EDMOND CHAN

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I learned to swim at 39 years old. Here’s how I did it

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I’ve always been a terrible swimmer. I never learned as a kid. And the times that I’ve swum, I’ve more thrashed about than technically swum.

I remember two times where I’ve swum in the sea and both times felt like I was in serious trouble. 

I thought that I might well have died. 

In fact, without help around me, I could well have died. (I’d never thought about that until writing this just now. Oops.)

The first was in 2009 in the Great Barrier Reef off Queensland, Australia. Me and my mate Grant were backpacking and decided to do a boat trip. We did some snorkeling which was okay. But then we had the chance to do some scuba-diving. With some rudimentary instructions on signalling and breathing, we were off. I didn’t feel nervous because I felt that with flippers, I’d be able to swim easily. At least, it looks easy in the movies. Boy was I wrong. At one point, deep below the catarmaran, our leader signalled to rise to the surface. I tried to rise but instead everything I was doing was taking me towards the coral reef. I knew this stuff was jagged and sharp and I tried to swim away but every stroke was taking me closer and closer instead of further and further away. Luckily, our scuba leader came to help me out and guide me to the surface.

The second time was with my mate Colin in Palawan, Philipines in 2015. We were in clear blue, pristine waters, in amongst islands. We had a boat to ourselves with a pilot taking us from island to island. The skipper said to go into the water, so I did. Oddly, I’ve never learned to tread water effortlessly, so it became a bit of struggle. I made my way to the rocky edges of the island nearest to me, but the edges were razor sharp and I couldn’t hold on. I motioned to the skipper that I was in trouble and he threw me a life jacket much to Colin’s amusement. I knew then that I had to learn to swim properly.

Recently, these thoughts have become deafening. For example, my in-laws live in Bulli, NSW, and as in the rest of Australia, there’s a strong beach and swimming culture. I want to be confident in the sea. I want to be good in the sea.

And finally, I want to be a strong swimmer for when I have kids, which should come pretty soon. I want to be able to go swimming with them and also know that if they ever got into any trouble in the water, that I could rescue them.

Which all led me and Angelique to Nuffield Gym for lessons in Wandsworth, as well as me getting new prescription goggles. 

New prescription swimming goggles

One thing that’s always put me off swimming is the fact that my eyesight is terrible and that I wear contact lenses. Contact lenses and water don’t mix, and they get damaged by non-saline fluid. Chlorine would destroy them and make wearing them painful. 

So I looked up ‘prescription swimming goggles’ and found this great company that does them for around £20. What a bargain.

Here’s the company: http://www.prescription-swimming-goggles.co.uk

So armed with my new goggles, I was ready for the next stage:

Getting lessons

We decided to get professional instruction and we found a great teacher called Sophie. She’s a school teacher in her day job and teaches swimming in the evenings. 

My first lesson was just me thrashing around in the pool. It turned out that my technique for freestyle was just instinctive and terrible. My arms were like side-on windmills and chopped into the water. My legs were sinking and very low in the water. And I couldn’t do more than half a length without stopping.

For the next few lessons, we worked on getting my arms to come over into the water at a much straighter angle and to engage my core so that my legs would sit straighter and more horizontally in the water. 

We used swimming aids such as pullboys (which go between your legs at your groin), and floats. The pullbuoys help with engaging the core and encouraging good leg action. The floats allow you focus on your leg action and good arm motion.

After 5 lessons, Sophie said that we should take a break from lessons and that I should practice on my own and get my endurance up. My lack of endurance was holding me back from making good progress. She was right. My endurance was weak and left me gasping for breath and a rest at the end of every length. Every lesson felt like a beasting!

By the 5th lesson, I felt like I had made progress. My technique was definitely better. I could do lengths pretty comfortably. And then Sophie said something that gave me confidence. (No wonder she’s a teacher!)

She said that I’d done 25 lengths in the 30 min lesson we’d just finished and that this would be our new benchmark. In the future, we would never do less than 25 lengths, no matter how long it took. She said that she could see me doing a kilometre in a session. It had crossed my mind, but when she said that, it breathed new life into my confidence levels. I started to believe it. And that’s what a great teacher does: they push you and stretch you and encourage you to look beyond what you thought you were capable of towards what you’re really capable of. 

