I heard the recipe for Bulletproof Coffee a while ago, but I never got around to trying it.

*400-500 ml of high quality black coffee*2 tablespoons of Kerry Gold or other unsalted butter*A quick two shots of MCT oil*Put it all in a blender and blend it up

Result?

It's impressive stuff.

I've had it by itself for breakfast, and I felt lower hunger than normal while eating less to start the day, with no dip in cognition or thinking. I didn't get any mental clarity benefits as Asprey writes about, but I felt physically quite good.

If you've got excellent project management skills -- coordinating people and resources, keeping execution on track, troubleshooting stuck areas, etc -- email me and let's talk for an hour on Skype and knowledge share.  

We'll make an agenda about what's most relevant, biggest challenges and lessons recently, and go from there. 

Everyone I've spoken with recently with an excellent PM background has led to some breakthrough insights, and my conversation partners on those have not been disappointed either.

So, email me -- sebastian@sebastianmarshall.com -- and let me know what your PM experience is, what's on your mind lately, and let's get a great conversation going.

When you're actively afraid, you know it. You can feel the fear pressing against you. Maybe you work through it and conquer it this time, or maybe you don't. But if you succeed, you know you worked through the fear. And you know if you fail, the fear beat you.

This is the type of fear you feel when you're about to do public speaking, make a cold call, ask for a raise at work, or do a difficult ski run.

And maybe sometimes you back down from whatever it is you were afraid of. It happens, and it's not the end of the world when it does. Fear winds up beating most people at least sometimes, in some domain.

Passive fear, on the other hand, is far more insidious. It's what Pressfield called "The Resistance" in The War of Art. It's a form of fear, but not one that shows itself. It's sneaky. You find the need to do some lower importance activity instead of doing your work.

Excuses abound, the important things don't get done.

"There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to pet wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything." -- Yamamoto Tsunemoto, Hagakure, 1716

Spend a few minutes thinking on the applications of this if they haven't already sprung to mind. Yamamoto-sama is right when he says, "This understanding extends to everything."

Question from a reader --

Instead of trying to sell him, educate him on what goes into web development, the usual costs, the chance of success/failure, what he needs to do to make itself, and the risks involved even if everyone does their part.

Don't try to sell him, just genuinely educate and let him know you'll be happy to participate if he wants to use you.

If he does use you, break it into discrete components where it could be "handed off" to another dev if anything goes off the rails... your potential client doesn't have experience as a buyer, so he might wind up being... umm, hard to work with.

INTERNAL SCORECARD #4

This is the fourth week of me publishing a weekly internal scorecard. The point is to learn about what looking to be productive actually looks like. This week I geared down intentionally. Let's start and go from there --

ON MOMENTUM AND MORALE

If you're worrying about something, one of two things is going on --

1. There's a good reason for your worries, they're justified, and you can potentially affect that outcome. If so, do something.

2. There's no good reason for your worries, they're not justified, or you can't affect the outcome. If so, stop worrying.

Easier said than done. But idle worrying does nothing of value. It makes you go crazy and doesn't make things better.

It's impossible to have perfect control of your thoughts, so worries emerge. When they do, investigate them, figure out if they're justified, figure out if you can do something, and then make a plan or let them go.

Question from a reader --

However, I'd say this -- Why are you cold calling, anyways?

I've been cleaning up my papers, and I just noticed something funny -- there were some goals I set around 21st February of this year. Around eight of the goals didn't happen in February or May, and I forgot about those particular goals explicitly when I hit the road again for Japan, Germany, England, Eastern Europe, and the USA.

It's always an interesting question whether it's better to keep focus on goals that aren't achievable at the moment due to circumstance. In this case, I opted against.

But now, I notice that all of those eight are either complete, or will finish this week.

*Two finished over three weeks in Japan.*Four finished in Germany and England.*Two will finish this week in the U.S.

It's interesting, because they weren't explicitly on my mind at all -- but it's a pattern I've noticed before, and many others have remarked on. Write down your goals and they're far more likely to happen.

If you've been following the site for a while, you know I'm a huge fan of the Mac application "Self-Control." You put in websites you don't want to access, you turn it on, and they're blocked for up to a day (you choose the time length).

Well, a brilliant reader of the site out in Dubai shared with me some Terminal commands to extend the maximum length of blocking sites up to one month.

Be careful if you do this.

I actually had to take off some of the "mostly bad but occasionally necessary" sites from my blacklist, because I don't want to commit to a month of not using them. But for pure distraction, here you go.

Self-Control is only a Mac OSX application, so this works on Mac. To make it so you can block sites for a month, open "Terminal" and enter these two lines one at a time --