Off Topic: The Easy Way To Stop Smoking

For any investors out there who are trying to quit smoking, I highly recommend reading Allen Carr's The Easy Way to Stop Smoking. Not only will your health improve, but so will your energy levels and focus (as well as saving money), and that will help with your real estate investing career!

Despite all the many important books I've read (real estate or otherwise), this one is the most important. What most quit smoking methods do is try to convince you that smoking is bad for you and thereby you should stop. But everyone already knows that. What Allen Carr does is show that smoking actually does nothing for you and there is no reason you should want to smoke. It takes no willpower to not do what you don't want to do. After all, how much willpower is required to not drink cyanide?

He goes through excuse after excuse. For example, "I smoke because I'm bored", well, smoking is quite obviously, very boring. Or "I smoke to relax". Well smoking is a mild stimulant. Indeed, many excuses such as concentration and relaxation or contradictory. It takes very little time to figure out that there really is no enjoyable reason to smoke cigarettes.

The only reason we smoke is to relieve the withdrawal pangs from the previous cigarette. This is why cigarettes taste better after an extended absence. When I tried to quit with willpower, it was an awful experience. I thought it was the physical withdrawal pangs, but in reality, it was almost all in my head. That was the biggest revelation to me; that the withdrawal pangs from nicotine withdrawal or almost imperceptible. According to Carr:

"There is no physical pain in the withdrawal from nicotine. It is merely a slightly empty, restless feeling, the feeling that something isn’t quite right, or that something is missing… (pg. 24)

"… Most smokers go all night without a cigarette. The withdrawal “pangs” do not even wake them up. Many smokers will leave the bedroom before they light that first cigarette; many will have breakfast first. Increasingly people don’t smoke in their homes and won’t have that first cigarette until they are in the car on the way to work… These smokers have eight or maybe ten hours without a cigarette—going through withdrawal all the while, but t doesn’t seem to bother them." (pg. 34)

So if you are a smoker and would like to quit, I highly recommend Allen Carr's book, webinar or seminar.