Motivation

Rich Roll’s book Finding Ultra: Rejecting Middle Age, Becoming One of the World’s Fittest Men, and Discovering Myself

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Rich Roll - Finding Ultra

Rich Roll is an ultra endurance athlete who also has a very popular podcast. He’s an advocate of a vegan, plant-based diet and healthy living and known as one of the fittest men on the planet, with a host of endurance accomplishments.

It wasn’t always this way. In Finding Ultra, Roll is searingly honest and tells us his life story from shy high school swim star to being a swim star at Stanford. At Stanford, he discovered alcohol and how it could help him with his shyness, and from there it was a steady decline into addiction. He tells of one of his lowest points, where he was drunk during his graduation from law school and in his drunken haze, he decided to collect his degree on stage in bare feet, much to his parents’ horror.

With the help of AA and rehab, Roll gets sober but is eating horrendous amounts of junk food. He has an epiphany moment when, just shy of his fortieth birthday, he wheezes out of breath climbing his stairs. He knew then that he needed to drastically change his life.

The next day, he asks his wife (who is a healthy living devotee) if he can do one of her week-long juice detox cleanses. (He details this process in the appendices at the back of the updated edition). From here, he becomes a vegetarian but is dismayed when even after a few months, he hasn’t lost any weight. He realises that he’s still eating a lot of processed foods, which may qualify as vegetarian, but are still pretty unhealthy. (Think about if you ate loads of meat-less pizza – you’d still be eating an unhealthy diet.) It’s at this point that he switches to a completely vegan diet and takes aim at getting seriously fit. He sets his sights at undertaking an Ultraman event (a three-day challenge in Hawaii totalling 320 miles of swimming, cycling and running). The rest of the book details his Ultraman events, the EPIC5 challenge with his friend Jason, and in the updated edition and new last chapter, the Ötillö Swimrun World Championship (a swimming and running challenge across 26 islands in Sweden).

This last chapter (titled There Are No Finishing Lines) is pure gold. It’s full of exercises that readers can do to improve their lives. One particlar exercise that resonated with me is called The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Ourselves. In a nutshell, we tell ourselves stories or formative experiences about ourselves, that are often negative. These can be likened to a knot in a tree. Each knot leads to another knot and so begins a branch; a branch of knots. This branch becomes your identity. Think of knots occurring when you tell yourself that ‘You’re not a leader because you failed to get into the Army’ or ‘You’re not very good at mental arithmetic because you can’t do quick calculations in your head’ or ‘You’re not a good swimmer because you can’t swim 50m without getting tired’. Over time, we build up myriad knots, and these negative stories become a prism through which we approach our lives. Roll encourages us to take each negative knot and find other experiences in our lives that rebut these. Eg. find times where you did show good leadership, or you were good with mental arithmetic under pressure. Afterwards, we can start to build more positive ‘knots’ and rebuild our identities into more objectively true realities.

Finding Ultra is an incredibly inspiring book. If you’re looking for inspiration to turn your life around and in a healthy direction, get this book. It’s mainly because of this book and what I know of Rich Roll that I’ve tried veganism (read more about this experiment here) and running more than 60 miles a month at the moment. It’s why I believe now that 40 doesn’t have to mean an inevitable physical and athletic decline; because Rich Roll is living proof of this journey.

Further reading

This Is What A Vegan Ultra-Athlete Eats In A Day (Huffington Post)

A Brutal Competition, Island to Island, in Sweden (New York Times)

Finding Ultra, Revised and Updated Edition (Amazon)

Rich Roll’s website

No alcohol for a month – here’s what I found

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I wrote the below in August 2019 but it’s been in draft until now. I thought about it again now I’m basically dry until the baby arrives.

I’ve never done a period off booze. Not that I’m a heavy drinker or ever have been. I’ve enjoyed social drinking and good binge session for more than 2 decades now and never felt the need to do a dry January.

In recent years, I’ve enjoyed boozing less and less. I still love the taste of craft beer and good wine, but my hangovers are getting longer and longer. Sometimes they last until the third day. 

It isn’t always throbbing headaches. It’s also a feeling of not being too sharp and slightly foggy-headed. I’ve toyed with the idea of would my life improve greatly if I just gave it up.

At the end of July, I went to a craft beer place with one of my best mates and some of his mates from Sussex, and one or three turned into 6 or 7 strong ones, and before I knew it, I couldn’t remember how I got home. I haven’t been like this for a long, long time.

