Real Mind Control: The 21-Day No-Complaint Experiment

Written by Tim Ferriss Topics: Filling the Void

The thought-awareness bracelet and the latest straw that broke the camel’s back.

“This $@#&ing mac will be the death of me. Intuitive, my ass.”

It just slipped out, and I don’t think I can be blamed. I was ready to leave the PC behind and take my mac overseas for the first time when I couldn’t figure out how to resize photos. On a friggin’ mac? I felt swindled. I also now had to move the bracelet.

For the last four months, I’ve been experimenting with a few types of thought experiments. The two most notable are Radical Honesty, which is 100% guaranteed to get you slapped or worse, and anti-complaining, which I’ll explain here. The latter started in my book agent’s office, where I spotted a pile of purple bracelets on his desk…

“What are these?” I grabbed one and it was inscribed with ‘acomplaintfreeworld.org.’

“Another author of mine. Interesting story, actually.”

And it was. The author was Will Bowen, a Kansas City minister who had recognized — as I have in a previous post — that word choice determines thought choice, which determines emotions and actions. It’s not enough to just decide you’ll stop using certain words, though. It requires conditioning.

Will designed a solution in the form of a simple purple bracelet, which he offered to his congregation with a challenge: go 21 days without complaining. Each time one of them complained, they had to switch the bracelet to their other wrist and start again from day 0. It was simple but effective metacognitive awareness training.

The effects were immediate and life-changing.

The bracelets spread like wildfire as others observed these transformations, and, to date, more than 5,900,000 people have requested the little devices.

“Can I have one?” I asked my agent.

It all made perfect sense. Fix the words and you fix the thoughts. I’m not a negative person, but I wanted to cut out the commiserating most of us use for 30-40% of all conversation (if you don’t believe me, keep track of how many people start conversations with you in the next 24 hours that center on a complaint or criticism).

I made it 11 days on the first attempt, then I slipped. Back to zero. Then it was two or three days at a time for about a month. Once I cleared 21 days at around month 3, I no longer needed the bracelet. I’m using the bracelet again now because I’m preparing for some large projects I expect to be challenging enough for Cornholio-style meltdowns.

But what is a complaint?

This is where I disagree with some of the rules set by Will. He asks you to switch wrists whenever you gossip, criticize, or complain, and the definitions can be a bit vague. He also requires you to switch wrists if you inform someone else they are complaining. I think this is counterproductive, as I’m big on constructive criticism.

I defined “complaining” for myself as follows: describing an event or person negatively without indicating next steps to fix the problem. I later added the usual 4-letter words and other common profanity as complaint qualifiers, which forced me to reword, thus forcing awareness and more precise thinking.

Following the above definition, both of the following would require a wrist switch:

“Man, I went into the post office and had to stand behind this rude jerk for 30 minutes. What a waste of time.”

or

“John can be such an a**hole. Totally uncalled for.”

The following variations would not:

“Man, I went into the post office and had to stand behind this rude guy for 30 minutes. It was a waste of time. From now on, I’ll go in the mornings before 10am to avoid the crowd.”

“John was a bit of muppet in there, wasn’t he? I suppose I’ll just send the e-mails directly to Mary in engineering for the next two weeks to get buy-in, then he’ll have to agree.”

Here are a few of the changes I noticed then and am noticing again now:

1) My lazier thinking evolved from counterproductive commiserating to reflexive systems thinking. Each description of a problem forced me to ask and answer: What policy can I create to avoid this in the future?

2) I was able to turn off negative events because the tentative solution had be offered instead of giving them indefinite mental shelf-life (and “open loop” in GTD parlance), resulting in better sleep and more pleasant conversations with both friends and business partners.

3) People want to be around action-oriented problem solvers. Training yourself to offer solutions on-the-spot attracts people and resources.

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For those interested in the more sophisticated applications and results of the the no-complaint thought experiment, I recommend you order a copy of A Complaint-Free World. I received an advanced copy and finished it in one afternoon, ending up with two pages of notes. I will be getting copies for my family and friends as X-mas presents.

Want to take the 21-day no-complaint challenge for a test drive now?

Last a friend checked, the bracelets had a 3-5-month waiting period, but a rubber band or other bracelet will suffice.

24 Hours with Tim Ferriss, a Sample Schedule

Written by Tim Ferriss Topics: 4-Hour Case Studies, Filling the Void

The goal is NOT inactivity. (Photo: the super smart and sexy Pinar Ozger)

Perhaps the most common question I’m asked is “what do you do all day?”

I was recently interviewed by J.D. Roth on his popular personal finance blog, and one of his readers wrote in with the following:

“I would like to know as best he can give, what Tim’s average NON-mini-retirement day entails.”

Here was my answer:

My days almost never look the same. I ask my assistants to avoid phone calls on Mondays and Fridays, in case I want to take a long weekend on either end, and I almost always allocate Mondays for general preparation and prioritizing for the week, then any administrative tasks that I need to handle (paperwork for accountants, lawyers, etc.).

I put very few things in my calendar, as I do not believe most people can do more than four hours of productive work per day at maximum, and I loathe multi-tasking. For example, my day tomorrow [Tim: this was about 14 days ago] looks like this, with items in my calendar preceded by an asterisk (*):

10am — get up and eat high-protein breakfast of 300-400 calories (I’m typing this at 2:22am, as I do my best writing from 1-4am)

10:30-12* — radio interviews and idea generation for writing (note taking)

12 noon — workout involving mostly posterior chain (back, neck extension, hamstrings, etc.) and abdominals.

