It is impossible to take a bad picture of this guy.
Pop quiz, hotshot: which character from Flash Gordon do you most want to be? Obviously you can’t say Prince Barin: he’s rude to ladies, and cheats at the woodbeast game. Ming The Merciless has it together pretty well, but his opinions on marriage are old-fashioned at best. And Flash is okay, but he’s not the sharpest spike on the War Rocket Ajax.
The correct answer, obviously, is Prince Vultan. He’s brave, he’s cool, he has a fantastic beard, his palace has a remote-controlled spike-fighting platform in it, and he is absolutely not averse to wrecking some shop in the ruler of the universe’s palace – even when the guy has an all-seeing robot CCTV camera checking up on him. And what does Prince Vultan eat?
Damn straight.
Damn straight.
Prince Vultan eats his meat off the bone, because eating meat off the bone makes you a better person. There are several things going on here:
1. Eating meat off the bone is good for you. Bones have nutrients in them, and there’s some evidence that cooking meat with the bone in allows those nutrients to leach into the meat. This is why it’s also a good idea to cook stew with bone-in cuts, and made stock from leftover bones.
2. It tastes better. The bone conducts heat through the meat for a more even texture, and whatever’s leaching into the meat also makes it taste good. All those guys with tupperware containers full of boneless chicken breast are missing out.
3. It’s cheaper. Separating meat from the bone is a difficult, skilled task, so boneless chicken breasts are always more expensive than bone-in wings and thighs.
4. It’s easy. Cooking meat on the bone is one of the simplest things you can do – usually, you just need to marinade it in something and stick it in the oven.
5. It is more fun. You’ll note that Prince Vultan doesn’t seem to own a fork. That’s because eating with your hands is manlier, more aggressive, and gives you a sense of connection to your food, making it taste better. Don’t take my word for this: Zakary Pelaccio, acclaimed New York chef and author of Eat With Your Hands, agrees with me. It also suits my style of gorge-and-dash predator eating, and is the standard in many cultures. You know why Jesus put thigh bones in chickens? As handles.
So, along with eating like a peasant, eating like Prince Vultan is very much part of my nutritional strategy. Do it more often, and maybe one day you’ll be as awesome as this guy:
HOMEWORK: Cook something bone-in this week. Leave your recipes in the comments.
]]>Looking good, little man.
Ever seen that film where Bruce Willis ends up meeting a younger version of himself, and child-Willis is really disappointed that he’s a ruthless executive without a wife or a dog? I haven’t, but I got the gist of it from the trailer. It looks rubbish.
It does, however, make a good point. Obviously my 8-year-old self was sort of an idiot – I decide about every three years that I’ve only just stopped being an idiot, and my 8-year old self hadn’t even read The Selfish Gene or realised that Wing Chun doesn’t work, so it’s fair to say he wasn’t operating with a full set of facts. But he had some sensible goals and daydreams, and I think he’d be pretty happy with the way things have turned out.
Now: I don’t know what strength coach Charles Poliquin was like as an 8-year old – he probably still had enormous arms – but these days he recommends making something called a Gratitude List. Essentially, this is a list of things you’re grateful for – whether it’s having great friends and a nice family, living in a lovely safe Western democracy, not having to work in a soul-destroying job or become a pirate because your fishing business has been ruined by foreign trade interests or whatever. Basically, the things that you don’t always appreciate. The point of this is that gratitude’s a mindset that’s incompatible with anger and stress, which cuts down on your body’s emissions of cortisol, keeps you positive, and gives your under-used right brain a workout. Good.
Now. You might be thinking that this is hippy nonsense – but that’s where your 8-year old self comes in. Look at it from that kid’s perspective and the whole process becomes much easier. Personally, if I told my young self the following, I think he’d completely lose his shit:
Man that kid would love me. Just thinking about it makes me happy.
HOMEWORK: This week, spend five minutes every morning thinking about things that your 8-year old self would be happy about. Share it with other people – especially the subjects of it – if you want, but you don’t have to. But write it down, and focus on it. Be grateful this week. And don’t bother looking up that Bruce Willis film – it’s called The Kid, and it only gets 5.9 on IMDB.
]]>I contend that there is another way. Announce your plans to everyone, then shut up about your progress.
