Lifehack or Lose Out in Life - Introduction to "How to Be Cross Eyed"
| Ⓒ By Jonathan Roseland |
Applied Neuroscience Strategist, K-Selected Biohacker, Tantric husband, Promethean peaceful parent, Adventuring philosopher, Raconteur & Author. He spent +14 years researching the intersection of human performance enhancement and advanced personal growth in his obsessive quest to find real-life "NZT-48."
You’ve been sold sweet lies by the mainstream personal growth pop culture.
That you should “just be yourself.” That you should “go with the flow” of life more. That you can “manifest” the life you want via positive thinking. That you should “be kind to yourself” no matter what. That obsessive self-improvement feeds an inherent psychological defect somewhere in the murky depths of your being. That you should do less to get what you want.
These lies are comforting, and perhaps they work for some people. But not for me, and they probably won’t help you.
Those peddling them, for profit, or just because they are popular, underestimate just how detrimental a physical imperfection can be (we’ll explore this more in chapter 2). Doesn’t it seem that these bland platitudes often come from people - authors, influencers, gurus - who are conventionally attractive (or were for decades of their lives)? They are almost certainly also underestimating the significant advantage of being good-looking while misattributing their success to personal growth principles that appeal to the natural human bent toward laziness.
If you, like me, were cursed with a conspicuous physical imperfection, you must lifehack relentlessly. You need the underground, unconventional, barely legal, ride-the-ethical-edge shortcuts to what you want. If you’re not occasionally called a “control freak,” you’re underestimating the amount of agency you need to bring to bear in life. And when you’re called that, just do what I do: smirk.
You need to bring sharper tools to the project of architecting a beautiful life.
As its subtitle implies, you don’t have to be cross eyed to read this book, but it is also not for a general audience of people interested in personal development. It’s for that one or two percent of the population that has a conspicuous physical imperfection.
Which I fall into. I’m cross eyed; if you’re reading this, perhaps you are too. I have fairly conspicuous Strabismus, which you can see here…
I think this uniquely qualifies me to write a book on thriving despite having a physical imperfection. There are certainly people out there with more conspicuous physical imperfections—who have it worse than I do. However, the eyes are said to be the windows to the soul; they are indeed a part of nearly every important human interaction. Not having normal eyes has been a disadvantage that I’ve needed to develop a specific set of skills and life strategies to overcome.
I was discussing this book with my lovely fiancée, and she asked me if the book’s purpose was to help people with physical imperfections boost their self-esteem.
Not really.
This book is about the lifehacks that I’ve employed over the past 15 years: strategies, methods, and tools that really work to help you overcome the challenge of a physical imperfection and thrive. These things will likely improve your self-esteem, but they will also work if you have low self-esteem, or no self-esteem (or too much self-esteem — as I’m sometimes accused of having). Self-esteem is not my primary focus; there are better books on the subject. My focus is on things that work.
This is not your typical self-help book…
I don’t share my life on social media just to show off —actually, I hate our pop culture of digital narcissism and pixel-powered jealousy — I share because anyone can write anything online. Sharing photos and vlogs of my awesome life is just the best way of proving that my lifehacking philosophy actually works!
I’ve had a pretty interesting life. I’ve dated a politician’s daughter in Medellin, Colombia. I hung out with spies in Kyiv, Ukraine. I’ve almost died underwater twice, I participated in a bank robbery, and I lost my virginity to a spy (yes, really! That story is in my second book) I’m a pretty good storyteller so I think a memoir is the right format for me to write a book as opposed to the problem>generalization>platitude>strategy formula that most personal development books follow.
About the third edition
This is actually a slimmer version of the book I first published in 2018, which will serve you better.
Since then, I’ve become a real stickler for good grammar. As a few reviewers pointed out, the original book contained more than a few glaring grammatical imperfections. I’ve done my best to correct those here, with the one remaining that cross eyed is actually supposed to be hyphenated (cross-eyed). These two words appear so many times in this work, reflecting my own persistent physical imperfection, that I’ll leave them as they are.
The original book contained numerous lurid tales and details of my life as a seducer across three continents. This element of the book was there to illustrate how someone might overcome their conspicuous physical imperfection and enjoy a lively dating life by employing an uncommon set of social dynamics strategies. But this may sully the empowering message of the book for some; it may come across as bragging, or compel female readers to throw the book away in disgust. So I’ve cut some chapters and stories.
If lurid tales and details aren’t so off-putting to you, more recently, I wrote a book for men specifically about dating, seduction, and ultimately finding meaning in the enduring embrace of a virtuous woman. Gents, if you’re frustrated with dating or the quality of the women that you find yourself entangled with, read Don’t Stick Your Dick in a Blender: How to meet a nice girl instead - from a tantric husband with a better sex life than you!
