I also had a lot of fun laying out the book. I get really into design things like this, so I surrounded myself with books in my RV and figured out how a book is laid out. There’s a ton to consider, from gutters and margins to font sizes and chapter pages.

For example… what is the very first page of a book? Take a guess! I would have gotten it wrong.

In the next couple of weeks the book will be on Amazon. I want to price it at $20, but I may have to jack it up to not compete with the ebook, depending on the strategy of the person who takes over the project.

Anyway, I’m in Austin for another 19 days, and so I’m going to do at least one batch of autographed books before I go. I may have time for two batches, but maybe not. I have the feeling the last week is going to be spent making last minute gear adjustments, figuring out how to store the RV, etc.

So… if you want an autographed book, now’s the time! Maybe the only time!

Here are some photos:

The price for an autographed copy is $19.99 plus $3.99 for shipping (more for international). I think that’s a pretty great deal since I normally sell the book for $47.

Of course, it doesn’t come with the online-only extras (70+ minute audio course, wingman ebook, and 30 day interactive online pickup course). If you want all that, I’ll make you a deal. Pay the $47 for the online version and I’ll send you an autographed copy of the paperback for free. I’ll even pay shipping.

If you already have the ebook then don’t feel like you have to get the paperback. The edits from the 2008 edition are mainly for clarity. There are no new sections, so don’t buy it expecting for it to be something new.

If you aren’t familiar with the book, it’s basically the collection of all of my pick up knowledge. It’s different from other books because it focuses on BUILDING a life and personality that attract women, rather than tactics and routines (although there are a few of those). It covers everything from opening to getting out of the friend zone to date ideas, etc.

People who have read the book really like it and despite a very liberal return policy on the ebook, I get virtually no returns. Lots of people have written to me and told me that their dating lives have been turned around 180 because of the book.

I’m really proud of the book and really happy with how it came out. I hope you enjoy it too! I’ll take down this link in a few days when I won’t have time to order, sign, and ship the books. Until then:

ORDER HERE!

And you also get free shipping if you order more than two. This is mainly because I got sick of trying to set up the shipping tables properly. This includes international orders for the same reason.

Also, you can get more info on the book by clicking the “dating” link at the top, but make sure you buy with the link above to get a deal.

If you want to wait and buy through Amazon, it will be on there in a few weeks, but the price may be really high. Not sure yet.

P.S. I have two proof copies which were sent to me to verify the layout of the book. I have them labeled #1 and #2. They represent the first two physical copies of a book that I’ve written that have ever existed. If you want to buy these as a collector’s thing or an investment (because you rightly believe that I will be famous-er some day), I’ll sell the #1 for $200 or the #2 for $150.

If you like my writing and don’t have a love life you’re totally satisfied with, check out my full course on dating here.

One of them gave up on the late bus after a while so I started talking to the other one. He was friendly and a good conversationalist. Fifteen minutes into the conversation he casually and without shame mentioned that he was homeless.

Man. I was way off on that one, I thought.

The bus finally came and brought us to the airport. Backpack strapped to my back I ran across the arrivals lanes, up the escalator, across the lobby, and through security. Time from bus to gate? Seven minutes.

In the middle seat next to me was a non white woman. I assumed she was poor based on her ethnicity and the way she was dressed. She pulled out an ipod. Those poor people, always buying these that they can’t afford.

An hour into the flight she opens up her year or two old apple laptop. There’s a picture of the Golden Temple of Kyoto on her desktop. It looks like it might be a snapshot.

“Hey, I don’t mean to be spying on you, but have you been to the Golden Temple?”

“Oh, no. My daughter is learning Japanese and she put it there.”

I turn my screen to her to show her that I’m learning Japanese too. For the next half hour or so we have one of the most pleasant airplane chats I’ve ever been part of. She warm and friendly. Her daughter goes to a private school and is learning Japanese in the fifth grade. Amazing.

Thats zero for two on judging people that day.

I won’t stop judging people. I don’t know if that’s possible or even a totally good thing. But I will be putting a lot less faith in my judgements – that’s for sure.

If you like my writing and don’t have a love life you’re totally satisfied with, check out my full course on dating here.

