Review and summary: Writing Down The Bones, by Natalie Goldberg
One of the best ways to improve your writing is to study other forms.
Like poetry, for example.
Natalie Goldberg is the author of 15 books, a painter, and a poet, among other things. Her book “Writing Down the Bones” is a how-to manual on fostering a writing practice that reduces creative inhibitions and pushes our inner critic on the sidelines where it belongs.
I pulled together some of the most surprising quotes and lessons that apply to both new and experienced writers. Then I sprinkled in observations from my own writing struggles. Can you relate to these?
Lean into first thoughts
To summon your most interesting and emotionally resonant work, ignore your inhibitions while drafting.
First thoughts are also unencumbered by ego, by that mechanism in us that tries to be in control
[...]
Go for the jugular. (If something comes up in your writing that is scary or naked, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.)
This one’s a personal struggle. One friend in particular is always pushing me to draw more of myself into my writing--including this essay.
I’m learning the “scary essays”--those that reveal personal struggles and other things I prefer to broom under the carpet--often resonate most.
Even when writing about a less personal topic--a book review, for example--it’s still important to blend personal insights and stories into the piece. Writing personally makes it yours, and forms a stronger connection with the reader.
Give your writing time
The internet makes us feel like everything must be created and shared immediately.
This is nonsense.
Let your experiences and insights marinate and age, like a good steak.
Hemingway wrote about Michigan while sitting in a café in Paris. “Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan. I did not know it was too early for that because I did not know Paris well enough.”
Time provides perspective. Observations and new feelings only reach the surface after we’ve had some time to reflect. Go ahead and draft immediately, if you want.
But come back later with a new perspective, ready to layer on deeper observations and feelings.
I often do this with book summaries and reviews. My perspective shifts and ripens with time as something in the back of my brain works on what I read.
Write with a beginner’s mind
Become a tourist in your own life.
Even the mundane details can be approached as new. I’ve heard James Altucher say he sometimes tries to live life as an alien in his own body. What would be interesting, or odd, about the activities, people, and places you experience every day if someone else lived your life?
Writers, when they write, need to approach things for the first time each time.
Bring fresh eyes to your life looking at it—and writing from—a newcomer’s perspective.
Saying “I’m not a writer” is fear talking
The ability to write is universal.
Again, but louder: THE ABILITY TO WRITE IS UNIVERSAL.
You tap your writing power by practicing and publishing.
Katagiri Roshi said, “Capability is like a water table below the surface of earth.” No one owns it, but you can tap it. You tap it with your effort and it will come through you
I wrote a newsletter for a year with nearly zero subscriber growth. I started with 75 subscribers.
A year later: 90.
Today: over 900.
Keep working. Keep writing. Keep publishing.
Write. Publish. Release.
Each piece of writing is a snapshot of you, from you, in time. Release it and move on to the next piece.
Don’t identify too strongly with your work. Stay fluid behind those black-and-white words. They are not you. They were a great moment going through you ...
You today are not the words you wrote yesterday, last week, last year. Let go and keep writing so you can discover who you are today.
For example: last year I wrote about how I obliterated sugar from my diet.
Guess what? Sugar is back in my diet. And now I’m whittling it down again.
That doesn’t make the essay untrue. Sugar was out of my diet, at that time.
And now it’s a different time.
Release the writing. Then write something new.
Forget your interests. Write about your obsessions.
Your obsessions elicit deeper emotions, deeper energy. That’s more interesting.
Your main obsessions have power; they are what you will come back to in your writing over and over again. And you’ll create new stories around them. So you might as well give in to them.
But how do we discern between our interests and obsessions?
For me, my interests are things I passively consume: pro sports. Star Wars.
My obsessions are things I regularly do: write, workout, read books.
My obsessions fuel writing consistency. And that work also seems to resonate more strongly with readers.
Risk brings writing rewards
Writing that feels safe isn’t interesting because it’s common.
A little too much exposure is better than too little. Take some risks.
Sometimes we expose ourselves before we understand what we have done. That’s hard, but even more painful is to freeze up and expose nothing
This one is tough in the modern cancel culture era. Sometimes putting ourselves out there comes with consequences, from strangers or friends and family.
If we don’t push our boundaries, our writing doesn’t grow. We don’t grow.
The boundary changes with time. At first, publishing a newsletter exceeded a boundary for me. Then, writing more personal essays exceeded a boundary.
When I got personal and wrote about my own struggles with beer, it resonated far more than if I’d written a generic piece about the state of alcohol consumption today, for example.
Your writing has a courage muscle which gets stronger over time. As it strengthens, you have to push harder to challenge it.
Cure writers’ block with food
Food is common ground. It’s an entry point to relatable descriptions and emotional resonance. Start there when you're stuck.
IF YOU FIND you are having trouble writing and nothing seems real, just write about food. It is always solid and is the one thing we all can remember about our day.
Food is great way to start a scene by dumping the reader into a sensory experience.
Someday, I’ll write about some of the most contentious and inane business meetings I’ve ever attended. They occurred offsite, in hotel meeting rooms. And what’s the one thing I remember most about them besides all the bile and posturing that went on?
What we ate and drank.
“The coffee was cold and bitter that morning, a harbinger of the the day’s discussions to come.”
Something like that.
Great writers make the ordinary fascinating
Hemingway-esque adventures are not required to write well.
A writer’s job is to make the ordinary come alive, to awaken ourselves to the specialness of simply being.
Learn to write about the ordinary. Give homage to old coffee cups, sparrows, city buses, thin ham sandwiches. Make a list of everything ordinary you can think of. Keep adding to it.
Think of wild adventures as special effects. They can inject pizazz into a piece of writing, but it’s the ability to find interesting observations about the mundane that form the backbone of interesting writing.
Realize almost no one writes online
Very few people write online, even though it can feel like everyone does.
Writing is not a natural part of the American context. Use that attitude to your advantage.
If you publish online, you are committing a rare and brave act. Congratulations. Now go do it again.
Writing Down The Bones: unique and timeless approaches to the craft of writing
Even though Writing Down The Bones was published in 1986, the book contains loads of great advice for digital writers, helping them to formulate a reliable writing practice and to lean into the feelings and topics that feel the most scary and true.
Review: So You’ve Been Publically Shamed, by Jon Ronson
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed chronicles the digital super-charging of an ancient human tactic: public shaming. Today, people aren’t shamed in the local public square, but globally, with all the speed and scale the Internet can bring to bear.
The rush to judgement--without all the facts--is a hallmark of cancel culture. A situation is often different than it appears on the surface. The human brain has to simplify the information it takes in, so it quickly crafts narratives to help us understand and act.
