Introduction to my memoir & lifehacking manifesto (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…
As its subtitle implies you don’t have to be cross eyed to read this book, but this book is also not for a general audience of people interested in personal development. It’s for that one or two percent of the population that has a conspicuous physical imperfection.
Which I fall into. I’m cross-eyed, if you’re reading this, perhaps you are too. I have fairly conspicuous Strabismus, which you can see here…
I think this uniquely qualifies me to write a book on thriving despite having a physical imperfection. 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 as they say, they really 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 really 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.
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!) I’m a pretty good storyteller so I think a memoir is the right format for me to write a book as opposed to the problem>generalization>platitude>strategy formula that most personal development books follow.
About the second edition
This is actually a slimmer version of the book I first published in 2018 which will, I think, serve you better…
Since then, I’ve become a real stickler for good grammar. As a few reviewers pointed out, the original book contained more than a few glaring grammar imperfections. I’ve done my best to correct those here, with the one remaining that cross eyed is actually supposed to be hyphenated (cross-eyed). These two words appear so many times in this work, reflecting my own persistent physical imperfect, that I’ll leave them as they are.
The original book contained a lot of lurid tales and details of my life as a seducer across three continents. This element of the book was there to illustrate how someone might overcome their conspicuous physical imperfection and enjoy a lively dating life by employing an uncommon set of social dynamics strategies. But this may sully the empowering message of the book for some, come across as bragging, or compel my female readers to throw the book away in disgust. So I’ve cut some chapters and stories. If lurid tales and details aren’t so off-putting to you I’ve included them as bonus content that you can access by joining my book newsletter.
Also, more recently, I wrote a book for men specifically about dating, seduction, and ultimately finding meaning in the enduring embrace of a virtuous woman. Gents, if you’re frustrated with dating or the quality of the women that you find yourself entangled with, read Don’t Stick Your Dick in a Blender: How to meet a nice girl instead — from a tantric husband with a better sex life than you!
I was banned as an author by Amazon without a cogent explanation of what in my work was unacceptable. This is doubly frustrating as I had made a real effort to abide by their content guidelines in the manuscripts I uploaded. The book before you is the uncensored edition, I make no effort here to appease the nonsensical and vague sensitivities of our big tech overlords!
Getting the most out of this book
A few guidelines for high-leverage reading…
- I’m a big fan of digital books because it’s so easy to highlight, take notes, and bookmark resources that you want to implement.
- You’ll notice that the book has a lot of little chapters as opposed to a few long chapters. This is to make it more consumable and easier for those who might want to jump around from section to section.
- Because of the storytelling format of the book, I think you’ll enjoy it more just reading cover to cover but it has been very modularized so you won’t be totally lost if you skip a chapter or two that doesn’t particularly interest you.
- While listening to audio programs is more convenient and allows you to multitask your comprehension does take a hit. I’d encourage you to actually read the book if you can. When I listen to audiobooks that I actually want to learn something from I usually listen to the chapters multiple times, and I listen to them while I’m doing something else that’s relatively mindless, like cardio at the gym or commuting.
- You’ll notice that this book contains a lot of discussion of brain science and health. I’ve tried to strike balance between proving what I’m saying with scientific references and readability. If you’re skeptical of a biohack that I talk about check out the science I cite or search on my website where I have hundreds of detailed articles in which I provide significant clinical evidence for anything mentioned here.
- After you read, give your mind a little downtime to metabolize the information into wisdom. I try to read in the evenings before bedtime.
Feel free to share this book
This book will always be free to anyone that it could help. Downloadable versions of it can be found here. There are a number of books I’ve read that were given to me as gifts or that the authors made free to download that profoundly changed the trajectory of my life for the better. The stuff in my book has really helped me and it can help this often ignored and abused unsung group of people with physical imperfections. If I can liberate just one person from their self-made, invisible prison of self-loathing by making my book free to download it’s totally worth it to me!
A huge “thank you” to those of you who actually bought it (despite my best efforts to give it away for free to the world!) 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. You can pay for it here (or not)…
Frequently Asked Questions
LimitlessMindset.com is read by about 10,000 people a month, so I want to address some questions I’ve been getting about this book…
Why write a book?
For over a decade I’ve had a dynamic conversation with the lifehackers and biohackers of the world via the Limitless Mindset blog and video channels but recently I become aware of how non-optimal a format blogs and videos are for communicating powerful information that can be deeply transformative for those who need it the most. I read The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains and learned that the HTML formatting of information on websites and the high distraction layout of Youtube or other popular video platforms severely retards our reading comprehension and metabolism of information into knowledge. Reading books is a very different mode of thinking and a sublime pleasure — it’s one of the few ways to really reside in someone else’s head and think their thoughts. Reading books entails an intangible romance with a writer that reading blog articles or watching videos simply doesn’t capture.
Furthermore, all my life people have told me that I was a raconteur; a great storyteller, thus this book is going to be a mémoire of my adventures, misadventures, and learning experiences.
There are already A LOT of self-help books out there. Why is yours worth reading?
Again, most self-help books follow a very predictable formula that makes for uninspiring reading. I’ve instead opted to illustrate the lifehacking strategies and tools with storytelling. I think this memoir will have quite a lot more entertainment value than the average self-help book. Furthermore, I do something that’s disappointingly rare in non-fiction which is thorough meta-analysis of human performance studies. Every month around the world there are hundreds of new scientific trials published but many are inaccessible. And every month many thousands of blogs and articles are published online but most of them are just rehashing what other bloggers are saying or trying to grab clicks with sensationalistic headlines. There are surprisingly few writers like me that actually delve deeply into placebo-controlled science and present it in well-researched articles and writing that are consumable for the public.
Your Twitter bio says that you’re a “smart drug dealer” is this book just going to be an extended catalog of the supplements and biohacking products that you promote?
No. But Nootropics, smart drugs, and biohacking have been a huge game-changer for my life — I’m not aware of a self-help philosophy that even comes close to the transformational bang that you get for your biohacking buck spent. For over a decade I’ve been studying Nootropics and consulting biohackers on how to use them to accomplish their goals. So I will touch on some Nootropics and Biohacking products in the book but I’m aware that not everybody can afford these things (or has access to them) so it’s really not what the book is about.
How do you define a physical imperfection? Aren’t we all physically imperfect? Almost all of us are less beautiful than an airbrushed Megan Fox or Channing Tatum…
Well yes, but some of us have conspicuous physical imperfections. Thanks to a birth defect, accident, medical condition, or just an unlucky roll of the genetic dice we have something about us that is not within the normal spectrum of the natural human physical form. It’s likely the first thing that people notice about us when they meet us. This is a unique challenge that cannot simply be overcome by being confident, faking it till you make it, or reading books about self-esteem. Really thriving despite a glaring physical feature 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.
Thank you…
For choosing to spend your precious time reading my book. I certainly welcome any feedback you might have. Feel free to get in touch with me on social media or drop me an email.
I look forward to a continued conversation with you!