The only bad news is that it’s REALLY difficult to choose. The hardest decisions to make are those where you have several good options, and I have about four of those decisions to make. My challenge is to press on and make the best decision I can, instead of just deliberating forever.

Tough decisions are sometimes the decisions that matter least. If you’re torn between two options, then probably one of them isn’t significantly better or worse. If it was, it would be an easy decision.

This sort of reminds me of a project I had that never came to light. I decided I was going to have a once monthly “Hot girls and Tynan in Austin” feature. I was just going to find a couple hot girls on Craigslist, go to some famous Austin monument and take photos and post them here.

I put an ad on Craigslist and got TONS of replies. Some were easy to weed out, but I had too many hot girls to choose from at the end. Paralyzed by a too-many-good-options decision, I never did it.

Anyway, I’m hoping that by next week I will have found homes for all of my projects.

Work on Life Nomadic is going really well. Todd and I are doing a lot behind the scenes to make it spectacular (both the trip and the site). If you go to the site now you can put in your e-mail to get notified when we launch. If you read this site regularly, there’s no need to do that…. I’ll mention it here.

I have less than three weeks left in Austin. Soon I’ll be heading up to the Northeast where I’ll leave for Life Nomadic 09.

If you like my writing and don’t have a love life you’re totally satisfied with, check out my full course on dating here.

I’m hoping that some or all of my businesses can be taken over by readers. As I’ve met readers over the years I’ve been really impressed with most of them and would trust them to run my businesses.

For each I’m happy to stay involved in a minimal role, offering advice and strategy, doing interviews to promote things, etc. I just can’t be involved in running them or worrying about them. When I’ve been in this role in previous businesses, things have gone very well.

I’m willing to split profits and be partners or sell each one outright. I believe in all of them, so I’d rather be cut in.

Without further ado:

Conversion Doubler

Conversion Doubler probably has the most profit potential. It really is THE BEST in its field.

To take this over you should be a team of a PHP programmer and a marketer, or be good at both. Right now it works on most major hosts (Dreamhost and Hostgator, for example), but not on all of them. A decent PHP programmer could fix that, or a marketer could just warn people or bundle it with a hosting package and set it up for them.

I have no way to judge the quality of my code, but I think it ranges based on how early I wrote the section. A lot was rewritten as I got better. None of it is documented well, but I think it’s all relatively easy to follow.

The challenge for a marketer will be to explain multivariate testing, explain why it’s so important, and find good sources of customers.

I would rather not charge for this and get a percentage, but will consider selling outright.

www.conversiondoubler.com

Daily 15

Daily 15 has a lot of potential and I didn’t really get into it enough to tap that. Almost 2000 people signed up for the RSS on day one, but it has since tapered off to a stable 650.

I get lots of e-mails from people who really like the idea, so someone who was able to write new fun and useful challenges would probably be very successful at this. It’s based on wordpress and I made a custom theme for it. I also have some very rough PHP software I wrote to build a database of challenges and automatically schedule them based on category and recency.

Someone with a self help style site may want to keep this ad free and use it for traffic and to keep people engaged. I’d be willing to do that and split the branding between my site and yours.

www.daily15.com

Best in The Land

I hate to see this go because I still have a ton of things I want to write about.

If we partner on this one I can offer TONS of products with a quick outline of what makes it the best. You just write the articles, get affiliate links for everything, and promote the site.

Despite having very few entries, I get more people telling me this is their favorite of my sites than any other.

www.bestintheland.com

Skinny Snob

I’m not sure this one is really worth taking over. The book is okay, but not world class. It could use some updating. I’d be happy to provide knowledge for this, but not actually write any more.

The real asset is a list I built through adwords and a landing page of around 16,000 names, e-mails, and amount of weight they want to lose. It’s all in Aweber, so it’s easy to send them e-mails.

Marketers say that lists are worth $1 per month per user. I have no idea how that’s true, but if you do then maybe this is a good project for you. I haven’t e-mailed the list in years so some may not still be interested.

www.theskinnysnob.com

Make Her Chase You

I think this one has a ton of potential too. The book is excellent and gets close to zero returns. I also have a good, but not great, guide to being a wingman, a very good 30 day e-mail course, and a very good 60+ minute hidden mic pickup recording.

