the Ripening

Notes & Quotes: 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson

The following are my favorite quotes from Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.

In the aftermath of a losing battle, regardless of how aggressively a lobster has behaved, it becomes unwilling to fight further, even against another, previously defeated opponent. A vanquished competitor loses confidence, sometimes for days. Sometimes the defeat can have even more severe consequences. If a dominant lobster is badly defeated, its brain quickly dissolves. Then it grows a new, subordinate's brain -- one more appropriate to its new, lowly position.
The wings of bats, the hands of human beings, and the fins of whales look astonishingly alike in their skeletal form. They even have the same number of bones. Evolution laid down the cornerstones for basic physiology long ago.
Mark Twain once said, "It's not what we don't know that gets us in trouble. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so."
It is difficult to use money properly, particularly if you are unfamiliar with it. Money will make you liable to the dangerous temptations of drugs and alcohol, which are much more rewarding if you have been deprived of pleasure for a long period. Money will also make you a target for predators and psychopaths, who thrive on exploiting those who exist on the lower rungs of society. The bottom of the dominance hierarchy is a terrible, dangerous place to be.
I always ask my clinical clients first about sleep. Do they wake up in the morning at approximately the time the typical person wakes up, and at the same time every day? If the answer is no, fixing that is the first thing I recommend. It doesn't matter so much if they go to bed at the same time each evening, but waking up at a consistent hour is a necessity. Anxiety and depression cannot be easily treated if the sufferer has unpredictable daily routines. The systems that mediate negative emotion are tightly tied to the properly cyclical circadian rhythms.
People are better at filling and properly administering prescription medication to their pets than to themselves.
The division of life into its twin sexes occurred before the evolution of multi-cellular animals. It was in a still-respectable one-fifth of that time that mammals, who take extensive care of their young, emerged. Thus, the category of "parent" and/or "child" has been around for 200 million years. That's longer than birds have existed. That's longer than flowers have grown.
Women's proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained (competitive, aggressive, domineering) creatures that we are. It is Nature as Woman who says, "Well, bucko, you're good enough for a friend, but my experience of you so far has not indicated the suitability of your genetic material for continued propagation."
The Taoist juxtaposition of yin and yang doesn't simply portray chaos and order as the fundamental elements of Being -- it also tells you how to act. The Way, the Taoist path of life, is represented by (or exists on) the border between the twin serpents. The Way is the path of proper Being.
Chaos and order make up the eternal, transcendent environment of the living.
When life suddenly reveals itself as intense, gripping and meaningful; when time passes and you're so engrossed in what you're doing you don't notice -- it is there and then that you are located precisely on the border between order and chaos.
Order is not enough. You can't just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned. Nonetheless, chaos can be too much. You can't long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are learning what you still need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. That is where meaning is to be found.
Women have been making men self-conscious since the beginning of time. They do this primarily by rejecting them -- but they also do it by shaming them, if men do not take responsibility. Since women bear the primary burden of reproduction, it's no wonder. It is very hard to see how it could be otherwise. But the capacity of women to shame men and render them self-conscious is still a primal force of nature.
Beauty shames the ugly. Strength shames the weak. Death shames the living -- and the ideal shames us all. Thus we fear it, resent it -- even hate it.
Perhaps Heaven is something you must build, and immortality something you must earn.
Dogs are predators. So are cats. They kill things and eat them. It's not pretty. But we'll take them as pets and care for them, and give them their medication when they're sick, regardless. Why? They're predators, but it's just their nature. They do not bear responsibility for it. They're hungry, not evil. They don't have the presence of mind, the creativity -- and, above all, the self-consciousness -- necessary for the inspired cruelty of man. Why not? It's simple. Unlike us, predators have no comprehension of their fundamental weakness, their fundamental vulnerability, their own subjugation to pain and death. But we know exactly how and where we can be hurt, and why. That is as good a definition as any of self-consciousness.