This process can be disastrous online, creating an overwhelmingly disproportionate--and often incorrect altogether--response to a situation shared online. We see this mistake over and over again, but we never learn. Or we don’t want to. The power in shaming feels too good, overwhelming our ability to stop, think, and to borrow an analogy from carpentry, measure twice before we cut once.
Ronson takes us briefly through the violent backstory of shaming, which included public whippings and worse, before moving on to modern cases.
Jon Ronson is a gifted storyteller and covers a range of high-profile cancelees, including:
Max Mosley, a Formula One racing chief who’s tryst with prostitutes was captured on camera, and slandorously framed by British Tabloids as a Nazi reinactment
An up-and-coming writer, Jonah Lehrer, caught fabricating Bob Dylan quotes in a popular book.
A public relations professional, Justine Sacco, who made a bad Twitter joke about how she couldn’t get AIDS because she’s white.
At its most interesting, the book examines how the shamed respond and the corresponding after-effects. We get responses in several flavors: denial, complete ownership--without regret--and something in between, a laying low and slow recovery.
Mosley, for example, refused to be shamed. He sued the tabloids for slander and won, and didn’t care that his time with prostitutes was caught on camera:
If our shameworthiness lies in the space between who we are and how we present ourselves to the world, Max was narrowing that gap to nothing.
Jonah Lehrer was paid $20,000 to publicly apologize, in a speech about plagiarism. It was disastrous, because it was seen as disingenuous. He still writes, but is nowhere near the success he reached with “How we Decide” in 2012.
Justine Sacco apologized authentically. Her career recovered. She’s a chief comms officer today.
I’m not sure the book reaches actionable conclusions about shaming. I believe, ultimately, shame is an internal battle, and it's up to us to decide how to carry or discard it.
That said, Ronson tells a series of entertaining stories that should, at a minimum, make us pause and think about our natural propensity to participate in online mobs. And hopefully make a better choice.
What to do when you’re not sure why
Midweek, I was in a funk.
Sometimes struggles pile up, their collective weight greater than the sum of the parts. In those moments, I lean hard on workouts. I push back against heavy weight, before life’s weight gets heavy enough to flatten me out. And Wednesdays, well …
Wednesdays are leg days.
My leg day routine isn’t long. But it hurts. And this week, my internal prosecutor, who continually argues against going to the gym, took a new angle:
“Why bother? What’s the point. There isn’t any. Skip it.”
This new line of questioning was startling. Normally he chooses lazier arguments, like substandard weather conditions, or a suddenly-urgent task that must take precedence over the gym.
My prosecutor’s new position backfired, though.
The argument’s energy propelled me directly into the gym, a reverse magnetic force pushing me away from its intended conclusion.
“What’s the point,” felt sharp and dangerous. If I agreed with him, he might talk me into a bunch of other things being pointless, also.
A slippery slope best avoided.
If you have a good habit—writing, exercise, picking up trash in the neighborhood, whatever—sometimes you might wonder why you bother.
Don’t overthink it.
You do the thing because it helps you do other important things. Value and protect the habit because of other things you value and protect. That’s the why.
Oh—and tell your internal prosecutor to shove it.
The macro rhythm of writing
Do you pay attention to the “macro rhythm” of your writing?
Writing’s micro rhythm is about varying sentence length and flow within a paragraph. And making word choices that propel a piece forward from beat to beat.
But the macro rhythm of a piece tells its own story.
Macro rhythm is what you first see and feel when you scan a piece of writing online. The bullets, subheads, bold text, paragraph lengths—all are individual clues that set the first impression for a piece.
The reader can quickly discern whether a piece is:
High tempo: short bursts of tight paragraphs and single sentences.
A slower and more exploratory experience: with long and descriptive paragraphs.
A regimented, super-organized list: with bullets and clear and concise subheadlines.
Or maybe the piece is a wild ride—a gear-shifting cacophony of all those beats.
Alex Garcia wrote a thread with 13 lessons gleaned from Apple marketing copy. Here he writes about the macro rhythm:
Readers scan your work before they dive in.
What’s the instant impression your writing delivers?
That’s the macro rhythm.
Performative Posts stack up bucks for Zuck. Let’s stop.
People think the biggest problem with Facebook is disinformation.
It’s not. It’s something far more insidious.
It’s the social pressure to make a Facebook declaration—a Performative Post—of love and admiration on every birthday, and anniversary, and celebratory event known to man.
It’s not enough anymore to directly tell someone we care. We must do so to a digital audience on a stage hosted by Facebook. These Performative Posts expand Facebook news feeds and generate more ad dollars for Zuck.
Our best intentions have been hijacked.
Woah Nellie, this is a big one
My 20th wedding anniversary is this week.
I feel pressure lurking around the edges of my psyche. It whispers I should be working on a lengthy and heartfelt proclamation to my wife.
Not to recite to her under a shady tree during a serene riverside picnic.
Not to write out with a feathered pen on scented parchment paper.
No. Not at all.
It’s to post to freaking Facebook.
But who would that be for, really? Not my wife.
A graveyard of Performative Posts
I make this observation with all humility. My own Facebook past is littered with the digital skeletons of Performative Posts.
I, too, have caved to the new social expectations. A genuine desire to make people feel appreciated was coerced by Facebook, which bolted on the requirement to make the declaration in front of a digital audience.
There’s no finger-wagging going on here. This isn’t about the posters themselves. Many Performative Posts are truly heartfelt. It’s just frustrating we feel such pressure to do this inside Zuck’s Funhouse.
I am certain Facebook has a team on this. Experimental A.I. iterates on co-opting the desire to support friends and partners, all to serve a few more ads about Bill Gates’ vaccination microchips.
HallMark holidays
We once declared marginally acknowledged holidays, like “Sweetest’s Day,” as “Hallmark Holidays.” We chalked them up to the conspiratorial conjurings of greeting card companies desperate to move folded paper at 1,000 percent markups.
Today we’ve left the Hall behind for “Mark Holidays,” creating content expectations that put yet more ad dollars into Zuckerberg’s coffers. And these holidays have mutated. We have new variants on tradition. Suddenly “Son’s Day” is here. So is “Daughter’s Day.”
What even are these days? Most of my life is “Daughter’s Day,” “Daughter’s Hour,” and “Daughter’s Minute.” Choose your favorite unit of time measurement. It belongs to my daughters already.
What if we just … hear me out … used air and vocal cords?
One year, near my birthday, I could tell my wife was stressing about trotting out a proper Performative Post.
