One Thought

The food-animal industry in the United States is a mess. Most food animals are raised in confined animal feeding operations — “factory farms,” colloquially — where they’re crammed together into warehouses or small cages, forced to stand in their own urine and feces, and subjected to painful mutilations. They’re given hormones to make them grow faster and larger and produce more. They peck and bite at one another in boredom and frustration.

Factory farms exist because it’s cheaper to produce meat, eggs, and dairy products in confined conditions. Animal suffering is irrelevant as long as it doesn’t cut into profits. Even premature deaths are acceptable as long as overall production per unit cost is higher.

Since you’re reading this, I’m assuming that you care about animal suffering and want to minimize it. But there are other reasons to buy humanely-produced animal products. For one: meat, eggs, and dairy produced in more natural conditions are provably healthier than factory farmed alternatives. Not all steaks and eggs are created equal.

Growing awareness of factory farming conditions has led to an abundance of labels. Eggs are “cage free,” “free range,” and “vegetarian fed”; meat is “free range,” “grass fed,” and “certified humane”; milk is “rBST free.” The problem is that these labels are deceptive. Some aren’t controlled or verified at all, while others require only minimal protections for animals. You can bet that factory farms, which compete mostly on price, aren’t doing any more than their labels legally require them.

In this article, I’ll explain what these labels actually mean and which of them indicate humane conditions for animals. (Very few of them do). I’ll also explain the health benefits of eating products from naturally raised animals. And finally I’ll look at prices and availability.

A warning: The humane stuff isn’t cheap. Factory farms have gotten meat, egg, and dairy production down to a science. We’re used to unrealistically low prices for these foods.

Eggs

By all accounts chickens are one of the most poorly treated species of food animal. In the worst case (and also the most common one) they’re crammed into tiny “battery cages,” each about the size of a filing cabinet drawer and holding eight to ten hens. The chickens don’t have room to lie down or stretch their wings, much less engage in natural behaviors.

It’s safe to assume that any eggs not labeled as “cage free” or “free range” come from hens living in battery cages. The cheapest eggs — the ones you can get for $1 to $2 per dozen (or less) — fall into this category.

"Cage free" chickens, taken from linked New York Times article

“Cage free” and “free range” eggs are better from a humane standpoint than battery caged eggs, but they’re not as much better as you might think. “Cage free” hens are packed into large warehouses often containing more than five thousand birds apiece. Though the hens aren’t in cages, they get only a square foot or so of space each and are kept awake in artificial light to increase production. The ends of their beaks are chopped off to prevent them from pecking each other to death — which will happen when thousands are jammed together and they can’t establish a pecking order. The warehouses reek of ammonia from the hens’ urine.

The “free range” label is deceptive. All it means (according to the US Department of Agriculture definition) is that hens are given “access to the outside.” This generally means hens can exit their cage-free warehouses (see above) and roam in a small outdoor lot, which is often little more than a fenced-in patch of dirt. Because the hens’ food is stored indoors, there is little incentive for them to go outside, despite their “access.”

Google satellite view of "Judy's Family Farm"

The imagery on egg cartons is usually a total fabrication. Factory farms strive to project a quaint, family farm image. Their packaging materials show small barns and chickens roaming in idyllic settings. (See, for example, egg cartons for “Judy’s Family Farm,” which is nothing more than the marketing work of a large factory farming operation.). When these images are juxtaposed with the labels “cage free” and “free range,” they give consumers the wrong impression.

So what eggs do come from humane conditions? Unfortunately, none that you can find in the typical supermarket or grocery store. In many areas, however, it’s possible to buy humanely-raised eggs directly from small-time farmers or from specialty stores that buy from these farmers. The key is to look for eggs from “pasture-raised” or “pastured” chickens. These chickens spend their days outside in the grass, scratching in the dirt and eating bugs. See the section on price and availability below.

Pastured eggs are quite a bit more expensive than normal, factory-farmed eggs. They’re also healthier to eat. I’ll get into that later as well.

Meat: Chicken, Pork, and Beef

Factory farmed chickens raised for their meat have it about as bad as “cage free” chickens raised for their eggs. They live in large warehouses packed with thousands of their own kind. Their beaks are clipped and they live amidst the ammonia stench of their own urine.

The “free range” label means the same thing it does for eggs: the chickens need only be given “access” to the outdoors. The amount of time they are given access and the quality of their outdoor area — and most likely whether they use it at all — are up to the factory farmer.

Pigs in a factory farm, courtesy Wikipedia

Factory farmed pigs have it especially bad. They’re crammed together into small cages in large warehouses where they have little room to move. They bite at each other out of frustration and boredom. They develop sores on their bodies from lying on the hard floor. While pregnant, sows are confined to “gestation crates,” where they don’t have enough room to turn around and can do little more than eat and lie down.

Cattle probably get the best treatment of the bunch. They spend the beginnings of their lives on pasture. When they’re about 6 to 12 months old, however, they’re shipped off to dirt feedlots, where they’re packed together with thousands of others, forced to stand in piles of their own manure, juiced up on hormones, and stuffed with grain and whatever other food can be bought cheaply — stale candy, sugar beet waste, chicken feces, etc. Because cows’ stomachs are designed to digest grasses, this diet gives them painful and constant indigestion. Feedlot cows are given regular doses of antibiotics to ward off diseases stemming from their lifestyle.

So how to get humanely-raised meat? The key words again are “pastured” and “pasture-raised.” “Free range” and “grass fed” aren’t good enough. All cattle are grass fed before they’re shipped to feedlots. Look for beef that is “100% grass fed” or “grass finished” instead. However, even some cows that are “100% grass fed” are confined for most of their lives, so it’s necessary to verify that they were pastured.

As with eggs, meat from pastured animals is substantially healthier than meat from factory farmed animals. See the section below on health.

Milk and Other Dairy Products

Dairy cattle have it at least as bad as beef cattle. They’re also confined to feedlots. They’re artificially inseminated yearly to keep them lactating and separated from their calves shortly after giving birth — which is traumatic, judging from their reaction. They’re given hormones to increase milk production far beyond natural levels and then antibiotics to ward off diseases that result. Mastitis, a painful udder infection, afflicts about half of them.

Once again, look for milk from cows that are “pastured.” From what I’ve seen, most pastured dairy cows are confined indoors for part of the year or during certain seasons — but that can be done in a sanitary and humane way. Look for dairy products from cows not treated with any hormones (all organic products pass this requirement).

Health Benefits

Humane treatment of animals isn’t the only reason to by pastured eggs, meat, and dairy products. The pastured versions of all three are significantly healthier than factory farmed equivalents along a number of dimensions.

For example: Eggs from pastured hens have less saturated fat, less cholesterol, double the omega-3’s (health-promoting fats), three times the vitamin D, and substantially more vitamin A and E than factory-farmed eggs (whether they be caged, “cage free,” or “free range”). (See, for example, this article.) The difference comes from the pastured hens’ diet and lifestyle — rather than staying indoors and eating grain, pastured hens are outside eating bugs (and some grass) as they would naturally.

Pastured eggs are immediately recognizable: their yolks are a bright, deep orange color (factory farmed eggs’ yolks are more yellowish). This coloring comes from carotenes in the grass.

Factory farmers have started to do ridiculous things to appeal to current health trends. For example, many stores now carry “Omega-3 Enhanced” eggs, which come from hens whose diets have been supplemented with flaxseed (which is high in omega-3). This micro-nutrient approach to health has failed in the past, and it’s just a band-aid, anyway. You get none of the other health benefits of pastured eggs from “Omega-3 Enhanced” eggs.

Decline of omega-3's in feedlot cows, courtesy EatWild.com

Meat from grass-fed animals is similarly better for you. It has substantially less total fat, less saturated fat, less cholesterol, more of vitamins E and C, and more omega-3’s than factory farmed meat. 100% grass fed beef, for example, has about three times the omega-3’s of “normal” beef. Though all cattle start out grass fed, the nutritional content of their meat degrades as they spend time in feedlots (see graph right).

Milk from pastured cows contains more omega-3’s and more of vitamins A and E (see this article). These benefits come from the cows’ diet and the fact that they’re producing less milk.

These health differences aren’t well known. Factory farmers are used to competing only on price. The corners they cut don’t just increase production (and animal suffering); they also produce an inferior product. The eggs, meat, and dairy products we’re eating now are the least healthy in all of human history.

Price and Availability

So pastured eggs, meat, and dairy products are humane and healthy. What’s not to like? Well, two things: price and availability.

You have to do some work to find pastured products, and it’s harder to find them if you don’t live relatively close to farming areas. It’s usually best to buy directly from farmers, either through farmers’ markets or “community supported agriculture” (CSA) programs, which distribute boxes of farm-fresh goods on a regular basis. Some CSA’s distribute eggs, meat, and dairy products.

