You may have heard of blogger and life coach Alex Fayle, also known as the “Someday Syndrome” guy. Someday Syndrome is the affliction that people suffer from when they know their life isn’t what they want, and they stare off into space thinking “someday my ship will come in.”

What Alex does is help people uncover hidden patterns so they can break their procrastination habit and start living the life they desire. He’s certainly done that in his own life, overcoming his procrastination to move to Spain and follow his dreams such as becoming a fiction author. In his new ebook Someday My Ship Will Come In: A Practical Guide to Finding Your Dreams, he shows you how to do the same.

I had a chance to read a draft of this ebook. When Alex asked me specifically what I thought it would do for people, I said the lessons and exercises would help them get clear about their dreams now versus never thinking about them and leaving them to chance. Because the biggest reason that people fail to achieve their dreams isn’t so much that they try and fail, but they put them off to a “someday” that never arrives.

Whatever your dreams are, you can’t just wait for them to come to you. You have to identify them, focus on them, take the first few steps, and get the ball rolling. That’s what it takes to cure your Someday Syndrome. Let Alex show you how in Someday My Ship Will Come In.

One of the books I’m reading now is Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. I’m just reading a little bit here and there, but I’ll definitely be reviewing it when I’m done.

So far, it’s about how success is less dependent on talent and hard work than we think. Yes, it still takes a lot of hard work (according to the 10,000 hour rule) and a good amount of talent. However, one critical factor is often ignored – the environment that made you who you are. It turns out that random factors such as your birth date can be hugely important.

But my review will come later. For now, I just want to talk about what success means.

In What Malcolm Gladwell Should Have Told You In ‘Outliers,’ Glen Allsopp says that while he’s a huge fan of Outliers, he has one problem with it. Namely, that Gladwell tends to define success as a large bank balance or some form of status. Glen says:

“While Bill Gates spent years behind a computer screen, people his age where going to parties, sunning on the beach, meeting new people and making the most of life…yet he has made it.

While kids were playing the violin for hours every week, their friends were playing in the park, running through fields and making the most of their childhood. Yet now the violinists are professional or well known…they’ve made it.”

I agree, people who are considered successful have paid an enormous price to get there. If you’re willing to accept being “average” or “good” instead of “off the charts,” you can free up massive amounts of time for other things.

Someone who’s OK with being a little overweight might be a lot happier than a gym rat who works out several hours a day. Someone who’s OK with being a little uninformed might be a lot happier than a Jeopardy champion. It’s much, much easier to be average than an outlier.

Still, the book is about success, not happiness. To learn about success, it makes sense to study Bill Gates and world class violinists. On the other hand, we don’t need to read a book to learn how to go to parties and play in the park. If you want to do those things, you’re free to just do them.

Which brings me to this question: Is success important?

That may sound like a strange question, but it has to do with how you think of success. A lot of people think success is the ultimate measure of your life. Either you’re successful and you’ve had a good life, or you’re unsuccessful and you’ve had a bad life.

I don’t see it that way. To me, success simply means what the traditional definition says. For now, let’s just use this dictionary definition: the attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence.

Is there more to life than the attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence? Of course! I’ve written about a lot of things that are important to me, but which have absolutely nothing to do with wealth, favor, or eminence.

Some people want to be successful. Some people want to be happy. Some people want to be in good shape. Some people want to travel. Some people want to learn. Some people want lots of friends. These are all different things, none of which is the be all, end all of life. We all value different things.

And guess what? It’s OK if you don’t want to be successful!

But wait, if you’re not successful, does that make you unsuccessful, a failure, a bad person? Not at all. I can’t play the violin, but I wouldn’t consider myself a failed violinist. The violin just isn’t important to me, so it’s not how I judge myself.

Likewise, I wouldn’t consider Barack Obama a failed dentist, or Mohandas Gandhi a failed football player. Maybe they’re not good at those particular things, but they have different objectives.

When you walk past a homeless person, your first thought probably isn’t “Wow, look how successful he is!” Because face it, success, as defined by society, means money. After all, money is what society invented as a store of value. On the other hand, no one needs to feel threatened by this, because you don’t need to make money a priority if you don’t want to.

