There are dozens of types of tea ceremony, but the simple ones you do as a beginner last for about 15-25 minutes, depending on how many guests you have and how quick you are. In that time you perform dozens of steps, and most of those steps have a lot of nuance to them, so you may have gotten a certain amount of water from one container to another, but you may have done it all wrong.

In that way, it reminds me a lot of ballet. There is a precisely correct way of doing everything, and even if you do it for years there is still room for improvement on even the most rudimentary movements.

At first I thought that I was great at it, because I received very few corrections. Then as I got better I realized that teachers usually only correct a couple of the biggest mistakes so that you have something to focus on. Like so many other subjects, you constantly realize just how incompetent you were just a few weeks ago.

The biggest hurdle to learning it is that it’s difficult to get a lot of practice in. Classes are usually 2-4 hours and you typically do one ceremony in that time. I’ve done two maybe once or twice. When you’re doing your ceremony there is some element of performance, since you’re trying to make a nice bowl of tea for the other students, so your inclination is to cover up mistakes and never pause or redo things. It’s often impossible to redo things anyway, as many moves are irreversible (for example, adding water to the tea).

Classes are also hard to come by, at least in the US. Class meets 3x per week in Hawaii (though almost everyone only goes once per week), and once per week in Vegas. My friend Todd moved to Japan and started a class that meets three times a week. In the span of a month or so he went from being about one month behind me to being so far ahead of me that I can’t really estimate how long he would have to stop for me to catch up.

Tea ceremony requires at least 12 different items to perform, but over time I collected all of them, including a big antique iron pot. I was excited that I could finally practice at home, until I realized that the iron pot rusts very easily and is annoying to care for, and that since I only drink one serving of tea per day I would either have to only drink matcha or I’d have to waste tea and just pour it out. I thought about buying really crappy matcha and doing that.

Ten days ago I had an idea that now seems so incredibly obvious, but at the time felt like a genius idea. Why bother with tea? I could just practice without tea or water and just pretend they are there.

For four days I practiced once or twice each day with no water, no tea, and and empty kettle. If I did something wrong, I rewound several steps and redid it properly. After each session I watched a video of someone doing it properly and made notes on what I did wrong. Then the next time I would read my notes and try to do better. It felt as though I got at least “one month” better in those few days. I decided to go to class without telling my teacher I had practiced and see if she noticed.

My plan was slightly foiled by us doing a special ceremony that was new to everyone, but I went second to last and it was similar to the one that I had been practicing. After I finished the teacher said, with some level of shock, “Tynan, your tea ceremony looked… really good…”.

Success!

This whole experience may seem like nothing, but it was a big reminder to me that, even as someone who basically does everything his own way, it’s good to be vigilant and make sure that you’re doing things the best way, not just the way everyone else is doing them. By simply examining how I was learning tea ceremony, I believe I’ve cut my learning time (in months/years) down by at least 75-80%. I can now teach myself the basics and only use the valuable time with a teacher to correct the things I can’t teach myself.

How do you learn best? How do you work best? What in your life isn’t going as well or as quickly as you think it is? Maybe there’s some way to speed it up. And now I’m off to whisk a bowl of imaginary tea in preparation for class tomorrow.

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Look! A relevant image that isn’t of Lake Mead. It’s been a long time. The picture is my little 2 mat tea room in my house in Vegas. The paper has some dialogue on it so that I can practice and check if I’m right.

Thanks to everyone who has supported my Patreon so far! It really does make me more motivated to write.

In other Superhuman Alumni news, the Superhuman 2 group has been in regular touch with each other and organized their own 1 year anniversarry with 100% of them attending.

I always knew that people would make huge progress from coming to these events (especially as I’ve gotten better at figuring out how to get everyone to follow through), but I didn’t fully anticipate the bonds and community that would form. Many people have told me that the best thing they’ve gotten from the event is a group of peers who share their principles and help encourage them.

All that said, it’s time to schedule another Superhuman event. This year Superhuman 4 will be in Las Vegas from April 10th-12th. The two mandatory days are the 11th and 12th, but I invite everyone to come over the night of the 10th to meet each other and chat so that we can hit the ground running the next morning.

