The way we consume information is ever changing, but what remains constant is the importance of books.
Whether read on good ole’ paper, or on digital ink, the compilation of ideas and thoughts in one piece of work conveys the author’s intention as much as is truly possible in a one way communication.
We’ve shared our reviews and thoughts on a selection of books in the past. In this post the selections are just as eclectic as our last book review post, with an emphasis on the markedly important aspects of mental training, to change thoughts, habits, and assumptions that may be holding us back.
Ryan’s Book Choices
Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about mental management and habit change. The two selections I’ve reviewed below are great reads I highly recommend to anyone looking to improve themselves and their ability to handle the challenges in their lives.
The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Adversity to Advantage, by Ryan Holiday
I loved The Obstacle is the Way.
This book’s premises are based on Stoicism, a school of philosophy teaching that destructive emotions are a result of judgement errors, and that we can control these unwelcome emotions by improving our ability to reason.
This way of thinking is well suited for me, as I’ve gone through so many methods of mental training from Zen seated meditation, to the full contact competitiveness of black belt tournament Judo.
It seems I’ve always been seeking a way to control myself and my emotions.
I enjoyed how Holiday structured the book, not as a formal treatise on Stoicism, but rather, presented in an easily digestible manner that keeps the reader interested and engaged. What makes the book even more interesting is Holiday’s examples of different Stoic thinkers, such as Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Tim Ferris, and Bill Clinton.
This book gives you the opportunity to see examples of how others, especially highly accomplished people, reflected upon their own behavior and biases, and adjusted them to prevail over their challenges.
It’s really helped me to shift my perspective and take note of the way I perceive and react to things.
My favorite quote Holiday includes is from Marcus Aurelius:
Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.
Life gets tough, progress is anything but linear, and when things get really hard, it’s important to be able to deal with those issues in the best way possible.
What this book taught me most is how much perspective determines outcome.
As Holiday puts it,
How we interpret the events in our lives, our perspective, is the framework for our forthcoming response—whether there will even be one or whether we’ll just lie there and take it. Where the head goes, the body follows. Perception precedes action. Right action follows the right perspective.
With Winning in Mind, by Lanny Bassham
With Winning in Mind continues in a similar vein as The Obstacle is the Way, with it’s focus on perspective, attitude, and mental management.
The author’s background is in competitive shooting, so winning as pertains to competition is a main theme of the book. The principles apply quite broadly, though, beyond competitive sports. Since reading this book recently, I’ve already found myself successfully incorporating some of Bassham’s ideas into my daily life.
Being positive is our only hope. Positive pictures demand positive results from the subconscious. If we think negatively, we have to expect negative results.
This quote from Winning in Mind helps me tremendously in my daily workouts and, really, in everything I do. I feel that if I go into my training expecting not to be able to do something, chances are I’m not going to be able to do it.
In the kids classes I teach over here I don’t like it when the kids say, “I can’t do it,” before they’ve even tried. If you’ve never tried it, how do you know you can’t do it? And, if you go in thinking you can’t do it, you will probably fail. Clear your mind, have a bit of faith, and just TRY!
The Self-Image, made up of your habits and attitudes, makes you “act like you.” Your Self-Image directs your behavior.
This is another great quote from the book that resonated with me.
If your habits are horrible and you have a bad attitude on top of that, well, you aren’t going to be a very good you. By working on improving your habits – and what is attitude, if not a habit? – you can be the person you would like to be.
Jarlo’s Picks
I’ve chosen two books to share that, at first look, may seem to be completely different from one another.
One is ostensibly a long commentary about daily maximum weight squats, and the other is a short self help book hoping to give you strategies to help you change your attitudes toward the trials in your life.
However, these books share the primary concern of helping you to analyze your assumptions and habitual thinking, and reframe them in a way to get you working towards a change. Whether it’s your physical fitness training or your life in general.
Squat Everyday, by Matt Perryman
Matt is one of my favorite strength and fitness writers, and his ideas are a refreshing change from the usual authoritarian “this is the best way” mentality.
With the advent of evidence based training and a reliance on research, it’s great that there is more thinking being applied to the fitness field, but unfortunately, what should be a fluid and critical thinking process can devolve into dogma and unwillingness to acknowledge that the “science” may very well be wrong.
Squat Everyday makes the case for high frequency heavy lifting, but the crux of the book is much more than that. At its heart it asks you to question your assumptions, and instead, pay close attention to the effects of your work, rather than your expectations.
As Matt so eloquently explains the philosophy behind this methodology,
Forget the goal, take your self out of the equation, and just train. Immerse yourself. Center your workouts on effortless effort. Seek optimal experience. Be mindful. Do what happens and nothing more. You just go train, and forget the rest.
I followed Matt’s recommendations a couple years ago, and I’m currently going through it again after a re-read of the book and adjusted with the new insights of experience. It has taught me so much about how expectations can cloud your judgement.
Remove your assumptions and follow the results and not your expectations.
There’s something to be said for treating physical training as mental exercise. Training has a belief-dependent quality which matters perhaps more than any of the physical explanations. If you don’t believe that your goal is achievable or your program is going to get you there, then your entire condition ― psychological and physiological ― will respond as if that were true.