This serves several purposes. Firstly, by telling everyone your plans – especially if you go about it with the right amount of confidence – you ensure that you’ll have at least a few people asking you how the novel/six-pack/running is going. Hopefully some will mock you about it, which should give you the right amount of rage to maintain steady progress. Secondly, by shutting up about the actual process, you avoid the feeling that you’re being productive when you aren’t. Thirdly, when you turn up one day with your trapezius muscles bursting out of your shirt and a fully-fledged novel on Amazon, it’s a nice surprise for everybody except the people that doubted you.
More importantly, you avoid the problem of internalising the idea that what you’re doing is hard or special, when it really isn’t. This is the problem with diets, Crossfit, and most people who start writing books. Think about it: if you’re treating every training or writing session as some sort of heroic effort, posting what you did on Facebook or Twitter or otherwise looking for approval, then it will always, always seem difficult, something that you should be lauded for doing and shouldn’t feel too bad if you skip or give up. If, on the other hand, you can start the process and then regard the actual work as something that just gets done, it’ll eventually become as integral to your life as brushing your teeth. I’m still not great at this, but I’ve been going to the gym and writing for years now, and I get jittery if I can’t do either – it’s actually harder for me to stop.
Need more inspiration? I’ll leave you with a quote from Mark Twight, formerly top-flight alpine climber, now trainer to the likes of the 300 cast and Henry ‘Superman’ Cavill, and a man who I have enormous respect for – especially since he doesn’t talk about his own achievements all that much.
‘If you keep saying it’s hard, it will be. If you treat training as a chore, it’s drudgery. The pretense of difficulty is just an invitation for social feedback. Change your attitude. Unfuck your head. Make an honest, unsentimental accounting of your present condition. Define what you want instead, clearly. Give yourself a deadline, and a penalty for missing it. Be realistic. Be consistent. Insist. And the road will rise to meet you.’
HOMEWORK: Whatever project you’re working on, shut up about it for the next seven days. No Tweeting that you’ve just been to the gym, no Facebooking about the thing you’ve just written. Treat making an extra effort as normal, and soon it will be.
]]>I used to think I had a natural talent for writing, but then I ran the numbers. Years of being read to, taken to the library, bought books and – on a couple of memorable occasions – being giving merciless punctuation pop-quizzes by my parents. More years of writing thousands of words that I never sent to anyone, followed by a year of sending out scattergun on-spec features to a variety of magazines, with something like a 1:10 success ratio, to magazines while I was at university. Then a few more years writing for videogames magazines – traditionally more tolerant of interesting/ridiculous ‘concept’ pieces than more established media – which, I figured out once, totalled more than a million words. All of it accompanied by relentless self-criticism, and loads of it was terrible. Some of it is still terrible. Conclusion: I might be pretty decent at writing, but I’m not naturally talented at it. I spent a long time getting here.
The idea that constant, deliberate practice is both necessary and sufficient to succeed in almost anything is pretty well-established these days. Anders Ericsson was the first man to popularise what’s now known as The 10,000 Hour rule, which suggests that nobody at the top level of chess, music, business or fighting has got there without putting in roughly 10,000 hours of deliberate practice…and that anyone who puts in that much practice will definitely be able to compete at the very highest of levels (in the absence of some genuine non-arguable setback, like being 5’0 if you want a career in the NBA). Even if you haven’t got 10,000 hours – a long time, considering how demanding ‘deliberate’ practice is – this should reassure you that you aren’t wasting your time, no matter how futile your early attempts at anything are. Books like The Talent Code, Outliers, Bounce and Talent Is Overrated all tackle the same body of research from different directions, and you should definitely read one/all of them.
What they won’t do, though, is make you believe it.
Understanding the theory is important, maybe even essential, but you’ll never know – instinctively know, like you know that gravity happens and fire is hot – that you can improve at anything without improving at one thing you think you’re bad at. The key is picking the right thing.
Writing is a terrible choice for your ‘thing’. You could ‘fail’ at writing for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with your writing talent – maybe you pitch to the wrong people, the market isn’t there for what whatever you’re doing, you’re too self-critical to let anyone see anything, and so on. You can ‘succeed’ with shitty writing for almost as many. Fighting is better, but only just. So what’s the best ‘thing’? Easy.
Weight training.