The "egg matrix" at Rainbow Grocery

It’s also possible to get this stuff from some grocery stores. You won’t have any luck at typical supermarkets like Safeway, but independent ones sometimes carried pastured products. In San Francisco, I found two: Bi-Rite Market and Rainbow Grocery. Both of these places were very clear in their labeling of their products. It’s easy to be fooled by marketing language and imagery on packages, so you have to make sure you’re getting the real thing. I also checked out the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market and found three suppliers of pastured eggs and meat there.

Prices aren’t low. Partly this is a San Francisco thing — there’s a lot of demand for these products here, and land prices in the surrounding area are high. But it’s also unavoidable: Factory farming exists because it’s cheap. It’s cruel to animals and produces an inferior product, yes, but it’s cheap. That’s the whole point.

The cheapest pastured eggs I found in San Francisco were $7.50 / dozen. Compare that to $3 – $4 for “cage free” eggs at Safeway and $1 – $2 for eggs from chickens in battery cages. That’s a huge difference, but keep in mind that these products aren’t the same. Pastured eggs are substantially healthier — and tastier, many say — than the alternatives. (Note that pastured eggs are about $6 / dozen from a CSA in my hometown of Modesto, California.)

In general, meat from pasture-raised animals was about 2 to 3 times more expensive than the factory farmed alternatives. For example, ground beef was $6 / lb at the farmers’ market, compared to $3 – $4 / lb at Safeway. A whole chicken was $5 / lb vs. $1.50 / lb at Safeway.

EatWild.com has a great state-by-state directory of farms selling pastured animal products.

So how to afford these more expensive products?

There are two options: either hunker down and accept that we’re paying too little for animal products right now (and start paying more), or eat less of them.

Though people like to complain about rising food prices, our total expenditure for food (time- and effort-wise) is, in the context of human history, at an all-time low. Maybe we should be paying more for food (and buying it more responsibly).

Americans eat a lot of animal products. Do we need to stop eating them entirely? No. But do they need to be the centerpiece of every meal? Also no. It’s possible to afford humanely-produced animals products simply by eating less of them.

Is there a middle ground between pastured animal products and bottom-of-the-barrel factory farmed ones? Yes — but it’s more similar to the latter than the former. Organic animal products are usually at least marginally better than normal ones from a humane standpoint — no hormones are used, for example. Some factory farmers are producing better, more-humane products than others. Niman Ranch beef, for example, comes from cattle “finished” in feedlots. But they aren’t given hormones or antibiotics and minimum living and handling standards — over normal industry conditions — are specified.

So there you have it. It’s not easy or cheap to buy humanely-produced animal products. But considerations of animal welfare and personal health provide a strong argument for doing so. Any step in the right direction is better than no step at all. I know I’m changing my buying and eating habits.

A week and a half ago, I issued a new challenge to myself.

I blocked out a week of my life. The plan: to help other people out, full-time — eight to ten hours per day, for seven days straight. Everything I’d do beyond sleeping, showering, eating, and a bit of relaxing would be devoted to others.

This week would be about them, not me.

I’ve become interested recently in immersive challenges as a means to personal growth. A month ago, I spent 16 hours in the kitchen over a single weekend after a decade of avoiding cooking. The experience was fun, enlightening, and exhausting.

I thought afterward: I need to do this more often. Despite its arbitrariness, the challenge was exhilarating. It brought me fully into the present moment. It shook up my reality: Here I was thinking about and preparing food to the point of exhaustion after a decade of procrastinating. It was almost an out-of-body experience. (No kidding!)

There’s something about an immersive challenge that brings me to life. The focus, the determination, the immediacy. The doing of things completely foreign to me. The fear of failing. These challenges are so much more fun than taking baby steps, making routines, analyzing, planning. Why do things the boring way?

I’ve wanted to become more other-focused for some time now.

It’s a long story. I’d like to say it’s not about my having been selfish, per se, but about my being an individualist. I’m sure my feeling of being an outsider, which came from my childhood, has something to do with it.

The point of this experiment is to shed what’s-in-it-for-me thinking for a week. It’s to immerse myself in others’ perspectives. It’s to understand what they want and to give it to them — without asking for anything in return.

I craft a plan: I block out a week where I would make no other commitments. I’ll spend the majority of each of these seven days helping other people.

How will I help them? I could spend the week doing unsolicited favors for people — cleaning my entire 5-bedroom apartment (which I share with roommates), volunteering at the homeless shelter, cleaning garbage in the park, etc. Or I could ask people how I could help them and simply do what they request — run their errands, do their laundry, whatever they want.

After waffling between extremes, I decide to do both. Why limit myself to one form of help? The two types take different mindsets, and I want to experience both.

I generate a long list of ideas. Once I’m sure I have enough — it’s not easy to fill an entire week! — I get started.

This is how things go.

Day 1 – Cleaning house

Deciding to start close to home on day 1, I spend about seven hours cleaning the common rooms of my five-bedroom apartment. The apartment doesn’t get cleaned very often, and when it does it takes my roommates and me several hours working together.

After seven hours of scrubbing toilets and mopping floors, I still have more to do, but I’m tired — and to be honest, I’m starting to feel a bit irritable. Helping out is easier said than done. After finishing, I shop for food and cook fried rice for the roommates and myself.

Day 2 – Trash pickup

I start day 2 a little farther from home, heading over to Dolores Park, a well-known hangout in San Francisco’s Mission District.

I’m not here to hang out, though. The weather’s gloomy, it’s 10 AM, and I have a few large trash bags.

The park itself is already pretty clean, but the public rail tracks beside it are covered in garbage. I’ve found the mother lode: There’s plenty of trash to pick up — as long as I can avoid getting hit by the train. Dying wouldn’t be very helpful.

I spend two hours filling two and a half large trash bags with liquor bottles, candy wrappers, burrito remnants, and what look like nitrous oxide canisters. At one point, some hippie-looking dudes look down at the tracks and yell, “Right on, man!” — marking the high point of what may have been the low point of my week.

It starts raining, so I can’t pick up any more trash. I head home and post a Facebook message to all my friends, asking them how I can help them. I get a big response. Everyone has things they want me to do. That’s good, because I have plenty of time over the next six days.

I do my friend Christine’s laundry. While at the laundromat, I begin affixing 500 stickers to 500 cards for my friend Arvel’s fledgling record label. I finish a couple hours later. I sign up for work in a soup kitchen the next day at a friend’s suggestion. I research techniques for getting a good night’s sleep for my stressed-out brother Chris (at his request) and send him a report. I end the day by cooking a large stir fry for the roommates.

Day 3 – Meatballs for the homeless

Day 3 begins with community service work at Glide, a soup kitchen in San Francisco’s slummy Tenderloin district. I’m here to serve lunch to the homeless and otherwise down-and-out.

While there are a few other volunteers, it’s clear that a number of the helpers are doing their mandatory community service work. I make eye contact with one tough-looking guy and say, “What’s up?” His response: “I’m having a bad day.”

The permanent kitchen workers are all, by contrast, very friendly. They assign me to be the “runner,” meaning my job is to ferry trays, cups, and silverware from the cleaning room in the back of the cafeteria to the service area in front. The cafeteria itself is in the basement of the building and has the look of a slightly spruced-up prison mess hall.

Soon a large line forms and people are streaming in. On the menu are cabbage, some kind of rice, and meatballs and gravy on a hotdog bun. The room gets crowded very quickly. I carry utensils back and forth and refill pitchers from a garbage can full of water.

People are scraping food off others’ trays before it gets thrown out. One guy waits by the garbage for 20 minutes, filling a plastic bag with scraps for his dog.

At one point, a fight breaks out. Two men are rolling on the ground under a table, and some others are shouting and rubber-necking to see what’s going on. Security comes over to break it up. I walk around the crowd with another rack of cups.

The experience overall is interesting and quite rewarding. I head home and finish cleaning the house, which takes a couple hours. I spend the rest of the day researching loose leaf tea prices for my friend Ameeth and editing my friend Rachel’s grad school application essay.

Day 4 – Habitat restoration

Day 4 — a Saturday — starts early. At 9 AM, I arrive at Mount Sutro in San Francisco, ready to do some habitat restoration with an organized group. I found this gig on OneBrick.org, a great site that pairs volunteers with projects for one-off events.

This event is popular: over 40 people show up. I join a group heading to the top of the mountain to do some weeding. Apparently the entire mountain was overgrown and inaccessible prior to the founding of this project a few years back.

I spend about three hours pulling sow thistle, forget-me-not, french broom, and some kind of ivy from the ground. These are all invasive species; they’re crowding out the less-hearty native plants. The work is fun, and it’s nice to get my hands dirty. The people are cool, too.

