Timothy Ferriss's Blog, page 111

How To Gain 20 Pounds In 28 Days: The Extreme Muscle Building Secrets of UFC Fighters

The following is Part 2 of a two-part guest post from Nate Green, who works with John Berardi, PhD, Georges St-Pierre’s nutritional coach.

Part 1 detailed how top UFC fighters rapidly lose weight before weigh-ins for competitive advantage.

Now, in Part 2, Nate shares how he gained 20 pounds in 28 days, using techniques an elite fighter such as Georges St-Pierre (GSP) might utilize to move up a weight class. This is a very, very comprehensive post.

If you’ve ever wondered how to quickly gain muscle — or how a GSP versus Anderson Silva super-fight could happen — you’ll want to print this out and refer to it often.

Let’s jump into the detail…

Georges St. Pierre vs. Anderson Silva: The Superfight

For the past couple of years, there have been rumors of a super-fight between current UFC Welterweight champion Georges St Pierre and current Middleweight champion Anderson Silva.

If the fight becomes a reality, it will easily be the biggest fight in UFC history.

Fans want it. Sponsors want it. UFC president Dana White wants it. The only people who seem like they don’t want it?

St Pierre and Silva.

And it’s easy to see why when you look at the stats:

St Pierre, who’s 5’10″, fights in the 170-pound division. Silva, who’s 6’2″, fights in the 185-pound division.

After reading Part 1, you know how elite fighters use weight manipulation to strategically lower their body weight before official pre-fight weigh-ins. You also know that they quickly rehydrate to get back up to their real weight.

In GSP’s case, that would be about 190 pounds. In Silva’s? 230 pounds.

So for the super-fight to go through, and for it to be a reasonably fair fight, one of two things would need to happen: either St Pierre would have to gain 20-30 pounds to move up a weight class, or Silva would have to lose 20-30 pounds to move down a weight class.

Both are very difficult.

In fact, it’s enough of a weight disparity to make even the most enthusiastic MMA fans chalk up the super-fight to a pipe dream, something that will likely never happen.

But here’s the thing: That kind of extreme weight manipulation isn’t impossible. Far from it.

In fact, it’s entirely possible to gain 20 pounds of quality mass in as little as 28 days.

That’s what Nate did recently with some help from GSP’s nutrition coach, Dr. John Berardi and Martin Rooney, a strength coach who regularly trains UFC athletes.

And in this post, we explore how a guy like GSP could gain 20-30 pounds in a short period of time, increase his power, boost his strength, and maintain his athleticism and (mostly) endurance.

And maybe — just maybe — these techniques will make this super-fight a reality.

Take it away, Nate…

Enter Nate

I recently decided to try and gain 20 pounds of quality mass in 28 days.

Why?

For starters, a lot of people in the fitness world don’t think this is possible without taking steroids. Fortunately, this isn’t true. With the right program and world-class advice, it’s attainable. I wanted to prove this beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Dr. John Berardi wanted a guinea pig to show exactly how someone like GSP could–if he wanted to–gain enough muscle to move up an entire weight class and take on a fighter like Anderson Silva.

I started the official experiment at 169 pounds and 28 days later, weighed in at 190.

This post detailed exactly how we did it.

Here’s a breakdown of the strategies I used to put on 20 pounds in 28 days.

6 Strategies for Rapid Muscle Gain

[Note from Tim: Nate shares the exact meal plan and workout program after outlining the six strategies/principles. Again, after reading once, this is probably a post you'll want to print out for reference.]

STRATEGY #1: CYCLE THE AMOUNT OF FOOD YOU EAT.

We kept things simple here. My nutrition plan was split into two different kinds of days: High-Calorie or Low-Calorie.

On my weight-training days, I ate more food. This ensured I was getting a huge influx of nutrients on the days where my muscles could put them to use. On the days I did interval workouts or took off from the gym, I ate a little less food. This helped me to add weight without adding lots of body fat.

It’s important to note that even my “low calorie” days still involved eating more food than I was previously used to. So, no matter the day, I was always in a positive energy balance. Except for Sundays. Which brings me to the second strategy.

STRATEGY #2: USE INTERMITTENT FASTING.

Every Sunday I did a 24-hour fast to offset the inevitable fat gain that would normally come with an eating plan like this. The goal was for me to be in a caloric surplus – an anabolic state – six days per week, eating more calories than I burn which would lead to muscle growth.

And then I’d be in an extreme caloric deficit one day per week, which would help reset my insulin sensitivity, boost growth hormone secretion, and help stimulate fat loss while preserving my lean mass.

STRATEGY #3: GIVE YOURSELF ROOM TO GROW.

Making a big change is all about small incremental improvements. You try something for a little while, see how it works, and if you need to, make a small change and repeat the steps.

For this experiment Berardi started me off with a lot of food, enough to where I’d be in a caloric surplus and gain muscle. But he didn’t overload me as much as he could have. Not at first, at least. He wanted to leave a little wiggle room to make changes if needed.

In both Weeks 3 and 4 we strategically added more calories to help push me past a plateau when my weight stalled at 178 pounds. (You’ll see how we did that below.)

STRATEGY #4: EAT MORE FOOD. MUCH MORE.

My weight-gain nutrition plan called for way more food than I was used to eating. So instead of focusing on counting calories — which would have been a nightmare — we turned our attention instead to making sure I was in a positive energy balance.

When you eat more calories than you burn, you gain weight. Dr. Berardi knew all I’d have to do to gain weight was eat more food than I was eating before we started the experiment. And that was easy to do, since I was eating enough to only maintain a 170-pound body.

So how much food does it actually take to gain 20 pounds? I went through and added everything I ate in 28 days. Here it is:

65 pounds of meat
54 bananas
84 scoops of protein powder
72 pieces of bread
36 sweet potatoes
7 jars of almond butter
5 jars of fruit jam
8 jars of sauerkraut
144 cups of vegetables
36 pieces of fruit
72 squares of dark chocolate
8 bags of frozen blueberries and raspberries
7 cans of coconut milk
4 cartons of heavy whipping cream

STRATEGY #5: TRAIN YOUR ASS OFF.

Most guys think the training program is the most important part of gaining muscle. Well, most guys are wrong. If I didn’t eat enough food I could have trained as hard or as long as I wanted and not much would have happened.

Of course, the workout program is important. So Martin Rooney hooked me up with a variation of his Training For Warriors routine that he uses for high-level UFC athletes like brothers Jim and Dan Miller.

Here’s what it looked like:

Monday: Upper Body Strength

This workout focused on compound exercises and used heavy weights to build strength and target fast-twitch muscle-fibers, the ones most primed for growth.

Tuesday: Hurricane Day – Sprints

An intense total-body workout that promoted rapid fat burning and power development. Martin calls them “hurricanes” because the workouts are like a brief, powerful storm that create disruption in the muscular, cardiovascular, and neurological systems.

They’re also some of the hardest workouts I’ve ever done in my life. (I nearly passed out after my first Hurricane session; I took a 5-minute nap next to the treadmill.)

Wednesday: Off – Recovery

A much-needed rest for my muscles and mind.

Thursday: Hurricane Day – Energy Circuit

A brief, intense workout comprised of five unconventional exercises (like sledgehammer slams, medicine ball work, and rope climbs) all done in circuit fashion.

Friday: Upper Body Hypertrophy

A second upper-body day that used less complex exercises and higher reps to promote more muscle growth.

Saturday: Lower Body Strength

Just like the Upper Body Strength day, this workout focused on compound exercises and used heavy weights to build strength and target fast-twitch muscle-fibers.

Sunday: Off – Recovery

Another rest day.

So when you put it the weight-gain nutrition plan and workout program together, this is what you get:

Monday: High Calorie / Upper Body Strength

Tuesday: Low Calorie / Hurricane Sprints

Wednesday: Low Calorie / Off

Thursday: Low Calorie / Hurricane Energy Circuit

Friday: High Calorie / Upper Body Hypertrophy

Saturday: High Calorie / Lower Body Strength

Sunday: Fast / Off

STRATEGY #6: USE STRATEGIC SUPPLEMENTS.

We like to say “Supplements are supplements.” In other words, they’re ingredients you add to a smart eating and training program. They don’t replace them.

Despite what the supplement ads say, no guy has ever built a good body by taking a weird powder with a stupid name and doing nothing else.

For this experiment, however, Dr. Berardi decided I should use a few supplements strategically to maximize the amount of muscle I could build on such a short time-frame. With only 28 days to gain 20 pounds, I had to look at every opportunity to take in more calories.

The following surely didn’t “make the difference”. But they did help.

Multivitamin: Helps fix small decencies of vitamins and minerals and enhance energy metabolism. I used Optimen Multivitamin.

Protein powder: Makes eating large quantities of protein easier. I used Optimum Gold Standard Casein (for my Breakfast Pudding) and Jay Robb Egg-White Protein (for my Super Shakes).

Vitamin D: Even though natural sunlight allows our body to create Vitamin D, many of us are still deficient, which can lead to loss of muscle strength and mass and low levels of immunity. I used Vitamin D3 by NOW.

Creatine monohydrate: Helps regenerate muscle energy stores and can improve strength, boost performance, and increase muscle mass. I used Biotest creatine monohydrate.

Liquid fish oil: A key source of omega-3 fatty acids that helps improve mood and motivation while boosting fat-burning and dampening inflammation. I used Carlson’s Very Finest Liquid Fish Oil.

BCAA capsules: Helps reduce the chance of muscle tissue breakdown while stimulating protein synthesis, leading to better recovery and preservation of lean muscle mass. I used Optimum BCAA capsules primarily on my fasting days.

Greens powder: Veggies, fruits, algaes and/or grasses that have been compacted and distilled into powdered form and contain vitamins, minerals, fiber, and phytonutrients. All good things for a growing man. I used Biotest Superfood.

Peri-workout drink: Supplies essential amino acids to help re-build muscle and acts as a performance-enhancing stimulant. I used Purple Wraath by Controlled Labs.

Post-workout drink: A mixture of high-quality protein and fast-acting carbohydrates that helps your body recover and rebuild quickly. I used Universal Torrent.

The Weight Gain Menu – Weeks 1 and 2

Now that we know the strategies, let’s get to the actual menu.

HIGH CALORIE DAY (MONDAY, FRIDAY, SATURDAY)

Breakfast

Breakfast pudding

The following was all put into a blender and blended into a pudding.

2 frozen bananas, blended until creamy

1/4 cup of almond milk

3 scoops casein protein powder

2 squares high cacao chocolate

Side dish

4 pieces whole grain bread

2 Tbsp peanut or almond butter

2 Tbsp jam

multivitamin

3,000 IU vitamin D

1 tsp creatine in coffee or green tea

Immediately Pre-Workout

500ml water

10 grams BCAA’s

Sip During Workout

1L water with

1 scoop of workout drink

Immediately Post-Workout

1L water with

3 scoops post-workout drink

Post-Workout Meal

1.5lb any type of lean meat

3 cups of favorite veggies

½ cup sauerkraut*

2 large sweet or white potatoes

1 Tbsp Udo’s 3.6.9 oil

Anytime Meal

1lb any type of lean meat

3 cups of favorite veggies

½ cup sauerkraut*

2 servings of your favorite fruit

1 Tbsp fish oil

*Your body has a mixture of good and bad bacteria in it. Fermented foods like sauerkraut are rich in enzymes and help increase the amount of good bacteria in your intestines. You’ll notice my diet contained a cup of sauerkraut per day. That’s not in there by chance.

LOW CALORIE DAY (TUESDAY, WEDNESDAY, THURSDAY)

Breakfast

Breakfast pudding

2 frozen bananas, blended until creamy

1/4 cup of almond milk

3 scoops casein protein powder

2 squares high cacao chocolate

Side dish

2 pieces whole grain bread

1 Tbsp peanut or almond butter

1 Tbsp jam

multivitamin

3,000 IU vitamin D

1 tsp creatine in coffee or green tea

Lunch

1.5lb any type of fattier meat

3 cups of favorite veggies

1/4 cup mixed raw nuts

½ cup sauerkraut

1 large sweet or white potato

1 Tbsp Udo’s 3.6.9 oil

Dinner

1lb any type of fattier meat

3 cups of favorite veggies

½ cup sauerkraut

1 servings of your favorite fruit

1 Tbsp fish oil

FASTING DAY (SUNDAY)

I fasted every Sunday with the goal to reboot my insulin sensitivity and carb tolerance before another 6 days of big eating. The rules were simple:

Rule 1: Stop eating by 10pm on Saturday.

Rule 2: On Sunday, have 3 “meals” consisting of the following:

1L water with 1/2 serving greens powder
15g BCAA’s
1 cup of green tea

Why have these fake meals? According to Dr. Berardi, we release a hormone called ghrelin about 30 minutes before our normal meal times, which stimulates hunger pangs and gets us ready for the upcoming meal.

So it was psychologically comforting to have some kind of eating routine. The BCAAs and greens powder made it feel like I was still “eating”, which helped curb those hunger signals. (Plus the BCAAs helped preserve my lean muscle mass.)

Also, the caffeine in green tea (or coffee) helped to liberate stored fats. This helped my body eat the “food” that was stored in my love handles instead of requiring me to actually have a meal.

Rule 3: Break the fast at 10pm Sunday night by eating 1 pound of any protein with 3-4 cups of veggies.

The  Weight Gain Menu – Weeks 3 and 4

My menu on Weeks 3 and 4 followed the same base menu as above but we strategically added calories. In Week 3, we introduced a Super-Shake (basically a fancy protein shake) because by this time I was tired of chewing. Drinking a shake was much easier.

Here’s what we added:

WEEK 3 ADDITIONS

High-Calorie Day Super Shake (Monday, Friday, Saturday)

8 oz unsweetened almond milk
2 Tbsp heavy cream/whipping cream
1 scoop protein powder
Handful frozen raspberries
Handful frozen blueberries

Low-Calorie Day Super Shake (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday)

8 oz unsweetened almond milk
2 oz coconut milk
1 scoop protein powder
2 Tbsp cacoa nibs or 99% chocolate
1 Tbsp favorite nut butter

WEEK 4 ADDITIONS

We continued to add more food to my existing meals in Week 4.

Additions to High-Calorie days

1 banana to my breakfast pudding (for a total of 3 bananas)
1 chocolate square to my breakfast pudding (for a total of 3 chocolate squares)
1 scoop Purple Wraath to my workout drink (for a total of 2 scoops)
1 scoop Universal Torrent to my post-workout drink (for a total of 4 scoops)
2 Tbsp nut butter to my breakfast toast side-dish (for a total of 4 Tbsp)
1 Tbsp of jam to my breakfast toast side-dish (for a total of 2 Tbsp)
2 Tbsp heavy cream to my Super Shake (for a total of 4 Tbsp)
1 scoop protein to my Super Shake (for a total of 2 scoops)

Additions to Low-Calorie days

1 banana to my breakfast pudding (for a total of 3 bananas)
1 chocolate square to my breakfast pudding (for a total of 3 chocolate squares)
1 Tbsp nut butter to my breakfast toast side-dish (for a total of 2 Tbsp)
2 oz coconut milk to my Supe Shake (for a total of 4 oz)
1 scoop protein to my Super Shake (for a total of 2 scoops)
1 Tbsp chocolate to my Super Shake (for a total of 3 Tbsp)
1 Tbsp nut butter to my Super Shake (for a total of 2 Tbsp)

These were seemingly small changes that made a big impact on how much weight I gained this week.

Workout Program – Week 1

MONDAY – UPPER BODY STRENGTH

Warm-up

3 sets jumping jacks x 10

3 sets pogo jumps x 50

3 sets of wide outs x 10

2 sets of 20 yard skips

2 sets of 20 yard side shuffle

2 sets of 20 yard carioca

2 sets of 20 yards backward run

1 set of fire hydrants x 8

1 set of forward hip circles x 8

1 set of backward hip circles x 8

1 set of side leg raise x 8

2 sets of band shoulder external rotation x 10

2 sets of band shoulder row x 10

2 sets of band shoulder extension x 10

Weights

Bench Press

Warm-up sets of 5 reps up to the weight of your 5RM (5 Rep Max)

Perform 5 sets of 5RM.

Weighted Chin-up

Warm-up set of 8 reps.

Second set with 25 pounds of 6.

Perform 4 sets of 6 reps with 6RM.

Weighted Dips

Warm-up set of 10 reps.

Second set with 30 pounds for 8.

Perform 4 sets of 8 reps with 8 RM.

Overhead Press

Perform 4 sets of 10 with 10RM.

Barbell Curls 

Perform 4 sets of 10 with 10RM.

Abs of your choice

(I did 3 sets of 8 reps of weighted crunches.)

TUESDAY – HURRICANE SPRINTS 

Warm-up

3 sets jumping jacks x 10

3 sets pogo jumps x 50

3 sets of wide outs x 10

2 sets of 20 yard skips

2 sets of 20 yard side shuffle

2 sets of 20 yard carioca

2 sets of 20 yards backward run

1 set of fire hydrants x 8

1 set of forward hip circles x 8

1 set of backward hip circles x 8

1 set of side leg raise x 8

5 sets of quick steps for 5 yards

5 sets of high knees for 5 yards

Hurricane Category 2

Round 1

Sprint on treadmill at 10 mph and 10% grade incline for 25 seconds.

Jump off treadmill and perform the following:

1 x 20 regular crunch

1 x 20 table-top crunch

Repeat from beginning for a total of 3 rounds.

Rest 2 minutes before moving on to Round 2.

Round 2

Sprint on treadmill at 11 mph and 10% grade incline for 20 seconds.

Jump off treadmill and perform the following:

1 x 20 knee-grab crunch

Repeat from beginning for a total of 3 rounds.

Rest 2 minutes before moving on to Round 3.

Round 3

Sprint on treadmill at 12 mph and 10% grade incline for 20 seconds.

Jump off treadmill and perform the following:

1 x 20 bicycle crunch

Repeat from beginning for a total of 3 rounds.

WEDNESDAY – OFF

THURSDAY – HURRICANE ENERGY CIRCUIT 

Warm-up

3 sets jumping jacks x 10

3 sets pogo jumps x 50

3 sets of wide outs x 10

2 sets of 20 yard skips

2 sets of 20 yard side shuffle

2 sets of 20 yard carioca

2 sets of 20 yards backward run

1 set of fire hydrants x 8

1 set of forward hip circles x 8

1 set of backward hip circles x 8

1 set of side leg raise x 8

5 sets of quick steps for 5 yards

5 sets of high knees for 5 yards 

Training For Warriors Circuit 

Complete each station of the circuit for 1 minute for 5 total minutes. Rest for 3 minutes and repeat.  Rest for 3 minutes and perform the last round for 30 seconds each station.

1. Rope

Begin standing holding one end of the rope in each hand. Start by performing 10 double arm swings by bringing the arms up and down as violently as possible. Then perform 10 alternating swings by bringing each arm up and down one at a time. Then perform 10 rotations by bringing each arm up and out to the sides and back down. Once all 30 reps are completed as fast as possible, start back at the beginning for the allotted time.

2. Kettlebell Swing

Begin standing with the kettlebell in both hands. Swing the bell between the legs. Extend at the knees and hips and swing the bell forward to shoulder height.  Repeat for 10 reps.  Then perform 10 more reps using each arm (single-handed swings). Once the 30 reps are completed, start back at the beginning with two hands for the allotted time.

3. Medicine Ball Slams

Begin holding the medicine ball in both hands overhead. Fire the ball into the ground as hard as possible. Recover the ball and repeat for as many reps as possible in the allotted time.

4. Sledge Hammer Swings

Begin facing the tire with both feet forward holding the hammer. Bring the hammer back and over one side of the body and hit the tire as hard as possible. Return the hammer over the other side of the body and repeat for as many reps as possible in the allotted time.

5. Ladder

Begin standing inside of the ladder with both feet.  Jump and land with your feet outside of and forward one box. Jump your feet back into the box and repeat for the length of the ladder and back.  Once completed, begin running with high knees using one foot in each box, down and back the length of the ladder. Once this second set is finished, perform side steps through the ladder using two feet in each box down and back up the ladder.  Once the third set is completed, start at the beginning and complete as many reps in the allotted time possible.