“You know,” I said, wading cautiously into murky and uncharted waters.
“I’m right here. You could just ... maybe, like … say it to me.”
I waited. I wondered. Beads of perspiration formed on my forehead.
After a few moments, she kinda agreed.
We were free from Performative Posts.
My wife still gets heartfelt and appreciative anniversary, Mother’s Day, and birthday messages from me. But they are nestled inside the confines of an insanely priced Hallmark card. They are for her, and only her. They are not for the news feed of that one guy I met at third grade camp.
And Zuck isn’t invited either. He cannot extract profit from words I write in ink. Not until he buys Hallmark, anyway. I bet he’s already on the phone with them.
Fiction books: the anti-algorithm
You amble up to your local library on a drizzly Sunday afternoon. As the doors slide open, you lazily sip on your lukewarm latte.
Suddenly, a team of highly-caffeinated librarians swarm you and hustle you inside.
“We know exactly what you’ll love next!” one shouts. Others hold up sheets on either side of you, keeping you from seeing any books in the stacks.
“This way! Right over here!”
The last book you read was “Atomic Habits.” A fine choice. But now the librarians jostle you into a corner with at least 25 other books on habits. They hold them up to your face, read short passages, and try to quickly move you on to the checkout desk.
This is the world of algorithms. This is the experience our social media overlords want for us, hustling us to content similar to what we’ve already consumed.
Reject this.
Add variety, adventure, and surprise to your book-reading experience. Explore fiction books. On your own terms and at your own pace.
Hustle culture swamps book culture
Online, book culture emphasizes non-fiction. The once-celebrated “Great American Novel” is shoved into a corner as we celebrate the latest in the self-help and business genres.
Hustle culture has invaded book marketing, and everything we read should make us richer and better. Billionaires like Mark Cuban and Warren Buffett are voracious readers--but of non-fiction only. Therefore, to be rich and successful like them, we should steer clear of fiction.
This a terrible fallacy, a product of America’s cultural obsession with self-actualization and money:
But business visionaries who extol the virtues of reading almost always recommend nonfiction. Buffet recommended 19 books in 2019; not one of the titles is fiction. Of the 94 books Bill Gates recommended over a seven-year period, only nine of them are fiction.
Fiction teaches knowledge in a unique way. It introduces layers of subtlety and shades of emotion often absent in non-fiction work, which is optimized in neon for maximum attention and dopamine dumps.
Fiction helps you practice empathy
As the amount of information online rises, empathy declines. Our algorithmic bubbles are, no doubt, at least partly to blame. We bathe in homogenous ideas and experiences.
In 2006, Oatley and his colleagues published a study that drew a strong connection between reading fiction and better performance on widely used empathy and social acumen tests. They tested participants on their ability to recognize author names, which helped them gauge how much fiction they read. Then, participants completed the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, which scores people across different dimensions of empathy.
Reading fiction takes you inside the perspectives and lives of people living differently than you, in a way that’s non-threatening. You’re reading a story and not thinking about your own worldview.
Fiction rearranges the way you see the world
“The Overstory” is a fiction book about trees. Written by Richard Powers, the book takes a small idea—writing about trees—and grows and twists and branches it out, using a series of interconnected short stories and characters to create a novel as complex and rich as any forest.
With beautiful prose, “The Overseer” completely changed the way I think about trees. They aren’t separate entities--they are part of a tightly integrated organismorganism. They communicate with each other. They even migrate.
I would never read a non-fiction book about trees. How boring. But a novel completely changed the way I think about trees.
Fiction improves social skills
As our lives shift ever more online, our social skills erode. Conversation skills, attention span, and even eye contact are all in decline. Reading fiction fights the trend by giving us social practice, right inside the pages of a book:
The Canadian cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley calls fiction “the mind’s flight simulator”. Just as pilots can practise flying without leaving the ground, people who read fiction may improve their social skills each time they open a novel. In his research, he has found that as we begin to identify with the characters, we start to consider their goals and desires instead of our own.
Focus is critical to our ability to connect with others and our surroundings. As we become evermore distracted, fiction books aid our attention spans by forcing us to concentrate:
There is no escape in fiction, though it offers something we so desperately need: time. Stories require an investment, the type of sacrifice tweets and selfies are not equipped to offer. The arresting power of a beautiful sentence; the captivation characters evoke, especially messy ones. To travel well with another’s mind is a necessary form of communication.
Want to differentiate yourself? Burst your own bubble
People who push outside the boundaries of their algorithmic bubbles have an opportunity to soar above the masses. Few people take the time to explore other viewpoints and think deeply about them. Reading a rich variety of fiction books is the antidote.
Contemplation and variety aren’t profitable for tech companies. Money comes from rapid exposure to ideas you’ve already engaged with. Algorithms feed you a fast-food diet of proven interests.
Corporations aren’t going to remove algorithms. Instead, algorithms will be refined and strengthened to better turn your attention into profits.
Challenge yourself. Get outside your algorithms.
Reading from a broad cross-section of fiction books is the anti-algorithm. The great bubble-burster. Start popping yours today.
Review and highlights: The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig
The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig
Imagine bouncing from life to life, undoing every regret you’ve ever had. In the space between life and death lies an infinite playground; the opportunity to reverse choices, right wrongs, and live “correctly.”
That’s the premise of Matt Haig’s “The Midnight Library.”
The main character, Nora Seed, has attempted suicide. Before truly dying, she visits a quantum library of sorts, which houses a limitless number of potential stories of her life. What she—and we—learn is that the regrets that weight down our lives are often built on faulty assumptions and, in choosing differently, we would have triggered second-order effects we could never predict.
Maybe the premise isn’t completely original, but Haig intertwines philosophy and insights in a way that kept me engaged and thinking deeply about my own life.
Three passages that made me think
A good reminder about authenticity—especially that most gossip is envy in disguise:
‘If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don’t give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise. Keep your head down. Keep your stamina. Keep swimming.
“Success” is something we should define for ourselves. There is no one race, no one prize, no real victor:
… what we consider to be the most successful route for us to take, actually isn’t. Because too often our view of success is about some external bullshit idea of achievement – an Olympic medal, the ideal husband, a good salary.
When really success isn’t something you measure, and life isn’t a race you can win. It’s all . . . bollocks, actually.
You don’t have to live multiple lives to live the wrong one. And when we start to find the right one, I believe things get easier. There’s more attracting, and less striving:
Whereas in every other life she had been continually grasping for clues and feeling like she was acting, in this one she increasingly found that the more she relaxed into it, the more things came to her.