If you want to live the life of the Mexican fisherman, fine. But don’t redefine “success” to mean “happiness” just because it’s much easier to achieve, and you have this false idea that all good people are required to be successful. It’s perfectly fine to decide that success – or if you prefer, “traditional success” – isn’t important to you.

Some people are meant to chase success, but most aren’t. Not everyone can be in the richest 1%, or the healthiest 1%, or the most educated 1%, or the happiest 1%, or the friendliest 1%, and so on. We have to decide on our priorities.

I once met a homeless woman who was doing exactly what she wanted with her life: enjoying the weather, scenery, and tourists outside the White House while protesting nuclear weapons. No sane person would consider her successful, and she wouldn’t be the subject of a book like Outliers, but she was doing what she wanted to do.

And in the end, isn’t that what we should all be striving for?

Oh, regarding the post title – is success for suckers? Yes, but only if you spend your life chasing it at the cost of things that are more important to you. However, if success is important to you, then we have something in common. There’s room for both types.

Photo by aloshbennett

A long time back, I ordered Lorelle VanFossen’s book Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging. For over a year, it remained under a pile of other books I haven’t read, until I finally got around to it. I wish I had done so sooner, because it would have been more helpful to me back then.

Much like ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income, this book is not going to give an experienced blogger a lot of stuff they haven’t seen before. But for somebody who’s new to blogging or thinking about taking the plunge, this is a great way to get hundreds of tips covering many aspects of blogging, all in one place.

Blogging since 1994, Lorelle has seen it all. If you need a crash course in blogging, this is a great resource.

Randy Pausch‘s autographed photo of Captain Kirk, on which William Shatner wrote “I don’t believe in the no-win scenario.”

In Star Trek, the Kobayashi Maru is a test that puts you up against a no-win scenario.

In this simulation, a civilian ship named the Kobayashi Maru has been disabled by a gravitic mine and is losing life support. If you don’t intervene, the Kobayashi’s 400 passengers will die.

Unfortunately, the Kobayashi lies in the Klingon Neutral Zone. If you attempt a rescue, you’ll be in violation of the treaty, which will cause the Klingons to take hostile action.

If you try to save the Kobayashi, three Klingon ships move in on you. They refuse to communicate, and they start firing. You’re outnumbered, and the computer is allowed to cheat, so there is no option but to lose.

The point of the test is not to win, but to behave well in the face of certain destruction.

How do you face a situation that you know you can’t win?

There’s a psychological concept known as “learned helplessness.” It refers to when a person or an animal learns that it’s helpless, so it stops trying, even after the situation changes.

In a 1960s experiment that I hope to God would be illegal today, learned helplessness was observed in dogs by subjecting them to electric shocks.

Two dogs were kept in separate rooms, but wired to the same electrical circuit. When the electricity was turned on, the first dog was able to press a lever that would turn it off for both dogs. The second dog didn’t have access to the lever, and from his perspective the shocks just stopped at a random time (since he didn’t know the first dog controlled it).

Although both dogs experienced the exact same electrical shocks, the first dog learned that he had the power to stop them, while the second dog learned that he was helpless. The dog in control quickly recovered, while the helpless dog become chronically depressed. In further experiments, the dogs that had learned helplessness were subjected to shocks that they were free to run away from, but they didn’t try.

But wait, it gets worse. It’s somewhat understandable for the dogs to think that because they couldn’t stop the shocks in the first experiment, they couldn’t stop them in the second. But in another set of experiments, dogs were temporarily paralyzed with a drug before being shocked. Obviously, they couldn’t even try to escape the shocks. By the time they regained their mobility, they had learned they were helpless. They didn’t try to escape the shocks, even though they had never tried before.

Here’s the silver lining: not all dogs acted this way. A third of them, the optimistic ones, did not become helpless. They still tried to escape the shocks and did, despite having failed before.

I’m not sure how the Star Trek cadets were supposed to behave in the Kobayashi Maru simulation, but I guess it was along the lines of staying focused and trying everything possible. And some cadets tried some unexpected solutions, with varying degrees of success.