12:30 — lunch in a restaurant of organic beef, vegetables, pinto beans, and guacamole (I have this almost everyday. Here is my diet.)

1-5pm* — write piece for The Economist (I’m not writing this whole time, but I block out this period)

5pm* — review my designer’s latest updates on planned blog redesign

5:30pm — first dinner – small

6:30-8:30pm — Brazilian jiu-jitsu training

9pm — second dinner – large

10pm — ice bath and shower

11-2am — chill out and do whatever, probably reading for enjoyment or drinking wine with friends

Before you ask “but what happened to the 4-hour workweek?!”, realize that the goal was never to be idle.

I hate laziness and make this clear in the book, the “Filling the Void” chapter being just one example. The goal is to spend as much time possible doing what we want by maximizing output in minimal time.

I don’t have to do anything in this schedule. I choose to do them because I like them. None of them are financially-driven or unpleasant obligations. If the chance to do something more fun comes up last-minute, I can cancel all of them.

Remember: having time isn’t hard nor necessarily desirable in and of itself–just quit your job and go on unemployment. It’s how you use time and trade it for experience that counts.

IT’S LESS THAN YOU THINK

Somewhere between college graduation and your second job, a chorus enters your internal dialogue: be realistic and stop pretending. Life isn’t like the movies.

If you’re five years old and say you want to be an astronaut, your parents tell you that you can be anything you want to be. It’s harmless, like telling a child that Santa Claus exists. If you pass 25 and announce you want to float in space or sail around the world, the response is different: be realistic, become a lawyer or an accountant or a doctor, have babies, and raise them to repeat the cycle. Put all of your disposable income in a 401(k) and do your best to enjoy your "too-weak" vacation.

Lifestyle Design offers more interesting options and reverses this repression.

Here are just two personal examples of what’s possible once we reset the rules:

$250 USD: Five days on a private Smithsonian tropical research island with three local fishermen who caught and cooked all my food and also took me on tours of the best hidden dive spots in Panamá.

$150 USD: Chartered a plane in Mendoza wine country in Argentina and flew over the most beautiful vineyards and snow-capped Andes with a private pilot and personal guide.

Question: What did you spend your last $400 on? It’s two or three weekends of nonsense and throwaway forget-the-work-week behavior in most US cities. But eight days isn’t what I’m recommending at all. Those were just interludes in a much larger production. I’m proposing much, much more. How about a four weeks of luxury living—and I mean penthouse apartments, five-star restaurants, and VIP treatment—in Buenos Aires or Berlin for less than $1,200 each, including airfare and stop-over trips in other countries?

Or forget about traveling. A brand-new black Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder, fresh off the showroom floor at $260,000, can be had for $2,897.80 per month. I found my personal favorite, an Aston Martin DB9 with 1,000 miles on it, through eBay for $136,000—$2,003.10 per month.

The rules of reality can be bent. It just requires thinking in different terms.

TMI—TARGET MONTHLY INCOME—AND DREAMLINES

For purposes of Lifestyle Design, it is necessary to move from annual thinking (“I make $50,000 per year”) and total costs (“A Ferrari 612 Scaglietti costs $250,509”) to monthly cash-flow. What is your ideal lifestyle in exact detail, and how much does it cost per month?

This figure becomes your TMI—Target Monthly Income. This is divided by 30 to give you a TDI—Target Daily Income. I know, for example, that for me to ride a Aston Martin DB9 in style, have a personal assistant handle my life, cover all of my expenses (including a new house and motorcycle), become a bestselling author, and take a month-long trip along the Croatian coast to celebrate, I must make…. $2,000 per day? $1,000 per day? No—$197.90 per day. That is my TDI and will enable my ideal lifestyle. It’s a simple idea with profound implications.

Before we get into automating income, firing bosses, outsourcing life to overseas MBAs, and all of the other things that make the four-hour workweek possible, we need to figure out your baseline. The first step is determining current monthly expenses:

Monthly Expense Calculator

The next step is creating “dreamlines” to determine the characteristics and costs of your ideal lifestyle. Detailed instructions for how to do this are contained in the book in “System Reset: Being Unreasonable and Unambiguous,” but you can get a good idea with the following worksheets:

Sample 6-Month Dreamline and Blank Dreamline
Dreamlining Calculators and Worksheet

Create a two timelines—six months and twelve months—and list up to five things you dream of having (including, but not limited to, material wants: house, car, clothing, etc.), being (be a great cook, be fluent in Chinese, etc.), and doing (visiting Thailand, tracing your roots overseas, racing ostriches, etc.), in that order. For now, don’t concern yourself with how these things will be accomplished. That’s all covered later.

Consider the question: What would you do, day-to-day, if you had $100 million in the bank? If still blocked, fill in the five “doing” spots with the following:

1 place to visit
1 thing to do before you die (a memory of a lifetime)
1 thing to do daily
1 thing to do weekly
1 thing you’ve always wanted to learn

Chances are that the ultimate TMI figure will be lower than expected, and it will decrease over time as you trade more and more “having” for once-in-a-lifetime “doing.” Mobility encourages this trend. Even if the total is intimidating, don’t fret. It is possible—case studies in the book prove it—to get to more than $10,000 per month in extra income within three months. This is usually 3 or 4 times more than is needed. Getting to an extra $2,000 or $3,000 is seldom a problem.

You can have it all—really.