Haig’s story is one that will have you considering your own life choices—especially the ones you think you got “wrong.” We can never know what the outcomes of alternate choices would be, and there’s no point in wasting time in this life thinking, worrying, and regretting. Instead, put that energy into making the best choices we can today, rooted in who we are and what we want.
The Midnight Library is true gift in that regard—a chance for us to revisit all our revisiting, make peace with our choices, so we can live the best today we can.
Kindle quotes from The Midnight Library
My favorite ideas and passages from the book.
‘Between life and death there is a library,’ she said. ‘And within that library, the shelves go on for ever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?’
Nineteen years before she decided to die, Nora Seed sat in the warmth of the small library at Hazeldene School in the town of Bedford.
‘Regrets ignore chronology. They float around. The sequence of these lists changes all the time.’
She quickly realised they ranged from the minor and quotidian (‘I regret not doing any exercise today’) to the substantial (‘I regret not telling my father I loved him before he died’).
One regret shifted from practically invisible to bold and back again, as if it was flashing on and off, right there as she looked at it. The regret was ‘I regret not yet having children.’ ‘That is a regret that sometimes is and sometimes isn’t,’ explained Mrs Elm, again somehow reading her mind. ‘There are a few of those.’
Bertrand Russell wrote that ‘To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead’.
And then quiet again. A quiet that had a presence, that was a force in the air. Weird.
‘Want,’ she told her, in a measured tone, ‘is an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely. Maybe you have a lack problem rather than a want problem. Maybe there is a life that you really want to live.’
Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are just . . .’ She searched for the appropriate term and found it. ‘A load of bullshit.’
She wondered how many Dans there were in the world, dreaming of things they would hate if they actually got them.
And how many were pushing other people into their delusional idea of happiness?
that you can choose choices but not outcomes.
It was a good choice. It just wasn’t a desired outcome.’
Maybe in some lives you just float around and expect nothing else and don’t even try to change. Maybe that was most lives.
‘The only way to learn is to live.’
From that moment in that car park she had felt she was really just an extension of the pain in his left knee. A walking wound.
‘The rook is my favourite piece,’ she said. ‘It’s the one that you think you don’t have to watch out for. It is straightforward. You keep your eye on the queen, and the knights, and the bishop, because they are the sneaky ones. But it’s the rook that often gets you. The straightforward is never quite what it seems.’
‘People with stamina aren’t made any differently to anyone else,’ she was saying. ‘The only difference is they have a clear goal in mind, and a determination to get there. Stamina is essential to stay focused in a life filled with distraction.
‘Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.’
‘Life is strange,’ she said. ‘How we live it all at once. In a straight line. But really that’s not the whole picture. Because life isn’t simply made of the things we do, but the things we don’t do too. And every moment of our life is a . . . kind of turning.’
‘Think about it. Think about how we start off . . . as this set thing. Like the seed of a tree planted in the ground. And then we . . . we grow . . . we grow . . . and at first we are a trunk . . .’
‘But then the tree – the tree that is our life – develops branches. And think of all those branches, departing from the trunk at different heights. And think of all those branches, branching off again, heading in often opposing directions. Think of those branches becoming other branches, and those becoming twigs. And think of the end of each of those twigs, all in different places, having started from the same one. A life is like that, but on a bigger scale. New branches are formed every second of every day. And from our perspective – from everyone’s perspective – it feels like a . . . like a continuum. Each twig has travelled only one journey. But there are still other twigs. And there are also other todays. Other lives that would have been different if you’d taken different directions earlier in your life. This is a tree of life.
what we consider to be the most successful route for us to take, actually isn’t. Because too often our view of success is about some external bullshit idea of achievement – an Olympic medal, the ideal husband, a good salary.
When really success isn’t something you measure, and life isn’t a race you can win. It’s all . . . bollocks, actually .
‘If one advances confidently,’ Thoreau had written in Walden, ‘in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.’ He’d also observed that part of this success was the product of being alone. ‘I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.’
It was currently minus seventeen degrees, and she had nearly been eaten by a polar bear, and yet maybe the problem with her root life had partly been its blandness.
There was an invisible baton of failure her mother had passed down, and Nora had held it for a long time. Maybe that was why she had given up on so many things. Because she had it written in her DNA that she had to fail.
He had grown up with only a mother, as his dad had died of a heart attack when he was two, cruelly hiding somewhere behind his first memories.
She imagined, now, what it would be like to accept herself completely. Every mistake she had ever made. Every mark on her body. Every dream she hadn’t reached or pain she had felt. Every lust or longing she had suppressed. She imagined accepting it all. The way she accepted nature. The way she accepted a glacier or a puffin or the breach of a whale. She imagined seeing herself as just another brilliant freak of nature. Just another sentient animal, trying their best. And in doing so, she imagined what it was like to be free.
am here but I also know I am not here. I am also lying in a hospital in Paris, having an aneurysm. And I am also skydiving in Arizona. And travelling around southern India. And tasting wine in Lyon, and lying on a yacht off the Côte d’Azur.’
‘Science tells us that the “grey zone” between life and death is a mysterious place. There is a singular point at which we are not one thing or another. Or rather we are both. Alive and dead. And in that moment between the two binaries, sometimes, just sometimes, we turn ourselves into a Schrödinger’s cat who may not only be alive or dead but may be every quantum possibility that exists in line with the universal wave function,
Sometimes just to say your own truth out loud is enough to find others like you.’
Gestalt psychology. About how human brains take complex information about the world and simplify it, so that when a human looks at a tree it translates the intricately complex mass of leaves and branches into this thing called ‘tree’. To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.
Humans are fundamentally limited, generalising creatures, living on auto-pilot, who straighten out curved streets in their minds, which explains why they get lost all the time.
‘It’s like how humans never see the second hand of a clock mid-tick,’
Minds can’t see what they can’t handle.’
There is no rejection, there is only redirection.
Nora began to feel a bit queasy. Was this what fame was like? Like a permanent bittersweet cocktail of worship and assault? It was no wonder so many famous people went off the rails when the rails veered in every direction. It was like being slapped and kissed at the same time.
‘I think it is easy to imagine there are easier paths,’ she said, realising something for the first time. ‘But maybe there are no easy paths. There are just paths.
The regrets she had been living with most of her life were wasted ones.
Caught in the middle. Struggling, flailing, just trying to survive while not knowing which way to go. Which path to commit to without regret.
‘And you acted when it counted. You swam to that bank. You clawed yourself out. You coughed your guts out and had hypothermia but you crossed the river, against incredible odds. You found something inside you.’
