How do you help those that you love most? In addition to his extreme chronic body odor problem, my husband also has an eating disorder. He loves candy and pizza. He eats jelly beans till he gets a stomachache and inhales a large pizza in under ten minutes. Well, that was the first 29 years of his life. In the recent months though, he’s been experiencing severe heartburn to the point that he can no longer drink ice water. He recognizes that something needs to be done but it’s not going to be easy because his addiction is deep rooted.

We often become emotionally attached to the food we grew up with. If McDonald’s and pizza made you happy as a little kid, then you are bound to develop a warm and fuzzy attachment for them as an adult. When I think about pure evil, Happy Meals and McD playgrounds invariably come to mind. In contrast, I feel pretty lucky to have been raised on healthy and delicious Chinese food my grandma prepared for me every day. When I first moved to the U.S., the smell of high school cafeterias used to make me sick. Seventeen years later, I still haven’t gotten used to American cuisine. For better or for worse, I’m going to be a picky eater for life.

Over the last few years, my eating habits have rubbed off on Dan somewhat. He doesn’t eat Hostess Cup Cakes anymore and rarely binges on potato chips, but candy and Pizza remain the final frontier that have so far eluded all attempts at intervention. I do realize that if the tables were turned, I wouldn’t want the person I’m with to get too involved. I’d just want him/her to understand what I’m going through and be supportive. But Dan assured me that he needs all the help he can get. So I decided that I’ll go all out on it and create an obby. I will employ a multi-pronged approach and try to attack the problem on different fronts. It will be interesting to learn about the psychology of addiction specifically in relation to eating disorders. I’ll read up on nutrition, do some brainstorming and planning for him to avoid getting trapped in situations with no healthy food. Finally, I’ll cook and experiment with various recipes. If I come across any techniques of general interest, I will post about them. I’m pretty psyched about this project. The time has come, must save the Dan! (BTW, I was just kidding about the body odor. Dan smells wonderful for the most part.)

If you have any tips on overcoming eating disorders, I’d love to hear them!

I’m starting another obby — learn about personal finance and investing. My personal finance up to this point has involved virtually no planning and I know much more about spending than investing. I’ve always assumed that I will get a job some day and a pension plan of some kind and that was that. But now, the situation has changed. As I became more conscious about designing the kind of life I want: a professional hobbyist doing short term projects for a living, I started to realize that there are certain types of securities that I can no longer count on. I think personal finance and investing will likely play a key role in this new lifestyle.

As a starting point, I’m going to read The Little Book that Beats the Market, another book recommended by Eric. I also organized an investment discussion dinner for the end of August to exchange ideas with other people.  If you have any interest or experience in this area, I’d like to hear from you. The actual oobby will be to make a small investment by Nov. 1st. I have to get geared up so I know what to do when my obbies start to generate more income than I can spend. The danger is imminent.

I’m starting a new obby — reading and discussing the book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell. The book is about the snap judgements we make in the first two seconds of meeting someone. It talks about how the subconscious mind processes information. Eric recommended it to me a while back, and I’m finally getting around to it.

This is the first step of my grand plan to become a mind reader. You may want to think twice before you try to hide something from me next time, heh heh heh.

On a more pragmatic level, the goal is just to be more aware of various perceptual channels. The meditation retreat made me more aware of my bodily sensations both in response to outside stimulus and my own thoughts. I believe there are many ways of knowing. Yet for the past ten years or so, I’ve been really emphasizing the analytical aspects of perception and problem solving. I hope this obby will provide a starting point for exploring the role of intuition in our daily lives. If you’ve read the book or are interested in reading it, I’d love to hear what you think. I’m putting together a book discussion dinner in late August. I’m thinking outdoor dinning, Italian food, Mmm… Hope to see you there!