Later in the day I spend a couple hours collecting band review data for my friend Arvel’s record label, at his request. I start reading excerpts of my friend Kim’s novel, which she is submitting to agents and planning to use in her grad school applications.

Day 5 – Reading about pyrates

For day 5, I choose an ambitious project: I will record a chapter of a book for LibriVox, on online library of public domain audiobooks recorded by volunteers. I found out about LibriVox a month ago, and I’ve been listening to books from it in the gym.

After some deliberation, I choose A General History of the Pyrates, a 1724 book containing biographies of contemporary pirates — you know, Blackbeard, Calico Jack, Black Bart, etc. I wouldn’t want to deprive the world of eighteenth century pirate audiobooks, now would I?

To make a long story short, it takes about 8 hours before I have an (almost-)finished product. It takes a while to create an acceptable recording setup, and it’s hard not to stumble over sentences like this one:

We find him Commander of a Pyrate Sloop of eight Guns, and 80 Men, in the Month of September, 1716, cruising off Jamaica, Cuba, etcetera, about which Time he took the Berkley Galley, Captain Saunders, and plundered him of 1000 pounds in Money, and afterwards met with a Sloop call’d the King Solomon, from whom he took some Money, and Provisions, besides Goods, to a good Value.

Yarr. When I’m done, I continue reading Kim’s novel — she’s sent about 70 pages! It’s good.

Day 6 – Sweeping the sidewalk

I return to the outdoors on the morning of day 6, sweeping leaves off the sidewalk on my block. This is the urban equivalent of raking the front lawn.

I feel a bit dumb doing this. But hey, it’s helpful, right? I’ve seen other people sweeping the street in my neighborhood, so they at least must appreciate the work. And the sidewalk is damn clean when I’m done an hour and a half later.

I finish Kim’s novel excerpts and send her feedback. I research technical details for my friend Brett’s consulting project, which aims to create online gallery software for existing art collections.

At this point I’ve done everything my friends requested, and I need to make a little work for myself. The most exhausting part about this project isn’t the helping itself; it’s the constant search for things to do. It’s not easy fill a whole week with helpful activities.

I sign up for Aardvark, a social search / question answering site that started recently. Unfortunately, I spend a lot of time looking for questions to answer and only find one that I’m actually qualified to answer. That’s not very helpful!

Oh well — the day’s almost over. I end it by cooking a large batch of mint brownies for everyone.

Day 7 – Stuffing envelopes

The week is almost up! I’ve enjoyed it, but I’m getting really tired. It’s been about 10 days since I had a day off.

I spend a couple hours editing and finishing up my Pyrates recording. My friend Raja says he doesn’t have anything specific for me to do, but he’d like me to read Gandhi’s autobiography, which he says will help maximize my positive impact on the world. Sounds good! I start reading.

Before heading off to my last volunteer event, I head downtown and walk around for a little while, giving a dollar to every panhandler I see. This is an interesting experience — I’m actively seeking out panhandlers after avoiding them for years.

In the evening, I head over to the offices of Streetside Stories, a non-profit that helps children improve their literacy skills. I’m here to stuff donation-request envelopes. Though this sounds mundane, it actually ends up being pretty fun and social.

After writing “Hi [name], We hope you can join us!” on envelope inserts for a couple hours, I chat with the other volunteers and then head home.

The week is over!

I’m tired, but satisfied. I’ve spent more than 60 hours helping others, done a bunch of interesting stuff, and met some cool people.

My intent during this week was to give the world what it wanted; it wasn’t to impose my will on it. I tried not to question the motives or intentions of others. I wasn’t choosey about how I helped; no task was below me.

I can already feel my perspective shifting. That was the main goal of this project. It wasn’t so much about the specific acts of helping as it was about taking the perspective of others. It was about immersing myself in their perspectives.

This week-long experiment will, I’m sure, filter into the rest of my life. And that’s what I love most about immersion — though temporary, its effects are often permanent.

—

Image credits:

Help Wanted by kandyjaxx
Dolores Park Tracks by atp_tyreseus
Mount Sutro Vegetation by Whole Wheat Toast
Glide Line by Andrew Turner
Leaves on the Sidewalk by me.

A few weeks ago I challenged myself to go from microwaving corndogs and boiling pasta to cooking a fancy meal in a weekend. Sixteen hours of work later, I emerged successful.

Are my food problems all solved? Not yet. Though being able to cook fancy is great for special occasions, it’s not something I can do every day. It’s time-consuming, expensive, and, unless I watch carefully, not very healthy. On a day-to-day basis, I want food that’s cheap, healthy, and quick to prepare. (Oh, and tasty — but let’s ignore that little detail for now.)

Preparation speed isn’t such a big issue — I can always reheat leftovers. But what about the other two? How cheap do I want my food? And how healthy?

I want it to be as cheap and as healthy as possible, of course. But those goals seem opposed. After all, I could heat up Ramen noodles and live — at least for a little while — on about a dollar a day. But that’s a terrible idea: I want to save money, but I don’t want scurvy.

Healthy food is more expensive than Ramen. But just how much more expensive is it? A week ago I issued a new challenge to myself:

I want to find the cheapest daily diet that meets all common nutritional recommendations.

Now, nutrition is tricky business. Nutritional guidelines change often. New nutrients are found. “Good” nutrients are discovered to be bad, and vice-versa.

For this reason, some experts — Michael Pollan comes to mind — recommend ignoring complex nutrition advice altogether. Instead, they suggest keeping it simple: Eat a variety of fresh, unprocessed foods. Focus mostly on produce and, if you’re an omnivore, choose high-quality meats.

I don’t want to stray too far from that advice. Besides the health arguments, I’m drawn toward unprocessed food on an aesthetic level. I want to keep things simple. But at the same time, I want to make sure I’m not straying too far from standard nutrition advice — stuff about fat percentages, vitamins, minerals, and so on. I’m not a nutrition expert, after all.

So I’m making sure my hypothetical cheap and healthy diet meets the following requirements, which come mostly from the standard USDA recommendations:

1. Provides 2000 calories per day
2. Maintains the standard caloric ratios: 20-30% of calories from fat, about 10% from protein, and the rest from carbohydrates
3. Meets standard vitamin recommendations for A, C, E, K, Thiamin, Riboflavin, Niacin, Folate, B12, Pantothenic acid
4. Meets standard mineral recommendations for Calcium, Iron, Magnesium, Phosphorus, Potassium, Sodium, Zinc, Copper, Manganese, Selenium
5. Meets standard fiber recommendation
6. Keeps saturated fat to a minimum
7. Keeps cholesterol to a minimum

Sounds complicated, right? Fortunately I’ve found a handy website that gives me nutritional breakdowns for lists of foods and quantities.

Of course, I could really geek out and write a computer program that solves a constraint optimization problem given nutrition data and prices for a variety of foods. But let’s not get carried away. Nutrition isn’t an exact science and prices vary, anyway. (But if anyone else wants to do that, let me know the result!)

I decided early on that I want the staples of my theoretical diet to be rice and beans.

Both are extremely cheap by calorie. Beans are high-protein and filled with vitamins and minerals. Together they contain all essential amino acids, which forms a complete protein. (I don’t really understand what that means, but it sure sounds good, right?)

It turns out that beans — kidney, pinto, black, white, etc. — are pretty equivalent as far as nutrition goes. They’re cheapest when bought dry. The best deal I found was on pinto beans at Safeway, where you can get a 20-pound bag for $15.19 — or $0.76 / lb. That equates to 2042 calories and 126 grams of protein per dollar!

Brown rice has more fiber and other nutrients than white rice, so I chose it. I wasn’t able to find any great deals in local grocery stores, but you can buy 50-pound bags of the stuff online for $61.48 (including shipping), or $1.23 / lb. That equates to a still-impressive 1364 calories per dollar.

Unfortunately — or perhaps for variety’s sake, fortunately — rice and beans form a very incomplete diet. Both contain almost zero fat, and it’s important to get a substantial portion of calories from fat. Their combination is also low in a number of vitamins and minerals — most notably vitamins A, C, E, K, and B12, riboflavin (gotta have it!), and calcium.

I turned next to fruits and vegetables. Of the two, vegetables seem most nutrient rich for the money. After looking at a lot of vegetables, I decided that broccoli and sweet potatoes looked most promising. Both are reasonably priced by the pound and packed with nutrients. They’re both often called “superfoods.” They’re also both in season right now.

The lowest price I could find on broccoli was at Golden Produce, a local shop, where it was about $1.33 / lb. Sweet potatoes sell for $0.99 / lb at KJ Produce, another local shop.