- On his third attempt, James T. Kirk cheated by reprogramming the simulator to make it possible to rescue the Kobayashi, saying he didn’t believe in the no-win scenario. (In one movie he was awarded a commendation for original thinking, but in another he was put on trial for cheating.)

- Chekov evacuated his ship before crashing it into the three Klingon ships. (However, this meant that the Kobayashi was not saved.)

- Sulu realized it was a trap, and didn’t cross into the Neutral Zone. (Again, this meant the Kobayashi was not saved.)

- Scotty used a bunch of crazy tactics that let him bypass the Klingon shields and beam destructive items to them. While this worked at first, the simulator kept adding more and more Klingon ships, finally beating Scotty with 15 ships. (Because Scotty knew that his techniques would work in the simulator but not the real world, he was judged unsuitable for command track and reassigned to engineering.)

- Piper used a bunch of unorthodox commands that tricked the computer into fighting itself, which ended up crashing the simulator. (Her instructors acknowledged that it might have worked in the real world.)

- Peter David made the bizarre move of destroying the Kobayashi, figuring that (1) a rescue attempt could not succeed, (2) destroying the Kobayashi was more humane than letting the crew be captured and tortured, and (3) the Kobayashi may actually have been a setup planted by the enemy.

- Peter Kirk (James’ nephew) faced a different version of the simulation, in which the enemies were the Romulans instead of the Klingons. He invoked an obscure Romulan law that allowed him to challenge the Romulan commander to a one-on-one fight to the death, during which all ships must cease fire. Before beaming over for the duel, he told his people to beam aboard the Kobayashi survivors and escape, leaving him to die. (The instructor stopped the simulation at this point, but Peter was credited with a nearly perfect outcome, sacrificing himself but saving the Kobayashi and his own ship. The simulator was reprogrammed to prevent this solution from being used again.)

Every now and then, you may face a situation that seems unwinnable. And maybe it is. But don’t give more power to it than you have to. Don’t be too quick to declare it as unwinnable, when there may be a solution you haven’t thought of yet.

And if you really can’t win, doing your best anyway will keep you away from the trap of learned helplessness for the future. Besides, you can always change your definition of “winning.”

Jonathan Mead, one of the faculty members of Project Mojave, has just released a manifesto called The Liberation Revolution.

It’s about creating a “freedom business” in order to “cut the cubicle umbilical cord.” While most of the information on how to do this is reserved for the paying members of Project Mojave, the manifesto is free and a pleasure to read.

Here’s what’s inside (I hope he doesn’t mind me ripping off his bullet points!):

• Why we’re tired of choking back vomit because we’re going another day doing a job we hate, with people we don’t connect with, working for someone we don�t respect.
• How we’re transforming our relationship with work, through breaking down social conventions and overly politicized nonsense.
• Why we think entrepreneurship is one of the highest forms of self-actualization.
• How we’re in this together.
• How to cultivate the “Free-man” (or free-woman) mindset and seven things you can do right now.
• The importance of getting to Game Over.

Being free, it’s not as earth-shattering as his paid ebook Reclaim Your Dreams. But it’s good, and well worth taking a few minutes to read. I’m a sucker for freedom manifestos.

I’ve never been much of a Star Trek fan, but I went to see it because everyone seems to like it. Yes, it’s good. And in addition to being good sci-fi, it also carries some important life lessons. (Contains spoilers.)

1. Being different isn’t a bad thing.

The young Spock, being half human and half Vulcan, is a child of two worlds, and doesn’t appear to belong in either one. He’s not accepted by the other kids, and even adults speak of his heritage as a disadvantage. In time though, he makes his own path, finding a huge asset in the combination of Vulcan logic and human emotion.

Do you ever assume that being different is a bad thing?

2. Find a balance between the extremes.

At first, Kirk overindulges his reckless nature with nearly disastrous results, while Spock completely shuts off his emotions and follows the rules to a life he doesn’t want. Eventually, they settle on more moderate personalities. Not exactly in the middle, but at a point where they can avoid most of the consequences of the extremes while still being themselves.

Do you have a tendency to be too extreme in any aspect of your personality?