Superhuman events are largely centered around working with you directly on your biggest goals or obstacles and making sure that you leave with a clear and actionable plan that will achieve the results you want. You will also leave with an accountability buddy who understands what you are working on and who will encourage you and make sure you succeed.

Besides those core takeaways, you will most likely leave with a new group of friends and new perspective on issues that other people brought up. It’s a very unique event and is hard to describe, but I guarantee that it will be of great value to you. So far the average rating for each post-event survey has been over 9/10.

I limit these events to 10 people because it’s important that everyone gets enough time focused on them. The cost is $1500, which you can pay up front or in installments. Expect two very long days (10am to 9pm+ with a few breaks).

Interested? Send me a brief bio so that I know where you’re coming from and what you’re working on. If it sounds like a good fit, I will send you additional information. If you have any questions or concerns, please email me.

One Superhuman Alumni likes Superhuman so much that they have offered to cover the cost of the program for one attendee. If you need financial assistance please let me know in your email and let me know if it is ok to share your email with the alum so that we can decide who to give the scholarship to together.

To apply email me at event at tynan dot net. I sent an email to people on the Superhuman mailing list and half of the spots are full already, so please let me know soon if you want to come.

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Photo is a sunset off the coast of Kona right before we went diving with the Manta rays.

I talk a lot about automating things, and the reason that I do so is because automation is one of the biggest ways to reduce friction. When I first started setting up automated processes I questioned whether or not they’d actually be worth the up-front time investment. Now that I’ve done dozens of them I’ve come to realize that they’ve always been worth it for me as well as for my coaching clients who have automated away their friction.

One of the things I like about reducing friction is that it forces you to focus on important tasks. The path between you and your work is clear and unimpeded. When there’s a lot of friction in your life it’s easy to focus on that friction, even if you aren’t doing anything to resolve it.

A good example of reduced friction is my daily routine in Las Vegas (which, by the way, is the lowest friction city in which I’ve spent any real amount of time).

When I wake up in the morning I have tea nearly every day. We bought two adjoining condos, so my kitchen became the tea kitchen. I have two shelves of identical tea tins with magnetic labels so that I can choose the one I want. I have a scale, tea scoop, and tea plate so that I can measure out my tea. The labeling system was one of those friction reducers that felt like it was maybe not worth it at the time, but now it feels well worth it.

If I’m having tea with my friends or wife I bring it over to the tea room, which was a bar area to the previous owner. I have one tea kettle there and another in the kitchen for making matcha. For a long time I only had one, but found that it was too much friction to make matcha, so I bought an extra kettle. I found the additional benefit of now being able to bring both kettles into the tea room so I don’t have to get up to get more water when I’m making tea there. If I have tea by myself I make it in my office.

In my office is a huge 98″ desk that I made out of an IKEA countertop. I have a 43″ monitor and the exact same keyboard/trackpoint combo that I use on my laptop. My desktop and laptop sync so that I can work equally well on either, and I use the same keyboard/trackpoint combo so that there’s no friction in moving between them. My computer is a whole other level of friction-reduction, doing a lot of stuff for me, and having key combinations for just about everything else.

We turned one of the spare bedrooms into a gym which has everything I need to do my full workout. In a commercial gym it used to take me about 40-45 minutes to do the complete workout, but our gym is so optimized that it takes me only about 30-35. Everything is set up correctly and there’s no waiting. Plus there’s obviously a huge savings and hassle cost in actually leaving and going to the gym.

I only eat one meal a day so that I don’t have to think about the other two, and I default to eating at Chipotle at 6pm every day. If we have guests or if my wife wants to go somewhere else I’m happy to do that as well, but by having a default I never have to agonize over where to eat.

Our entire house is fully automated, so that when I put my phone on its charger next to the bed at night the doors lock and the lights turn off. Curtains close at sunset and open at sunrise, thermostats get turned down when we leave. Our plants are all in self watering pots. I even bought a valve and piping to make our humidifier fill itself. The bed makes itself at 11am every day.

Some of this stuff sounds excessive, and a lot of is certainly in the luxury category, but the combined effect is that when I’m home it is far easier for me to do the things I ought to be doing than those things that I shouldn’t. For me that makes it all worth it.

