Get Up

Set the Bar Low When You Can
Especially for material goals, a low, attainable goal is best. It’s a lot better to start small and have the end be in sight. If it’s too high, you may need to break it down into smaller goals. Do you really want a Ferrari, or will a reliable Toyota do the trick? Do you really want a house or will a really nice apartment suit your needs? When you’re specific and realistic about your goals, the path to them materializes in front of you.

My first financial goal was to get rid of my outstanding debt. I wasn’t thinking about retiring or living the lush life. I wanted to make more money so I could pay back what I owed. After my debt problem was solved, I tried to think of how much money I wanted.

I want to be a millionaire, was my first thought. But why? What I really wanted was to be able to retire at some point and live off my earnings. Being a millionaire was way too abstract an idea for me to accomplish. I’m fine with working until I’m sixty-five, but I’m quitting that day and retiring with what I have.

Then I saw that I didn’t have to make a lot of money quickly, but I needed a better job that would help me attain these goals. I didn’t have to make the money in two years. I still had thirty years from the time I set the goal. So I knew that in a job I would need to make enough to save at least 10 percent per year in a 401(k) or an IRA.

At the beginning of 2007, I wasn’t close to these goals. I was working in a job I liked that didn’t pay me much more than I needed to get by. I kept my head up and looked for other work. If I couldn’t find a better job, I’d find an additional one.

Two jobs came my way. One was a well-paying freelance job that lasted for two weeks, and the other was a

Every plot in the series was full of holes, but the lessons learned were solid. The team, supposedly in hiding, drove around in a very distinctive customized van. Murdock routinely escaped from various institutions but was never so insane as to jeopardize a mission. And, most unbelievably, for the thousands of rounds they fired, they never hit a single person. But what we have to learn from them will help us socialize with the Normies.

Interacting with the Normies is a difficult part of sobriety. If we didn’t learn how to deal with them the first time, you learn to deal with them now.

Normies, at first viewing, seem like strange creatures. They leave beers unfinished. They open a bottle of scotch, have a drink, and don’t drink from the same bottle again for months. They can keep a stash of wine in the cellar. They don’t drink if they’re about to drive or operate heavy machinery. They take the prescribed dosage on the side of the bottle instead of the whole bottle at once. Weird, huh? But wait, it gets weirder and weirder.

Normies socialize sober. They go out on dates, to dinner parties, celebrate holidays without ever taking a drink or smoking pot. Many of them don’t drink unless they’re at a wedding, and they only go to weddings they’re invited to. I know, it sounds like an urban legend, like the story about the old lady who tried to dry off her poodle in the microwave, but it’s totally true.

Hannibal
Hannibal is the planner of the team. He’s a master of disguise, rarely spotted by his enemies whilst walking among them.

If you’re a Hannibal, your life is orderly. You know where everything is. You don’t lose important items. You make appointments and keep them, never showing up late. You can’t stand indecisiveness on a group level. Your polar opposite is Murdock.

As an Addict. You were the one who kept the scale and weighed everything out perfectly. When it was time for a beer run, you designated what would be purchased and collected the money from everyone. You rarely ran dry. You were an overachieving alcoholic, showing up first to work, often in a managerial position, and leaving last.

As a Recovering Addict. You’re going to be happiest with service work. You need to run meetings, have sponsees, and be a part of organizational activities. It irritates you when you see meetings being run in an inefficient manner. Step work makes sense to you, but you like to break each step down into twelve more steps, and add other steps that were left out.

Pros. Hannibal’s organizational skills are of good use. Paperwork, forms, and responsibility come naturally to the Hannibal. Less likely to relapse if kept busy. Confident, assertive, and enthusiastic.

Pros. When there’s something you want, you go directly after it. There’s no hesitation or pussyfooting around. Your goals, once realized, are targeted and achieved.