3. Anyone can be worth listening to.

As the fleet responded to a Vulcan distress call, Kirk connected the dots and realized it was a trap. He tried to warn the crew, who wouldn’t even hear him out at first. After all, he had been suspended, and he was regarded as a loose cannon. Still, he was the only one who knew all the relevant information, and because the crew finally decided to listen, they were prepared for the trap.

Do you ever ignore potentially good advice because of your personal bias?

4. Anyone can make a difference.

George Kirk was captain of the U.S.S. Kelvin for only 12 minutes. But he spent those 12 minutes evacuating the crew and sacrificing himself to save 800 lives.

Are you capable of doing more than you give yourself credit for?

5. Revenge is a dish best not served at all.

The saying “revenge is a dish best served cold” is said to be a Klingon proverb. It means that revenge is more likely to succeed when carefully planned out (cold-blooded) as opposed to being hasty and emotional (hot-blooded).

That might be true, but why not skip revenge altogether? It rarely works out to your benefit. Did Captain Nero really need to sit around doing nothing for 20 years, waiting for Spock to emerge from the black hole? That’s a long time to stay mad at someone, especially someone who didn’t intentionally do anything wrong.

Are there any grudges you can drop today?

6. Don’t play with red matter.

Red matter is a substance that ignites to create a black hole. Spock used it to contain a supernova that would have destroyed the galaxy, so this is dangerous stuff. Apparently, Nero forgot that part when he fired on Spock’s ship. Metaphorically, playing with red matter is doing something that can potentially work, but isn’t worth the risk.

Do you ever try to succeed at any cost, regardless of the consequences?

7. Extreme situations call for extreme measures.

When the Enterprise’s engines weren’t powerful enough to escape from the black hole’s gravitational field, Kirk went with Scotty’s idea of ejecting the warp drive reactor cores and exploding them to propel the ship forward. It was a risk – they could have blown themselves up, or the explosion could have done nothing but destroy their warp capability. But since full speed ahead wasn’t enough, they had to try something.

Have you ever ruled out a risky but feasible option, while clinging to something that wasn’t working?

8. There’s no such thing as a no-win scenario.

Kirk took a test that was designed to be a no-win scenario. It’s a simulation in which no matter what you do, your ship is destroyed. The point of the test is to judge your response to the fear of certain death.

On his third attempt, Kirk beat the no-win scenario by altering the simulator’s programming. He was accused of cheating and missing the whole point of the test, to which he responded that he doesn’t believe in the no-win scenario.

The no-win scenario really doesn’t exist, although you may have to reconsider your definition of “winning.”

Are you facing any scenarios you consider to be “no-win?” Are you sure that’s an accurate perception?

(Randy Pausch, a life-long Star Trek fan, received an autographed picture of William Shatner, on which Shatner wrote “I don’t believe in the no-win scenario.” Randy makes a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo appearance early in the movie as a crew member on the Kelvin, with the line “Captain, we have a visual.”)

Twitter bird icon courtesy of Smashing Magazine. Click the bird, get my book!

Are you a frustrated blogger? Are you spending way too much time marketing your blog, with little results to show for it? Do you wish there were an easier way?

You’ve probably heard lots of good things about Twitter, but maybe it still seems like a waste of time to you. I sure used to think so. Who cares what everyone else is doing?

But that was then. Today, I’m a converted tweeter. Not only do I love using Twitter, but it’s my #3 traffic source (after search engines and StumbleUpon). I’ve cut back drastically on other forms of blog marketing, because Twitter works better for me in a number of ways.

If you’re one of the many bloggers who…

• Doesn’t see why everyone loves Twitter so much
• Thinks Twitter is for telling people what you had for breakfast
• Doesn’t think they have time for Twitter
• Thinks Twitter will destroy their productivity
• Doesn’t know why Twitter needs to be part of your traffic growth strategy
• Thinks Twitter is just for social media geeks
• Or even if you’ve never heard of Twitter until now

…then Why Bloggers Need Twitter is for you! Grab your free copy right now, and learn why you can’t afford not to be on Twitter.

And for those of you who are already Twitter aficionados, feel free to leave your Twitter link in the comments. Tell us why you like Twitter so much, and why we should follow you. Oh, and follow me at @hnuttall!