Only man can conceive of the rack, the iron maiden and the thumbscrew. Only man will inflict suffering for the sake of suffering. That is the best definition of evil I have ever been able to formulate. Animals can't manage that, but humans, with their excruciating, semi-divine capacities, most certainly can.
Perhaps Man is something that should never have been. Perhaps the world should even be cleansed of all human presence, so that Being and consciousness could return to the innocent brutality of the animal. I believe that the person who claims never to have wished for such a thing has neither consulted his memory nor confronted his darkest fantasies.
To sacrifice ourselves to God (to the highest good, if you like) does not mean to suffer silently and willingly when some person or organization demands more from us, consistently, than is offered in return. That means we are supporting tyranny, and allowing ourselves to be treated like slaves. It is not virtuous to be victimized by a bully, even if that bully is oneself.
You deserve some respect. You are important to other people, as much as to yourself. You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world. You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself. You should take care of, help and be good to yourself the same way you would take care of, help and be good to someone you loved and valued.
Treat yourself as if you were someone you are responsible for helping is to consider what would be truly good for you. This is not "what you want." It is also not "what would make you happy."
It is not the existence of vice, or the indulgence in it, that requires explanation. Vice is easy. Failure is easy, too. It's easier not to shoulder a burden. It's easier not to think, and not to do, and not to care. It's easier to put off until tomorrow what needs to be done today, and drown the upcoming months and years in today's cheap pleasures.
We are not equal in ability or outcome, and never will be. A very small number of people produce very much of everything. The winners don't take all, but they take most, and the bottom is not a good place to be.
Talking yourself into irrelevance is not a profound critique of Being. It's a cheap trick of the rational mind.
Winning at everything might only mean that you're not doing anything new or difficult. You might be winning but you're not growing, and growing might be the most important form of winning.
Before you can articulate your own standards of value, you must see yourself as a stranger -- and then you must get to know yourself.
What you aim at determines what you see.
Making your life better means adopting a lot of responsibility, and that takes more effort and care than living stupidly in pain and remaining arrogant, deceitful and resentful.
Our values, our morality -- they are indicators of our sophistication.
A properly disciplined person is, at least, a well-forged tool.
"What is it that is bothering me?" "Is that something I could fix?" and "Would I actually be willing to fix it?" If you find that the answer is "no," to any or all of the questions, then look elsewhere. Aim lower. Search until you find something that bothers you, that you could fix, that you would fix, and then fix it. That might be enough for the day.
She was out to produce a little God-Emperor of the Universe. That's the unstated goal of many a mother, including many who consider themselves advocates for full gender equality. Such women will object vociferously to any command uttered by an adult male, but will trot off in seconds to make their progeny a peanut-butter sandwich if he demands it while immersed self-importantly in a video game.
When someone does something you are trying to get them to do, reward them.
The judgmental and uncaring broader social world will mete out conflict and punishment far greater than that which would have been delivered by an awake parent.
Rules should not be multiplied beyond necessity. Alternatively stated, bad laws drive out respect for good laws.
A hurricane is an act of God. But failure to prepare, when the necessity for preparation is well known -- that's sin.
Have you cleaned up your life? If the answer is no, here's something to try: Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong. Start stopping today. Don't waste time questioning how you know that what you're doing is wrong, if you are certain that it is.
If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city?
Once we can see the future, we must prepare for it, or live denial and terror. We therefore sacrifice the pleasures of today for the sake of a better tomorrow.
Soldiers who develop PTSD frequently develop it not because of something they say, but because of something they did.
Nietzsche writes, "The Christians have never practiced the actions of Jesus prescribed them; and the imprudent garrulous talk about the 'justification by faith' and its supreme and sole significance is only the consequence of the Church's lack of courage and will to profess the works Jesus demanded."
