I only get political here on the blog every once in a while, but I have something needs saying so I’m going to say it here.

We should invade Mexico.

Seriously. We should do it. This year.

I came to this conclusion after reading an extremely smart article suggesting that no border wall will solve the problems of south border immigration in the United States. It posited that the reasons people are leaving Mexico in droves will always outweigh any attempts we make to restrict the influx…so instead we should spend that energy and budget on helping to stabilize Mexico.

But stabilizing her is a sisyphean task that would cost trillions to maybe work. A full-on invasion would be cheaper and more effective.  And I don’t mean a take-backsies invasion like what we did in Iraq. I mean making Mexico part of the United States permanently like we did with parts of Mexico coming on to two centuries ago. Let’s look at some of the benefits:

• Make the Drug War a Real War. Our “wars” on poverty and drugs have not gone well, but we’re pretty good at actual shooting wars. The power of the cartels is the single biggest factor that makes life in Mexico terrible for (almost) everybody, and our sad civilian law enforcement efforts have made no significant headway. If we got busy dropping a SEAL team on the heads of each of those snakes, then played whack-a-mole with whoever stepped to the plate, actual legitimate government could actually make some headway toward establishing just social order.
• They Have A Lot of Natural Resources. Even oil, Republican friends. Those resources aren’t being tapped effectively right now because of the state of disarray for government and business. This makes an admittedly expensive invasion less of a budget buster and more of an investment. They get a nicer place to live and raise families. We get lots of silver, copper, salt, fluorspar, iron, manganese, sulfur, phosphate, zinc, tungsten, molybdenum, mercury, gold, and gypsum. And oil. Lots and lots of oil.
• We Cut the Source of the Undocumented Labor Problem. Employers are the real bad guys in the immigration story. They take advantage of illegal aliens by paying them below market wages because the power differential is big enough to get away with it. They screw over American workers by hiring cheaper labor. If all Mexicans became Americans, this wouldn’t be possible. Employers would have to hire local labor for market scale. (Yes, I know lots of illegals are from other countries, but at last count this would cut off 59% of the supply).
• It Might Save Tequila. You might have read a few years back about how we’re about to face a worldwide tequila shortage. Thing is, farmers are growing less agave and more things like coca plants and marijuana because of market forces and the influence of the cartels. A stabler Mexico could put those agave plants back in the ground before we have to start making our margaritas with vodka.
• “Fuck Yeah.” Politics in the USA has never been so viciously divided, which is why we let the foxes run the henhouse for so long. For better or for worse, we’ve done better at remembering we’re all Americans when we have a common enemy to face off against while we sing the iconic song from our favorite movie.

So sincerely. Let’s invade Mexico. If nothing else, it will make our Facebook feeds even more interesting.

Who’s with me?

My beloved and departed sensei Lee Sprague used to say “If you hit a man, kill him.”

If sounds macho, brutal, and unnecessary, but what he always said next demonstrates why he’s right.

“If you have to go hands-on with somebody, fight the best fight you can or he has a better chance of killing you.”

That follows, and it’s tactically sound, but still seems to fall squarely in the macho warrior thug box. But his second insight is what makes this some of the best advice in the world:

“And if you don’t feel comfortable killing the man, you shouldn’t hit him in the first place.”

There’s huge wisdom in that, as applied to all endeavors. So much that Our Most Badass President ever said similar words:

The unforgivable sin is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly.

Apply this to your writing…

If you’re going to bother writing at all, it’s a sin to write soft. Don’t write what comforts you. Don’t write what the market suggests will give you a soft life. Write what scares you, what hurts you. Write the yucky stuff that will help you grow as you pour it out onto the page with a feeling exactly like what you get when you pour alcohol on some road rash.

And don’t write just stuff from that space, but write it hard. If you have to drop an f-bomb to make it real, drop an f-bomb to make it real. If one of your characters is an ignorant hillbilly from Kentucky, don’t you dare not write the word “nigger” for fear of offending some middle-class white book reviewer. If the story calls for ugly, write the ugly and put it boldly on the page. If it calls for beautiful, write a rainbow that leaves people weeping. If it calls for staring at the abyss, stare hard until it blinks and asks you about the weather.

