Posts published in August 2018

That day I slept very late. I think I may have been binge-partying the nights before.

And I didn’t sleep well. It was emergency sirens all about – and a lot of them.

I’ve lived near some of the largest hospital clusters in the world. So I’m used to the clangor of ambulances, police cars and fire engines.

Fire engines are the worst.

But that day was something else. The noise really filled the air like never before, and there was something extra chaotic and panicky about the sirens and how they moved about.

I hopped out of bed and got onto a normie news website.

Someone had bombed the finish line of the marathon, a few blocks from my house. Dozens of casualties. I was surprised I hadn’t heard the blast myself.

The first thing on my mind wasn't about myself. It was to email my mother that I was fine before she went into a hysterical rage on hearing the news.

That done, I needed to figure out what to do with myself. Obviously, the city would be blocked off and dysfunctional for days on, if previous experience was any indication.

I went back to the news to scan for imminent danger – to exclude chemical and radioactive fallout or secondary attack. I was quickly satisfied that it was not an issue. My knowledge of psychology and the apparent size and type of device used suggested that the bombers were probably some idiot children and not a part of a larger plot. And I was right.

All this took less than an hour. Then, there was the rest of the day.

Unlike most people, I’m aware that the more attention you pay to assholes, the more energy you feed them. So I was determined to go about my business with as little disruption as possible. What else could I possibly do?

The first thing on my agenda was to go running, as I did every day.

About half of my usual route coincided perfectly with the final stretch of the marathon – almost to the finish line itself, where the bombing had gone off.

So I went about it.

I didn’t care about security risks because I had done my homework. If my assessment was correct, there was nothing to worry about. Skin in the game.

I didn’t care about being judged by onlookers because I don’t care about other people’s opinions. And because I knew the sheeple would be hiding under their beds anyway, as long as the MSM told them to.

I was slightly concerned only about being accosted by public safety, but their response turned out to be much directed and deliberate than I could have expected.

The only real issue on my run was the filth left behind by marathon spectators. And the fumes of the tireless cleaning crews that had crawled out to deal with it.

By going about my business, I wasn’t addressing any specific emotion or reacting to the circumstances. The intent was directed the other way – I was taking stock of the conditions, so I could go about my business with minimal disruption.

This is what “being yourself” is about. "These are the things I do, and I do them because this is me. Not because of any other condition."

As you become more of yourself, you build fortitude. Your self-awareness energizes it, your overcoming of obstacles to your self-actualization makes you mentally stronger and more antifragile.

Fortitude isn’t something you do at the gym, although physical fitness certainly helps.

Fortitude is your unconditional will to continue on the path you have chosen for yourself, to be the person you have decided to be, regardless of circumstances or “what the community thinks”, including your own fleeting feelings and emotions.

I’m giving you a long-winded semantic definition because I know you will ask for one or come up with something worse.

37) THE FOURTH LAW

Don’t behave like people you don’t want to become.

— sᴛᴀʀᴛᴜᴘ ᴅᴀᴇᴍᴏɴ (@startupdaemon) November 29, 2017

Fortitude is only manifest in our daily actions and our regulation of thoughts and emotions – in harnessing and directing all that energy towards who we want to be.

When confused or unsettled, ask yourself: Who do I want to be? What would that person do right now? What does that person do every day?

Then do as who you want to be would do. Be your better Self.

No matter how bad or unexpected the conditions, your fortitude can come through.

Think of fortitude as a habit – the habit of being reminded of who you want to be and that you won’t be deterred by anything from being that person.

And this is how you know that without fortitude you can never be Authentik.

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Some weeks ago I went to Acadia with a couple of my best and oldest friends (ENFJ & ENFP, both savages and proven troublemakers – an unbearable combo unless you have nerves of steel).

We had decided to go camping for a long-awaited get-together, just the three of us. No wives, no homos.