An idea is not the same thing as a fact. A fact is something that is dead, in and of itself. It has no consciousness, no will to power, no motivation, no action. There are billions of dead facts. The internet is a graveyard of dead facts. But an idea that grips a person is alive. It wants to express itself, to live in the world.
The socialists were more intrinsically capitalist than the capitalists. They believed just as strongly in money. They just thought that if different people had the money, the problems plaguing humanity would vanish. This is simply untrue.
Each human being understands, a priori, perhaps not what is good, but certainly what is not. And if there is something that is not good, then there is something that is good. If the worst sin is the torment of others, merely for the sake of the suffering produced -- then the good is whatever is diametrically opposed to that. The good is whatever stops such things from happening.
Aim up. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix. Don't be arrogant in your knowledge. Strive for humility, because totalitarian pride manifests itself in intolerance, oppression, torture and death. Become aware of your own insufficiency -- your cowardice, malevolence, resentment and hatred. Consider the murderousness of your own spirit before you dare accuse others, and before you attempt to repair the fabric of the world. Maybe it's not the world that's at fault. Maybe it's you.
Make that an axiom: to the best of my ability I will act in a manner that leads to the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering.
If you decide that you are not justified in your resentment of Being, despite its inequity and pain, you may come to notice things you could fix to reduce even by a bit some unnecessary pain and suffering. You may come to ask yourself, "What should I do today?" in a manner that means "How could I use my time to make things better, instead of worse?" Such tasks may announce themselves as the pile of undone paperwork that you could attend to, the room that you could make a bit more welcoming, or the meal that could be a bit more delicious and more gratefully delivered to your family.
You may find that if you attend to these moral obligations, once you have placed "make the world better" at the top of your value hierarchy, you experience ever-deepening meaning. It's not bliss. It's not happiness. It is something more like atonement for the criminal fact of your fractured and damaged Being. It's payment of the debt you owe for the insane and horrible miracle of your existence.
Taking the easy way out or telling the truth -- those are not merely two different choices. They are different pathways through life. They are utterly different ways of existing.
If you're lucky, and you fail, and you try something new, you move ahead. If that doesn't work, you try something different again. A minor modification will suffice in fortunate circumstances. It is therefore prudent to begin with small changes, and see if they help. Sometimes, however, the entire hierarchy of values is faulty, and the whole edifice has to be abandoned. The whole game must be changed. That's a revolution, with all the chaos and terror of a revolution.
Error necessitates sacrifice to correct it, and serious error necessitates serious sacrifice.
A good friend of mine discovered that his wife of decades was having an affair. He didn't see it coming. It plunged him into a deep depression. He descended into the underworld. He told me, at one point, "I always thought that people who were depressed should just shake it off. I didn't have any idea what I was talking about." Eventually, he returned from the depths. In many ways, he's a new man -- and, perhaps, a wiser and better man. He lost forty pounds. He ran a marathon. He travelled to Africa and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. He chose rebirth over descent into Hell.
If you pay attention, when you are seeking something, you will move towards your goal. More importantly, however, you will acquire the information that allows your goal itself to transform. A totalitarian never asks, "What if my current ambition is in error?" He treats it, instead, as the Absolute. It becomes his God, for all intents and purposes. It constitutes his highest value. It regulates his emotions and motivational states, and determines his thoughts. All people serve their ambition. In that matter, there are no atheists. There are only people who know, and don't know, what God they serve.
Advice is what you get when the person who you are talking to wants to revel in the superiority of his or her own intelligence.
If you're not the leading man in your own drama, you're a bit player in someone else's -- and you might as well be assigned to play a dismal, lonely and tragic part.
There is the conversation where one participant is trying to attain victory for his point of view. This is yet another variant of the dominance-hierarchy conversation. During such a conversation, which often tends toward the ideological, the speaker endeavors to:

denigrate or ridicule the viewpoint of anyone holding a contrary position.
use selective evidence while doing so.
impress the listeners (many of whom are already occupying the same ideological space) with the validity of his assertions.

You already know what you know, and, unless your life is perfect, what you know is not enough.
Why avoid, when avoidance necessarily and inevitably poisons the future?
You have to consciously define the topic of a conversation, particularly when it is difficult -- or it becomes about everything, and everything is too much.
People motivated to make things better usually aren't concerned with changing other people -- or, if they are, they take responsibility for making the same changes to themselves (and first).
We know, from studies of adopted-out identical twins, that culture can produce a fifteen-point (or one standard deviation) increase in IQ (roughly the difference between the average high school student and the average college student) at the cost of three-standard-deviation increase in wealth. What this means, approximately, is that two identical twins, separated at birth, will differ in IQ by fifteen points if the first twin is raised in a family that is poorer than 85 percent of families and the second is raised in a family richer than 95 percent of families.
Too-agreeable people bend over backwards for other people, they do not stand up properly for themselves. Assuming that others think as they do, they expect -- instead of ensuring -- reciprocity for their thoughtful actions. When this does not happen, they don't speak up. They do not or cannot straightforwardly demand recognition. The dark side of their characters emerges, because of their subjugation, and they become resentful.
There are only two major reasons for resentment: being taken advantage of (or allowing yourself to be taken advantage of), or whiny refusal to adopt responsibility and grow up. If you're resentful, look for the reasons.
Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life:

Stand up straight with your shoulders back.
Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.
Make friends with people who want the best for you.
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.
Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.
Pursue what is meaningful. (Not what is expedient.)
Tell the truth -- or, at least, don't lie.
Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't.
Be precise in your speech.
Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.
Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.