Cons. Fear, ironically enough. While few things will scare a B.A. ,what does scare you completely dominates you in the situation. Your strength is thus rendered helpless. Has trouble with intimacy. Refuses to back down in situations even when it would greatly benefit you to do so.

Murdock
Murdock was the pilot of the bunch. On the show, he served as comic relief as the Hilarious Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Guy. Aren’t shell-shocked vets hilarious?

Murdock is the prankster, the artist, the performer, and the jester. Everyone loves having you in the group. Your polar opposite is Hannibal.

As an Addict. You did copious amounts of drugs that were given to you by those who loved having you around. You were the “fun” drunk. You likely had a nickname that people shouted when you entered the bar. Though you angered many people who were the brunt of your pranks, you escaped without a scratch.

As a Recovering Addict. Chaos still rules. You have poor organizational skills, are late often, and lose important items. A creative outlet is

As a Recovering Addict. When told what to do by a sponsor, you may not be able to resist bargaining for something else. You’ll be able to reenter society, as people treat you as a hero for kicking your addictions.

Pros. Despite your checkered past, people trust Face when you asks for responsibility, loans, or gifts. You’re the first one to get a second chance.

Cons. Acquiring positions in life and material items, Face is never satisfied. You can’t enjoy them; you only enjoy talking people into giving them up. There are never enough toys or joys for Face. Finding emotional value in life is difficult. You may find yourself in a position in which you do not have the skills to succeed and must further talk your way out of a situation.

Yo, dude, all this is great, but how the hell am I supposed to use this knowledge?

You see, you’re supposed to have aspects of all four of these characters to be a complete person. Without your Hannibal, you’ll never be able to get things done. Without your B.A., you’ll be walked on by others and not be able to improvise in difficult situations. Without your Murdock, you’ll never be able to live in the moment and truly enjoy life. Without your Face, you’ll have trouble getting people to trust you.

Figure out which area is weak, and make that team member exercise. Start small.

If your Hannibal is weak, make paying your bills and being on time your priority. Clean your room; it needs it. Even if it’s cleaner than it was when you were a junkie, it’s not clean

Achieving Your Goals the Lee Marvin Way
Point Blank is one of my favorite Lee Marvin movies. It’s hard to choose between his role as the biker in The Wild One or in the weird midwestern mafia flick Prime Cut or any of his other fine films. But one that sticks out to me is Point Blank.

In this film, Lee Marvin is after $93,000 that was his share of some unspecified heist. What stood out for me was his use of a step method to get his money back. He calmly yet violently moved from one step to the next in the quest to retrieve the money owed him.

We have two main lessons to learn from this: Be specific in your goal making, and be ardent with each step. Marvin doesn’t look to get any more than a specific amount. He’s not interested in getting $100,000, he wants what’s coming to him. His resolve goes no further than what he needs to do for that part of his journey.

When I got sober, I wanted my life to improve. That’s a very vague goal to have, so nonspecific that I may not notice or achieve satisfaction when it does happen. Think of your goals as a location where you want to be. Would you get in a car without knowing where you were going? Well, maybe. If you’re reading this book, you likely have. But it didn’t turn out well, did it? Would you try to drive to Boston from California by heading vaguely east without looking it up in an atlas or on a map? That’s not a good idea, either. So I had to figure out exactly what I wanted for myself.

Getting sober is going to give you a lot of time that you used to spend staring at the TV in the bar. You have time to get most things in life done that you want to do. But first, you need to figure out what those things are.

San Francisco State was the school that would graduate me the quickest. I had a lot of resentments about my previous time there, and with various faculty members from my department who were still there. I had to get over these problems. I had been carrying around grudges from ten-year-old incidents, and they were hindering me from achieving my goals. Drunk Me would’ve not gone back because of those resentments, but this was Sober Me who was trying to get into school.

Getting back in was a mess. On the university website, there were forms for new students and transfer students, but none for drunk students who dropped out in 1992 and wanted to go back twelve years later. I knew they would want transcripts from the previous schools, records I didn’t have, but I couldn’t let anything stop me.