I knew exactly what I was getting myself into and I enjoyed every moment to the fullest. It was at times a truly transcendent experience. Suffice it to say, we almost got kicked out of the camping ground the very first night by a visibly fearful grounds manager. As per usual.

For the first day of our outing, we had planned a bike ride around the park. We did about 25 km that day. And got “lost” along the bike paths, mostly because we didn’t care where we were going until just before dark.

I hadn’t been on a bike for a decade. (OK, OK, I had been speeding once on a bike without brakes – but that’s another story for another time.) I had not been working out, not even running, for a good three months. To say that I wasn’t in great shape would be a rancid understatement.

But I encouraged the guys to ride faster downhill, often led the pack and ended the day without any complaint – or any subsequent muscle pain. I woke up early the following morning in high spirits, with lots of energy and no pain. That after drinking until late into the night and sleeping in a tent at near-freezing temperatures.

I must surely be exaggerating, mustn’t I? Not one bit. And here’s the little bit of magic behind it.

Your ability to control your body, your organs, your muscles is much greater than you suspect.

You can use your mind’s directed attention to manage physical activity at a level that significantly increases your capability, especially in endurance, and negates adverse consequences such as strained muscles and need for recovery.

This is only ground-level High Awareness of oneself. And a gateway drug of sorts. Just a foretaste of what’s possible when you start removing misplaced beliefs and assumptions, and lean on experience and savagery instead.

People have been making fun of how I move for longer than I can remember. Whether it’s pool or basketball, they’ve likened my movements to ballet. And they didn’t mean it in a good way. This “they” includes my own mother making fun of me. As a kid.

Then as now, I didn’t care one bit about it. Because I knew what I was doing.

I was optimizing my movements to take advantage of inertia and the nature of motion, save energy for the next thing and get the optimal result.

My understanding of what I was doing became more conscious when I took up karate at about 16-17 years of age. In training, I made an effort to master every detail of every movement first. Only after that would I concern myself with hitting the opponent.

During the most grueling practice, I would remind myself to embrace the pain and go with the flow of what we were doing. I intuitively felt the value of flowing with the environment – flowing with the floor, flowing with the air when I was moving – and applied it in every other aspect of life.

Over time and attention, this practice expanded and deepened to different muscles, movements and even internal organs.

In graduate school, I got a taste for long-distance running as a way to pump my brain with energy and get out the aggression of sleeping 5 hours a day and often being intensely bored the rest of the time.

Mind you, I was often doing 18-30 km a day, some of it in midday tropical heat and humidity. It was no joke.

I learnt to switch between different postures, pay attention to my breathing and liver function, control joint movements and stress, understand how to manage my heart rate and still make room for sprinting – which is the most enjoyable part.

One time I went on a 14-hour drinking binge, got home when the Sun was already high up, and minutes later took a 12 km run like it was nothing. The air was so humid that it felt almost like swimming. And I didn’t feel unsafe for a single instant while I was doing it. I was almost 30 years old.

When I hit up the trails with my friends a few weeks ago, this practice kicked right in. Once you learn the basics of High Awareness, it becomes second nature even if you don’t use it for a long time. It’s easier to forget how to ride a bike, literally.

As soon as I got on the pedals, I was already applying mind-body awareness to driving hard uphill. Without effort. I myself was surprised how easy it went.

What did I do specifically?

Much of it is instinctual and unconscious like any other well-honed skill. Hence the expression High Awareness. You do something else, your inner monologue concerns itself with other subjects, and you perform top-level all the same. But you remain focused, in control and directing energy towards this unconscious effort consciously, in Awareness.