This is true of everything we do. Our belief systems that have built up over time affect us in ways we don’t even realize because they are so deeply a part of who we believe we are as a person. Perhaps even just realizing this can be true can help us break free and achieve so much more than we think possible.
Rise Above: 7 Strategies to Crush Adversity, by Nate Miyaki
We’ve recommended just about everything Nate has written, and for good reason – the guy knows his stuff!
Usually, we turn to Nate for his expertise on all things nutrition, but I really enjoyed reading Rise Above, which is a completely different piece, focusing on tactics we can use to strengthen ourselves to deal with and conquer life’s challenges.
What can you really control? You can control your effort, your actions, and your authenticity. That’s it. Everything else is really out of your hands. So do what you can to the best of your ability, focus on getting a little bit better every day, be yourself, and then be done with it.
Working on being a better version of yourself, a better person, is such an integral part of living the life you want to live, and being able to handle the hard times.
We’ve all dealt with our fair share of adversity, and as we continue your lives there’s likely to be more of the same.
If we work to build ourselves up and strengthen the attributes Nate highlights in this book, we’ll be much better prepared for dealing with negative situations in the future.
As Nate says,
Challenges and struggles are universal. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you come from, or where you are trying to go. Rich, poor, famous or ignored, we all just have different kinds of problems. But they are problems, nonetheless. So stop wishing for a different situation, and start living in your own.
Andy’s Reads
Change is complex, and comes in many forms.
It’s not always just about creating habits like flossing every day or drinking more water. My book choices reflect different kinds of change.
The first examines what courtship behavior reveals about our private selves. It combines analysis of a large data sample with some very personal experiences we can all relate to.
My next pick is actually a novel that has been life changing for me and many other people I know. In this case, change comes about through the act of getting through this challenging, yet meaningful and quite enjoyable masterpiece. This method of change may not be for everyone, but if it speaks to you, I recommend giving it a try.
Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One is Looking), by Christian Rudder
You’ve probably heard of “Big Data” recently and about how massive corporations track your buying behavior to show ads you’re more likely to respond to.
Well, years before Big Data was news, the dating site OK Cupid began trying to find patterns in their user behavior, such as “What do the most attractive profile pictures have in common?” and “What words should you avoid using in a first message if you want a date?”
Dataclysm is the result of analyzing tens of millions of users over five years to find those answers.
It’s a fun read, offering deep insights into our courtship behaviors – and since romantic relationships are kind of a big deal, those insights have a lot to say about human nature in general. Our attitudes about sex, music, race, money, and more come to the surface in the way we comminucate with potential mates, and where Big Data knows what brand of breakfast cereal you prefer, OK Cupid’s millions of users represent the emotional lives of a big chunk of American society.
Though I’ve been happily married for several years, I enoyed the clear explanations (with loads of charts) and humorous analyses.
This is not one of those books that’s going to change your life, but it will definitely change the way you think about your interactions (especially online) and the differences between people’s public and private personas. If you’re a fan of pop-psychology and socio-cultural topics, you should definitely pick it up.
Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace
There’s several schools of thought on the role of fiction in modern society. Should it be easy entertainment, or can a challenging work of fiction change the way you see the world around you?
I happen to fall into the latter camp, so if you prefer Harry Potter to The Brothers Karimazov, you might want to skip Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus loosely about North American entertainment culture. I’m not even going to try and sum up the plot or premise here, but I recently re-read IJ for probably the twentieth time, and I’m always rewarded with new levels and jokes and insights with every reading.
This is definitely a challenging book to get through, with over a hundred characters and lots of difficult vocabulary, plus extremely nerdy references to math, pholosophy, tennis, avante garde film, and addiction recovery. It’s also over a thousand pages long and features a somewhat confusing chronology.
But, like many of the physically challenging things we teach around here, there are rewards.
Reading IJ will have you rethinking your relationship with your education, with TV and movies, with working out, and with how you define yourself as a person. I know that sounds like some deep stuff, but that’s the real power of challenging your mind with such colossally difficult fiction.
I can’t recommend this book to everyone, but I recommend it to anyone who wants to read a novel that really changes you.
We Are Our Habits – How These Books Can Help You Be a Better Version of Yourself
The saying that we are all creatures of habit is cliché, but all too true.
Often much more than we’d like, we fall into the same patterns of thinking, doing, and reacting emotionally. Life is difficult and full of tough choices so, even if only subconsciously, we tend to follow the path of least resistance.
Building habits is important, but sometimes it’s just as important to break free of your usual way of doing things.
Sometimes that’s just fine but often, it prevents us from accomplishing our rightful potential in our careers, relationships, and physical attributes. It’s not so much that we should rid ourselves of all habits, but rather give ourselves the opportunity to take a real and conscious look at how much we allow our actions and emotions to operate on autopilot.
From there we can begin to choose for ourselves what is postitive and negative about our personal patterns. And perhaps of equal importance with an honest appraisal of ourselves is knowing that we have the capacity to change.
Change is tough, but it’s doable. Having faith in yourself to make it happen can supersede a lot of formidable obstacles.
In the next article, we’ll share some exercises and strategies we’ve used for improving mental training and personal growth. They’ll be helpful for applying the principles you can learn from all of the recommended books above.
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