FRIDAY – UPPER BODY HYPERTROPHY

Warm-up

3 sets jumping jacks x 10

3 sets pogo jumps x 50

3 sets of wide outs x 10

2 sets of 20 yard skips

2 sets of 20 yard side shuffle

2 sets of 20 yard carioca

2 sets of 20 yards backward run

1 set of fire hydrants x 8

1 set of forward hip circles x 8

1 set of backward hip circles x 8

1 set of side leg raise x 8

2 sets of band shoulder external rotation x 10

2 sets of band shoulder row x 10

2 sets of band shoulder extension x 10

Weights 

Close Grip Bench

Do 3 warmup sets of 5 reps.

Perform 4 sets of 8 with your 8 RM.

Cable High Pull

Do 4 sets of 10 reps after a warmup set.

Band Triceps Pushdown

Do 4 sets of 15 reps.

Cable Rows

Do 4 sets of 8 reps with 8RM.

Dumbbell Curls

Do 3 sets of 8 each arm.

Abs of your choice.

(I did 3 sets of 5 reps on each side of half-kneeling chops.)

SATURDAY – LOWER BODY STRENGTH

Warm-up

3 sets jumping jacks x 10

3 sets pogo jumps x 50

3 sets of wide outs x 10

2 sets of 20 yard skips

2 sets of 20 yard side shuffle

2 sets of 20 yard carioca

2 sets of 20 yards backward run

1 set of fire hydrants x 8

1 set of forward hip circles x 8

1 set of backward hip circles x 8

1 set of side leg raise x 8

Weights

45-degree back raise

Perform 1 set of 10 with bodyweight.

Perform 1 set of 8 with 25 pounds.

Perform 1 set of 8 with 45 pounds.

Perform 1 set of 8 with 70 pounds.

Barbell Squat

Do 3-4 warmup sets.

Perform 5 sets of 8 reps with 8RM.

Deadlift

Do 3-4 warmup sets.

Perform 5 sets of 8 reps with 8RM.

SUNDAY – OFF

WORKOUT PROGRAM – WEEK 2

MONDAY – UPPER BODY STRENGTH

Warm-up

Same as Week 1.

Weights

Bench Press

Warmup sets of 6 reps up to the weight of your 6RM.

Perform 5 sets of 6RM.

(The goal is to use heavier weight in last few sets than Week 1 at 5 reps.)

Weighted Chin-up

Warmup set of 8 reps.

Do second set with 25 pounds for 8 reps.

Perform 4 sets of 8 reps with 8RM.

(The goal is to use heavier weight in last few sets than Week 1 at 6 reps.)

Weighted Dips

Warmup set of 10 reps.

Do second set with 30 pounds for 10.

Perform 4 sets of 10 reps with 10RM.

(The goal is to use heavier weight in last few sets than Week 1 at 8 reps.)

Overhead Press

Perform 5 sets of 6 with 6RM.

Barbell Curls

Perform 5 sets of 8 with 8RM

Abs of your choice

(I did 3 sets of 10 weighted crunches.)

TUESDAY – HURRICANE SPRINTS 

Warm-up

Same as Week 1.

Round 1   

Sprint on treadmill at 9.5 mph x 10% grade for 25 seconds.

Jump off treadmill, grab a 65-pound barbell and do the following:

Push Jerks x 10

Close Grip Snatch x 8

Repeat from beginning for a total of 3 sets.

Rest 2 minutes before performing Round 2.

Round 2   

Sprint on treadmill at 10.5 mph x 10% grade for 25 seconds.

Jump off treadmill, grab a 65-pound barbell and do the following:

Wide Grip Bent Over Row x 10

High Pull x 10  

Repeat from beginning for a total of 3 sets.

Rest 2 minutes before performing Round 3.

Round 3  

Sprint on treadmill at 11.5 mph x 10% grade for 25 seconds.

Jump off treadmill, grab a 65-pound barbell and do the following:

Biceps Curl x 10

Cleans x 10

Repeat from beginning for a total of 3 sets.

Curl into a ball and try not to throw up.

WEDNESDAY – OFF

THURSDAY – HURRICANE ENERGY CIRCUIT 

Warm-up

Same as Week 1.

Training For Warriors Circuit 

Complete each station of the circuit for 1 minute for 5 total minutes. Rest for 3 minutes and repeat. Rest for 3 minutes and perform the last round for 30 seconds each station.

1. Farmer’s Walk   

Begin standing holding a heavy dumbbells in each hand with the elbows extended. Walk for 20 yards down and back as many times as possible in the time allotted.

2. Sandbag Drag   

Begin facing the sandbag while gripping the bag with both hands.  Drag the bag backward for 20 yards, using a toe-heel foot contact. Repeat for the distance as many times as possible in the time allotted.

3. Hand-Over-Hand Rope Pull 

Begin standing with the single rope in each hand. Pull the rope to the hip with the far hand and then grab further down the rope with the opposite hand. Repeat for as many times as possible in the allotted time.

4. Prowler Push or Sled Push

Begin using the high grip on the Prowler. Taking as big of steps as possible, push it 20 yards. Run around to the other side and push it back using the low grip. Repeat for as much distance as possible in the allotted time.

5. Tire Flip 

Begin facing the tire. Bend down and grab both hands under the bottom rim. Using the legs, lift the tire onto one side while keeping the elbows extended.  Turn the hands over and push the tire down as hard as possible. Run to the opposite side of the tire and flip it back to the other side. Repeat for as many reps as possible in the allotted time.

FRIDAY – UPPER BODY HYPERTROPHY

Warm-Up

Same as Week 1.

Weights

Close Grip Bench

Do 3 warmup sets of 5 reps.

Perform 4 sets of 10 with your 10RM.

Cable High Pull

Do 4 sets of 8 reps after a warmup set.

Band Triceps Pushdown

Do 4 sets of 20 reps.

Cable Rows

Do 4 sets of 8 reps with 8RM.

Dumbbell Curls

Do 3 sets of 8 each arm.

Abs of your choice.

(I did 3 sets of 6 reps on each side of half-kneeling chops.)

SATURDAY – LOWER BODY STRENGTH

Warm-up

Same as Week 1.

Weights

45-degree back raise

Perform 1 set of 10 with bodyweight.

Perform 1 set of 8 with 25 pounds.

Perform 1 set of 8 with 45 pounds.

Perform 1 set of 8 with 90 pounds.

Barbell Squat

Do 3-4 warmup sets.

Perform 5 sets of 8 reps with 8RM.

Deadlift

Do 3-4 warmup sets.

Perform 5 sets of 8 reps with 8RM.

SUNDAY – OFF

WORKOUT PROGRAM – WEEK 3

MONDAY – UPPER BODY STRENGTH

Warm-up

Same as Weeks 1 and 2.

Weights

Band Bench Press

Warmup sets of 5 reps up to the weight of your 5RM.

Perform 5 sets of 5RM.

(I used mini-bands. Here’s a video of how they work.)

Alternating Grip Weighted Chin-up

(One hand using a overhand grip, and the other hand using an underhand grip.)

Warmup set of 8 reps. (4 reps with each grip.)

Do second set with 25 pounds for 8 reps. (4 reps with each grip.)

Perform 4 sets of 8 reps with 8RM. (4 reps with each grip.)

Weighted Dips

Warmup set of 6 reps.

Do second set with 40 pounds for 6 reps.

Perform 5 sets of 6 reps with 6RM.

Overhead Press

Perform 5 sets of 5 with 5RM.

Barbell Curls

Perform 4 sets of 8 with 8RM

Abs of your choice

(I did 3 sets of 10 of reverse crunches.)

TUESDAY – HURRICANE SPRINTS 

Warm-up

Same as Weeks 1 and 2.

Round 1   

Sprint on treadmill at 9.5 mph x 10% grade for 25 seconds.

Jump off treadmill, grab a 65-pound barbell and do the following:

High Pull x 10

Bent-over Row x 8

Repeat from beginning for a total of 3 sets.

Rest 2 minutes before performing Round 2.

Round 2   

Sprint on treadmill at 10.5 mph x 10% grade for 25 seconds.

Jump off treadmill, grab a 65-pound barbell and do the following:

Close-Grip Snatch x 10

Repeat from beginning for a total of 3 sets.

Rest 2 minutes before performing Round 3.

Round 3  

Sprint on treadmill at 11.5 mph x 10% grade for 25 seconds.

Jump off treadmill, grab a 65-pound barbell and do the following:

Cleans x 10

Repeat from beginning for a total of 3 sets.

WEDNESDAY – OFF

THURSDAY – HURRICANE ENERGY CIRCUIT 

Warm-up

Same as Weeks 1 and 2.

Training For Warriors Circuit 

Same exercises as Week 1 but with different time parameters  Complete each station of the circuit for 30 seconds for 2.5 total minutes. Rest for 1 minute and repeat. Do 4 total sets.

FRIDAY – UPPER BODY HYPERTROPHY

Warm-Up

Same as Weeks 1 and 2.

Weights

Incline Barbell Bench Press

Do 3 warmup sets of 5 reps.

Perform 4 sets of 10 with your 10RM.

One-Arm Dumbbell Row

Do 4 sets of 8 reps after a warmup set.

Cable Triceps Pushdown

Do 4 sets of 12 reps.

Bent-Over Reverse Fly with Dumbbells

Do 4 sets of 8 reps with 8RM.

Dumbbell Curls

Do 3 sets of 8 reps.

Abs of your choice.

(I did 3 sets of 8 reps on each side of half-kneeling chops.)

SATURDAY – LOWER BODY STRENGTH

Warm-up

Same as Weeks 1 and 2.

Weights

45-degree back raise

Perform 1 set of 10 with bodyweight.

Perform 2 sets of 8 with 45 pounds.

Perform 2 sets of 8 with 90 pounds.

Barbell Squat

Do 3-4 warmup sets.

Perform 5 sets x 6 of 6RM.

Deadlift

Do 3-4 warmup sets.

Perform 5 sets x 6 of 6RM.

SUNDAY – OFF

WORKOUT PROGRAM – WEEK 4

MONDAY – UPPER BODY STRENGTH

Warm-up

Same as Weeks 1, 2, and 3.

Weights

Band Bench Press

Warmup sets of 8 reps up to the weight of your 8RM.

Perform 5 sets of 8RM.

Weighted Pull-Up

Warmup set of 8 reps.

Do second set with 25 pounds for 8 reps.

Perform 3 sets of 6 reps with 40 pounds added.

Weighted Dips

Warmup set of 6 reps with 25 pounds added.

Do second set with 40 pounds for 6 reps.

Perform 5 sets of 6 reps with 80 pounds added.

Overhead Press

Perform 4 sets of 8 with 8RM.

Barbell Curls

Perform 4 sets of 10 with 10RM

Abs of your choice

(I did 3 sets of 12 of reverse crunches.)

TUESDAY – HURRICANE SPRINTS 

Warm-up

Same as Weeks 1, 2, and 3.

Round 1   

Sprint on treadmill at 10 mph x 10% grade for 30 seconds.

Jump off treadmill, and do the following with light weight:

Cable Row x 10

Cable Triceps Pressdown x 8

Repeat from beginning for a total of 3 sets.

Rest 2 minutes before performing Round 2.

Round 2   

Sprint on treadmill at 10.5 mph x 10% grade for 30 seconds.

Jump off treadmill, and do the following with light weight:

Cable High-Pull to Chin x 10

Repeat from beginning for a total of 3 sets.

Rest 2 minutes before performing Round 3.

Round 3  

Sprint on treadmill at 11.5 mph x 10% grade for 30 seconds.

Jump off treadmill, and do the following with light weight:

Cable Lat Pull-Down x 10

Repeat from beginning for a total of 3 sets.

WEDNESDAY – OFF

THURSDAY – HURRICANE ENERGY CIRCUIT 

Warm-up

Same as Weeks 1, 2, and 3.

Training For Warriors Circuit 

Same exercises as Week 2 but with different time parameters  Complete each station of the circuit for 30 seconds for 2.5 total minutes. Rest for 1 minute and repeat. Do 4 total sets.

FRIDAY – UPPER BODY HYPERTROPHY

Warm-Up

Same as Weeks 1, 2, and 3.

Weights

Incline Barbell Bench Press

Do 3 warmup sets of 5 reps.

Perform 4 sets of 6 with 6RM.

One-Arm Dumbbell Row

Do 4 sets of 8 reps after a warmup set.

Cable Triceps Pushdown

Do 4 sets of 10 reps.

Bent-Over Reverse Fly with Dumbbells

Do 3 sets of 10 reps.

Dumbbell Curls

Do 3 sets of 8 reps.

Abs of your choice.

(I did a basic plank for 3 sets of 30 seconds.)

SATURDAY – LOWER BODY STRENGTH

Warm-up

Same as Weeks 1, 2, and 3.

Weights

45-degree back raise

Perform 1 set of 10 with bodyweight.

Perform 2 sets of 8 with 45 pounds.

Perform 2 sets of 8 with 90 pounds.

Barbell Squat

Do 3-4 warmup sets.

Perform 5 sets x 10 of 10RM.

Deadlift

Do 3-4 warmup sets.

Perform 5 sets x 8 of 8RM.

SUNDAY – OFF

Girth, Body Fat, and Performance Metrics After Gaining 20 Pounds

So let’s say Georges St Pierre wanted to put on 20 pounds to move up a weight class to fight Anderson Silva. (Granted, he probably wouldn’t do it in 28 days.)

What would happen to his performance? Would he get slow and fat? Or even more powerful and agile?

We can only speculate with GSP, but here’s what happened to me.

Baseline
After Weight-Gain


Weight
169.6
190.2


Girth Measurements


Neck
15.25
15.38


Shoulder
48
49.25


Chest
41.5
44


Upper Arm
14.75
16


Waist
31.5
32.25


Hip
38
39.5


Thigh
23.13
24.25


Calf
15.5
15.38


Body Fat Measurements


Mid-Ax
2.8
3.8


Cheek
2.8
5.7


Chest
2.8
4.7


Ab
7.6
3.8


Subscap
5.7
7.6


Triceps
2.8
3.8


Suprailiac
2.8
4.7


Knee
5.7
2.8


Hamstring
3.8
4.7


Calf
9.5
6.7


Body Fat (%)
3.03 (probably ~6)
4.1 (probably ~7)

GIRTH MEASUREMENTS

Expected: We were confident every part of my body would increase in size, and for the most part, that was true.

Surprised: My calf measurements actually went down. We believe it had something to do with the resultant fat loss from doing the Hurricane sprint days.

BODY FAT PERCENTAGE

A quick note about the body fat test: We used calipers and a 10-site skinfold test. All measurement days were done at the Missoula Underground Strength Training Center and performed by trainer Mike Scialabba.

When testing body fat with calipers, there’s always a 2 – 3 percent margin of error. Mike, who’s done this same test on hundreds of his clients, ended up with skinfold measurements that indicated the obviously wrong numbers of 3.03 and 4.1 respectively. Adding a 3% margin of error, the real numbers were probably more like 6-7% and 8-9%.

All of this to say, my body fat percentage went up, but very minimally.

Surprised: I expected to gain more body fat than this (but was pleasantly surprised that I didn’t). Also, while most of my individual sites increased, there were a few that went down (ab, knee, calf). Those were three of the places that had the highest body-fat percentage on the initial Day 0 test.

And here are the performance metrics:

STRENGTH TEST: DEADLIFT MAXIMUM

Baseline: 405 pounds

After Weight Gain: 475 pounds

POWER TEST: VERTICAL JUMP

Baseline: 28 inches

After Weight Gain: 31.7 inches

STRENGTH ENDURANCE TEST: 225-POUND BENCH PRESS

Baseline: 8 reps

After Weight Gain: 15 reps

ENDURANCE TEST 1: MAX VELOCITY ON TREADMILL (VMAX)

Baseline: 9 minutes and 32 seconds of sprinting at 8mph, working up to an incline of 8%

After Weight Gain: 7 minutes and 38 seconds of sprinting at 8mph, working up to an incline of 6%.

ENDURANCE TEST 2: MAX TIME ON TREADMILL (T-MAX)

Baseline: 3 minutes and 11 seconds of sprinting at 8mph with 6% incline

After Weight Gain: 3 minutes and 14 seconds of sprinting at 8mph with 6% incline

STRENGTH/POWER/MUSCLE ENDURANCE TESTS

Expected: We expected to improve performance dramatically in all three of my non-endurance tests (vertical jump, 225-bench, max deadlift).

Surprised: No surprises here.

V-MAX AND T-MAX

Expected: I wasn’t too sure what to expect here, honestly. I felt like I was in better shape than on our baseline testing day, but I didn’t know if my short duration Hurricane sprint training (25 second sprints) would translate to better endurance.

Surprised: What surprised me about both the VMax and the TMax was that I actually felt like I had more endurance. However, I was much heavier and I felt it during the endurance testing. Perhaps I didn’t have enough time to adapt to my new body weight.

Now, this is something GSP may not have to deal with, since he’d likely gain weight over a longer period of time and his body would have more opportunity to adapt.

Closing Words

During each phase of my experiments, I pushed my body to its physiological limits.

I ate as much as I could for 28 days straight. I fasted for a full 24 hours multiple times. I purposefully dehydrated myself and robbed my body of water. I lifted heavy weights and sprinted as fast as I could.

I proved that it’s possible to for a regular guy to gain 20 pounds of (mostly) lean mass in a month. That it’s possible to then lose those 20 pounds in a week. And that it’s possible to gain them all back in a day.

In the process, I hope I’ve demystified the process of muscle building, weight cutting, and rehydration. In the end, there’s no voodoo and witchcraft here. Just the right advice, expert guidance, and a ton of hard work.

+++++

For more about Nate, Dr. Berardi, and their work on building muscle and gaining strength, check out Scrawny To Brawny.

Additional resources: You can download the entire weight-gain nutrition plan Nate used here: Muscle-Building Nutrition Plan. And you can download the entire training program he used here: Muscle-Building Workout Program.

How To Lose 20-30 Pounds In 5 Days: The Extreme Weight Cutting and Rehydration Secrets of UFC Fighters

The following is a guest post by Nate Green, who works with Dr. John Berardi, nutritional advisor to athletes like UFC champion Georges St. Pierre (GSP).

This is the first of two blog posts entailing extreme physical experiments. Absolutely no performance enhancing drugs of any kind were used.

Part 1 — this post — details exactly how top fighters like Georges St. Pierre rapidly lose 20-30 pounds for “weigh-ins.” To refine the method, Nate performed this on himself, losing 20 pounds in 5 days. The unique part: Dr. Berardi and team measured key variables throughout the entire process, including the last “rehydration” phase. As Berardi put it:

“We used GSP’s exact protocol with him [Nate]. The idea was that by doing this with a guy who didn’t actually have to compete the next day, we could measure all sorts of performance variables that you’d never get with an athlete about to fight.”

Part 2 — the next post — will share how Nate used intermittent fasting and strategically planned eating to gain 20 pounds in 28 days, emulating a fighter who wants (or needs) to move up a weight class in competition.

Cautionary Note on Part 1

Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighters put it all out in the open for the world to see: they kick, punch, laugh, cry, and bleed in front of thousands of arena fans and millions more watching at home.

But even if you’re a hardcore fan who knows all the stats, there’s something behind the scenes that you’ve probably never seen in full: world-class weight manipulation…

Done right, it can significantly increase a fighter’s chances of winning. An athlete will artificially lower his weight for pre-fight weigh-ins, then show up to the actual fight 10, 20, or even 30 pounds heavier than his opponent. It’s a game changer.

Done wrong, it can make even the toughest guy lose his edge… and probably the fight. There’s serious risk of organ failure if done haphazardly.

Even though boxers and wrestlers have been manipulating weight in this fashion for decades, it has the air of illicit activity. And though it’s legal in MMA competition, you should *never* try this at home or without medical supervision. Excessive dehydration can kill you. “Cutting weight” has no place in real-world dieting or behavior.

This is NOT an article on sustainable weight loss or healthy living. Rather, it’s a fascinating look at how far athletes and scientists will go to manipulate the human body for competitive advantage.

