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, 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.And 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.

The real story is not nearly as epic

I was born this way. I'm cross-eyed; I have conspicuous strabismus, which is currently beyond the bounds of Biohacking or surgical solutions because of some nerve damage I have. It got worse in my mid-20s because my career mostly involved staring at computer screens for +8 hours a day, which is bad for your eyes. If you don't want to end up looking like me, then don't spend so much damn time staring at screens.

But, 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.

I should have done this earlier; there are a few good personal development lessons in why I didn't. I'll explain...

Casting your identity in stone kills growth

Let me be honest: I made "cross-eyed" my identity.

I wrote a freakin' 221-page book entitled How to Be Cross Eyed about Thriving Despite Your Physical Imperfection, and I did thrive. Despite my glaring physical defect...

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!) From having sex in a brand new Maserati and getting in high-speed car chases to being deported from South American countries and representing the US Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump I've found the happiness that I didn't give a damn about and realized my dream of becoming an adventuring philosopher.

And along the way, I found edifying joy and meaning between the voluptuous legs of a beautiful Bulgarian woman on the edge of Europe - which turned into a happy 7-year marriage.

But more recently, I had the most mind-blowing day of my life as a Biohacker, and it reminded me that personal growth and embracing adventure demands 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)

In my recent essay about sex addiction, 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.

What got me here won't get me there

Let me tell you about Bill. He's a very cool guy. He was a Canadian ex-pat I met in South America. Bill was an amazing salsa/bachata dancer; I saw him in action plenty of times, and he's a dangerous man on the dancefloor.

* He also speaks Spanish fluently, almost like it's his first language.

* He is also in great shape and obviously takes care of his body.

* He's a somewhat successful businessman; he has very high standards for his product and its marketing, and this extends to his numerous customers.

* I would seldom NOT see him surrounded by friends, and he always had a pretty girlfriend (and a few waiting in the wings to take her place).

* You might think that a guy this successful would be kind of a douchebag, but he's actually down-to-earth and friendly.

So here's the interesting thing about Bill - the successful salsa dancer, he's very short. This brings up an interesting question: if he was born with the luckier genetics of being tall or even average height, do you think he would have developed into being such a dynamic and robust guy? I say no. He turned the disadvantage into a hell of an advantage - like me.

In my first book - a memoir and lifestyle manifesto - I described a number (Dozens? Hundreds? It was a lot!) of lifehacking your looks, networking up, and sharpening your social skills. And the lifehacking approach paid such dividends that I ignored what's held me back from being more successful in business and its obvious solution: my crossed eye and an eye patch.

I've got some big goals, personally and professionally, for this year that require some reinvention and re-tooling of Jonathan Roseland. The eye patch will be the most conspicuous outward sign of this.

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. Really, it has been a liability to the entire Biohacking/Nootropics industry! 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 done on Nootropics which encompass many thousands of individual participants -- you can search on 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 in Poland. They'll instead wonder if I lost it serving in the military or in a knife fight once upon a time in Mexico (at least until they find this article!)

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.

The inner beauty myth

There is this myth of inner beauty; that we will be loved and wanted for our individual inner beauty. This could not be further from the truth; you’ll be accepted or rejected based on the most superficial things.

I considered titling this article a little more harshly - Inner beauty = selfish narcissism - because it's such a pernicious, toxic, bad idea. Why? We all probably have a few people we love and care deeply for who are a long way from the epitome of beauty. We love them because of what they do: they support us, they listen to us, they have moral courage, or they have a great work ethic. We might not love them for their beauty, but we love them for what they do on the outside, NOT some hidden, passive part of them. And we're all the same way: you'll be loved and appreciated for what you do (the value you bring to others) and your appearance. Nobody (other than perhaps your parents) cares that you think you have some unseen magical beauty deep within, and expecting it is self-sabotaging selfish narcissism.

However, here's a counter-intuitive finding: The internet will be especially cruel to you based on your appearance, while strangers you cold approach in real life will often give your personality the chance to outshine your physical imperfections. As I related in my second book: every time I tried online dating, it was utterly fruitless (I suspect this had a lot to do with my conspicuous crossed eye). BUT when I met women in person - doing daygame, nightgame, or social cycle game - I got dates, laid, girlfriends, and ultimately, a wife out of it.

There have been numerous studies showing that lucky genetics ROI: good-looking people have life a whole lot easier; people say "yes" to them a whole lot more. There was even a book published on this topic: Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful -- probably worth reading if you need any more motivation to lifehack your looks.

If you were not born with lucky genetics...

You are going to have to work a whole lot harder. You need to develop some character, work ethic, and skills to get ahead in life. You'll force yourself out of your comfort zone more, and you'll end up living a life pursuing adventure and novelty instead of comfort and amusement. You'll end up having a life that looks like this...

This article is getting a little more self-aggrandizing than I'm normally comfortable with, so I'll offer a nuanced point: If you were not born with lucky genetics, every unfortunate time that you pass a mirror and catch a glimpse of your imperfect visage, let it be a reminder that you are entitled to nothing. Every time you are slighted or insulted because of your imperfections, let it be a reminder that you are going to have to work harder and smarter than everybody else.There's this absurd, politically correct idea that access to opportunity should be equalized. Your opportunity is in the personal development that happens when you reach for something you should be precluded from attaining because of the disadvantages you've been dealt. Every time you are reminded of an unfair disadvantage you have, let it be a motivator to practice a little more discipline, apply creativity, and act like the person that you want to be.

My new look might be a little weird for those of you who have followed me for a while...

Sorry about that! Stick with me; you'll get used to it soon. And thanks for overlooking my physical imperfection in the past; that was downright decent of you!

Hopefully, this inspires you to embrace reinvention in your own way!

Share this with someone in the midst of a reinvention…

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