Think about what creates friction in your life and chip away at it, one piece at a time. At first the benefits may not seem obvious, but eventually you get to a point where your life has almost no friction at all and you can spend your time doing things that are important to you.

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Photo is my desk in Vegas

I still have a couple spots left for Superhuman 3 in Las Vegas in October. Email me if you’re interested or read more details here.

If I do have a commitment, though, I will be there exactly on time. An exceptional situation might cause me to be a couple minutes late. Of all of the coaching calls I’ve done, for example, I’d estimate that I call on the exact minute promised around 99% of the time.

There are a number of reasons why this is the best way to be, even for unimportant meetings. If I tell an oil change place I’ll be there at 10:30, I will be there at 10:30. In fact, many of the reasons for doing this have nothing to do with the other party.

The first reason I do this is, in fact, for the other party. If I am five minutes late to something, I have wasted five minutes of that person’s time. This is an egregiously arrogant thing to do, as I’m tacitly saying that my time is more important than theirs. If there are multiple people waiting, I’m telling them that their time combined isn’t as valuable as mine.

Sometimes I may even believe it. If I’m doing someone a favor, maybe we both know my time is worth more than theirs. But even in that case, it’s extremely rude to be late. You may know you’re more handsome than me, but it’s still rude to tell me that to my face.

Even if there were no other reasons to be on time, this one is good enough. Being late is really rude and inconsiderate.

However, an even more important is your relationship with yourself. You must be able to set deadlines for yourself and live up to them. If you don’t do that, you cannot effectively manage your time.

Imagine that there is a child who misbehaves. But every time he misbehaves, he just gets away with it. No reprimand or correction. Will he learn to behave? Probably not.

If you allow yourself to be late constantly to everything, you will never learn to manage your time. Even though you are very rude in being late, most people are polite enough to let you get away with it. No reprimand.

The correct method is to stop whatever you are doing, even if it is important, and go where you said you’d go so that you arrive at the right time. It may be painful and even detrimental to not finish your other thing, but that’s the whole point. The consequences fit the action, and you’ll remember them.

Maybe next time you will start earlier to make sure you finish in time. Maybe you’ll pace yourself better or waste less time. Or maybe you’ll just say no to commitments that aren’t that important. Any of these are fair things to do. You should want to feel negative consequences when you make incorrect actions, so that you will make fewer incorrect actions in the future.

I agreed to a speaking engagement that I sort of wish I didn’t agree to. I don’t mind going, but I have other ideas for how I could use that time. I could easily get out of it, as it’s still far enough in advance and I’m doing it for free. I won’t bail, though, because I want to feel the pain of making a sub-optimal decision. It will train me to think more about alternatives when agreeing to things.

Stick to your committments. Your word is important, both to others and yourself. Even when sticking to the committment is the wrong move in the short term, it is correct in the long term because it will help train you to make better decisions.

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Ironically my trip to Kazakhstan was the speaking trip I wanted to avoid when I wrote this. Turned out to be an amazing trip. Photo is a picture of us rowing in a lake.

One of them is for CruiseSheet, but another is just for life in general. I send it to two friends who usually send me monthly reviews back.

If you feel like you’re getting a lot done on a daily basis, that’s great. Or maybe it’s not. A very common trap, one I’ve spend a bit of time in myself, is immersing oneself in work that feels important and keeps one busy, but doesn’t actually produce anything. This applies to work beyond career ­— it could also be said about working out, learning, social life, or anything else.

Longer periods of time don’t have the same paradox. If you look back at your year and can list all of the things you accomplished that year, they’re probably all important. Busy work gets forgotten by the end of the year. A month is similar to a year in this regard. Looking back at a month is usually a pretty good reflection of your progress in life in general.

So I like to write a monthly review to see if I’m on track and to spot areas I’m overlooking. I have the same categories every month, and I’d like to share them and talk about why I include each one.

Income

One of my big goals this year was, for once in my life, to focus on income. I generally have a “do productive things and money will follow” attitude, but I started feeling like I was falling further and further behind my financial goals, which led me to question that assumption. So that’s why this section is first. I talk about how much money I made that month and where it came from. This section is usually pretty short — I just want to have an idea of trends here.