Like the quotes? Read the book.

Notes & Quotes: Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer

The following are my favorite notes from Jon Krakauer's Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman.

As Aeschylus, the illustrious Greek tragedian, noted in the fifth century B.C., "In war, truth is the first casualty."
Young Pat and his brothers were instructed to tell the truth, to respect their elders, to stand up for the vulnerable, and to keep their promises. Tillman pere also impressed upon the boys the importance of defending their honor, with their fists if necessary.
When Pat fought, he fought to win and never capitulated, which earned him the reputation at Leland and beyond as a guy not to be trifled with. In the pack he ran with, there was no question in anyone's mind that he was the alpha male.
In Afghan society, individual loyalty belongs foremost to the family and then -- in rapidly descending order -- to one's extended clan or tribe, one's ethnic group, and one's religious sect.
The bomb [used in the first bombing of the World Trade Center] had been assembled, delivered, and detonated by a Kuwaiti named Ramzi Yousef, under the supervision of his uncle Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who would later be identified as "the principal architect" of the attack against the same buildings on September 11, 2001. Yousef had learned the art of making bombs from a manual written by the CIA for the mujahideen to use in their struggle against the Soviets. He was given the CIA instruction booklet while attending an al-Qaeda camp in Khost, Afghanistan, in 1991 or 1992.
His good looks, cocky deportment, and status of a football star led some people to assume that he was a stereotypical jock -- entitled, self-absorbed, intellectually shallow, incurious about the world beyond football. Actually, Pat was none of those things. A diary he kept as a sixteen-year-old reveals an introspective youth who mourned the death of a beloved cat, opined that religion was inadequate to elucidate the mysteries of existence, and ruminated on the downside of his empathetic nature. "I can't even be an asshole to someone anymore," the journal sardonically notes, "without feeling bad. I'm too conscious of their feelings."
If he was considered a long shot for playing at the Division 1-A college level after high school, even fewer people believed Tillman stood much chance of making it to the NFL. Athletes who manage to reach that rarefied stratum must survive a ruthless culling process: only 6 percent of the kids who play high-school football go on to play in college; and only about 1 percent of those college players advance to the NFL.
One of the sacred tenets of Pat's moral code was that it's unacceptable to let a hangover interfere with one's duties and commitments.
"War is always about betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians." - Chris Hedges, "A Culture of Atrocity"
I [Pat] know what decision I must make. It seems that more often than not we know the right decision long before it's actually made. Somewhere inside, we hear a voice, and intuitively know the answer to any problem or situation we encounter. Our voice leads us in the direction of the person we wish to become, but it is up to us whether or not to follow.
If fratricide is an untoward but inevitable aspect of warfare, so, too, is the tendency by military commanders to sweep such tragedies under the rug. It's part of a larger pattern: the temptation among generals and politicians to control how the press portrays their military campaigns, which all too often leads them to misrepresent the truth in order to bolster public support for the war of the moment.
In January 2003, the White House created the Office of Global Communication, a $200 million program to manipulate public opinion about the coming war, and installed Jim Wilkinson to oversee its operation in the Persian Gulf. According to an article by James Bamford in the November 17, 2005 issue of Rolling Stone, as the war in Iraq has spiraled out of control, the Bush administration's covert propaganda campaign has intensified. According to a secret Pentagon report personally approved by [Donald] Rumsfeld in October 2003 and obtained by Rolling Stone, the Strategic Command is authorized to engage in "military deception" -- defined as "presenting false information, images, or statements."
The Iraqi staff at the hospital treated [Jessica] Lynch well, according to doctors and nurses interviewed by the British newspaper the Guardian. Dr. Harith al-Houssona, one of the physicians who supervised her care, said that the hospital personnel even donated two pints of their own blood to give her. On March 30, al-Houssona actually put Lynch in an ambulance and instructed the driver to drop her off at a nearby American military checkpoint, but Marines shot at the ambulance as it approached, forcing it to turn around and take Lynch back to the Iraqi hospital.
Pat's suspicions about the Lynch rescue were well founded. The resources devoted to the mission were astonishing by any measure, and had been put in place primarily to ensure that it would be a public relations jackpot for those promoting the war. At least seven other American servicemen and servicewomen were also being held captive in Iraq at that time, including five soldiers from Lynch's convoy; yet almost nothing at all was being done to find and rescue the less marketable prisoners of war.
Eventually Wilkinson's rendering of Lynch's ordeal was exposed as propaganda, but by then it had already accomplished what it was meant to accomplish: covering up the truth in order to maintain support for the president's policies. To this day, very few Americans have any inkling that seventeen U.S. Marines were killed by U.S. Air Force jets on the fourth day of the Iraq War.
For the Tillman brothers to denounce the war while on active duty in Iraq would no doubt have struck many Americans as treasonous. But Pat and Kevin had been raised to speak their minds, so speak they did.
Pat and Kevin were familiar with the words of Hermann Goring, Hitler's Reichsmarschall, who in 1946, shortly before he was sentenced to death for crimes against humanity, notoriously observed: Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it's the leaders of country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same way in any country.
As much as Pat hated being in the military and forcing [his wife] Marie to endure all that his enlistment entailed, breaking the commitment he'd made to the Rangers would have violated principles he considered inviolable. The handful of people who understood what made Pat tick knew that leaving the Army early was something he would never consider. It was absolutely out of the question.
Rumsfeld was obsessed with achieving positive "metrics" that could be wielded to demonstrate progress in the Global War on Terror, or the illusion thereof.
At 10:00 p.m. on April 22, when Kevin stepped out of a helicopter at Forward Operating Base Salerno after being flown from the canyon where Pat was shot, he was summoned to the TOC -- the Tactical Operations Center -- to meet with Major David Hodne. Hodne testified, "and I attempted to console him... He declined my offer to meet the chaplain that was inbound. He asked me to promise to exact revenge on the ambushers." Hodne assured Kevin that whoever was responsible for Pat's death would pay dearly for their actions. This would turn out to be the first in a long string of broken promises and self-serving lies proffered to the Tillman family by commissioned officers of the U.S. Army.
Despite praising Tillman's patriotism and courage at every opportunity, the White House in fact used every means at its disposal to obstruct the congressional investigation into Tillman's death and its aftermath.
Pakistani forces have cooperated both passively and actively in numerous attacks on American and NATO troops -- notwithstanding the fact that Pakistan is a putative ally of the United States and that Islamabad has received more that $17 billion from Washington since September 2001 to fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
Decades from now, when the president of the United States declares yet another war on some national adversary, a great many men (and more than a few women) will doubtless stream forth to enlist, just as eager to join the fight as the Americans who flocked to recruiting offices during the previous armed conflicts -- regardless of whether the war in question is a reckless blunder or vital to the survival of the Republic.
The Oxford Companion to American Military History estimates that between 2 percent and 25 percent of the casualties in America's wars are attributable to friendly fire.