I joined the two local Nuffields through PayAsUGym which allows unlimited access for a month at a time and for the last month, I’ve swum around 4 times a week. 

I LOVE IT!

My goals now in swimming are:

  1. Get to 200m without stopping (10 lengths in our 20m pool)
  2. Get to 500m without stopping (25 lengths)
  3. Get to 1km without stopping (50 lengths)
  4. Finish a sprint triathlon (that’s a 750m swim)
  5. Finish an Olympic triathlon (that’s a 1.5km swim)

I had hoped to do achieve these goals by the summer of 2019, but it’s looking more like the end of 2019, given those triathlon distances.

My freestyle tips for beginners 

I’m no teacher (!) but here’s what’s worked well for me: 

Get your face in the water and your chin to your chest

For some reason, this makes your body lie more horizontally in the water, which is good thing.

Roll your body to the side as you swim

This will feel weird but it will allow you to breathe easier to each side.

Master your breathing

I’m not a master of this yet, but it’s fundamental to good freestyle swimming.

Look behind you as you breathe

This will help your body to be more streamlined as you take a breath.

Swim as fast as you can 

This will develop your cardiovascular abilities specifically for swimming.

Takeaways from learning this life skill

  1. It’s never too late to learn anything. It really isn’t! If you want to learn the guitar, do it. If you want to learn Italian, do it!
  2. Get good coaching and instruction. This is a shortcut to learning the right technique and doing the right drills. You could teach yourself, but how’s that going to go vs getting good coaching. Even Tiger Woods has a coach.
  3. Learning new things opens up horizons you never dreamed of. Before learning how to swim, I had no idea how much I would enjoy it. I love it! Now I want to go scuba diving, learn how to dive off the high board and go surfing. What could you learn that would open up your horizons?

Invest in yourself and compound the investment!

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Warren Buffett said that the best investment you can make is not in the markets, but instead, in yourself.

That’s pretty deep and until today I had no idea what he meant.

Yes, you could learn a new skill like data analysis and translate that into more money at work or something, but I think Buffett meant something slightly different.

He’s big into the power of compounding. Remember Einstein said that compounding is the eighth wonder of the world. To get the full power of compounding, you have to start something (like investing) early, and do it for a long time, so that you start making money on the money you make.

Imagine that you learned a new skill like touch typing early in life. Think on just one variable, time-saving, just how much that would have saved you. Imagine that I had done this at 19, and not at 39. That’s 20 more years of touch typing wizardry I would have had, and 20 years of faster typing. It isn’t just this variable that would have been impacted. Faster typing would mean that I could have typed at the speed of thought and not had to slow my thoughts down every time I two-finger typed. Think about all that lost thought. That’s a loss of a return on a return.

Invest in yourself now. Now is as early as you can do it. And the earlier you invest in yourself, the longer you can compound the investment.

What would you do? How would you invest in yourself? Would you get fit? Learn a language, learn to code, learn to cook delicious meals, parachute, sell things well, paint, write better, memory training, conversation skills etc? Imagine you learned all of that in the next 2 years. Not crazy or ridiculous. Imagine compounding all that knowledge, all that interweaving of new and old knowledge? And then compounding all of that with new skills, knowledge and experience? Now that would be an incredible investment.

 

What’s really holding you back? Truly?

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If we start from the position that we all have potential, then why is there a gap between where your potential self is and where you are at the moment?

How big is that gap? What is your true potential? It might be that your true potential is way more than you think it is. In which case, the gap is even bigger than you know.

Step one is where you are now.

Step two is looking at where you think your potential is. So this might be being a writer or being an artist.

Step three is discovering where your true potential might be (and you would need help from outside to discover this). This might be being a rocket scientist, climbing the world’s highest and most difficult mountains.

Step four is addressing how to bridge that gap and narrow it as much as possible.

Do you think that you can achieve step two and step three?

If you don’t think you can, then something is holding you back.

It’s a mindset thing for sure.

A great example of opening up your mindset and horizons is what learning how to swim has done for me. Even after my first lesson, when I couldn’t really even finish a length of the pool, I was looking up scuba diving holidays. Now after three lessons, I’m thinking about taking up wild swimming in rivers and taking up surfing. This is all stuff that I’ve dreamed about doing but thought it was pure fantasy. Those are the sort of things that I come up with when asking myself “What’s on my bucket list? What would I love to do?” And now it’s all possible. My horizons and possibilities with regards to swimming and watersports have expanded.