The e-mail list for it is around 15k and they really like newsletters and have been e-mailed recently. If we partner, I’m happy to provide advice to be used in the newsletter, but not write them myself.

I also have a professionally (well, by me but done excellently) formatted paperback book. I’m going to make one push to sell this to readers of this site (you), as well as to the list.

I think the book is good enough to get published and do very well. Tim Ferriss’ agent was interested at one point and we spoke on the phone, but nothing every came of it. If you are an agent or know one (and want a finder’s fee), maybe you could help in that way

www.makeherchaseyou.com

I’m VERY open to out of the box ideas and proposals. I respect all of my projects too much to sell them to lowball offers.

In my ideal world each one would be taken over by a reader who is really interested in that particular business and I could offer some guidance to add to the reader’s expertise and hard work.

I won’t allow my subscribers to the MHCY or SkinnySnob lists to be spammed. I’m all for newsletters that are valuable and also sell, but not for just hammering them with sales offers and burning through the list.

So… let me know what you propose. Don’t send me e-mails asking me what I’m looking for. Show me what you can offer. Ask questions about anything.

You can find my e-mail address here: http://www.betterthanyourboyfriend.com/talk-to-tynan/

If you like my writing and don’t have a love life you’re totally satisfied with, check out my full course on dating here.

Well, as you probably know, he won. We were the force that pushed him over the edge, and he was very thankful for our help.

This week is the finals, which determines who actually wins the prize. He and one other guy have been going back and forth between first and second place.

As I said last time, I hate asking people to do things like this, but Bobby is my dad’s best friend and he and his bus really do deserve to win. What can I say? I have a soft spot in my heart for converted schoolbuses.

Around a thousand people read this RSS and another 600-700 check the page every day, which is more people than have voted so far in total. Can I ask you one LAST time to vote for Bobby and help him win? I would love to see him just crush the other guy.

CLICK HERE TO VOTE.  Click “Bobby”

You don’t have to put in your e-mail, name, or anything annoying like that. Just one click and maybe a victory comment back here. Two seconds. The voting ends Wednesday at noon CST.

Thanks! Real post coming tomorrow!

If you like my writing and don’t have a love life you’re totally satisfied with, check out my full course on dating here.

Then I read the subheader.

“A little book that teaches you when to quit (and when to stick)”

It seemed like a fluffy bit of entertainment. Something like “The Tipping Point” which is fun to read but not exactly a life changer. I was wrong, though. Dead wrong.

It was only seventy three pages, so I read it aloud so that both of us could read it at the same time. Halfway through I knew that it would change my life. It is DEFINITELY worth reading in its tiny little entirety, but here are the big things I got out of it:

• There is no point in doing something which will define you that you can’t be the best at in the world at. This doesn’t apply to a non defining hobby like yoga, but it DOES apply to your career.
• “The world” can be shrunk down by choosing a niche. Best doctor in the world is nearly impossible, best thyroid surgeon in Texas isn’t so bad.
• It’s important to be the best in the world because they get paid WAY more than the second best. No one is looking for the second best of anything. EVERYONE is looking for the best of everything.
• To become the best of anything you will have to go through a dip. A dip, as shown on the cover, is the period of time where the work put in doesn’t yield the benefits you want. It’s the hard part. The part where people quit.
• The dip is a good thing. It’s the “moat” that filters people out and makes it so valuable to be the best. If there was no dip everyone would be good and you couldn’t stand out. It’s an opportunity.
• The dip is hard to cross, but not as hard as you think it is. You’re probably farther along than you think.
• You MUST quit everything and focus on one remarkable project in which you can a) be the best in the world and b) WANT to be the best in the world.

The book had a monumental impact on me. And it should—who is worse about doing a million and one projects than me? And seriously, how many of them have I pushed through the dip in?

Umm… none?

So Annie and devised a process to figure out what to quit and which one thing to stick with. It made a muddy and difficult decision crystal clear for both of us, and I hope it will for you too. Here’s the process:

Step One: Write down everything

Write down every possible career path or project you are considering. Add in hobbies that take up tons of time. Here is what I wrote down:

• BTYB Blog
• Life Nomadic
• Make Her Chase You
• Conversion Doubler
• Rapping
• Best In The Land
• Daily 15
• Poker

Annie had fewer career sort of things and way more hobbies that took up a lot of time like Ballet, Yoga, Cooking, Running, etc.