You can donate to the Pat Tillman Foundation here.

Notes & Quotes: Own the Day, Own Your Life by Aubrey Marcus

The following are my favorite notes from Aubrey Marcus' Own the Day, Own Your Life: Optimized Practices for Waking, Working, Learning, Eating, Training, Playing, Sleeping, and Sex.

To own your life, you gotta own the day.
Small things, when compounded over time, tend to have big consequences. That, after all, is the essence of evolution.
Focus on the micro and the macro takes care of itself.
Morning cocktail:

12 ounces filtered water.
3 grams sea salt.
1/4 lemon, squeezed.

Our entire culture is built on the elimination of the difficult and the pursuit of the comfortable.
Breath is the rudder of life. We have the choice to either take over conscious control or let ourselves wander aimlessly. If you are going to own the day, you must own your breath.
No sugary stuff for breakfast. Period. Instead, we need to add fats back into our diet in sugar's place. Yep, you heard me, fats. Fat fats fats fats. Get used to the word, because you are going to hear it a lot. Make this simple substitution -- fat for sugar -- and you will have the sustained, balanced energy to power you all the way up to lunch. And if you can't find find a way to make this happen, then skip breakfast entirely.
In 1822, according to Dr. Stephan Guyenet, people consumed on average the amount of sugar currently found in a single can of Coke or Sprite every five days. Today, we consume that amount every seven hours.
Flexibility of thought is one of the greatest attributes any human being can have, scientist or otherwise. It's the ability to take those deeply engraved opinions, and overwrite them with new and better information. Our brains are malleable enough for that task; you just have to bring the goal into awareness.
Know the plants, know yourself, be honest, and decide the terms of your relationship with them. If it can be healthy, it will enhance more than just your performance, and you'll have an advantage in everything you do for as long as you live.
We are built for work. It is never going to go away, nor would most of us ever want it to. It is part of the balance of life, and however you define it, you will always have work to do. To derive as much meaning, pleasure, and value out of this inescapable part of life as possible, you need to know your mission -- whether it's related to the work itself or not. Then you need to own your workspace, and work as effectively as possible. Because what makes work feel less like labor is when you know why you are doing it, and how to do it well.
There is no amount of work you will do that will finally make the work go away, and definitely no amount of money you can make that will solve all your problems. And the sooner you realize that, the sooner you can look for happiness in places where it might actually be found.
Once you embrace the grind, whatever your grind may be, all of the sudden it isn't so bad. It is never pain that is the problem; it is the suffering caused by the resistance to that pain.
With an estimated 75% of the world's food produced from only twelve plant and five animal species, the lack of biodiversity in our diet is failing to support our "second brain."
We've all heard the expression "You are what you eat." Well that's literally true. You didn't grow from magic, or because that's just what babies do. You grew because you ate stuff. But that's only half the story, because the stuff you ate grew because it ate (and metabolized) stuff too. You aren't just what you eat, you're also what you eat ate.
Sugar is the biggest antinutrient of them all.
My favorite study is a 2008 British experiment in which they compared a nap, a cup of coffee, and more nighttime sleep, to see what would happen to people's afternoon energy levels and concentration. The nap -- yes, the nap! -- won.
Fuck exercise. Exercise is for puppies and babies. We need to train.
A healthy body can come in all shapes and sizes, but it does have a certain set of characteristics: the joints are mobile and fluid; the muscles are strong and flexible enough to perform a variety of tasks; the frame is capable of carrying weight, a little more, or a little less, without unnecessary strain; the tissue is healthy and supple. If you meet all or most of those criteria, you are what is called, in evolutionary terms, "fit," and in Aubrey Marcus terms, "sexy AF." I don't care about your BMI or whether you look like an Instagram model. Healthy is sexy.
The Tools of the Trade:

Bodyweight.
Kettlebell.
Steel mace.
Club.
Sandbag.
Rope.
Barbell.

The training pyramid -- your ideal 50 minute workout:

Durability (mobility + flexibility) - 15 minutes.
Cardio - 10 minutes.
Muscular endurance - 8 minutes.
Strength - 5 minutes.
Power - 3 minutes.