Coaching

Coaching is one of the things I’m most excited about, so here I talk about how many clients I have, the waiting list, some of the more exciting coaching successes (in very anonymous and privacy respecting terms) and things I’ve learned. The main reason I have a separate section for this is because of the trust people have put into me. A lot of people make big decisions based on my advice, so I make sure coaching is something I’m prioritizing and thinking a lot about.

Dating

Here I talk about how my relationship is going (great!), stuff I’ve learned, and my general optimism for our relationship. These past couple months we’ve been apart because we both had travel already planned, so recently I’ve talked about how I was surprised that I felt that we got closer even though we were apart.

Family

My family is incredibly important to me. I know I say it a lot, but I truly believe that my success is largely due to having an excellent family. Specifically, I’ve always had a large group of people who believed in me, had time for me, and wanted to see me succeed. Now that I’m getting older I’ve realized that I can contribute back/forward to my family, even just by doing simple things like reaching out and making sure I stay in touch with people and go out of my way to see them.

Friends

As someone who travels a lot, I try to take a lot of responsibility for keeping in touch with my friends. I also know that quality time spent with friends is the time I rate most highly, so I keep track of that, too. Usually this section is a list of things I did with my friends that month.

Misc

This section is just for random stuff that happens or that I want advice on. For a while it was full of hand-wringing about buying the Bentley, then it was about all of the home projects I did. Sometimes it’s a bit forward-looking to record what’s occupying my mind.

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I always read the previous month’s update before writing the new one. By far my most common reaction is, “Wow, a lot has happened since then!” If I ever don’t feel that way, that will be a cue to make sure that I’m on track and not drifting.

Consider choosing a couple friends and writing monthly reviews with them. If you can’t find anyone, you can even send it to me if you don’t mind not getting a reply. It’s about an hour per month that helps you stay on track, be grateful for what you’ve accomplished, and focus on what’s important. And now I’m going to write this month’s…

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Photo is a progress shot of the island cabin. I didn’t want to bombard people with photos of it, but a lot of people have asked for more. And… that’s basically all I took photos of last month.

I’m pushing Life Nomadic 2 to December so that I can finish it properly on another cruise I’m going on.

Totally random, but if you’re interested in buying a 2005 Ducati Monster S2R, I’m selling mine in Vegas. I feel like one “fun” vehicle is more than enough and I don’t ride it anymore. It’s awesome, though.

If I’m in a new city, I’ll find healthy food. Unless I’m with a group of people going for some special dessert, I don’t eat any junk food. I try to balance convenience with quality, and do my best.

Airplanes are a different story, though. I’m currently on BA 771 from London to Chicago, and dinner was just served. There was Chicken Tikka Masala, some strange mayonnaise salad, a whole wheat roll with butter and cheese, and a chocolate mousse dessert.

I have to eat something, and I know where I draw the line. I should eat the bread with butter and cheese, and the chicken and vegetables part of the chicken tikka. The mayo salad looks gross, but the dessert looks really tasty. I glance at the ingredients, and they’re not as repulsive as I hoped. Usually seeing artificial colors and flavors is enough to gross me out, but the weirdest thing the mousse has is natural vanilla flavor. Still, it’s not good for me.

So I peel open the top and look at the dark chocolate shavings on top of the milk chocolate mousse. I then get my salt packet, open it, and dump it all over the mousse. For added effect I mush some trash into it. Temptation gone.

I don’t know if I would have eaten the mousse, but I can tell you that I certainly have in the past. I intend not to, but then they take forever to clear my tray, I’m still hungry, and I rationalize that I need the calories. Then I eat it and wish I hadn’t.

It’s hard to maintain willpower over a long period of time. One little rationalization or lapse, and all of a sudden your mouth is full of chocolate mousse. You can have good willpower 90% of the time, and still do all of the wrong things because of moments of weakness.

To combat this, try to make it so that you only need to have good willpower once. You resolve not to eat the mousse, and then immediately destroy it so that if your willpower falters, it’s irrelevant. You can add water to bread, salt to dessert, or smash up chips.