I’m back!  Let me tell you, it was quite an experience!  I remember before I left, I had some guesses as to what it would be like.  I thought it might feel like traveling to an exotic place.   Well, I was right on!  I travelled to a sensory deprivation chamber for five days and then spent another five in a mental hospital.  It was pretty silly of me to think that I was going to spend a peaceful, calm, albeit physically challenging ten days contemplating my life.  It turned out to be anything but peaceful.  The best way to describe the experience is intense Eastern psychotherapy.  What do I mean by that?  Well, we will have to start from the very beginning.

I arrived at the center in the afternoon.  There were around 140 of us in total, half men and half women.  The majority of the people there were in their mid twenties to mid thirties.  I chatted with a few women right after I arrived (they keep the men and the women completely separate, later I saw that this is indeed wise).  I got into a good conversation with a woman who restored antique art.  This is actually her second time.  She said that she got a lot out of it the first time around.  That’s a good sign, I thought to myself.   After a brief orientation, silence was instituted.  So, that was day zero.

For the next three days, we were trained to observe our breath while sitting still without moving.  Yup, that’s right!  That’s what we did from 4:30 in the morning to 8:00 at night.  My back was killing me at the end of the first day.  As the days worn on, the physical aspect got easier and easier but the psychological intensity got cranked up higher and higher.  If you think about it, it makes sense.  When you are sitting there for the entire day with your eyes closed, your mind is starved for stimulation.  At first, it’s the daily thoughts and feelings.  But after four or five days, you run out of the normal stock of things to think about.  More and more, you find that your subconscious mind starts to manifest itself.

By day six, I got seriously paranoid.  They are telling us that in order to be truly happy, you have to get rid of all your cravings and aversions.  The aversions part is easy to understand.  But I definitely don’t want to get rid of all my cravings.  I thought, what am I getting myself into?  I don’t want to turn into a Buddhist monk!  Maybe they are trying to perform some kind of mass hypnosis on us!  While we are mentally susceptible, they tell us messages that will turn us into obedient and peace-loving drones.  Who are these people?  The atmosphere definitely had some cult-like qualities to it.  Then there is the no talking part, maybe it is aimed to create an aura of obedience and conformity — if you see others silently obey it makes it harder for you to question things.  On that same day, I noticed that the girl that used to sit in front of me was gone.  Her mat removed.  I wondered what happened…

During lunch, I looked around and realized what a strange scene this made.  You see seventy women milling about a cafeteria, moving slowly but methodically.  Some chose to sit facing the wall.  Ones that are sitting at the same table would either stare at their food or off into the space.  No one makes eye contact with anyone else.  No one is laughing or even smiling.  Everything in my body was telling me to get out of there.  It just didn’t feel right.  I wanted to return to my normal life and forget that this had ever happened.  In the end though, my curiosity got the better of me.  I figured whatever parts of the practice I don’t feel comfortable with, I will just resist.  I will only practice the parts that are acceptable to me.  I remembered reading somewhere that even hypnosis won’t work on someone who doesn’t want it.

From day seven on, everyday I had to deal with some serious cravings and anxieties during meditation.  The nature of most are too personal to reveal.  Sorry guys.  But just imagine whatever fantasies, nagging doubts about your life goals and relationships, regrets and fears, they will surface one by one.  Personally, I would say that my experience was 2/3 cravings and 1/3 aversions.  During one of my long meditation sessions, I dreamed up my next obby: making an anime porn flick for women.

Up to this point, I haven’t really talked much about the practice itself.  I thought we were going to learn all kinds of breathing and visualization techniques.  But the actual technique is deceptively simple: you sit and observe your breath and the sensations in your body and try to remain detached and nonjudgmental of the sensations no matter what comes up.  How do you observe the sensations in your body?  That’s what they train you to do in all the days you are there.  You start with observing your breath coming in and out.  Then, you move your attention to the area near your nostrils and feel the sensations there.  After that, you systematically move through every part of your body from head to toe.

Just to illustrate what I mean, now close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, then focus your attention on your right palm (left if you are left handed), give it ten seconds or so and see what kind of sensations you feel.  Chances are you will feel SOMETHING. It might be heat, tingling, pausing, etc.  We get trained over the course of ten days to become more and more sensitive to the sensations so that in the end, you just feel an even vibrating flow going through your entire body.  There will be no more blind spots.