At this point, the major holes remaining in the diet were fat — there was still almost none — calcium, and vitamin B12. For fat, I decided to use a combination of oil and seeds or nuts. I couldn’t use only oil, as way too much would be necessary.

I chose olive oil, which seems universally regarded as healthy and is quite reasonably priced. At Safeway, I found a 44 oz (88 tablespoon) bottle for $15.99. That equates to $0.18 per tablespoon.

Peanuts are the cheapest nut, but I didn’t pick them. They’re pretty high in saturated fat and less nutrient-rich than many other types of nuts. Almonds are a lot better, but they’re also a lot more expensive.

I settled on sunflower seeds, which are somewhere in the middle nutritionally. They’re a good source of vitamin E, niacin, and zinc, which were still lacking. They sell at Safeway for $1.59 / lb (unshelled) in bulk.

The remaining nutrients needed were calcium and vitamin B12. Calcium is easy — milk is the best source, and it’s pretty cheap. It costs $2.99 per gallon at Safeway.

Vitamin B12 is tricky. There’s some in milk but none in any of the other foods I’ve chosen so far. It’s the one vitamin that’s missing in vegan diets, and all the foods I’ve selected (other than milk) are vegan. It’s recommended that vegans supplement their diets with B12, either in fortified health foods or as a separate pill.

Why not just include meat in the diet? Well, first, it’s not very cheap. But more importantly, I’d rather buy the cheapest grains and vegetables than buy the cheapest meat. Bargain basement meat is likely produced in atrocious factory farming conditions and pumped up with hormones.

So … B12. I’m copping out. Take a supplement! It’s only a few extra cents a day. This diet provides adequate quantities of all other vitamins and minerals.

Time to wrap up.

I settled on the following daily quantities of each of the foods listed above, with prices listed:

1. 3 cups cooked brown rice ($0.53)
2. 2 cups cooked pinto beans ($0.23)
3. 2 stalks cooked broccoli (360g) ($1.06)
4. 1 baked sweet potato (180g) ($0.40)
5. 1 tablespoon olive oil ($0.18)
6. 1/2 cup sunflower seeds, shelled ($0.22)
7. 2 cups nonfat milk ($0.37)

The total cost per day is $2.99.

This diet supplies 2090 calories and all essential vitamins and minerals (with the exception of B12; see the discussion above). Fiber is high. Saturated fat and cholesterol are very low. 23% of calories come from fat, 15% from protein, and the rest from carbohydrates.

This diet is quite high in protein (at 174% the daily recommended value). I don’t think there are any problems with that, but it’s something to keep in mind. (And it’s interesting to note, since many think vegetarian diets are low in protein.)

See the vitamin and mineral charts below, courtesy of NutritionData.com:

(Notes: add salt to taste if you want more sodium. Vitamin D comes from exposure to sunlight!)

Am I recommending eating exactly the foods listed above every day?

No.

And would you do that even if I were recommending it? Didn’t think so. My goal here isn’t to suggest an exact diet. It’s only to see how cheap it’s possible to go while remaining healthy.

The diet above is very nutritious. I’m sure, in fact, that it’s quite a bit more nutritious than what I’m currently eating. And it’s only $2.99 per day.

I’ll definitely be looking more closely at what I’m eating. With substitutions for variety, spices, and interesting recipes, the basic diet listed above is actually very workable. Of course, I’m not planning to adhere strictly to any diet. I’m too lazy, and exceptions make life interesting.

But for run-of-the-mill daily meals, it’s nice to make sure I’m eating healthily and cheaply. And clearly it is possible to do both.

It’s Saturday morning, and I have no idea what I’m going to cook. All I know is that by Sunday evening I need to complete four dishes — a full meal.

The dishes need to be fancy. It remains to be seen whether they’ll be edible.

I’m starting my cooking challenge. The rules: one man, one weekend, no prior planning. The goal: one fancy meal, cooked and ready to eat.

What’s so challenging about cooking? If you’re me, a lot. I’ve avoided it my whole life. When asked to illustrate a recipe in high school German class, I diagrammed Ramen noodle preparation. Through college, I chopped vegetables for others but never did the cooking myself. Right now, cooking means heating up pasta and pouring sauce out of a jar — and that’s if I’m feeling ambitious.

Every year for the last decade I’ve thought, “I really should learn to cook one of these days,” but I haven’t done anything. The years have passed by; I’ve procrastinated and come up with excuses. There’s always been something else to do.

Well, no more! A week ago I decided to undertake this cooking challenge. The goal: to eliminate my fear of cooking once and for all — and to do it in a single weekend.

So here I am on Saturday morning.

I need to decide what I’m going to cook and then I need to get all the ingredients. As planned, I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to do.

I head to the bookstore. There are a lot of fancy cookbooks — French Laundry, Chez Panisse, etc. — but the first thing I think is … Top Chef! If you’re not familiar, Top Chef is a popular TV reality show that pits chefs against each other. Fancy dishes are usually the result. I’ve watched a couple seasons, and I like it.

Unfortunately, the Top Chef cookbook doesn’t look very good. It’s high on trivia and low on recipes. The recipes seem vague. They use obscure ingredients I probably won’t be able to find.

That’s actually something I’m worried about — I don’t know what’s in stock at the grocery store, and that makes it a little difficult to plan what I’m going to make. I just need to hope that everything important is there. I’m not going to bet on finding quail eggs.

But I do like the Top Chef idea. (After all, it lets me use “Top Chef” in the title of this article, right?) So I pick up a copy of Tom Colicchio’s Think Like a Chef. If you’re not aware, Colicchio’s the stern, bald judge on Top Chef. He’s founded a couple famous restaurants in New York City.

Colicchio’s book looks good. The recipes seem doable, and he explains the techniques well. There’s even a lot on his cooking philosophy. Great! I buy it and head home.

I spend the next couple hours reading about half of the book. I learn about roasting, braising, blanching, and so on. I think about what to do. I finally decide on four recipes — three from this book and one from another of Colicchio’s books.

These are the dishes I plan to make:

• Artichoke Hearts Braised in Olive Oil and White Wine, with aromatic vegetables
• Roasted Tomato Risotto
• Roasted Herbed Leg of Lamb with Apple Cider Sauce
• Banana Upside-Down Cake

Sounds pretty good, right? I make a huge list of all the ingredients I’m going to need. There are about 40 of them! This could take a while…

I also list the equipment I need to buy. I live in a large apartment with a lot of useful stuff — pots and pans of every size, strainers, lemon juicers, etc. — but I still don’t have everything. Among other things, I need to get a cake pan, a meat thermometer — I’ve never used one before — and twine for tying meat.

I buy all the produce first. I’m able to find almost everything at Golden Produce, a local shop, and Safeway. Fresh tarragon is out, so I have to settle for dried.

Then I get the rest of the ingredients, mostly from Safeway. Luckily Safeway stocks legs of lamb, which are about five pounds each. Nowhere else I looked does.

I have to take about three separate trips to the store to get everything, and I’m pretty exhausted when I finish. So many new concepts and recipe details are floating around in my head. I’ve spent about eight hours today on this challenge: first looking for cookbooks, then reading them, then deciding what to make, and finally getting all the ingredients.

Time to go to sleep and prepare for day two.

I sleep fitfully. I’m nervous about how this is all going to turn out. There are a lot of things I’m going to need to do tomorrow that I’ve never done before. Will they all work out?

Sunday comes. After taking a shower and eating, I procrastinate for about an hour. Then I get started.

First I come up with my plan of attack. I’ll roast the tomatoes and garlic first. They’re needed for the risotto, and roasting them takes a few hours. Then I’ll make the braised artichokes and upside-down cake, both of which can sit at room temperature. I’ll prepare the lamb and start it roasting. Finally, I’ll make the risotto and the apple cider sauce.

I’ll spare you the details of everything I do. I work methodically and try not to have too much going on at once. It’s easy to let things overcook if you’re not watching them. I learn techniques as I go — clarifying butter is hard without the right tools! – and improvise where necessary.

The most challenging part comes when it’s time to cut the hearts out of the raw artichokes. Doing so isn’t easy, even with directions. The artichokes fight back every step of the way. It’s not clear where the hearts begin and end. It takes me several artichokes before I feel like I know what I’m doing.

Everything else goes surprisingly smoothly. I credit that mostly to my attentiveness: I watch everything cook with eagle eyes, making sure not to let it go too long. Overcooking would have been particularly disastrous for the risotto, where I have to add more stock every few minutes.

After about eight hours of cooking, I’m done! I’m tired, but it’s great to see all the finished food — and, of course, to eat it. I share it with my brother Chris, his girlfriend Terra, and my apartment-mates Arvel, Sarah, Steve, and Brett.

