Book Announcement: “How to Be Cross Eyed” Second Edition
There’s that moment when you meet a new person and you can tell that they are just a bit disoriented by your weirdness. You feel that familiar little pang of embarrassment and shame because you know how weird you must look to them.
You’re physically imperfect. So am I. I know that moment as well as you do…
But you don’t have to be cross eyed (or have a conspicuous physical imperfection) to enjoy this book. Really thriving requires an uncommon set of barely legal biohacking tools, social dynamics strategies from the fringes of polite society, and rapid mindset transformation technologies which this lifehacking manifesto delves deeply into.
This book is especially for that one or two percent of the population that has a glaring physical defect. Which I fall into. I’m cross-eyed with Strabismus, which you can see below. If you’re reading this, perhaps you are too.
There are certainly people out there with more conspicuous physical imperfections, who have it worse than I do. However, the eyes are the windows to the soul, they are a part of nearly every important human interaction. Not having normal eyes has been a disadvantage that I’ve needed to develop a specific set of skills and life strategies to overcome.
I was talking to my lovely fiancée about this book and she asked me if the purpose of the book was to help the self-esteem of people with physical imperfections.
Not really.
This book is more about the lifehacks that I’ve employed over the past 15 years; strategies, methods, and tools that work to help you overcome the challenge of a physical imperfection and thrive. These things will likely improve your self-esteem, but they will also work if you have low self-esteem, or no self-esteem (or too much self-esteem — as I’m sometimes accused of having!) Self-esteem is not my focus, there are better books on self-esteem. My focus is on things that work.
- Networking
- Mindset
- Aesthetics
- Social dynamics
- Adventure
- Biohacking
- Travel. hacking
- Holistic antifragility
- Lifehacks
This is not your typical self-help book…
I’ve had a pretty interesting life. I’ve dated a politician’s daughter in Medellin, Colombia. I hung out with spies in Kyiv, Ukraine. I’ve almost died underwater twice. I participated in a bank robbery and I lost my virginity to a spy (yes, really!) From having sex in a brand new Maserati and getting in high-speed car chases to being deported from South American countries and representing the US Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump I’ve found the happiness that I didn’t give a damn about and realized my dream of becoming an adventuring philosopher.
I may sound like quite the pompous pontificator but I’ll offer no apologies because storytelling is the best way to impart the unconventional mindset that saved me from mediocrity and the biohacks that enabled me to defy my selfish genes.
If you’re bored of the tired problem>generalization>platitude>strategy formula that most self-help books follow you’ll enjoy this memoir of adventures, failures, and unexpected successes across three continents. I’ll share some powerful tools for transformation — biohacking, flow state, an optimistic red pill mindset, and smart drugs — with which I’ve managed to pack several lifetimes’ worth of peak experiences into a single decade.
I’m not a theorist in the business of making generalizations. The tactics and tools presented here are for rigorous practitioners, ethical hedonists, and open-minded self-experimenters.
Digital Book Format
For a lot of authors, especially of digital books, the formatting seems to be a total afterthought. I’ve almost totally given up on reading ebooks because they are often in this crappy PDF format, I have to open them up in a clunky PDF reader, sit in front of my computer, and scroll down the screen as I’m reading. It’s far from the sublimely pleasurable experience of settling down with a book and flipping the pages. For that reason I’m properly formatting this book into EPUB and Mobi versions which you can read on a Kindle device, if you don’t have a Kindle you can use the Kindle app on your smartphone, failing that you can read it using the Google Play Books app.
Do yourself a big favor, if you’re going to read the online version of this book, read it using the Medium app for Android or IOS — this is one app that’s worth taking 30 seconds to download. This is a very cleanly designed app that’s a pleasure to read on; no annoying notifications, or distracting social networking features and it has a white text on black background night mode that you should enable in settings.
Audio Book
I have a face for radio and a voice for radio, so I have recorded and produced an audio version of this book for your listening pleasure which you can download here but I’d also encourage you to subscribe to the How to Be Cross Eyed podcast feed on the Castbox app.
This is the best app for listening to audio programs; it’s free (and commercial free!) and it even remembers where you’ve stopped listening when you want to resume.
This book is free
I’m going to be releasing, chapter by chapter this book for free here on this blog. This book will always be free to anyone that it could help. Downloadable versions of it can be found here. I’ve also produced audio versions of the chapters that you can download and listen to while you’re commuting or at the gym or whatever.
If you want to thank me for it you can buy it.
In fact, if you think it might help you I’d encourage you to buy it. There’s this phenomenon of sunk cost motivation; if you pay for something (even if it’s not very expensive) you’re much more likely to follow through, take action, and actually improve your life.
Sample chapters
If your interest is piqued I’d encourage you to give these sample chapters a read…
- Lifehacking Your Looks
- How to Suck at Life
- Social Dynamics Secrets of Elite Socialites
Chapters published on Medium
Your web browser is NOT a great medium for reading comprehension and enjoyment, what I recommend is that you click the little bookmark button in Medium for each of these chapters then go read them in the app.