When you methodically go through every inch of your body, you may feel a wide range of sensations, some pleasant and others quite irritating.  But you are to remain detached and nonjudgmental to every sensation and not react to it.   You can’t react to the sensations physically because you sit there for an hour at a time without moving or opening your eyes.  When your nose itches or when a drop of sweat rolls down your neck, you just observe it and try to not to react to it emotionally either.  You tell yourself that this sensation, like any other, arises and passes away.  It is impermanent.

So far, this sounds like sick torture, an attempt to develop your discipline at best.  What’s the point of all this?  The theory is also quite simple.  It basically says that when you are addicted to something, you are not really craving that object.  You are craving the sensations that the object induces in your body.  By observing that sensation and not reacting to it, you cut off the feedback loop and eases the escalation of that sensation.  Addictions and intense aversions such as fear all have the tendency to get more riled up when you start to think about them.  Say someone just insulted your mother, you immediately get angry and experience unpleasant sensations.  Then, you react more to that unpleasant sensation and get even more agitated.  This technique makes you aware of your sensations as soon as they occur and to make some conscious choice about how you’d like to react.

On a psychological level, the technique effectively makes you your own psychotherapist.  One reason why confessing to a priest or talking to a therapist helps is because you get to air everything out in the open.  The fact that they accept you and react toward you in a nonjudgmental manner allows you to face your own situation with more objectivity.  But of course, it’s hard to observe your own thoughts objectively.  When you start thinking “why does my boss always pick me for overtime?” the next thought is likely to be “He must think I’m a push over.  He is such an asshole…”  The ingenious part of the technique is in recognizing that we can remain objective about our bodily sensations much more easily than our own thoughts.

Gotama the Buddha invented this technique 2500 years ago.  This guy must have been a genius.  I just ordered a biography of him on Amazon.   In the end analysis, I’m glad I went.  Do I recommend it to others?  Well, I think it can be a beneficial practice for overcoming any kind of obsession or destructive patterns.  So, if you have addictions, serious depression, want to have much less ups and downs, or you find yourself hitting rock bottom at some point in your life, I’d say give it a try.  For others, I will have to let things sink in some more before I give any enthusiastic recommendations.  Although, if you enjoy having experiences in life that are kind of out there, then go for it!  It may give you some perspective on various issues in your life. But don’t expect it to make you feel in touch with the universe or anything like that. So far as I can tell, it’s an actual practice and not some kind of initiation into a cult.  At least they won’t turn you into a cult member in a ten day course.

One thing I can tell you is that boy am I glad it’s over!  On the day I got back, Dan and I went out for some Korean food for lunch and Thai food for dinner and then saw Clerks II in the theaters.  Life is good!

Here is what I’m in for for the next 10 days… I’m leaving right now. Check back after the 23rd, if I haven’t given up on this world completely by then .

4:00 a.m.———————Morning wake-up bell
4:30-6:30 a.m.————–Meditate in the hall or your own room
6:30-8:00 a.m.————–Breakfast break
8:00-9:00 a.m.————–GROUP MEDITATION IN THE HALL
9:00-11:00 a.m.————-Meditate in the hall or your own room
11:00-12:00 noon———-Lunch break
12noon-1:00 p.m.———-Rest and interviews with the teacher
1:00-2:30 p.m.————–Meditate in the hall or your own room
2:30-3:30 p.m.————–GROUP MEDITATION IN THE HALL
3:30-5:00 p.m.————–Meditate in the hall or your own room
5:00-6:00 p.m.————–Tea break
6:00-7:00 p.m.————–GROUP MEDITATION IN THE HALL
7:00-8:15 p.m.————–Teacher’s Discourse in the hall
8:15-9:00 p.m.————–GROUP MEDITATION IN THE HALL
9:00-9:30 p.m.————–Question time in the hall
9:30 p.m.———————Retire to your own room–Lights out

How much education and training do we need before we can embark on that thing we love? I read a story recently that made me think (here is a link to the book it came from). It’s a real life story about a guy named Andrew. After high school graduation, Andrew got a job at a fast food place. He didn’t have many marketable skills, and he wasn’t interested in the only thing he knew how to do: work on cars. What he loved was vintage airplanes. He was also fairly organized. With only a high school diploma, no experience, and a tiny skill set, Andrew found a way to work on things he loved.