I was banned as an author by Amazon without a cogent explanation of what in my work was unacceptable. This is doubly frustrating, as I had made a genuine effort to adhere to their content guidelines in the manuscripts I uploaded. The book before you is the uncensored edition. I make no effort here to appease the nonsensical and vague sensitivities of our big tech overlords!
Getting the most out of this book
A few guidelines for high-leverage reading…
- I’m a big fan of digital books because it’s so easy to highlight, take notes, and bookmark resources that you want to implement.
- You’ll notice that the book consists of many short chapters, as opposed to a few longer chapters. This is to make it more consumable and easier for those who may want to jump between sections.
- Due to the book’s storytelling format, I think you’ll enjoy it more if you read it from cover to cover. However, it has been modularized, so you won’t be totally lost if you skip a chapter or two that doesn’t particularly interest you.
- While listening to audio programs is more convenient and allows you to multitask, your comprehension does take a hit. I'd encourage you to actually read the book if you can. When I listen to audiobooks that I want to learn something from, I usually listen to the chapters multiple times, and I listen to them while I'm doing something else that's relatively mindless, like cardio at the gym or commuting.
- You'll notice that this book contains a lot of discussion of brain science and health. I've tried to strike a balance between proving what I'm saying with scientific references and readability. If you're skeptical of a biohack that I talk about, check out the science I cite or search on my website, where I have hundreds of detailed articles in which I provide significant clinical evidence for anything mentioned here.
- After you read, give your mind a little downtime to metabolize the information into wisdom. I try to read in the evenings before bedtime.
The digital and print editions are somewhat limited to just text on a page (what a book is supposed to be!) If you find a chapter particularly interesting, I encourage you to check out the version of it that I’ve published here. This is where I’ve created media-rich chapters with photos, videos, and additional links to resources.
Do yourself a big favor: If you’re reading the digital edition, use white text on a black background, which you can enable in settings if you’re reading at night.
Audio Book
I have a face for radio and a voice for radio, so I have recorded and produced an audio version of this book for your listening pleasure. I’ll give it to you for free, as a token of appreciation for choosing to spend your time with me.
If you like audio programs, you’ll want to listen to the Limitless podcast. (I encourage you to subscribe to my podcast on the Castbox app. This is the best app for listening to audio programs; it’s free and commercial-free!)
Feel free to share this book
This book will always be free to anyone who it could help. Downloadable versions of it can be found here. There are a number of books I’ve read that were given to me as gifts or that the authors made free to download that profoundly changed the trajectory of my life for the better. The stuff in my book has really helped me, and it can help this often ignored and abused unsung group of people with physical imperfections. If I can liberate just one person from their self-made, invisible prison of self-loathing by making my book free to download, it’s totally worth it to me!
A huge "thank you" to those of you who actually bought it (despite my best efforts to give it away for free to the world!) There’s this phenomenon of sunk cost motivation; if you pay for something (even if it’s not very expensive), you’re much more likely to follow through, take action, and improve your life. You can pay for it here (or not)...
Frequently Asked Questions
LimitlessMindset.com is visited by thousands of people each month, so I’d like to address some questions I’ve received about this book…
Why write a book?
For over a decade, I’ve had a dynamic conversation with the lifehackers and Biohackers of the world via the Limitless Mindset blog and video channels. However, I have recently become aware of how non-optimal a format blogs and videos are for conveying powerful information that can be deeply transformative for those who need it the most. I read The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains and learned that the HTML formatting of information on websites and the high distraction layout of YouTube or other popular video platforms severely retards our reading comprehension and metabolism of information into knowledge. Reading books is a very different mode of thinking and a sublime pleasure — it’s one of the few ways to really reside in someone else’s head and think their thoughts. Reading books entails an intangible romance with a writer that reading blog articles or watching videos doesn’t capture.
Furthermore, throughout my life, people have told me that I am a raconteur—a skilled storyteller. Thus, this book will be a memoir of my adventures, misadventures, and learning experiences.
There are already A LOT of self-help books out there. Why is yours worth reading?
Again, most self-help books follow a very predictable formula that makes for uninspiring reading. I’ve instead opted to illustrate the lifehacking strategies and tools with storytelling. I think this memoir will have significantly more entertainment value than the average self-help book. Furthermore, I do something that’s disappointingly rare in non-fiction, which is thorough meta-analysis of human performance studies. Every month, around the world, hundreds of new scientific trials are published, but many remain inaccessible. And every month, many thousands of blogs and articles are published online, but many of them simply rehash what other bloggers are saying or attempt to grab clicks with sensationalistic headlines. There are surprisingly few writers like me who actually delve deeply into placebo-controlled science and present it in well-researched articles and writing that are consumable for the public.