Now if I asked myself about step 3 (discovering where your true potential might be), what’s possible with my swimming? What couldn’t I even contemplate or imagine before that first swimming lesson? Swimming the Channel or swimming the Hellespont? I wouldn’t have dared dream about that a month ago. Now it’s possible. Maybe not likely, but possible. Hold on, why isn’t that likely? Maybe I’ll think differently after I master the freestyle stroke. Imagine once I get to 1,000m without stopping, maybe my horizons with regards to swimming will be so far from what I can imagine now? Maybe swimming the length of the Thames? Who knows!

So what was holding me back?

Why has it taken me until I’m 39 to finally address my terrible swimming and do something about it? In my head, I told myself that it was because of my eyes that I couldn’t swim because of my poor eyesight. I’m a minus 4.0 in my left eye and a minus 0.75 in my right eye. This means that I can’t really see anything without contact lenses or glasses. And glasses or contacts don’t work in the pool. That’s what I told myself and that’s why I couldn’t go swimming to learn in the past 10, 15 or 20 years.

This was probably bullshit. Stuff I told myself so that I wouldn’t have to do it. Now that I’m 39 and thinking about having kids soon, I think it’s really important that I learn to swim. Just in case I ever need to and to teach my kids and just for the sheer joy of being good at a fundamental human skill.

The solution was ridiculously easy. I just googled ‘prescription goggles’ and it was SO cheap and easy. £15 for prescription goggles. Now swimming is something that I look forward to.

How easy was that?

What’s something that you want to do and what’s holding you back?

How can you break through? Maybe it’s that you want to be a singer. So how about taking a singing lesson. £100 for 5 lessons from a professional singing teacher. Or maybe you want to be an artist. Go on a short course at a decent art school. I did one for about £350 for 10 x 2 hour lessons at Chelsea School of Art. At the very least, it’s fun and you’ll find out whether it’s something you want to pursue. Let me know what you want to do in the comments below!

Discovering Mel Robbins: a summary of her message and her 5 Second Rule

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I recently discovered Mel Robbins on Instagram. She puts out great Instagram content such as:

I thought at first that she was Tony Robbins’s wife. But she’s not. Imagine those guys as a motivational power couple!

I’ve watched her great TEDx talk:

and her interview on Lewis Howes’s podcast:

Here is my summary of her message.

  • There is a gap between what you know you should do and actually doing that.
  • Motivation is not enough. Most of the time you won’t feel motivated to do what you don’t want to do.
  • The way around this is to make use of your basal ganglia which manages habit and unconscious action. eg for an example of unconscious action, think about when you put on your trousers in the morning. You just do it and if you thought now about which leg you put in first, you would have no idea!
  • To activate the basal ganglia, don’t let your prefrontal cortex and natural desire for comfort to hijack you. Instead use the 5 second rule.
  • Whenever you are going to procrastinate, you just count backwards from 5 and by 1 you’ve started doing what you’re wanted to do but were too lazy/scared to do. Eg if you want to start getting out of bed, you can’t just say ‘I’m going to start getting out of bed early’, because in all likelihood, if that’s not your habit, then you’re not going to do that. If instead you count down from 5 to 1 as you’re deciding to get out of bed as soon as you first wake up, then you’re more likely to get up.
  • Nobody is coming to save you. Don’t wait for that raise, starting that podcast, starting that business etc. Nobody is going to magically come and do this for you. You need to do this yourself. Help yourself.

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39 things I know at 39

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1. Manage your testosterone

Testosterone for men is essential and the defining hormone that makes a man a man. High levels make you feel confident and rambunctious and aggressive. It makes you lean and muscular and gives you a strong sex drive. What’s not to like? In terms of testosterone, we’re supposed to be half the men our fathers and grandfathers were. Testosterone is produced at night and your body needs sleep and dietary fat to produce it. So eat red meat, nuts, butter and oil and get your sleep. And stay away from stress as well as stress produces cortisol, the stress hormone, and the testosterone killer.