Here’s how it works…

Enter Nate

Imagine this: It’s Saturday night and you’re a top-ranked MMA fighter who just stepped into the cage to fight for the 170-pound Welterweight Championship.

Question: How much do you weigh?

The answer may seem obvious: 170 pounds, right? But if you followed the steps of extreme weight manipulation, the real answer is that you weigh somewhere between 185 and 190 pounds. That’s 15-20 pounds more than the “cutoff” weight of 170.

24 hours before you stepped into the cage, however, you did in fact weigh 170 pounds. You had to. Friday night was the official weigh-in where you and your opponent both stripped down to your skivvies, stepped on the scale in front of the judge, and prayed that the number on the scale hit 170 or lower.

But once you stepped off that scale it was a race to gain weight.

I find this kind of physiological puppetry very interesting. Most of us regular guys have a hard time gaining or losing just 5 pounds at a time.

But the top combat athletes can lose up to 30 pounds in just 5 days leading up to the fight. Then they can gain nearly all of it back in the 24 hours between weighing in and going toe-to-toe.

They do this to gain a massive competitive advantage. In other words, the bigger guy who retains more of his strength, agility, and endurance will likely win. The guy who weighs in at 170 — and then fights at 170 — often has a world of hurt coming his way.

That’s why Anderson Silva – arguably the world’s best MMA fighter — normally fights in the 185-pound class even though he actually weighs 215 pounds. A few days before he fights, Anderson “cuts” 30 pounds to make weight…then gains most of his weight back in 24 hours in time for his fight.

Georges St Pierre — arguably the world’s 2nd best fighter – normally walks around at 195 pounds. He ends up cutting 25 pounds to make his 170 pound weight class, and then gains 20 of it back before his fight.

Sneaky, huh?

Just how do these guys do it? And what does this rapid weight loss and weight gain do to their performance?

My Extreme Weight Manipulation Experiment

I’m lucky enough to be friends with Dr. John Berardi and Martin Rooney, two guys who regularly work with UFC athletes.

Recently, I told them I wanted to see what cutting weight was like. Is it really possible for a regular guy like me to drop 20 pounds in a few days then gain all of it back in 24 hours?

And if it was possible, what would it feel like? I heard cutting weight was one of the hardest things fighters do throughout their career. Was I man enough to handle it? Or would I give up when things got tough?

They agreed to help me cut 20 pounds in one week, and then put it all back on again in 24 hours.

Nervous doesn’t even begin to explain how I felt.

The Smart Way To Cut Weight Fast

Before pics. Full of water and feeling happy.

Now extreme weight manipulation can go horribly, horribly wrong. Even a lot of UFC guys don’t know how to do it the smart way. Instead, they put their bodies in real harm by doing stupid things like taking a lot of diuretics, not drinking any water, skipping meals, wearing trash bags while exercising (sometimes in the sauna) and generally being idiotic.

They lose weight, of course. But they also lose energy and power and develop one bad temper. None of which helps during fight time.

With the help of Dr. Berardi and Rooney, I decided to take a smarter route, instead of putting my health in serious jeopardy.

I started at 190.2 pounds and had 5 days to lose 20 pounds.

Here’s a breakdown of the nutritional strategies we used — the same one Georges St Pierre and other elite MMA fighters use before a big fight. (Remember: we know this because Dr. Berardi is Georges’ nutrition coach).

STRATEGICALLY DECREASE WATER CONSUMPTION

Dropping weight fast is all about manipulating your water and sodium levels.

For a fighter who wants to cut weight quickly and safely, here’s how much water he would consume in the 5 days leading up to his weigh-in:

Sunday – 2 gallons

Monday – 1 gallon

Tuesday – 1 gallon

Wednesday – .5 gallons

Thursday – .25 gallons

Friday – No water till after weigh-in at 5PM.

As you can see, the amount of water starts high with two gallons and decreases with each day till he’s drinking hardly any water on Thursday and Friday.

This is to ensure their body gets into “flushing mode.”

By drinking lots of water early on, the fighter’s body will down-regulate aldosterone, a hormone that acts to conserve sodium and secrete potassium.

And when he suddenly reduces the amount of water he drinks in the middle and end of the week, his body will still be in flushing mode, meaning he’ll hit the bathroom to pee a lot even though he’s hardly drinking any water.

What happens when you excrete more fluid than you take in? Bingo! Rapid weight loss.

DON’T EAT MORE THAN 50 GRAMS OF CARBS PER DAY

Since one gram of carbohydrate pulls 2.7 grams of water into the body, it’s important for fighters to keep their carb intake low.

By doing this, they also deplete muscle glycogen (a source of energy) and keep their body in “flush mode”.

DON’T EAT FRUIT, SUGAR, OR STARCHES

These are carbs that should be avoided entirely while cutting.

EAT MEALS THAT CONTAIN A LOT OF PROTEIN AND FAT

Fighters have to eat something. Since they’re avoiding carbs, Dr. Berardi advises them to load up on high-quality protein like meats, eggs or a vegetarian sources of protein. It’s also the perfect opportunity to eat lots of leafy vegetables (like spinach) and cruciferous vegetables (like broccoli and cauliflower).

Georges St Pierre normally has his meals prepared by a private chef so he doesn’t even have to think about this stuff or make decisions. Recommended reading: here’s an entire article detailing GSP’s training diet.

DON’T EAT SALT

Since the body likes to hold on to sodium (which will hold on to water), dropping salt helps the fighter’s body flush water out.

CONSIDER A NATURAL DIURETIC

This step isn’t always necessary, but it can help when you’re getting down to the wire and still need to lose water. Opt for a natural diuretic like dandelion root, but wait until the last 2 days to use it.

TAKE HOT BATHS

We sweat a lot in hot environments. However, we sweat the most in hot, humid environments. Since hot water offers both heat and 100% humidity, fighters lose water quickly by taking hot baths and fully submerging everything but their nose for 10 minutes at a time.

SIT IN THE SAUNA

This is the “finishing touch” to flush the last few pounds of water and is only used on the last few days leading up to the weigh-in.

The Weight Cut Schedule

So if we take all of that and break it into a weekly plan, it looks like this:

SUNDAY

Carbs: Less than 50 grams per day. No fruit, starches, or sugars.

Protein and Fat: As much as you want in 3 meals

Water: 2 gallons

Salt: None

MONDAY

Carbs: Less than 50 grams per day. No fruit, starches, or sugars.

Protein and Fat: As much as you want in 3 meals

Water: 1 gallon

Salt: None

TUESDAY

Carbs: Less than 50 grams per day. No fruit, starches, or sugars.

Protein and Fat: As much as you want in 3 meals

Water: 1 gallon

Salt: None

WEDNESDAY

Carbs: Less than 50 grams per day. No fruit, starches, or sugars.

Protein and Fat: As much as you want in 3 meals

Water: 0.5 gallon

Salt: None

Sauna in afternoon

THURSDAY

Carbs: Less than 50 grams per day. No fruit, starches, or sugars.

Protein and Fat: As much as you want in 3 meals

Water: 0.25 gallon

Salt: None

Sauna in afternoon for 30 minutes, hot water bath at night

FRIDAY (WEIGH IN AT 6PM)

Carbs: Less than 50 grams per day. No fruit, starches, or sugars.

Protein and Fat: Eat 2 very small meals until weigh in

Water: None till weigh-in

Salt: None

Sauna until weight is met

(Note from Tim: You can download the entire weight-manipulation plan that Nate used here: Weight Loss and Rehydration Protocol.)

What It Feels Like To Cut Weight

Dry as a bone and none to happy about it.

So that all looks fine on paper. But what does it actually feel like to go through it?

One word: Hell.

I started my cut on Sunday at 190 pounds. Here’s a quick rundown of what it looked like.

SUNDAY – 190 POUNDS

I carry a gallon water jug with me wherever I go, which makes me feel ridiculous. But I have to make sure I get my two gallons of water in. Overall, though, I feel fine. It actually doesn’t seem that difficult. I’m not sure what the big deal is.

MONDAY – 187 POUNDS

I’m starting to miss the taste of salt. All of my food is bland. Now I’m drinking one gallon of water instead of two. Still not that bad.

TUESDAY – 182 POUNDS

I go to the bathroom 13 times in one day. A new record, I believe. And I’m still drinking a gallon of water.

WEDNESDAY – 179 POUNDS

Now I’m down to half gallon of water per day, which means I have to ration it out, which feels weird. I have a little with breakfast, a little with lunch, and a little with dinner. It’s definitely not enough water.

My mouth is dry. I feel dehydrated. I’m drinking straight espresso instead of drip coffee because it contains too much water.

In the evening, I try my first hot water bath. I generally enjoy baths, but this one’s different. My apartment’s water doesn’t get as hot as Dr. Berardi wants it to be — “hot enough to cause moderate pain but not burn your hand” — so I fill two pots and a kettle with water, put them on the stovetop until they boil, and pour them into the bath tub.

I get into the bath and immediately regret the decision.

10 minutes later, I’m lying naked in the middle of my living room trying to catch my breath. My eyes are rolled back into my head. My entire body feels like a giant heartbeat. I want to drink some water, but can’t.

This is starting to be less fun.

THURSDAY – 175 POUNDS

I am a zombie. A zombie who sits. Mostly in the sauna or on the couch.

In the sauna I watch beads of sweat collect on my skin. I see my precious water run down my arms and chest and legs and know that I won’t be able to replenish any of it when I get out.

I only have .25 gallons of water to last me the entire day. I’m ready for this to be over.

FRIDAY – 169.7 POUNDS AT 5PM

I look sick, very sick.

I spend the last 30 minutes before the weigh-in in the sauna and drink four sips of water throughout the entire day…

What Cutting Weight Does To Performance

OK, I’ll save you the rest of the journal entries and share some performance data.

While the fighters are tested in competition, no one has ever really documented how much strength or power they lose by dehydrating. (Or how much strength and power they regain after they get all their weight back.)

So we decided to check.

And it turns out, losing 20 pounds in 5 days is not conducive to being strong, powerful, or agile. (Surprise!) I couldn’t jump as high, lift as much weight, or run as fast or as long as I had just a week before during our baseline testing.

POWER TEST: VERTICAL JUMP

Baseline: 31.7 inches

After Dehydration: 27.6 inches

STRENGTH ENDURANCE TEST: 225-POUND BENCH PRESS

Baseline: 15 reps

After Dehydration: 5 reps

ENDURANCE TEST: MAX TIME ON TREADMILL

Baseline: 3 minutes and 14 seconds of sprinting at 8mph with 6% incline

After Dehydration: 1 minute and 28 seconds of sprinting at 8mph with 3% incline

It’s no wonder these guys try to gain all their weight back immediately after weighing in. They’d be screwed if they didn’t.

Speaking of which…

The Smart Way To Gain Weight Fast

Once UFC athletes cut weight and weigh-in, they’d never be able to perform at a top level. (Which is obvious from my less-than-stellar performance in the gym).

So what do they do next? They gain as much weight as humanly possible in 24 hours.

Here’s how they do it. (And how I did it, too.)

DRAMATICALLY INCREASE WATER INTAKE.

According to Dr. Berardi, the body can absorb only about 1 liter (2.2 pounds) of fluid – at maximum – in an hour. So he advises the fighters he works with to not to drink any more than that. Instead, he tells them to sip 1 liter (2.2 pounds) of water per hour.

However, the fighters won’t retain all that fluid. In fact, probably about 25% of it will be lost as urine.

So, here’s the math for someone like Georges St Pierre:

9 liters (20 pounds) of water to get back.


11 liters (25 pounds) of fluid between Friday weigh-in and Saturday weigh-in to get it all back.


24 hours in which to do it. 8 of which he’ll be sleeping and 3 of which will be leading up to Saturday weigh-in.

This leaves 13 total hours for rehydration.

So as soon as Georges steps off the scale, he literally slams a liter of water and carries the bottle around with him, refilling it and draining it every hour until 3 hours before his fight. (There isn’t a bathroom in the cage.)

EAT AS MUCH CARBOHYDRATE (AND PROTEIN AND FAT) AS YOU WANT

Now’s also the time for fighters to load up on carbs and pull all the water they’re drinking back into their muscles. It also helps them feel more human and look less sickly. (Something I definitely experienced during my super-hydration phase.)

Dr. Berardi has his fighters eat a big meal directly after they weigh in. He doesn’t restrict calories – his athletes can eat as much as they want in that meal as long as it’s healthy food like lean meats, sweet potatoes, rice, and vegetables. (Gorging on junk food is a bad idea.)

Then on Saturday (fight day), Dr. Berardi has his fighters eat a satisfying amount of healthy food in a few small meals leading up to the fight.

ADD SALT TO EVERYTHING

Since sodium helps the body retain water, fighters are encouraged to add extra salt to their meals.

Here’s what my super rehydration schedule looked like:

The Weight-Gain Schedule

FRIDAY AFTER WEIGH-IN

Carbs: Eat as much as you want in one meal after weigh-in and testing

Protein and Fat: Eat as much as you want in one meal after weigh-in and testing

Rehydration Beverage: Drink 1 liter of water mixed with 1/2 scoop of carbohydrate/protein drink for every hour you’re awake. (We used Surge Workout Fuel.)

Salt: Salt food

SATURDAY

Carbs: Eat satisfying amount in four meals before weigh-in

Protein: Eat satisfying amount in four meals before weigh-in

Rehydration Beverage: Drink 1 liter of water mixed with 1/2 scoop of carbohydrate/protein drink for every hour you’re awake but stop 3 hours before testing.

What Gaining Weight Does To Performance

Back to normal-ish.

First things first: Personally, I ended up gaining 16.9 pounds back in 24 hours. Not bad.

But the real question: How much strength and power do you really gain when you super-hydrate?

Answer: A lot.

While I didn’t perform as well as my baseline (when I did all the performance tests before I started the experiment), I got really close. Which means that even though I put my body through a week of torture, it was almost 100%.

And I totally annihilated my performance numbers from just 24 hours before when I was sickly and dehydrated.

I ran faster and longer, jumped higher, and lifted more weight for more reps.

POWER TEST: VERTICAL JUMP

Baseline: 31.7 inches

After Dehydration: 27.6 inches

Re-hydrated: 29 inches

STRENGTH ENDURANCE TEST: 225-POUND BENCH PRESS

Baseline: 15 reps

After Dehydration: 5 reps

Rehydrated: 12 reps

ENDURANCE TEXT: MAX TIME ON TREADMILL

Baseline: 3 minutes and 14 seconds of sprinting at 8mph with 6% incline

After Dehydration: 1 minute and 28 seconds of sprinting at 8mph with 3% incline

Rehydrated: 3 minutes and 25 seconds of sprinting at 8mph with 6% incline

Lose Weight. Gain Weight. Fight.

For an MMA fighter, this is about the time when he’d be getting ready to step in the cage and fight, which means it’s about the same time you’d turn on the TV and see him in his corner, jumping up and down, getting psyched and ready for battle.

How much does he weigh?

It’s safe to say at least 10-30 pounds more than the weight class he’s fighting in.

And now you know the “secret” to extreme weight manipulation, something 99.9% of guys who watch MMA will never know.

Pretty cool, right?

If you have questions, please put them in the comments and Dr. Berardi and I will do our best to answer them.

###

Nate’s not done yet. Next we’ll have Part 2 – How To Gain 20 Pounds in 28 Days: The Extreme Muscle Building Secrets of UFC Fighters.

For more about Nate and his work on building muscle and gaining strength, check out Scrawny To Brawny.

A Few Thoughts on Content Creation, Monetization, and Strategy

(Photo credit: Shewatchedthesky)

This is short post on content creation and monetization.

Below is an e-mail I received from a friend of a friend. My answers to him are inline after “TIM”, and I’ve elaborated on a few.

The e-mail itself is also a great example of a thoughtful approach to a busy person (me). I bolded one key phrase.

For those who want to explore further, here are two related posts:

How to Build a High-Traffic Blog Without Killing Yourself

Tim Ferriss Scam! Practical Tactics for Dealing with Haters

Now, let’s read that e-mail…

The Email: Questions and Answers

Tim -

I realize you are a very busy man and you mentioned in your last reply that you are taking a couple of months off from doing interviews. I respect your request and, having read your work, understand the motivation behind it. I certainly don’t mean to intrude, but I’m working on a project for my work as a Content Strategist and would greatly appreciate it if you wouldn’t mind taking two minutes to answer two questions. I promise they are short and to the point and that I will not follow up your answers with more questions, unless you specifically allow me to. I thank you for your time in advance.

TIM: No problem

The questions are as follows:

When working with brands, specifically big multinational brands, I often run into the mindset that volume and velocity are the most important aspect of content marketing. Yet, it seems to me that agility and ensuring the content is found, consumed, shared and acted upon – meaning that content leads to conversions of direct business value – are more important than simple speed. What is your rule of thumb as it relates to content that keeps you from being in the news business and so focused on specificity while allowing for flexibility in topics and responsiveness?

TIM: You can’t out Fox News Fox News. Timely news-based content turns life (or business) into a keeping up with the Joneses nightmare. I focus on evergreen/useful content that is as valuable 6 months from now as it is the day it’s published. It might mean less immediate traffic, but it means sticky traffic and also Google traffic that will add up to monstrous traffic later. This all factors into conversion and sales, if that’s your priority.

My approach allows great flexibility and offers the option to hit STOP without losing it all. If I stopped writing blog posts tomorrow, I’d still make tons of income from my traffic (via books, start-up intros, speaking gigs, etc.). That was never the primary intent of my writing, but it’s a nice side-effect!

People prefer to trust other people, not brands (e.g. Steve Jobs versus Apple), so I have the advantage of being a single-person-based media provider. Brands can do this by singling out killer personalities to drive their brands (e.g. Bobby Flay for Food Network in the early days).

People want to follow humans, not trademarks. Plan accordingly.

How much of your content is planned vs. responsive?

TIM: 90% planned, at least. I write about the things that capture my attention and imagination, first and foremost. Guessing what other people want is exactly that — guessing. The remaining

As a content marketer, the value of my work is often calculated in the same terms that media ROI is determined by. Yet, working in the digital space, it seems we can be so much more precise as it relates to causation. TV and media metrics often fall into the old logical fallacy of “Post hoc ergo propter hoc” (“After this therefore because of this”) Knowing that you are devotee of Drucker’s axiom “that which gets measured gets managed” I wonder what model you use to calculate the ROI of your content. Can you make a recommendation?

TIM: I don’t quantify the profitability of each piece of content, as it would affect my editorial purity and stymie my curiosity to explore things on the edges… yet that’s precisely what’s built my reputation, if I have one!

I write about what most excites me and assume that will hold true for 10,000+ people… if I write about it well. If I get 100 die-hard fans per post like that, I can build an army that will not only consider buying anything I sell later (assuming high quality — most critical!), but they’ll also promote my work as trustworthy to other people. This compounds quickly. The product — here writing — needs to stand on its own two feet.

Furthermore, it’s much more interesting to me to sell something like a small-scale, $10,000-per-seat seminar every 2-3 years, instead of obsessing over monthly, weekly, or even daily Amazon commissions, for instance.

Many high-traffic blogs and publishers are coming to similar conclusions and doing much the same. Optimizing a bad business (or marginally profitable one) is not as elegant as creating a parallel, higher-margin revenue stream. Think TED videos and TED attendance. If TED charged for their videos from the beginning, where would they be now? Near obscurity.

As Warren Buffett once said, “Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.”

That said, if you’re operating in a CPM-ruled world, you might have other near-term pressures, but I’m building a snowball the size of continents. The catch: it sometimes moves at a glacial pace. Big things take time, but that’s OK — almost nothing can stop a glacier from moving once it reaches critical mass.

Thank you again for your time and consideration in this matter. I certainly appreciate it, as I do all of your work.

TIM: Thank you and my pleasure!

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AFTERWORD TO READERS: What are your most burning questions about content, whether as craft or business? Please let me know in the commments, and I’d love to hear your own best practices.

Jedi Mind Tricks: How to Get Loved Ones to Lose Weight

Darya Pino Rose, PhD, and her dad, who transformed himself after years of resistance.