Your Twitter bio says that you’re a “smart drug dealer” - is this book just going to be an extended catalog of the supplements and Biohacking products that you promote?
No. But Nootropics, smart drugs, and biohacking have been a huge game-changer for my life — I’m not aware of a self-help philosophy that even comes close to the transformational bang that you get for your Biohacking buck spent. For over a decade, I’ve been studying Nootropics and consulting biohackers on how to use them to accomplish their goals. So I will touch on some Nootropics and Biohacking products in the book, but I’m aware that not everybody can afford these things (or has access to them), so it’s really not what the book is about.
I don’t really struggle with a physical imperfection—what should I do with this book?
I know that a lot of you in my audience are very good-looking people. I’d encourage you to get this book and give it to someone in your life who is not so fortunate. It may really help them! If you’re concerned about offending them, I’ll include instructions for sharing the digital version anonymously with them. Alternatively, you can obtain the print version and leave it where they’re likely to find it.
How do you define a physical imperfection? Aren’t we all physically imperfect? Almost all of us are less beautiful than an airbrushed Megan Fox or Channing Tatum…
Well, yes, but some of us have conspicuous physical imperfections. Thanks to a birth defect, accident, medical condition, or just an unlucky roll of the genetic dice, we have something about us that is not within the normal spectrum of the natural human physical form. It’s likely the first thing that people notice about us when they meet us. This is a unique challenge that cannot be overcome simply by being confident, faking it until you make it, or reading books about self-esteem. Thriving despite a glaring physical feature requires an uncommon set of barely legal Biohacking tools, social dynamics strategies from the fringes of polite society, and rapid mindset transformation technologies, which this lifehacking manifesto delves deeply into.
In your newer vlogs, you now wear an eyepatch. Why did you make this change?
On my 40th birthday (yeah, I look pretty good for my age, don’t I?), I decided to correct one of my most grievous errors and cover it up in public.
I should have done this earlier; there are a few good personal development lessons in why I didn’t…
1) Casting your identity in stone kills growth, and let’s be honest: I made “cross eyed” my identity. I was the unapologetically cross eyed guy. But recently, I had the most mind-blowing day of my life as a Biohacker, and it reminded me that personal growth and embracing adventure demand a flexible identity. It’s OK to hold to a couple of core values and principles, but certainty is often the enemy of edifying evolution. Identity and certainty often go hand in hand. Mark Manson explains this better than I in his book; he recommends not being too married to an identity as it closes you off to transformation and growth. Manson’s law of avoidance is…
The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it. (p. 136)
I say don’t find yourself. I say never know who you are. Because that’s what keeps you striving and discovering. And it forces you to remain humble in your judgments and accepting of the differences in others. (p. 139)
I wrote an essay about sex addiction; in it, I made the point that it’s an especially bad idea to have your identity married to something negative. Then I looked at the man in the mirror - I had allowed my public identity to become entangled with my ugliest feature.
Also…
2) What got me here won’t get me there. In this book, I describe a multitude of lifehacks for improving your looks, networking up, and sharpening your social skills. This lifehacking approach paid such dividends that I ignored what had held me back from being more successful in business — and its obvious solution: my crossed eye and an eye patch.
Finally…
3) I was letting the trolls and bullies limit me. I’ve been on the receiving end of a couple of decades of trolling and bullying, which has imbued me with skin a couple of miles thick. (Oddly, this has given me a quantum of respect for the schoolyard bullies who used to call me “Four-Eyes” or whatever; they at least had the balls to do it in person, unlike the multitudes of cowardly internet trolls who hid behind anonymous usernames and anime profile photos.) The correct response to the congruence testing (shit-testing from women, bullying from men, and petty rules made by petty tyrants) that the universe hurls at you is almost always to smirk and keep doing what you are doing. I’ve got a real defiant streak, so as long as internet trolls bullied me about my cross eye, I just kept showing my (unafraid) face to defy them.
But really, my crossed eye is a costly conversion optimization problem for my content, message, and livelihood. Over the years, many well-meaning people stumbled upon my videos and questioned genuinely…
Can Smart Drugs, Nootropics, or Biohacking make you cross eyed?
NO. These things can have some very strong effects (and even negative side effects in rare cases), but they don’t cause strabismus, which I have, or make anyone cross eyed. If they did, it would be very well documented in the human clinical studies on Nootropics, which encompass many thousands of individual participants (you can search PubMed), it is not. If they did, there would be anecdotal reports to this effect in the Biohacker forums, but there aren’t. There’s just me.
Now, nobody will be dissuaded from trying Nootropics or Biohacking because of the way I look, thanks to this stylish eye patch made by a master leatherworker on Etsy. For the longest time, I told myself (naively) that my message would bear fruit in the fertile soil of those minds who might overlook my imperfection. But I’m 40 now - 5th decade on planet Earth - and it’s really time to leave behind naivete.
