A date in Ben Meer’s early 20s turned into an assessment of everything he was doing wrong.
“You dress in baggy clothes,” his date, a Dutch woman, told him. “You eat too fast. You walk without grace. You don’t speak a second language. You can’t cook …”
Her list of his shortcomings “was longer than a CVS receipt,” Meer recounts in his new book, “How to Be Good at Life” (Avery, out now). The criticism stung because he knew she had a point. He didn’t have it together in myriad ways.
He was running a failing skin-care business from a 350-square-foot apartment and carried $32,000 in credit-card debt. He paid the rent by waiting tables on weekends, working 14-hour shifts. Eventually, he closed the company and included a sample kit with his application to Cornell’s business school, which accepted him.
A class in business operations gave him a different way to think about his problems. His startup, he realized, had no reliable way to bring in sales or handle customer complaints. He applied that same thinking to his own life, setting up systems to manage his life using savvy and behavioral science — not sheer will power — to meet deadlines, get in workouts, stick to a budget and the like.
“We hear things like ‘trust the process,’ but I spent years trusting the process when I didn’t actually have a process,” he said.
Meer, now 34, has made a career of teaching that worldview. He has roughly 2.25 million followers across his social media accounts. Another 252,000 active subscribers receive his free newsletter, System Sunday, which offers practical ways to make smarter choices and avoid distractions.
His advice is simple but effective. Meer charges his phone in the living room, so he sleeps better and doesn’t waste endless hours scrolling. To watch less TV, he removes the batteries from the remote control so that he has to get up off the couch to put on a second episode.
Meer didn’t intend to become a productivity guru. After earning his MBA, he joined Ernst & Young as a consultant in 2019 and was assigned to write an internal newsletter. He was going through a breakup and threw himself into the writing. His manager suggested he become a writer, advice that took a while to appreciate.
“I was actually a little bitter about it because I’d just spent $150,000 on an MBA and wanted to be thought of as this great strategist,” he told The Post.
He returned to writing during the pandemic, launching a blog about using systems to improve everyday life in February 2022, and things took off from there.
His company now rakes in seven figures, with coaching clients who pay tens of thousands of collars for his expertise. Meer won’t reveal the names of his clients, but he told The Post he helped a creative director get home in time to put his kids to bed. He also described working with a senior product leader at a major tech company who started an advisory practice and eventually quit her job to run it full-time.
Meer and his fiancée, Jade Bonacolta, also run Archimedes, a 12-week program for building a following on LinkedIn. It has a listed price of $3,299.
Bonacolta, a former Google marketing leader who also writes about self-improvement, brings an audience of her own. Her advertising page lists 482,000 LinkedIn followers and 312,000 subscribers to her newsletter, The Quiet Rich.
He and Bonacolta hold a monthly “Life Dinner,” an idea the book credits to venture capitalist Brad Feld. Over supper, they discuss their relationship and what each needs from the other, which sounds like a performance review with appetizers. At one of their first Life Dinners, Bonacolta told him he’d seemed tired and distracted during a meal with her colleagues. He figured he could be better company next time if he took a nap first.
Years ago, as he was helping clients make better use of their time, Meer spent two hours every morning trying to set himself up for success. His routine included brushing his teeth on one leg and dunking his face in ice water. “I thought that I had to do all of these things to prove that I was worthy of success,” he said. “I just got really good at checking all of these boxes. But they hadn’t made me happier.”
His morning routine now takes 20 minutes, beginning with drinking water, which he calls an “internal shower.” This gives an ordinary glass of water the unsettling suggestion that your kidneys need a loofah. He follows it with espresso and meditation before writing, an improvement on spending two hours preparing for a day that wasn’t getting any better.
Meer is the first to admit that some of his advice — like utilizing birthday reminders and automatic bill payments — may seem obvious, but that’s the point.
He said, “Common sense is not common practice.”
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