Step Two: Evaluate Each

Next write down whether you COULD be the best at each item and whether you’d WANT to be.

In some cases I found that I didn’t even really have a goal. Like Daily 15. How can I be the best at that? Even this site, Better Than Your Boyfriend, has no real goal.

Here’s my list after evaluating. The first Y/N is to indicate if I CAN be the best, the second is do I WANT to.

• BTYB Blog: Not in its current state / Don’t know
• Life Nomadic: Yes / Yes
• Make Her Chase You: Maybe / No
• Conversion Doubler: Yes / No
• Rapping: Yes / Yes
• Best In The Land Yes / Kind of
• Daily 15: ? / Not really
• Poker Yes but hard / Not really

Here is my thought process for each:

BTYB Blog: The main reason I write this blog is to have a way to catalog my adventures and thoughts. I guess I’m the best at writing about my life, but that’s not something that really has a dip. The best strategy is to use BTYB as a personal outlet and to use it so that my slowly growing readership of similarly thinking people can keep up to date with my projects.

Life Nomadic: Todd and I probably ARE the best modern day nomads out there, at least the ones documenting it. I think that this is a huge growing trend, and we’re the ones who are on the cutting edge of adventure, lifestyle, gear, and technology. That’s not to say that we’re perfect or that our way of sharing it with the world is particularly great, but that we definitely have the potential.

And I DO want to be the best at that. I love the lifestyle and it’s the lifestyle I’m going to have no matter which one I pick.

Make Her Chase You: I don’t want to be the best pickup artist in the world. I think I COULD become that with a ton of work, but I just don’t love it like some people do. Mystery, Tyler, and Style have set the bar very high and created a huge dip. I think my book is the best book written about it, but to really make money from that I would have to become much better at marketing, and I’m not interested in that.

Conversion Doubler: Conversion Doubler has some bugs that need to be resolved so that it can work on ANY host, but once installed it IS the best. The problem here again lies in marketing. I would need to become a much better marketer and I am just not interested in that dip.

Rapping: I could become one of the best rappers. I’ve been practicing nearly daily since 1999 and have gotten to be pretty good. I have TONS of areas I need to work on, but I know I could do it. I also think that now is a great time for it since most new rap is terrrible.

Best in The Land: I think that I’m one of the best people at knowing which products to buy. I’m really interested in it and am really good at figuring that kind of thing out. But I don’t really love writing reviews.

Daily 15: I seriously have too many projects. I started this because I thought it was a good idea, not because I had a grand long term plan for it. I got bored of it.

Poker: Getting to be the best at poker would be a monumental task. It may not even be possible. And I just don’t love it enough to push through that dip. Even being the best poker player wouldn’t be as exciting to me as some other things.

Step Three: Pick One and Only One

This is the important part. Choose one, quit the rest, and become 100% dedicated to it.

I’m not arrogant enough (anymore) to think that I can beat my competition without dedicating 100% to anything. As a kid I was always told how smart I was, which gave me the idea that I somehow didn’t have to work as hard as other people.

Not true. At all.

The fact of  the matter is that there WILL be people you’re competing against who are giving it 100%. Your 50% is never going to be as good as a serious competitor’s 100%.

And yes, saying no to good options sucks. It’s hard. So are a lot of things worth doing.

I decided to keep BTYB around as a hobby. Two posts a week, no strategy or effort to make it into something huge. I’ve been doing it for three years and I like the practice of it, having a record, and the readers and friends it’s brought.

Make Her Chase You is almost gone. I have just finished making it into an actual paperback book so I’ll do a one time announcement to sell copies of that and then just leave it on my site for readers to buy.

Conversion Doubler is done. I’ll probably stop selling it and let existing subscriptions keep running until they quit.

I’ll keep rapping for fun.

Best in the Land is dead in the water.

Daily 15 hasn’t been updated in a while. I had a system to queue posts up for a year but I guess it broke.

Poker is out.

And that leaves the big winner. Life Nomadic.