I decided I would take getting back into school one day at a time, just as they say to take sobriety when you’re a newcomer to recovery. I didn’t have to get back into school with one click of an Internet button; I would be able to get in over a period of days, months, or years, whatever it took, but I resolved to do something for this quest every day.

My daily tasks ranged from short phone calls to long forms. Every day, I had a number to call to get a transcript, to set up an appointment with a guidance counselor, or to go down to San Francisco State in person to stand in a line for an hour. Since I had started school in the ’80s, my records had not been kept on computers; they were kept on what was called microfiche, the high-tech version of microfilm. I was lucky that the people at all three of my schools were able to find them. I pictured them in some warehouse, akin to the closing scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where my college files were

That’s when it really hit me what this step thing is all about. 12 Step is not some kind of random ritual to put us through; it helps us build life skills that get us through each day. It’s not only about quitting drugs and drinking, it’s about living without them, really living our lives without escapes and crutches and false security mechanisms.

Eventually, I was done. I received a diploma in the mail, with the automated signature of Arnold Schwarzenegger. I had done at the age of thirty-five what many twenty-two-year-old shad done. Graduating with a BA from a state school would be a step down for a lot of people I knew, but for me it was huge.

Being Happy
Maybe you don’t know what goals you want to accomplish. You may have spent the recent parts of your life simply getting by day to day and working around your addiction. Take the obsession to use away, and there’s a big hole to fill in its place. The best place to start is with a simple question: What makes you happy?

Aside from drug, alcohol, and sexual experiences, what were the last times that you were happy? Where were you? What were you doing? Who were you with? If you can find

The Hustle Monkey is the most insidious of all your inner primates. It’s the one most people don’t know about, yet it’s the one who is most responsible for your relapses, unless,o f course, you have the rare Relapse Monkey. If you have a Relapse Monkey, you’ll need to be in an inpatient program or the heiress to a hotel magnate. But most of us need to watch out for Hustle Monkey.

Hustle Monkey likes the act of acquiring our vices, more so than our respective vice monkeys like their vices. Hustle Monkey is the one who gets you to hit the liquor store at one minute before close. Hustle Monkey likes stealing and selling CDs for dope money. Hustle Monkey likes to buy a whole ounce of weed with the idea that you’ll sell enough to get three-eighths for free. Hustle Monkey is the most morally debilitating of all of them. It likes to steal, scam, and otherwise procure the vices and their tools.

Think of what you went through to score dope with no money, to shoot up with no rig and only a plastic spoon in sight, and to get out of the house while wearing the ankle monitor. To normal people, this would seem like a world of trouble. They wouldn’t know the first thing about any of this. To us, it seems like the normal ins and outs of everyday life. What I’m trying to get across to you is this idea: What is one man’s short con is another man’s thesis paper.

Think of some simple scam, like Brick In A Box. First, you have to find an empty box that used to contain something like a camcorder that you could resell; how many times have you looked to only find boxes for Pop-Tarts and tampons? Then, you have to find a brick, of course, never around when you need one. Then you have to find some mark who’s dumb enough to buy it without looking inside. Sure, it works, but it takes up a lot of time and trouble, all for $20. You likely would’ve made more than that working for minimum wage. But that fact never stopped you. You had that incentive of scoring dope at the end of it all, but it’s the Hustle Monkey inside you that kept you in the moment of one step to the next in the face of being dope sick.

These are the same qualities your Hustle Monkey can use to get you through the more legitimate areas of your life. If you can have this same approach to hunting for one job after another, and interviewing fearlessly, you will get the job you want. If you hunt for the right fixer-upper, and are willing to restore it to livable conditions, you will get the house you want. If you can focus on making your partner happy, in the face of temptation and live selflessly, you can maintain a monogamous relationship.

And no, you’re not getting a new monkey. You’re keeping the same old one. You’re still an alcoholic, a drug addict,