2. The mind and body are inextricably linked

When you have problems with your body, you will have problems with your mind. When you’re ill with the flu, you have nothing to give with your mind. When you’re sad and depressed, your energy levels plummet. Don’t just focus on either your mind or your body. Focus on both. Eat well, sleep well, exercise well. Relax well, think well and read well.

3. Strive for there to be no disconnect between what you think and feel and what you present to the outside world

If you’re always filtering what you say to other people and not articulating what you really think, then there’s literally no integrity between your inner life and your outer life. You’re presenting a different person. If the real you is your inner world, then the one you presenting to the outside world is not real. Fake. How exhausting that must be. To constantly filter and watch what you say. Tell people what you really think What’s the worst that could happen? What’s the best that could happen in terms of feeling congruous between your inner world and your outer world? Strive for self-integrity and congruence.

4. Work your levers

When you’re feeling low or depressed, I always say to watch your levers. The levers are my words for the foundations of a good mental state. If you’re not sleeping well and enough, if you’re not eating well, then you’re going to be much more susceptible to being stressed and anxious. So work those levers. Do the foundations well. Eat decent food. Get sufficient sleep. Exercise well. Get some sunshine. Look after yourself.

5. Don’t put women on pedestals

I made this mistake for most of my post-pubescent life. At least until I was 30. Treat women like equals or even better, as bros, and see how much better you do with women.

6. Saving is a good thing

If I had saved just 5% of my paychecks each month, I’d have £50,000 more in savings by now. And that’s without investing that further. 5% of £2,000 per month is £100 per month. We could all definitely save that. In fact, the advice from The Richest Man in Babylon is to save 10% of your income before anything else. Like the book says, “Pay yourself first”.

7. Most conventional wisdom should be taken with a pinch of salt

Think about it. Most people know and follow conventional wisdom, and with that, most people do averagely.

8. Being positive is a superpower

When you’re young, people try very hard to appear world-weary and jaded. This just hurts them. Go against the grain and be relentlessly positive and optimistic.

9. We know very little for sure

A priori truths such as 2+2=4 is a certainty but democracy being superior than autocracy is much less certain, as is whether abortion or euthanasia is wrong. Yet people fight and protest about these things. As the Oracle said to Socrates, “Wisest is he who knows that he does not know”.

10. Exercise daily

Walk everywhere. Run when you can. Lift weights. Do pull-ups and push-ups. Feeling physically fit and strong will enhance your life every single day.

11. Seek adventure

I will never forget cycling from Land’s End to London or canoeing the length of The Thames or climbing Mount Kilimanjaro or backpacking around the world or doing the Three Peaks Challenge. Although I’ve not done any challenges for a few years now, it’s time to get back on that horse.

12. Read more great books

Victor Niederhoffer said that he never reads books less than 100 years old. You don’t have to go that far, but surely there’s more in it for you to be acquainted with War and Peace, The Fountainhead, The Odyssey and The Iliad than in Booker Prize winners like Wolf Hall.

13. Invest in your friendships

I’m lucky to have circles of very good friends. Look after your friendships and nurture them. Because of my friends and the quality of those friendships, I count myself a very lucky man.

14. Tell the truth

Lying is bad for the soul. Even little lies hurt you. If you lie to others, then there is a disconnect between you and them. Why would you want to put a barrier between yourself and others around you. That’s the opposite of integrity. Don’t we all strive for integrity and authenticity? Well then, stop lying.

15. Be kind to people

You know how good it feels when someone is kind to you? That warm, fuzzy feeling? Feels good doesn’t it? Why not be the person who gives that feeling to someone else? Giving other people that feeling feels pretty good too. Make others feel good and make yourself feel good as well in the process.

16. Don’t be too nice a guy

You’re too nice if you put someone else’s self-interest above your own self-interest. Why would you do that? You’re at least as important as other people. At least. And probably more. So don’t be too nice and subsume yourself to other people.

17. Make the first move

Most people are afraid to make the move. Whether that’s saying something in a meeting, or asking for someone’s number or going first in a large training exercise. Show the way and go first. You’ll feel good for doing so and you’ll get more respect for doing so. Win win. Make the first move.

18. Keep going. The mind is often weak whilst the body is willing.

You know when you’re on a 5 mile run and you go for a fast finish from a mile out from the end. On a day when you’re not feeling it, you might get really tired with half a mile left to go. You don’t think you can go on, so you slow down and stop. You quit. However, the body could have kept going. It was your mind that was weak.