Every life she had tried so far since entering the library had really been someone else’s dream. The married life in the pub had been Dan’s dream. The trip to Australia had been Izzy’s dream, and her regret about not going had been a guilt for her best friend more than a sorrow for herself. The dream of her becoming a swimming champion belonged to her father.
‘Exactly, yet physicists believe in parallel universes.’ ‘It’s just where the science leads, isn’t it? Everything in quantum mechanics and string theory all points to there being multiple universes. Many, many universes.’
Whereas in every other life she had been continually grasping for clues and feeling like she was acting, in this one she increasingly found that the more she relaxed into it, the more things came to her.
Never underestimate the big importance of small things, Mrs Elm had said. You must always remember that.
When the binge becomes cringe
(Enormous disclaimer: I’m neither counselor, psychiatrist, nor 12-step program participant. I haven’t dealt with serious addiction. This is my experience, which may or may not be helpful to your personal situation.)
In 2013, I met a new drinking buddy.
I didn’t enjoy his company. He was obnoxious. He interrupted frequently when I was trying to enjoy my evening, or the game I was watching. He was annoyingly persistent, dropping truth bombs I didn’t want to hear.
But let’s back up a second.
I had a stereotypical Midwestern big college experience. At Michigan State, the weekend started on Thursday. And I was up for it. My partying never went beyond beer consumption, but there sure was a lot of it. And you know what? It was super fun, mostly. Except for the night someone stole my microwave. But that’s a story for another time.
When college was over, I packed up my stuff--and my beer binging habit.
It was a weekend thing--and not an every weekend thing--in my 20s and 30s. Hanging out on a college football Saturday, for example, I had no problem getting through seven or eight beers. Sometimes more.
This continued for 15 years.
But one fall day in 2013, I plopped down on the couch to watch a game. I cracked open what was probably my sixth beer.
That’s when I met my new drinking buddy.
From somewhere deep inside me, he rudely interrupted my evening with a simple question.
“What are you doing?”
What was I doing? Deluding myself.
First, let’s talk about the official definition of a drinking binge:
For men: five or more drinks over a two-hour period
For women: four or more drinks over a two-hour period
I’m reasonably certain this binging definition is sponsored by Budweiser. It’s a joke.
In my experience, anything over two drinks in an evening is a binge. The third drink leaves you legally impaired. And I know once I’ve had three, the slope gets more slippery.
Binge drinking into your 40s requires ignoring inconvenient details. It’s harder to keep bodily expansion in check. The recovery, that once arrived so easily, becomes an arduous bear crawl through cold mud.
Cutting down alcohol consumption is a fight on multiple fronts. It’s not just internal. Your friends do it, and we mimic the behavior of those around us. America’s advertising engine enthusiastically and incessantly supports it. To change a long-ingrained drinking habit is to walk into a stiff wind going up an icy hill. The elements conspire to work against you.
The big reset
Back to the question that first bubbled up that fall day: Just what was I doing, and why?
Hanging out, watching sports, trying to forget another corporate week filled with false urgencies and drummed up dramas.
My new drinking buddy pointed out the obvious: my escape wasn’t to a better place. It was to someplace lower, someplace darker. It created next-day friction that brought on the blues and anxieties, before sending me slogging into another week.
What followed was a long, slow process of self-examination. Progression and regression. Trial and error.
I was in a deeply ingrained behavior groove. It’s just what I did. And heavy drinkers tend to find each other socially, reinforcing the activity.
Over time, I whittled away at the beer habit. As the flow reduced to a trickle, and then to no beer at all, I realized beer made me feel like garbage. Even one beer makes me feel like a bloated, amorphous blob.
And mentally? I have no scientific basis to claim beer affected me differently than any other alcohol. But looking back, beer seemed to enhance negative emotions more than other forms of alcohol. Sadness, anger, anxiety--all more likely after a beer binge.
I still drink today. I have red wine with dinner most nights. I’ll have a drink when out with friends. Some experts say that’s still too much, that no amount is safe for either the brain or the body. But my binging days are behind me. I’m not more social when I drink excessively. I actually turn inward--a natural instinct accelerated by alcohol.
The ups and downs of going binge-free
Rainbows and unicorns will not appear to celebrate your healthier path. Changing ingrained habits is hard, even if you’re not addicted. I encountered plenty of challenges in making this change:
When you’re doing something different than the crowd, it can get lonely.
You may sometimes get left behind socially, especially if you moved in circles of heavier drinkers. They tend to move on once you’re no longer mirroring their habits.
People ask why you’re not drinking.
Even more absurd, if you do have a drink, some people will apply pressure to drink more. It seems insane that peer pressure to drink endures into middle age. But it does. High school never really ends.
If you’re an American football fan, the beer-bro culture is a giant black hole with the singular gravitational aim of pulling you into bad consumption habits. Anheuser-Busch InBev, for example, spent $230 million with the NFL in the 2019-2020 season. Signage, digital ads, TV, event sponsorships, radio--the “beer=fun” messaging is relentless.
On the other side of the challenges, the good things emerge:
You’ll feel better, both in the moment you would have over-imbibed, and the next day. You’ll have more money.
You’ll probably get leaner--it’s difficult to out-work a beer binging habit.
You’ll feel more centered and even.
You’ll understand who your real friends are, and who wanted someone to drink with.
You’ll sleep better.
If you’re male, your testosterone might improve.
Last call? Your call.
At this point, you might be thinking: “Screw you, man. YOLO. I’m good.”
Or, you might be like I was. The binge isn’t fun anymore. You’re sick of dragging down your hard work in the gym or on the trail. You’re sick of feeling off the next day. The fog. The headache. The inability to get traction in your day.
If that’s the case, you can reset things. You can make profound life changes, quickly or gradually. Some people won’t support you. But the best people in your life will.
I can’t tell you how to do it. It’s like working out. You have to find the system that works for you, and stick with it. Replace old habits with new ones. Set up rewards for your good behavior. If you’re not in an addiction situation, but merely a habitual one, applying basic psychology can be a tremendous help. Implement the incentive theory of motivation.
And here’s one other thing you can do: reach out to me. I don’t have things all figured out. But I recognized I wanted to change, and headed down another path. And I’m happy to talk about it.
Review and highlights: The Bomber Mafia, by Malcom Gladwell
The Bomber Mafia, by Malcom Gladwell
Malcom Gladwell is commonly criticized for reaching some inaccurate conclusions. In “The Tipping Point,” he popularized the Broken Window Theory, which states New York City’s tight policing of minor infractions drove historic crime decreases in the 90s and early 2000s. In fact, that decrease began before the city’s efforts. Gladwell’s detractors blame him popularizing the tactics throughout the US, leading to increased harassment of underprivileged Americans.