Here’s some of what I did on the bike, and without thinking too much about it:

• Adjusted my seat to an unusual height, for which I received a lecture from my ENFP friend about how my knees were going to be killing me the next day (nothing of the sort happened).
• Shifted my body weight between feet and hands as well as onto the bike seat.
• Changed the sideways angle at which I was pedaling with my ankles. This would have looked very funny and awkward from the outside. It was extremely effective and I'm convinced it's what ensured exactly zero joint pain.
• Shifted the main thrust of the pedaling motion between my hips, knees and ankle joints. This was a consistent flow-shifting of stress, without waiting for any one joint and muscle group to get worn down.
• Changed my forward/backward and sideways body tilt even when I wasn’t making any turns and there wasn’t an obvious aerodynamic or inertial reason to do so. This allowed muscle groups and joints to take turns at complete rest. Low stress is not rest – it’s harmful when chronic.
• Shifted my back posture (especially between convex and concave) and the intentional strain in my back muscles, especially the position of my neck and shoulders.

How did I know what to do when? I was simply paying attention to my body on an unconscious level and using many years of attentive experience to interpret and act on those signals.

To an outside observer, this would have looked like a messy knot of physical awkwardness. To me it was an intricate implementation of direction and control that amplified the enjoyment of the trip. Because effectiveness is such a turn-on.

And I was being extremely effective, especially considering my complete lack of preparation for the specific physical activity. Because my attention wasn’t drawn onto struggling with the bike, I was able to enjoy the sunshine and the beautiful vistas along the path.

What I felt the next day not just in my legs but throughout my entire body was rabid muscle growth, the kind you get after a robust well-structured workout.

The slow sizzle of muscle being formed. That’s not painful, it’s exalting.

You can get that elation from your workouts, too, even if you’re not into working out. Putting in the full power of mind increases your effectiveness in growing muscle and helps lower the chance of HIT injury.

And applying High Awareness to your body and muscle movements is just the tip of the mental powerberg.

Sign up on Patreon to get on the weekly Q&A. Every dollar counts.

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You can get a head start on cultivating Awareness with Joseph Goldstein's Insight Meditation: The Practice of Freedom.

Joseph is one of the few original westerners who brought effective meditation practice from Asia. And I find him the most effective meditation teacher I have ever heard speak.

I’ve almost-died three times – that I can recollect.

The first time I was still an infant in diapers, just a few months old.

I spent much of my childhood on my grandparents’ farm. They had a vineyard and a huge vine shade all around the front of the house. Before the first grapes were fully ripe, the elders would start prepping barrels and grinders for the coming harvest.

One day in the high heat of summer, everybody had left somewhere to do field work. They’d left me in the care of my great-grandfather.

The family had put up a few wine barrels to be cleaned under the yard vine hugging the house. My great-grandfather was filling them with water from a hose.

Somehow my perambulator ended up parked right next to a barrel that was being filled. The water flowed in. The barrel filled up. The water started flowing over the edge – right into my bowl-like, impermeable, rain-proof stroller.

And yes, my divine person was present – asleep – in said stroller. My godly respite quickly turned into an unplanned swimming lesson.

Let this sink in.

Drowning inside your own waterproof perambulator. In the high heat of summer. Miles away from the nearest pond and the nearest cloud. At the safest place imaginable – your grandparents’ home.

Can death get any more ridiculous than this? Can life get more absurd?

I’m skeptical that it can, but I like a challenge.

Next family member who tried to take me out was my grandmother.

I was still less than a year old when she dropped me head first on the sharp edge of a raw brick wall.

You might think this explains a lot, and it well might.

But here’s the fun part. The doctors decided it would be a good idea to put my skull back together without a painkiller, let alone a sedative.

I don’t remember if I was awake or in shock when I got bricked in the head and on the way to the hospital. But I sure as hell snapped out of it when the doctor started gluing my cracked head. How I must have screamed.

Because, you know, babies and toddlers don’t remember and what not.

Well, that’s the very first memory of my life – being tortured as an infant and excruciating pain being inflicted on my unsuspecting person. That image of the doctor leaning over me is carved into my memory like it was yesterday. Moses can go pound sand with his stone tablets.

Be reminded of this joyous episode next time you feel like complaining about your life. I couldn’t complain. I could only scream, and I took ample advantage of the opportunity.

By the time I graduated from kindergarten at about 7, I had the distinct suspicion that my parents were absolutely klueless about how to raise kids (they were). And probably so were most other parents (they are).