You can do this in other areas of life, too. If you’re debating going somewhere you know you should go, just start driving towards it. If you are in a store and are feeling tempted to buy something, just use a moment of good willpower to get back to your car. Make the natural variance in willpower work to your advantage, irrevocably committing at your best, and being unable to backtrack at your worst.

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Photo is a the Berlin Cathedral!

Back in Vegas now, preparing to play in the World Series of Poker. A friend is staking me, so the pressure is high!

The bet was Sebastian’s idea, and I agreed to it for two reasons. First, I thought it would be an unequivocally good thing to do, and second, because it was just crazy enough that I didn’t want to back down from the challenge.

It’s amazing to me how quickly something can become normal. As soon as I wake up every day, I’m thinking about what I’m going to write and when I’m going to do it. Sometimes I have a great idea for a post and can’t wait to get to it, but other days I’m busy and am grasping at straws for something to write about. As unpleasant as that may be, I wonder if it’s maybe the most valuable part of the exercise. After all, the hard part of blogging is coming up with compelling ideas for posts. Maybe practicing that 730 days in a row isn’t such a bad idea.

I think my writing has become better, but it’s hard to know for sure. This is definitely a case of the frog boiling so slowly he doesn’t notice. I feel like I get more compliments on posts that I think are just “good” now, so that’s probably a positive sign.

I’m a little bit sick of writing every day, but I’m also a little bit sick of working out all the time and doing other things that are good for me, so I don’t put too much weight on that. The truth is that it’s only a small imposition, and the benefits seem to be worth it.

Looking forward a year, it’s hard to imagine that I’ll really come up with another 365 things to write about. But it also felt that way on week one, so there’s probably not much truth to it. I vacillate on whether or not I’ll continue after a year. There are definitely some days that I don’t want to write, and it’s largely a waste of time, but there are plenty of other days where I unexpectedly get some good writing out of myself. I think I may switch to a quota of four posts per week or something like that.

I’m curious if, as a reader, you’ve noticed anything in this past year. Were the posts better? Worse?

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Photo is a street in Bruges, Belgium.

It’s actually been a bit more than a year now. I’ve been spending a lot of my writing time working on my new book, so I’m going through my backup posts I have written.

One of the factors contributing to how effectively you spend your time is how you divide it. Do you do it all in one chunk? Ten one-hour chunks? Six hundred single minute chunks?

The answer to that depends heavily on the task, but for many habits, daily execution is ideal. You can break something huge like language learning into daily chunks that are manageable. You get the benefit of constant forward momentum. It’s easy to remember that you’re supposed to do something every day.

Someone asked, at a recent reader meetup in Budapest, how I do things every day. At this point it’s such a fundamental part of who I am that I don’t have an immediate answer other than: I just do them. But having to answer an earnest question made me think about it in depth. I used to be the kind of person who couldn’t do anything on a regular daily basis. What changed?

The biggest thing is that I realized how important it was to trust myself. It occurred to me that if I told a friend I’d do something for them, it was almost certain that I’d follow through, but that if I told myself the same thing, it may or may not happen. How crazy was it that I treated others with respect, but not myself, I thought?

So, slowly, I built self-trust. It was a mental shift, just realizing that respecting promises to myself was important, and a habitual one, giving myself progressively more difficult challenges to stick to.

Once you have the ability to stick to things, how do you actually get yourself to do them every day? There are tricks, like betting with your friends. That works, and I do it myself. The most important, thing, though, is to surrender yourself to the power of daily habits. Want something really bad? Build a daily habit, follow through, and you’ll probably get it.

At first you have to go on faith. Each daily increment feels too small to be making any difference, but then all of a sudden you can speak German. And once it works once, you’re hooked. The next time you want something and design your daily habit, it’s that much easier to stick with it, because you remember how well it worked last time.

And then eventually you’ve done it a dozen times. You came up with something, stuck with it daily, and it worked. Now adherence is simple. You don’t even think of quitting, because that’s just not what you do. And when someone asks how you do things every day, you have no answer other than: I just do it.

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Photo a statue in Budapest that looks to me like the Ghost of Future Blog Posts. He haunts me every day until I write a post. I’ve written daily for approximately 400 days in a row now.