Everything is good. The artichokes are tender, the risotto is creamy, the lamb wasn’t overcooked, and the upside-downcake is, in my brother’s words, “perfectly executed.” (I think he may have been channeling Tom Colicchio!)

So, success!

In a mere sixteen hours spread over two days, I have all but eliminated my fear of cooking. Sure, there’s a lot more to cooking than following recipes — and most chefs don’t even like recipes — but for the casual cook they work well.

What have I learned? First, cooking isn’t such a big deal. No huge surprise there, I guess.

But more importantly: Sometimes it’s best not just to face fears, but to kick their ass. After a decade of procrastination, I’m glad I got down to business and did this in one weekend. I could have taken a more measured approach — researching, planning, trying one thing at a time — but I’m glad I didn’t. The measured approach is boring, slow, and probably less likely to succeed, anyway.

Screw that. I want my roasted, herbed leg of lamb with apple cider sauce now!

—

Pictured below: My four dishes

I thought I’d take a break from the usual essays I post here to cover a few things I’ve been loving recently.

The rules: I’m listing only stuff that’s current and that you may not have heard of before. You don’t need to know that I like to watch Teletubbies or eat at Chili’s (and boy, do I!). The point is to give helpful recommendations.

I hope you find something here interesting.

Blogs

	The Art of Nonconformity is run by world-traveller Chris Guillebeau. The site focuses on independent living, travel, and entrepreneurship. On it, Chris chronicles his quest to visit every country in the world — of which there are about 200, depending on how you count. He’s visited more than half of them. I love Chris’s writing style. His travel keeps what he says grounded in real-world experience and provides plenty of interesting stories. He’s also an expert networker and social media user — I’m amazed at how quickly he’s risen to internet fame.
	Derek Sivers is a musician and the founder of CDBaby, an online store for independent musicians. He blogs mostly on entrepreneurship and marketing, with a focus on music. Derek is one of the guys (along with Seth Godin — see below) who have turned me on to marketing. (It’s not as bad as you might think.) He writes short and engaging posts, and he knows a lot about the music industry. He’s one of those guys who seems to communicate, either in-person or over the net, with hundreds of people per day. I’m impressed.
	Seth Godin is already pretty well-known. He keeps a blog, writes books on business and marketing, and speaks at conferences like TED. He’s an engaging writer and speaker. Seth’s blog is interesting, but I’m actually a bigger fan of his books. They’re short and expensive, but they’re full of insights on leadership, community building, and earning people’s attention (rather than buying or demanding it). Check out Purple Cow and Tribes. Seth’s books get bashed on Amazon for various reasons, but I’ve found them very helpful.

Books

Talent Is Overrated, written by Geoff Colvin, argues that virtuoso performance (in pretty much anything) is the result of thousands of hours of focused practice. Talent — meaning any genetic disposition to do well without putting in the work — is much less important. I loved this book. Colvin does not merely speculate or pontificate: he provides plenty of evidence to support his view. Talent tends to be imputed after-the-fact, when someone has already shown themselves capable of great work. Colvin shows that early talent (as judged by instructors) is a bad predictor of later success. The best predictors are, by far, practice hours and what he terms practice “deliberateness.” Deliberate practice involves identifying and isolating weaknesses and working to overcome them. It requires intense focus and determination, and it’s not usually very fun. Colvin describes in detail how a number of sports stars, writers, and performers have used it.

Brain Rules, written by molecular biologist John Medina, is a breezy summary of the practical findings from the last few decades of brain research. It’s organized into sections on exercise, attention, memory, sleep, and so on. The book’s section on exercise is illuminating: Besides the obvious physical benefits, exercise — well, mostly aerobic exercise — has a big positive impact on cognitive performance and mood. It also increases neuroplasticity — the brain’s ability to learn new things. Medina also discusses the brain’s need for breaks in attention. He relates that to his teaching (and, in particular, lecturing) experience. He argues in support of taking a short afternoon nap and against multi-tasking. There’s a lot in this book, and I found almost all of it extremely interesting.

Music

	Ensiferum are an awesome Finnish viking metal band. (Well, now that I look at their Wikipedia page, I see they describe themselves as “heroic folk metal” — go figure.) The band is cheesy and over-the-top, but not in an annoying way. Every Ensiferum album opens with an epic folky passage that would fit perfectly in movies like Braveheart and Lord of the Rings. The music that follows is usually heavy and fast, highly melodic, and upbeat. Vocals vary from harsh and raspy to clean and deep.
	Primordial are one of the most emotionally compelling bands I’ve come across in the past year. They’re a metal band from Ireland, but their recent output has been straying into hard rock territory. I saw them live earlier this year and was blown away by their vocalist. The guy’s been touring with this band for almost 20 years, and he sounds like he’s singing the last show of his life every time. I’m having trouble describing Primordial’s music. It’s heavy, epic, and emotionally intense. Check out the song “Empire Falls” on their MySpace page.
	Star of Ash is the work of Norwegian musician Heidi Tveitan. I discovered her only because she’s the wife of Vegard Tveitan (aka. Ihsahn), the brilliant force behind symphonic black metal band Emperor. Heidi Tveitan’s music is best described as cinematic. It’s atmospheric, moody, and often haunting. Her most recent album, The Thread, should be listened to as a single unit. Its songs tell a story and flow into one another. Though mostly instrumental, the album is punctuated by beautiful vocal performances from Tveitan and others.

—

There you have it. Have any recommendations of your own?

Are you sick of hearing “rockstar” applied to everything? I am. Everyone is a rockstar: Internet companies search for “rockstar” Python programmers. Corporate websites advise you on how to be a “rockstar” recruiter. You can even drink high fructose corn syrup and caffeine and be a rockstar.

There’s a reason guys like Jimmy Page and Kurt Cobain aren’t called “top corporate recruiter” musicians. Yes, that would be unwieldy … but it would also be lame. Let’s call a horse a horse.

In that vein, I’d like to look at how rock musicians write rock music. I run a not-so-oft-updated site called The Songwriting Process where I collect quotes from musicians on their creative process. In the process of collecting them, I’ve noticed a few patterns.

Of course, songwriting can’t be boiled down to a definable process. You’ll never find a recipe that makes it easy or straightforward. Creativity doesn’t work that way. Still, there are some techniques that help songs flow more freely. And if you do some analogizing, the patterns I’ve found should be useful for any creative process.

This is how to write rock music like a rockstar:

1. Start with one small, but good, idea.

This is an extremely common technique. The idea is to build songs from the ground up: Rather than worrying about song structure or interplay between instruments, just come up with one good part – a melody, guitar riff, drum loop, lyric, whatever. Once you have a part that moves you, grow it into a full song.

John Lennon describes how he wrote the Beatles’s song “Because”:

I was lying on the sofa in our house, listening to Yoko play Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” on the piano. Suddenly I said, “can you play those chords backwards.” She did, and I wrote “Because” around them.

Metallica used this technique to write their hit “Enter Sandman.” Guitarist Kirk Hammett came up with the song’s main riff, which was then modified slightly by drummer Lars Ulrich. The rest of the song evolved from that single riff. Ulrich calls “Enter Sandman” a “one-riff song.”

2. Use rules or limitations.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed as a songwriter. After all, a song can go in any direction and become almost anything – the freedom’s almost too much to handle. For this reason, some songwriters like to constrain themselves.

Nine Inch Nails mainman Trent Reznor says:

If I come up with rules or limitations it focuses me in a direction. … those rules and limitations can change if you realize it’s a dumb idea. You start to mutate it and see what fits best.

For the album With Teeth, Reznor forced himself to write two songs every 10 days. He also decided before starting that he wanted to album to sound “frail” and “unsure of itself.” This guideline had a big impact on his recording and production process.

Bob Dylan says that if he gets stuck while writing a song, he forces himself to change keys on guitar. Because of the nature of the instrument, playing the song in a new key often leads to new ideas: “Anything you do in A, it’s going to be a different song in G. … There’s too many wide passing notes in G not to influence your writing unless you’re playing barre chords.”

3. Keep it simple.

Many songwriters write with just one instrument–often acoustic guitar or piano–and their voice. A whole band or complex equipment would just confuse things. Other instruments and parts can come later once the core of the song has been formed.

Heidi Tveitan, head of atmospheric rock outfit Star of Ash, describes the writing process for her most recent album:

All songs were written on piano, and when I felt that it worked there, I took it further in the studio. It was important to me having the compositions work in their basic forms before I started layering, as it is so easy to get lost in the arrangements during the writing process. This way I was also more confident and had a clear vision on the songs’ expression before I brought in additional musicians.

