jesus or should I test? I feel like killing myself when I lose money. When I was daytrading to keep from going broke and I lost money on a trade, I’d have nightmares all night. I’d wake up early the next day and go to the church directly across the street. I’d kneel down right in front of the 12 foot tall statue of Jesus and I’d say, “Jesus, I have an open position long futures. Please make the market move in my direction for the first five minutes of the day.” Sometimes I’d sit there like that and pray for an hour. I would try to feel love for Jesus so maybe he would feel love back towards me and bless me. I’m Jewish. I had to change tactics. I did whatever I normally did whenever I had a problem. Problems with a girl. Problems with homework. And now problems with the stock market. I wrote a software program. First I modeled the markets. Every pattern you could think of. “If the market goes down 8 days in a row, does something statistically significant happen on day 9.” I’d look for all trades that were highly statistically significant. I developed a winning style that way. But still....but still… The markets are never that simple. They know what you are up to. And then you have to manage your own psychology, when she starts to whisper in your head. So I modeled my own behavior also. I charted my P&L as if I were a stock. Up $5000 one day, down $10,000 the next. Up $3000 the next. And so on. And, like a stock, I looked for patterns of statistical
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significance. I tended to lose money on Mondays, for instance. I tended to make money on morning trades and lose on afternoon trades. I made all my money on Nasdaq futures and broke even on S&P 500 futures. I found all the patterns in my own behavior that were statistically significant for me making money. And I stuck to them. I was up for almost 24 straight months in a row. I was successful enough that I then started a fund of hedge funds where I invested in other traders. Takeaway: Everything I do now I test before, during, and after. Testing is just a social science. It’s not physics. But it’s a lot better than praying. James Altucher is an investor, entrepreneur and best-selling author of “Choose Yourself.” His advice has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Forbes, CNBC, CNN Radio and more. Learn more at http://www.jamesaltucher.com.
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Jay Cross How I saved $29,000 “testing out” of college So you’re just starting college and you need to earn all of those major-independent “general education” credits (ie, English 101) that every student takes. What do you do? Option #1: Take a standard English course. You know what that means: classes, homework, tests, quizzes, projects, group assignments...ugh. 95% of students assume this is their only option. Time: 4 months Cost: $3,000+ Option #2: Take CLEP tests instead. They cover a full semester of material...and if you pass, you get the same credits you would have spent months in a classroom for. Time: 2 hours Cost: $80 This isn’t just for English class. I earned the final 36 credits of my degree this way and was the only person I know to graduate 100% debt-free. CLEP offers 33 multiple-choice exams in five subject areas, is accepted for credit by 2,900 colleges and universities, and is proctored in over 1,800 test centers nationwide. Developed by College Board — the same organization behind AP and SAT — CLEP measures your knowledge regardless of how you obtained it: independent study, internships, and work experience included.
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Even if your school only allows 30 exam credits, that’s still a quarter of your degree. You will save over $29,000 by NOT earning those credits in the classroom! Takeaway: Don’t waste time shaking your fists at student lenders. They don’t care. Avoid debt in the first place by testing out! Jay Cross is the founder of The Do-It-Yourself Degree and helps thousands of independent learners graduate faster for less. His college acceleration strategies have been featured by Fox Business, Huffington Post, Popular Mechanics, Brazen Careerist, The Personal MBA, and UnCollege.org.
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Chris Guillebeau When all else fails and you have to just go for it I was on a mission to visit every country in the world. For nearly ten years the pursuit had consumed me. It was the thrill of my life, and most of the time everything went as planned — but once in a while, I got stuck. One of the biggest challenges was receiving visas for a few especially interesting countries. For some reason, the government of Saudi Arabia wasn’t excited about me crashing their country for no good reason. I had dutifully applied for a visa (under the pretext of “cultural enrichment”) but the process was stalled. I had the sense that no matter how long I waited, the embassy would keep delaying. Finally I had to travel — so I just decided to go for it. I booked a ticket and talked my way onto the flight from Jordan. Landing in Riyadh, I presented myself to the immigration office and tried to explain how excited I was about visiting their country. It didn’t go well. The officials were ready to put me back on the flight to Amman, which would result in a failure for my quest (I don’t count airport stops). Now it was my turn to stall. I figured if I kept talking I could delay the process long enough to miss my flight, and then they wouldn’t know what to do with me. Technically they could put me in jail until the next flight a day later, but I had to take the risk. I went off on a long monologue about why this project was so important, and I presented various paperwork that showed I had prepared well: my hotel reservation, tickets for the next country, and so on. Sure enough, the flight back to Jordan took off without me, and after much persuasion the officials agreed to let me stay in town as long as I surrendered my passport and agreed to leave three days later. That was fine with me — I had no plans to illegally immigrate. Walking outside the terminal and hailing a cab, I hoisted a fist pump into the air. Against the odds, I had made it. Victory!
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Takeaway: Sometimes, no matter how much testing you do, you just have to jump in with both feet and take a risk. Chris Guillebeau is the New York Times bestselling author of “The $100 Startup.” During a lifetime of self-employment, he visited every country in the world (193 in total) before his 35th birthday. Every summer in Portland, Oregon he hosts the World Domination Summit. Connect with Chris on his blog or at your choice of worldwide airline lounge.
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Thanks for reading I hope you enjoyed this little guide full of small tests that can change your life. If you know someone who would enjoy or benefit from any of these tests, please feel free to forward this guide to them. If you’re interested in using a “testing mentality” in all areas of your life to earn more, create habits, or improve your career, I share some of my best psychological insights every week to my private email list. You’ll get access to some of my personal test results as well as tests that I do with my team at IWT. Here’s that link: http://iwillteachyoutoberich.com/more-tests Thanks for reading, - Ramit
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