It never occurred to me that LN would be my choice. I had no real intention of making it my focus, but this process made it crystal clear that it was really my only choice.

Todd and I have some huge plans for it next year and will be working at full tilt to make it amazing. Stay tuned for that…

If you aren’t totally sure what to do with your life, do the process yourself! Post in the comments what you came up with.

You can buy the book at Amazon.

edit: added poker

If you like my writing and don’t have a love life you’re totally satisfied with, check out my full course on dating here.

There are, of course, tons of haters bashing all of us. In one clip we’re hanging out with Miss Toronto, and they call her a five and say they wouldn’t even talk to her. But that’s okay. I understand that being chronically single brings a certain level of frustration that can both lead to trying to learn pickup and also to venting on the internet.

There is also a lot of speculation about Project Hollywood, or more accurately, The Game. How much of it was real? How much of it was exaggerated? Since no one who actually lived there has come out and publicly talked about it, I’ll quickly run through the common speculations.

First, EVERY event in the book actually took place. Neil didn’t make anything up. A few of the things happened in different orders and were swapped around, but this is minor. As far as I can tell, these sorts of swaps were made to make the story flow better, not to change what happened. In other words, causes and effects weren’t swapped around.

Most of the characters were dead on. I thought Neil did a great job with everyone with the one exception of Tyler. And even with Tyler, I don’t think he actually ascribed any actions to him that he didn’t do.

Tyler and Neil were NEVER on great terms. Whatever caused it was there before I knew either of them, so I can’t say much about that. At the end of Project Hollywood, from what I understand, there was a lot of bad blood between them. I don’t think that Neil intentionally painted Tyler as an evil dude – I think that’s just how he felt at the time and it colored his perceptions. The motives and behind the scenes plotting that he assumed Tyler was engaged in just weren’t true.

On the other hand, Neil and I were on great terms when I left. As a result, my character is surprisingly positive. TONS was left out of the book. Believe me, if Neil wanted to make me into a bad guy he would have had more than enough ammo to do so. And that probably goes for just about anyone in the book. Interpretations of actions could have varied wildly.

The other thing about the book is that, by necessity, it’s a highlight reel. It covers the most tense parts of the year. There were tensions and drama, but there were also a lot of times that the whole house got together to go out to dinner or to the clubs or whatever. Most people got along reasonably well for most of the time.

There’s also the issue of the quality of girls that were brought around the house. Was it ALL bikini models? Nope, not at all. Certain people at certain times were more focused on quantity than quality, whether that was just to practice or because they just weren’t that picky. At the same time, there WERE a ton of incredibly attractive women there. I’d say that at one point or another every resident of the house was involved with a girl you’d objectively rate as a 9 or 10.

If anyone has any specific questions about the Game or Project Hollywood, ask in the comments and I’ll try to answer them all.

Do you ever have problems like this?

If you like my writing and don’t have a love life you’re totally satisfied with, check out my full course on dating here.

The guy who runs the site really has a knack for finding pictures of gorgeous Japanese girls, so of course I started scrolling down looking at the pictures. Then a headline of an article caught my attention.

Master the Japanese Writing System in Two Months

What!? It seemed impossible. The Japanese have three alphabets. I can bumble through and sound out the two phonetic ones, but the third is a beast—thousands of characters that must be individually memorized. It’s called Kanji.

It’s such a daunting task that I never really even considered doing it. I had some experience learning the writing system of Chinese in college and it was brutal. The Japanese borrowed their characters from Chinese, so it’s basically the same thing.

But… this article convinced me. Sure enough it wasn’t hype—he actually had found a system to learn it in two months. There is a list of 2000 characters that the government has designated as essential Kanji. If you can read those then you can read a magazine, newspaper, or any sign. It takes schoolchildren many years to learn all of them.

Do 35 kanji in a day and you’re done in just about two months. How hard could it be? I did three months of Japanese tapes before going to Japan. Two months of this would be easy.

Day one was a breeze. It was really working! Soon I had been going for over a week and had almost 300 characters under my belt. I found a program for my phone to practice with when waiting in lines or at restaurants and I was consistently drawing the correct Kanji 95% of the time in just over ten seconds on average.

Killing it.