Mike Mills of R.E.M. and Billy Joe Armstrong of Green Day both report writing hard-rocking numbers by themselves on an acoustic guitar. While Mills says the songs can change a lot when he brings them to the band, Armstrong says he always has the dynamics of the full band in mind:

I always have it in the back of my head about the dynamics of electric guitar and drums and bass. … But I think that’s the beauty of this. That not only can I play these songs with a band at full volume, but also that I can play them on a cheap, acoustic guitar. And it can have the same kind of impact. 

4. Record ideas and come back to them later.

So songwriters often start with a single idea — see (1). But what if they have an idea but don’t know how to use it? Or what if they have too many ideas and can’t use them all right now?

David Gilmour of Pink Floyd solves this problem by recording his ideas to a portable device. Since he started doing this, his output has grown “massively.” He doesn’t forget his ideas any more. Gilmour’s most recent (solo) album was composed from 150 ideas that he recorded over 12 years.

Niklas Sundin of melodic death metal outfit Dark Tranquillity says his band works similarly:

We always have a backlog of tons and tons of different riffs. You write something that everyone agrees is good, but it might not be possible to finish it at that time. Then a few years later it might be perfect for something that’s around then.

Interestingly, avant-garde singer-songwriter Björk takes a completely different approach. She tries not to record her melodic ideas when they first come. Rather, she prefers to “let [her] subconscious do the editing,” using only ideas that she can remember later.

5. Intermingle the writing and recording processes.

Some songwriters don’t like to keep things simple. This is partly a stylistic issue: Some musical ideas are, at their core, too complicated to be composed by one person on one instrument. Instead, a multi-track recording device is necessary: Ideas are recorded, layered, and rearranged as inspiration calls. 

Mikael Åkerfeldt of progressive metal band Opeth actually demos the band’s songs by himself in his house. He uses a simple Pro Tools setup on his computer, recording guitar and vocal parts and programming drums electronically. He listens to recorded rough drafts of his albums before the “real” recording process begins.

Ihsahn, leader of symphonic black metal band Emperor, says that while composing the band’s newer albums in the studio,

I could record a riff when I came up with it, or I could write a riff to accompany a new synth passage, or vice versa. The arrangements became more complete because of this; I had much more freedom. I could delve into various elements for a mid-section of a song, and then not have to worry about the beginning or ending of the songs until later on. … I can document my ideas as I get them, record riffs immediately after they are developed. Later on, I can pick out elements and work more on them or change them afterwards

Previously he had been forced to write “band music” in rehearsal and then layer the symphonic elements later.

6. Jam with the band.

Most people think bands come up with music by jamming together in the same room. And some bands do, of course. But I was surprised to many (and perhaps even the majority) don’t. Instead, a single individual often writes the core of the band’s songs, with other members layering their parts later.

Still, many artists like to compose collaboratively. Madonna describes how she worked with Prince to come up with “Love Song”:

He played drums and I played the synthesizer, and we came up with the original melody line; I just, off the top of my head, started singing lyrics into the microphone. And then he overdubbed some guitar stuff and made a loop of it and sent it to me, and then I just started adding sections to it and singing parts of it. And then I sent it back to him, and he’d sing a part of it and add another instrument and send it back to me … it was like this sentence that turned into a paragraph that turned into a little miniseries.

John Lennon reports that he and Paul McCartney often wrote together, eyeball to eyeball, in the Beatles’s early days. He says:

In “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” I remember when we got the chord that made the song. We were in Jane Asher’s house, downstairs in the cellar playing on the piano at the same time. And we had, “Oh you-u-u / got that something…” And Paul hits this chord, and I turn to him and say, “That’s it!” I said, “Do that again!” In those days, we really used to absolutely write like that — both playing into each other’s noses.

Mike Mills says R.E.M. takes a half-way approach: members will come up with ideas themselves at home, but then they’ll jam together to form songs:

Everybody sits at home and diddles around. Sometimes you’ll come up with little ideas and sometimes you’ll come up with a huge part of a song. And then you’ll take that into everyone else and piece it together until you get a song. Other times, things just come out of, literally, just the four of us sitting around and making noise. All of a sudden it will reemerge into a song.

—

These are the patterns I’ve noticed so far. Have you seen others? Do you use techniques like these in other pursuits?

By the way, for many, many more songwriting tips, check out these two articles at Songwriting Zen.

Why Self-Discipline?

Self-discipline sometimes gets a bad rap, and I can understand why: On first glance, it seems to be about forcing ourselves to do things we don’t want to do; it seems to impose a rigid structure on our lives and undermine spontaneity.

Self-discipline is, in some sense, about these things. But that’s not what it’s really about: Self-discipline isn’t about denying ourselves pleasure. It’s about pursuing a different kind of pleasure.

We have short-term and long-term wants. Short-term wants can be fulfilled right now, while long-term ones require prolonged and consistent effort. Without self-discipline, we tend to address only our short-term wants; long-term ones get the short-shrift.

Short-term wants can be powerful. Many mornings I wake up and don’t feel like going to the gym. I feel tired and unmotivated. My mind is working frantically to come up with reasons not to go. I (usually) go anyway–and overrule my short-term wants–because I know doing so is in my long-term best interest. (And I tend to feel better immediately afterward, anyway.)

Like most people, I fear public speaking. When I’ve done it, I’ve always been nervous–and sometimes intensely so–beforehand. I short-term want to back out–to call in sick, “forget,” whatever–but I know doing so isn’t in my long-term best interest. I force myself to get on stage and give the speech even though every short-term bone in my body is telling me not to.  And as with the gym, I tend to feel better after giving the speech.

There will always be some conflict between short-term and long-term wants. When we pursue short-term wants, we sometimes override long-term ones (and vice-versa). The challenge is to minimize this conflict. Don’t deny your short-term or long-term wants; acknowledge that they both exist and work to bring them as close to agreement as possible. Self-discipline isn’t about denying wants. It’s about creating a compromise between them.

The Components

Of course, it’s hard to create this compromise — self-discipline isn’t easy. But it’s never impossible: Self-discipline is a skill that everyone possesses, and it can be trained. It isn’t something you can be born without, and it’s not something you can lose forever if you fail to maintain it.

Having had both great success and great failure maintaining self-discipline, I’ve noticed a pattern: it has worked only when a few components are all fully addressed. These components are: clarity, commitment, and consistency.

Clarity

Clarity is precisely defining what you’re going to do. To be self-disciplined, you need a clear vision of what you’re trying to achieve: You need a goal. From the goal, you work backward and define the actions that will be required to meet it.

Why do you need a goal? Because without a goal, it will be hard to come up with specific actions, and the ones you do come up with will seem arbitrary. It’s hard to motivate yourself to do things that seem arbitrary. Realize, though, that you don’t need to know what you want in any definite or ultimate sense to be self-disciplined. You just need a specific goal — and specific goals can be formed even from uncertainty.

Say you have no idea what you want to be doing or where you want to be a year from now. Your goal, then, can be to find out what you want to do. From that goal, you can work backward to generate a list of actions. (If you’re in this situation, incidentally, I recommend making a list of possibilities, picking something, and trying it for a while. Finding what you want takes more than just sitting around thinking about it.)

Here’s another example: I love music, and I know I want to create it. But I have no idea how music will fit into my life in a big-picture sense; I’m still trying to figure that out. For now, I intend to compose and record an album of my own music. I know I do want to do that, and it’s pretty easy for me to see the actions required to accomplish that goal.

It’s important that you feel the importance of your goal. If you don’t, the actions you take will, again, seem arbitrary, and it will be hard to stay motivated. You need to believe your goal is worthy to push past the obstacles you’ll encounter. If you feel uncertain about a goal–and you probably will if it involves doing something new–keep in mind that the point of pursuing a goal can be to obtain certainty.

Say you’re out of shape and considering starting an exercise routine, but you have reservations about the time commitment. You’re considering exercising three days per week, but you’re worried you won’t have time to do other things. As long as you have this reservation, you’ll have trouble motivating yourself. You won’t be able to commit because you won’t believe in the purpose of your goal.

Here’s what I recommend: Don’t try to convince yourself that a regular exercise routine is a good idea. Instead, reformulate your goal: Don’t just say your goal is to get in shape; instead say your goal is to get in shape in a way that doesn’t intrude on the rest of your life. Or, since you probably don’t know how intrusive a routine will be until you try it, say your goal is to find an exercise routine that doesn’t intrude on the rest of your life. You should be able to buy into one of these goals even if you have reservations about a whatever-it-takes approach to getting in shape.

Commitment

The second component of self-discipline is commitment. Once you have clarity about what you’re trying to achieve, you need to come up with short-term actions — and then you need to commit to doing them.

Your commitments need a time frame and a definite success point; they’re useless without them. In particular, short-term actions should be fully achievable within the next few months. If you’re trying to develop an exercise routine, a good one would be to perform a trial routine for three months.