If you like posts about habits and the like, you should read my book, Superhuman by Habit. It has five stars on Amazon and is the book I’m most proud of writing. I’ve gotten lots of great success-story emails as a result!

I went west on a cruise ship, which led to me crossing the international date line, and thus losing a day. I had the twenty-fifth, the twenty-seventh, but not the twenty-sixth. No big deal, though. I woke up every day, wrote my post, and checked that box.

But then, returning east by plane, I essentially had a 36 hour day where I woke up twice. It was a bit of a grey area– I treated it as two days for sleep and meals, but the calendar never clicked over.

I wrote two blog posts that day. I wouldn’t have lost the bet if I hadn’t, but when applying external forces to habits, it’s important to remember that you’re doing it for the habit, not for the external forces.

Most of us have an aversion on some level to cheating, but that aversion seems to be lightest when applied to ourselves. I’m not writing to not lose money, I’m writing to try to become a better writer, and to have consistent output. Skipping a day because it’s a grey area takes me farther away from that, even if it has no bearing to the bet.

This is just one of many situations where it’s important to think about why you’re supposed to be doing something before you excuse yourself from doing it. Our society, particularly the educational system, has us focused on external validation rather than internal validation. You can go pretty far on external validation alone, but not nearly as far as you’ll go on internal validation. So don’t cheat anyone, most of all yourself.

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Photo is me facing off with a Toucan in Brazil. Fun fact: a bird tried to attack me in Paraguay when visiting the Jesuit ruins. Flew straight at me, and then circled around and flew at me again. Terrifying.

I’ve been writing for nine years now, and a good portion of that time has been spent focused on self-improvement. How can I get the most out of life? Out of myself? As I’ve gone down this path, the answers I’ve found have coalesced around habit building. Get your habits right, and everything else falls into place.

Doing things when they’re the most fun and exciting things to do is easy. Those are the gains that everyone gets. Once we move beyond that, we have to rely on willpower. The problem with willpower is that gains are slow and incremental.

Habits, on the other hand, are the mechanism by which we can leverage our willpower. Rather than relying on willpower for everything, we use it only to build new habits. Once a habit is installed, it uses little to no willpower. That’s why I called the book Superhuman by Habit– habits let us expand our capabilities exponentially. Things that were difficult become easy, and stay that way.

I had originally planned on using a bunch of old blog posts about habits and mixing in some new content, but the perfectionist in me demanded that I write it all from scratch. So while you will see some familiar topics, the entire book is new content that you haven’t seen before. The first half is essentially ~50 pages of discussion on the building of habits. In the second half I take key habits from every major category (productivity, social, health, outlook, etc.) and break them down with the pros and cons, how to build each habit, and notes on taking it further.

This is the first book I’ve written that I think will appeal to all of my readers. If you like my posts here, I think you will really love this book. Please consider buying it for Kindle here at Amazon.

A Note on Reviews and an Offer

It’s impossible to overstate how important reviews are for an author. Although most of my book sales for the first few weeks come from readers, the sales over the following years come largely from people who find my books in the recommendation engine on Amazon. When you leave a rating, that helps Amazon figure out what types of people would like the book, and helps show my book in other places.

The amount of stars is also very important. For a while one of my books had a perfect five star rating. Then one person gave it a one star rating (he believed that I was successful with girls because I was fabulously wealthy, which I wasn’t/am not) and my earnings went down to 25% of what they used to be overnight.

I’d never ask people to rate my book higher than they think it deserves, but I will ask this: if you like my book, please take the time to rate it and write a short review on Amazon. This is literally one of the biggest things you can do to support me as a writer. It’s not just an ego thing of having one more good review– each review impacts how many people will read my book.

So on that note, if you buy my book from Amazon and leave a review, I will send you any one of my other books for free. Just send me a link or screenshot to your Amazon review that says “verified purchase” and tell me which book you’d like. It may take a few days to send the book, because I’ll be on a boat for the next couple weeks, but I will do my best. If you’ve already bought all of my books, send the email anyway and I’ll try to do something special for you down the road.

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My next book might be a fiction book. I’ve actually written 1/3 of it already. I’m a finalist for the Amtrak residency, and if I win, I’ll use that time to finish the book.