Normally I’d do the Kanji as soon as I woke up or at least before dinner (I’m a night owl, so this is a 5-6 hour span of time), but yesterday I had another project I was excited to work on.

I took a break in my work to fit in Kanji practice. I went through the day’s three dozen words and had a ton of difficulty remembering them. I quizzed myself and did terribly. The lesson seemed so much harder than previous ones. I pushed on through it and eventually got them down.

At midnight today I finally got around to doing the Kanji. I would have done it earlier but I knew that I’d be reviewing the Kanji from yesterday and was dreading it. Again I had a tough time remembering the Kanji and was getting most of yesterday’s wrong as well.

What happened? Two days earlier I was an A+ student and today I was a D.

I put away the Kanji for a minute and thought about it. Why was I learning this stuff? What’s the benefit? This is a technique a hypnotist friend taught me that always stayed with me. If you’re doing something you don’t want to do, like cleaning, think about the end result and not the process.

Then it hit me.

I am VOLUNTARILY learning this. I chose to do it on my own because I wanted to. How can anything voluntary be drudgery? Once I put in two months of work I will be able to read ANY common Japanese or Chinese character (there are some differences with Chinese, but many more overlaps). That’s an awesome skill that will be very useful in my travels.

In fact, visiting Japan, one of my very favorite places in the world, will be an even better and richer experience! This is an exciting challenge, not some chore to dread.

And just realizing that changed everything. With a new positive attitude I began to easily remember the new words and started doing much better on my review. And best of all, it’s fun again. Instead of thinking about how difficult it is I think about how I’m going to totally dedicate myself to this and learn them all really well.

P.S. Thanks for the inspiration Emergency!

If you like my writing and don’t have a love life you’re totally satisfied with, check out my full course on dating here.

Self improvement has a stigma to it. It’s embarrassing to be into it. So embarrassing, in fact, that some of its modern day figureheads have tried to rename it. Personal Development. Lifestyle Design. Self Actualization. Fluffy euphemisms, some of which admittedly do sound pretty cool.

But I’ll come out and say it. I love self improvement. I don’t need to call it anything else – I like it for what it is.

Life is unpredictable. New people come in without warning, best friends move to Tempe, Arizona. The unexpected happens constantly. New opportunities you’ve never even fathomed fall on your lap, and accidents happen that change everything.

I don’t know about you, but when I try to predict what my life will look like in any significant distance in the future, I’m almost always dead wrong. Sometimes comically so.

I’ve only been alive for twenty seven years. I can’t even imagine trying to predict what things will be like by the time I’m 80.

But the one constant in life that I can count on, as long as I’m alive, is myself. I’ll always be here. Anything I put in to bettering myself will improve my life forever.

If I learn something important now, it will be there to guide me for the rest of my life. Habits I start now are more than likely to follow me to the grave. Exercising and eating right will prolong my life and keep my body functioning properly for a long time to come. I’ll be able to talk to and have relationships with more people if I speak more languages. The more I know and discover the more I can help other people live life like they want to.

Self improvement has the practical potential to make every second of life better.

In other words, self improvement is the ultimate investment. If other activities are the equivalent of spending money, self improvement is the process of investing it.

There’s nothing wrong with spending, but something should be invested as well. And, like interest, the effect is compounded. A little bit every day becomes a ton in a year or two.

Self improvement isn’t a wholly selfish pursuit either. When you work on yourself and improve yourself, you become more pleasant and satisfying to be around. I’m no Ghandi, but I know that I’ve been able to positively impact a lot of peoples’ lives in ways I would have been incapable of before.

For me, Self Improvement is the ultimate hobby. It should never totally consume one’s life, but I think we all have dead time we could fill with learning or bad habits we could replace with better ones.

Reject the idea that self improvement is for losers or that it’s all new age wishful thinking. Yes there are losers who are into it (don’t they need it the most, and aren’t they at least DOING something about it?). Yes there are paths in it that aren’t particularly effective, but that’s true of anything.

I love self improvement and will never stop being a part of it. If I can do anything for the field I hope that I can show people that it is a cool thing to do and share ideas and techniques that have really made a difference in my life.

If you like my writing and don’t have a love life you’re totally satisfied with, check out my full course on dating here.