Does the eye patch change how people treat you?
On the internet, I get fewer trolling comments about my appearance and fewer pirate jokes than I expected the eyepatch would elicit.
Out in public, at the numerous swanky cocktail parties I attend (Just kidding—As a brand new dad, I don’t make it many cocktail parties these days), I note that people pay just a little more attention to me. Very few people ask me about it. When they do, I give them a version of this silly story, which I posted on social media…
Yes, I’m wearing an eye patch now. And it’s finally time I told THE TRUTH about why my eye is… like that.
It begins with my mother. After college, she took a solo Euro trip — the kind of spiritually expansive journey you go on before seed oils ruin everything. She ends up in Crete. She is big into hiking, sunlight exposure, and keeping her circadian rhythm synced with Mediterranean daylight cycles. Just really living her best proto-biohacker life!
She goes hiking along the coast. There were caves. Of course, there were caves. And in one, there was this big opening in the roof where the sunlight streamed in like something out of a perfume commercial. She stood there, basking in the moment, contemplating her future, so full of mystery and adventure…
That’s when she hears a voice behind her. A deep, melodic murmur in Greek.
She turns around and sees a Cyclops.
Yes. A literal, living, one-eyed man-mountain glistening with olive oil and ancestral masculinity. He’s wearing some kind of animal hide that definitely hasn’t been sanitized.
She freezes. He smiles.
“Don’t be afraid,” he says, “Welcome to my cave.” (He said it in perfect English, by the way. With a charming island accent.)
Now, my mother is a bold woman. She didn’t backpack across Europe to NOT vibe with supernatural beings. They got to talking. He noticed she only had a couple of protein bars for lunch, and being a gracious host, he offered her some traditional Cretan cheese and locally fermented biodynamic wine; which he explained was made by his cousin, a winemaker who only listens to goats to decide when to harvest.
They talked. They laughed. The Cyclops listened; really listened. At one point, he said, “You’ve been hiking all day. Would you like a foot rub?”
And you can see where this is going…
Yes. My mom banged the Cyclops.
There, in his cave beneath the ancient sky. Because YOLO. Because wanderlust. Because when a muscular mythological being offers you cheese, wine, and affection — you say YES.
She lost track of time. The conversation, the connection - it was so deep, so magnetic, so primal - she found herself lost there in an “unbearable lightness of being” moment.
And, I won’t reveal too many lurid details; but we all know that there’s really no such thing as “safe sex,” and it was the 80s, and my mother lived DANGEROUSLY (and THAT, friends, is how to use a semicolon with salacious style! Style that throws caution to the wind as my mother did there in that cave below foreign stars.)
Midnight came.
And just as their climactic union reached its apex, a bolt of lightning - out of nowhere, pure freak act of nature or divine intervention - struck the Cyclops on the back mid-thrust.
He died instantly.
My mother survived. Traumatized (of course, being an American woman), barefoot, and slightly tipsy, she staggered out of the cave, made it back to her hostel, and chalked the whole thing up to a heatstroke hallucination. Until a few weeks later…
Her period was late.And that is how I was conceived. A child of lightning. Half-Cyclops. Born of wine, goat cheese, and pure magnetic polarity. Conceived in a cave during a wine-fueled union between woman and legend. It explains so much: The intensity that I bring to everything I do, my habitual rule-breaking, my perspective, my vision — or, rather, the lack of it in one eye.
Which brings us to this look.
Over the years, just a few commenters on my videos have pointed out - ALWAYS VERY POLITELY - that my naked face is not the MOST PLEASANT viewing experience. And for the longest time, I just said, “Be yourself unapologetically!” And for the longest time, I embraced radical authenticity. Full frontal weirdness. And no fucks were given.
But I am a man who embraces reinvention the way the Cyclops embraced my mother. So it’s time for a new look, and this is it.
If you’re cross eyed, you’ve probably contemplated wearing an eye patch...
It made a lot of sense for me as a public figure, but I can’t tell you whether or not to do it. It will make you look kind of like a James Bond villain. But it also cuts off half your field of vision (look twice before crossing streets!)
You have very little to lose by trying an eye patch. Only the boldest of drunks will make dumb pirate jokes at your expense; most people will instead wonder quietly if you lost an eye serving in the military or in a knife fight once upon a time in Mexico.
Thank you…
For choosing to spend your precious time reading my book. I certainly welcome any feedback you might have. Feel free to get in touch with me on social media or drop me an email.
I look forward to a continued conversation with you!
From my book How to Be Cross Eyed: Thriving Despite Your Physical Imperfection — a mémoire and lifehacking manifesto
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