Make sure not to think too much about how things are going while you work on the commitment. The time the evaluate a commitment is after you’ve met it. Once the time has elapsed, you can gauge how things are going and make any necessary changes.

Why not just plan to stop the routine if it’s not working out? Because sometimes it won’t be working out. Particularly in the beginning, you’ll feel uncomfortable, tired, and distracted much of the time. You’ll feel annoyed by how exercise is disrupting your normal routine. You need to push through this period to understand what regular exercise (or anything) is really like. That’s why commitment is important: it gives you reason to keep going even when things don’t seem to be working out. Remember that this commitment is only for the short-term — you’ll have a chance to evaluate what you’re doing after the time is up.

Consistency

Part of being committed is being consistent. Consistency is important for two reasons: First, you can only follow through on your commitment by being consistent; you’re not going to get much accomplished if you flake out all the time. Second–and perhaps more importantly–consistency actually makes self-discipline easier. The more consistent you are, the easier it is to be consistent. Every time you uphold a commitment, you make it easier to uphold the next one (and every time you flake out on one, you make it easier to flake out the next time).

Clarity helps you to be consistent–and without it, you probably won’t be–but it’s far from sufficient. Consistency is the hardest part of self-discipline. Every day is a battle for consistency: You don’t get things done in the future by thinking about them; you get them done today by doing them.

The good news: Consistency can be practiced — and if you find it hard to be consistent, that just means you’re out of practice. To get better, you need to challenge yourself. I like Steve Pavlina’s weight-training analogy: Self-discipline is like a muscle. It can be strong or weak, and it can be trained. Just as you shouldn’t try to bench press 300 pounds on your first visit to the gym, you shouldn’t attempt more self-discipline than you can handle. To get better, you must gradually increase the weight (difficulty), always moving slightly beyond what’s comfortable.

It’s important to recognize your present limitations. Though it’s easy to say, “I’ll go to the gym five days a week,” it’s much harder actually to do that: Your self-discipline may simply be too weak. Instead of setting yourself up for failure, recognize your present limitations and set less-ambitious short-term goals. Plan to go to the gym one day per week, and do that for a few months. After that time has passed, try something more challenging.

If you’ve set a goal for yourself and you’re finding it extremely difficult to be consistent, you’ve probably overshot your bounds. If you keep trying and failing to maintain consistency, you may give up. Don’t let that happen: If you’re inconsistent for too long, reshape your short-term goal. Having to do that sucks, but it’s better than the alternative. And as you gain experience, you’ll get better at setting realistic goals for yourself. You’ll also get better at being consistent, which means your goals can increase in difficulty.

If you’re bad at being consistent, it helps to overcompensate. Start out with a rigid, fully-planned routine, and make exceptions only when you absolutely have to. This doesn’t sound like fun–and it may not be–but rigidity helps a lot in building consistency. It’s much easier to turn away every distraction than it is to weigh the costs and benefits of each as it arises.

The idea here isn’t to change you into a person who loves a predictable routine and hates spontaneity. It’s only to help you build consistency. Once you’re confident in your ability to maintain a consistent routine, you can start to lessen its rigidity. Self-discipline doesn’t have to be a trade-off between planning and spontaneity. The more self-discipline you have, the more possible it is to be spontaneous while still maintaining a fairly set and regular schedule. If your self-discipline is low, this is very hard to do — which is why it’s good to overcompensate in the beginning.

Wrap Up

If you make sure you have the three components covered, you’ll have much greater success maintaining self-discipline. They’ve worked for me, and I’ve seen them work for many other people.

Don’t be fooled by the idea that self-discipline is about denying yourself pleasure. It’s not. Self-discipline’s about balancing between your short- and long-term needs. Don’t let either dominate the other.

I’ve talked in the past about performing thought experiments to discover what you want. Those can be effective, but they’re not the best method. The best way to discover what you want is to do it.

When you do something, you get a real measure of how much you like it. You cut through fears and fantasies. You adjust your expectations to fit reality. To discover whether you like something, you need to do it. There’s just no other reliable method.

That’s why school is dangerous. The work you do in school is rarely similar to the work you do after you graduate. Sometimes your post-school job is more enjoyable, but often it’s less. In any case, it’s always different.

School is time-consuming. It’s possible to go through years of school only to realize a year into your post-school job that you hate what you’re doing. And since it can be hard to admit you wasted the time, it’s tempting to stay the course, even when that means spending the rest of your life doing something you don’t like.

School is often expensive. It’s common to graduate from law school, medical school, and business school, for example, with tremendous debt. When graduating with this kind of debt, it’s hard to switch directions: you’d better like what you’re doing because you may need to do it to pay off your debt. These schools are able to charge so much in part because their students expect to earn high incomes when they graduate.

When you’re in school, you don’t get a good picture of your future working life. The day-to-day of school is vastly different from the day-to-day of a job. It’s possible to love school but hate what it’s training you to do. That’s its danger: school saps your time and money without doing much to help you to discover what you want. When you graduate, you know whether you like school or not, but not much else.

School is a good option when you’re certain of your chosen path. But it may be a terrible one if you’re not. School’s an attractive form of procrastination: It allows you to spend several years living comfortably. It gives you structure. It gives you a feeling of certainty about your direction. As long as you’re in school, it’s easy to think you’ll love what you’ll do after you graduate, even when that’s not the case.

When you don’t know what you want, school is rarely the best option. It’s particularly dangerous when it puts you in debt. If you don’t know what you’d like to do and are thinking of returning to school, be sure to consider the alternatives.

If you think you want to do something that requires a degree, you’re not going to do it before you get the degree. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot you can do before heading to school. If you think you want to be a lawyer, work with lawyers for a year — say, as a paralegal. You’ll get a realistic view of what it’s like to be a lawyer. You’ll be able to talk to lawyers about what they like and dislike about what they’re doing. If you decide being a lawyer isn’t for you, you’ve dodged a bullet: no years of law school, no debt, and no need to work as a lawyer to pay off that debt.

If you’re not sure of what you want to do, it’s worth doing even unpaid work if it will help you learn more. School carries an immediate prestige boost, which is why many find it tempting. It’s more glamorous to be in grad school than it is to be an unpaid intern. But the unglamorous approach is often the best one — do the thing that will help you find and do what you want the soonest, not the thing that’s most comfortable right now. Don’t sell out your future self by wasting time and acquiring needless debt.

If you think you’d like to do self-employed work, do it. What you’re doing doesn’t need to be profitable — and it probably won’t be for a while anyway. If you like the idea of writing, write. No need to get an MFA (or whatever) unless you’re sure of what you want and know the degree is going to help you get there.

How can you afford to do unprofitable self-employed work? There are two main approaches: being unemployed and being partially employed. If you already have a reasonably well-paying job and have saved money, take a year or two off work. You can do this for substantially less money than it would cost to attend most schools, and you’ll have all the time in the world to pursue your interests. If you’re disciplined, you’ll learn far more about what you like to do than you would in school.

If being unemployed isn’t a realistic option right now, take the partial-employment route. Take a part-time job that pays the bills and isn’t mentally taxing. Pursue your interests in the time you’re not working. You’ll make slower progress when partially employed than unemployed, but it still shouldn’t take long to discover what you like (and don’t like) doing.

Why is doing so effective in discovering what you want? Because when you do something, you cut through the fantasies of what it’s like to do that thing. You see what it’s really like. You’ll learn far more about what you want doing things that interest you day after day than you will learning how to do them in school. If you’re unemployed or partially employed, you can make quick adjustments: if something’s not working for you, change it or try something else. You can’t do that in school without considerable pain.

If you don’t know what you want and you aren’t working toward finding out, you’re procrastinating. School is a particularly time-consuming and expensive form of procrastination. Grad school is not a good place to find yourself — if you need to find what you want, take the most direct route, not the most comfortable or prestigious one.

When you’re trying to find what you want, money and prestige are your enemies. They can cloud your judgment and make things seem better than they really are. It feels good to have or be working toward a well-paying job, at least for a little while.  Money and prestige make you feel important. But their effects eventually wear off — if you don’t like what you’re doing, you’re left with nothing.

For this reason, it’s actually better to do activities with low prestige and money attached to them while trying to find what you want. You can be sure they aren’t clouding your judgment if they aren’t there in the first place. Going to a top-ranked school is more prestigious than working part-time as a waiter and writing for free, but the latter is often more effective in helping you find what you want.

What if you don’t know what you want and no clear possibility springs to mind? Here’s my suggestion: Make a list of all the things you might be interested in doing. Choose one. Commit to doing it for a few months, and then do it. After a few months, gauge whether it’s working for you. If it is, great — it’s not easy to discover something you love. If it’s not, cross it off your list and pick something else.