Don't confuse owning the day with figuring out ways to squeeze out more and more productivity in less and less time. Owning is not about working more. It's about living a full and fulfilled life -- one that speaks to what our bodies need most, which, yes, includes meaningful bursts of productivity, but also includes the rich and joyful connection that other people give us. If you don't connect with others, then you can't own the day. Plain and simple.
If you are into alcohol and marijuana, you aren't breaking the law, and you still want to own your day, after your workout is the perfect time to have a drink or smoke a little of the sticky icky... The key is: a little.
The general rule with any intoxicating substance, particularly alcohol, is to use the least amount necessary to achieve the desired effect. This has a couple advantages: 1) it's cost-effective, and 2) it limits any negative side effects like toxicity to the liver or lungs. In short, you want to be your own cheap date, and the best time for that is postworkout.
Play. If you believe you are too old to play, you will become too old to play. If you stay young in heart, spirit, and belief, you will stay young in body and mind as well.
The first thing you do when you come home from work, or emerge from the "productive" part of the day, is reset.
Dinner should be a celebration of a day fully owned.
The best timing for bread is dinner, after your glycogen stores have been depleted by exercise, and you're about to head into the winter of your day...sleep. So if bread and butter is your thing, do it the right way, with grass-fed butter on sprouted or sourdough.
If we tell our body something is poison, it becomes more poisonous. If we convince ourselves that it is healthy, it becomes more healthy. This is not to say that the reality of a food or situation doesn't matter. Molecular biology still exists -- it's a real thing -- but the mind isn't a passive bystander.
There is an old saying, attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, that to be healthy you must "Chew your drink, and drink your food."
Have you ever gotten up from the toilet after a bowel movement and inspected your work? Have you ever been able to tell, by its contents, exactly what you ate a few hours earlier? Maybe some corn kernels. Some threads of spinach. Some almond slivers or carrot chunks. If you can see it, it means you didn't digest it, which usually means you ate too fast.
Ginger has the ability to speed up the time it takes your stomach to pass food to your digestive tract by up to 50%.
Here are some foods with high dietary nitrate levels that are easily converted into the biological signal of nitric oxide: beets, pumpkin seeds, Swiss chard, arugula, watermelon, red wine, and dark chocolate.
For overall health and optimal mood and physical performance, you need to pair any sugar you consume with something that slows its absorption into the body -- and the two things that do that are fat and fiber.
"Cheater shooter." Mix one ounce of ACV and a half a teaspoon of Ceylon cinnamon into three ounces of room-temperature water and send it down the hatch.
The key to alcohol is only having a little. Not necessarily because I'm worried that you will become an alcoholic; it's more because the last thing you want to do is feel like your owning this day at the expense of the next one. Then you're not really owning the day at all, you're overspending and borrowing from tomorrow.
Before you eat, prepare the very best bite on your fork. Take a moment to look deeply at all the food on your plate. Think about where it came from (a reinforcement to eat food sourced in a healthy manner). Think about the energy required to grow that food -- the nutrients, the sunlight, the other plants and animals ingested by your food. Take time to bring yourself to a state of mindfulness and reduced stress. Think about how that energy will translate to energy in your own body and what you are going to need that energy for (a reminder about portion control...and that you're about to bone down!). As you put the bite in your mouth, if the food is lacking in any of these categories, forgive it. You never want to think that what you're about to eat is poison, or bad for you, or will ruin your diet. Instead, tell your body that what it is about to eat is nourishment. Then look at the food, smell the food, and savor it. When you taste it, chew it until there is nothing left, and your tastebuds have flirted with every ingredient in this orgy of flavor. That should be your first bite, and how you say grace: it's a piece of mindfulness, a nutrition reinforcer, and a way through the placebo to ensure that your food will be digested and absorbed optimally.
Build upon your successes rather than complain about your failures.
Do it well, or not at all.
The only rule you should follow is that if you start a book, and you don't like it, do not continue to read it just because you bought it.
The bottom line is this: if you wouldn't eat it, you shouldn't put it on or in your body.
You shouldn't count how many hours of sleep you get in a night, but rather how many ninety-minute sleep cycles you get in a week (thirty-five cycles should be your target).
For that knowledge to turn into wisdom you have to forgive yourself for all your past failings. You did your best then, and your best now is different.
Whether in love, or in business, or in health, if we don't feel like we deserve a positive outcome, or even worse, like we deserve to be punished, we will manifest that outcome with the subconscious choices we make.
If we allow the inner critic to punish us every time we fail to meet the standards of perfection, we'll stop trying altogether. We'll decide that it is better to pretend that it's someone else's fault, hiding behind excuses and rationalizations. If we know that when we fail, we will forgive ourselves, then we get to play from inspiration rather than fear. We'll be able to look our mistakes in the eye, take the medicine, and move on.
Psychologists agree that there are four keys to compelling positive action: 1) know what to do and how to do it; 2) believe it will work; 3) see the value; and 4) get support from your community/tribe/family.
I want you to imagine yourself a year from now. You know that in a year you are going to be different, whether you do nothing or something. And the choices you make between now and then will determine that difference.