“Families are like fudge: mostly sweet with a few nuts.”

- Anonymous

“Language is a means of getting an idea from my brain into yours without surgery.”

- Mark Amidon

Losing fat yourself is one thing. Readers of this blog have lost 100-200 pounds without too much trouble.

Getting your mom or dad to take you seriously? To stop eating white bread or drinking 64-ounce sodas? That can seem impossible.

Loved ones — whether family, friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, spouses, or otherwise — can be sensitive. The people who need help most often won’t accept it, especially from those closest to them.

So what to do?

This post gives a real-world example from Darya Pino Rose, PhD. I’ve known and followed Darya for years. Her PhD is in neuroscience from USCF, and she champions a whole-food-based approach to nutrition that avoids pills and powders. This combination produces fascinating results.

The below story, from her new book Foodist, shows exactly how she transformed her dad’s health without butting heads with him… and how you can do the same for your loved ones.

Do you have any tricks that have worked with your family or friends? Please share in the comments!

Note: For the purposes of this post, a “foodist” is someone who uses real food and real science to lose weight permanently.

Enjoy…

Enter Darya

Eating like a “foodist” does not doom you to being ostracized from your friends and family. This post will teach you how to lightheartedly deflect your critics and gently nudge (but not annoy) those loved ones you hope will adopt better eating habits.

This is tricky business, but it can be done.

How To Win Over Friends and Influence Family

It’s hard to see loved ones suffer as a result of their eating habits. Traditional whole foods have been out of fashion for so long that many of our parents and sometimes even our grandparents are completely unaware of the negative health effects caused by the foods they grew up loving. As they age, however, these habits start to take their toll, and we must watch as their health deteriorates. A medical emergency that brings them face-to-face with reality is sometimes what it takes for them to make changes. Other times even that isn’t enough.

Unfortunately, changing the habits of another person is even more difficult than changing your own. Stubbornness, pride, and ignorance can prevent people from even listening to advice that could save their lives, and for whatever reason age tends to compound these particular traits. Pushing a message that people don’t want to hear can cause them to dig in and fight even harder to preserve their way of life, straining and potentially destroying your relationship with them. When dealing with someone like this, it’s first essential to accept the fact that there may be nothing you can do for him or her. No matter how badly you may desire to help, a person has to want to change and cannot be forced.

But still, change can happen. Despite my close relationship with my father and his enthusiasm about my career path, I didn’t expect him to ever alter the way he ate. My dad had suffered from depression since I was in high school, and his outlook got even worse after my mother passed away in a car accident in 2003. Like most people, he had developed the habit of eating processed and fast foods starting in the early 1990s, and as his depression grew deeper, the effort he put into feeding and taking care of himself waned.

“In general, I did not want to continue living and didn’t think I would. With all the health problems I was having, and especially after your mom died—that was a really hard thing for me to deal with—and I thought it would be better if I was gone too,” he told me.

After a series of serious medical emergencies that nearly took his life on three occasions, I had nearly given up hoping for a turnaround, even though he was only in his fifties. But I continued to love him and share my passion for seasonal food whenever possible.

“You were so understanding, you never put any pressure on me or tried to convince me to change, but you always gave me hope that things would get better, things would be better,” he recalled.

From my perspective he had gone through enough and didn’t need me or anyone else telling him how to live out his life. If he didn’t want to live, I didn’t want to bug him about his blood pressure or eating habits. I just wanted to have as many happy and positive times with him as possible until whatever happened happened, and the last thing I wanted was to strain our relationship unnecessarily. I know my dad, and he is not one to do anything just because someone else, even me, thinks he should. Still my excitement about food and health was genuine, and I knew he had always been a fan of a good meal, so I continued to share what I was learning.

My cooking was the first thing that caught his attention. I made a point whenever visiting home in southern California to stop by the San Francisco farmers market before getting on the plane and bringing back something delicious. On one summer trip I brought home a small bag of padrón peppers, some good olive oil, and a crusty baguette. Padróns are small green peppers that are a common tapas dish in Spain and a seasonal delicacy for foodists in San Francisco. They are incredibly simple to prepare. All you have to do is heat some olive oil in a cast-iron pan and cook the peppers over medium heat until they blister and just start to brown. When they’re done, sprinkle them with some coarse sea salt and eat them with your fingers. Padróns have a deep pepper flavor, but are not usually spicy—except when they are. One out of every ten peppers is incredibly hot, so eating a bowl is a bit like playing Russian roulette with your tongue.

My dad has always been a fan of spicy foods, and I knew that padróns would be right up his alley. At his house I cooked them with a little more olive oil than usual, because it becomes infused with the oil from the peppers and tastes delicious. We used the bread to sop up the extra pepper oil and cool our mouths when we got burned on the spicy ones. My dad loved every bit of it and quietly started paying more attention whenever I mentioned food.

His next great epiphany was beets [ubersimple recipe at the end of this post]. All his life he had hated beets, and consequently I had never eaten them as a child. The first couple of times I tried them, even at nice restaurants, beets tasted a little off to me. Something about their flavor reminded me of dirt, and I could never get past that to enjoy their earthy sweetness. But I continued to sample them when they were available, hoping one day something would click. That day came one sunny afternoon at the house of a friend who was hosting a dinner party. We were having Dungeness crab for dinner, which I was totally excited about, but the main course was a long way off, so she put out a huge pile of roasted beets sprinkled with chèvre cheese and fresh mint as an appetizer.

I was starving, so I started reluctantly picking at the giant pile with my fingers, since I didn’t want to scoop myself a serving of food I didn’t expect to like. I popped the first bite in my mouth and, yeah, it still tasted like beets. But I was hungry, so I tried another, this time with a good portion of mint and cheese on it. After a few chews, it hit me. “Whoa, this is good,” I said to myself. Something about the fresh-tasting mint and the creamy cheese balanced the earthy flavor of the beets and transformed them into something I could appreciate. I proceeded to put a hefty dent in the beet mountain, leaving bright pink stains all over my fingers. Beets had finally made it onto my beloved vegetables list, and I started making my own version of the recipe at home.

Proud of my recent conversion, I told my dad about my beet discovery during our next phone conversation. He replied skeptically, saying that he hated beets and always had. But I knew I was onto something and decided to include the recipe in our next Thanksgiving dinner, just so he could try it for himself. I made plenty of other dishes as well, just in case he really didn’t like the beets, but I followed my friend’s lead and set them out earlier than the rest of the food as an appetizer, knowing that someone with a hungry tummy couldn’t resist trying a bite. It worked.

“When you made those beets I was like, ‘Wow, this is so unbelievable! So different from what I remember,’ ” he recalled.

I was stoked, and my dad became a believer. At almost sixty years old, he developed a new appreciation for vegetables and real food (turns out the beets he grew up eating were always from a can), even the ones he thought he didn’t like.

“It made eating and preparing healthy food much more fascinating,” he explained. “It became exciting to me to see what the possibilities are.”

The beets weren’t enough to change my dad’s habits, but he was starting to make the connection between good food and good health. More important, he was now convinced that vegetables and other healthy foods could taste amazing and that eating them would not be a sacrifice. He also began paying more attention to me and the things I would say and share on Facebook about the connections between food and wellness.

Though he still didn’t care much about his own life or health, he was growing weary of feeling sick and drained all the time, and it was becoming obvious to him that his health (and possibly his diet) was the reason. After living for decades on processed foods, my dad had developed prediabetes and his blood sugar swings were having a terrible impact on his mood and energy levels. He also had dangerously high blood pressure, and in 2006 a mild stroke left him with a speech impediment that deeply troubled and embarrassed him. Worse, the stroke made it nearly impossible for him to play his guitar, the only passion he had left in his life. Though he was able to recover his speech and dexterity after a couple of months, this experience scared him enough to at least start taking medication for his condition and paying more attention to his diet. He may not have cared then if he lived or died, but he knew he didn’t want to live without his music.

Because he’s a good father, my dad had always done his best to keep up with my work ever since I started writing in 2007. He’s seen almost all my rants against processed food and praise for seasonal vegetables, pastured eggs, and wild fish, and nothing had ever convinced him to change the way he eats. Then one day in late July 2011, I got a phone call with the words I never expected to hear.

A few weeks earlier I had released a video on Summer Tomato about salt, explaining how it affects your health and what you need to understand to make smart food decisions. My basic argument was that salt itself is not bad for you. In fact, it is necessary to have some sodium in your diet. Moreover, salt makes food taste better, and I encourage everyone to sprinkle some on their vegetables if it helps them eat more of them. There are three reasons salt is a problem for most Western societies. The first is that we eat way too much of it, which can lead to hypertension. However, a whopping 75 percent of the sodium we eat comes from processed foods.11 Relatively speaking, the salt you add to your own home-cooked food is insignificant.

The second issue is that sodium intake must be balanced by sufficient potassium intake, which comes mainly from vegetables. [Note from Tim: avocados, white beans, and spinach are great options.] That is, the more vegetables you eat, the less dietary sodium matters. Most people don’t eat enough vegetables, so eating a lot of sodium poses a bigger risk for developing high blood pressure than it would in the context of a healthier diet. Third, a high intake of fructose, a common ingredient in processed foods, exacerbates the effects of sodium in the diet. This means that the same amount of salt in your food is more dangerous if there is a lot of fructose around as well. All three of these points lead to the simple conclusion that too many processed foods and too few vegetables are the real causes of hypertension, not the little white shaker sitting on your kitchen table.

On that random day in July, my dad called to tell me that he watched this video, and something about it struck a chord. I remember his words so vividly I can still hear him saying them in my head.

“I watched that video you made about salt, and it was really great,” he began.

“Thanks, Dad,” I replied.

“Yeah, I was watching it, and you made me realize that salt is already inside the processed foods,” he explained.

“That’s right,” I answered, almost chuckling at his excitement about this simple revelation. My brain instantly cued the scene from the movie Zoolander in which Hansel realizes that files are kept in the computer and then throws the machine off a balcony, so he could open it up and find them.

“Well, since the salt is already in there, I stopped eating them,” he continued.

“What?” I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right.

“I stopped eating the processed foods a couple weeks ago. But I needed something else to eat, and I remembered you always saying I’m supposed to eat vegetables, so I went to the store and bought all of them,” he went on.

“What? What did you buy?” I asked, starting to realize the meaning of his words. Maybe he did throw his processed foods off the balcony.

“I bought all the vegetables. They weren’t very well labeled, so I wasn’t sure exactly what I was getting. But I think I got some kale and some chard. And I got some peppers, onions, mushrooms, and all sorts of other weird shit. I took it home and cut it all up—it took an hour there was so much of it—and I made three huge batches of stir-fry. It was beautiful, and so colorful, so I call it my Rainbow Stir-Fry. And it was delicious! I take it to work and eat it every day for breakfast and lunch. I also sauté some fish or turkey meat and eat that. After eating that all day, I’m not usually hungry for dinner.”

Laughing again, this time in disbelief, I asked, “So you’ve been eating nothing but vegetables, fish, and turkey for two weeks?”

“Yeah, and I love it! And I’ve had to poke two new holes in my belt. I think I’ll need to get new pants soon.”

To say this was hard to believe is beyond an understatement. Seemingly overnight, my dad, who had nearly given up on his own life, had completely overhauled his eating habits and loved everything about it. At the time I didn’t let myself dwell too long on what this could mean. It was still too new, and too unbelievable. But deep down I knew what was at stake if he was serious: it meant he might make it. It meant he might be around to meet his future grandkids, my future children.

As I hoped, my dad’s change was real and permanent. In just two months he was down twenty-five pounds. I know this because he was so impressed by his own transformation that he went and bought himself a scale to track his progress. It wasn’t out of vanity—the man doesn’t have a full-length mirror in his entire house—but out of curiosity. He wanted to have something tangible to look at and know that what he was doing was making a difference.

“In the beginning I didn’t know I was losing weight because I didn’t weigh myself, but I kept having to put new holes in my belt, and one day there were so many folds in my pants. I wore a size 36, so I tried a 34, and goddamn those were too big! I couldn’t believe I was a size 32—I was so proud of myself.”

Shortly after that he developed an uncontrollable urge to start exercising.

“It only took about two to three weeks of me eating like that every day to feel a complete difference in my body, in the way I felt. It all starts adding together, it has an effect on your whole life,” he explained. “The exercise came along when the weight started melting off. It was just dropping off me. And I felt like I wanted to stretch and move again. I didn’t want to feel weak anymore,” he said.

For over five years he had been using a cane to walk. His knee had been severely weakened from a staph infection, which required surgery that left a massive amount of scar tissue. But when he started losing weight, it was easier for him to move around, and he started using the cane less and less. He started taking the stairs instead of the elevator at work, spent more time walking with his dogs, and bought some used exercise equipment for his house—some dumbbells and an ab roller wheel. Over a year later he is down fifty pounds and doesn’t use a cane at all.

“Now I do a hundred ab rolls every day,” he told me. (If you’ve ever tried these you know how hard they are. I can only do about thirty, and then I’m sore for days). “I remember when I hit eighty the first time I couldn’t believe it. It’s really good because when things don’t go well at work one day, or I have problems with the dogs, I know I did my hundred rolls. I have at least that one thing I’m proud of. It’s a lifestyle that I find very delightful,” he gushed.

As his eating habits and body transformed, so did his outlook on life. “I thought, ‘Well shit, if I’m going to live and see my kids grow up, I don’t want to be in a wheelchair. I better be fit enough to do stuff on this planet,’ ” he explained.

When I asked him what he thought led to his change, he had a hard time putting his finger on it.

He said, “For me it took having the wake-up call of the health issue. Then somewhere in me I decided I really didn’t want to die. I don’t know exactly when it was, but it was definitely associated with you. I always felt better after speaking to you. It wasn’t for me or because of me, but your belief that things could be better.”

My dad’s healthstyle has evolved since he first started on his journey. Eventually he became tired of eating his Rainbow Stir-Fry day in and day out.

“At first,” he explained, “it was a bit like cooking dinner and making a piece of art you could eat. Then after about six months it started being too much of a hassle and started getting old. But that didn’t mean I went back to my old habits.”

He now shops and cooks more frequently, making smaller batches of vegetables and fish that he can whip up quickly in the morning before work. “I mix it up with different sauces, Chinese or Turkish, and I rotate and shop at different places for my vegetables. I found a little produce place by my house now that has better vegetables than my grocery store. I never get tired of this stuff.”

Though he knows his dishes and strategies will continue to change as he gets better at cooking and learns to use new vegetables, he isn’t worried about slipping back into his former habits.

“I’ve gone long enough now that I know in my heart that I’ll never go back to my old way of eating, because I don’t find any joy in it. I still go get sushi or Mexican food occasionally, but I don’t want to do it every day. I’m happy and comfortable with how I’m doing it now.”

My video on salt was clearly a catalyst for my dad’s turnaround, but it would have been impossible for it to have had the impact it did without the years of education and encouragement from me that came before it. Just as important is that he was able to make the adjustments at his own pace, without pressure from anyone to do it a certain way.

“I was able to read on Summer Tomato without interacting with you all the time, and see the reasons for doing all this stuff. Then I had the opportunity and knowledge, which I got because of you, and I stumbled my way through it until I got my own style. Once I made up my mind, I’m pretty hard to keep down. I went whole hog,” he explained.

I asked him if he had any advice for people in the same situation that I was in, wanting to help a loved one make healthier choices.

“As long as they can be patient and present things in a way that’s easy to understand. Let your family see how you eat, read a little, and get some inspiration. Everyone has to find their own path, what works for them,” he advised.

As for my dad, he’s just happy it clicked for him when it did.

“I’m feeling better now than I have in a really, really long time. I’m very confident about the future,” he said.

“So am I.” I smiled.

Beating Beet Aversions

If my dad can learn to like beets at the age of fifty-five, anyone can. This is the recipe that convinced him (and me a year earlier) that the humble beet can be as delicious and elegant as any exotic vegetable.

This is the perfect dish for the beet skeptic and beet lover alike, and it hardly requires any cooking skills. If you are still worried you will not like the flavor of beets, look for the milder and less messy golden or pink-and-white-striped cioggia beets. Whenever possible I like to use a few different colors to mix it up, but if all you have are the common red garden beets they work beautifully on their own.

To begin you must eliminate all thoughts of substituting canned beets for fresh. Fresh roasted beets have a rich, sweet, earthy flavor that is completely unlike that of the flaccid purple slivers that come in a can. You will also need fresh mint leaves. Most grocery stores carry them; ask if you can’t find them. Chèvre is a soft goat cheese that a close friend of mine describes as “like cream cheese only better.” A little bit goes a very long way, so I always buy the smallest amount possible (it usually costs around $3).

Be careful not to add the cheese directly to hot beets or it will melt and form an unattractive pink slime. It still tastes good, but it’s better to avoid this problem by cooling the beets beforehand. An hour in the refrigerator works well, but if you are in a hurry you can get away with ten to fifteen minutes in the freezer. This dish is very easy to scale for large batches, making it ideal for parties and potlucks.

Roasted Beets with Fresh Mint and Chèvre

Serves 2 to 3

1 bunch of beets (3 large), any variety

1 to 2 tablespoons olive oil

½ cup fresh mint leaves, loosely packed

¼ ounce chèvre

Sea salt or kosher salt

Preheat the oven to 375?F. If the leaves are still on the beets, twist them off, leaving enough stem to use as a handle for peeling. (If the beet greens are still fresh and springy, I recommend cleaning them and cooking them up with some onions and garlic—sauté them like spinach. Beet greens are so full of potassium that they taste naturally salty, so be careful with your seasoning, because they are easy to oversalt.)

Peel the beets using a vegetable peeler and chop them evenly into ¾-to-1-inch cubes. Keep in mind that the larger the

pieces, the longer they will take to cook. Discard stems.

Add the olive oil to the beets and toss to coat. Sprinkle the beets with salt and place in a single layer in a large Pyrex baking pan. Place the pan in the oven on the middle rack and roast until the beets are tender and have a glazed-like appearance, stirring every 8 to 10 minutes. Roasting takes approximately 35 minutes.

When the beets are finished roasting, transfer them to a large bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and place in the refrigerator. Chill for at least 30 minutes, but 45 to 60 minutes is preferable.

Five minutes before the beets are done chilling, stack the mint leaves on top of each other and chiffonade them by rolling them lengthwise like a cigarette and slicing them into thin ribbons. For very large leaves I like to cut the ribbons in half once by making a single cut through the middle of the pile along the vein of the leaves. Discard the stems.

Using a fork, crumble a small amount of the chèvre into a small bowl or plate and set it aside. When the beets are ready, sprinkle the mint onto the beets and stir, reserving a few ribbons for garnish. Adjust salt to taste. Transfer the minted beets to a serving bowl and sprinkle with the chèvre and remaining mint. Serve immediately.

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Click here to learn more about Darya’s book Foodist.

Have you been able to help loved ones quit bad behaviors or adopt healthy ones? Please share your stories and recommendations in the comments!

Case Studies: How to Build Online Businesses That Gross $250,000+ Per Month

Debbie Sterling’s GoldieBlox is now grossing $300,000+ per month.

My specialty is modeling success. I analyze what works and ask: what recipe can I find that others can use?

In this post, we’ll look at five successful online businesses. Some of them (e.g. GoldieBlox) are now grossing $300,000+ per month…and it’s the founder’s first company! One (Fresh-Tops) has gone from 1 to 20 employees in six months. Some of the other stats are even more impressive.

Out of more than 10,000 contestants in the 2012 Shopify Build-a-Business Competition, these are the five businesses that sold the most in completely different categories:

Design, Art and Home

Gadgets and Electronics

Fashion and Apparel

Canadian [Because Shopify is based in Canada. Go Canucks!]

Everything Else

What do they have in common? And what can you replicate on your own?

For both questions, the answer is: more than you think.

The highest monthly sales by a contestant in the FIRST two months of starting, excluding any pre-existing businesses, was $196,811. How would that change your life?

Without further ado, let’s analyze these five rock stars, looking at what they did right and, just as important, what they did wrong…

5 CASE STUDIES
Electronics & Gadgets Category Winner: GameKlip

Who are you and what is your Shopify store?