But Gladwell is master storyteller who examines historical topics in an engaging way. It’s on the reader to draw their own conclusions and, if so inclined, do further research with other sources.
Through that lens, “The Bomber Mafia” is another interesting and important work by Gladwell.
The Bomber Mafia was born as a audiobook, and then later converted to print. It’s a bit on the short side, coming in under 180 pages. As a result, it feels somewhat incomplete, more like a lengthy blog post than a full-length book. Given the gravity of the material, Gladwell could have presented a more complete story by including more perspectives of the German and Japanese citizens who suffered at the hands of the Allies’ all-out bombing efforts.
Key ideas from The Bomber Mafia
General Haywood Hansell was the leader of The Bomber Mafia, a small group within the military that believed an emerging technology—airborne warfare—could make wars shorter and far less deadly. By dropping bombs with precision onto strategic targets, Hansell believed wars could be won faster and with far less bloodshed.
Unfortunately, Hansell’s theory failed in the field. The technology was not there to bomb with precision. The weather wrecked havoc on their efforts. And, because precisions runs had to occur during the daytime, missions were more susceptible to both enemy pilots and groundfire.
General Curtis LeMay had a competing vision. He too believed airpower could shorten wars, but only by bombing widely and indiscriminately to create as much civilian and military destruction as possible. After successfully revamping and leading the bombing efforts over Germany—including going on bombing runs himself—LeMay replaced Hansell in the Pacific. As a result, the U.S. firebombed nearly 70 Japanese cities using napalm, and, of course, dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Gladwell examines the motivations of both men and reaches a couple of interesting conclusions. LeMay, reviled in some circles for his aggressive tactics, probably did shorten the war, and undoubtably saved the lives of many Allied soldiers who would have died in a ground invasion of Japan. LeMay’s vision that short and brutal war creates faster peace might have been the right one overall.
But in the long run, Hansell and The Bomber Mafia’s vision won out. Technology simply had to catch up. Today, the United States can drop a missile into a particular room of a house from a drone. Pinpoint bombing is a reality.
Kindle highlights from The Bomber Mafia
So there were Hansell and Norstad in Guam. Two war-weary airmen, facing what they hoped might be the war’s
final chapter.
Curtis LeMay was Haywood Hansell’s antithesis.
How is it that, sometimes, for any number of unexpected and random reasons, technology slips away from its intended path? The Bomber Mafia is a case study in how dreams go awry.
Chapter One
Norden was Dutch.
His nickname was Old Man Dynamite. He drank coffee by the gallon. Lived on steak.
Norden “read Dickens avidly for revelations on the lives of the disadvantaged and Thoreau for the discussion of the simple
Bombers, in the early days of aviation, couldn’t hit anything. Not even close.
The most expensive single undertaking of the Second World War was the B-29 Bomber, the Superfortress. The second most expensive was the Manhattan Project, the massive, unprecedented effort to invent and build the world’s first atomic bomb. But the third most expensive project of the war? Not a bomb, not a plane, not a tank, not a gun, not a ship. It was the Norden bombsight, the fifty-five-pound analog computer conceived inside the exacting imagination of Carl L. Norden. And why spend so much on a bombsight? Because the Norden represented a dream—one of the most powerful dreams in the history of warfare: if we could drop bombs into pickle barrels from thirty thousand feet, we wouldn’t need armies anymore.
Chapter Two
Revolutions are birthed in conversation, argument, validation, proximity, and the look in your listener’s eye that tells you you’re on to something.
Richard Kohn, chief historian of the US Air Force for a decade, explains that in the early days, people just didn’t understand airpower: I remember one congressman being quoted as saying, “Why do we have all this controversy over airplanes? Why don’t we just buy one of them and let the services share it?”
That’s what always happens: Conversation starts to seed a revolution. The group starts to wander off in directions in which no one individual could ever have conceived of going all by himself or herself.
principle number one of the Bomber Mafia doctrine: The bomber will always get through.
The second tenet:
if the bomber was unstoppable, why would stealth matter? The Bomber Mafia wanted to attack by daylight.
The third tenet: If you could bomb by daylight, then you could see whatever it was you were trying to hit. You weren’t blind anymore. And if you could see, it meant that you could use a bombsight—line up the target, enter the necessary variables, let the device do its work—and boom.
The fourth and final tenet: Conventional wisdom said that when a bomber approached its target, it had to come down as close as it could to the ground in order to aim properly. But if you had the bombsight, you could drop your bomb from way up high—outside
High altitude. Daylight. Precision bombing. That was what the Bomber Mafia cooked up in its hideaway in central Alabama.
When he first got to England, Eaker lived at the home of his counterpart in the Royal Air Force, Arthur Harris,
Ira Eaker and Arthur Harris have doctrines of bombing that are 180 degrees out from one another, completely different. Yet they become fast friends.
And it also turns out that maybe if you bomb another country day in and day out, it doesn’t make the people you’re bombing give up and lose faith.
The British had their own version of a Bomber Mafia—with an equally dogmatic set of views about how airpower ought to be used. Actually, the word mafia is not quite right—more like a single bombing mafioso. A godfather. And his name was Frederick Lindemann.
The psychologist Daniel Wegner has this beautiful concept called transactive memory, which is the observation that we don’t just store information in our minds or in specific places. We also store memories and understanding in the minds of the people we love. You don’t need to remember your child’s emotional relationship to her teacher because you know your wife will; you don’t have to remember how to work the remote because you know your daughter will. That’s transactive memory. Little bits of ourselves reside in other people’s minds.
When your partner dies, everything that you have stored in that person’s brain is gone.
In 1935, Churchill spent the modern equivalent of more than $60,000 on alcohol—in one year.
One of the subjects on which Lindemann was most persuasive, when it came to Churchill, was bombing. Lindemann was a great believer in the idea that the surest way to break the will of the enemy was by bombing its cities indiscriminately.
When you make the leap to say that we will no longer try to aim at something specific, then you cross a line. Then you have to convince yourself that there is no difference between a soldier on the one hand and children and mothers and nurses in a hospital on the other.
The whole argument of the Bomber Mafia, their whole reason for being, was that they didn’t want to cross that line. They weren’t just advancing a technological argument. They were also advancing a moral argument about how to wage war. The most important fact about Carl Norden, the godfather of precision bombing, is not that he was a brilliant engineer or a hopeless eccentric. It’s that he was a devoted Christian.
