In Paul Graham’s essay, How to Start a Startup, he describes the type of people you should recruit to build a business as animals. How goes on to define what makes someone an animal:

It means someone who takes their work a little too seriously; someone who does what they do so well that they pass right through professional and cross over into obsessive.

What it means specifically depends on the job: a salesperson who just won’t take no for an answer; a hacker who will stay up till 4:00 AM rather than go to bed leaving code with a bug in it; a PR person who will cold-call New York Times reporters on their cell phones; a graphic designer who feels physical pain when something is two millimeters out of place.

Are you an animal? We all are to varying degrees. Our ability to use our animal strength depends on how we apply ourselves. Identifying the characteristics that makes animals successful is the first step to developing your inner animal.

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Being an early riser has its benefits, but it isn’t for everyone. Some of humanity’s greatest minds (Voltaire for example) were renowned for sleeping in. Depending on personality, environment, and work schedule, being an early riser may not be practical.

A few months ago I gave early rising a try. I was able to wake up 1-1.5 hours earlier, but I couldn’t adjust to the early bed time. Each night around 10:00, no matter how tired I’d felt that day, my mind became active and I was unable to shut down until after 12:00. After a few weeks, sleep deprivation set in and I went back to my normal sleep pattern.

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Although I usually focus on writing original content, I read a few articles this week that were so relevant I felt compelled to share them and add my own comments.

Train Your Brain

This fascinating article covers a scientific experiment on neuroplasticity — the brain’s recently discovered ability to change its structure and function, in particular by expanding or strengthening circuits that are used and by shrinking or weakening those that are rarely engaged.

In simple terms, the brain becomes stronger with training and weaker with idleness, similar to the way muscles react to exercise. In the experiment, the brain activity of Buddhist monks (who’ve spent up 10,000 hours in meditation) was compared to novice meditators.

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The other day I came across some disturbing statistics on reading. According to a Jenkins Group survey, 42% of college graduates will never read another book. Since most people read bestsellers printed in the past 10 years, it follows that virtually no one is reading the classics. Although it’s unfortunate that the intellectual heritage of humanity is being forgotten we can use this to our benefit. By reading the classics to improve your mind you can give yourself an advantage. These examples illustrate 10 ways reading the classics will help you succeed.

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For too long I’ve sat idly by while the good name of procrastination is dragged through the muck. For the sake of getting things done we’re advised to banish, kill, and avoid procrastination without any acknowledgment of the good it’s done.

We owe procrastination. Big time. It’s responsible for our best ideas and busiest hours. Used effectively, procrastination is a powerful motivator and source of inspiration.

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Multiple positives — activities that benefit you in multiple ways — are a powerful productivity tool. These activities maximize your time by combining necessities like education, exercise, money making, and fun into a single, super productive action. The more multiple positives you use, the easier it is to get everything you want done without feeling stressed. They also free up loads of time and create a pleasant feeling of satisfaction and efficiency.

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The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. -Einstein

The biggest misconception about creativity is that it involves a moment of magical creation when the incredible appears out of thin air. The truth is less romantic. Everything comes from somewhere. All ideas have been thought before and all artists, especially the most brilliant, have their sources of inspiration. I’m going to break Einstein’s famous rule by revealing some of my sources and explaining how I use the genius of others to further my own ambitions.

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One popular saying that’s always struck me as particularly stupid and harmful is, “People don’t change.” Although everyone has ingrained personality traits, we aren’t held captive by them. Believing that we can’t change encourages us to accept our weaknesses. How many people with substance problems claim they aren’t capable of stopping? It’s much easier to continue a harmful behavior when responsibility is placed on an outside force like genetics or an “addictive personality”.

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Readers who’ve been following PickTheBrain for the past few months may have noticed my inability to pick a tagline and stick with it. Each one I chose felt wrong after a couple weeks because the purpose of the site continued to evolve. I started writing without a plan and followed my inspiration. After more than 6 months of experimentation and feedback, I’ve finally found a purpose and a tagline that I’d like to explain.

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People love tips. A list of tips is the easiest way to make the front page of Digg, attract dozens of back links, and acquire hordes of RSS subscribers. The tips don’t even need to be new or insightful, they just need to make sense and cover an interesting topic. Who doesn’t enjoy useful information in an easily digestible format?

The problem with tips is that they’re too delicious. People become obsessed with prepackaged information nuggets and stop thinking for themselves. When an article focuses on theory, no matter how brilliant it is, people complain that the information isn’t “useful”. The definition of “useful” has become so narrow that it only includes information that applies directly to a concrete problem. This reluctance to master and apply conceptual knowledge is a symptom of intellectual laziness.

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