Write hard. Leave your reader feeling like this:

Apply this to your life…

Same goes for your hopes and dreams. If you want to do something, do it. Don’t halfway do it. Don’t go through the motions while giving most of your attention to safe, familiar other things. Don’t wish and whine and hold back until your time and life and opportunities are all spent. Hit it hard and try to kill everything in your way just as ferociously as you would kill a human attacker that stood between you and seeing your family again.

A close friend of mine recently experienced the importance of this. Last summer, he needed to make a Big Life Change which involved having a very hard conversation with somebody he cared a lot about. He did it exactly wrong, having instead a series of soft conversations that left room for equivocation and negotiating.

Six hard months with lots of tears later, he had to have the very hard conversation anyway. The stuff that happened during those six months irrevocably (probably) destroyed that relationship. They are no longer friends, because he hit soft when hitting was necessary.

Most of us have been there or seen it from reasonably close up. That hit should be hard, and clean, and decisive. End the fight so everybody can move on with the least amount of damage possible.

The exact same thing applies to the big things you want out of your life. You can say to yourself “I want this thing” and approach it in tiny steps that never amount to anything. Years of frustration later, you will either decide it wasn’t really for you, or decide to finally hit it hard.

Or you can decide to hit it hard from the beginning. Decide nothing in the world will get between you and this accomplishment, then map it out and work the plan you make. Ruthlessly eradicate everything in between you and that goal (including and especially your bad habits, which will amount to 80% of what’s in your way). Fucking commit to it and make it happen.

And if you’re not ready to make that kind of effort and commitment? Just like killing a man, maybe that means you shouldn’t get started on that road in the first place.

Hell Yes or Fuck No

Derek Sivers is a smart guy who recorded a video with the best message about commitments I’ve ever read: Hell Yes or No. You can watch the video, but I’ll explain it in three points.

• You are overcommitted
• When asked to commit to something else, check to see if you feel a physical “Hell Yes!” response in your body.
• If you don’t, the answer is “No.”

I added the “Fuck” because to me just saying “No” to myself is hitting too softly. Whether or not you need the f-bomb in there, the point is easy to understand. Only commit to responsibilities and social engagements you’re actually excited about. The stuff you can go in whole hog on. The stuff you look forward to.

If you say yes to things you’re luke warm about, you hurt yourself by stealing time from what you value. And you hurt the person who asked you by doing something half-assed…or worse, by beginning to resent and ultimately dislike that person because of an unnecessary series of soft hits against you.

To Review

Don’t hit softly. 

If you’re going to write something. Write it hard.

If you want to be or do something in your life, attack that goal it with total commitment.

If you’re going to do something or help somebody, do what you can engage with passionately.

Don’t leave life just swaying against the ropes. As they say in a famous video game…finish him!

I recently had a conversation with a smart friend about security, safety and thinking the best in others.

Her point was it’s better to assume the best of people and spend your life happy, with occasional big pains when they do you dirt, than to experience constant little pains by assuming people are going to do you dirt all the time. She’s a smart person, and one of the happiest I know, and her basic framework is right.

Except for a thing security people know. If you’re alert for people doing you dirt all the time, it doesn’t make you unhappy. It’s neutral input that doesn’t make your life worse. What’s better, by being alert for signs and taking proper action — you avoid those occasional big pains by taking steps so they don’t happen. By paying more attention, you worry less.

The point is: by being alert for danger you live a happier, less painful life because you know you’re safe.

Budgeting is the same way, whether you’re budgeting your money or your time.

With money it’s simple. People who don’t like to live on a budget think that it restricts their freedom. The argument is they’d rather spend freely and enjoy the money they have.

Except they don’t really spend freely. They have to check their bank balance from time to time, and need to decide if they really need that new jacket, or that night out. Then there’s the guilt and buyer’s remorse.

By contrast, if you budget your money you actually get to spend freely. You earmark a hundred bucks for fun and frivolity, and you can spend it all every month without a second of worry or guilt or remorse. You know what’s going on, so you worry less about money. Taking on a little extra responsibility for yourself frees you from lots of extra stress.

The same goes for time. If you don’t plan and schedule your day, it’s hard to know when you’re done working. It’s hard to really relax in your off hours because you’re never quite sure that you’ve done all the things you promised yourself you would do. There’s a slight, constant nagging in the back of your mind even when you’re trying to relax.

If you do budget your time (which is really what scheduling is), you know when it’s time to work. More importantly, you know when it’s time to stop working. So you can really enjoy that time with your kids, your jujitsu class, or just sitting in the hammock reading a book. You can focus mindfully on your free time, confident you haven’t forgotten anything.