So for Commanding General Ira Eaker, that midnight trip to Casablanca to save precision bombing was the most morally consequential act of his life. And when he came back to his air base in England, he said, We need a new plan for the war in Europe, one that will show the British that there is a better way to wage an air war. And whom did he pick to think up that plan? Haywood Hansell, now General Hansell, one of the brightest of the young lights in the US Army Air Forces. The same Hansell who would one day abruptly lose his job to Curtis LeMay on the island of Guam.
Chapter Four
He put flying first, polo second, and family a distant third. Once, early in his marriage, the story goes, he heard a baby cry and turned to his wife. “What in heaven’s name is that?” “That’s your son,” she said.
The Bomber Mafia was made up of theorists, intellectuals who conceived of their grand plans in the years before the war from the safety of Montgomery, Alabama. But Curtis LeMay was the one who figured out how to realize those theories.
he was one of those guys that, if you gave him a problem to fix, you didn’t ask a whole lot of questions how he was going to do it.
Chapter Five
The orders given to Curtis LeMay on the eve of the Schweinfurt raid called for him to lead an elaborate decoy mission. He would take off first with the Fourth Bombardment Wing—a fleet of B-17 bombers. And they’d head for the Messerschmitt aircraft factories in Regensburg.
A few years after the war, a movie came out called Twelve O’Clock High. It was based on a book written by Beirne Lay, the pilot under LeMay. Twelve O’Clock High starred Gregory Peck as the leader of an attack on a ball-bearing factory. It’s worth watching because it perfectly captures the persistence of the Bomber Mafia’s vision.
The year 1943 was a dark time for the Bomber Mafia. Every one of its ideas crumbled in the face of reality. The team was supposed to be able to put a bomb inside a pickle barrel from thirty thousand feet. That now seemed like a joke.
The more you invest in a set of beliefs—the greater the sacrifice you make in the service of that conviction—the more resistant you will be to evidence that suggests that you are mistaken. You don’t give up. You double down.
In a 1971 interview, LeMay was even more blunt.
Some swivel-chair target analysts back in the Pentagon. He’s talking about Haywood Hansell and the Bomber Mafia, with their fanciful conjecture about how to disable the enemy.
In 1948 and 1949, he would run the Berlin Airlift, one of the pivotal events at the start of the Cold War.
In the entryway to his house, he hung a reminder from his first real encounter with the orthodoxy of the Bomber Mafia, a reminder of failure and loss.
But the Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage is not about what happened after the nuclear attacks on Japan. It’s about what happened before them—between November of 1944 and the late winter of 1945. From the command of Haywood Hansell to that of Curtis LeMay.
Chapter Six
But the Pacific theater? It was on the other end of the war-absurdity continuum. The United States and Japan probably had less contact with each other and knew less about each other than any two wartime combatants in history. More importantly, they were as far apart geographically as any two combatants in history.
If you were the United States and you wanted to drop bombs on Japan, how would you do it? Solving that problem took the better part of the war. The first step was building the B-29 Superfortress, the greatest bomber ever built, with an effective range of more than three thousand miles. The next step was capturing a string of three tiny islands in the middle of the western Pacific:
To reach Japan, a B-29 first needed to be loaded up with twenty thousand pounds of extra fuel. And because that made the plane dangerously overweight, each B-29 also needed a ferocious wind to lift it off the runway.
In the many considerations and reconsiderations of LeMay’s legacy, there have been all manner of theories about his motivation for what he would do the following spring, when he took control of the air war in the Pacific. I wonder if the first and simplest explanation isn’t just this: when a problem solver is finally free to act, he will let nothing stand in his way.
the winter of 1944 and early spring of 1945, this narrow, hurricane-force band of air was directly over Japan. That made it impossible for Hansell’s pilots to do any of the precision bombing they had planned
Chapter Seven
In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, however, this heretical idea began to seem less heretical. Didn’t a lot of Japanese industrial production actually take place in people’s houses? Wasn’t it true that a lot of the war effort happened in living rooms as well as factories? A gradual process of rationalization began to take hold.
“These generals don’t believe what scientists do. They only believe what they think they can visualize. We’ve got to build a Japanese village and a German village. It’s amazing the enormity of the effort that went into building those things.”
Hottel grouped whatever fire he saw into three categories of destructiveness: (a) uncontrollable within six minutes, (b) destructive if unattended, and (c) nondestructive. Napalm was the hands-down winner, with a 68 percent success rate in the first category on Japanese houses.
With napalm, the United States had built itself a superweapon.
The Army shipped thousands of napalm canisters to the Marianas. They urged Hansell to try—just try—a full-scale incendiary attack on Japan.
Then Norstad turned to Hansell, completely out of the blue, and said: You’re out. Curtis LeMay’s taking over. “I thought the earth had fallen in—I was completely crushed.”
he was a true believer, but he was not the kind of man who was willing to kill hundreds of thousands of people. He just didn’t have it. Didn’t have it in his soul.”
Hansell’s final mission takes place on January 19. It’s a tremendous success. Sixty-two B-29s take out the Kawasaki factory. As historian William Ralph notes: “Every important building in the entire complex was hit. Production fell by 90 percent. Not a single B-29 was lost. Hansell flew back to the United States the next day.” The irony is unbearable.
Chapter Eight
So what does “trying to get us to be independent of weather” mean? It means not only is he going to come in under the jet stream, he’s also going to come in under the clouds. He’s going to have the pilots come in between five thousand and nine thousand feet, lower than anyone has ever dreamed of taking a B-29 on a bombing run.
To be clear, five thousand feet is not just low. Five thousand feet is also unheard of.
LeMay: We had ideas flying back and forth, a lot. It was my basic decision. I made it…Nobody said anything about night incendiary bombing. But [we] had to have results, and I had to produce them. If I didn’t produce them, or made a wrong guess, get another commander in there. That’s what happened to Hansell. He got no results. You had to have them.
LeMay was uncompromising with his men in terms of how relentlessly he prepared and drilled them, but he was that way for a reason. Because he cared about them.
how would LeMay have justified the firebombing he intended to inflict on Japan? Well, he would have said that it was the responsibility of a military leader to make wars as short as possible. That it was the duration of war, not the techniques of war, that caused suffering.
Curtis LeMay’s fleet of B-29s had, as its destination, a twelve-square-mile rectangular region of central Tokyo straddling the Sumida River.
one of the most densely populated urban districts in the world.iii
The bombs fell from the B-29s in clusters. They were small steel pipes twenty inches long, weighing six pounds each, packed with napalm.