Ryan French, Creator of GameKlip

Describe your product in 1-3 sentences.

The GameKlip is a device that attaches your Android phone to a DualShock3 controller, normally used for the PlayStation3. This allows you to use a real controller to play games on your smartphone. It opens the Android platform up to more than just “casual” gaming with touch screen controls, and really gives you a full console experience at a fraction of the cost.

How did you decide on your product? What ideas did you consider but reject, and why?

I was frustrated with the controls on my smartphone. Touchscreen controls worked okay for simple games, but anything more complex was impossible. I made a bracket to hold my phone onto my controller, and realized other people might want one too.

I didn’t reject any other product ideas. I set out looking for a solution to a problem I had, instead of looking for a product to sell. Once I had my solution, the GameKlip, I focused on finding a way to share it with others.

What were some of the main tipping points (if any) or a-ha moments? How did the tipping points happen?

The first a-ha moment was when I snapped my phone onto my controller for the first time. I found myself playing games for hours, and really enjoying the experience. I stayed up all night bending plastic and trying out different shapes until I arrived at a design I thought was efficient and presentable.

The second a-ha moment was when I posted a video of my prototype and started pre-orders. I realized there actually was a demand for my creation. I used the pre-orders to fund my first batch of plastic.

The third a-ha moment came when I realized that I couldn’t continue hand-making the GameKlip forever. I spent all my money on a mold so I didn’t have to make the GameKlip by hand anymore. I couldn’t afford a mold for every phone, so I cut the product line down to just two versions, a model for the Galaxy S3, and a universal solution. The community met the new models with open arms and demand increased immensely.

My final a-ha moment was when I could finally contract my assembly process. I was able to use some of the funds generated from the new molded version to contract out an assembly line. Now that my production process was scalable beyond the hours I could put in myself, the GameKlip was finally ready for retail distribution.

What were your biggest mistakes, or biggest wastes of time / money?

About half of my time was spent struggling with my spreadsheets and dealing with the post office, instead of focusing on my product, so I wish I found solutions to those earlier.

It’s easy to say that I should have streamlined my manufacturing earlier, but each step along the way was a learning experience. If I had jumped into contract manufacturing and assembly earlier, it’s very possible that I would have taken on too much. If I had unlimited units to sell, with no ecommerce platform to sell them on, it would have been a disaster.

Key manufacturing and marketing lessons learned?

Keep things local. To find a manufacturer, I started with a simple Google search. I found that there was an injection molding company right across the street from one of the restaurants I frequent, but unfortunately their machines were all booked. Even though they weren’t able to take on my project, I was able to use their 3d printer for my prototypes, and they pointed me in the right direction for finding another company that could produce the part.

If you’re just starting out, I’d suggest doing some local searches and talking to as many people as possible. I started by calling a local shop that supplied plastic sheets for home projects. I described my idea, and asked if they knew anyone in the area that could help me make it happen. I found that most people were more than happy to spend a few minutes on the phone to help.

Try searching for a “rapid prototyping” shop in your area. They’ll be able to help make some physical prototypes of your product, and most will have connections with companies that can handle the manufacturing when you’re ready.

When I did get all my manufacturing processes figured out, I was really glad that I kept everything as local as possible. The GameKlip and packaging are made in the USA. It costs a little more to manufacture things here instead of overseas, but the added convenience of being able to drive over and talk to people is incredibly valuable. The packaging is printed, and the units assembled, about half an hour away from my apartment.

As for marketing, I approached that aspect of the company a little differently than most. Instead of making a traditional advertisement, I simply sat down and recorded myself showing the product and explaining what you could do with it. I think it’s important to let the product speak for itself. Everything exploded organically after that.

Any PR wins? Media, well-known users, or company partnerships, etc? How did they happen?

I was an active member on Reddit, and Android forums like XDA Developers, long before I started GameKlip. When I did launch my product, the members of both of those communities definitely helped me spread the word. I couldn’t have done it without them.

The GameKlip has been featured on Gizmodo, The Verge, The Fancy, ABC News, PC World, CNET, Phandroid, Android Authority, Ask Men, as well as many other blogs around the world.

I didn’t make any pitches or hire a marketing firm to get these mentions, they all picked up on my story on their own. In my opinion, having interesting photos of your product is crucial! I made sure I had a somewhat large selection of quality photos available, to make it as easy as possible for writers to feature my story. If I had to do it over again, I would have gone a step further and created a press kit ahead of time. That way it would have been even easier for blogs to pick up on my story.

What software/tools and resources, mentors or groups did you find useful for growing, if any?

The most useful tool to me was Google search. For example, to learn more about international shipping, I simply searched “best way to ship a package overseas” and found that lots of people post on forums with great information. The amount of information stored on forums is incredible!

Software wise, ShipStation is an app which allowed me to automatically pull orders from my online store and create shipping labels. Before I found this I was copying and pasting addresses into the USPS website manually. Now I click one button and the invoices come out of one printer and the shipping labels come out of another. The order processing efficiency still amazes me every morning!

If you were to do it all over again, what would you do differently?

Having a real shipping system and the hardware to back it up (a label printer), would have helped a lot. My two most prized possessions at this point are a shipping label printer and an automatic tape dispenser. When I first started I was running sticker paper through my home printer, cutting the labels out with scissors, and using tape from my local office supply store. I managed to ship over a thousand packages this way, but I could have saved a huge amount of time and money if I adopted a better system earlier.

Any other advice to people starting their first online businesses?

Don’t feel like you need to know everything, or that everything has to be perfect before you start. I knew nothing about running a business, had no idea how to have something manufactured, and had no idea how to ship a package overseas. I’ve now shipped thousands of units to over 80 countries worldwide. It won’t be easy, there’ll be many points where you feel like giving up, but it’s worth it.

What’s next?

I am still pushing forward at full speed. I hope to have the GameKlip on store shelves around the world.

Design, Art & Home Category Winner: GoldieBlox

Who are you and what is your Shopify store?

Debra Sterling, Founder of GoldieBlox

Describe your product in 1-3 sentences.

GoldieBlox is a book series and construction toy starring Goldie, the girl engineer. Throughout Goldie’s adventures, she encounters problems she needs to solve by building simple machines. As kids read along, they get to build along with Goldie, learning basic engineering principles with each story.

How much revenue is your company currently generating per month (on average)?

Over 300K per month.

To get to this revenue number, how long did it take after the idea struck?

About 6 months.

How did you decide on your product? What ideas did you consider but reject, and why?

When I first started, a lot of advisors were telling me to ditch the idea of a toy entirely and just do an app. I decided to do a physical toy (in addition to an app, which we are launching around x-mas this year) because I felt that the tactile experience of building things was a better way to introduce mechanical engineering principles. Screen play alone just doesn’t do it justice.

My earliest toy sketches were girly Legos… curved shapes, tiny decorative pieces, girly themes like princess castles and stuff (a lot like the Lego Friends line of girl construction toys that just launched, actually). I ditched this idea because I felt like it was reinforcing all the same old gender stereotypes. I wanted to push the envelope and develop an idea that didn’t rely on those stereotypes to engage girls. I knew that little girls are more than just princesses and that I could make something different and empowering that they’d fall in love with.

What were some of the main tipping points (if any) or a-ha moments? How did the tipping points happen?

My big ‘a-ha’ moment came when I realized I needed to incorporate a book into the game element. I did extensive research into the differences between the learning styles of boys and girls. I met with neuroscientists and teachers, and I spent a lot of time playing with kids. I asked kids to bring me their favorite toy. Girls would always bring me a book. Boys would bring me a toy. After the fifth girl brought me a book, I decided I needed to blend the construction components of my boardgame with a story. This was a huge ‘a-ha’ moment for me because it significantly changed the direction of my toy.

What were your biggest mistakes, or biggest wastes of time / money?

My biggest waste of money so far was when I first hired a law firm. I met with a few different law firms and I felt really, really good about one with whom I really connected. I liked the lawyer, but he was expensive and because I had limited capital, I hired a cheaper law firm I didn’t like as much. I almost instantly regretted my choice. I eventually had to leave the cheaper law firm and went with my original choice. The cheaper firm made me pay money upfront, while the one I eventually went with was willing to defer payment until I was in a stronger financial position. I wasted a lot of money by making the wrong choice.

Key manufacturing and marketing lessons learned?

1. Prototype and test everything! It’s important to prototype everything beforehand. Then test the prototypes on your target demographic. Long before I approached a manufacturer, I designed the toy myself in my living room. I made crude working prototypes using ribbon, clay, wooden dowels, thread spools, Velcro and pegboard from the hardware store. I wrote and illustrated a book where Goldie built a belt drive to spin her friends, and mimicked the action in the book with the physical pieces.

I probably spent a total of $250 on the prototypes. I tested everything on children around the Bay Area – I went to over 40 homes and 3 schools. I observed girls and boys, ages 4-12, interacting with the game. Every time I observed a child and/or parent playing with it, I learned a new insight, which I incorporated into the next version. I quickly iterated and improved the design until it rocked.

2. Be prepared for the manufacturing part to take a long time. The whole process of prototyping and manufacturing is huge. Example: I sketched out detailed drawings and dimensions for each piece of the board game, but I needed the drawings in CAD. One afternoon, I snuck into an Industrial Designers Society of America “happy hour” to try and find an industrial designer who could assist me. I met a really talented engineer there who was passionate about my mission and agreed to help. Then, I needed the prototypes to be printed, so we used 3D printing technology to take them to the next level. I hired a professional sculptor to create the character figurines to match my drawings. I sent everything to the factory, and they made a manufacturer’s sample. Once I approved the sample, we began the tooling process, which is timely and expensive. It took several months of back-and-forth revisions of the plastic parts until the tolerances were perfect. This resulted in a lot of hair pulling. We are still tweaking the molds. Nevertheless, we finally hit the green light and went into production on a first run of 40,000 toys to fulfill our pre-orders from Kickstarter and our website. Seriously, you can’t underestimate the time that manufacturing takes.

3. Decide if you’re an entrepreneur or an inventor. When I started out I was incredibly secretive because I didn’t want anyone to steal my idea. But then a friend asked me if I wanted to be an inventor or an entrepreneur. An inventor works by themselves in a lab, but an entrepreneur needs to inspire others to lend their expertise. I realized that I needed help. I went out and found the best mentors in the fields I was working in and asked for their help. I had to be specific about what I needed and asked them exactly what I wanted them to do. I was amazed at how much help I got! I saved so much time and money by getting help from someone who had been in the toy business for 30 years.

4. Create an authentic and emotional story behind your product. When it comes to my marketing strategy, I am a brand-driven person and I believe that the most important thing is creating an authentic and emotional story and brand. We’re more than a product, we’re a social mission and I like to give the product a face and personality (mine!) For example, our decision to launch on Kickstarter wasn’t about raising funds. We used it as a platform for sharing our story in a video format. Because then it wasn’t: “Hey! Here’s this toy for girls,” it was: “Hey, here’s this female engineer who is trying to do something about a problem in our society.”

5. Plan your Kickstarter exit strategy. We started on Kickstarter, but a lot of these products just fizzle out when their campaign has ended. We started our Shopify store ahead of time so that people who missed the Kickstarter campaign could still participate. My online store was my saving grace because my video went viral and my shop was up and running to capitalize on the publicity. My online store far exceeded the sales I had made on Kickstarter.

Any PR wins? Media, well-known users, or company partnerships, etc? How did they happen?

Our first PR win happened very early, in fact months before we even launched. I was still in the earliest prototyping stages, but I created a blog to share my stories of building GoldieBlox with friends and family. A friend-of-a-friend’s sister found the blog, she was a writer for The Atlantic. Another friend-of-friend found the blog, who happened to be a writer for TechCrunch. I set up phone interviews with both of them and gave them the “exclusive story.” They both posted wonderful pieces about GoldieBlox the day we launched, which created a ton of buzz.

Another win was that we got Tim Schafer (cult video game designer / Kickstarter celebrity) to make a cameo in our Kickstarter video with his 4-year-old daughter. He then tweeted the link to his 90,000 Kickstarter backers. I met Tim through my banker. When I told my banker I was about to go up on Kickstarter, he made the introduction to Tim’s colleague, Justin, who had just joined on board at DoubleFine Productions (they had raised over $3 million dollars on Kickstarter). I arranged a meeting to learn how they’d done it and to get advice. I hung around there a couple times, until I ultimately persuaded Tim to appear in our video.

When we launched on Kickstarter, we had a lot of influential people in tech backing our project: Sheryl Sandberg (COO of Facebook), Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist), Alexis Ohanian (Founder of Reddit), Mayim Bialik (Actress, Big Bang Theory), the list goes on.

We also got written up in Forbes, Huffington Post, The Guardian, Wired, TIME, Ms. Magazine, The Boston Globe, The San Jose Mercury News, interviewed on BBC world radio, and NPR. We didn’t have a PR agency or anything. These reporters simply emailed into “info@goldieblox.com” and we set up the interviews.

But our biggest PR win to date was on November 14, 2012, we call it “G Day.” Eduardo Jackson from upworthy.com posted our Kickstarter video about a month after the campaign had ended. It instantly went viral. In just a couple days, the video spiked to almost a million views. There were so many orders, we literally sold out of our first shipment and had to push back the delivery date.

What software/tools and resources, mentors or groups did you find useful for growing, if any?

StartingBloc, a social entrepreneurship fellowship program, was by far the biggest game-changer for GoldieBlox.

Pacific Community Ventures, connected us with a pro-bono advisor, Sam Allen (founder of ScanCafe) who has been instrumental to our business.

I got to pitch GoldieBlox on the main stage at SOCAP and met really great contacts in the social innovation space.

The books “Lean In” by Sheryl Sandberg and “Start Something That Matters” by Blake MyCoskie both inspired me.

And my mentors: Terry Langston (founder, Pictionary), Brendan Boyle (head of toys, IDEO), Bob Lally (co-founder, Leapfrog), Jake Bronstein (founder, BuckyBalls), and Clara Shih (founder, Hearsay Social) played a huge role in helping me learn about the toy business.

If you were to do it all over again, what would you do differently?

I would ask for help from the start. Also, in the beginning I thought I had to make a range of products, but this spread my team too thin and it wasn’t very realistic. I had this idea that if you are a startup, you have to work around the clock until you just about kill yourself. If I had to do it over again, I would only work on one thing at a time.

What’s next?

This month we’re launching into retail stores. And we’re also very busy developing new products to add to the line.

Fashion & Apparel Category Winner: Fresh-Tops

Who are you and what is your Shopify store?

Nella Chunky, Founder of Fresh-Tops

Describe your product in 1-3 sentences.

Fresh-Tops is high end fashion for hipster trendy teenage females. Our products are inspired by pop culture with a girly twist. We sell everything from leggings, accessories, crop tops, sweaters and anything that our customers requests that makes sense.

How did you decide on your product? What ideas did you consider but reject, and why?

I experimented with a bunch of brands until we found one that really worked. I ended up with my current brand by being inspired by pop culture, and a love for bright colors and creating fun, cute little things. I believe that to be successful in fashion, you have to stay fresh, and that’s where the name Fresh-Tops came from.

What were some of the main tipping points (if any) or a-ha moments? How did the tipping points happen?

My biggest tipping point was realizing how important social media is to the growth of my company. Being able to interact with our customers 24/7 on various social media platforms has been really, really important.

What were your biggest mistakes, or biggest wastes of time / money?

My biggest mistake was with packaging. When I first created Fresh-Tops I was convinced that fancy packaging and the experience of our customers opening our products would increase sales. Nope. Its better to focus on fast delivery and high quality products rather than packaging, which only eat out on your profits. Once our brand became more established it made more sense to invest in pretty packaging.

Key manufacturing and marketing lessons learned?

1. Network. Getting to know people in my industry played a huge role in developing my company. We found all our manufacturers through referrals from personal relationships. Get involved with the market of your specific products. If you’re in the fashion industry go to every fashion event you can.

2. You can’t ignore social media. Our marketing strategy is completely focused on our social media. We use Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram and Twitter to share pictures of our clothing. Then our fans share those pictures with their audiences. This social influence is very powerful. People tend to shop where their friends shop and they feel left out if they’re not involved.

3. Secure your brand name. We keep our ears open for the next popular network, and we’ll then immediately establish accounts. It’s important to do this for two reasons. First, to secure your brand name before someone else gets. Second, you want to be in these social circles in case they catch buzz. For example, there is a lot of buzz around Keek right now. It’s a social site which allows users to post videos no more than 30 seconds long. We don’t know how we’re going to use this as a marketing tool yet, but at least we have reserved our company user name before anybody else could.

Any PR wins? Media, well-known users, or company partnerships, etc? How did they happen?

No company partnerships as of yet but we are looking to partner with a PR firm and a very well known web development company this year.

What software/tools and resources, mentors or groups did you find useful for growing, if any?

We don’t really use any fancy software or tools. You’d be surprised how much you can do with very little integrated software. A couple of my mentors who I study, and who inspire me are Kimora Lee Simmons and Tony Hseish.

Conference wise, learnt a lot from Fashion Week and Stitch Trade Show in Las Vegas.

If you were to do it all over again, what would you do differently?

Our biggest challenges so far have been holiday seasons. During the holiday season, it was tough to keep up with increased demand, so I would have ensured our stock count was big enough.

Any other advice to people starting their first online businesses?

I would really suggest that if you are starting your own business, it’s very important to listen to your customers and use their input to drive the growth of your business. We relied on email requests and suggestions from our social media fans when deciding how to move forward and what items to add to our line, and it worked really well.

The second thing I would say is just do it. Keep experimenting and keep trying different things and different brands until you find something that works. Be versatile and flexible and you’ll learn and grow as you go along. Stick to doing a few things really well and don’t overextend yourself.

What’s next?

This spring we are starting a new line of shorts which are fun and colorful.

Canadian Category Winner: Canadian Icons

Who are you and what is your Shopify store?

Aron Slipacoff, Founder of Canadian Icons

Describe your business in 1-3 sentences.

Canadian Icons is an online museum and store that shares stories about iconic Canadian brands like Canada Goose and Manitobah Mukluks alongside rare objects from Canada’s past. We ship every order overnight for free – and sometimes even faster than that. Our aim was to make our website a place where you can always encounter an inspiring collection of Canadian treasures and find out about organizations working to produce, preserve and protect them.

How did you decide on your product(s)? What ideas did you consider but reject, and why?

We wanted to offer items with incredibly strong connections to Canada’s past. If it was something that really resonated with what could be considered to be truly ‘Canadian,’ and it was something iconic, the decision wasn’t really ours to make—the items and the stories behind them would just speak loud and clear.

The items in the Canadian Icons collection are as relevant now as they were 50 years ago, and they will be just as relevant 50 years from now. And, of course, everything had to be made in Canada.

What were some of the main tipping points (if any) or a-ha moments? How did the tipping points happen?

The only real tipping point was when the media began talking about our unique concept of combining storytelling with online sales.

What were your biggest mistakes, or biggest wastes of time / money?

We spent a lot of time early on pursuing a hard copy version of the Canadian Icons collection. We wanted to make a book that could live in the physical world but the web proved to be a much better medium to tell the stories and conduct business at the same time.

Key manufacturing and marketing lessons learned?

It’s important to learn where you can add value and how you can stand out amongst your competition. We quickly learned that customer service was the way we could really provide value. We saw opportunity to fill a gap with our Canada Goose jackets in particular because our competitors weren’t great on service because the demand for these products is so huge. So we decided to offer the best possible service to our customers. This meant overnight shipping in Canada and 90 minute delivery within 50km of our office. We also decided to offer a full return policy, no questions asked and no postage required. Risky, but ultimately worth it.

Any PR wins? Media, well-known users, or company partnerships, etc? How did they happen?

PR wins: Our PR approach for Canadian Icons was determined right up front, we wanted high quality links for Google juice, and we wanted brand mentions in good publications to help drive traffic and support our reputation. We hired a firm to help with PR and have received lots of positive media mentions in Canada.

Partnerships: First, I developed great historical content. I wrote stories about Canadian icons such as the canoe, the snowshoe, and the Group of Seven. I began to curate a collection of high quality content. Then, I approached national cultural organizations such as the Museum of Civilization and got them on board.

