The Tarentino Method

If I told you that you could completely reshape your life in one night, would you do it? Would you sacrifice one single night? Would it be tonight?

While on the Joe Rogan Effect podcast, Quentin Tarantino shared a story about working at a video store and witnessing someone close to him experience disgust with his life at 30 because when looking back upon his life, there was nothing that he was proud of.

When Quentin turned 25, he experienced a similar realization that his dream was not to work at a video rental store but to direct and make his own movies.

Less than 15 years later, he was a two-time Academy Awards-winning director. He credits the catalyst of his success to his method that he called Tarantino’s Detest Fest.

If you want to watch Quentin's entire interview, it is Joe Rogan Effect episode #2240, and clips can be found all over YouTube for the Tarantino Method.

So, what is the Tarantino Method?

It consists of a full night of commitment, where you spend all of the hours of the night writing down with brutal honesty everything that isn’t going well in your life. Your personal flaws, your failed hopes and dreams, your bad habits and addictions… everything that you can think of between the hours that you usually spend sleeping.

Finally, once you have pages and pages of documents with all of your shortcomings, in the final two hours of the night, the next step is to write down solutions to all of your writings. As many as you can. Sometimes, as many as a hundred per problem.

and finally, now is not the time to sleep in until noon and lose the fire inside you because you missed your sleep. Now is the time to make the changes. With no sleep, miserable with yourself after seeing everything about your life that you don’t like sprawled in front of you, now is the time.

So, why does this method actually work, and why should you give it a shot at least once?

There are quite a few different steps in this process that compound for an increasingly large catalyst for change.

First of all acceptance. By writing down everything that you’re unhappy about you become honest with yourself for probably the first time in a while. As I have talked about before honesty is one of the greatest determining factors for success of downfall. For an empire built on lies cannot stand, a person built on lies cannot prosper.

This honesty lights a fire inside you. While before, you may have just been satisfied enough not to make a change. Just teetering on the edge of misery but not quite falling off, choosing instead to continue to teeter. This will give you that feeling eating you up from the inside out, forcing you to change your life for the better.

Next, actually transferring these thoughts to paper takes them off your mind. Reducing the daily weight that you feel. Making you feel free to make changes in your life without fear of this overbearing weight pouring down on you. It also gives you the confidence to change and gives you that belief in yourself that it is possible and that you can actually make changes.

While writing solutions, you realize that your problems are not all-powerful. Sometimes this problem that you thought was once insurmountable, you realize that you could solve in nearly 20 different ways, you just have to choose one.

While writing solutions you may make connections, you may find that one solution solves a couple of many problems. And that makes that one change become the key to solving a large area of your life.

Finally, you must act. And when you find yourself acting with no rest and this burning passion, you find that maybe time doesn’t need to be right, you just need to have that passion to push forward. And this passion will carry you to your solutions. Once you make changes in the worst conditions, you gain the confidence to change them when times are better.

The Tarantino Method may not be for you. But I encourage you to give it a try. Because while it may not be for you. One night may change your life.