Not getting killed means paying attention to your environment. It’s a matter of being in “condition yellow” unless you know you’re perfectly safe…and it actually makes life feel safer and be more fun. Since stress-related diseases are three of the four biggest killers in the developed world, paying attention to your time and money isn’t just superficially like not getting killed. It is not getting killed.

And it makes life more fun while you’re living it.

2017 Is Coming…

What are you going to do over the next twelve months to make your life exponentially more satisfying, enjoyable and inspiring than it is right now?

Ask 100 different people and you’ll get 100 different answers — 200 if you ask again in six months. But here’s one thing science tells us over and over again: organized people’s answers turn out to be right more often than people who don’t plan how they work toward their goals. 

So here’s what we’re going to do about that:

Next year I’m putting together a planning and accountability gang. We’ll set goals this December. We’ll break down those goals. We’ll meet regularly, using planners, to keep each other on the straight and narrow. We’ll celebrate our victories, bemoan our defeats, and cheerfully mock each other when we’re standing idiotically in the way of our own progress.

If you’re interested, email me today. 

But Wait! There’s More!

Readers of my blog might recall I had a planner-off last year, where I used two and picked my favorite. We’ll be using the VOLT planner as the core of the project, because it’s the awesomest bar none. Check out this video about it, but read what’s below it because that’s important, too.

This is really cool!

• The first person to enroll in the program gets one of them. 
• The next ten people to enroll get entered into a drawing for the other one. 

Somebody I know recently brought to my attention an email. I have to change the name and specific content to protect the innocent, but here’s an approximation.

The email was sent from an author to an editor, and it proceeded thusly.

Dear Editor,

You are a dick. I sent you my manuscript more than a year ago and I haven’t heard back from you yet. I’m gonna self publish my Work of Utter Genius and become a millionaire. Remember, my work is copyrighted. If your plan is to steal it and self-publish the stuff for profit, I own your ass. Go soak your head in a bucket of wombat urine. 

Love and Kisses,

Author

All of my friends who are agents and editors are sharing this around, saying “Dude, what a dick Author is. Let’s none of us ever do business with Author. Screw that guy.”

And they’re right. That kind of abuse and unprofessional behavior (I’m paraphrasing, but the original wasn’t much better) is unacceptable in any craft or trade. Dude broke the rules of basic courtesy, and the rules of observing chain of command (editors outrank authors). He even broke the basic rule of knowing how to talk to people in a position to do you favors.

So yeah, he’s an asshole.

But on the other hand…

A year without contact is a long time. A looooooong time to an author who’s waiting to hear whether or not an editor is interested in publishing the written distillation of his heart, hopes and dreams. I can understand being frustrated, even angry, even though I can’t condone how he chose to express it.

This goes double for the agents and editors who (a) ask you not to send in simultaneous submissions and (b) have a policy of only responding on acceptance. Those guys are being serious assholes. I mean, really. What reasonable human says “Please don’t ask anybody else to the prom until you hear back from me, but I won’t answer at all if I’m gonna say no and maybe wait half a year before I say yes” ?!?!?!?

But that’s what a lot of agents and editors are saying.

So they’re kind of being assholes, too.

But do you know who’s the biggest asshole here?

Us. People. Human beings.

You. And me.

Once upon a time, agents and editors could respond quickly enough to not be assholes. The publishing industry made enough money across the board that agencies weren’t understaffed, and publishers had robust catalogs.

Then we discovered self-publishing and ebooks. And we started reading less and Netflixing more. We forgot much of our love affair with the written word, and started downloading the books we did read. Publishing suffered. Publishers had to cut catalogs. Agencies had to cut staff.

So now we’re in this situation where agents need months to respond to the massive deluge (over 100 per week, according to folks I know) of manuscript submissions they get. That means they can’t respond to your novel query in anything resembling a reasonable frame of time. It means the best way to get your novel read quickly is to meet an agent via pitch sessions, at a bar, or through social engineering. It means they have no choice but to act like assholes sometimes because the resources aren’t there to give them any other option.

It’s not anybody’s particular fault, but we’re in an untenable situation.

• Agents don’t have the resources to respond to every submitter with anything resembling reasonable courtesy
• Authors have to wait unreasonable times, which makes them whiny

What’s worse is we can’t do anything about it….other than remember with compassion what it’s like for the other side.