19. The power of 80/20

There’s so many applications of this principle. For example, 80% of a result comes from just 20% of the inputs. This means that we should focus on the 20% of inputs that really matter and that have an outsized bang for buck. It also means that it takes 20% of the total time to do something to get to 80% complete, and it will take you 80% of the time to finish the final 20%. So in lots of situations, just try to get to 80% done and move on.

20. You have the ability to always change your state of mind

Say you wake up in a bad mood and you let this bad mood pervade your whole day. What was the point of letting it ruin your whole day? Instead, take a deep breath, breathe out slowly, take another deep breath, exhale slowly. Put on your headphones and listen to your favourite tune, something uplifting to you. Try a few power poses like Amy Cuddy talks about and reset yourself. You are not a slave to your emotions. You control your mind and your mental state.

21. Know that what you consume is who you are

If you read comics all day long or binge watch zombie box sets on Netflix, know that this is who you are. You’re not developing skills, learning new things, gaining interesting new experiences, you’re a comic reader and a TV watcher. On the other hand, if you’re reading Milton and listening to jazz and opera, then you’re a poetry fan and an opera buff. Which would you rather be?

22. Create content every single day

Don’t just be a consumer all day. Whether that’s reading news in print or online, or scrolling through social media for hours on end. Consuming all the time doesn’t let you grow. Instead produce some content, whether that’s writing a blog (easy to do and set up), taking photos and uploading to Instagram with some interesting caption, making a vlog or even just doing a daily Facebook Live. Even if it’s just in a small, small way, be a creator and producer.

23. Keep learning every single day

Ancora Imparo or I am still learning. You leave school at 18 and you probably die around 75 or 80. That’s about 60 years that you have outside of formal education. Do you still carry on learning or do you remain static in learning from 18 onwards? For most people, the latter is the case. Don’t be like that. Everyday, try to learn something new. Google the blockchain, enroll on a free computer science course from Harvard or MIT, pick up a book on MBA skills, read some classic philosophy or poetry. Keep on learning, a bit every day.

24. Don’t read most newspapers. Most news is pointless to consume

It might be about celebrity gossip, sports, immigration, Brexit. It’s mostly pointless. Do you need to consume this? Even if you did need to consume this, can you trust the source? What is the spin that’s being put onto the story? Even newspapers of record like The Times of London have a spin or slant on their reporting of events. The only paper I trust is The Financial Times followed closely by The New York Times. Be careful with the news you consume.

25. Appearance matters

Dress well and look good. Think about a time you went in for a bank appointment and think about the bank staff who served you. Did they look like they’d just come out of school with a suit that didn’t fit them properly or dd they look like an experienced professional who should be taken seriously? We see interactions play out like this multiple times on a daily basis. Think about the flipside. What impressions are you throwing out there?

26. Find a woman who treats you well

Assuming you’re going to get married, you’re going to be married for a very long time. You’re going to be spending more time with them than anyone else, and for decades. This one then is a no-brainer.

27. Treat yourself kindly

Time and time again, I see people put huge burdens and expectations on themselves. They beat themselves up for not being productive and castigate themselves for not being perfect. Go easy on yourself. You wouldn’t let your kids or your friends and family be like this. Why do you do it to yourself? Treat yourself well and with kindness.

28. Negative self-talk is toxic

I hear people I know say on a daily basis stuff like, “I’m an idiot.” or “I could never understand that”. or “I’m fat” or “I’m the worst”. This is terrible self-talk. You’d never talk to your friends like that. Why would you talk to yourself like that? Language is so incredibly important. It leaves a psychological mark or impression as soon as you say it. If you say, “I’m worried about…”, even if you not worried about it, guess what? You’re going to feel slightly worried, just because you said the word ‘worried’. Watch the language you use to talk to yourself. It’s crucial. Replace it with power words, kind self-talk, and positivity.

29. Language and precision of language matters

We’ve seen how bad self-talk infects you. That is the power of language. We can use it for good and for our own well-being. Think about whether you’re over-exaggerating your illness, your stress-ness and ask yourself what would be a more accurate way of describing your circumstances. I bet it would be less over-egged than you intially described it as. And guess what, I bet you’d feel better too.

