Living With A S.E.A.L.

Today is a Jesse Itzler kind of day. Reflecting on his book Living With A S.E.A.L. which is a tremendous book that is hilarious at the same time. It's the first real exposure one gets to the living myth who is David Goggins and it is inspiring. A sober slap in the face if you feel like you are pushing yourself, Goggins will quickly make you realize that your 100% is probably closer to your 40%. I know it's something I often struggle with. It's one thing to motivate yourself to get to the gym but to be able to push through those difficult points when things get hard. Things start to get heavy and we pat ourselves on the back and say that was a good workout. What are we leaving on the table though? This book opens the door to what is possible and really the idea that we are capable of much more.

An interesting thought exercise I've been playing with lately while working out is simply asking What If? style questions. What if I ride for 5 more seconds? What if I do two more reps? It's an interesting little exercise as you start to see yourself push a little further than you have in the past creating more space for growth. Jesse uses the term under-indexing what we are really capable of and as we do these small exercises we begin to see we are all living an under-indexed life. Maybe it's thinking back to something we did that seemed difficult at the time and recognizing this as our limit but, in fact, I'd argue that you, and I, are capable of much more. I've never run a marathon and have always considered myself a runner. Then I ran 5k and suddenly realized that if I push myself, I can be a runner.

Slowly, over time, we can begin to ask this question in various parts of our life. What if I write a blog post every day? Why would you think it's not possible, to begin with? What if I take/edit/post a photo every day? What if I post two a day? There are a lot of areas in our lives, namely the mental models and beliefs we carry around, where this type of exercise can really be beneficial. Perhaps it is the new year around the corner and the sense that we need to take count of how the past year went, but I think there should always be an urgent sense of evaluating our lives to make sure we are on the path we want to be on.

This book is worth a listen for its hilarity and also the underlying inspiration that it provides. Recognizing that difficult things are good for us and that we need to stop under-indexing our own lives. We are all capable of so much more. If you think of the points in your life where you achieved some great success or met a difficult goal, what if that was only 40%?

#JesseItzler #DavidGoggins #LivingWithASEAL #BookPhotography #BooksandBeers #BookReview #Motivation #Mindset #TwinSailsBrewing

Zen in the Art of Archery

If you have come here searching for a book review I'd say you are better served looking elsewhere. I truly enjoyed this book but perhaps, more importantly, I'm in the process of working through my own system of overcoming self-imposed limitations in the mind. The conversations placed throughout this book reflect this deep-seated self-talk we all carry around with us and life can be spent in simply trying to overcome it. The idea of letting go plays heavily in the idea of mastery that can be achieved in any art form; in this case, archery. We don't really know what letting go is until we've seen the entire spectrum of our own mental thoughts.

What struck me about this book is that it takes place over a time span of almost a decade. The briefness of this book could lead a reader to imagine this is a simple mental game to overcome and yet the author notes it took years of practice to find their own ability to let go of thoughts to truly find mastery.

Eugen notes early success and yet reflects on the fleeting nature of these states:

"This exquisite state of unconcerned immersion in oneself is not, unfortunately, of long duration. It is liable to be disturbed from inside. As though sprung from nowhere, moods, feelings, desires, worries and even thoughts incontinently rise up, in a meaningless jumble, and the more far-fetched and preposterous they are, and the less they have to do with that on which one has fixed one's consciousness, the more tenaciously they hang on. It is as though they wanted to avenge themselves on consciousness for having, through concentration, touched upon realms it would otherwise never reach. The only successful way of rendering this disturbance inoperative is to keep on breathing, quietly and unconcernedly, to enter into friendly relations with whatever appears on the scene, to accustom oneself to it, to look at it equably and at last grow weary of looking."

It seems like in today's day and age, it has become more difficult to find the time to set aside to truly master something. We are caught up in the need to be perfect, right away. Instant gratification leaves us all temporarily satisfied but perhaps leaves us longing for something that is generated through years of hard work and suffering. We lose sight of the time and dedication it takes to truly find mastery, or zen, in the skills that we learn and the benefits of attempting to achieve it. The skills that I'm slowly trying to master would be a combination of photography, storytelling, and writing. Yet, I can see these faults in myself in the fact that I'm quick to dismiss the idea of daily writing because the path is too long. So here we are, not truly a book review, but an attempt to look at those deep-seated self-doubts within me, and put some work into trying to work towards my own state of zen and mastery.