I don’t know if those early experiences were among the motives, but I went on a long road of experimentation, one of whose goals was to gain my independence from parental control. And I did. That’s also how Blood in the Game was born.

So, the third time I almost-died, there was no familial involvement. If anything, I was barely able to scrounge together (borrow from my parents) the money to make it happen.

I must have been in my early twenties already. I was on a beach in Croatia, working to improve my swimming skills. Alone.

While I normally swam like a rock, that day I had decided to demonstrate my prowess while a giant cruise ship was coasting by. I don’t know if it was the size of Queen Mary II or Queen Mary 17. Suffice it to say, it was larger than many small mountains.

I remember few details, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t drowning until that thing decided to stop. Big ocean liners make big waves – this much is obvious. Imagine what happens when they pull the parking break.

I was paying attention, so I did expect a jolt or two. Instead, I ended up in something like a centrifuge of giant waves that only pulled me closer to the cruise ship.

Some minutes passed and I wasn’t making any progress towards the beach. If anything, I was making regress – in the direction of death by drowning.

The lo-awarenes narrative says you should believe in yourself and you can overcome anything, blah-blah-blah. Let me tell you something about that. From deadly experience.

Semantics don’t float. You can believe whatever you want and still drown like a cockroach.

If anything, by the time I made the move that saved me I was almost certain I was going to die. And it didn’t make the least bit of difference. Because I was decided to do everything I can to prevent it anyway.

The way I saw it, the situation was pretty simple:

1.  I was minutes away from ded.
2.  I had better use those minutes as best I can to prevent being ded within said minutes.

And – yeah – all that hogwash about your life running before your mind’s eyes is rubbish too.

Young as I was, I had put myself through a lot of craziness already, but I had no ragrets.

I did think of my family and how hurt they’d be if I died. But my only real concern was this – how pathetic it would be to have died in a freak accident off a crowded beach in Croatia. While doing nothing even borderline exciting.

I was about to have a boring frivolous death. That nonsense could only stand over my dead body. Literally, as the case might have been.

Yep, and I smiled at these thoughts while finding myself minutes away from a gruesome death. Only the bottomless sky stared back at me. If I wasn’t swallowing enough water already, I would have laughed for real.

What saved me that day wasn’t belief or any other semantics. It was my composure and the fact that I wasn’t afraid of dying. At least not afraid at the panic level that many people “believing in themselves” would have experienced.

Despite struggling to stay above water, I had kept calm and paid attention. At that point, I figured my best chance was to get help from people on the beach. And there were good reasons I hadn’t tried that earlier. To put it mildly, the odds of it working out looked less than favorable.

Almost as soon as my ordeal had started, I had been pulled in far from anyone who was insane enough to wade in farther than the sandy shallows.

The beach was packed with people, mostly families, but there was no lifeguard. And people were all desperately far away. The beach was loud as hell that time of day – the perfect setup to get ignored and ded.

Lucky for me, there was a stocky guy with his kids by the water. After a minute or two, he saw my waving and yelling for help. He jumped in and pulled me out.

As soon as I could catch a breath, I realized he looked like he competed on World’s Strongest Man contests.

“How are you”, he asked unhurriedly as we were walking out of the water shoulder-to-shoulder.

His accent seemed Finnish, maybe Estonian.

“Swallowed a bit of water”, I said cold-bloodedly.

“That’s always a problem”, he shrugged.

I had to make an effort not to laugh. I don’t remember if I succeeded.

I thanked him heartily, shook his hand and we parted ways.

Here’s the lesson from all this.

Know who you are, what you’re about, what you want from yourself and this life. Accept your imminent departure. Then believe whatever the hell you like. Or, better, don’t.

And avoid swimming around cruise ships, especially if you can’t swim.

God Save the Queen of Finland.

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If you want to have a laugh at the absurdity of life, click here to get "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". I laughed myself to tears when I first read it.