Everything burned for sixteen square miles.
the United States Strategic Bombing Survey concluded the following: “Probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six-hour period than at any time in the history of man.”
Chapter Nine
After the firebombing of Tokyo in March of 1945, Curtis LeMay and the Twenty-First Bomber Command ran over the rest of Japan like wild animals.
LeMay burned down 68.9 percent of Okayama, 85 percent of Tokushima, 99 percent of Toyama—sixty-seven Japanese cities
LeMay always said that the atomic bombs were superfluous. The real work had already been done.
General Hap Arnold, head of the Army Air Forces, once told Stimson, with a straight face, that LeMay was trying to keep Japanese civilian casualties to a minimum. And Stimson believed him. It wasn’t until LeMay firebombed Tokyo a second time, at the end of May, that Stimson declared himself shocked at what was happening in Japan. Shocked? This was two and a half months after LeMay had incinerated sixteen square miles of Tokyo the first time around. Historians have always struggled to make sense of Stimson’s obliviousness.i
The historian Conrad Crane told me: I actually gave a presentation in Tokyo about the incendiary bombing of Tokyo to a Japanese audience, and at the end of the presentation, one of the senior Japanese historians there stood up and said, “In the end, we must thank you, Americans, for the firebombing and the atomic bombs.” That kind of took me aback. And then he explained: “We would have surrendered eventually anyway, but the impact of the massive firebombing campaign and the atomic bombs was that we surrendered in August.”
The other thing that would have happened is that there would have been millions of Japanese who would have starved to death in the winter.
by surrendering in August, that gives MacArthur time to come in with his occupation forces and actually feed Japan…I mean, that’s one of MacArthur’s great successes: bringing in a massive amount of food to avoid starvation in the winter of 1945.
Curtis LeMay’s approach brought everyone—Americans and Japanese—back to peace and prosperity as quickly as possible.
We can admire Curtis LeMay, respect him, and try to understand his choices. But Hansell is the one we give our hearts to. Why? Because I think he provides us with a model of what it means to be moral in our modern world. We live in an era when new tools and technologies and innovations emerge every day. But the only way those new technologies serve some higher purpose is if a dedicated band of believers insists that they be used to that purpose.
Conclusion
It was a hot summer night. We sat outside in deck chairs—five of us. Planes roared overhead as they took off from nearby Reagan National Airport. A big air-conditioning unit hemmed and hawed. Mosquitoes buzzed about happily.
Today, the expectation is that a young pilot can hit just above the pinnacle at the base of the chimney. And…if he didn’t hit that, then that’s a miss. That level of precision. And…the reason I use that as an example is that the target is an individual who’s in that room. And I don’t want to destroy the floors below it. We do that all the time. That’s the level of precision we’ve achieved.
One general said, “So in essence, [in] Fort Myer, where we’re sitting today: you could take the eighty targets you want, and so from above forty thousand feet without seeing it, without [the bomber’s] being on your radar, those just go away.” I asked whether we would be able to hear the bomber’s approach. The reply: “You don’t. It’s too high. You don’t hear it.” We would all be sitting in our deck chairs in the backyard, and we would look up, and all of a sudden, the Air House—or maybe even some specific part of the Air House—would be gone. Poof. High-altitude precision bombing. Curtis LeMay won the battle. Haywood Hansell won the war.
What do you do to stay in shape?
“You’re never, ever doing these again.”
That inner voice—that annoying voice—shows up every time I climb on the stationary bike. Through all six rounds of 30-second sprints, it tells me to quit.
And yet, two days later, I’m doing them again.
Ironically, listening to my inner voice leads me to workout routines I will stick with. But I also have to know when to ignore the voice, and push through difficult workouts.
I’ve made plenty of mistakes in my 47 trips around the sun. But there’s one thing I’ve gotten mostly right: I’ve stayed in shape. Starting with workouts for high school sports, I’ve exercised consistently and mostly eaten with intention for 30 years.
Now, in middle age, I look around, and I’m on the high end for fitness in my peer group. Not because I did anything special. I just kept showing up.
And so, being middle-aged and fit, people ask me what I do to stay in shape.
In the past, I would have answered the question like this:
I strength train three times per week, including leg day.
Three times a week, I climb onto a stationary bike and do sprint intervals. I go as hard as possible for thirty seconds, then recover for thirty seconds. Six rounds.
I walk pretty much every day, 4-5 miles. Sometimes more.
I don’t pound beers on the weekend. I like red wine with dinner. But no beers: Sam Adams is a stage-five clinger.
Protein is the main point of every meal I eat.
I limit sugar. Dark chocolate MnMs are still a thing, though. We only live once.
I don’t eat breakfast. Intermittent fasting reduces my total consumption, and exercising in a fasted state seems to offer greater fat-burning effects.
But I’m not sure my listicle-laden answer is helpful.
Here’s a better answer: I try things. Different workouts, different eating styles. I find things I will stick with. Then I do them over and over and over until I find something more effective or efficient. Then I stick with that.
Experimentation and consistency, in balance, is the key. If you’re new to fitness, then, as my friend Tobi Emonts-Holley points out, it’s important to journal your routines, results, and feelings. All three are signals for what is working for you not just physically, but emotionally. Both sides have to be addressed in order to sustain fitness over the long term.
For example: I made big changes to my workouts this year. I was a runner for 30 years. I quit cold turkey in February and shifted to walking and bike sprints. Why? My friends were getting injured. I wasn’t, and still felt great. But walking is lower-impact and more likely to keep things that way. As I get older, I want my workouts to protect and enhance my mobility--not to hinder it.
Speaking of turkey, I used to be a vegetarian. Then, after 18 meatless months, I just had to eat turkey. It was time to try something new.
Now I’m protein-centric: A cheeseburger and five eggs, every single day. And it works for me: when I made the switch, I added over ten pounds of muscle without changing my strength training routine.
I tailor workouts to my personality. I’m a bit of an introvert. I’m perfectly happy to pop in my AirPods Pro and grind through a strength training session, or take a walk listening to a podcast. That system won’t work for everyone, though. Many people need to socialize while working out or they get bored. They need accountability partners. So what I do won’t work for them in the long run.
The real answer to “what do I do to stay in shape” is to know myself and be clear about my fitness goals:
Stay lean
Be strong
Protect long-term mobility
Limit injury chances
And I experiment to improve efficiency, effectiveness, and most most importantly, to keep going.
So, “what do I do to stay in shape,” is the wrong question.
The right question is, what are you willing to experiment with to stay in shape?