Great book.

#EugenHerrigel #MihalyCsikszentmihalyi #Archery #Mindfulness #BookPhotography #NonFiction

Book On Books About Not Reading Books

As a reader, I'm sure you can relate to the idea that reading a book with the main premise being that we should read less as being a bit crazy. Pierre Bayard, a decade ago, wrote just a book that was subsequently translated from French to English after it became quite popular among those who read it. Presented as a series of essays that spiral into deeper topics on the subject, I found myself skimming at times due to a lack of interest. The body of the essays lacked interest for me tending to reference works that I'd never heard of or read myself.

If you are a collector of books on books then have a read of this one, if not, I'd say it's probably worth a pass. End of story, right? Well not quite. Despite the sections that I skimmed through, Pierre does provide an interesting overall theme to the book that can at times be hard to pull out. Scattered throughout the book are thoughts and ideas that seem to sit above any of the work previously discussed in the essay.

Take the essay on not being ashamed to talk about books you haven't read. The essay progresses much like the others referencing novels by an author, in this case, David Dodge, and using examples from Dodge novels to show that one should never be ashamed to talk about books that you haven't read. If that was the end, I'd have shaken my head and said what did I just read? In a moment of clarity, Pierre summarizes his paragraph with some progressive knowledge that everyone should take heed of:

"Truth destined for others is less important than truthfulness to ourselves, something attainable only by those who free themselves from the obligation to seem cultivated, which tyrannizes us from within and prevents us from being ourselves."

Wow. Without this piece of the puzzle, the essay didn't hold a lot of weight and yet these truisms remain with me even after reading the book. If you are deep into the book community through different forms of social media it can seem to be even more pressure-filled that we seem cultivated by reading many of these literary pieces. If you judge by likes then you'd say these books must be what everyone reads. Pierre squashes this notion and confirms that we must stick to our own truth when it comes to reading or anything for that matter. The minute we put on a different face we move away from our authentic selves and lose that connection that we might have had.

Perhaps it was me, but Bayard takes us on this journey through books he is both familiar and not familiar with and comes to the crux of his discussion and reason for pulling along this adventure. Bayard is focusing in on this notion that to be creative we must lift ourselves out of our preconceived notions of life and especially the books we read. He recognized the grip our own psychology towards books may have on us and notes:

"To begin with, such an evolution implies extricating ourselves from a whole series of mostly unconscious taboos that burden our notion of books. Encouraged from our school years onward to think of books as untouchable objects, we feel guilty at the very thought of subjecting them to transformation."

Critical of our upbringing and the education system Bayard links this system we are accustomed too with the inability to be creative:

"Our educational system is clearly failing to fulfil its duties of deconsecration, and as a result, our students remain unable to claim the right to invent books. Paralyzed by the respect due to texts and the prohibition against modifying them, forced to learn them by heart or to memorize what they 'contain,' too many students lose their capacity for escape and forbid themselves to call on their imagination in circumstances where that faculty would be extraordinarily useful."

When my eyes had finished rolling in my head, and I had time to digest what Bayard was saying, this book had stepped up a couple of notches in my mind. These seemingly silly notions of not reading the books and talking about books we've never read were really covert ways of getting us to get out of our comfort zone. To stop putting this idea of a book on a pedestal and allow our own thoughts and ideas to come forth. Mortimer Adler in his incredible work How to Read a Book gets to a similar notion in that we have to be able to not only read a book but truly understand what the book is saying and then synthesize that with our own ideas. Otherwise, what is the point?

So next time you hear someone talking about a book you've never read, why not jump in and offer up your own ideas on the book or the ideas being talked about. Stretch those creative muscles that may be feeling a bit lethargic.

#NonFiction #BookReview #BooksandBeers #BookPhotography