Weight training is great because the numbers don’t lie. However ‘talented’ you are, however strong or weak you are when you start, if you do the work the numbers will go up. They’ll go up quickly at first, then you’ll hit a brick wall. At that point you’ll need to find a programme, make a plan, put it into practice, tweak things, experiment, work harder…and ultimately, watch your lifts go up. There: you’ve improved, thanks to your own efforts. After you’ve done that, maybe you take up climbing, and go from a V2 to a V4 – because, again, you’ve put in the time, done the work, and improved. Then maybe you read up on some basic science, even though you thought you weren’t ‘talented’ at it at school, and realise that it wasn’t actually that hard after all. Then you learn Japanese, or take up ballroom dancing, or do another one of the hundred things you thought you weren’t good at, when actually what happened was that you just never put the time in. When you work this out, it feels miraculous – but you have to start somewhere.
I’m not naturally talented at anything. But I know that I can do anything I want. Do you know the same?
HOMEWORK: Read either The Talent Code, Outliers or Talent Is Overrated. Pick something you think you’re ‘bad’ at – preferably with easy-to-quantify results. Get good at it. Repeat until you’re Lex Luthor.
]]>Unlike the vast majority of people in the entire history of the world, you, person reading this on the internet, weren’t born into circumstances that dictated that you’d have to spend most of your waking life worrying about food or shelter. Without getting up, you can access more knowledge than Plato and Galileo and Newton had available over their entire lives. You can travel faster, further, and in greater comfort than any Roman emperor. You can eat like a caveman, or you can pick up the phone and access a greater selection of food than any monarch born before WWII could summon from the farthest corners of his/her kingdom.
Similarly, it’s never been easier to reshape your body and your mind. Whether you want to look like Ronnie Coleman or Eugen Sandow or Brad Pitt, the principles behind getting to that size and shape are pretty well-established. If you want to rewire your brain and become cleverer, happier, more confident, better, those tools are out there too. They’re not even terribly well-hidden.
So the only question left is: how much do you care? This isn’t a flippant question, and answering it on a regular basis is the key to self-improvement, being happy and staying sane.
Probably best to explain via an example. I, for reasons to do with playing a lot of Street Fighter 2 as a teenager, would quite like to be the best fighter in the world. Or at least better at fighting than I am, which I would describe as ‘good in comparison to most of the population, but not nationally competitive.’ It occupies quite a lot of my thinking time. I know, right?
Could I be much, much better at fighting than I am? Absolutely. While maintaining my job and relationship, I could make sure I never miss a class (at the expense of nights out with friends) make time to drill or ask questions or take notes or get private lessons. If I wanted to change things around a bit I could work less, save money by spending less on , and go to more classes. If I was really committed, I could get a job at the gym/dojo, train all the time and split up with my girlfriend.
I don’t do any of these things, obviously. I don’t do them for the same reason that you don’t do any of these things: I like going out with my friends, I love my girlfriend, I like my job and having spare cash to spend on stuff I want. I like cooking elaborate breakfasts on a Sunday morning, not being punched in the face.
So that’s how much I care about being brilliant at fighting: enough to train quite a lot, not enough to give up elaborate breakfasts. And that’s the key. By consciously embracing the process I can fine-tune it. Instead of blaming non-existent obstacles (lack of time or cash, lack of parental involvement when I was three, lack of talent), I can concentrate on the only real one (don’t care enough), identify steps I can take to change it, then apply them at a level I’m comfortable with.
And here’s the actual secret: this is the way everyone thinks about everything, but acknowledging the process is the difference between being happy and productive and being a frustrated mess. Do you want to get leaner more or less than you want to get wasted on Fridays or eat doughnuts for breakfast? Do you want to write a book more than you want to spend your weeknights hanging out with your friends? Do you want to improve yourself, or carry on the way you are? There’s no wrong way to answer, except for pretending that the question doesn’t exist. Don’t say you can’t do what you want: admit that you don’t care enough.
It’s never been easier to do anything you want. How much do you care?
HOMEWORK: Choose something you want to do: write a book, drop two percent bodyfat, learn Mandarin or whatever. Write down five things you could do this week to get you closer to that goal – ideally one simple, a few slightly trickier, and one totally outlandish. Stop eating crisps, write a plot outline, move to China, whatever. Decide whether or not you’re actually going to do them. Congratulations: you just realised how much you care.
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