I decided to stop drinking any alcohol for the month of August. I’ve heard about One Year No Beer, where you sign up for a year-long challenge to not drink any alcohol. Testimonials rave as to the benefits of clarity and clear-headedness. A year was a bit too long for me and my Dad was surprisingly sceptical about me giving up booze. His main reason was that he didn’t want me to beat myself up if I ended up having a drink. Surely, it isn’t that hard to give up drinking? I’m not an addict. I don’t drink on weekdays and I generally steer clear of getting drunk these days. 

People who give up alcohol generally report vague words like: “more clarity”, “more energy”. It’s all very vague. For me, the thing I’ve noticed the most is that I feel like I have a To-Do list that I just want to keep adding to and I have this urge to consistently smash my to list. I suddenly want to get things done that I would normally put off such as emptying the vacuum cleaner. I get up early on Saturdays and Sundays and go swimming. I just feel ‘on it’. Sharper and more mentally agile. My aggression levels are up a bit (not that I’m shouting at people) but more that I push harder in the gym and better shrug off things that would normally give me anxiety.

I’m also sleeping better. I’m starting to feel tired around 10pm and actively yawning. My eyes start to feel heavy and the pillow on my face is a welcome relief. I don’t sleep all the way through unbroken but this is a serious improvement on my normal sleeping patterns. 

Could this be down to something other than not drinking? Quite possibly. I’ve also been exercising a lot. Lots of cardio and lots of weights. That could be raising my testosterone levels. But it could be down to no alcohol. Alcohol increases oestrogen, so it makes sense for the opposite to reduce oestrogen and therefore increase testosterone. My sleep is also better quality and for longer which also has a direct positive effect on testosterone.

I also like the feeling of exerting self-discipline. Not cracking when I would normally fancy a beer, particularly on weekends or at social events. It’s been fortunate to coincide the dry month with a month where I have very little in the calendar in terms of socials. If it had been a month full of 40th birthday celebrations, then it might have been a bit more of a struggle. Peer group pressure is a powerful thing even if wielded with subtlety. I find that there’s even self-peer group pressure, as you don’t want to be the party-pooper. 

Do I miss alcohol? Not for the first weekends. I still love the taste of craft beer and good wine. And I still like feeling tipsy and drunk (but not too drunk). That first drink after the break will be interesting. I wonder what I’ll like and dislike about it.

So back to today! How did the rest of August go? By the end of the month, I was gagging for a beer or three. Particularly on some of the blazingly hot and sunny Bank Holiday weekends, when all I wanted to do was have an ice-cold beer. The last weekend fell on the 31st Aug, and it would have been easy to capitulate but I resisted, just to get the full calendar month.

I’m doing it again at the moment as the due date for baby Chan is Boxing Day, and I don’t want to be a bit pissed if suddenly labour comes on. It’s been two weeks without a beer (bar a couple of afternoon glasses of wine last Saturday in the pub). And I’m starting to feel similar effects to what I felt in August: feeling more ‘on it’ and more ‘getting shit done’ and it’s probably no coincidence that I went swimming this morning and about to go for a run.

Give it a go. Commit to a month without booze and see what the effects are. If you’re a social drinker, I’m sure you’ll feel the positive effects!

4 speeches to put fire in your belly and put hairs on your chest

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These speeches will make you stand a little taller, with your chin held up, with your chest puffed that bit further out. And put fire in your belly and hairs on your chest.

I watch these whenever I need inspiration and some courage. Hopefully, they give you some too!

Al Pacino’s speech in Scent of a Woman (1992)

If you haven’t seen this film yet, then watch it before this humdinger of an ending speech.

For a very useful transcipt of the Pacino’s barnstorming speech, see this link from American Rhetoric.

Arnie’s 6 Rules of Success

Arnie is the man. Plain and simple. Champion bodybuilder, self-made millionaire businessman, blockbuster A-list acting legend, Governor of California, all-round great guy. Listen to this.

Rocky’s speech to his son in Rocky Balboa (2006)

Every Rocky film (except Rocky V of course) has made me cry. Floods of tears. The final struggle of the training sessions. The punishment Rocky inevitably takes in the ring. And then the beyond-rousing comeback of pure heart that is Rocky. I’m left a sobbing mess of heaving tears.

This scene always gets me.

Here’s a useful transcript of the speech.

Al Pacino’s Game of Inches speech in Any Given Sunday (1999)

For raw aggression, and channelling that aggression into a common goal of victory, this speech has no rivals:

Here’s a very useful transcript of the speech as well.

Hope you enjoyed this post. Let me know what your favourite movie speeches are in the comments below!

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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