Once I had these great partners and stories in place, I presented an idea to some iconic brands, suggesting that Canadian Icons would be the most authentic Canadian place online to tell their brand stories and offer iconic Canadian products in a new way.

For brands like Canada Goose and Manitobah Mukluks, it was clear early on that they “got it.” Both of these companies take great pride in their product’s deep and unique connection to Canada.

What one thing (knowledge, skill, tool, etc.) would have saved you the most headache if you had it when you just got started?

There really weren’t any headaches. I had a lot of experience in Canadiana, in writing, marketing and PR, and I actually enjoy cold-calling and developing strategic partnerships and building relationships.

The hardest part, for me, was building the business online – the actual coding and backend – but that really wasn’t that difficult.

Any other advice to people starting their first online businesses?

Build it and they will not come! You need to put a lot of work into PR. Get your name out there, get featured in the press, get backlinks. Getting in the media really helped people to get to know us as well, but the links that the media mentions gave us really improved our SEO ranking.

What’s next?

We are going to continue to strive to provide Canadian products delivered in a manner never before seen in Canada, stories and world-class service you can only really get right here at home!

Everything Else Category Winner: SkinnyMe Tea

Who are you and what is your Shopify store?

Gretta Van Riel, Founder of SkinnyMe Tea

Describe your product in 1-3 sentences.

SkinnyMe Tea is an all-natural detox and weight loss program designed to provide fast results and kickstart a healthier you. SkinnyMe Tea is formulated with all-natural, high-potency ingredients rich in antioxidants, vitamins, minerals and fibre. The natural ingredients in SkinnyMe Tea aim to cleanse and detoxify, increase metabolism, assist in the digestion of food, suppress appetite and much more.

How much revenue is your company currently generating per month (on average)?

Over 600K per month.

To get to this revenue number, how long did it take after the idea struck?

It took around 9 months after we launched to reach this revenue; however, as we’re still a very young company (we turn 1 next month) our revenue is still increasing.

How did you decide on your product? What ideas did you consider but reject, and why?

I had a dream about “teatox” one night which gave me the inspiration for the name. When I woke up, I knew that I had a great idea and I started building my business literally the same day. While I have experimented with various ways to package and sell the product, my vision for the product has been the same from the start.

What were some of the main tipping points (if any) or a-ha moments? How did the tipping points happen?

The biggest tipping point is when our revenue from one week was above my yearly wage at my previous job. That’s when it really hit home. I get so excited when we meet targets we never even considered possible when just getting started. I guess it’s time we start setting more challenging goals.

What were your biggest mistakes, or biggest wastes of time / money?

Our biggest mistake was underestimating our rate of growth. We were constantly finding ourselves catching up. Apart from being quite stressful, this meant we had less time to look at the bigger picture and had no time for planning and creating strategies about the new directions our business should be going. That was a big mistake, being able to strategize high-level direction is really important for long-term growth.

Key manufacturing and marketing lessons learned?

1. Make sure you do your research and know which certifications you need. In Australia it’s important to find a manufacturer with TGA (Therapeutic Goods Administration) approval which isn’t always very common for tea manufacturers because tea isn’t often classified as a therapeutic good per say. That was a challenge in itself.

2. Make sure you will be able to scale your business to keep up with increasing demand. When you can afford it, be overstocked rather than under-stocked. In today’s push-button society everybody wants everything yesterday.

3. Social media can work both ways, it drives discussion but not always in the direction you intended. Be ready to deal with negativity, and listen to your customer’s feedback… sometimes that’s more important than the numbers game and driving sales.

4. Take a personal approach to social media. Your overall message should target your key demographic, but your responses should always target the individual.

Any PR wins? Media, well-known users, or company partnerships, etc? How did they happen?

We have a lot of very well known customers but of course for their privacy we cannot reveal who they are. No significant PR or media wins and no company partnerships, we have tried to stay quite low key while getting started.

What software/tools and resources, mentors or groups did you find useful for growing, if any?

We almost exclusively used social media to grow our brand. We found Instagram to be the best tool for us, we now have over 180K followers on Instagram! With social media we are able to harness the broader messages surrounding health and wellbeing and tie them into our marketing. We don’t just talk about the product, we talk about everything in the health industry and emphasis our product as a part of a healthy lifestyle, not a ‘just another diet’ per se.

If you were to do it all over again, what would you do differently?

I would have given us more time to plan things out. If I had anticipated the incredible rate of growth we would be enjoying, I would have embraced it and planned accordingly rather than considering it some sort of fluke that would pass.

What one thing (knowledge, skill, tool, etc.) would have saved you the most headache if you had it when you just got started?

With so many websites around now, it’s really important to be able to give your website an individual look and feel. You should do something to stand out. For example with the ‘Happy Ending’ Shopify app we now add a personal message that says “You’re Amazing!” at the end of checkout. Although it’s a small thing, it’s a nice personal touch which our customers have responded really well to.

Any other advice to people starting their first online businesses?

Just do it! Believe in yourself and your vision. Everyone has an idea, turn your dreams into plans before somebody else does!

What’s next?

We’re working on lots of innovative new products and the worldwide distribution of our existing products. We’re really excited for what’s to come.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Thinking of giving it a shot yourself? You don’t need to go it alone.

Check out Shopify’s “Build-A-Business” competition forums, which include all of the questions and answers from the 2012 competition that the above 5 companies won. The forums cover almost every topic imaginable.

Also check out the “Build-A-Business” mentor lesson videos featuring Tim Ferriss (that’s me), Daymond John, Eric Ries, and Tina Roth Eisenberg.

What other questions or topics would you like explored? Please let me know in the comments.

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ODDS AND ENDS ELSEWHERE: $10,000 MEMORY CHALLENGE RESULTS

Here’s another example of a success “recipe”…

The biggest memory competition ever held now has a winner! The competition was co-created by me and Grand Master of Memory Ed Cooke, then announced on this blog — it challenged “ordinary” people to learn to memorize a pack of cards in less than a minute.

Irina Zayats, a 24 year-old Ukrainian woman, showed just how quickly a brain can be trained. Miss Zayats had no previous experience using memory techniques, but she learned to perform the gold standard of memory skills (memorizing a shuffled deck of cards) in just five days. In doing so, she won $10,000 and, to her surprise, a job offer from Memrise, the learning platform that ran the competition.

Keep in mind that the American record for this feat was, until recently, 1 minute 40 seconds. And those were trained competitors!

So, how did Irina do it? Here’s the full blog post, and an incredible video of her performance is below:

Announcements: Live Q&A Today, $10,000 Memory Challenge, Etc.

Hi All,

This post is simply a few time-sensitive announcements. More juicy content (really fun stuff) coming in the next post.

LIVE AND FREE Q&A TODAY! – 2 HOURS LONG, ASK ME ANYTHING

I’m doing a live two-hour Q&A session today — please join me!

Just go to this Facebook page, click “Like”, and ask me whatever you like. Here are the details:

Date: Today, April 22, Monday

Time: 4:30-6:30 PM EST (1:30-3:30 PM PST)

Where: This Facebook page



$10,000 MEMORY CHALLENGE RESULTS

The biggest memory competition ever held now has a winner. Co-created by me and Grand Master of Memory Ed Cooke, then announced on this blog, it challenged “ordinary” people to learn to memorize a pack of cards in less than a minute.

Irina Zayats, a 24 year-old Ukrainian woman, showed just how quickly a brain can be trained. Miss Zayats had no previous experience using memory techniques, but she learned to perform the gold standard of memory skills (memorizing a shuffled deck of cards) in just five days. In doing so, she won $10,000 and, to her surprise, a job offer from Memrise, the learning platform that ran the competition.

How did she do it? Here’s the full blog post, and an incredible video of her performance is below:

How to Create a Viral Book Trailer (or Get 1,000,000 Views for Almost Anything)

How do you create a viral video?

I am asked this quite a lot. I’ve been asked by authors, TV producers, and first-time Kickstarter entrepreneurs. In my experience, the answers are the same for all of them.

In this post, I’ll deconstruct one example: The 4-Hour Chef (4HC) book trailer, which is now the most-viewed non-fiction book trailer of all time. Roughly 1.5 million views and counting.

Before we dig in…

First, let’s make a distinction: creating a “viral” video is not the same a creating a “popular” video, but both can be valuable.

If you use ads to drive 1,000,000+ views, a video is not viral; it is popular. If your views come from organic sharing (or incentivized sharing like DropBox), it can be considered viral.

This post is also intended as a companion to my post, Behind the Scenes: How to Make a Movie Trailer for Your Product (or Book), which goes into equipment, planning, and (tons of) other details that I’ve omitted here.

For later — below are resources that will save you a TON of time and tail-chasing…

Feel free to skip the box for now if you like:

VIRALITY RESOURCES:

YouTube Channel stats – http://vidstatsx.com/

Viral video chart – http://viralvideochart.unrulymedia.com/all

Trending videos – http://www.youtube.com/trendsdashboard

Good blog posts on the topic, probably in this order:

-http://gawker.com/5912376/

-http://www.socialh.com/a-little-bit-of-math-measuring-virality/

-http://tinyurl.com/bnowj55

Outlets that cover trends and tools in online video well:

-Reelseo.com

-Tubefilter.com

-http://newmediarockstars.com/

YouTube Creator Playbooks

– http://www.youtube.com/yt/playbook/index.html

– http://www.youtube.com/yt/playbook/guides.html

Now, without further ado, here’s how we got ~1.5 million views for my latest book trailer…

Step 1: Storyboarding

This is like creating a comic book for the trailer, scene by scene. It’s the same process used by Pixar, among many others (video example here).

Here was my first stab for 4HC:

Click here to enlarge the below.

Click here to enlarge the below.

Optional Step 2: If Budget Allows, Assemble a Team

For the 4HC trailer, I brought in several specialists to help with production and promotion.

Please note that a team is nice-to-have and not must-have insurance. To date, my most viral video had zero budget. Here’s what gets you 4-5 million views:

That said, I like to tilt the odds in my favor whenever possible. Here’s my A-Team for doing so when funds allow:

- Directing and post-production – Adam Patch

- PR strategy and implementation – Ryan Holiday and BrassCheck

- Marketing, YouTube influencers, and experimental campaigns – Mekanism (Thanks, Jason and team!)

But how do you choose someone like Adam, if it’s not Adam? You ask for proposals, of course.

Typically, before you hire a production lead like Adam (who also acts as a general contractor for the production team), they will put together a proposal or “treatment”, which includes an itemized budget.

For 4HC, since I’d worked with Adam before, things started with my storyboarding and an in-person lunch with Adam.

Below is the 4HC “treatment,” cobbled together from our subsequent emails and conversations. It gives you a good idea of what you might expect you see:

4-Hour Chef video trailer Treatment

Step 3: Shot List and Logistics

Once you agree on look and feel, you have to roll up your sleeves: it’s time to scout locations, find talent (if needed), and choose specific shots for a to-do list (the “shot list”) that you check off as you film.

Special thanks to Chris Young and the amazing ChefSteps team for letting us use their Mr. Wizard-like food lab in Seattle. We shot the entire trailer in Seattle as a result. Here’s the kind of fun we had (see first 15 secs):

Our full shot list is below. Note that “CU” stands for “close-up”, and “TT” stands for “tabletop”.

View this document on Scribd
Step 4: Shooting Principal Footage

Not much to say here, other than shoot a TON of material when you have the chance. It’s easier to edit down than to add extra shooting days.

Below an example of original footage that will be magically changed in the next step. Here we used one of my favorite books as a stand in:

Step 5 – Editing

The first step is to cut down hours of footage into 120 or fewer seconds. This is tough but important work.

If you make the finished product look polished enough for broadcast, you might have opportunities (or make opportunities) to get it on major TV. Here’s the process I used to get bookings.

The 4-Hour Chef trailer was featured as my introduction on everything from Dr. Oz to The Hallmark Channel. It’s the perfect adrenaline rush and sales pitch wrapped into one. Especially for short-form TV interviews — typically 3-4 minutes total, with multiple hosts — you’ll be strained to get a word in edgewise. It’s fantastic to let your video hit the talking points, doing the sales job for you.

Now you have a “rough cut” of the trailer. This is first draft, without graphics or special effects.

Once the footage, cuts, and order of scenes is agreed upon, you arrive at “picture lock,” which means that the footage and length can’t be changed. Only at this point does it make sense for anyone to create time-consuming graphics, animation, or sync’d music. Something like this, for instance:

Here’s the complete progression from first “draft” to finished product. Can you tell what changes in each version?

Now that you’ve taken a shot, here’s the full commentary from Adam, taking you though it step-by-step:

And how exactly does Adam work his magic?

Let’s watch how Adam edits the opening atrium scene in The 4-Hour Body trailer, which also has roughly 1,000,000 views. But first, take a look at the finished trailer and notice the opening shot of me at my desk:

Now, we go behind the scenes:

Step 6 – Music

For The 4-Hour Body trailer, I chose music first (Splinter by Sevendust), which I then set visuals to. This turned out to be a licensing headache marathon, and I explain the whole how-to process here. And that was with the band offering it for free! For this new 4HC video, we had custom music produced after the video was complete. The talented Luis Dubuc provided a sync’d jam, and we were ready to roll. No fuss, no muss.

Custom music need not be expensive, and you can even use crowdsourcing with start-ups like Audiodraft. I’ve used them before as well (see here and here).

Step 7 – Launch and Promote

First, a super basic note on uploading. ENSURE YOUR VIDEO CAN BE VIEWED ON MOBILE DEVICES!

25% of global YouTube views come from mobile devices. I screwed this up for The 4-Hour Body trailer, and I’ve been unable to reverse the mistake and make it viewable on mobile; as a result, I’ve lost hundreds of thousands of views.

No option to change — shite!

So, avoid being a dumb-ass like me and get it right the first time. Back to launching once you’ve uploaded…

The 4-Hour Chef trailer premiered on HuffPo, then it was reposted to my blog here. When I announced the post my Facebook fan page, we promoted it through FB’s paid mechanism. Notice that this was all done on 11/7/12 and 11/8/12 — roughly two weeks before official book launch on 11/20/12.

One of the most effective promotions I did was a unique BitTorrent bundle of 680MB+ of free content. For the super-low labor involved, it drove fantastic numbers:

Watched the trailer on YouTube: 293K people

Visited the author’s website: 325K people

Visited the book’s Amazon page: 852K people

But that was just one piece of the YT traffic puzzle.

When it comes to YouTube, you need to realize what you’re up against in terms of noise: 72 hours of video are uploaded every minute. To capitalize on the opportunity (it’s the second largest search engine in the world), you need to plan. Spray and pray almost never works — your competition is too good.

So, what to do?

First off, do not split your ammo. If you’re considering ads to help drive traffic, do it when it counts: the first 24 hours, when you can combine it with all PR for a synergistic effect. Momentum begets momentum, and early success begets later success. I often pile nearly all book launch media/interviews into a 5-7 day period (Check out this madness).

Team Mekanism was responsible for 99% of all my YT-related PR and directly and indirectly 50%+ of traffic. BitTorrent and my PR that week make up the rest. Mekanism combined extensive PR outreach with early judicious use of TrueView ads and StumbleUpon traffic (Disclosure: I advise StumbleUpon).

Here’s Mekanism’s explanation of what they did, first as PDF with screenshots, then as text:

4 hour chef coverage from Mekanism

Bolded emphasis below is mine:

To help support Tim’s book launch, Mekanism took a three tiered approach: connecting him to relevant online influencers, hosting a contest on Pinterest (to expand his exposure among the female demographic), and promoted content within Slideshare.

[TIM: Slideshare is hugely underused for product launches. We used it for The 4-Hour Body as well.]

Online Influencers:

To drive widespread awareness of The 4-Hour Chef, Mekanism reached out to credible online influencers to help drive word-of-mouth. Mekanism reached out to bloggers and YouTubers across a variety of verticals relevant to each of the different chapters within the book. For example:

• Food Enthusiasts

• Male Lifestyle

• Science + Tech Bloggers

• Mom Bloggers

• Lifehackers

In researching outlets and people, Mekanism took an approach very similar to that outlined by Mike Del Ponte in his Hacking Kickstarter post. The key is establishing relationships, and ensuring your content/message is tailored to each individual blogger’s audience. To accomplish this, Mekanism not only crafted custom pitches, but also provided a wealth of assets that could be freely used: exclusive excerpts, interviews with Tim (live or recorded), his video book trailers, images, etc.

Without a doubt, the most engaged audiences were those of several YouTube stars/channels, specifically SourceFed & WheezyWaiter. These appearances led to thousands of comments and likes and contributed to YouTube being the second largest traffic drive to Tim’s target landing pages.

Slideshare:

We wanted to see if it was possible to get a deck outlining the benefits of the 4-Hour Chef on the homepage of Slideshare, vis a vis having it rank on Slideshare’s ‘Top Presentation’s of the Day’ section. Slideshare was chosen because it has a well-educated and affluent user base that matches the target consumer of The 4-Hour Chef (69% college grads, 37% have $100k+ HHI).

First, a Slideshare deck was created to outline the benefits/chapters of 4HC. Next, we did the math to determine how many views, and in what period of time, were needed to drive the into the ‘Top Presentation’s of the Day’ section. Based on our observations, it seemed as though 15,000 views within a 24-hour period was likely enough.

Having this understanding of required viewing density, we uploaded our deck and promoted it via paid StumbleUpon ads and drove the content to the homepage of Slideshare via “stumbles,” ensuring everyone visiting the site the day of launch saw the presentation.

Keep in mind that the sum is greater than the parts. Here are more of the parts, written in a report to Tim:

“Slideshare Presentation

- Made the ‘Hot on Facebook’ and ‘Hot on Twitter’ section (on homepage)

- Was ‘Featured’ (also on homepage)

- Peaked as 2nd most popular presentation last night

Sourcefed Video

-#3 most liked & top favorited ‘How To & Style’ video of the day

-#5 most viewed ‘How To & Style’ video of the day

-#65 top favorited & most liked video on YouTube today (of all videos across all categories)”

BLOG COVERAGE

http://sourcefednews.com/workout-systems-roundup/

http://www.tubefilter.com/2012/11/19/tim-ferriss-book-trailer-youtube-4-hour-chef/

http://www.dannyroddy.com/main/my-interview-with-bad-ass-mother-fucker-tim-ferriss

http://www.tubefilter.com/2012/11/19/tim-ferriss-book-trailer-youtube-4-hour-chef/

http://www.insidehook.com/nation/tim-ferriss/

http://gearpatrol.com/2012/11/21/tim-ferriss-the-4-hour-chef/

http://www.5minutesformom.com/67553/an-interview-with-tim-ferriss-author-of-the-4-hour-chef/

http://newmediarockstars.com/2012/11/tim-ferriss-interview/

YOUTUBE INFLUENCERS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ggiUlMujSE&list=UU_gE-kg7JvuwCNlbZ1-shlA&index=2&feature=plcp

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olSnJC3juXw&feature=youtu.be

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw7nZmqiH1I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J8fiuG7z-I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAJBnwBxAWs

The goal of all of this, of course, is to build a rapid view count number that pushes the trailer above the noise. This then propagates into additional organic sharing, all of which sells books.

###

So, those are the basics of stacking the deck in your favor for online video. Most posts on “virality” are vague generalities, so I wanted to dig into the weeds. Hopefully you like this.

Are there any other details you’d like to see, or questions you’d like answered? Please let me know in the comments.

How to (Really) Make $1,000,000 Selling E-Books – Real-World Case Studies

Who will be the JK Rowling of self-publishing? Better still: who will be the legions who make an extra $1,000-$1,000,000 per year? (Photo: The Telegraph, UK)

This is a guest post by Ryan Buckley and the team at Scripted. I have added my own tools and recommendations after “TIM” throughout the piece.

Enter Ryan Buckley and Team

Barry Eisler writes thrillers about a half-Japanese, half-American freelance assassin named John Rain. John Rain is the consummate anti-hero, a whiskey swilling, jazz-loving former CIA agent battling crippling paranoia as he adventures around the globe. Readers love John Rain, so much so that they’ve landed Barry Eisler and seven of his John Rain books on the New York Times Bestseller list. [TIM: Here's how the different bestseller lists work.]