First, he got a job stocking the shelves at a shop that sells airplane parts. He organized the stock room to facilitate easy parts lookup. The store was located near an airport and was frequented by many plane owners. His knowledge of vintage airplanes quickly made him the go to guy for obscure parts. His boss was impressed with his work and let him represent the store in an airplane maintenance trade show. There, Andrew met a vintage plane collector and was hired to maintain his collection. Not only does he get to receive training and education as part of his job, he also gets to travel all over the country.

In some ways, Andrew’s problem is actually simple. He was stuck at terrible job he absolutely hated. He had no where to go but up. What’s your situation? I’d venture to guess that you are better educated and already have tons of marketable skills. You probably don’t want to be stocking parts but chances are you don’t have to. You can probably parlay your skills and connections into a much smoother transition. But even so, in order to do the things you really love, you may have to go down before you can go up. This may involve getting a lower paying and/or a less prestigious job. This may involve getting some funny looks from people around you. The more monotonically upward your life has been up to this point, the harder it is to take the leap. You may be imprisoned by your own success. Anything that doesn’t immediately escalate the level of success that you have already achieved is labeled as failure.

One thing that may be helpful if you find yourself in this situation is to realize that whatever that has brought you your current level of success will not suddenly abandon you. Those qualities and skills will serve you quite well in your new chosen domain.

Another thing is to realize that success and failure are often in the eyes of the beholder. If you are an established painter or performer, there are guaranteed to be some people looking at you and thinking, “why don’t you do something more substantial and useful with your life.” If you are an engineer, some people may sneer and say “that stuff you do is so boring, no one can understand it and there is no life or imagination in that stuff.” If you are a successful business person, someone may say “there is more to life than making money, look at all those people who are really in need.”

You may be raised with some subtle variations of the above messages that still shape your world view. Say you want to be a pastry chef and you are currently a management consultant (I recently met a woman who made this transition). Then you may find it easier if you start hanging out with more pastry chefs and fewer management consultants (at least for the time being). The pastry chefs will see your career change as a matter of course: how can anyone choose to be stuck in a sterile office when they can be crafting magnificent dark chocolate hazelnut truffles? Their world view will start to rub off on you.

The point is to realize that one world view is often as arbitrary as another. We may be subconsciously subscribing to one that is preventing us from realizing our true potentials. What do your parents, siblings and current peers value? Education? Creativity? Money? Math and Science? Social status? Hard work? Persistence? Do you have any of these biases? Barring the fact that we all need to somehow make a living, what’s holding you back? (If you are ever worried about the making a living part, just remember Andrew

Yesterday, I spent the morning with Jeff, a photographer friend I met recently. We spent two hours brainstorming how to expand his business. I noticed afterwards that I had a great amount of focus and clarity. I felt more engaged than when I’ve had to tackle a problem of my own. It’s not the first time this has happened. I remember once in college, I was visiting a friend of mine at another school. He was swamped with work. In the interest of being able to spend more time together, I took over one his problem sets. There was one problem that was particularly interesting and challenging. I happily spent a whole evening on it, trying to figure out a clever solution. But if that was my own homework, I would have long given up in disgust. I wondered why it’s so much easier to work on someone else’s problems rather than our own.

After a little thinking, I came up with a few thoughts.

Perhaps working on others’ problems is just a way to procrastinate? When you procrastinate, everything seems so interesting.

Perhaps when we work on other peoples’ problem, the goal is more clear: to solve it in the best/most efficient way possible. But when it is a problem of our own, we may have additional constraints, oftentimes subconscious ones that prevent us from committing to a course of action. For example, if I were shy, I may be subconsciously avoiding solutions that would require me to talk to a stranger.