This approach sounds time-consuming, and it is. But it’s the best way to discover what you want. Don’t dive into school just because you don’t know what you want. And don’t assume you do know what you want if you haven’t actually done it. There are other options besides school, and they may be a better fit for you.

Our personal identities are important to us.  They’re supposed to define us, to pick us out of a crowd.  When we define ourselves, we think we’re picking out characteristics that aren’t universal and whose combination is rare.  We don’t list “breathes air” and “has two arms” when asked to describe ourselves, after all.

But are our identities as specific to us as we think they are?  The answer, it turns out, is no.  We systematically underestimate the prevalence of some personality characteristics and, as a result, mistakenly form our identities around them.  We’re less different than we think.

A Personality Test

In 1948, psychologist Bertram Forer administered a personality test.  He had each of his students answer a series of questions, and he gave out personality analyses based on the test results.  Forer’s analyses were presented as unique personality profiles.  His students judged them as such, rating them on a scale from 0 (very poor) to 5 (excellent).  The result: an average rating of 4.26.  The students were impressed with the accuracy of their analyses.

There’s a catch: the analyses were all the same.  Each was the following:

You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself.  While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them.  You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage.  Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside.  At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.  You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.  You also pride yourself as an independent thinker; and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof.  But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others.  At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved.  Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic.

Forer’s experiment has been repeated many times with the same result.  His result is now termed the “Forer effect.”

The statements Forer used are vague, yes, and that’s usually the focus of analyses of his experiment.  But it can’t be the only reason his personality analyses scored so highly.  They were presented as unique personality profiles, after all, and ones containing only known-universal statements like “You breathe air” and “You have two arms” (or their mental equivalents) would, presumably, have scored much lower.

What We Don’t Talk About

This much is obvious: Some components of our personalities are less rare than we think they are.  We think we’re different in ways we’re not.

But why do we think statements like Forer’s uniquely describe us?  What is it about them that makes them high scoring?  I have a hypothesis: We tend not to talk about some things, and because we don’t, our perception of ourselves is skewed.  We think some characteristics are more rare than they really are.

What don’t we talk about?  Two things: our problems, and opinions and desires we see as controversial.  We feel uncomfortable talking about internal problems: our insecurities, neuroses, doubts, depressed feelings.  We think they make us look unattractive, flawed, and weak.  We’re embarrassed by them.

We tend to keep controversial opinions and desires to ourselves.  We’re worried we’ll garner others’ disapproval and ruin our chances of getting of finding a job, getting a promotion, or finding a mate.  We may tell no one, or maybe only our closest friends, what we really think.

Our silence has consequences.  Because we don’t talk about our problems, we think ours are worse.  Because we’re not aware of others’ insecurities, we think we’re more insecure.  Because we keep controversial opinions and desires to ourselves, we see ourselves as lonely dissidents.

To make matters worse, we tend to see ourselves as more revealing that we really are.  We think we’ve conveyed information to others that we haven’t.  We see ourselves as misunderstood, and we internally chastise others for not treating us how we’d like.

Our own feelings, desires, and experiences are more real to us.  We can empathize with others, but we only really experience our own mental states.  Our own feelings, desires, and experiences seem stronger.  Our highs seem higher and our lows lower.  Our problems seem more severe.  We may not even be aware of others’ problems, and even when we are, it’s still hard to understand their severity.  We tend give ourselves more credit for overcoming our own challenges than we give others for overcoming theirs.  We don’t know what it’s like to be them.

Exaggerated Differences

A vicious cycle emerges.  Because we think we’re different, we isolate ourselves or form groups that isolate themselves.  This behavior exacerbates the problem: When we’re more revealing around our friends, we guarantee we’ll appear more similar to them (and therefore more different from others).  We don’t know what it’s like to be someone outside our group, and we often assume things that are incorrect.  We’re not aware of the inner lives of people we don’t know.  We exaggerate the supposed differences between us and them.

It’s impossible to understand people without knowing how they see themselves.  We know how we see ourselves, and we may know a little about how our friends see themselves, but we have no idea how most people see themselves.  Because of this, we think we’re different in ways we’re not.

What can we do?  We need to be honest and revealing of ourselves, even when doing so makes us uncomfortable.  We can’t assume we understand others or they understand us.  We need to communicate more than seems natural, and we need to talk about things that make us uncomfortable — even to people we don’t know well.  We’re less different than we think, and we’re all better off acknowledging that.

Henry David Thoreau famously stated in Walden that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”  He thinks misplaced value is the cause: We feel a void in our lives, and we attempt to fill it with things like money, possessions, and accolades.  We think these things will make us happy.  When they don’t, we just seek more of them.

Thoreau argues that the value we attach to possessions and status is misplaced.  They aren’t the key to happiness, and they may hurt more than they help.  To him, happiness lies instead in a simple life stripped to the essentials.  To find it, we must shed our false values and live austerely, with no luxury and only meager comforts.  Thoreau attempted to do just that in his minimalist excursion at Walden Pond.

Thoreau’s basically right: Misplaced value contributes to “quiet desperation.”   But it’s not the end of the story: it’s possible to value all the right things and still lead a quietly desperate life.  What Thoreau’s missing is resignation.  We lead lives of quiet desperation when we resign ourselves to dissatisfaction.  Quiet desperation is acceptance of–and surrendering to–circumstances.  Quietly desperate lives are frustrated, passive, and apathetic.  They’re unfulfilled and unrealized.

Pay attention to the following signs of a quietly desperate life.  You might be leading one if:

1. You’ve worked hard to reach a place of comfort and security — but you’re still dissatisfied.  You’re comfortable, but you feel trapped.  Every path away seems to go downhill.
2. You’ve convinced yourself you’re not talented, creative, disciplined, or lucky enough to pursue your dreams.  You think you’re not one of the chosen few, so you’ve resigned yourself to mediocrity.
3. You’ve accepted the power your fears hold over you, and you work within their constraints.  You concede to your fears rather than confronting them.  You refuse to do anything scary and new.  
4. You’re your own worst naysayer.  You focus on how your plans will fail rather than on how to make them work.  You expend great energy rationalizing inaction.  You’ve decided your past failures predict future ones.  
5. You’ve adopted a fatalistic attitude.  Rather than working to improve your situation, you sit idly, hoping to get a lucky break.  Rather than working to help yourself, you wait for others to help you.
6. You’ve decided you missed your chance.  You’re too old, too committed, or too set in your ways to turn back now.  Instead you sit and watch younger and more-free people do what you want to do.

I’ll address each of these points.

Comfort and security are curses in disguise.  They’re like a warm blanket on a chilly day — it’s far too easy (and tempting) to stay with them.  When you’re dissatisfied, you need to venture out into the cold unknown, even if that means a short-term decline in your happiness.  If you don’t, you’ll die comfortable — and still dissatisfied.

Thinking you lack talent, creativity, discipline, or luck is never good reason to resign yourself to mediocrity.  Assume for a minute you do lack these things.  Does that mean you should give up?  No, it doesn’t — you’ll always feel better doing what you know you should do, even when your results aren’t what you’d like.  Now consider that you’re probably underestimating your potential — everyone is insecure, and it’s impossible to know what you can do without putting in the effort.  Talent and creativity don’t spring spontaneously from nothing, especially when a difficult skill is involved.  Self-discipline is entirely about implementation right now — you can be self-disciplined today even if you haven’t been for the past 10 years.  Luck is malleable — we’re all lucky in some ways and unlucky in others, and we can create our own luck.  Even if you’re unlucky in every way, that still isn’t reason to give up.

If you’ve accepted your fears, you’ve accepted your life as it is now.  If you love every part of it, great — but if you don’t, you’re stuck.  It’s often difficult to confront fears, but it’s never impossible.  The good news: they’re entirely internal.  You can’t always change the world, but you can change yourself.

Naysaying is attractive because it encourages inaction; it allows you to be lazy and avoid the unfamiliar.  But it’s a terrible way to spend time and energy.  Don’t use your power against itself.  Spend your time thinking about how to make your plans work, not about how they won’t work.

Fatalism is another excuse for inaction.  You don’t have control over everything, certainly, but you do have control over some things.  Spend your time thinking about the things you can change — and work to change them.  If you sit and wait for something good to happen, you’ll probably be waiting for a long time.

It’s true that some things are easier when you’re younger.  But that’s not always the case — being older has its own set of advantages.  Age and commitment may mean you have to make adjustments to your plans, but there’s always something you can do.  Start slowly, and work from there.  Don’t use them as an excuse to be lazy.

Quiet desperation is dangerous.  It tends to feed on itself as time goes on.  It’s never unconquerable, but extraordinary energy can be required to defeat it.  Don’t resign yourself to a life of dissatisfaction.