Having conquered all that needs to be conquered in the world of commercial publishing, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Eisler’s publisher offered him $500,000 deal for a new two-book deal.

The surprise was that Eisler turned down the deal and decided to tackle self-publishing instead.  In a freewheeling discussion with self-publishing expert Joe Konrath, Eisler says:

“I know it’ll seem crazy to a lot of people, but based on what’s happening in the industry, and based on the kind of experience writers like you are having in self-publishing, I think I can do better in the long term on my own.”

We asked Eisler for a current update, and he told us that this month (March 2013), he expects to sell 8,000 copies of his 10 self-published novels and stories, which are priced $1-5 each. Despite self-publishing his first story only two years ago, it appears he’s made the right decision. With roughly $300,000 in royalties per year, he already beat his publisher’s offer…

The writing on the wall couldn’t be any clearer: the publishing world is changing fast. 

Getting a publishing contract has long been the first litmus test of a writer’s success. Writers spend years in the wilderness accumulating rejections before finding a single buyer (advances usually start at $1,000 to $10,000). Even The 4-Hour Workweek was rejected 20+ times before it got an offer.

But conventional publishing isn’t the only game in town anymore.

Self-published authors are increasingly landing on the NYT bestseller list and hog a fair share of Amazon’s top-20 list. Amanda Hocking became a self-publishing multi-millionaire with her teen supernatural thrillers before bagging a $2M publishing contract with St. Martin’s Press. John Locke sold $2M worth of eBooks before landing a deal with Simon & Schuster.

All this means that perhaps you don’t need a contract to validate you… now or in the future.

Why eBooks, Why Now?

The numbers don’t lie: Amazon now sells more eBooks than printed books. Kindle sales topped 1 million per week by the end of last year. More than 20% of publishing giant Random House’s revenues last year were from digital sales.

[TIM: Here are my personal stats -- the percentage of total sales from ebooks for each of my books, limited to their first year on-sale:

April 2007 pub date - original 4HWW - less than 1%

Dec 2009 pub date - revised and expanded 4HWW - approximately 21%

Dec 2010 pub date - 4HB - approximately 31%

Nov 2013 pub date - 4HC - will surpass 50% by November 2013]

Amazon is at the forefront of this publishing revolution. Through the Kindle eReader and the Kindle eBook store, it has given indie authors a platform to get published and gather an audience. As a $100-billion-plus market cap e-commerce juggernaut, Amazon already has a substantial user base (as per comScore, 282.2 million people visited Amazon.com in June 2011 – or roughly 20% of the total internet traffic). Coupled with high royalty rates (70% compared to 10-15% for traditional publishers), it is the perfect platform for a fledgling writer to make a living, and if fate agrees, even a fortune.

The path to becoming a Kindle millionaire isn’t easy, but it’s possible to tilt the odds in your favor by following best practices. [TIM: Becoming a millionaire using non-Kindle ebooks is arguably even easier -- here's one $1,000,000/month example.]

This how-to post will look at general principles and lessons from real-world successes.

Understanding Amazon and Niche Selection

The first step is market research.

Your first order of the day should be to spend a few hours around the Amazon Kindle marketplace. Browse through the top sellers, be generous with your clicks and read up as much as you can – user reviews, book descriptions, Amazon’s editorial reviews (if any). You want to get an intuitive feel for the market, what sells, what doesn’t. How many non-fiction books end up in the top 10? What genre do they belong to? What is the average price of a Kindle bestseller? What do their covers look like? How many reviews do they have? What is the average rating? What is the correlation between rating and current ranking?

[TIM: For what it's worth, much like Hugh Howey, I write about what I love or would love to learn about. Here's how I did preliminary market research for The 4-Hour Chef:

- I polled my 400,000+ followers on Twitter and Facebook with questions like “What are your favorite 2 or 3 cookbooks?” and “If you were starting over, which 2 or 3 books would get you most excited while learning fundamentals?”

- I then used virtual assistants via Taskrabbit.com to create a list of those titles that pop up more than 3 times. I also asked professional chefs the same questions and cross-referenced the lists.

- Once I had the repeat contenders (let’s assume 20 titles), I headed to Amazon, where I did 2 things:

1. First, I identified the titles on my list that have an average review of 4 stars or higher.

2. Second, I read the “most helpful” critical reviews from those titles, aiming to focus on 3-star ratings, whenever possible. If not, I look for 4-star. The 1- and 2-star are usually written by people who hate everything (look at their other reviews if you

doubt me), and the 5-star reviews tend not to go into detail. From the “most helpful” 3–4-star reviews, I compile a list of:

A) Things “missing” or deficient in even the best books. These are opportunities for me to do or explore something new. For instance, even the best-selling BBQ books were criticized for omitting the “heart and soul of BBQ”: short ribs and brisket. This meant I naturally had to include at least one.

B) I download all 20 books onto my Kindle and read the “Popular Highlights” in each, sorted by “Most Popular.” This often allows me

to read 20–50 pages instead of 300, 500, or even 1,000 pages. Then I can deep dive only where I love what I see. If you don't like the movie trailer, you're certainly not going to like the book the highlights were pulled from.

But this begs the question: how do you go about selecting your niche in the first place?

I’m tempted to say: pick a niche you actually enjoy reading. But this may not always be the best advice. I enjoy reading complicated literary novels and obscure texts in linguistics, but they’re hardly the stuff best sellers are made of. Your niche selection should be in-line with market demands. This is why spending time in the Amazon marketplace is important: it will tell you which niches are popular and which are not.

[TIM: To really determine what will sell and what will not, I highly recommend reading this step-by-step method by Noah Kagan. He built two multi-million-dollar businesses before age 28 using similar methodologies.]

Once you have your niche, spend some time researching your ideal buyer. See where they hang out, how active they are online, what is their average age and income, and what motivates them to buy an eBook in the first place? Are they looking for solutions, or are they looking for adventures and story-telling to ease their boredom?

Once you have a faint picture of your ideal buyer, find out what they do and what they consume online. Entrepreneurs will likely hang out at TechCrunch, while productivity folks will have Lifehacker bookmarked. Quantcast is a good tool to understand market demographics better. Just type in the URL of the target site, and you’ll get a fair idea of their demographic make-up. [TIM: You can also get valuable data from Kickstarter projects you find that might attract similar customers -- which sites are sending them the most traffic?]

Be prepared to spend a few hours over a weekend in market research. [TIM: I'll spend weeks doing this, if necessary. I don't truly know my audience until I could make decisions for them.]

A few power tips for niche selection:

- Weight loss and dieting are a perennial Amazon favorite.

- Business books tend to find a lot of favor with readers as well, especially if you can package scattered information into an easy to digest package (example: Personal MBA by Josh Kauffman).

- Reddit is one of the finest sources to research niches and gather ideas. Spend a few hours in /r/Fitness and its related sub-reddits (/r/leangains, /r/paleo) and you’ll come up with dozens of ideas for a book (example: The Butter and Bacon Diet: Losing Weight With Keto, inspired by /r/keto). This is a nice list of sub-reddits arranged by popularity.

- Don’t go niche-hopping. Stick to one niche and dominate it with a flood of quality content. There are dozens and dozens of ideas scattered all over the Internet. Research these ideas, agglomerate them into comprehensible forms, and synthesize them into consumable format, and you’ll have your eBook. [TIM: This isn't my approach, but it can be done well, even with public domain materials.]

Creating the eBook

This can be the hardest or the easiest part of becoming a Kindle publisher, depending on your comfort level with writing. Writing the eBook yourself can be incredibly fun if you enjoy the creative process, or a mind-numbing chore if you don’t.

[TIM: Writing a book shouldn't be used to determine if you like (or can at least handle) writing. Try and publish a chapter-length (3,000-5,000 words) blog post a week for a month. If you can't do that, don't commit to a book, IMHO. To improve your craft, I suggest On Writing by Stephen King, Bird by Bird, and On Writing Well.]

Alternatively, you can outsource the entire project. But before you jump into the fray, there are a few key steps to consider:

- Brainstorm the title of the book. Along with the cover, your title is the most visible aspect of your book. Dig through the bestseller list in your targeted niche to see how top books are titled, and consider following their lead. [TIM: I actually test both titles and subtitles using cheap Google Adwords campaigns.]

- Brainstorm angles and approaches to the content. What makes your book unique among the competition? What new perspective are you bringing to the niche? How can you deliver most value to your readers?

- Create a detailed outline of the entire eBook. Map everything out, from the introduction to the concluding paragraph. Look to the best selling books in your niche for inspiration and advice on structure and organization. You should have a thorough outline detailing the style, tone and content of each chapter.

[TIM: I typically break my books into 3-5 "sections" which are then broken down into chapters. I use the program Scrivener to map this out. Each chapter has a beginning, middle, and end like a magazine article. Each of them should be independently self-sufficient. This makes the book easier for me to write if I hit a block... and it makes the book easier to read. I can write chapters out of order, and readers can consume them out of order.]

- While it’s necessary to strive for quality and push conventions aside, it is also important to be practical in your approach. You might aspire to write avant-garde literary novels, but that’s hardly the stuff best-sellers are made of. The key is to write an astounding book in a niche that sells. This, of course, doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice on quality; Max Brooks’ “World War-Z” piggybacked on the zombie apocalypse trend, and yet found a way to comment on compelling present day social and political issues. Now it’s a major film starring Brad Pitt.

If you want to write the book yourself, as Tim would have it, there are a few things you can do to sharpen your skills:

- Become a master of the Snowflake Method. Essentially, it means building a comprehensive ‘map’ of your book – character backstories, narrative arcs, plausible scenarios – before you write a single word. It flies in the face of all conventional notions of ‘creative inspiration,’ but it can be deadly effective at writing superior novels with strong narrative arcs, especially in genre fiction. The Snowflake Method has been devised by author Randy Ingmerson, who has used it himself in all six of his best-selling novels.

- Storytelling is a craft, and like any other craft, it too can be mastered with practice. Barry Eisler, who has tackled both legacy and self-publishing (and succeeded wildly), suggests a reading of three books – Stein on Writing: A Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies by Sol Stein, Learning to Write Fiction from the Masters, by Barnaby Conrad, and Robert McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style and Principles of Screenwriting to improve the craft of storytelling. [TIM: I personally favor Save the Cat for fiction/screenwriting.]

- Learn from fellow self-published authors. Eisler recommends the blog of novelist J.A. Konrath, who has been self-publishing since 2004 and recording his experiences on the blog. Eisler says, “I think anyone even considering self-publishing ought to be reading Joe, and if you’re not interested in self-publishing, you should read him just to be sure you understand the pros and cons of the various publishing options available today.” Eisler also has a list of indie author blogs on his website that can help you understand the self-publishing process.

- Learn from the masters: the likes of Stephen King, Nicholas Sparks, and Robert Ludlum have spent a lifetime perfecting their craft. Comb through their novels diligently. See how they create tension, withhold information to create suspense, and write dialogues. The more you read, the better you will become at grasping the essence of a good novel.

- Create a writing schedule and stick to it. Set aside at least an hour or two for writing each day. This is the hardest part about writing a successful novel, simply because it requires discipline and commitment. Most writers don’t succeed because they give-up midway. Don’t be that writer. [TIM: Most of my friends who are consistently good writers write between 10pm-8am. This means they either go to be really late -- I do my best work between 11pm-5am -- or they wake up really early. It's easier to concentrate when the rest of the world is asleep.]

Otherwise, it’s time to find freelancers to finish your project:

- Insist on a Skype interview before you hire anyone. Pay careful attention to their command of language. Also pay attention to how well they ask you questions.

- Ask them difficult questions: What is their prior experience with writing eBooks? What’s their best and worst published work and why? What mistakes have they made, professionally and creatively?

- Speak with references and include: “He/she seems great. I like them. Of course, all people have strengths and weaknesses. If you had to choose theirs, what would they be?”

- If they pass the above, give them your detailed brief and outline in full. The more information your writer has, the better the finished product will be.

- Consider payment on a chapter-by-chapter basis until a strong working relationship is established.

- Last but not least, have them sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement.

Formatting the eBook for Kindle

You’ll most likely write your eBook as a Word document. Converting a. docx/.doc file to the Kindle format is relatively straight forward with Amazon’s conversion tools. Amazon itself has a comprehensive guide on formatting a book for Kindle.

The key things to keep in mind when formatting are:

1. File size: files larger than 50mb cannot be converted to the Kindle format. Remember that Amazon’s delivery costs are approximately $0.15/mb. The larger the file size, the higher these costs. Compress the document as much as possible before uploading it to Amazon for the conversion process.

2. Amazon has a comprehensive guide to building a book for Kindle that covers every aspect of formatting – creating front matter, table of contents, etc. This is a free eBook that can be downloaded here.

3. The catalog/cover image is crucial for sales. Here’s Amazon’s online guide on how to create the cover.

Designing the Cover

Never judge a book by its cover, they say. On Amazon, however, your cover will go a long way towards setting you apart from the self-published pap that usually litters the Kindle store. If you’ve done your market research right, you already know what I’m talking about: badly formatted books with covers that look like Photoshop disasters and a child’s scribbling in MS paint dominate the low-end of the market.

A quality cover is proof that you’ve put thought and effort into the book – a good signal for a prospective buyer. [TIM: Also think in terms of thumbnail size -- will it grab attention as a tiny image on a handheld device? You won't have a nice big hardcover to show it off. Think like an app designer choosing an icon for the iPhone.]

Depending on your budget and Photoshop skills, you can either design the cover yourself ($0), or outsource it ($5 to $395).

OPTION A: DESIGNING THE COVER YOURSELF

Unless you are a Photoshop whiz, I don’t recommend this option. If you must cut corners and design the cover yourself, I recommend keeping things simple: grab a high quality image from Shutterstock that echoes the generic conventions of your niche and write your book title in an appropriate font. For inspiration, head to the Book Cover Archive.

Pro tip: Fonts, like images in a cover, echo the established values of a genre. Fonts in romance novels are usually florid, while those in thrillers and weight loss books are more contemporary. Make sure that you use fonts that adhere to genre conventions.

OPTION B: OUTSOURCING THE COVER DESIGN

Pick your poison:

Cheap: Set up a competition on 99designs to crowdsource your eBook cover. Prices can range from $50 to $500. OR, hire an established, experienced book cover designer. You can easily find a ton of these on sites like AuthorSupport or Damonza.

Cheaper: For $20-50, hire a designer from oDesk to design a cover for you.

Cheapest: For $5, get a cheap cover from Fiverr.

Marketing and Promoting Your Book

So you’ve written your book, you’ve formatted it for Kindle, and you have a gorgeous cover image to entice readers.

Now it’s game time.

Marketing is what separates the successful Kindle publishers from the also-rans who hug the bottom of the sales charts.

Self-publishing essentially inverts the traditional publishing model, where publishers publish the book, then get the media to drum up enthusiasm before the public can pass it along through word-of-mouth. Self-published authors must do this entire process in reverse: they must get people interested in their books before they actually publish the book on Amazon. It requires building relationships with your readers and establishing a sense of community by leveraging social media.

[TIM: I'll keep this note short. Here's how to create a high-traffic blog (1MM+ unique visitors a month) without killing yourself. It's exactly how I built this blog and manage it.]

ESTABLISH A CONSISTENT AUTHOR PROFILE

In the mid-80s, at the height of his literary prowess, Stephen King started writing books under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman. Bachman’s books were failures – Running Man sold only 28,000 copies in its initial print run, but ten times as many when Bachman was outed as a pseudonym for King. The message is obvious enough: readers won’t think twice about buying books from authors they know and recognize.

For amateur authors, this translates into maintaining a consistent author profile across multiple media properties. You are essentially trying to create a personal brand (like Tim’s). Select a good picture and make sure you use it on all author-related websites, including your blog, social media, and Amazon Author Central (more on this below).

START A BLOG

It is 2012; you have no excuses for not running a blog. It is free and downright easy with software like WordPress. The 4-Hour Workweek blog (built using WordPress) was started as a platform to promote a book and foster a community. Today, the blog and its readership are arguably more valuable than the book itself. [TIM: Definitely true.]

Share advice and tips related to your niche. Your blog should serve as a teaser trailer for what’s in store in your book. Be as educative, informative, and creative as you can be. This 4-Hour Workweek blog is a good model to imitate.

[TIM: You don't have to start out sexy! Check out this hideous mess, the earliest version of this blog. It's atrocious.]

HARNESS THE POWER OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Start with the obvious:

- A Facebook page

- A Twitter account

Then the not-so-obvious:

- Do Reddit AMAs on appropriate sub-reddits (here’s a big list).

- Answer questions on Quora related to your niche.

- Do guest posts on niche specific blogs.

- Create author profiles on GoodReads and Amazon Author Central.

- Engage and communicate with fellow writers and readers on forums like Authonomy and Absolute Write.

Barry Eisler advises “not to use social media to sell, but rather to give away useful information and entertaining content for free, and to build relationships thereby. What you do on your Facebook page and Twitter page should be intended to benefit your friends and followers. If they like it, they’ll like you; if they like you, maybe they’ll become interested in your books.”

BECOME A MASTER OF MARKETING

A foundation in conventional and Internet marketing can go a long way in helping you make Kindle sales. Eisler recommends four books on marketing to the aspiring author:

1. Marketing High Technology: An Insider’s View, by Bill Davidow. According to Eisler, “the sixteen factor he (Davidow) looks for in determining whether marketing is likely to be successful are incredibly useful and adaptable to the book industry.”

2. The Dream: How to Promote Your Product, Company or Ideas – and Make a Difference Using Everyday Evangelism, by Guy Kawasaki. Eisler adds, “approaching marketing as evangelism is a brilliant concept, and unusually applicable to books. Recruiting and training evangelists with the power of social media is something any writer intent on commercial success should do.”

3. The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk!, by Al Ries and Jack Trout. [TIM: I love this book. Also don't miss this article, perhaps my fave of all-time: 1,000 True Fans.]

4. Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends and Friends Into Customers, by Seth Godin. Eisler especially recommends Godin’s book, saying that “the concept of what a customer gives you permission to market and where you’re counterproductively overstepping your bounds is hugely important to bookselling, and this short book should be on any self-published author’s short list.”

PRICING, DESCRIPTIONS and REVIEWS

Price is a major advantage self-published authors have over published authors. $0.99 to $2.99 seems to be the sweet spot for self-published works. Amazon offers two royalty structures for its Kindle Direct Publishing program: 35% or 70% royalty. The 70% royalty option is available only a few select countries – including the United States (see the full list here). However, books with 70% royalty must be priced at least 20% lower than their physical counterparts. If you choose the 35% royalty option, you have much more freedom in setting the list price.

70% royalty is perfect for self-published authors who do not have physical books in the Amazon store. $2.99 is the recommended price point since it nets you more than $2 per sale (excluding delivery costs, which start at $0.15/mb) while still keeping the price low enough for impulse buys.

It is also a good idea to give away your book for free initially to jump start sales. You do this by setting the list price as $0.00 and promoting the book’s initial run through social media. If the product is good enough, it will spread through word of mouth and you can alter the list price accordingly.

The book description is important for telling the readers what to expect in the book. This is where you put your blurb and review snippets from bloggers. Look at books in the Amazon Top 100 to see how they capture reader attention and write their blurbs.

[TIM: I'm astonished when authors spend 1-10 years writing a book and then let a junior copyeditor at their publisher write their backcover and inside flap copy. Don't do this! That copy will end up being your "Description" text on Amazon, which is your most important tool for converting browsers to buyers. Good copywriters know that you spend 80% of your time on the headline of an ad. You should spend at least 10x as much time on backcover/flap/"description" copy as you would on an average internal page.]

Reviews are social proof of a book’s quality and a crucial contributing factor to its success. Gathering positive reviews will go a long way in pushing your eBook towards the bestseller charts. Some authors, including John Locke, confessed to buying reviews for money (as per this NYT expose), but it’s a practice that is unethical and looked down upon in the writer community. Your best bet is to leverage your existing relationships with your Twitter followers, blog readers, friends, and relatives to get positive reviews.