Perhaps another factor is that we don’t feel emotionally invested in the outcomes. We try to do the best we can and beyond that, we don’t worry too much. We don’t fixate on the possible negative consequences (however unlikely). We are able to have things in perspective.

Perhaps this suggests I should make a living doing consulting

Has this ever happened to you? Any insights?

Do you dream of making a movie, writing a book or playing the piano beautifully? Do you find it hard to get started? There’s always some thing or another keeping you from it. There’s your full time job, family obligations, a friend’s birthday party… On that rare occasion that you are finally able to block off a Sunday afternoon, you find yourself reaching for the phone or the remote, you start feeling restless or sleepy, or you suddenly notice that your apartment is too messy. After several failed attempts, doubts start to creep in: maybe I just don’t have what it takes, maybe it’s not meant to be. Why is it so hard to get started on our dreams?

There are many practical and psychological factors that hold us back. First, there may be a lack of information. For example, you may dream of becoming a fashion model but have no idea how to get started. Another factor may be the fear of failure: you’ve been telling everyone at your day job that you want to be a writer, holding on to that dream is what makes you stay above the office politics. Now, what if you find out that you suck at writing?

No one can tell you whether you will succeed. But if you can somehow overcome the inertia and get things rolling, maybe you’ll love it and run with it, maybe you will realize that it’s too much hard work and just not worth it. It’s hard to give up a dream, but by giving it up you make room for new ones. Plus, it may be even harder to face the regrets ten years down the line if you never gave it a shot. Here is how an obby can help get you started.

The key to overcoming inertia is to simultaneously lower resistance and raise excitement. You can lower resistance by carving out a very small obby. It has to be so small that it is doable. We are not talking about picking the first thing off of a to-do list and implementing it. An obby, though small, has to be exciting. It has to have an oobby that you just can’t resist. How can you come up with an exciting oobby? Well, you can try the brute force approach that I call pile-it-on. The idea is to list out all the things that you enjoy and pile on as many of them as you can until you jizz in your pants.

Here is an example. Say I want to learn to play the piano. I will try to carve out a small obby. In order to make it exciting, first I think about the things I love. I love event planning, I love arts and crafts, and I love dining outdoors. If I wanted to overcome the inertia of getting started playing the piano, here is what I might do. The oobby associated with the piano-learning obby would be a summer concert featuring me, the budding pianist. The concert will be held at my apartment in two months. Of course, I’d convince my friends to perform. I’d try to get Emily to play her mandolin, Amanda to sing, and Lisa to play her violin. I’d design and make formal invitations as an arts and crafts project. If that still weren’t exciting enough, I’d pile on more things I love. I will have it outdoors and have food served! You get the picture. I will keep going until I pile on enough things I love that I can’t wait to get things rolling. The sense of excitement is key. Oftentimes, all it takes is the integration of one thing you love to get yourself hooked.

At the end of the two month. I’d ask myself, did I really enjoy playing the piano as much as I pictured? Was it worth spending hours and hours practicing? If the answer is yes, then I will keep on learning how to play the piano. But if I decide that it’s not worth it, I will announce my retirement at the end of my performance and thank everyone for attending my debut/farewell concert. This interest didn’t just fizzle out, it went out with a bang and I will look back on it fondly, rather than with guilt or regret.

As another example, let’s revisit the movie making dream. Perhaps you like the creative part of the movie making but you are having a hard time getting yourself motivated to figure out how to use a video camera and the video editing software. If that’s the case, let’s make up and obby and pile-it-on. Maybe you’ve always wanted to volunteer. How about teach the residents at the local senior center how to use a video camera? Maybe you can collaborate and make a little movie together. Or say, you enjoy competition and intensity, then consider entering the 48 Hour Film Project. There are so many possibilities.

What have you always dreamed of doing?

Limited time offer: if you reply to this post (or email me) with your dream and the list of things you love within the next five days, I will brainstorm up some potential obbies and we can compare notes.