30. Don’t watch too much Netflix

One hour a day is 7 hours a week or 365 hours per year. 365 hours a year!! That’s the same as 15 solid full days of watching Netflix! 15 solid days. Think about what you could have done in that time. Watch the hours. How you spend your hours is how you spend your years.

31. Smile and laugh all the time

Life is too short to be miserable or even to be restrained and measured all the time. Smile whenever you find something funny or amusing. Watch comedies. Hang out with funny people. Don’t be a grump unless you have very good reason to be so, and even then, don’t stay grumpy for long.

32. Life is too short to hold grudges

Grudges shackle you to the past. You’re holding onto to something that other person in all likelihood does even know about. The negativity of a grudge is hurting you. No one ever said, give me more negativity, it’s awesome. Let it go, and move on. You’ll find you more space in your mind and your heart for other more positive and beneficial things.

33. Seek some balance

If you’re spending too much time in the city, go and find some peace in the countryside or the beach. If you’re partying too much, take a few weeks off the partying. If you’re eating too much junk food, eat clean for a few weeks. Don’t go to the other extreme, just find a balance.

34. Be generous

Be generous with your time, your praise, your money, your kindness, your energy and your zest for life. It’s good for you. It will make you feel good. For those of you who think that the above resources are finite and that therefore they should be preserved, you couldn’t be further from the truth. How can you give too much time, too much praise? Think from a position of abundance. Would you rather live in a world where people were mean and penny-pinching? Of course not. Don’t be that guy. Be generous.

35. Know that you can always change your mental state

If you’ve had an argument in the morning, does this negative mood continue for the whole day? If so, why do you let it do so? Park it, compartmentalise it, move on. It’s already ruined your morning, why let it ruin your afternoon too? Slow down, take a deep breath and focus on the next thing you have to do. Read more in this previous article on how to become more positive.

36. Realise just how fucking lucky you are

Every day I think about what a lucky bastard I am. I think about how lucky I am to have two legs, a good brain, all my senses intact, some skills and knowledge, how lucky I was to have great parents and a great sister who cared for me and gave me a great education or how lucky I am to have a great wife who looks after me and loves me, or to have great friends who I’ve known all my life, or have a good job or to have the ability to travel and to be free of mental and physical illness. Think about what you have gratitude for and smile about that every single day. Trust me, this shit works.

37. Have a growth mindset and not a fixed mindset

We’ve talked about growth mindset vs fixed mindsets before. A fixed mindset thinks that you can’t learn or develop new skills, and that your abilities and potential are fixed at birth. A growth mindset on the other hand believes that even if they can’t do something now, they can learn how to do that thing and make that happen. Which do you think you have right now? If it’s a fixed mindset, know that you can start cultivating a growth mindset right now.

38. Talk to strangers

We’re social creatures at our core. Talking to just a few people each day is anti-social and bad for you as you’re not scratching this essential itch. Talking to new people will scratch one of our fundamental needs: to be social. Get out of your anti-social comfort zone and talk to new people. Start small if this is uncomfortable. Say hi to your neighbours, to the person at the train station, the barista at the coffee shop, the bus driver, someone you recognise from your commute, anyone! Watch the positive impact that this has on your day.

39. Diminishing returns

This principle applies to much more than just economics. One example of it is that a £10 burger often tastes much better than a £5 burger, but the difference between the £10 burger and a £15 burger is often not as great as the difference between the £10 burger and the £5 burger. Apply this to cars, watches, clothes, eating out, wine, everything! It’ll make you think twice about buying a £60 bottle of wine. How much better really is it than a £20 bottle? Try to find the sweetspot of returns. Eg. do you really need to spend more than £300 on a good watch. Or £200 on a really good pair of shoes? Or £9 on a good burger (check out Bleeker Burger’s double cheese)

And one more for luck…..Stop complaining! There’s always someone alive in the world who is much worse off than you. There’s likely billions of people who have it worse than you. Imagine that guy in a Brazilian prison, or that person who has to walk 6 miles just to drink some water than may kill them, or that person who’s been homeless for 10 years with mental illness. Simply put, your situation doesn’t warrant complaining about. As Gary Vaynerchuck consistently says, you being alive was a 400 trillion to one shot. 400 trillion!! You’re ridiculously lucky to be alive. Stop whining!

What would you add to this list? Let me know in the comments below!