Finally, I’ve found that it is profitable in the initial run to release books within a space of a week or a month, so that your readers have something to move onto if they like your work. It also helps to create narrative arcs that span several books (something that can be done with non-fiction as well) to keep readers coming back for more. [TIM: Haha... I personally prefer to take 2-4 years between books and focus on ensuring that each one sells for decades.]

Closing Words

The beauty of Amazon is that once you have enough leverage in the market, you’re essentially working on auto-pilot. Once you are an established presence in the market, your name alone will attract the curious and the faithful. As far as passive income is concerned, it’s hard to beat a portfolio of Kindle books.

[TIM: Or 1 or 2 books that sell forever. Here's how to maximize the odds -- The 12 Main Lessons Learned Marketing The 4-Hour Body.]

Caveat lector: be aware that success through self-publishing is rare and hard fought. Eisler compares publishing to the lottery, where few can get in and even fewer can succeed. The main difference between legacy and self-publishing, he says, is that “the overwhelming majority of writers who couldn’t even get in the door in the legacy world can now publish just as easily as everyone else, but beyond that, so far I’d say the odds of making a living are roughly the same.”

He adds, “fantasizing about making it big in self-publishing is no more crazy than fantasizing about making it big in legacy publishing.”

Here’s to the crazy ones: take action, research, write, sell, repeat.

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Did you like this post? Would you like more of this type of post? If so, please let me know in the comments. Thanks!

ODDS AND ENDS: MEDIA, MAPTIA WINNER

Media from the web:

Your Book is a Start-up (BitTorrent Partnership)

Surrender to Tim Ferriss (New York Observer)

How We Lost 68 Pounds – 4-Hour Body (Globe and Mail)

Maptia:

We have chosen Mexican-inspired Spicy Chocolate Soufflé with Avocado Whipped Cream by @poconversation (Natalie). Here’s the recipe, and here’s her winning tweet:

@maptia @tferriss Fancy a trip to France & Mexico? Spicy Chocolate Soufflé with Avocado Whipped Cream #RTWflavors bit.ly/YwEqmI

— Natalie (@poconversation) March 24, 2013

The First-Ever Quantified Self Notes (Plus: LSD as Cognitive Enhancer?)

The very first Quantified Self meetup, held at Kevin Kelly’s home. Here, Dr. Seth Roberts is speaking, and I’m seated third from the right. (Photo: Kevin Kelly)

Below are the notes I took at the very first Quantified Self meet-up on 9/10/08.

It was held in the picturesque home of Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of WIRED magazine. Surrounded my books, wood paneling, and white boards, we had one hell of a jam session.

From that small, 28-person gathering, “QS” has since grown into a pop-culture term and international phenomenon, with organizations in more than 20 countries. Forbes has even called 2013 “The Year of the Quantified Self.”

Here’s where it started…

View this document on Scribd
Next, just for fun…

Next, just for fun: a term paper (and some random notes) from my sophomore year in college. It’s far from perfect, but it explores some worthwhile questions.

The late Professor Hoebel, a pioneer in food addiction research, was a fascinating man and incredible teacher. This paper was written when I was interested in later joining the lab of Dr. Barry Jacobs, which was focused on brain monoamine neurotransmitters. Alas, I couldn’t hack the requisite animal testing and later switched from neuroscience to East Asian Studies with a focus on language acquisition.

And now to the question: could LSD function as a cognitive enhancer? Hmmm…

For posts on my own self-experimentation, click here and scroll through.

View this document on Scribd

A huge styrofoam robot — one of many wonders in Kevin Kelly’s home. (Photo: Telstar Logistics)

The Alchemy of Writing — More Tips from a Pro

Ernest Hemingway used to leave his final sentence of each day half finished. It gave him an easy starting point for the next morning.

This interview on the creative process is part II in an interview with award-winning author Fred Waitzkin. Part I can be found here.

Reading time:

- Bolded points (teaser) – 3 minutes

- All – 15 minutes

—

TF: But what about “inspiration”? Does it exist for you?



For me, inspiration is primarily energy. If I feel energy for a paragraph or a description I can almost always get to the essence of it. If I feel dead to myself, I don’t have a chance. I am always looking for energy. Where can I find it? What or who can give it to me? How can I amp up what I have?

A story can help us here. An older friend of mine was once depressed about his advancing years. He lacked zest or motivation for his regular gym workouts. He couldn’t concentrate on his career. One evening this man found himself in an elevator with a woman, a housekeeper who had worked for him in the past. But she was wearing outside clothes, a tight fitting sweater. She was young and beautiful. They talked a little. There was chemistry. She got off the elevator at his floor. They chatted in the hall. She said that she found him attractive. But he could feel this even before she said the words. She embraced him. And that was it. Nothing more happened between them. He was married and not looking for an affair. But he felt a big surge of life. He felt renewed, deeply so. There was a bounce to his step. He returned to the gym feeling ten years younger… There are many ways to experience the girl in the elevator.

If I’m beginning an important new project I try to get away for a few days to feel a different spirit–islands work for me. My mother was a great painter. She spent much of her life on Martha’s Vineyard because the tree line outside her house felt ominous and that spurred her work along with the sound and smell of the ocean.

I look for energy all over the place. Often just riding my bike along the river for three miles from my house to the office heightens my mood. Then I make a cup of green tea and look at my work from the previous evening. I always read back several pages before I try to write anything new. Moving back through interesting material seems to give me momentum to push ahead…

But what if there is no energy? I read the paper. I switch on sports talk radio. I look at my watch. I pace. I am eyeing the lunch hour. It’s getting closer to lunch. One hour before I meet my friend Jeff for turkey burgers. Forty-five minutes. Now I’m getting nervous. Thirty-five minutes before I have to leave my office! Suddenly I feel an urgency. I CAN’T leave for lunch without writing one good paragraph. I’m sweating, feeling the time pressure… and the words pour out. Sometimes a writer can do more in a fervent half hour than in a dreary eight-hour day. I’ve often played this game with myself.

There are many energy tricks. Sometimes in the afternoon when I’m groggy I wander over to Starbuck’s for a coffee. But it’s not just caffeine. I know all the women who work there. They know me. We chat. I love these talks–okay, innocent flirtations. Sometimes I even get a free latte. When I get back to my office I usually feel fired up.

Here is a story about deep mining for inspiration. Early on in the composition of The Dream Merchant I had an impression of the woman whom I wanted to be the great love of my central character’s life. She would be something like the girlfriend of Eddie the pool hustler, played by Paul Newman, in the great movie, The Hustler. She would be beautiful but a little worn from love and tough living. But her accessibility made her all the more desirable. The actress who played that part, by the way, was Piper Laurie although when I thought about what my character looked like, she was more voluptuous like Marilyn Monroe. This character would be hugely important in my book. She would have to be Jim’s match—she would love Jim and ruin him. Only problem was, I had never known someone like this.

I talked about the problem with Josh [his son, the subject of Searching for Bobby Fischer] and one day he proposed an idea. “There is someone I want you to meet,” he said. He arranged lunch for me with a young actress, Maya, a girlfriend of a friend of his. We met in a restaurant. Maya was sensual, the right body type, and gorgeous. I spent more than an hour describing the character I wanted to write—her name was Ava. Maya listened but said virtually nothing. She was a sweet girl—NOT Ava. This great idea was beginning to feel like a failure. But then when we were leaving the restaurant she turned to me and her entire being had darkened, she had become sultry and damaged. It was thrilling. She was becoming Ava. She was Ava. It gave me chills.

For the next year we would meet in my office about once a month. I would send Ava, no Maya, a long email describing what I needed from Ava in the next chapter of my novel. Then during the course of an hour or two together we would imagine the scenes or she would act them out. When Maya left me at the end of a session I was shot out of a gun to write the new material into the novel. As time went on, I did less talking and Maya held court. After a year of this she had truly become Ava. I put her in dangerous situations and she embodied Ava’s responses, her muted passion, her madness, a reckless impulse to bolt to the edge of the cliff. Would she fall? I think it was deep fascinating work for both of us…Just to say, I’ve never tried to create a character in this manner before or since. But I could never have written Ava without Maya.

TF: Do you have any friends you rely on to help breakthrough deadlock? If so, why do you find them helpful?

I have a couple of friends that I rely upon. They are very perceptive about the human heart. I’ll talk quite specifically about what isn’t working in a section of my book. I listen closely to what they think. I’ve done this many times. My wife Bonnie has helped me many times like this.

Here is the curious thing. Often her advice or the idea of a friend isn’t what I end up doing. But listening to the ideas engenders a new idea. The whole point is that you have to get moving. Movement begets movement. You need to get unstuck.



TF: There are many people with brilliant ideas, fascinating lives, and a good feel for language–but who have never seriously taken on the art of writing. What is some specific advice you would give to up and coming writers?



If a young person is not passionately motivated, talent aside, I would never encourage him to try to become a professional writer.

Even if you love writing, and it possesses you with missionary zeal, it is such a hard thing to do. First you need to learn the art, and the path is littered with generations of talented writers that couldn’t sit alone in a room and apply themselves for thousands of hours to become really good. Then there are legions of devoted writers who did good work but couldn’t crack the profession, they couldn’t get published or if they did they couldn’t make a living. It is a very tough field.

But whenever I happen to meet someone who is talented and possessed by writing, and particularly a youngster, it is a great pleasure to have a chat. However, the conversation needs to be personal to have any real meaning. I need to know my “new friend” somewhat deeply, to feel the play of his mind and what turns him on before I would presume to offer advice. There are many different ways to be a writer.

For a teenager who is dreamy, who makes uncanny associations like a poet, it can be ruinous to force onto him a rigorously academic approach to writing, even with a good teacher. Teaching him to compose organized mannered essays, like all the other smart boys in class, can make him inhibited and ultimately edit the imagination from this unusual fellow. For another classmate who plans to be a lawyer, proper carefully constructed essays are perfect.

A writer has a core, a sensibility to draw from like pulling gold from his own acre of earth. What you have to say on the page will be different than what I would say. Good writers have their own voice. A paragraph by Philip Roth sounds like Roth. His sensibility and prose rhythms are all through his pages. Same for Hemingway or Thomas Mann. A young writer can deepen his voice and make it richer. But a writer is on perilous ground when he moves away from his core into an area he doesn’t know, when he “lies” or when he cheapens himself with compromises.

Let me give you an example. I have a young friend who is gifted with words and sentences. The scenes he writes are emotional. And he feels impelled to write. He’s got the right stuff. This young man has led a difficult life. He is an orphan. As a teen he became an addict and alcoholic. He suffered greatly getting clean. He’s known a lot of women and hurt some badly. Okay, in shorthand, that’s his base. It is very rich with pain and dark-side-of-the-moon adventures. But whenever he writes more than a paragraph he feels the need to say that in his new life he is redeemed and he is so grateful. He proselytizes. The embarrassment about his past life is thwarting this writer who has such an interesting story to tell. It makes it hard for him to dig deeply. It is difficult to get over such habits like a quarterback who has an awkward throwing motion. But he can do it if he wants it badly enough.

Here is one generalization that might be useful: A good writer needs to become intimately involved with “fictive truth.” Bullshitting never works in writing—a good reader can always tell when a writer knows what he is talking about. If you write about the ocean, you must know the movement of the ocean, the smell and taste. Don’t try to invent it. It will smell like a fake. When you are trying to create a character he or she must be “true.” Fiction is not making up stuff out of whole cloth. It is always linked to a writer’s experience. Fiction is a wonderful tango between the writer’s experience and his imagination.

When I write a scene I always put it to a personal test: does it relate to something that has happened in my own life either directly or by analogy? Perhaps something similar happened to my father or a close friend. If I can feel it deeply, and if I know my craft, then chances are you will feel it. If I am guessing, chances are I will fall on my face. Even if you are writing fiction, research isn’t cheating. If you are writing about the ocean, go out on a boat when it’s rough, feel queasy in a breaking sea, smell the salt water. Then read Conrad’s great passages on the ocean for inspiration, or Jack London’s. In The Dream Merchant it was part of my plan that the last third of the book would take place in the dense rain forest of Brazil. I didn’t dare write that section of the book until I travelled there and spent a month in the jungle.

TF: What inspired you to write The Dream Merchant? Tell us a story or two that will help us understand the process behind the book. How did you draw from real life characters when writing fiction?

The inspiration for The Dream Merchant came from many people. Certainly the earliest influence was my father who was a lighting fixture salesman–a great one. I have often referred to him as the Beethoven of fluorescents. During his best years in the fifties, my dad sold the commercial lighting for nearly every new skyscraper in NYC: The Seagram building, the Saucony building, the United Nations building–his jobs sounded to me like poetry. As a boy I would look out at the magnificent night skyline of Manhattan as though it were my father’s work. Like Jim in the novel, my father did some terrible things—he destroyed men who got in his way—but it did not dampen my love for him. I knew that I wanted to explore this undiscriminating father adoration in my book. That was a key connection between Jim and the narrator, insofar as the narrator loves Jim despite his profligacy and shocking moral drift. By the same token, Jim idolizes his own father who has a considerable history of sins.

Without my father there could never have been Jim. But Jim is not a portrait of Abe Waitzkin—not by a long shot. They were both larger than life salesmen. Neither was impeded by conscience or restraint. Abe was perhaps more ruthless. Jim was much more lusty. My dad didn’t care much about women. Jim was a physical powerhouse. Abe was a dominant personality but he was sickly.

The great comedian, Lenny Bruce, has a small but important role in my novel. To write him I felt that I had to know this one-of–a-kind-personality inside and out. If I didn’t get into his skin the scenes would be fake and would ruin the book. I read books about him and his wife and I listened to performance tapes. I learned his dark slicing humor until I could write it myself. I did write it. After a half year I felt like I was Lenny Bruce. Then Lenny moved through the scenes naturally—he fit right in. It was a pleasure writing in his voice. I’ve already talked about Maya who became my Ava, Jim’s wife. Lenny Bruce and Ava become lovers. They go to very dangerous places together. For a while it was hard for me to stop being Lenny Bruce.

Here is an interesting story about inspiration. More than twenty-five years ago, when I was writing feature magazine pieces, I happened to read a short article in Time Magazine about illegal gold mining in the jungles of Brazil. The piece described secluded enclaves deep within the rain forest called garimpos where men slaved in deep muddy pits trying to collect gold to feed their impoverished families living in the cities. Their employers hideously exploited these scrawny little men, lured them into the camps by offering beautiful women. These poor men spent their hard earned gold on a single night of desire. Then they had to go back to the mudpits to work for another month before they could return home. It was an endless cycle. The workers were sometimes murdered by marauders or they died of disease or animal attacks. Many never made it home. This whole jungle scene was so exotic, violent, sensual and unlikely that I felt I had to write about it. I signed a contract to do a long piece for Harper’s magazine and was preparing to leave for Brazil when I received a contract from Random House to write Searching for Bobby Fischer. I abandoned the Brazil trip to write about Josh and the chess world, which greatly irritated the editors at Harper’s–they didn’t return my calls after this. Anyhow, the scene in Brazil haunted me for years and once I began my novel I decided that my character would ultimately save himself or perhaps perish in the Brazilian rain forest. I wrote the earlier sections of the novel aiming for Brazil.

TF: Tell us about the Amazon trip. What were you researching? What did you learn? Why was it so important to go there?

Oh man, what a trip. Josh wouldn’t let me go by myself. He was determined to protect his old man in the jungle. By then Josh was already one of the top martial artists in the world–he had won the Tai Chi Push Hands World Championships in Taiwan a year before, and now he was training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu [Tim note: Josh later became the first black belt under the legendary Marcelo Garcia, the Michael Jordan of BJJ]. I was thrilled for him to come but not so much for protection as camaraderie—so that we’d see it all together. By then I’d already written the first half of The Dream Merchant and as I’ve already said, I’d been pointing toward Brazil. I’d been writing about a great salesman who takes ethical short cuts to make it big and then loses everything. The deep jungle was the perfect pallet for the changes I wanted in Jim who by now was ready to cross any line to win big again—and he did. I wanted the last third of the novel to switch gears and come on like a firestorm—this was my homerun idea. But to work, as I’ve already said, the Brazilian scene would have to be truly rendered, all the smells, the violence, the animals, the decadence, the disease, the astonishing beauty.

Josh and I flew to Manaus, which is an island city surrounded by rivers and jungle. It’s a haunting place, sultry from the heat and danger of the jungle all around. My character Jim would own a big estate in Manaus, where he would sell his gold to buyers, and then after several days he would travel back to jungle—the jungle became Jim’s greatest passion. But first, to set up his operation he needed to hire an army of gunmen to protect his garimpo from marauders in the rain forest, to guard the gold. Josh and I travelled to gun dealers to learn the business of small private armies. We met with gunmen, talked about their malevolent work. We visited steak restaurants where Jim would dine with his top men. We visited poor shacks on the fetid riverbanks where he recruited hundreds of miners and we went to huge ornate brothels that catered to miners, where Jim hired gorgeous sad-eyed girls to work on their backs for him in the remote camp. Really, Jim constructed a little jungle empire that mirrored his runaway ambition.

There were many ways to maim oneself or to die in Jim’s jungle world but also it was a captivating place. Josh and I spent several weeks in the deep jungle, with its dense foliage a crazy tangle of living sculpture. We hiked for miles learning to softly push the vegetation aside like swimming. It was the dry season and watermarks on towering ancient trees were ten feet above our heads. In six months, four hundred pound fish would be swimming where we were walking. We swam in the rivers terrified about piranhas, and tiny fish called a candiru that swim up a man’s penis and with sharp spikes become lodged in the urethra. We played with pink porpoises that swam through our legs. We visited abandoned gold mining operations and met with garimpeiros who explained the work of searching mud pits hoping to find gold and pull themselves out of poverty but rarely did. These men were addicted to this difficult work—I suppose they were addicted to hope.

We spent nights in hammocks suspended between acai trees listening to an infernal racquet of insects and the bleating of hunting creatures. We worried incessantly about being attacked by jaguars. Every night we heard them hunting nearby. Travelers in the jungle worried about jaguars. Every native we ran into carried a rifle. We were told that a man by himself in the rain forest was a dead man walking but parties of two or three men were more likely to be left alone by jaguars. There were little cats, the size of house cats called jaguatiricas. They attacked howling like babies in packs of five or six. They ran up a man’s legs and ripped him apart. The little ones scared the hell out of me.

I could go on and on about the Brazilian Amazon: the beauty of the women, the unforgettable people we met. The jungle has a deep intoxicating call–really it is a siren’s call. It was hard for me to leave and return to the states. My character Jim couldn’t bear to leave even though staying would likely cost him his life.

TF: Last but not least: what are your top ten favorite books?



FW: This is a risky question to answer. For one thing, I have loved so many. How can I narrow it to ten? And to further complicate the process, I’ve noticed that books are always changing for me. Some books that I admired at thirty feel dead to me today. I know that I never got more excited reading any novel than Jack Kerouac’s masterpiece, On the Road. But would I revere it as much today, forty years later? Last week I read This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz. I was so taken by the painful truths in these stories and the amorous Latin rhythms of his prose. Before reading Diaz I was telling all of my friends about Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. These are my recent infatuations. But did I love these books as much or more than The Sun Also Rises? I just don’t know. Last time I read Hemingway’s classic it was a hard push for me…but ten years before it thrilled me.

Here goes:

1. Love in the Time of Cholera — Gabriel Marquez

2. Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad

3. The Great Gatsby –F. Scott Fitzgerald

4. Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov

5.

a. For Whom the Bell Tolls — Ernest Hemingway

b. The Old Man and the Sea — Ernest Hemingway

c. The Sun also Rises — Ernest Hemingway

6. On the Road -- Jack Kerouac

7. Death in Venice — Thomas Mann

8. The Sheltering Sky — Paul Bowles

9. Invisible Cities — Italo Calvino

10.

a. The Train — Georges Simenon

b. American Pastoral — Philip Roth

c. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John le Carre

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Read more about Fred Waitzkin and The Dream Merchant here.