We’ve all done a lot of things in life in service of the future. When you are little, your parents enroll you in piano lessons and say “you’ll thank me for it later”. In high school, you join the debate team and yearbook so you will have extracurricular activities to put on your college application.

My crazy husband actually took preparing for the future to the next level. He always prepares for things a few years in advance by reading books pertaining to his goals. When he was in college, he read all the books on how to succeed in grad school. When he was in grad school, he read all about how to get tenure as a professor. The key, according to him, is that you want to show your future employers that you can already do what they expect you to do.

Say you are in college now and you want to go to grad school. You find out that grad students conduct independent research, publish papers, and teach. That suggests that as an undergrad, you should do an independent studies project with a professor and try to publish the results in a workshop or conference. If you do this, grad schools will love you. They will probably take you over someone with a higher GPA. This trend is even stronger in the workplace when employers will regularly take an employee with the right experience over someone with more appropriate education. By showing them that you are already doing what they would like you to do, you are essentially eliminating risks for the employer.

This plan is fine and well if you know exactly what you want to do. Now, what if you feel OK about your current job but you get a sinking feeling when you picture yourself doing that ten years from now? Chances are, on the day to day level, you still try your best to get ahead. You try to go for the next promotion, and may even go so far as to get more education, whether that be a seminar, an online degree, or full time MBA program. If you are a smart person, you can go pretty far in life by doing just that. You keep gaining expertise and preparing yourself in areas that you are not all that passionate about. You do it for the challenge. This can become a self perpetuating cycle, because after you invest energy acquiring these new qualifications, you find it such a waste not to leverage them. In this way, you build a bigger and bigger trap for yourself while burying your natural interests deeper and deeper. You keep looking good to the wrong people.

Many people have thought about this problem, written about it, and found great solutions. What I’m about to suggest isn’t all that original. But because of its doable, entertaining and self-contained nature, it’s very easy to get started. My suggestion is simply to make up an obby in something that you purely enjoy and go for it. This basically boils down to doing a project and producing a small product at the end of it. This serves many purposes:

1) It gives you an excuse to block out time for something you enjoy – it’s in service of your future.

2) It allows you to get in touch with the things that you are truly interested in.

3) Psychologically, it can give you a sense of accomplishment. More importantly, this sense of accomplishment is derived directly from something you love. This connection gets stronger the more you build on it.

4) You might have created something that looks good to the right people in your future. These people are going to look at what you did, appreciate it, and give you an opportunity. That is because this time, unbeknownst to you, you’ve actually prepared yourself for something you really enjoy.

I realize that this is best demonstrated by some examples. I will expand on it in my next post.

If you know me personally, then I don’t think you’ll have any qualms
with me describing myself as a well grounded, rational and reasonable
individual. So, if what I’m about to tell you sound hokie, cultish, or
bizarre, just bear with me till the end and try it for yourself. You may
be as surprised as I was.

I just did an exercise that is aimed at discovering my true purpose in
life, and while I still need to reflect on the answer, I think it is very
compelling. Now, I’m not going to tell you what it is. That part is rather
irrelevant. What’s relevant here is the process by which I arrived at
that answer (but if you do the exercise to completion, then I will
share my answer with you).

We all wonder about our purpose, our goal in life. But chances are,
you tend to think through it by using your rational mind. You may
even have it written down in a list somewhere titled “what do I truly
care about.”

But now, for a moment, just let the emotional side take over. What
kind of answers do you imagine you will get? Can the emotional side
be effectively engaged to answer this question?

The article below describes a way to tap into your feelings and let it
tell you what you truly care about. It will give you a very clear
answer, one that is much more concrete than the intellectual list you
made.

To sum it up, the real answer will make you cry (literally). I was very
skeptical until I tried it. It took me six minutes to start balling. I made
my husband try it, it took him twenty-five minutes. But sure enough,
it worked for him too.

So, when you get home tonight, when you can be in a room by
yourself, uninterrupted for an hour, try this and see what you find.